Calista must’ve been going a little crazy herself because, against her better judgment, she felt a hint of compassion. She almost suggested that Malek’s hex could be driving Aphra crazier than she already was, and if he cut the strings, Aphra could learn to tame the summonings herself—or, at the very least, snip one string at a time. But at the moment, Aphra’s sanity (or lack thereof) wasn’t her primary concern.
“How do I know you’re not controlling me? That you can’t pop inside my head, make me do whatever you want?”
Malek breathed out a long, bewildered sigh. “Because if I could control you, you’d bloody well be a lot less irritating.”
It was a fair point. “So you can’t hypnotize me?”
“A hex that controls a mind is the most exhausting form of magick I’m aware of. It requires incredible focus, and my subconscious works tirelessly to keep Aphra in check, even while I sleep. I couldn’t hex more than one person at a time if I wanted. Compulsion charms are quick and easy, but they rarely work against Scriveners, yourself included. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“At least you’re honest enough to admit it.” She pitched back in her chair, gazing through the arched skylights. The final rays of afternoon sun retreated behind a grim knot of clouds.
“It’s been known to happen on occasion,” he said. “Now go back to your life. When Foxcroft reaches out to you, we’ll go from there.”
“I can’t keep waiting. I have to do something.”
“You are doing something. You’re bait, and doing a fine job of it. Keep doing that.”
“Dangling on a hook isn’t a job,” she said, once again straining to keep her volume under control. “Maybe if we knew more about this mole, we could go on the offense.”
“Whatever you’re thinking,” Malek said, making a small cutting gesture with his hand, “for the love of God, stop thinking it. Whomever this mole is, they’re getting more brazen, which means they’ll get sloppy. Aphra is shadowing a suspect from the Pentagon, and I’m following up on leads. We’ll unmask them soon enough, but these things take time.”
“I can ask around, too,” Calista said. “You said it yourself: my name is floating around the dark web. If Foxcroft can see the bait dangling, then so can the mole. If they’re tracking me, I need to do something about it. I need to help.”
“You’ve helped more than you know,” Malek said. “Your instincts with Parker were brilliant—he’d even slipped past Aphra. But this is dangerous work. I can’t ask you to do more than you already have.”
“You don’t have to.”
He cracked a smile and laughed, seemingly against his will. It was like watching a blooper reel where an actor breaks character mid-scene. “You’re awfully tenacious for someone so young.”
“You’re not much older than me,” she said, though on closer inspection, she wasn’t so sure. He had the unblemished skin and impenetrable hairline of a man who’d barely ventured into his 20s, but his eyes reflected a wisdom that went far beyond his years.
“Looks can be deceiving.” He stole another glance at his watch. “We’re out of time, darling. I’m under surveillance, and I’d rather we weren’t seen together. ‘Redundancies on top of redundancies’ is the company motto; for every agent like myself, there’s another one watching.”
Calista scrunched her nose. “Redundancies on top of redundancies? That sounds like a huge waste of time and money.”
“Welcome to the American government.” Malek stood, reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his wallet. He produced a card. “Take this, and if you have an idea about the mole, remember you’re not a bloody superhero. Ring me, and I’ll come straight away.” Then he peeled out a ten dollar bill and let it flutter to the table. “Now treat yourself to a double fudge sundae. You’ve earned it.”
The universe never gives. It exchanges. To manifest the ultimate, you need to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.
– Passage in the North Valley Grimoire
25. Where There’s Smoke
JANUARY WAS POISED to spill into February. It was typically a frigid, blow-into-your-hands time of year, made bearable by roaring fireplaces and warm chocolaty beverages. But this season, mother nature had granted the East Coast a reprieve; the ubiquitous layer of white was shot through with determined blades of green, and melodic chirps rang from bare tree tops.
While inhabitants of The Valley enjoyed bike trails and rounds of golf, Calista remained in winter hibernation mode. Her walks to and from the bus stop were her only treks into the great outdoors, and after her conversation with Malek about a rogue agent, even those brief excursions filled her with dread.
Parker’s threat was a screeching, slow-moving cog that relentlessly turned in her mind, never giving her a moment’s peace. Someone was out there. His accomplice. Probably another killer. Maybe someone who knew Calista was a Scrivener. And possibly the person who had called in a bomb threat, opening every locker in the school.
