by H G Lynch
Wow. Some serious crap must’ve happened; Brandon never barged into their room without knocking first – the one time he’d done that before, he’d been greeted by the sight of a drunken bartender lying on the floor in her underwear and another girl tangled in Reid’s bed sheets. After that, he’d avoided their room as much as possible.
A muffled snort from the bed reminded him that Ember was still in the room, and he hoped she wouldn’t ask what was going on. He hadn’t told her he was working with Brandon and Perry on the lake killings. One more thing he’d been keeping from her. So much for telling her about his nightmares today. It looked like he’d be pretty busy. Still, Ember sat up slowly and arched a brow at Reid. He waited for her to ask, but instead all she said was, “Someone has got to stop slipping crack into his morning coffee.”
Reid nearly choked as he tried to swallow his laughter.
*****
Unfortunately, his good mood didn’t last long. As he pulled up at the rundown house for the meeting, a nasty cloud settled over him. His stomach dropped in apprehension as he swung his leg off his motorbike and shoved the keys into his pocket. The air was heavy and stiff with the frost hanging about on the grass and rotting leaves. His breath formed puffs of mist in front of his face as he walked up to the peeling door of the building. He pushed open the door, which gave with a low groan and a grinding sound, before slamming shut almost of its own accord behind him.
The old farmhouse looked the same as ever; dim, dusty, dilapidated. Rubbish sat in piles in the corners, spiders dangling over the empty crisp packets and bottles of beer and other assortments of used, unwelcome items. The walls were a mess of crumbling drywall and spray-paint graffiti. The upstairs, Reid knew, was a long corridor lined with rooms, and above that, there was an attic. Of course, the stairway up to the attic had been sealed off for a while now, ever since there was that thing with a wraith that decided to move in. It hadn’t been pretty.
Shaking away the memory, Reid made his way to the steel door under the stairs, and found it unlocked. The door gave a metallic moan as he open it and clanged when he shut it. He descended the stone steps, firelight showing him the way, the shadows dancing along the walls, seeming to chase him.
When he reached the bottom, the familiar, stone-bound room, with its many books and roaring fire, revealed itself from the gloom. Perry and Brandon were already there, sitting in their usual seats, talking in hushed tones. They looked up at Reid’s entrance. Brandon frowned.
“Where’s Ricky?” he asked impatiently.
Reid took his seat and propped his feet on the lip of the stone bowl which held the fire. “Coming. He wanted to tell Sherry where he was going,” he told Brandon and Perry.
It was five, long, boring minutes before Ricky showed up, and the relief was plain on Brandon’s face. He’d been growing more agitated by the minute while they waited. Whatever was up, it was likely time-sensitive.
“Sorry I’m late. I had to tell—” Ricky began, rushing down the stone steps and bounding to his seat. He dropped into it just as Brandon cut him off.
“Doesn’t matter. Look, this is what’s happening: I think there might be another victim of the lake killer. On my way to Physics this morning, I heard some of the guys on the basketball team saying they hadn’t seen Leon Baker since last night. He didn’t come home after they went to the bar. I think whoever is doing these killings, took him.”
Reid frowned, shook his head. “Or he got laid last night and hasn’t bothered getting up for school.” Not everything had to be a potential murder on their watch. But, he had the feeling that maybe this one was. He hoped not.
Ricky was shaking his head, too. “Didn’t you banish the nymphs already? They wouldn’t come back to a lake tainted with holy water.”
“I don’t think this is group of nymphs messing about anymore. This is something else. Something bigger and more dangerous. I think we should re-consider the possibility that we’ve got a rogue kelpie on our hands. I know, we dismissed it because kelpies eat their victims, but there is something weird going on here and we can’t rule out the possibility that a kelpie has simply gone on a killing spree for whatever reason.” Brandon sighed, raked a hand through his hair. In the firelight, his mouth looked like a harsh black line against his skin, and his cheeks looked sunken. The stress was getting to him.
