Fangtabulous

by Lucienne Diver

  I passed the amulet off to him before there could be any more mushy stuff that didn’t involve me and Bobby.

  Brent’s eyes almost immediately rolled up into his head.

  “Brent!” Marcy called, but I grabbed her before she could rip the amulet from him.

  “Give him a sec,” I said. “We need to learn what we can.”

  “But—”

  Brent spasmed and dropped the amulet like a hot potato.

  “That’s definitely what’s powering the spirits,” he said, gasping for breath. “It’s like some sort of energy cell with no off switch.”

  “Any connection to a Book of Shadows?” I asked, pulling my sleeve over my hand again to rescue the dangerous amulet from where it had fallen.

  “Could be. I got a pretty good sense of the original owner. You’ll never believe this.”

  “What? Who?” I mean, on a previous mission we’d met Rasputin. The Rasputin. The Mad Monk, advisor to the doomed Romanov royal family killed during the Russian Revolution. Next to Elvis, Jesus, and Dracula, how much crazier could it get?

  “Tituba,” he answered.

  There was that name again, and I still couldn’t remember what it meant. Marcy’s face crinkled up in confusion.

  “The name sounds familiar,” I started. “But—”

  “The witch!” Bobby exclaimed, and suddenly I remembered it from all the times he’d read us Salem history snippets until we wanted to brain him. “The slave who taught those Salem girls the ‘spells’ that they felt so guilty about, they started acting out.”

  “Wait, I remember this!” I said, excited. “She and her husband John Indian were accused of witchcraft.”

  “He turned on her to save himself, just like the girls,” Bobby jumped in again.

  “That so sucks,” Marcy said, totally recovered now.

  “Not so much,” Bobby responded. “Unlike so many others, she wasn’t put to death. Someone bought her way out of prison.”

  “So, what’s this amulet?” I asked Brent.

  “Something she brought with her from her homeland. When Tituba sensed that the authorities were coming for her, she knew everything she had would be confiscated—the accused basically funded their own trials. Tituba hid the pendant and her Book of Shadows to save them for her daughter, and also so they couldn’t be used against her. She foresaw her own imprisonment.”

  “Harsh,” Marcy commented.

  “But she didn’t hide the pendant and book together,” I cut in, “or they’d have been found together.”

  “I didn’t get all that from the amulet. Imprints are only left when strong emotions are involved—I got Tituba’s fear that witch hunters would come for her, and her acceptance of an almost-certain death, which turns out wasn’t so certain after all. I don’t have much more than that. Her daughter did get the pendant somehow, because I feel her here as well, overlying the memories, obscuring the hiding places. I have images, but not much else … nothing that means anything to me. The necklace was in a secret spot, a hidey-hole within the household where she served. The book … wasn’t,” Brent answered helpfully.

  His gaze shot suddenly to Bobby, as if something had just occurred to him. “Should he be hearing all this?”

  We all looked at Bobby, whose eyes were, mercifully, still baby blue.

  “Brent, it’s Bobby,” I said, even though I had the same doubts.

  “For now. But you said Rebecca knew I was a telemetric. I know Bobby wouldn’t have intentionally told her about me, but he doesn’t seem to have any control over himself, and I don’t see how else she could have known.”

  “I’m right here,” Bobby said.

  “That’s exactly my point. Until we break this … spell or whatever, you can’t be trusted. What if this is plan B? What if you’re still somehow bound to her and she meant for you to come along and turn on us once we solve her mystery and find the book?”

  “Paranoid much?” I asked.

  “Occupational hazard,” Brent answered.

  “What occupation? You wait tables.”

  “Enough,” Ulric said, cutting across us all. “You can’t start turning on each other. If you want the amulet destroyed or deactivated or whatever, I know who to call.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Olivia?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “But the coven’s already tried to lay the spirits to rest. They couldn’t do anything.”

  “They didn’t have the source of the problem to study, though.”

  “You’ll make the call?” I asked.

  “Um, yeah, hold that thought.”

