Watch Me Burn: The December People, Book Two

by Sharon Bayliss

  “Where’s Emmy?” Amanda asked, continuing to ignore his rage. She came back out of the bedroom and had already pulled her hair back and changed into yoga pants.

  “What?” David asked.

  “Emmy…you know, your daughter. Where is she?”

  “She’s not here?”

  Amanda’s pleasantness melted away and she gave him a few curses with her own eyebrows.

  “You have got to be kidding me. Your only job is to sit on your ass and watch the kids. And you can’t even do that.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Okay, he gave up. He didn’t stop himself from yelling now. “This is your fault, Amanda. You did this to me. And then you left the kids with a man who could barely figure out how to feed himself today. You did this. You!”

  “She’s fine,” Patrick said, turning around from where he sat on the couch. “She went out with friends.”

  “What friends? Where did they go?” Amanda demanded, while she dialed Emmy’s number. Emmy’s phone trilled in her bedroom.

  “She leaves her phone at home so you can’t track her GPS. We know you do that, you know,” Patrick said.

  “Dammit, that little…” Amanda trailed off into incoherent hissing. “Who picked her up?”

  “Some creepy guy in a van,” Patrick said.

  “What?”

  “Are you guys ever going to get jokes?”

  “That’s not funny,” David said. Adding the only coherent thought he could manage.

  “It was a couple girls. In my grade. A Cassie, or Chrissie, or something. Or maybe it’s Erica.”

  mmy dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the garage as noisily as possible. For leaving the house without permission, she had been sentenced to vacuuming and shampooing the inside of the truck. Her mom was such a bitch. She had gotten home at 8pm. 8pm—when nuns and babies came home. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Mom claimed she smelled cigarettes and alcohol on her, but she had no proof. But Mom didn’t care about proof. She was crazy. And Dad wouldn’t stand up to her.

  Whatever.

  The truck still smelled of Jude—a mix of sweat and body wash. Cleaning the truck was good because she wanted that smell gone. She didn’t like thinking about him.

  She plugged in her earbuds and listened to angry music—not hard to find in her playlist. She started by vacuuming the air in the cabin as if trying to catch ghosts. She cleaned the dashboard and the windows and mirrors, and found she didn’t hate it. She might volunteer to do this every night, for the chance to be alone in the dark and quiet with something to do.

  Then she pulled out the floor mats to vacuum and shampoo them on the driveway. Some small pieces of trash had accumulated under the mats and she reached for something silver she mistook for loose change.

  The significance of what she held washed over her immediately. The object dripped in magic—an abhorrent magic that felt familiar. Her stomach squeezed into knots. She held Julie Prescott’s charm bracelet.

  Emmy put the bracelet in her pocket and continued cleaning the truck, with more dedication than she had before. She cleaned everything at least twice, until her hands stung from the chemicals in the carpet shampoo. She stayed out there so long, Mom had to come and call her in to go to bed.

  Emmy avoided speaking to anyone when she came in. They probably assumed she was continuing to sulk about her punishment, but her throat felt too tight to speak. She headed straight for the bathroom. When she changed out of her khaki shorts and into her sleeping shorts, she kept the bracelet grasped in her hand.

  The bracelet felt hot and pointy, as if she had shoved a cactus covered in fire ants in her fist. She felt about the bracelet as she felt about the girl. She couldn’t stand it, without a good reason. Some of the girl’s energy stuck to the bracelet, which meant this was Julie’s object talisman, a protective symbol wizards kept with them at all times, which accumulated bits of their magic. A talisman Julie had lost. Emmy touched her own object talisman, a glass orb filled with holy water she wore around her neck.

  Even though she found the thing innately distasteful, she didn’t want to put it down, not even long enough to take a shower. Instead, she turned on the water on so people would think she was showering while she examined the bracelet in the full light of the bathroom. She laid it on the counter, arranging it into a circle. She didn’t know what to look for. Some kind of answer. Some kind of information. She tried her usual senses first. She saw some clay mud crusted on some of the charms, but nothing helpful.

  If it was Julie’s object talisman, she could get some information from it by magic. Maybe get a sense of what spells Julie had performed or where the bracelet had been. She’d never tried to extract information from a talisman and no one had ever taught her how, but it seemed possible.

  She held the bracelet between her palms and concentrated. She got an uncomfortable hot feeling behind her heart, but no insights. She tried putting the bracelet on. Other than feeling like the abhorrent bracelet might contract and lop off her hand, nothing seemed different.

  Finally, she turned off the water and concealed the bracelet in her balled fist so she could leave the bathroom. If anyone noticed she still had dry hair, they didn’t say anything.

  Emmy crawled into her bed and Evangeline hovered over her.

  “What’s wrong?” Evangeline asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You haven’t said anything since you came in. And you usually talk a lot.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Okay.” Evangeline didn’t sound convinced, but went to her own bed without saying more.

  Emmy kept the bracelet in her fist and slept with the wretched thing right against her heart all night.

  he kids had all gone to their rooms. Amanda sat on their bed reading, acting completely innocent. David took his pillow off the bed and grabbed the afghan that was draped over her legs.