“Maybe the kelpie got kicked from his water polo team,” Reid joked, trying to put a hole in the overwhelming cover of seriousness that had descended on the room. It was smothering and gave Reid a slightly sick feeling. This was just like old times, just the four of them dealing with a nasty supernatural problem, and him trying to keep his snarky attitude so that he wouldn’t be sucked under the waves of depressing stress. If he lost his wit, he’d end up like Brandon, and that would royally suck.
All eyes turned on Reid, and he thought he saw a glimmer of amusement in the depths of Brandon’s narrowed eyes. Ricky pinched his arm, and Reid slugged him playfully in return. Perry gave a snort, and the painful tension was shattered. “I take it we’re going to the lake then? This should be fun. Last time we dealt with a kelpie, I nearly got my hand bitten off.”
“Reid, that happens to you with normal horses, let alone a supernatural meat-eater,” Ricky pointed out.
Reid shrugged. “Beside the point. It still tried to eat me. Do you suppose kelpie blood would taste like seaweed and salt water? I don’t think I’ve ever tried kelpie,” he pondered idly as he got his feet with everyone else. Off to the lake it was. They began ascending the stairway, the crackling fire dousing itself, and the flickering candelabras doing the same as they passed.
“What makes you think you could get close enough to bite a kelpie without it taking a chunk out of you?” Perry nudged him and he nudged back.
“Fine, no kelpies then. How about brownies? Would a brownie taste like…well, brownies?”
“No, they taste like dirt.”
“How do you know, Kee?”
“I tried one. Remember last year when we rounded up that gang of miscreant fae that were selling illegal potions to school kids? Yeah, one of them tried to stake me with a branch, so I bit its head off. It tasted like dirt.”
Even Brandon laughed at that, and they kept up a steady stream of random banter until they reached Onyx Lake, preserving the light mood for as long as possible.
Once they reached the lake, though, the banter came to an abruptly end as Reid shut up mid-joke. Everyone else fell quiet too and stared at the body resting, face-down, in the mud of the shallowest part of the lake. It was a guy, stripped down to just his boxer shorts, his arms spread wide on the gritty mud. His skin was that horrible blue-grey that all corpses adopt after a few hours and he didn’t seem to have any outward signs of injury. But Reid was sure, if they looked at his face, there’d be petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes. There was likely a pint of water in his lungs, too. Poor guy. Drowning would not be a pleasant way to go.
Seeing that nobody else seemed inclined to move any closer, Reid sighed and went to the body, carefully scanning the mud and grass for hoof prints or anything else that would indicate a kelpie had done this. But mud and water didn’t retain evidence very well, so it was no surprise when he didn’t see anything. Leaning over the body, he touched the corpse’s shoulder and rolled him over. The skin was icy cold and slick, and there was a horrid smell like of rotting meat. Thankfully, because of the cold weather, it wasn’t nearly as nasty as it could’ve been. He wasn’t sure if human senses could’ve picked it up so well.
The corpse, now on its back, stared blankly up at the sky. His once-blue eyes were covered with a thin film of white, and below it, Reid could see the tiny red blotches of petechial hemorrhaging. The mouth was open, the lips purple, white at the corners. There was a mask of mud on one side of his face, matting the wet, blonde hair into dirty tangles. Blue veins were clear under the translucent surface of the skin. Even so, Reid recognized him as Leon Baker, captain of the basketball team. He felt a twinge of sadnes
s for the dead boy. Leon had been a decent guy, polite enough, not a total moron unlike most of the other guy on the sports squad. He and Reid had played a few games of basketball, and if he’d been human, Reid would’ve gotten his ass handed to him.
“Damn.” He sighed, pushing himself to his feet and gave the rest of the guys a solemn head shake. “It’s Leon. But there’s no hoof prints, no horse hair, no bruising or chewed skin. I still don’t think this a kelpie,” he said.
Brandon just shook his head, and Perry had lost the usual gleam in his eyes. Ricky’s mouth was pinched and he moved forward to examine the body.
“Reid has a point. And the body is only in boxers. Kelpies don’t undress their victims. This has a distinctly female feel to it. This isn’t a kelpie,” Ricky agreed.
