“It’s at my house,” I told her. “You turned it into a swimming pool yesterday, remember?”
“That wasn’t my fault,” she argued. “How am I supposed to get to work now?”
“I’ll drive you,” I offered. “I want to run over to Mrs. Kendricks’ place anyway.” It would be a lot easier to talk to her about Amy over there without the others listening in.
“What for?”
“Oh, um.” I wasn’t awake enough to come up with a plausible reason off the top of my head and Melissa’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. I grabbed at the first thought that popped up. “I didn’t want to worry you about it but my father thinks Agent Prescott and Olivia murdered Lilith.”
“What?” she asked incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”
“I know, it’s weird. Anyway, Olivia and I need to talk to Mrs. Kendricks and see what we can do.” I winced as soon as I said that. I hadn’t planned to take Olivia with me but now I was stuck with it. At least she couldn’t accidentally let anything slip about Amy while we were gone. “Let me go get her.”
I walked down the hall and tapped on Olivia’s door, easing it open when I didn’t hear a reply. Olivia was curled up under her blankets with only her head showing, smiling contentedly at whatever dream she was having.
“Olivia,” I called quietly but she didn’t stir. “Olivia!” She mumbled something inaudible. I heaved a sigh and walked to her side to poke her shoulder through the covers. She started and blinked up at me.
“Peter!” she gasped in surprise and popped. The blankets slumped through her as she clutched her nightgown tightly. “What are you doing in my room?”
“Come on,” I told her, “we need to drop Melissa off at work.”
“Why do I need to go?” she complained, sitting up and trying to rake her intangible curls back into some semblance of order with her fingers. “I was sleeping.”
“So we can talk to Mrs. Kendricks about You-know-who. Let’s go.” I left her room but Olivia stayed where she was. “Well?”
“I need to change,” she insisted, pointing at her clothes sitting in a neatly-folded stack on a nearby box. “Close the door.”
“You can go ghost this morning,” I assured her. “We’re in a hurry.”
“I’d rather be real,” she grumbled but she got to her feet obediently and followed me out.
“Is Olivia following us?” Melissa whispered, glancing around uneasily as I led them to the front door.
“I can hear her, you know,” Olivia grumbled.
“We really need some way for people to know where you are,” I told her. “This is getting old.”
“It’s not my fault they can’t see me. You’re the one who wouldn’t let me change.”
“We’re in a hurry,” I told her, exasperated. I pulled open the front door and stopped in my tracks. “Susie! What are you doing out here?” She sat cross-legged on the porch with her palms up and her eyes closed.
“Greeting the dawn,” she said absently.
“Oh my God!” Olivia gasped. “She’s naked again!”
“You can’t do that on my front porch!” Melissa protested. “Everyone can see you!”
“No, they can’t,” Susie argued. “The van’s in the way.” That wasn’t entirely true. I could clearly see a long section of the sidewalk from where I was standing. Anyone out for an early morning jog would have gotten themselves an eyeful.
“Well, the van’s about to move,” I told her tersely, “so get back inside.”
“Fine,” she grumbled. She unfolded herself and walked past us into the house without a second glance.
“Has she always been like this?” Melissa asked me dubiously.
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, unlocking the van.
“And you think it’s normal for a girl to be walking around like that all day?”
“I’m just used to it,” I told her as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Oh? And I suppose you expect me to do the same when we move in together?” She slid into the passenger seat beside me, giving me a look I couldn’t quite interpret.
“I’m going to plead the Fifth on that.” I looked around for Olivia and found her standing beside the van, glaring resentfully at Melissa with her fists on her hips, as if she’d intended to have the front seat. I opened the side door for her with the remote and she climbed in and sat in the middle with ill grace. “All right, everyone, keep your seat backs and tray tables in their upright positions.” Both girls rolled their eyes at me.
We reached downtown in the middle of the morning rush hour, although that didn’t mean all that much in Hellburn. Most of the debris from yesterday’s excitement had been cleared away, but temporary stop signs stood in place of some of the traffic signals. The entrance to the library parking lot was blocked off with orange cones and I slowed down as we passed, watching a work crew scratch their heads as they inspected the damage to the alley.
“I guess the coven won’t be meeting tonight,” Melissa noted. The front doors had caution tape strung across them. “Do you think they’re going to be able to repair it?”
“It depends on how badly it’s damaged,” I said. “Bellagra-whatever really messed it up.”
“And he was only a six, Dara said.” She rubbed her arms as if she was cold. “What’s the next one going to be like?”
Worse, I thought, but I couldn’t admit that out loud. “Let’s worry about that when it happens. Here you go.” I pulled over to the curb across from Mr. Franklin’s office building.
“Thanks.” Melissa leaned over with her lips puckered expectantly so I kissed her fleetingly, all too aware of Olivia’s disapproving glower. Melissa seemed disappointed by my feeble osculatory effort but she opened her door and slid out onto the curb.
“When should I pick you up?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “You don’t need to. I’ll call Luis at the dealership and have him drop off a loaner for me and tow my car to the shop. Try not to get yourself killed during office hours, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” I told her dryly. She closed the door and jogged across the street, pausing to blow me another kiss before disappearing inside the lobby.