  Ulric had slowed the car to a crawl and was staring hard out the window ahead of us.

  There was a patrol unit about a block away on the right, along with another car, both parked on the street. Since all other cars on the block were tucked away in driveways or garages, this seemed pretty significant.

  “Your aunt’s place?” Marcy asked, jumping to the same conclusion I had.

  Ulric nodded. “But why?”

  He pulled over to the side of the road and started to get out of the car. Brent reached over from the back seat to stop him. “What are you doing? It’s probably you they’re after. They probably have the Crown Vic on tape at the hospital driving away after the incident there. You can’t go in.”

  Ulric shook him off. “I have to! What if something’s happened to her?”

  “Wait!” I said urgently. “Think about this for a second. I’m not saying don’t go. Just, if you do, if you’re questioned, remember that the police don’t have anything on you. If there’s footage from the parking lot, they’ll know you weren’t the one driving getaway. You weren’t even conscious.”

  “Whatever. I’m not worried about me. What if the killer cop’s the one in there interrogating my aunt?”

  We all went silent.

  “You all go,” he said. “I’ll handle this on my own. But I have to go in there.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean yes, you go. But you won’t be alone.”

  “But they can’t see you … ”

  “They won’t,” I said. “And neither will you.”

  He gave me a funny look, but I didn’t explain and he didn’t wait around for it. He was already out before I turned to the others. “You all bug out, in case they search the car.”

  But don’t go far, I mind-spoke to Bobby, forgetting for a second that his abilities were on the blink. You stay you until I get back. I love you. I wished … I slipped out of the car, pushing aside the pain of the wishes I couldn’t make come true. Instead, I focused on going insubstantial. Almost in an instant I was as light as air. The sounds and smells of the night lost their clarity. The ground was no longer beneath my feet. Even my sorrow seemed a distant thing. It took all my concentration to move myself after Ulric. I wondered if this was how actual ghosts felt. If so, it was no wonder they took possession of a body, to recover the immediacy of life when they could.

  I floated, past the police car and the other cars, toward the house. I sensed rather than saw Ulric let himself in, mostly by the change in the air as the heat from the house met and mingled with the cold air outside, creating a swirly pattern of contrast. I aimed for that turbulence, but he must have shut the door right behind him, because as I hit the entrance, I smacked up against something dense. Only my momentum pushed me on through … or rather, it felt like pieces of me squeezed through, like spaghetti through a press. Panic that all my parts might not get sorted out again on the other side overtook me. This happened every time I went through something solid. I hated it. Hated. With a fiery passion rivaled only by my feelings toward my old arch-nemesis, Tina Carstairs.

  Then I was in, past the door, all together again. Or so I hoped. I tried to get a sense of where in put me. A big open space that I’d be caught out in at any second? The safety of a coat closet?

  I sensed the air, stretched out my awareness, and tried to let the impressions come. It definitely wasn’t a closet, or I�
��d have subtle pressure from the contents on all sides, but it wasn’t a big space either. Air currents were swirling just beyond—people talking or moving around. I had to know what was going on.

  The more solid I became the better spy I’d make, but also the more discoverable. I floated behind some big object—like one of those typical New England pieces that combined a wooden bench for pulling on your boots with a mirrored back for seeing how you looked in them, and a wide backsplash with hooks on either side for hanging jackets and scarves. Aside from that, the area felt almost entirely taken up by boots, lined up all the way to the door like soldiers standing at attention, reporting for duty.

  Luckily, the behemoth piece of furniture was big enough to hide me, which was a good thing, because I had to go at least semi-solid to hear. I peeked out from behind the jackets and could see straight into the sunken living room, in which Ulric’s aunt, I guessed, was serving two uniformed officers—luckily not the killer cops—tea and cookies. I craned my neck to see farther into the room, and nearly knocked all the coats aside in shock. My heart wanted to beat just so it could stop all over again.

  There, right in Ulric’s living room, were our former Federal handlers: Agents Sid and Maya, aka Stuffed Shirt and Stick-up-her-butt.

