by Jen Klein
She nodded, her mouth set in a resolute line. “I’m sure.”
Mr. Lowe glanced back at me. “Why did you choose Persephone?” he asked her.
She swallowed, and her answer sounded more like a question. “I really like pomegranates?”
As the class burst into laughter, I grabbed my backpack and lurched to my feet. “I’m sorry, I have a headache,” I said before charging for the door. Mr. Lowe didn’t try to stop me, but I felt his and Lauren-or-Laurel’s eyes on me the entire way.
Although I slunk around the halls, ducking into bathrooms and janitor’s closets any time a teacher came near, I ended up running into somebody after the bell rang. Not Sky (who’d apparently ditched) and not Norbert (who had a free study period).
No, it was Corabelle who fell into step beside me.
“How far have you gotten on my case?” she asked. She didn’t sound happy.
“Far. Really far.”
“Do you know where Todd is?” she demanded.
“Not that far.”
Corabelle grabbed my arm and pulled me to a halt. “Stop screwing around. You’re supposed to be working for me, remember? Instead all you’ve done is waste my money and my time.”
“Not true,” I snapped, yanking my arm away. “I’ve made a lot of progress. Investigations take time.”
“I don’t have time. I’m falling apart.”
I took a good look at her. It was true; Corabelle didn’t look so hot. Her usual perfect blonde hair was lank, falling in greasy strands to her shoulders. Her face was shiny, and she had a small cluster of pimples along her left jawline. There were light purple smudges under her eyes. Her lips were even more chapped than they had been.
“Where’s Sky?” she asked, glaring at me.
“I’m not his keeper.”
“Aren’t you his partner?”
“According to him. But you hired me. Why? Do you need something to play with while your boyfriend’s out of the picture?” I knew I probably shouldn’t have said it, but this entire day was starting to piss me off.
“I don’t care that Sky wants me. He can get in line. I want my own boyfriend back.” Her chapped lips trembled. “When I hired you, I was under the impression that you would be able to find Todd Harmon, the boy I love. Of course, I was also under the impression that Umbra Investigations was something a little more legit than the high school freak show no one wants to sit next to.”
I froze, staring back at her. Feeling my fingers clench into fists. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to punch her right in the face. But then . . .
Then.
She’d tell everyone the truth. She’d take away my case. I’d be left with no alibi, no money, nothing. I wouldn’t have a secret identity. I wouldn’t have anything. I really would be the freak show everyone avoids. The one with no electricity. The one with no parents. The one who might have a date with death in six months.
And so, although it required everything in my power to do it, I took a deep breath. I relaxed my fingers. “I’m sorry,” I said, as sincerely as I could manage. “Give me the weekend.”
“Tell me one good reason why I should.”
“Here are two.” I shot her a hard smile. “One, the police can’t find Todd. Two, I can.”
God, I hoped that was true.
Corabelle took a step backward, her eyes still locked on mine. “Friday,” she said. “Find him by Friday, or I get my money back and tell the cops myself. And then I let everyone at school know who you really are.”
She turned and stormed away, her long ponytail swinging behind her. Her face may have taken a nose dive, but she clearly hadn’t lost any beauty in her ass; a handful of guys turned to stare longingly at it until she disappeared around the corner. I was furious at them, at their dumb boy desire for a pretty, shitty girl. I was furious at Corabelle for being that girl. Worse, I was furious at myself. Out of the awful things Corabelle had said, the one that stung the most was the one about Sky wanting her. She was so sure of it, so nonchalant.
It was all that pent-up fury that ended up getting me thrown in detention.
Twenty
Any other day, I would have walked right past three jocks making fun of a girl whose books had fallen out of her locker. Any other day, I wouldn’t have noticed how one of the jocks kicked the books so that when the girl bent over to get them, another could grab her by the hips and mime banging her from behind. Any other day, it wouldn’t have mattered that the girl was Lauren-or-Laurel, or that she was crying.
It wasn’t any other day.
I tapped the mime banger on the shoulder. When he turned around, I slammed my fist into his nose.
He went down hard and spat something from the floor that was impossible to understand. Ignoring him, I faced his two friends. One had gone silent, but the other—the bigger, book-kicking one—took a step in my direction. I jerked my hand up in front of his face. “See, no bruising. It’s all in the curvature of the swing. You keep your thumb on the outside and it doesn’t break. All the things I will do to you, they won’t hurt me at all. You, on the other hand . . .”
“You’re full of shit,” he said. But his voice wavered.
“That’s what Mario Amello thought. Ask him how his balls were after our last interaction.” I took a step closer. “Or ask around about the razors I keep on my person at all times.”
“You don’t have a razor. I don’t see a razor.”
“They’re hidden.” I stepped right up to him, dropping my voice. “One is in my boot. One is in my hair.” I saw him glance up at the messy knot atop my head. “And the other one,” I whispered, “is somewhere very, very secret. If you ever again even look like you’re going to touch me”—I glanced at Lauren-or-Laurel, who was trying to melt into the lockers—“or her, or any other girl, I will introduce all three razors to you.”
