Deadhead (Damned Girl Book 1)

by Clare Kauter

  I heard a noise outside and shoved all the scraps of paper in my tracksuit pockets. No one else needed to see my working. I didn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them. And that’s quite harsh coming from someone with as little upper body strength as me.

  Henry, Daisy and Hecate all crossed the threshold looking a little beat down. Ed followed shortly after.

  “Good to see you made it home OK,” said Henry. “We assumed Death would bring you back in one piece.”

  “Yeah, he’s good like that. Unless, you know, he decides he wants your soul and rips it from your body without your consent,” I answered. Henry frowned at me slightly, concerned. Fair call, really. That had been a little bleak.

  “Do you mind if we crash here tonight, Nessa? I’m beat, and I don’t think I can handle the trip back into Gretchen,” said Hecate.

  “Of course,” I said. “Actually, I wanted to asked you about the bank robbery if I could.”

  Hecate and Daisy exchanged glances.

  “Of course,” Hecate answered finally. “What did you want to know?”

  “I know the cameras were clouded and the clerks were confused, but there was some DNA evidence, wasn’t there?”

  Catch the thief, catch the killer.

  “Yes, actually,” said Daisy. “One of the guys cut his hand while he was running away, but we couldn’t find a match.”

  I nodded. I knew that much already. “Did you test it against Jon or Patty?”

  “No,” said Hecate. “We didn’t know they were involved until today.”

  “Right, of course.” I thought for a moment. “How many robbers were there in the bank?”

  “Two,” they said in unison.

  OK. Jon and Patty were in the bank, doing the job for some third party. They’d thought Ed had figured it out and the third party killed him, before killing the other two when they started to crack.

  It was a good theory, but it wasn’t the whole story. There were way too many things that didn’t sit right.

  Like… um, everything.

  Why I could apparently ‘trust no one’, for one thing. Why Ed could remember what I’d done today when the others couldn’t. What Daisy knew about me that I didn’t. Who had actually done it. What the Doomstone was.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. When in doubt, sleep.

  I left the lounge room and walked upstairs, managing to skilfully avoid making eye contact with Ed. That was something I didn’t want to get into now. ‘Sure, we kissed an hour ago, but now I don’t trust you enough to discuss the details of your own murder with you.’

  After a very thorough shower (no more blood and guts on me, no siree), I jumped into bed. Three hours later, I was still lying there, staring at the ceiling. Sleep was not coming as easily as I’d have liked. Thoughts of the case and my murders and my friends’ potential betrayal churned round and round in my head, keeping me from closing my eyes even for a second.

  That lack of sleep combined with slowly going insane from uncertainty is my defence for why I found myself climbing out my bedroom window and shimmying down the drainpipe in the dead of night. I’d decided to borrow Hecate’s magic carpet (which she’d left on the front veranda) and head back to Ed’s house. The reason I’d climbed out the window was because I didn’t want to go through the house in case someone saw me. They were all liars, and even potential murderers. I didn’t have time to be stabbed in the back. This was going to be a covert, single-operative mission.

  Satan’s advice hadn’t helped much so far, but I was hoping that if I found the evidence in the remains of the house that she’d insisted was there, everything would start tying together. I had a lot of facts, but it seemed like I was missing a big piece of the puzzle. Like the piece that told me who the murderer was.

  I picked up the rolled carpet and carried it out of my yard past the cemetery, crouching down and sneaking along until I knew I was no longer in sight of the house. When I was safely out of view, I stood and flicked the carpet out. It unfurled and I climbed on. And it stayed still.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered. “Let’s go!”

  It responded by dropping to the ground.

  “Ouch!” I cried, before continuing in a quieter voice. “Please, I have to get back to that house. I need to solve this case!”

  Nothing.

  Really? I was going to have to plead with a rug?

  “Carpet, please.”

  Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe Hecate had cast a spell on it so that only she could use it and I was essentially just trying to reason with an inanimate object. Please, let that not be the case.

  “Come on, you know I’m on your side here. I saved you from those vamps, remember?” I wondered if it did remember. What if it had been clouded too? What if it wasn’t a sentient being at all? This had the potential to be very embarrassing.

  Suddenly I felt a hum of energy moving through the carpet. It remembered! I continued. “I have to find out who killed Ed so I can figure out who robbed the bank and the police station and get Hecate out of trouble by getting the Doomstone back before whoever it is harnesses its power and takes over the world or whatever they want to do.”

  The energy humming through the carpet seemed to intensify, but it wasn’t sure enough to lift more than a couple of inches off the ground. I needed to convince it further.

  “You know what I can do. The others don’t remember that I have any powers, but you know that I’m strong. I need to at least try to do this by myself or the others won’t let me get involved and they’ll get hurt. Please, carpet, trust me.”

  The carpet seemed to think for a moment, tilting slightly to one side, as if it were tilting its head in contemplation. After a moment, a ripple ran the length of the carpet – a shrug. It rose a few feet off the ground. I grabbed the front and laid forward to make myself as aerodynamic as possible. The rug shot forward and took me back to the house in record time.