  Brent had been right that the Feds would be on top of the goings-on in Salem, and wrong to think that they wouldn’t be instantly connected to us. It couldn’t be mere coincidence that it was these two agents who’d showed up. Here. Now. We were so screwed.

  Seeing Ulric, his aunt—a militantly trim woman in a lavender sweater set, her gunmetal gray hair like a helmet on her head—straightened. A teacup with hand-painted cherry blossoms dancing across it was clasped in one hand and a matching kettle in the other. She trapped him with her steely gaze and demanded, “Ulric, what have you done?”

  I was both relieved and offended on his behalf. Family should give you the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, at least she was safe.

  “Now, ma’am,” Agent Sid said soothingly, “we don’t know for certain that he did anything. But your car was caught on camera at North Shore Medical Center, where an officer was wounded last night, and you say he borrowed it, so, of course, we have to follow up.”

  Sid’s gaze transferred from the aunt to Ulric, and there was a don’t-screw-with-me look to it. Given his aunt, though, I was guessing Ulric had experience handling himself under that kind of scrutiny.

  In fact, Ulric answered all the questions with claims of amnesia. He was knocked out at the hospital and came to in the car—all the absolute truth, if only a fraction of it. Nobody trained to read cues, as I knew Sid and Maya were, could possibly cry foul, though Sid clearly wanted to. The interesting part came next, when Agent Maya pulled out pictures to show Ulric and his aunt.

  “Have you seen any of these people before?” Maya asked, fanning the stack out on the table. Bobby’s pic, Marcy’s, and mine must have been from our pre-vamp days when our images could still be captured. I so hoped mine wasn’t from junior year, when my mother forgot to check the airbrushing option to cover up the fat lip I’d gotten from a stray volleyball in gym class.

  She and Sid studied Ulric closely as he looked at the pictures. They knew very well that Ulric had met Bobby and me back in New York when I’d infiltrated the goth gang. They were hoping to draw him into a trap.

  “Yeah, that’s Geneva … Belton? Bison? Belfry, that was it. I knew her back in New York. Strange girl. And I might have seen him around.” I was guessing he’d indicated Bobby. I wasn’t at the right angle to see. “We didn’t hang. He was a brain.”

  “You were smart enough,” his aunt started in on him. “You just didn’t apply—”

  “Ma’am,” Sid cut her off, “we’ve got this. So,” he said to Ulric as she huffed her indignation, “you haven’t seen them recently?”

  Oh crap on a crispy, crumbly cracker. Haunts in History—they’d find out, if they didn’t already know, that we all worked together. They’d assume he was in league with us. Which, of course, he sort of was. We’d put him right in their crosshairs.

  I didn’t know exactly what that meant anymore. Back when we’d worked for the Feds and I thought we were on the side of good, I’d have assumed they’d merely put him under surveillance. That was before I’d seen their secret “medical” facilities, with vampires being bled for goth-knew what use of their blood, kept barely alive. Ulric didn’t have any special powers. He could be of no possible use to them. What if they decided he was a liability? What then? We had to hope they viewed him as someone who could lead them to us Federal fugitives—someone worth keeping alive.

  I was torn between staying behind to watch Ulric and ghosting out to give the others the bad news. We were going to have to ditch even the phones we had left and buy a bunch of burners. If the Feds knew about Ulric, they’d be tracking all calls to or from his phone. We might as well be carrying around our own personal Bat-signals.

  Suddenly, the hip radios on both of the uniformed officers went off simultaneously. Everyone in the room stopped cold, eyes riveted on the radios like they’d suddenly display 3-D video or something. Instead, someone snapped out code, cross-streets, and shock. Definitely shock. Whatever the code meant, it was no run-of-the-mill drunk and disorderly.

  “Officer-involved shooting?” one cop said to the other. “What the hell is going on in this town?”

  “Can we ride along?” Sid asked.

  “Knock yourselves out. Just stay out of the way.”

  Sid looked like he’d like to spit nails as he ground out, “Sure thing.”