  “David,” she said.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m giving you the whole bed. I’m taking the afghan.”

  She followed him out into the living room.

  “So you’re sleeping on the couch,” she said—an obvious fact that didn’t need stating aloud. “Listen…I’m sorry.”

  He couldn’t remember the last time they fought and she apologized. “You’re sorry? What’s your angle?”

  “My angle is apologetic.”

  “You messed with my head. I asked you to never do that again.”

  “Can you please trust me on this one?”

  “That’s not how it works, Amanda. I don’t care if you had the best reason in the world. You don’t get to decide what I know and what I don’t.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Yes, obviously. That was the point, right?”

  “Fine, be mad at me. I guess next time I’ll ask you to leave yourself a note.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You asked me to cast this spell. I thought it was a good idea, so I did. And if I tell you, then you’ll just ask me to cast the spell again. And then every day you’ll be mad at me when I come home from work. Like some fucked up Groundhog Day.”

  David wanted to yell again, but her words sounded true. Getting that small bit of truth relieved his agitation, as if puzzle pieces in his brain had snapped together.

  “Why would I want you to make me forget something? What could have happened yesterday that would be so traumatic?”

  “It wasn’t like that. You wanted me to counter a spell that had been cast on you. I did the best I could. I’m sorry. I’m not a fantastic witch.”

  That last line gave David pause. He couldn’t remember Amanda ever admitting to not being fantastic at anything. Granted, she had lived most of her life as a non-practicing witch, and had been raised by the same, so she didn’t have much training or experience. It probably annoyed her deeply to be a beginner at anything at forty-two. She sat on the couch, and pulled the afghan up to her neck.

  “I don’t want to fight,” sh
e said. “If you really want me to tell you what I distracted you from, I will.”

  “I…” David’s mind had cleared, but he still felt as if he missed important things, like trying to catch smoke. For one, since when did she give in so easy?

  “Tell me,” David said.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

  David sat next to her. “What do you mean?”

  “The good guys always win. Always. They talk about dark wizards being dangerous, but that’s ridiculous when you think about it. The good wizards win every time. They’re the dangerous ones.”

  “I think you’re thinking about Disney movies.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close, even though he didn’t understand why he was comforting her. She leaned her full weight into him, as if she might fall asleep at any moment.

  “Maybe. I just don’t like you involved in summer magic. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it.”

  “Summer magic?”

  She leaned over and grabbed the tablet off the end table. After a few swipes and taps, she handed the tablet to David, displaying a news story about Julie Prescott.

  David sighed with relief, feeling his brain reorienting itself. He also felt the magic that had propelled him to investigate Julie coming back. Well, not coming back, exactly—it had never left. Now it vibrated in him more strongly than ever, as if the spell had been screaming over loud music, and someone had turned the music off.

  However, the feeling of relief subsided, because he also remembered why he had wanted Amanda to make him forget.

  David considered asking Amanda to cast the spell on him again, but aside from the grief she would give him, he knew she had been right. Her spell hadn’t worked. Amanda’s spell and the summer magic would battle it out in his head, which could not be good for him. The spells had fought for less than 24 hours, and he felt as if he had spent that 24 hours binge drinking, or running a marathon, or both.

  So, that next morning, he felt sick and sore. But his mind had cleared, and he remembered asking her to cast the spell.

  When he told her what he wanted her to do, she said, “Honey…” and patted his arm.

  “Nowadays, you only call me ‘honey’ when you’re about to say something patronizing,” he had said.

  “I think the magic part may be all in your head.”

  “Yep, there it is.”

  “I think you’re seeing things that aren’t there. It makes me worry.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I know…I just want you to stay that way.” She’d avoided his eyes then, in a way that made her look young. Frightened.

  “I’m not making this up, Amanda. Maybe at first I had thought you might be right. Maybe I was just bored. Maybe missing kids get me all worked up. But the magic has been getting stronger. I don’t even know if I’ll even be able to sleep.”

  After David had spoken to Patrick and Xavier, the magic had gotten worse. Almost as soon as David showed Patrick the photo and saw him react, the white noise had moved out of the background. The humming vibrated through his brain. The magic screamed. So he dropped the matter and walked out of the room. He could hardly hear his own voice over what felt like a waterfall pummeling his brain. He also left because he didn’t want to know any more. And that’s why he had asked Amanda to stop the spell.

  “It’s something Emmy said, too,” David said, carefully selecting which part of the truth he wanted to share. “About how any dark wizard would want to attack her on sight. I don’t like that…I don’t know what that might mean.”

  Amanda crossed her arms over her chest then. “Oh, I think I see what this is about. Really, David?”

  “What?”

  “Just because he made one mistake one time doesn’t mean he’s capable of something like this.”

  “What? Jude? That’s not what I’m saying. I mean, I suppose it’s possible but…”

  “He’s not a psychopath. He made a mistake,” she said again.

  “Why are you defending what he did?”

  “I’m not defending what he did, I’m defending him. He’s my son. And if you’re going to accuse him of every crime you see on the news, then hell yes, I’m going to defend him. Because that’s not fair.”

