Paranormal Magic (Shades of Prey Book 1)

by Margo Bond Collins

  Not a chance, I thought. From now on, I was going to stay as far away from those two as humanly possible.

  “We’re working on it,” Josh said quietly.

  “But Abba, she’s spending a lot of time with the norms,” Mason said.

  “Then separate her from them.” Bartlef’s tone was dismissive. “Between the two of you, you have more power than any other students at that school. Use it. Keep her occupied.”

  “Yes, sir,” both boys said.

  “Then we are agreed,” Bartlef said. “We’ll meet here again a week from Sunday.”

  Oh, no. It sounded like they were getting ready to close out their strange little meeting. Sarah and I looked at each other in alarm. I nudged her so that we could start crawling toward the edge of the house.

  Once we reached it, we both began running in a crouch, trying to avoid making any noise that might give us away.

  Not that it mattered, I thought. Josh saw me. He knew I was there.

  My heart stuttered at the thought and I stumbled. Sarah grabbed my arm and pulled on it.

  “Come on,” she said in a harsh whisper. “We need to get farther away.”

  When we reached the unpaved road, we turned toward the house, but Sarah steered me away from it and into a small stand of stunted trees, the kind that John had said were mesquite.

  We collapsed onto the ground and caught our breath.

  “Okay, Sarah Ann Watkins,” I finally said. “That’s it. You need to tell me everything you know. What the hell is going on in this freaky town of yours?”

  Chapter 6

  Sarah’s eyes gleamed huge in the moonlight that filtered down through the scrubby trees.

  “I don’t know much. Really.”

  “But you knew where they met.”

  She nodded. “I used to date one of the other guys in their group. He told me a little bit about it.”

  “Which guy?”

  She shook her head. “He’s gone now.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. One day he was here, and the next day he didn’t come back to school. He didn’t even tell me he was leaving. The teachers all said he’d moved, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “So this guy—” I paused and waited.

  “Quentin.”

  “So this guy Quentin starts dating you, tells you about some weird midnight rituals he’s involved in, and then just disappears?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “So why did you take me out there?”

  “I knew that Josh and Mason were involved. Quentin told me so. So when they both started chasing you, I thought that maybe you could. . . .” She took a deep, shaky breath. “That maybe we could, I don’t know, find out what was going on. Or something.” She stared at the ground and tugged at some weeds. “I didn’t know that they were going to talk about you. Honest.” Her quiet voice had dropped even further.

  I put my face in my hands.

  Think, Laney, think.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Assuming that you’re telling the truth—”

  “I am,” she interrupted.

  I waved my hand. “Whatever. Fine. So what do we really know?” I spoke aloud, working it out as I went. “They’re out here doing creepy ritual-type things. We know Quentin and Cody were involved somehow. When Quentin told you about it, he disappeared. Cody refused to do whatever they wanted, and ended up dead on the track. And both Mason and Josh are supposed to keep me busy.”

  “And away from the norms,” Sarah added.

  “Which I assume means you and Natalie and Scott and Ally and Andrew.”

  Sarah nodded in agreement.

  “And they’re supposed to find out if I’m this yaw-taw thing. Whatever that is.”

  When I said it out loud, it almost sounded funny.

  It also sounded a little bit like a word problem: Josh and Mason both want Laney to be their own personal yaw-taw. Mr. Bartlef has mostly invisible bat wings. They all hang out at John Hamilton’s ranch. Assuming that Laney isn’t a total moron, calculate her chances of survival.

  Have I mentioned how much I hate math?

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I climbed back into my window and pulled the screen back up after me, then locked the window. And for good measure, I put my desk chair under the doorknob like I’d seen in movies. Even if it wouldn’t keep anyone out, maybe they’d trip on it trying to come in. Then I kicked off my shoes and huddled into my bed, fully clothed. After being out in the hot Texas night, the air conditioner on my skin made me shiver.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the air conditioner.

  At any rate, I curled up under the covers and stared at the clock. I dozed occasionally, but my dreams were strange and filled with bat wings and chants. I jerked awake several times. Finally I gave up on sleep entirely. Outside, crickets chirped softly. In Atlanta, I could hear the sounds of the nearby interstate from my bedroom. Here, sound seemed to travel farther, but all I could hear were animals: the crickets singing, cows lowing, and from a longer way off, coyotes howling.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the window started to get light and I decided to start my morning.

  Not sleeping ensured I got the shower first, at any rate. No one else was up yet, so I stood in the hot spray and let it sluice over me for a long time, until the water ran cool. That ought to irritate Kayla, I thought.

  When I wiped my hand across the mirror to clear the steam, my shadowed eyes stared back at me, ringed with purple smudges so dark they almost looked like bruises.

  Hooray for concealer.

  I drank two huge cups of coffee that morning, and then jittered around the house while I waited for Kayla to finish getting ready.

  Mom was packing to go on her first road trip to meet all the doctors in her area.

  “I’ll be gone a week,” she said, “but I’ll call every night. You’ll be fine here with John and Kayla.”