Olivia climbed into her vacated spot and resumed her sullen glare out the window. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said curtly.
That obviously meant no but I couldn’t tell what was bothering her. Is she still annoyed at being woken up early? I wondered. Is she bored? Is she hungry? No, she’s a ghost, she doesn’t eat. Is she jealous of Melissa? That was a definite possibility but if I guessed wrong, I’d just make things worse. I decided to stall for time and pulled out my phone to call Mrs. Kendricks.
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
I froze with my finger hovering over my phone. Uh-oh. “Yes, of course,” I assured her.
“Prettier than Melissa?”
“You’re both pretty.” The slight tightening of her lips indicated that wasn’t the right answer, or at least not the one she wanted to hear.
“Am I prettier than Dara?”
I cleared my throat. “Dara’s a special case. You can’t really compare her to –”
“But you like looking at her, don’t you?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted carefully.
“And Melissa too.”
“Um, yes.”
Olivia finally turned to face me. “Do you like looking at me?”
I swallowed. “Sure, of course.”
“But you don’t want me to be your girlfriend.”
“There’s more to being a girlfriend than just being pretty,” I argued, wondering how I was going to get out of this conversation in one piece.
“Like boobs.”
“What?”
“Your girlfriend has to have boobs, right? That’s why you like them better than you like me.”
“That’s not true!” I protested. She was right about the boobs part, but only in the sense that a girlfriend had to b
e a girl and all girls had boobs. The exact size and shape didn’t much matter to me, frankly, although I had to admit that Melissa and Dara both possessed superb examples of the species. “Yours are, um, fine,” I said, clearing my throat again awkwardly.
Olivia gasped in alarm, hugging herself tightly. “How would you know that? Did you see me last night?”
“No!” I assured her hastily. “I’m just saying that you’re probably in good shape, being a ballet dancer and all.”
“Well, okay,” she acknowledged slowly, still eyeing me sidelong. She kept her arms crossed, though. “I don’t think you should choose girlfriends based on their bra size,” she groused to herself.
“I’m not!” If that were the case, I would have picked Mrs. Kendricks the first time she tried to seduce me. “There are a lot of factors to consider.”
“Exactly! A girlfriend should be kind and gracious and funny and happy and demure and supportive and –”
“In other words, she should be you.”
“Well, yes,” she mumbled, twirling a lock of hair around her finger.
Why is she so obsessed with being my girlfriend? I’m wondered irritably. She knows I like Dara and she knows Melissa’s already claimed me and she knows we wouldn’t have much of a future together. I mean, sure, I’m the only person she can talk to as a ghost, but – oh. The truth finally dawned on me. She’s afraid I’ll abandon her after all this is over unless she becomes my girlfriend. How do I convince her that’s not true?
“Olivia.” Her big blue-gray eyes looked up at me, glimmering with hope, and I cleared my throat. “I like you, I really do. You’re pretty and demure and all those other things you said but –”
“But I’m dead, that’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it?” She turned away from me, her shoulders slumping. “You can’t love a ghost.”
“I love a lot of people,” I told her firmly, “and at least one of them isn’t even human. You being dead isn’t the problem, it’s that we hardly know each other. We only met a couple of days ago, remember?”
She hazarded a glance over her shoulder. “So you’d like me better if you knew me better?”
“I’m sure I would,” I hedged, “but let’s take care of our more immediate problem first, okay?” She frowned doubtfully. “Lilith’s plan to kill me and take the Philosopher’s Stone?”
“Oh, right.” Her thoughtful expression worried me, if she was contemplating whether my death would be such a bad thing after all. “So what’s next?” she asked, sounding a bit more chipper.
“Next we see if Mrs. Kendricks learned anything about Amy.” I tapped Mrs. Kendricks’ number before Olivia could concoct more reasons why we would make a perfect couple.
“Peter! I didn’t expect you to be up so early.” Mrs. Kendricks sounded tired and I wondered if she’d gotten any sleep at all.
“I had to drop Melissa off at work. Did you find out anything?”
“About Amy? Peter, it’s seven-thirty in the morning. I don’t have a worldwide network of demonologists sitting by the phone waiting for me to call. All I can do is contact a few people I happen to know and see if they’ve heard of anything matching Amy’s description. I’ll let you know what I find,” she promised, “but don’t expect anything soon.”
“Okay,” I sighed, disappointed. “So what should we do in the meantime?”
“I spoke to Ryan a couple of hours ago and told him about your father’s suspicions. He was shocked, to say the least.”
“I can imagine.” I noticed Olivia leaning closer, trying to listen in, so I set my phone on speaker mode. “Does he have a plan?”
“Not yet. He’s on his way to Dallas to pick up the other two agents but he should be back before noon. Hopefully he’ll think of something by then.”
“Dad’s going to be looking for him this morning,” I warned. “Skipping out of town looks suspicious.”
“I’m more concerned about your father looking for Olivia,” Mrs. Kendricks said. “If he discovers her, ah, special nature, we’re going to have a situation on our hands.”