He backed away, his face frozen in a look of fear, disgust, or confusion—or all three. Behind him, the quiet jock pulled the other one up from the floor. “Come on,” he said. They limped off. And just like that, every trace of the three was gone. Except for some tearstains on the floor.
I picked up Lauren-or-Laurel’s books and handed them to her. Her gaze rose to the top of my head, and I offered a grim smile. “I don’t really have a razor hidden in my hair.”
She nodded, her eyes wide.
“I don’t have razors hidden anywhere else either, so try to stay out of trouble,” I told her.
I had started down the hallway when I heard her voice behind me. “Wait. Why did you do that?”
I turned. “Who did you really pick for mythology?”
“Artemis.”
Of course I wasn’t familiar.
“She likes children and nature,” Lauren-or-Laurel explained. “And she’s a virgin.”
“You wanted to advertise that?” I asked. No reason to mention that I was sailing in the same sea of celibacy.
Lauren-or-Laurel shrugged. “It’s not like anyone would be surprised. Besides, Artemis is cooler than she seems. She’s the goddess of the hunt.”
“So why didn’t you tell Mr. Lowe you were Artemis?”
“Because.” She paused, as if considering the answer before she gave it. “Because when I saw your face, you looked the way I feel all the time. Scared.”
“There you go,” I said. “I kicked that cretin’s ass because of Persephone.”
The tiniest smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Thanks.”
“Can I ask you something? What’s your name?”
The smile broadened, lighting up her whole face. “It’s Laura.”
I’d been double wrong this whole time. I smiled back, feeling almost like a normal girl . . . until Principal Vander rounded the corner and handed me a detention slip.
Those stupid jocks.
Twenty-One
The on
ly exciting thing that happened in detention was a reminder text from Corabelle:
Find Todd by Fri or Im telling every1 abot Umbra
Besides that, the passage of time was marked only by me and the other degenerates staring at each other in resentful silence.
I was almost to my car when my phone rang.
“Where are you?” Sky asked the minute I answered.
“Where are you? I’ve been trying to find you all day!”
“See, that’s what I like to hear.” His voice went soft, and so did my insides. “But we’re on a case, so we should probably stick to the topic at hand. Meet me at Norbert’s.”
“Wait, why are you at . . .”
But I was talking to myself. Sky had already hung up.
Of course Aunt Aggie and Uncle Edmund were at home, and of course they couldn’t have been happier to see me on their doorstep. Before I could say hello, I got swooped into one of my aunt’s signature angel-love hugs while my uncle clapped me on the shoulder with his heavy hand.
“There’s a boy downstairs with Norbert,” Uncle Edmund told me. “Nice manners. Good teeth. You should check him out.”
I pulled away from Aggie’s tight embrace. “How many hands tall is he?”
My uncle didn’t even begin to understand the sarcasm of my horse analogy. “Seventeen, maybe. Or eighteen. What’s the horse-to-metric ratio again?”
“I’ll take a look, Uncle Edmund.”
“Good thinking, Jillian. You do that.”
“Do you want lemonade?” Aunt Aggie didn’t wait for me to answer. “Go on. I’ll bring it in.”
I headed down the thinly carpeted stairs stained with the residue of someone else’s life.
My aunt and uncle had rented the house two years earlier when they moved back in a hurry so that—unlike my useless father—they could help with Mom. Since I had refused to live with them, and since Dad had supported my decision in absentia from wherever he was in the Middle East or the Himalayas or the Amazon at the time, Aggie and Edmund had leased the closest place they could find: a small ranch house that had peaked in the eighties. Lots of peach and turquoise wallpaper. The basement was a plus, unusual because most California houses don’t have them. Earthquakes.
As I descended, my cousin’s class photos descended the wall alongside me, a trip back in time. By the time I reached the bottom step, a chubby five-year-old beamed out at me. That was the Norbert I remembered from our last normal family vacation: a trip to Pilot, North Carolina, where Norbert’s family used to live. Back when my family could still pass for normal.
The musty basement smell was comforting in its familiarity. As was the wood paneling. Preexisting decor aside, my aunt and uncle had furnished the room in a way that they believed to be inviting for Norbert’s potential teenaged guests. Rickety Ping-Pong table. Dorm-size refrigerator filled with sodas. Some sort of video-game console hooked up to an ancient, bulbous television set.
Norbert and Sky had pulled the room’s two faux-suede, oversized beanbags together. Both were tapping away on their laptops. They barely looked up when I walked in, but Sky scooted over and patted his beanbag.
“Share with me.”
I was torn but curious, and—let’s be honest—the desire to be close to him won out. I plopped down on the cushion. “You better have something good.”
“We do,” Sky told me. “Your cousin is amazing.”
Norbert gave a modest shrug from the other beanbag. “It’s a gift.”
“We’re hoping to hear back from your dad, but he hasn’t—”
“Wait, what?” I grabbed Sky’s arm.
Norbert gave Sky a sour look. “Dude.”
“Dude what?” Sky asked innocently.
“What’s going on?” I threw out my arms, giving them both a whap. “Why are you talking to my father?”
“Don’t freak out,” said Norbert. “I emailed Uncle Lewis. I asked for everything he’s got on succubi.” He ignored my grunt of disapproval. “He hasn’t written back yet, but I’m hoping he’ll give us something more than what we can find online.”
