Section A—terminology:
1. Overdue Book; the seizure, theft, or loss of an unlocked, functioning grimoire.
2. Cracked Spine; a grimoire in civilian possession that has been unlocked (ie. containing enchantments, wards, rituals and hexes that have the potential for use and proliferation)
In the event of an Overdue Book or a confirmed Cracked Spine, FATHER Division will have the full cooperation of the DHS, FBI and CIA in order to contain the threat.
– FATHER Division Agent Handbook
9. Mendacity
WHEN MALEK PULLED up to The Hawthorne Academy, a uniformed officer was unspooling a length of yellow tape, having just knotted one end to a tree outside the front doors. He’d parked and sloshed halfway across the courtyard before the rain-soaked policeman spotted him.
“This is a crime scene,” the officer called out, extending a palm.
Malek stepped into the light provided by twin lamp posts that flanked the staircase. He reached into his pocket and extracted a shiny gold badge. Bollocks to the business cards. Might as well start with the big guns.
The cop goggled at the reflective shield, jaw unhinged. “I’ve never seen … I mean … welcome!”
“Am I permitted to pass?” Malek asked rhetorically.
The officer practically swooned. He scurried up the stairs and pulled open the door for his guest, waving him in like a bellhop at a five-star hotel.
The computer lab upstairs had two more officers milling about; a squat portly man in his mid-thirties was dusting for prints, and a gangly twenty-something kid with a thin mustache jotted notes on a pad. A corpse lay prostrate in a pool of blood. The sticky perimeter was marked with little orange cones.
Malek flashed his badge and, once again, received the red carpet treatment. ‘Anything you need, Mister Malek,’ was the tone of the exchanges, and everything ended with ‘sir.’ He could certainly get used to this.
“This is now an F-Division crime scene,” Malek announced.
They nodded compliantly.
Malek glanced at the corpse. The wounds were clean and precise, as were the matching holes punched in the whiteboard. “These holes aren’t from bullets,” he said without looking back at the officers.
“That’s what I thought, too,” the younger one said. “The placement is right, but the entrance and exit wounds are all wrong. The wall behind her has no bullets in it, as far as I can tell, but two are lodged in the ceiling.”
“This one’s a real head-scratcher,” the older one added. “Never seen anything like it.”
Malek felt a vibration on his left hand. His ring was glowing green. Not so much of a head-scratcher, he thought. These brilliant little Fox techno-toys reduced a fortnight’s worth of detective work to a cursory glance; the killer had unleashed a substantial dose of magick, and as a result, this depressing plebe was used as a pincushion.
“You don’t seem overly surprised,” the squat officer put in.
“I’m British,” Malek said. “Stiff upper lip and all that. Never show surprise.”
The gangly kid made a vague hand gesture as if raising it to ask permission. “May I ask why the Pentagon sent you, sir?”
“No, you may not. But I take my coffee black. And lately, I’ve been fond of donuts. Not the full ones—my god, the calories—but those little round things they cut from the center.” he snapped his fingers twice. “What are those called again? The word escapes me. On second thought I’ll take a muffin. Blueberry if possible.”
The kid motioned to the exit. “You want me to get you a …”
Malek plucked a five dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to the officer.
“Should I go now?” the kid asked.
“Now would be lovely,” Malek said with a thin smile.
He paced the room, hands clasped behind his back. He lingered by a workbench at the head of the class with a pair of overturned chairs next to it. A computer chassis sat open, rusted fan whirring. The attached monitor was in hibernation.
“This computer was on when you arrived?” Malek asked.
“Yes,” the portly officer said. “I mean, yes sir.”
“I see.”
“Should I unplug it and log it into evidence?”
“No,” Malek said offhandedly, righting one of the chairs before taking a seat. He pulled the keyboard closer. “You’re excused as well. I need to finish up here, and I find it difficult to concentrate with officers hovering about. Something about blue polyester. Just being in close proximity gives me a bit of a rash.”
“You want me to leave, too?” The officer sounded confused, and more than a little disappointed.
“That would be brilliant,” Malek replied.