  David’s jaw tightened and he had to remind himself to breathe. He hated thinking about what Jude had done. And even more than that, he hated thinking about what he hadn’t done. He had done so little to protect Samantha from harm and help her recover from it. Instead, he never wanted to look at her or hear her name again. She reminded him of not only of the darkness inside of his son, but the darkness inside of himself.

  “I never accused him,” David said. “That’s not what I was trying to say.”

  “Because he’s a winter wizard and she’s a summer witch, he’s automatically a suspect? If that’s all you’re going on, you could just as easily accuse me, or any other winter wizard. It’s not exactly an airtight case.”

  “Yeah…I know.”

  “Don’t even think it. I know it wasn’t Jude.”

  “What do you mean you know?”

  “I know. It wasn’t him. He had nothing to do with it.”

  “When you say you know, like that…do mean like ‘a mother knows’, or you actually know something that proves it wasn’t him?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I think you know what the difference is.”

  “Don’t be paranoid. It wasn’t Jude. End of story.”

  “I don’t think it was Jude,” David said. “But…I don’t want to even wonder. If the spell needs to use me…then I must have some connection to Julie. There must be a reason why it’s using me. And it’s a summer wizard’s magic, so I have to assume the spell wouldn’t be kind to me. Just make it stop.”

  And so she did her best. She specialized in memory magic after all. But the memory of Julie didn’t slide out of David’s brain. It fought. It clawed. It screamed.

  David rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes while he spoke into the phone. He had hired a private investigator several times in his life—on multiple occasions, in fact, to try and find Crystal and his kids, and more recently to find Samantha’s missing parents. He didn’t know why he kept hiring Mundane PIs, because they failed every time. Mundanes just couldn’t find missing wizards. He had accepted that, so he wouldn’t try to have this man find Julie. Instead, he had asked for a full background check on the Prescott family. He wanted to know about any possible threats or anything unusual. Fortunately, since David had hired this particular PI before, and he had failed to find his children despite guarantees to the contrary, David had been able to negotiate a drastically reduced rate for this search.

  When he called to give David the results, the PI started the call with a suspicious tone. “Why are you investigating the Prescotts?”

  “That’s not really your business, is it?”

  “Normally, I wouldn’t say anything. But I don’t want to get involved in anything nasty. I’m sure you know, their daughter recently went missing? It’s all over the news.”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m investigating. The Prescotts are friends of the family, and the police aren’t getting anywhere, so I wanted to look into it myself.”

  The man paused, but David’s story must have convinced him enough, because he continued, “Well, I’m not sure what you were looking for. If the Prescotts have any skeletons in their closet, they hide them well. In fact, they seem to be some of the most good and honest people I’ve ever investigated.”

  David made an unconscious growling sound that he covered with a fit of coughing.

  “John Prescott, is a pediatric oncologist—you know, helping kids with cancer,” the PI continued. “He’s on the board of multiple charitable foundations. His wife, Thea Prescott, is a kindergarten teacher. They’ve been together since high school, and have been married for twenty years, and as far as I can tell, happily so.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Wh
at is?”

  “I don’t know. Continue.”

  “They have five children. All who get good grades, are involved in lots of extracurricular activities, and have no significant recorded behavior problems. Their oldest, Caroline Prescott, is enrolled at the University of Texas. She had phenomenal test scores and went to an accelerated private school for her Junior and Senior year. Nathan Prescott graduated from Sugar Land High School in May and plans to attend Texas A&M in the fall, pre-med. Lucas Prescott will be starting his Sophomore year in the Fall. He takes flight lessons and wants to join the Air Force. Lucas has gotten a couple of speeding tickets and got in a fender bender. His parents took away his car. So, I guess that’s a little bit of dirt for you, eh?”

  “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

  “They’re a good family, sure. But I appreciated the challenge. I’m usually investigating cheating spouses who aren’t good at hiding their affairs. The Prescotts took work. But I told you I could find dirt on anyone, and I did.”

  “You mean other than the speeding tickets?”

  “Oh, yes. Let me finish.”

  “I did some extra digging into Nathan and Julie, since Nathan was the last one to see her before she disappeared. I included all of it in the report I e-mailed you. Nothing too interesting. They’re both popular, and well-liked, even by the unpopular kids. Julie has a few ex-boyfriends that might be worth checking out, but they all seem like cream puffs, and my gut says they’re not involved.

  “And I already told you about the parents. Model citizens. No criminal record, no scandalous rumors, not so much as a parking ticket. However, I did find something that seemed odd to me. Their oldest and youngest daughters…I can’t find them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leona never attended middle school. After fifth grade, they withdrew her from public school so they could homeschool her. They cited she had special needs. However, there are no reports of her having any kind of special needs throughout elementary school. Like her brothers and sisters, she excelled and had no behavior problems. So, I don’t know why they chose to homeschool her and not their other children. I was curious, so I looked into her as deeply as I could. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t been seen in a year. They’ve given all sorts of reasons for her not being around. Not comfortable in crowds. Sick. At camp. Staying with relatives. No one ever questions them.”