Already, people above had sensed Kalanthe’s presence. While they lingered in other parts of the bleachers, directly overhead the rows were emptying rapidly. Had she stepped any closer, it would have started a screaming stampede. As it was, parents were scooping up young children and snapping at older ones to stay close before walking hurriedly down the aisle between the rows of seats. The quadruplets left in a huddle. A girl called, “Mr. Reynolds, will you walk me to my car?” The teacher nodded and gathered three more students to him. Even Cadi wanted to move away, her human side on edge to the presence of death. She focused on her sigil side to stay put, the half of her that sensed nothing. Angry to be an unwilling participant in this, Cadi said, “Why don’t you just follow one home and shoot him with a tranquilizer gun?”
Her eyes lingering on the lighter boys of the teams as they slapped hands, Kalanthe said, “It sours the flavor.”
“I thought I was to meet you at the library. Worried I won’t show?”
“Oh, I don’t worry, little half-breed.” Kalanthe stroked one of the emblems on her unmarred shoulder. “An event at the library is running late, so we moved the party over here. You’ve got a girl on your football team.”
“You don’t need a girl,” Cadi said shortly.
“Not yet,” Kalanthe said. The Pikestown coach looked at his watch repeatedly, not with aggravation but with worry. Cadi wondered if he was sensitive enough to feel Kalanthe at this distance.
The emblems on Cadi’s right shoulder burned, as they had been more and more often while the insignia developed. She had been born with three fully developed on her left shoulder going down in a straight line, a spell for glamour, a spell for speed, and a spell to stop bloodflow. Nothing more than that until the other set sprouted overnight, three empty circles when she was fourteen. The insignia were growing slowly, Torvi unable to glean what spells they signified. They didn’t look to be like any of his dozens of healing spells, nor did he recognize them as their mother’s. But they could have belonged to a grandparent. There was no one to ask. Ceilidh sigils didn’t maintain contact with one another very well; there was no community.
Full Ceilidh sigils could live one hundred and eighty years and did not have children until the second half of their life span. Even then Mom had been a late starter. But she did not meet a male Ceilidh she liked until she was almost one hundred and fifty years old. And he was even older, on the brink of going into the night. One hundred and eighty years old, in his picture, he looked a youthful sixty with emblems along his collarbone. A Ceilidh’s blood was a mixture of divine and not divine, and its merge created a stop-start of aging, with reproductive interest and capability starting at ninety. Cadi had half-human blood, so other than growing slowly, she was following a human cycle. By sixth grade she was noticing boys, even if they never noticed her back because she looked all of eight.
Torvi was ten years older than Cadi and their mother died when she was three. But she knew the night was coming and set them up with the shop and plenty of money, enough to last until Cadi was in her teens. Torvi had taken over the shop in Alary by then, and everything would have been fine if it hadn’t burned down, the restaurant next door having a fire one night that wiped out five buildings along the block. All the stock had been wiped out, and you couldn’t exactly insure spells. If only that fire hadn’t happened, Cadi wouldn’t be here now under the bleachers. Her emblems burned fiercely as she stood next to Kalanthe, both of them watching the teams finish the Friendship Shake. The bleachers were now completely empty in a neat circle around Kalanthe’s head.
Cadi could not be seen luring away one of the boys, so her quarry depended on who straggled tonight. The Murphy players headed for the boys’ locker room, the wide receiver splitting from the group to go into the girls’ with the cheerleaders. The Pikestown team was gone in a clutch, looking at their coach like he’d lost his mind. But the man was having none of it; not even allowing them to use the restroom before they left, he drove them to the bus still in padding and almost screamed at the cheerleaders to get into the van. He was indeed one of those people extra-sensitive to a Nychos, and he practically stuffed the guys inside the bus.
“Did you see the tits on that one?” Oscar yelled. He didn’t even save it for the locker room. It was totally normal to hear him in the halls or classrooms talking loudly about whom he’d like to motorboat. On the rare occasion a teacher gave him the evil eye or confronted him, Oscar just claimed it was a joke. With his hands in front of his uniform to indicate cup size, the friends around him laughed before they vanished inside.