  I alighted in the backyard of Ed’s house. The fire trucks and police had left, but the building had been cordoned off with yellow tape out the front. The back door was amazingly unscathed, which surprised me after the earlier inferno. I turned the knob and pushed the door, but nothing happened. It was locked.

  “Oh, carpet, don’t tell me we came all this way to be stopped by a locked door.”

  Perhaps I was projecting, but I could have sworn that the carpet gave me a look of disgust.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I can do this.”

  B & E was, surprisingly, not one of the necessary life skills Satan had taught me over the years. How hard could it be, though, right? A key turning in a lock was just a transfer of energy. I could do that.

  Shutting my eyes, I traced the keyhole with my forefinger. The energy pulsed out of me and snaked around in the hole in an entirely unerotic way (you pervert). The energy continued to move about, filling the space (don’t go there). Eventually, every nook and cranny in that tiny keyhole was filled. And –

  Nothing happened.

  I turned to the carpet and shrugged helplessly.

  It rolled over in mid-air.

  “Oh! Right!”

  I turned my finger slightly, and with it the energy in the keyhole turned, tumbling the lock.

  “Nice one, carpet!”

  It gave me a high five with one of its front corners.

  I turned the doorknob and stepped inside, the carpet following behind me. I was in an unidentifiable room – the walls had been charred beyond recognition. It smelled of smoke and something acrid and strangely sweet. Burnt plastic? I held a hand over my face and mouth to try and block out the smoky air. Dirty water dripped from the ceiling, which was still wet from the firefighters’ efforts to extinguish the blaze.

  I walked forward into what I knew from my trip here yesterday was the lounge room. I tried not to look through the doorway at the charred mass lying on the floor of the hall. Although I’d spoken to Patty’s spirit, the image of his corpse bleeding out on the floor would pr
obably be my lasting memory of him.

  Focus, I told myself. There must be something here you can use.

  Satan had sent me here. She must have thought that there was something left behind after the fire, something that would give me a clue as to who was responsible for all of this. But what? I shut my eyes and began fishing around with my mind.

  It was hard to locate any hotspots of energy in this burnt out husk of a cottage. There were magical flare-ups everywhere, presumably the aftermath of the fireball that had been sent through the house to destroy whatever it was I was looking for. I needed to find it quickly. As long as I was in this house, I was not safe. Although, if I’d learned anything over the last few days, it was that as long as I existed I was not safe.

  Focussing in on the source of energy I presumed I was meant to be locating was not proving to be easy. I began to wonder if this was even what Satan had intended I do when I came here. If there was evidence with some significance to the case, surely this was how I was meant to find it? I didn’t really have any skills apart from sensing energy. (Well, other than killing people. But that wasn’t really something I could use here, or, in fact, wished to use ever again.)

  I doubled my efforts, racing around the house with my mind, seeking out the evidence as if by sonar – sending out energy and feeling how it interacted with the world around me. I was like a dolphin, except on land. And not as cute. And I didn’t eat fish. Plus I was looking for evidence in a murder trial, which as far as I knew dolphins didn’t do. Where was I?

  Oh, right. I was sending out a net of energy, hoping something would come back. Something different from the regular energy radiation left over from the fire.

  And it did.

  Eyes still closed, I followed the stream of energy through the house to its source until I was metres away. I opened my eyes.

  Ed’s bookshelf.

  “Shit!” I said aloud. The carpet looked taken aback. “Sorry. It’s just that I thought there was a clue in here, but I was lured in by Ed’s porn collection.”

  The carpet looked disgusted.

  “I know, right? Who keeps physical copies of porn anymore?”

  I sighed and turned to walk out the door, but I was stopped by a red energy barrier that zapped me when I walked into it. I cried out in pain and began to panic – momentarily. Then I realised what was happening.

  “Satan, you don’t need to hurt me every time you want to tell me something!” I yelled towards the ceiling.

  “I’ll stop zapping you when you stop being stupid!” her voice boomed back.

  “Wha – ” I began. But then it clicked. Finally. I stopped. Turned.

  And slowly walked back towards the bookshelf.

  My hand reached towards the source of the energy – the Encyclopaedia of Australian Birdlife – and I pulled it off the shelf. I took a slow breath in through my nose, and exhaled through my mouth. I took another slow breath, trying to calm myself. A feeling of dread had settled in my gut. Never before had I so strongly wished I were holding pornography.

  The dust jacket came off easily. Underneath, I could see the real title of the book. It was, indeed, an encyclopaedia.

  The Encyclopaedia Occulta.

  The same book that had gone missing from my room.

  Chapter 20

  I flipped the book open to check inside the cover, expecting to see the familiar heart-warming (yet terrifying) inscription from Satan: For my precious Nessa, the only human I like alive. What I actually saw, however, was something completely different.

  Witch’s Brew – Caffeine-dish reads

  So this wasn’t my book at all – just another copy of the same tome… bought from the very bookshop/café/magical police station that Hecate and Daisy ran. That explained how Ed had met them, then. It didn’t explain what this was doing in his possession. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear that explanation.