The officer trudged towards the door.
Malek let out a sigh. “Wait. Officer …?”
“Hilton,” he said. “Jonathan Hilton.”
“The pleasure is all mine. Here you are, Officer Hilton.” Malek extracted another five-dollar bill from his wallet. “Treat yourself to a donut.”
With the room to himself, Malek returned to the makeshift computer station and clacked the space bar, winking the screen to life. A map appeared. There it was, crisscrossed with symmetrical red lines, linking seemingly unrelated locations across the globe. ‘Seemingly unrelated’ only to the uninitiated. He knew better.
Malek’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the ID, ground his teeth, and cursed under his breath before lifting the device to his ear. “Director King,” he said with a dollop of false merriment.
“Where the hell are you?” King barked.
“I’m doing splendidly, thank you for asking. I’m at the crime scene at The Hawthorne Academy. Exquisite architecture. I want to say Baroque, but it also strikes me as Gothic, with a tasteful mixture of—”
“What did you find?”
“Ah, right. Well, we have a body. No ID. A teacher, perhaps, judging by her dreadfully pedestrian attire. Or possibly a janitor. Do janitors wear blouses from second-hand shops here in America?”
“I don’t give a shit who the stiff is. How did she die?”
“Puncture wounds. A quartet of them. Quite surgical. The attack was mystical, but I’m not sure about the spell. I’ll take a photograph if you’d like, but I’ll warn you in advance, the lighting is appalling.”
“So this is our guy’s handiwork?”
“If you’re referring to the convenience store killer, I have my doubts. The corpse is in one piece, which doesn’t fit his modus operandi.”
Malek was reticent to admit that perhaps the Diviners were earning their ridiculous government salaries; they’d mentioned the existence of more than one magickal adept in North Valley, and while their predictions remained no more precise than a newspaper horoscope, they seemed to be on the right track.
“Can I trust you to bring in our mystery guest alive this time?” King said.
“Not an issue,” Malek replied. “I assure you.”
King groaned, loud and obnoxious. It was fast becoming his trademark sound. “The last time you assured The Agency you’d get a job done you left me a house full of corpses and a shit-ton of paperwork. Any leads on a grimoire?”
I can’t believe he’s prattling on about this again. “No, sir, there are no leads on the fabled North Valley Grimoire. Perhaps I didn’t explain it in great enough detail during our previous chat: a grimoire is a collection of exceedingly high-level enchantments, wards, hexes, and rituals. Most of them custom made. It takes a Magnus level Scrivener to compile such a volume.”
“I may be new to F-Division, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve done the reading.”
“Then you’re aware that Scriveners with the ability to author grimoires have been in practice for years. Often decades. They always predate The Incident.”
“So you’re saying anyone who got lucky with a sigil after the meltdown couldn’t have written one.”
“That’s precisely what I’m saying,” Malek sighed. “We’re not dealing with
reality-shattering masters of the dark arts here in suburban Virginia. These are children.”
King coughed out a ragged laugh. “These children are only a few years younger than you, rookie. You could pass for one of them.”
“Well, it’s amazing what a decent night’s sleep and a retinol-based moisturizer will accomplish. But putting my youth and good looks aside, I’m certain whatever we uncover here will be the same thing we found in Perth, and Marseille, and Vancouver: kids, mucking about with power they don’t understand. If you’re searching for an Ark of the Covenant that you can drop on the President’s desk, such a relic won’t be unearthed in North Valley.”
King breathed into the receiver for a long, irritating moment, wheezing like a congested pug. Malek didn’t know whether his boss had tuned out during his speech or was busy making notes, filling page after page with swirls of blue scribbles. It was probably both.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” King said.
“Certainly,” Malek replied with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, though his supply of artificial cheer was running short. “By the way, did Forensic Symbology ever sort out that sigil on Jackson’s desk—the interlocking stars inside the circle?”
A short pause ensued. “They did.”
“And?”
“And it’s need to know,” King snapped. “Get back to work, and if a situation arises where you happen to need that intel, I’ll—”
“Yes, yes, I know. I’m not an idiot either. I’ve done some reading of my own.”