Peter’s mother stepped from the bleachers to wait outside the boys’ locker room. She was on her cell phone, saying, “Sure, I’ll bring Brandon home, too. No, you stay in bed, your voice sounds terrible. I don’t mind. The boys are changing now and we’ll-” On the stairs to the walkway, she gasped and looked around in sudden consternation. The repulsion pushed her across the wide steps, where she grasped the railing. Kalanthe slunk back several feet and the woman hurried for the locker room calling for Peter and Brandon.
“Must be hard when your meals sense you coming,” Cadi said.
“No one ever wants to play,” Kalanthe said. “Well, time to shine for someone, Ceilidh.”
They crept over the bars and exited the other side of the bleachers, where they circled to the locker rooms from the side in shadow. The only window at eye level was in the coach’s office. The door to the locker room was open but the office light was off. Boys walked back and forth in towels, shouting to one another and slamming lockers shut. None saw the faces at the window. Patrick Quence stopped beside the office door before turning and walking in the other direction, his expression troubled. Hearing the crackling of dead leaves behind her, Cadi stiffened as her sense of foreboding deepened. The other two were here.
“Great . . . team!” joked Delyth in a wheeze, like he expected Cadi to laugh in return. He had not been splashed in the throat as much as Vastax, but the greater burning of his face had wiped out his nose. There was a smooth crease of forehead where one had not been before, as well as over his cheeks. As he spoke, one of the doors to the locker room opened and shut. Oscar’s voice rang out into the night, having moved from breasts to tight asses.
“You can’t just kill like this! It looks suspicious!” Cadi hissed.
A finger trailed teasingly down her spine, cool through her shirt and icy in her soul. “There won’t . . . be anything left . . . of this one,” said Delyth. Cadi wriggled away, not wanting this disgusting creature to touch her. Like Kalanthe, the Nychos males were in the same clothes they always wore. Delyth’s shirt was stained, as were his jeans; Vastax’s preppie wear wasn’t as weathered though his khakis still needed ironing.
“The sacrili are states away,” Kalanthe said as Mrs. Stanley appeared briefly by the office door. Peter shouted in dismay and then he and another boy walked past to leave the locker room. “Now, Ceilidh, slip around the building and pull one back here.”
There was no choice. The lights had already been turned off in the girls’ locker room, and the bleachers were empty. It was late, and everyone was in a rush to get home. Cadi let herself into the boys’ locker room through the back entrance. It was quiet, the bang of another door carrying away a large group. She passed between the rows using the mirrors to see who was left. For a second she thought there was no one, but a rustling at the back made her heart sink. The mirror showed a boy in his underwear, sitting on a bench among the lockers and looking at his cell phone. Don’t think his name.
Spencer. Spencer Chaffin. A sophomore. His sister had graduated last year. For a football player, he was a little guy, even shorter than Cadi. He’d sprinted for the track team before joining football, burning through the defense but hobbled by the inadequacies of his fellow players. She had no classes with him, not now, not ever, but she had seen him around campus a hundred times. Stains of freckles and whiteheads covered the pale skin of his back. Playing a game, he didn’t seem aware tha
t he was the only boy left in the locker room. No, not quite, someone was in the toilets.
Touching her emblem, the glamour transformed her. She said nothing but Spencer turned, the game forgotten. Without glamour he might have shouted in surprise at a girl in the locker room, rushed to make sure he was covered, but with it, he only smiled. She was caught at that smile, showing clear braces on his teeth. His eyes were soft and longing upon her, as everything pretty about Cadi was made beautiful and mesmerizing. When she held out her hand, he reached back. They walked through the locker room together, Cadi moving quickly before the boy in the toilets emerged. At the door, Spencer said amiably, “Where are we going?”
Hidden in the shadows of that exit, Cadi whispered, “There’s something you have to see outside.”
“Okay,” Spencer said, entranced. The repulsion was strong, the Nychos not far away, but he could not sense it under the spell of her glamour.