“Whatever.” I couldn’t be gracious about anything associated with Dad. I turned to Sky’s computer. “So what did you come up with?”
His screen was open to a real estate website. “Misty said her lair is in Leimert Park, so we’ve been looking at locations there.”
“Succubi have very specific housing requirements,” chimed in Norbert.
“Such as?”
“Obviously, they can’t have too many windows,” said Sky. “And they need some distance from their neighbors.”
“Which rules out most of Los Angeles,” I said.
“Exactly,” Norbert told me. “But there are plenty of places with cinder block walls around the property, so we’re trying to focus on those. Also, succubi need natural gas heating and easy access to mass transit.”
“Wait, what?”
“Succubi don’t drive,” Sky explained.
“Why?”
Sky looked thoughtful. “Honestly, I don’t know. But my research says they don’t, so it’s part of the equation.”
I looked at a map on his screen. “That doesn’t make any sense. If Misty took the Metro into the Valley that day, she would have had to get back to the station in sunlight. Wouldn’t that be a problem?”
“Not if she had a driver.”
“A driver,” I repeated.
Norbert spun his computer around to face me. “That’s another part of the equation. We’re cross-checking information on privately owned hearses.”
“Hearses! Even for a fictional succubus, doesn’t that seem a little bit cliché?”
“Maybe,” said Norbert. “But if you were a sun-hating man sucker, trust me: a carrier of death would be the way to go.”
My cousin was loving this. I was almost happy for him.
Sky nudged my leg with his own. “Look. We narrowed it down.”
I peered at a list of six addresses. Again, I weighed all the different types of crazy in my head. It came down to what we already knew: Todd Harmon was missing, and this Misty chick was involved. No matter what she was—succubus or sicko—getting a look at her home base might give us a clue as to Todd’s whereabouts. Besides, the clock was ticking. The high school rumor mill didn’t care what sort of contract Corabelle had signed. If she told everyone the truth—that I was Umbra Investigations (and terrible at my job)—what little life I had was over.
I checked my watch. Almost five. Even with no traffic, driving to Leimert Park would take us close to an hour. And in Los Angeles, “no traffic” was every bit as fictional as “paranormal investigation.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
Getting out of the house took longer than I would have liked. First, the printer jammed while printing out the list of addresses. Then Norbert couldn’t find one of his favorite boots. Right when it looked like we were on the brink of escape, we were waylaid by Aunt Aggie and her lemonade. Then Sky felt compelled to butter her up with praise for the handmade beverage.
I was irritated at first, but I didn’t see his end game coming. Aggie didn’t blink an eye when he told her that we were taking Norbert out “to look at the stars for astronomy class.”
Are you kidding? Does any high school even offer astronomy?
We still might have made reasonable time had it not been rush hour and had we not encountered an ill-timed light summer mist. Rain happens so rarely in Southern California that when it does, people are astounded. Water from the skies! Everyone forgets how to drive. By the time I had fought my way down the 405 and slid into a space in a big, empty parking lot, the sun was on its way down.
Beneath the deepening shade of a sycamore tree at the edge of the lot, I ripped Norbert’s printout into three pieces, one for each of us.
“Here’s the deal,” I sai
d with a stern look at my cousin. “This is a fact-finding mission, and that is it. Two addresses each, all within walking distance from here. Use the GPS on your phone and take pictures. If there’s a trash bin and you can get a quickie shot of what’s inside, awesome. Same with mailboxes. Small talk with neighbors is fine, but don’t get caught snooping, and don’t enter any buildings. Everyone clear?”
Sky gave me a mock salute. “Aye, aye.”
“Right here,” I told them both. “By eight o’clock.”
“Copy that.” Norbert checked the blue lights on his watch. “Twenty hundred hours, this location.” He performed a less ironic version of Sky’s salute before dashing off. Sky and I watched him arrive at the corner of Forty-Third and Degnan and stop to look both ways. He actually hopped up and down while he waited for a car to pass. This was making him happy. You had to give it to the kid. He had enthusiasm for miles.
I was starting to enter the first of the addresses into my phone’s GPS when Sky’s hand covered my own.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night.”
I stopped typing but had to take a split second to compose myself before looking up into his eyes. “For ripping up my favorite Hater shirt? It’s fine. Probably looks better with a wide neck.”
Sky’s fingers lingered. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Oh, that thing where you got me drunk? And fed me your own blood? That’s cool too. First time for everything and all that.”
He lifted my hand away from the phone. “Be real with me. Just for a second, and then you can go back to . . . the way you are.”
I swallowed. I was tempted to be pissed. But he was right. I was . . . the way I was. I didn’t know how to be anything else. When I didn’t speak, he lowered our hands, entwining his fingers with mine so I couldn’t pull away. He took a step closer. “I shouldn’t have teased you. You saved me.”
“You dropped a piano on a guy for me,” I said. “I think we’re even.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sky. “I think I owe you something.”
“Gas money?”
He shook his head, flashing that white, bright grin. My pulse quickened. All I could think was, Good teeth. Uncle Edmund was right.