“Good to hear. I’ve notified the Media Control Division, and the graphics team is working up a plausible scenario. It’ll be on the news within the hour. Sanitation is on their way to deal with the stiff and her vehicle. Now, have you found anything at the crime scene that’s even remotely interesting?”
Malek pressed his finger into the small pushbutton on the floppy drive. It ejected a bright yellow disk with a barely audible clack.
“Nothing, I’m afraid. If anything of value pops up, you’ll be the first to know.”
Malek ended the call and slid the disk into his breast pocket.
Instead of choosing an apprentice, Magnus level Scriveners will sometimes let their grimoire make the selection for them.
Potential prodigies, even those with no clue that magick exists, gravitate towards certain sigils. There’s no logic behind it, no mathematical equation. It’s like falling in love: you know when you know.
Does a powerful grimoire recognize someone’s potential, magnetizing them to a specific sigil?
No one knows for sure.
And stranger still, does the book actually know who’s reading it, and which sigil they’re selecting?
No one knows that, either.
I’m not a big fan of hokey words like ‘kismet’ and ‘fate’ when it comes to explaining a latent Scrivener being matched with their personal sigil, but I’m not sure there’s a better description.
– Passage in the North Valley Grimoire
10. Cosmic Guillotine
SHE BOLTED UPRIGHT, clutching her chest, gasping like she’d been sucked into an undertow and had just clawed her way to the surface. It was the same every night. Calista rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and the radioactive glow of her alarm clock drifted into focus. 3:35am.
It has been two weeks since Mrs. Walton’s death, and the nightmares were always the same: face down on her bed, ink exploding from her back in a burning wave; the droplets solidifying into oily appendages; and then, rabidly turning on their host, they needle her repeatedly, rhythmically, like fabric through a sewing machine. In her dreams the tendrils are narrow, barely perceptible in the darkness, and they drain her with a thousand pinpricks while she screams her throat raw.
No one ever comes to save her.
On the night of Mrs. Walton’s death, Calista was horrified at what her tattoo had done, but at the same time she was infused with unsettling confidence; she didn’t fear her sigil, even moments after it had attacked. It felt like an obedient guard dog trained to defend her, and when her life was in danger it had done its job. Once the adrenaline drained from her system, she was unsure of how tight a grip she had on the leash. Maybe it was sentient, lashing out of its own accord, or maybe she triggered it with her emotional responses. Part of her didn’t even want to know. She just needed it gone.
When she first arrived at Alfonso’s Tattoo Temple she was greeted by a pierced, mohawked Italian who, despite the bone-chilling November weather, didn’t feel compelled to wear a shirt. Covered neck to navel in multicolored artwork, he served as a walking billboard for his business. Alfonso operated his eponymous shop out of a neglected strip mall a few miles west of North Valley, wedged between two abandoned units that had been shuttered for the better part of a decade. A little sketchy, but it would have to do.
She’d chosen Alfonso’s because it was relatively close, affordable, and the website boasted a guaranteed laser treatment to remove unwanted body art. As she suffered through session after session (which were a lot more painful than getting the stupid thing in the first place) a grim realization set in: it wasn’t coming off.
Alfonso’s site warned it could take five or more sessions to see results, and customers would have to be patient. Time wasn’t the issue, though. Weeks of lying face-down on a tattered green massage table with a laser slicing away at her lower back—and the blare of Alfonso’s favorite death metal band assaulting her eardrums—had yet to put a dent in the sigil. The tattoo artist didn’t seem especially surprised.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, halfway through their third session.
Calista twisted to her side and peered up at him. “You’ve seen it?”
He was clutching a laser pen in one hand and a shot of limoncello in the other. “Not this, bellissima, but a design like it. A yantra. A few people came to me, wanted to have something similar removed.” His accent got thicker the more he drank, and by the end of a session he was substituting every second word for Italian.
“A yantra?” Calista said.