This was not something she could do, ferry one person after another to their deaths for the Nychos! But the choice was Spencer or Torvi, and she had no doubt the Nychos would pick her apart once they were finished torturing Torvi in front of her. The Shaws lived if Spencer died; if she refused, all three of them died. A boy ran out of the toilets, shouting, “’Bye, anyone!” without looking.
Still Spencer looked at her in worship, and he smoothed his dirty blond hair to tidy it. She kissed his forehead, his skin so warm under her lips, and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
“You haven’t done anything,” Spencer said generously. “Let’s see what it is!”
He opened the door and stepped outside to look. A moment later, his hand was ripped from hers. Cadi flung herself back inside the locker room and shut the door, leaning against it and hearing the screams outside. Kalanthe yelled, “Catch him, Delyth!” and suddenly Spencer was pounding on the door, trying to get back in. Closing her eyes, Cadi braced it.
“Help! Help!” Spencer cried out in hysteria, and his screams after that were wordless.
Today she might have sat at a desk that once belonged to Bryan Tallman. His curved lips had taken the edge off his stern military haircut. In his senior remembrances, he wrote about relaxing in the shade under the school tree. It was the same tree now as it had been almost fifty years ago, and Cadi sometimes hung out under it, too. After seeing the missing posters for Holly Cleary, she wasn’t able to stop herself from reading the news. Holly Cleary had two sons, ages three and one, a frantic husband and a hundred comments under the article by armchair detectives saying it was always the husband who did it in the end. Another hundred comments blamed an affair or suicide, even though Holly had no history of infidelity or mental problems. Her parents cut short their vacation in Europe to fly to Los Angeles and join the hunt for their daughter. And now Spencer Chaffin was going on Cadi’s list as well. On the other side of the door, he screamed while she prayed for silence, and then he gargled.
In a few weeks, there would be new orders. New victims, new screams, new names to remember. If the Nychos did not get their own procurer, they could use Cadi like this for the rest of her life. Torvi could not leave Murphy; she could not leave Torvi. She did not know what to do. The emblems on her right shoulder were on fire.
Blood seeped under the door.
Even worse, then it receded.
Chapter Two
“I don’t believe in any of this woo-woo,” the old woman said staunchly. “I stand with Jesus.”
“Ellie, it’s just an herbal medicine that works miracles,” one of her friends said. Torvi’s unguent for arthritis sold so quickly that he couldn’t keep it on the shelves. It was good that Murphy High was so large or else there would be a suspicious epidemic of bald spots. Cadi took clippings three times a week for that one unguent. It made her a hundred dollars every time, each clipping done in a flash turning into thirty containers of cream that Torvi sold for fifteen ninety-nine each. Some customers complained about the price, Torvi nodding sympathetically before asking what the co-pay was on their health insurance. For those who still complained, he pointed to the sign that mentioned he had the right to refuse service for any reason. Then people stopped complaining, because one application of his unguent eliminated the aches and pains and swelling for a full day. None of their conventional medications did that.
Their weekend employee Catskill had called in sick, so Cadi was behind the counter in the shop for Sunday. In dresses and short heels, this trio of women looked like they’d come right from a church service. It was clear that two of them had been here before, walking straight past the Tarot card table and crystal balls to request the cream at the counter. Bug-eyed, the third woman was a first timer. Scandalized at the dreamcatchers, crossing herself at the Ouija boards, she washed up to the counter on a wave of indignation. Pulling out the sample container of the cream, Cadi said, “Now, this hasn’t been tested or approved by anyone, so we can’t sell it as a medicine. It’s only an herbal remedy that has been passed down in our family for generations.”
“Ca-di,” Ellie read disapprovingly off her nametag. “Is that some spelling of Katie?”
Removing the lid, Cadi offered the cream. The friend said, “Try it, Ellie.”
“I can’t even spell my granddaughter’s name. You say it Madison, but it has two y’s,” Ellie said. Cadi didn’t want to use her glamour to make this woman more amenable; she stoically turned her mind from Spencer to the normal comings-and-goings of the shop. It was almost never free of customers, older people or sickly ones wanting this unguent or that, the fruits and nuts buying candles and signing up for Saturday Tarot readings with Doris. Well, Cadi called her Doris. She sold herself as Madam Zeldine.