  I wanted to throw myself into her arms, call her “Mommy,” and beg her not to go. But she would have wanted to know why. And if Bartlef’s creepy group had made Quentin disappear, I didn’t want Mom to know anything about it. If she believed me at all, she’d insist we go to the “authorities.” And there had been adults out at the rock house last night. Some of them probably were the authorities.

  Nope. I couldn’t trust anyone. Best to keep Mom out of it altogether.

  So instead of throwing myself at her, clinging to her pants leg and wailing, I just smiled wanly and said “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  She frowned and held her hand up to my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “You look a little pale. Are you sick?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just tired from the first week of school. I’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “Okay, sweetie. Take care while I’m gone.” She kissed me on the cheek, and then reached up and gave John a kiss, too. I started—I hadn’t even realized he was standing behind me. Mom turned toward Kayla, but Kayla pointedly walked out of the room. Mom sighed.

  “I’ll see y’all in a week,” she said.

  * * *

  Ally had saved me a seat again in English. “So,” she said as I sat down. “How was your big night last night?”

  I blinked at her, not sure what to say. Had Sarah told Ally what we were doing? “Big night?” I finally managed.

  “Yeah. You know, your date with Josh.”

  Oh. That. I’d forgotten all about it.

  “It was fine,” I said shortly, and opened my backpack to take out my book. Mr. Carlson’s camera nestled at the bottom of the bag.

  “Well, you look terrible,” Ally said, pulling out a compact and checking her own makeup. “Did you let him keep you out too late?” She smirked at me.

  I started to answer her, but just then Josh walked into the room. He slid into the seat next to mine. I cringed away from him as he leaned toward me and whispered, “We have to talk.”

  “No,” I hissed back. “I don’t have to talk to you.” />
  Ally raised an eyebrow at this exchange. I wished she’d look at something else.

  “Laney, come on,” Josh said. He glanced at Ally. I could see the muscle in his jaw twitching. “It’s really important,” he finally ground out.

  I turned away and faced the front of the room, not answering him. He knew that Bartlef had killed Cody, and he hadn’t done anything about it. I shuddered.

  I could feel Ally’s speculative gaze moving back and forth between Josh and me. I spent the rest of the class looking attentively at Mrs. Norman and ignoring everything else.

  As soon as class ended, I scooped up my belongings, shoved everything haphazardly into my backpack, and headed for the door.

  I might have managed to avoid Josh if the other students hadn’t bottlenecked at the door. I felt his hand on my sleeve just as I was almost out of the classroom.

  “Laney,” he said, his voice pleading, “Will you just listen to me?”

  I got out into the hall and turned to face him. “What could you possibly have to say to me?” I asked.

  He ran a hand through his hair distractedly, making it stand up in spiky tufts. His eyes were bright silver today.

  I looked away from his face.

  “Please?” he finally said, quietly.

  I looked back up at him. “Where?”

  “Someplace private.”

  I shook my head. “No way. Someplace public. Very, very public.”

  “Okay. Okay. Fine. Of course.” He looked around nervously. “How about up in the bleachers out by the field?” he asked. “That way people can see us but not hear us.”

  “When?”

  “Last period. Get out of going to sell ads with Mason, okay?”

  I thought of the conversation I’d heard the night before—when Josh and Mason had argued over whether I belonged to either of them, when they had admitted that they knew Bartlef had killed Cody. No way in hell was I going anywhere with Mason. “Fine. But that doesn’t mean I trust you any more than I trust him.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll meet you out there.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He sounded like maybe he really meant it.

  I started to head to the gym but changed my mind at the last minute. This was Mr. Carlson’s free period, and I had something important to ask him.

  * * *

  “Okay, Laney, here you go.” Mr. Carlson stepped out of the darkroom and handed me a single sheet of photographic paper with several small images on it. “Take a look at that contact sheet and see if there are any you want me to print. Or better yet, you could wait and print it yourself after you learn to work with the enlarger.”

  I shook my head. “No. I really, really need it now, Mr. Carlson.”

  “Okay, okay. That’s fine.” He peered at the contact sheet in my hand. “These are pretty blurry,” he said. “I don’t know that I can get a good print off of any of them, anyway. You may need to practice with the camera some more before we use up any more materials.”

  “This one,” I said, pointing at a frame in the middle of the page. “Could you print this one for me?”

  He looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t think it’s going to make a very good photo, Laney,” he said.

  “Would you try anyway?”

  He sighed and took the sheet away from me again, stepping back into the darkroom. I tapped my foot while I waited. Why didn’t these people use digital cameras like the rest of the world? This place was backwards. I was starting to hate it.

  Ten minutes later he opened the door and turned on the light. “Okay, Laney,” he said. “You can come in.”

  I stepped past the light-blocking curtain that hung in front of the doorway. The smell of chemicals burned the inside of my nose, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. Hanging on a line was an 8" x 10" print of the image I’d asked for.

  The faces were blurry, like Mr. Carlson had said.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in experimental photography,” Mr. Carlson said. “This is actually quite artistic.”