Her paranoia festered like an untreated wound, spreading to every part of her life. When riding the bus she sat alone, moving as far from other passengers as possible. She glanced over her shoulder when she walked the streets, shuddering with anxiety if the same person trailed her for more than a block. And at Hawthorne, she studied everyone in search of a tell; a shift in their eyes, a subtle variation in their body language—anything that might reveal an ulterior motive. Was it a classmate? A teacher? Or someone who tried not to draw attention; a student she never conversed with, or a janitor who roamed the halls unnoticed? Then a dark notion swarmed her mind: what if the mole had already killed someone in her life, and was using a glamour to walk and talk like them?
Playtime was over. Calista began to study the grimoire like her life depended on it. Her new focus was self-defense.
Elemental magick opened the door to a whole new library of possibilities. It was clean and efficient: just draw the symbol, say the words and poof, you’re a mystical conduit. She memorized enchantments that could be useful in a brawl, like the Macedonian anti-gravity spell that sent objects rocketing into the distance, and a curse from Thailand that locked the joints of an assailant. In practice they worked flawlessly. She’d spent an entire weekend launching pillows across her room like plushy cannonballs, and had successfully frozen her legs like they were encased in ice—a harrowing ten minutes until she regained sensation.
Before long she was casting like an expert, and at breakneck speeds. Her trusted Sharpie was a six-shooter, and the front pocket of her jeans was the holster (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘quick draw’). While some spells required drawing directly onto objects, others had to be scribed onto herself. Her favorite was a spell that launched a concussive blast: with a quick design and a word of Latin (‘spiritus!’) an invisible wave flew from her palm like throwing a fastball, shattering her bedroom mirror on her first attempt. The ink disappeared from her hand once the spell had been cast, but the mirror, tragically, remained in pieces. If a spell existed to animate brooms and dustpans, it wasn’t in the grimoire. Disney had lied to her once again.
And although she hadn’t practiced unleashing the sigil on her back, she felt a measure of control over it. Like the tendrils were her appendages now—that she could reach out and strike like a volley of well-placed javelins. It would be saved as a last resort. She wasn’t about to poke someone full of holes unless it was truly a life-or-death situation, which was something she planned to avoid.
Many of the nastier self-defense spells were pure Blood magick; sadistic hexes designed to maim, mangle and flay. It was magick meant for war. She wasn’t planning to delve back in, but it couldn’t hurt to browse.
The sinister feats that could be achieved with blood seemed endless, and the more complex spells involved entire rituals: requiring candles and crystals and personal objects, and, of course, quarts of fresh crimson fluid. Sometimes gallons. Coupled with the right combination of words, a Scrivener could hex someone, sending them to the brink of de
ath; or take down a structure with a seismic blast; or, if Jackson’s notes were accurate, transport objects through space and time.
Summonings were covered in broad strokes, too, mostly as cautionary tales of what not to do. A loose page had been haphazardly taped into the book, detailing a summoning called Moretti’s Golem—it was a counter-spell of sorts that had been used only once, in a Roman town two thousand years ago. The lone survivor of a village raid scribed a sigil at the base of Mount Vesuvius, hoping to kill those responsible in the town below. The mountain yawned wide and spilled rivers of fire on Pompeii, incinerating murderers and innocents alike. A Scrivener in town saw the lava approaching, and he had only moments to react: Moretti incanted a summoning, and transformed himself into a walking, hulking mass of impervious rock. He sheltered his family and carried them to safety, but when the summoning wore off he calcified and turned to dust. Centuries later, someone unearthed a sheepskin parchment from beneath a hundred feet of pumice and volcanic ash. How Jackson came across a copy of it, she’d never know.
Moretti’s Golem was just one example; many of the high-level rituals required the participation of willing sacrifices. That was the rub: people had to choose to give their lives to conjure enough power. There was no possible way Jackson could have tested these Blood spells due to simple logistics—like the bizarre ritual he’d failed to complete in the back of the grimoire—but as thought experiments, they were mesmerizing.