“Power symbol that tourists get on vacation in China and Vietnam. Popular with your American celebrità … or, how do you say? Actors. They think yantra is good luck. Some shops offer them, but I stay away from those types of designs. Bad fortuna. Wait, what’s the word? Karma.”
“And the ones you saw before, they didn’t come off, either?”
“No. I’m thinking it was the ink, possibilmente? Local governo has been forcing parlors to use new synthetic inks … something about a batch being poisoned. Whatever was in there before, it doesn’t like coming off.” Alfonso took a swig from his massive stein. “Mi dispiace, bellissima. I can keep trying, but you might be stuck with your new friend for a while.”
It turned out he was right. The thing Jackson had branded into her skin didn’t want to be removed: it had moved in, gotten comfortable, and was more than happy with its epidermal accommodations. It wasn’t being evicted any time soon.
The laser sessions weren’t the most painful part of the last few weeks. It was being without Kaz. They drifted past each other in the halls without exchanging a sidelong glance, and were separated by narrow aisles in math and poli-sci without trading a single note. It was disconcerting, and not the natural order of things. Each successive weekday served as a harsh reminder of Calista’s social status, which had been demoted from, ‘weird girl who only hangs out with her childhood friend,’ to ‘weird loner that everyone avoids like the plague.’ At least when she was paired with Kaz, people like Whitney and Maddox bothered to make fun of her. She’d become so utterly pathetic she no longer merited a quality insult.
Jackson’s death, coupled with her foray into private investigation, had bled into a single instance in her mind; a horrible cluster of events that had effectively cleaved her life in two. There was her pre-grimoire existence, when, granted, she was miserable, but at least she had a friend—and the possibility of a mundane yet somewhat normal future. Now, in her post-grimoire existenc
e, after Kaz’s estrangement, and after she’d inadvertently shish kabobbed her teacher, things were measurably worse. Calista felt like the cosmic guillotine that bisected her life had bisected her as well.
First, there was Public Calista: sullen, withdrawn, doing her best to act natural and avoid suspicion. Although curiously, no one seemed the least bit suspicious.
Mrs. Walton’s death was ruled an accident; a drunk driving calamity where a depressed poli-sci teacher had one too many and wrapped her mid-sized Subaru around a telephone pole. Swerve, crunch, smoosh—open and shut case. Whoever had discovered Walton’s body in the computer lab that rainy October evening wanted to keep the circumstances surrounding her fate a secret. She couldn’t help but wonder if the people responsible for the cover-up were now investigating the actual cause of death.
She also wondered whether she should prepare a go-bag of her own, and be ready to run at the first sign of danger. But run where? And with what? Jackson’s stack of cash would eventually dry up, and she’d be scared and alone in a faraway city, waiting for an ominous knock at her door … and her mother would still be in prison. If anyone were investigating Walton’s death, they’d undoubtedly be monitoring Hawthorne’s students for strange and unusual behavior. Disappearing mid-semester and hopping a bus to Akron would certainly be filed under ‘strange.’
While Public Calista kept a low profile, Private Calista was a different person. In between her feckless laser sessions, she attempted to decipher Jackson’s grimoire. In the last two weeks she’d read a dozen books on cryptography and became a halfway decent code-breaker, but when it came to the grimoire, she was stumped. Message boards and forums didn’t provide any insight. Some lively chat sessions with code-cracking geeks seemed promising, at least at first; a man who claimed to be a former Russian Intelligence officer who went by the handle ‘D’agapeyeff’ (she’d never attempted to say it out loud, and didn’t think it was possible) referred to himself as the world’s foremost expert in seemingly indecipherable codes. He bragged about his cryptographic algorithm, able to crack the lid on everything from modern-day military encryption to the vaunted Dorabella Cipher. He’d talked himself up to the point that Calista entrusted him with a small sample. She scanned random pages, filled top-to-bottom with the bizarre Elvish scrawl, and Emailed him the images. Days passed, and the braggart D’agapeyeff begrudgingly conceded that he’d come up empty. “Meaningless,” he scoffed. “This isn’t code, it’s a joke. Scribbles of nothing.”
The North Valley Grimoire Page 9