  That was my cue. I ghosted out again before anyone could discover me and floated through the night. A weird vibration brought me crashing back into my body across the street from where everyone was exiting Ulric’s house. I stumbled with my sudden materialization, and ducked between two houses, out of sight. The strange vibration continued, and I realized it was Brent’s cell phone in my pocket. I answered quickly before it could go to voicemail.

  “Gina, thank God!” Marcy said immediately in my ear. “Everything okay?”

  “If you consider an officer down okay.”

  “What?” she screeched. “What went on in there?”

  “Oh no, not at Ulric’s. The police got a call while I was inside. We’d better follow.”

  “Crapcakes with suck sauce.”

  My thoughts exactly. I walked until the phone was no longer necessary and I had the others in my sight. Bobby was the first one I looked at, of course. Eyes … still blue. A good sign.

  “So, any ideas for playing follow that car?” Brent asked.

  As if I’d summoned it, there was a honk out on the street. I smiled. “I think that’s our ride.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave him out of it, given the official interest in him?”

  “You convince him. I’ll watch. Anyway, I think it’s a little late for that.”

  Ulric popped the locks as we approached.

  “How’d you convince your aunt to let you take the car again after all that?” I asked as I got in.

  “Who says I asked?”

  “You mean you stole it?” Bobby asked, horrified. Yup, still sounded like Bobby.

  Ulric pulled out, barely sparing him a glance. “No, stealing is the intent to keep. This is more like borrowing.”

  “Without permission,” Bobby pushed.

  “Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” Ulric spared a look away from the street to flash us a wolfish grin.

  “You’re not worried about the police and the questioning?” Marcy asked.

  “Been there, done that. Have the rap sheet to prove it,” Ulric answered.

  “Really?” Marcy sounded impressed. Everyone looked at her in shock.

  “Driving without a license,” he offered.

  “Oh.”

  “I was fourteen.”

  “Oh.”

  “Down girl,” Brent said, putting a hand possessively on her leg.

  “Rebel withou
t a clue,” Bobby added.

  Jealous, both of them. Stupid boys.

  Clearly, all the numbers spouted off on the radio had meant something to Ulric, because he didn’t need to follow the long-gone cops to the scene.

  It was chaotic enough that I thought we might not be noticed if we stayed far enough off. Unless Bobby went mental again. We didn’t have any choice but to bring him along and keep watch. We already knew the trunk wouldn’t hold him. I had no idea what would. Since shots had been fired, the scene was attracting a lot of attention … including from the Ghouligans, who were standing by. The cameraman held his piece at hip level—not filming, but ready to start at a moment’s notice. They were behind the crime scene tape with the rest of the hoi polloi, but just barely. I was fairly sure I could get the full story out of Ty if I could get close enough, but I didn’t dare risk it.

  Ulric tapped someone at the back of the gathered crowd, one of the few who wasn’t talking on his cell phone or holding it above his head hoping to get good and gruesome pics. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Dude, these guys—cops—stopped a girl for reckless driving and they got into it with her. What I heard, one tried to strangle her and the other had to shoot him to save her. Crazy, right?”

  “Is the girl okay?” I asked.

  He turned to me and the fumes from his breath nearly knocked me back. I was guessing a bloomin’ onion and some kind of garlic dipping sauce. My eyes watered.

  “They took her out in an ambulance instead of a body bag, so yeah, I’m guessing. Medics are still working on the cop.”

  I shot a glance at Bobby. He was sniffing, but not in the direction of the onion breath. He was sniffing high. Something in the air, then. I stepped away from the guy, with a mumbled “thanks,” to scent the night myself.

  Blood and fire.

  Literally. The air smelled of cordite and death. I hoped it wouldn’t trigger bad-Bobby.

  “Bobby,” I said gently, “that’s still you in there, right? Stay with us.”

  He looked at me, and his eyes were still blue, but deeper, darker … stormier. The other was fighting for control. I could see it.

  So could Ulric. “We’ve got to get all this under control,” he said.