“Maybe he undressed himself to take a dip in the lake. Maybe he was here with someone and whoever it was left,” Perry suggested.
Reid frowned. It was possible, he supposed. There was something very wrong here, besides the dead body. There was a feeling in the air, thick and heavy and dark. It practically stunk of magic.
Reid knelt and cautiously touched his fingertips to the surface of the water. It was cool and smooth, and nothing happened. He stuck his fingers in deeper, the cold encasing his hand, and felt a tingle run up his arm. He looked up at Brandon. “Didn’t you say there was warding on the lake? It must be specific to humans, ‘cause I’m not being zapped here,” Reid pointed out.
“Maybe the warding is breaking down. I mean, even the strongest wards need to be re-done eventually,” Ricky pitched.
Reid shrugged.
Ricky stepped toward the water and bent to stick his hand in…and promptly got zapped.
The whole lake lit up in a flash and Ricky flew backward, landing on the grass four feet away from where he’d been crouching. Despite himself, Reid cracked up at the dazed, stunned look on Ricky’s face as he propped himself up and blinked slowly. Brandon shot him a dirty look and went to help Ricky up.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Reid rolled his eyes. It was only a little zap, and it wasn’t like electrocution would kill any one of them.
Ricky nodded, brushing off his jeans. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just shocked me a bit. But I guess the warding isn’t breaking down after all.” He held up his hand and frowned at the minor magical burn on his fingers.
“So how can I touch it without being fried?” Reid muttered, more to himself than anyone else. He stuck his hand back in the water and swirled it around, pulled up his sleeve and sunk his arm in up to the elbow, and still all he felt was a tingling in his muscles. That was weird. In fact, it was downright freaky.
“This is messed up,” he mumbled under his breath, confused and disconcerted by this new development. If the warding was set up to keep out everything, including vampires, he should’ve been locked out like Ricky. He wasn’t like Ember and Sherry, he didn’t have mixed blood which would exempt him from the normal rules of the supernatural world. Either this warding had some weird loophole in it that only he could access, or it was personalized to allow him in. But that would mean this kelpie or nymph or whatever had acquired his DNA somehow and woven it into the warding. That was really scary thought. A supernatural with enough power could do some seriously nasty stuff with someone’s DNA.
They needed to find this guy – or girl, or thing — quick, before he woke up with some magic burns of his own in unwanted places.
*****
After the trip to Onyx lake, the boys returned to the meeting den to discuss various things like motives for the killer, strategies to take him or her or it down, but it was all very vague since they couldn’t agree on what kind of species the lake killer was. There were numerous possibilities, but none of them fit the pattern, unless some freaky monster was on a bender and breaking all the normal rules. It was a headache-inducing, depressing roundabout and Reid was glad when Brandon finally called the meeting to a close. They were no nearer an explanation than before, and Brandon said he was going to talk to Cris about research, but at least they’d missed a whole day of classes – Though Reid kind of wondered if he wouldn’t have preferred to be in English and Psychology all day.
It was already getting dark by the time he got back to the dorms, and Ricky muttered something about going to the pool for a swim and asked if Reid would like to come along. Reid told him he had to check on Ember first, and that he’d be down in a while. Honestly, swimming sounded like a nice idea, despite the fact he’d spent the whole day pondering a drowning case. He needed to relax, stretch his muscles a bit, and it had been too long since he’d done any real swimming. So, with a quick wave to Ricky, he headed up the stairs to Ember’s room, aiming to spend a half hour with her and then spend a few hours swimming.
When he reached Ember’s room, he thought about knocking, then shrugged and opened the door, slipping inside. To his surprise, Ember was sitting on the floor on her knees, her sketchpad open in front of her, and her hands were gliding swiftly across the page as she worked. With her hair coming out of its braids, the little white ribbons tied in bows at the ends, and charcoal smears on her t-shirt, she looked adorably messy. She didn’t even look up at his entrance, too absorbed in her artwork, her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth.
“Hey Emz,” he said softly, hoping not to startle her. Her head whipped up and she smiled brightly at him, a lock of hair coming free of its braid and falling into her face.