  This part of Ed’s room was oddly unscathed, but there was still murky water all over the floor, making my slippers blackened and moist. (Why hadn’t I changed before leaving the house?) I decided to move outside onto the back lawn, where I sat on the dewy grass with the carpet hovering next to me and opened the book across my lap. The light from the moon was bright enough to read with no further illumination.

  It fell open to a page with a picture of a large black gem with purple imperfections inside it. The Doomstone.

  Ed had known about the Doomstone. He’d known that I was about to find the book in his room, and thrown me off the scent with the porn lie. How did this make any sense? Had he also hidden my copy of this book so I wouldn’t find out more information about the stone?

  I kept reading.

  There seemed to be nothing of note in the passage. Nothing that made any sense to me, at least. It was a rock of untold power. No one knew much about it. Blah blah. There was nothing in this book that was even remotely useful. Why had he bothered hiding it? Why had he stolen my copy? What was the use of –

  The book began to hum and the fault lines in the gem began to glow, and slowly started swirling. Purple tendrils curled across the page, before rising into the air and extending, growing like a beanstalk along the length of the yard, before delving into the ground in a sandy patch near a large tree.

  I cast the book aside and ran to the place where the energy had hit the earth. I examined the patch of sand. It had been recently disturbed and was still pretty loose. I began to dig. Eventually my fingers closed around something smooth and hard. I pulled it out and stood.

  The Doomstone.

  “Finally, darling, you’ve found it,” said a voice from behind me. “I was beginning to think you’d never get there.”

  I turned.

  I was face-to-face with Ed. He reached out for the Doomstone and I was too numb and limp to stop him gently removing it from my hand.

  “All this time?” I said. “You’ve just been following me hoping that I’d lead you to the Doomstone?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s not what you think,” said Ed.

  “It is, though, isn’t it?”

  A grin spread across his face. “I’m almost one hundred per cent sure that it’s not. As much as I like you, Ness, you’re a bit slow,” he replied. “That worked out well for me, of course. I must admit, to give you your due, it did all get rather convoluted. There are probably people who would have taken longer to figure it out. Children, the brain damaged, you know.”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “Oh, of course you do. Now, do you want to know what happened? How much thought and care I put into it? How committed I was to my cause?”

  He was still smiling.

  “So committed you killed yourself.”

  He raised his eyebrows and continued, impressed. “Yes, that was something of an integral part. As was getting you onside.”

  “So you lied.”

  “Yes, darling. People do that. I hadn’t expected you to be so easy to con, though. You’re adorably naïve.”

  I crossed my arms and frowned back at him wordlessly.

  He sighed. “Fine, I’m sorry for lying to you. I did what I had to do. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “A necessary evil, I guess?”

  “Yes,” he said seriously. “You were.”

  Some apologies just make things worse.

  “What exactly is your game plan here?”

  “Not entirely sure yet.”

  I didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Don’t want to share it with me?”

  “Well, I was an only child. I never really learned how to share,” he quipped.

  “Looks like I dodged a bullet with you, then.” Had I actually ever thought that kissing a dead guy was a good idea? Next thing I’d be ending up with Vampire James. He was probably single now that I’d killed his girlfriend with my demon blood.

  “Come on, what fun would it be if I just told you everything?” Ed asked.

  I rolled my eyes. He wanted to play games.

  “F
ine. I’ve figured out bits of it for myself.”

  His eyes widened sarcastically. (Sarcastic facial expressions are my least favourite kind of facial expressions.) “Go on.”

  “You did it.”

  He laughed and said condescendingly, “Well done.”

  “You stole the clouding cones and amplifiers and all the rest from the evidence locker at the police station. I don’t know how you knew it was all there. Just met some magicals somewhere I guess. Slimed your way into their circle of trust somehow.” That was his classic MO. I thought for a moment. “You probably stole the Encyclopaedia at the same time as you took all the evidence from the shop.”

  “Actually, I paid for the Encyclopaedia. I had to do my research before I put my plan into action. Daisy served me, as it happens. That’s why I clouded her.” He caught the look I was giving him. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “OK, so you stole the stuff from the station. You used the clouding spell on the way out to hide yourself from the camera. Did Hecate see you that time? Is that why you clouded her?”

  “Very good,” he said. “It seemed like a better idea than incapacitating her in a more permanent fashion.”

  Yeesh.

  “Why didn’t you wait until you were a ghost to do that bit? Surely it would have been easier to break in once you were invisible to most people and could walk through walls.”

  “I wanted to make sure I had all the things I needed before I went to all the trouble of killing myself. That’s quite a drastic step, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  Fair enough.

  I continued. “You and your housemates did the bank robbery – two of you went in, the other probably drove the car. You used the clouding spells to cover your tracks, but you cut yourself while you were there. They didn’t have your DNA on file, but you were worried that if someone noticed the cut on your corpse someone might figure it out and it would ruin your master plan. That’s why you went to so much trouble to cover up your body later. Zombies, a bomb, clouding the forensics – very thorough.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But what I don’t understand is why the hell you came to me. Were you trying to get caught?”