Olivia and I exchanged a worried look. “I guess she needs to stay invisible until we come up with a cover story.”
“Except then your father will wonder what happened to her. Does he know she’s with you now?”
“If he doesn’t remember, Mom will remind him,” I sighed heavily. “I need to stay invisible too, I guess.”
“Or at least avoid answering any phone calls from him for a while,” she suggested. “In the meantime, we still have Lilith to worry about.”
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. We’d faced three attacks in less than twelve hours and I doubted Lilixandriel was going to let up now. I surveyed Milton Street to make sure some new demonic assassin hadn’t already tracked me down. “Maybe I should just surrender and get it over with,” I said glumly.
“Peter!” Olivia exclaimed, shocked.
“Don’t even think that, Peter,” Mrs. Kendricks told me sternly. “We’ll find a way out of this, I promise.” Even though I knew she was just saying that, it still made me feel a bit better to hear it. “I asked Tara and the other witches to stay alert. They’ll let me know immediately if they sense anything we need to be concerned about.”
“Susie and Melissa too?”
“I imagine they’ll contact you directly if anything comes up,” she said wryly. “Anastasia’s with me right now but she’s planning to make a few sweeps through town this morning, just in case Lilith decides to strike early.”
“That’s quite an army you have there,” I observed.
“Barely a squad,” she sighed, “and very few of them have the skills to confront a demon directly. Anastasia’s the strongest of all of them – not surprisingly, since I’ve been training her since she was born – but Susie might actually be better than she is in some ways. She’s a bit scary sometimes,” she admitted.
“That’s an understatement.”
“The one I’m most concerned about is Melissa. The powers you’ve described aren’t Goddess-given like the ones she had before. They’re too unbalanced, too – dark.”
“My powers are almost the same,” I pointed out. “You’re not worried about me, are you?”
“I can’t imagine you deliberately causing anyone harm, Peter. Even when you were fighting for your life against Dr. Bellowes, you were trying to stop him, not kill him. Melissa –” Mrs. Kendricks hesitated. “I’m not sure I say the same thing about her.”
A shiver ran down my spine but I shook my head in denial. “Melissa’s just doing what she has to do,” I insisted firmly. “We’d all be dead by now if it weren’t for her.”
“I know,” she sighed, “and perhaps I’m just borrowing trouble, as my mother used to say. Just keep an eye on her. You know her better than the rest of us and you’re more likely to notice any changes, for better or worse.”
“All right,” I agreed uneasily. I glanced up at the second-story window where Melissa’s office was, wondering what she was doing right now. The odds of her using magic during office hours were probably pretty low, so I figured I didn’t need to worry about her until quitting time at least.
“I’ll call you if I hear anything back about Amy,” Mrs. Kendricks promised. “In the meantime, you and Olivia just stay out of sight until Ryan gets back.”
“I think I can manage that,” Olivia joked, although her smile faded quickly into a pensive frown.
“We will,” I promised. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Goodbye.” She hung up and I silently tucked my phone away, wondering what other disasters were waiting in the wings for me today. I shifted the van into drive and pulled out onto Milton Street.
“Where are we going?” Olivia asked suspiciously.
“I haven’t had breakfast yet. Do you like taquitos?”
13
Up until recently, death hasn’t been particularly high on my list of things to worry about. Like most teenagers, I figured I had at least half a centu
ry to go before I needed to choose between burial and cremation, let alone what sort of inscription I want on my headstone. That estimate is looking a bit optimistic at the moment, but my current priority is still avoiding death rather than planning its aftermath.
Most people expect their loved ones to see them off with a respectful funeral service and a plot in the local cemetery, eternal care included. Depending on their ethnic background, a wake might be thrown in for good measure. Maybe it’s just me but the whole burial process seems unnecessarily expensive and kind of pointless. The dead person certainly doesn’t get to enjoy any of it and afterwards only the truly devoted will bother to visit the grave more than once a year.
I’m leaning towards cremation myself. It’s more economical, your family doesn’t have to find six friends strong enough to tote your casket around, and they get a very tasteful urn to place on the mantlepiece, hopefully out of reach of the cat. If you ask them to scatter your ashes, you’ll even get to swim in the ocean one last time and they can use the urn as a cookie jar afterwards. That’s a win-win for everyone.
“You’re dripping.”
“Hmm?” Olivia pointed at the end of my taquito and I dabbed at it with my napkin. “Thanks. Are you sure you don’t want one?”
“I don’t have anything to wear,” she groused for the umpteenth time. “I’d rather have beignets anyway.”
“Ben-yays?”
“Beignets,” she corrected me firmly. “They’re like big square donut holes covered in powdered sugar.”
“That sounds unhealthy.”
“And scrambled eggs, cheese, and sausage rolled up in a tortilla is supposed to be good for you?” she asked skeptically. “That’s like a Mexican heart attack.”
“Fewer carbs,” I pointed out.
“Okay, I’ll give you that.” She sat back in the passenger seat and glowered out the window. “This is a great view,” she observed sourly. “I bet people come from all over just to eat their burgers here.”
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