  I mumbled some response.

  Like black smudges on the photograph, the shadows of dark wings sprouted from the shoulders of the people in the photo.

  Not just Bartlef.

  All of them.

  * * *

  Sarah tried to talk to me at lunch, but our furtive, whispered conversation got as far as “Josh wants to talk to me later” on my part and “What are you going to do?” on Sarah’s before Natalie interrupted loudly.

  “What are you two whispering about?” she demanded.

  “Nothing important,” I said quickly.

  “Bet it’s about Laney’s date with Josh last night,” Ally said. “Laney’s not speaking to Josh this morning.”

  “Really?” Andrew perked up. “What did he do?”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “Then why aren’t you speaking to him?” Andrew asked.

  “Maybe that's why she isn’t speaking to him,” Scott smirked. “Maybe she wanted him to do something, and he didn’t.”

  “What?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  “Ignore him,” Natalie said, swatting at Scott’s arm. “He’s just being a jerk.”

  Sarah stepped in at that point and changed the subject. Bless you, I thought, and concentrated on eating.

  By the last class period of the day, I was truly exhausted. I’d stuffed the photograph into my backpack and spent most of my afternoon classes trying not to think about it.

  Right. Like that was going to happen.

  We all checked in with Mr. Carlson, then left to go sell ads.

  I followed Mason out into the hallway. “I have something I have to go do this period,” I told him.

  He frowned. “But we’re supposed to be out selling.”

  “I know,” I said. “Maybe we could go out again sometime this weekend to make up for it?” I’d had all day to think about it, and had finally decided that offering to spend extra time with him later was the best way to get Mason to leave me alone for now.

  His face cleared. “How about Saturday?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “And maybe we could go out to dinner afterwards?”

  “Sure,” I said. Saturday. That was three days away. A virtual lifetime, the way things had been moving recently. I’d deal with Saturday when it showed up.

  “Great,” said Mason. He grinned that blinding grin of his and walked down the hallway, a bounce in his step.

  I kept imagining black leather wings on his back.

  I shuddered and hurried out of the building.

  When I got out to the bleachers, Josh sat on the top row, legs sprawled out in front of him. I climbed up and sat down beside him. We didn’t look at each other.

  “You get away from Mason okay?” he asked.

  “It was fine,” I said shortly.

  “Good.” He fell silent again.

  “So,” I said, “Talk.”

  He sat very still for a long moment. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Okay, then I’ll start. Why haven’t you told the police that Bartlef killed Cody?”

  “Because they already know. They won’t do anything about it.”

  That gave me pause. “So the police are in on it?”

  Josh shrugged. “About half of them, maybe? Enough to make sure nothing ever happened to Bartlef.”

  “What is wrong with you people?”

  He shook his head. “We can’t do anything about it, not while Bartlef is in charge of looking for the Yatah.”

  This wasn’t making sense. Clearly I needed more information. “What’s a yaw-taw?” I asked.

  “Yatah,” he corrected my pronunciation. “Emphasis on the last syllable.”

  “Whatever. What is it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s a person,” he finally said.

  “What kind of person?”

  “A human one.”

  “Not funny, Josh. Don’t w
aste my time.”

  He concentrated on his hands, clasped in his lap. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to explain this in a way you’ll understand. The Yatah is a human, not . . .”

  “Not. . . ?” I prodded him when he stopped speaking.

  “Not like me.”

  “A human who’s not like you?”

  “Someone who’s human. Not like me.”

  I stared at him. “Not like you.”

  He nodded.

  “And you are . . .?” I let the sentence dangle, hoping he’d pick it up. When he didn’t, I finished with “not human?” I half expected him to correct me. Instead, he just nodded again.

  “And Mason? He’s not human, either?”

  “No.” Josh’s voice came out as a strangled whisper.

  “Bartlef?”

  “No one there last night,” Josh said. “Except you.”

  And Sarah, I thought—but if Josh didn’t know that, I wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.

  “So what are you, then?”

  He shrugged. “The People.” I could hear the capital letter in the way he said it.

  “But not human people?”

  “No.”

  I digested this for a moment. “Then what?”

  “Norms have called us all sorts of things.”

  “Like fairies?” I guessed.

  He nodded. “Or demons, sometimes,” he said. “Occasionally angels, but not very often.”

  On account of angels don’t usually have big leathery bat wings, I supposed.

  I crossed my arms and huddled in on myself. “So what do a bunch of demons want with me?”

  Josh rubbed his eyes with his hands. “You’re the Yatah. Maybe. It’s sort of like . . . I don’t know. Chosen. Or something.”

  “Chosen? Chosen human?”

  He closed his eyes. When he finally spoke again, his words came out in a tumbled rush. “The Yatah is a human, but not just any human. The word doesn’t translate very well. It also means ‘abortion’ or ‘stillbirth.’”

  Well. That wasn’t very flattering.

  “It’s kind of like a human without a soul,” Josh finished.

  Less and less flattering, in fact.