Occasionally they had visitors with Bibles wanting to save their souls. But this woman wasn’t proselytizing, now just complaining that she didn’t like the smell of cinnamon as she took some of the cream with distaste. “Anyway, cinnamon is the latest get-high drug. I saw it on the news at eleven, kids huffing cinnamon-”
“And where is that darling brother of yours?” one of the other women asked.
“He’s got the day off,” Cadi said. Having spent the night making unguents for insomnia and ear infections under the full moon, as that was a procurement for them, Torvi was upstairs in their apartment sleeping in.
“It’s the saddest thing, he’s a burn victim,” the other whispered to Ellie. “Always has to wear gloves and a hat to protect his injuries. Such a nice young man, Torvi.”
“Torvi. Cadi. Madysyn,” Ellie grumbled, tenderly working the cream into her knuckles. “I remember when the children in my classroom said their names were Ryan or Brittany, and I didn’t stop to think it was Ryan with two n’s or Brittany with an apostrophe!”
A hippie girl with dreads and a flowered skirt brushed by them to ask for the unicorn statue on the shelf behind Cadi’s head. While the old women talked about how names had changed, Cadi lifted it down. The statue was an ugly thing Torvi picked up just to decorate the store, and it was good Cadi checked the underside because he had taped a spare key to the apartment there. She pried it off before giving the statue to the girl, who cooed, winced at the price tag, waited for Cadi to come down, and gave up before sliding money from her fringe purse after bemoaning how the shop only accepted cash. Cadi counted out the change as Ellie looked at her hands in surprise. After the hippie took the bag with the statue, the old woman said irascibly, “When I was a shopgirl, I finished with one customer before taking up another.”
Her friends were embarrassed, nudging her sides and hissing her name. Cadi made Torvi pay her twenty bucks an hour, but it still didn’t feel like enough at times. Slipping her hand to her shoulder like she had an itch, she pressed her glamour emblem out of defeat. She was missing the new episode of Dashin’ to Fashion, the program recording while she worked, and there was a bag of microwave popcorn in the pantry . . . no. She’d had her eye on it when the orders came for Spencer two days ago. Torvi could have the popcorn now. She just wanted the telev
ision.
“Didn’t you have a huge crystal ball right by where that unicorn was?” one of the women asked fawningly as the glamour took hold.
“Sold,” Cadi said. The Nychos had broken it.
“It’s like some kind of voodoo,” Ellie said about her temporarily vanquished arthritis. The furrows in her forehead faded. “Aren’t you the loveliest thing!”
Without the glamour, Cadi had stood before her full-length mirror and tried to gauge herself objectively back when she attended Alary High. She was pretty, not beautiful. Neither short nor tall, not thick or thin, she had long, light brown hair that was impossible to curl. Her eyes were blue, and her skin was clear as long as she avoided gluten. No freckles, no moles or birthmarks, the only spots on her body were the six emblems. She looked like the girl in the movies who played the best friend, cute but not glamorous, pleasant yet forgettable. Torvi said that she was the most beautiful girl in the world, Cadi breaking into laughter because he didn’t know that brothers weren’t supposed to say those things. He was just Ceilidh in the first stage of life, no school exposure to teach him what was cool and what was not, no libido. She couldn’t imagine any of her friends at Alary discussing their sex lives with their big brothers, but it wasn’t the same with Torvi. He didn’t understand, unable to experience it for himself for another sixty years, and he was a good listener. Her fling with Lukas senior year (well, her first senior year, there was going to be another) she dissected with Torvi over tea in detail late at night.
Cadi had to explain to Torvi that he could not stop a man on the sidewalk and marvel at his pretty eyes; nor was it a good idea to sit on a park bench to watch children at play. It worried her that some homophobe would think Torvi was hitting on him, or that a parent might freak out that he was a pedophile. Neither gay nor into anything weird like kids, he was interested in women at a remove, appreciative of beauty in general, and convinced that his little sister belonged in the movies making boys pant.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 177