“Hey!” she squeaked, her blue eyes glittering.
“What’re you drawing,” he asked, closing the door behind him and going to kneel next to her on the floor. Peering over her shoulder, he saw her sketch and couldn’t help a grin. She cast him a sidelong glance, her cheeks tinting with a pale blush. He arched a brow at her, amused and a little breathless as his heart did a funny little jump and ache. “I get the feeling this isn’t the first drawing like this you’ve done,” he observed.
Ember shrugged.
The sketch, of course, was of him. But Ember had used her creative mind to draw him with wide, soft angel wings. Curiously, he snatched up her sketchpad and began flipping through the pages. Ember yelped in surprised protest, trying to grab it back from him, but he got fluidly to his feet and moved out of her reach hastily.
His heart contracted a little as he scanned through Ember’s sketches. She was a great artist, better than he’d realized. She didn’t usually let him see her drawings. Some of the sketches were of Sherry, a few of Ricky and Cris and even one of Hiro. But most of them were of him. Each time in a different pose, a different angle; sometimes close up, some at a distance. A lot of the time, she drew him shirtless, but that was no big surprise. What made his heart really squeeze, though, was the way she drew him. In every single sketch, he saw a vulnerability to his own features that he rarely saw in the mirror.
Amazed, he looked down at her where she sat on the floor with her arms folded, pouting sulkily. “Do I really look like this?” he asked quietly.
Ember smiled tenderly, a softness in her eyes. She shrugged delicately. “Sometimes. Usually just when you look at me. When you tell me you love me,” she answered shyly, toying with her smudged fingers.
Reid bit his lip and looked over the drawing on the page he’d flipped to. It was obviously one she’d done long ago, before she’d even found out what he was, before she’d admitted her feelings for him. It was a sketch of him in an alleyway, done in charcoal and white chalk, the moonlight spilling over him as he stood tall. Concern was all over his face, haloed in light. He remembered that night. The night he’d saved her from Joseph Rian.
Had he really looked at her like that on that night? With so much concern and tenderness and….fear? Oh, he remembered how terrified he’d been, not just for her safety, but of his own reckless, impulsive need to be the one who saved her. That was when he’d really started to fall in love with her.
“You—” His voice came out low and shaky, and he swallowed. He tried again. “You’ve been drawing me since
…way back then?” He turned the sketchpad around to show her the drawing he was looking at and she ducked her head, blushing. She rolled her charcoal across her palm, leaving black smears on the skin.
“You saved me that night. I had dreams about it. It was the first time I thought you weren’t maybe as much of an arse as you made out to be,” she said softly.
He had no idea what to say to that, or how to react to the idea that she’d been doing sketches of him practically since they met. Now, he understood why she’d never let him near her sketchpad.
With his heart in his throat, he dropped the sketchpad onto her bed and sat down on the floor next to her, and she looked at him with wide, sweet eyes. He leaned forward and kissed her, very gently, on the lips, then rested his forehead against hers. “You have no idea how much I love you,” he whispered, and he meant it. There was no way she could comprehend the feeling he got whenever he was around her, the way his heart tried to rip apart when she cried, the mind-blowing intensity of love that rippled through him when they kissed or embraced or just held hands. She was his everything and if she ever left him, really left him, if he lost her trust or broke her heart or disappointed her…he’d fall apart.
“I love you too. So much,” Ember whispered back, and there was a fountain of emotion behind those words, a raw passion so forceful it surprised him. Maybe she could understand after all.
*****
** Ember **
Tuesday was dull, dull, dull. Maths felt like it would never end, every minute ticking by so slowly it was agony. Then Art sucked because they had to work on their essays for the upcoming prelims, and Ember swore that if she had to write another line about the composition of Max Ernst’s ‘The Great Orthographic Wheel’ she’d stab herself in the eyes. Chemistry was crap. She haaaaated calculations. She didn’t give a damn how many atoms were in two liters of one mole sulphuric acid. And to make things worse, her agony didn’t end with the final bell.