Weeks drifted by without signs of another Scrivener, so Calista enlisted Kaz. She needed fresh eyes on the problem. She’d prepared for an attack, but she wanted to get the jump on this rogue agent; better to take the fight to them than to wait around and get sucker punched.
They set up shop in her bedroom on a wet but humid Saturday afternoon, and she cracked her window for the first time since October. She pushed it open with a sticky pop as the weather strip peeled from the casing. The hum of cars floated in on a warm breeze, and a kit of pigeons warbled on the roof two stories up.
“Careful!” Kaz shouted, cringing while Calista tip-toed through the paperwork, making her way back from the window. Her mattress was a raft, and the floor was a sea of newspaper clippings and photos. “I have a system, here.”
She believed him. In the last two hours, he’d meticulously unpinned every photograph and clipping from her corkboard, replacing them with a list of suspects, accompanied by photographs and corresponding notes. Some were tethered with a length of string that coiled around multicolored thumbtacks.
Maddox Bryce sat atop the list; he was Parker’s wingman—the logical other half of the aforementioned ‘we.’ Whether he was the mole within The Agency, just another Scrivener, or both, she wasn’t sure, but he felt dirty. Kaz chimed in with an annoying bit of logic, claiming it was Calista’s confirmation bias; she wanted it to be Maddox, so she was using the evidence to try and prove herself right, not the other way around.
The rest of the football team were prime suspects, too, and any of them could have a tattoo that was activated during the Gravenhurst Incident. It was a relatively small group, though none were gifted with Maddox’s preternatural athleticism.
“What about Whitney?” Kaz mused in a scholarly tone, stroking his non-existent beard. His legs dangled over the edge of the bed.
Calista sat cross-legged, hugging a pillow to her chest. “Really? You think Whit is the criminal mastermind who accessed the CIA databases? She doesn’t care about world domination. I don’t think she cares about anything without a Gucci or Prada label on it.”
“Fair point, but let’s not rule her out.” He snipped her photo from their junior yearbook and pinned it next to Maddox with a lime green tack. “We have to assume anyone in Jackson’s inner circle could have been transmogrified.”
The thought of Whitney being the mole sent a lopsided smirk across Calista’s face. If she was involved, she’d no doubt be locked in a dungeon, never to touch a piece of designer clothing for the rest of her miserable life. Fuzzies don’t get much warmer.
“Here’s hoping,” Calista shrugged. “Okay, who else?”
“Teachers are a possibility. Substitutes and guest lecturers are always coming and going.” Kaz knelt and sifted through a loose ream of papers beneath the board, shuffling past photos of every faculty member at Hawthorne, up to and including the sketchy teacher’s assistant, Ryan Warner.
Calista joined him on the floor and found a photo from last year’s yearbook. It was a candid black and white shot that made it into the Student Life section, with the football team celebrating on the sidelines. Some of the players had upended a tub of Gatorade, dousing Coach Martinez. In the background, slightly out of focus, Parker embraced a raven-haired girl who had leaped from the bleachers.
“Check this out,” she said, nudging Kaz with her elbow. “I’m sure this is Parker, but what’s with his fan club?”
Kaz leaned in and pressed his fingertip to the page. “Wait, is this … Ashley?”
“Ashley Flowers dated Parker?” Calista said, trying to mask her disgust. She didn’t want to speak ill of the no-doubt-soon-to-be-dead, but the very thought made her stomach churn.
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Kaz agreed, “but I think we’re getting off track. How about The Cobbler?”
Calista relinquished the yearbook. “How do you figure?”
“He’s got access to everything inside his control room. Who says he couldn’t have hacked The Pentagon?”
It was an interesting theory, and Wyatt certainly had access, if not motive. “I don’t know if I trust your objectivity on this one,” Calista said. “I think you’re still bummed that he didn’t want you to strip down for him.”
Calista laughed at her own joke.
Kaz did not.
Jokes aside, they were getting nowhere; she’d surveyed Kaz’s board, pondered his theories, and tried to follow his zig-zagging map of strings. If there was a pattern somewhere, she couldn’t see it.
“If we only knew who was sneaking around the Pentagon,” Kaz wondered aloud. “That’s what Malek said when you met him a couple weeks back, right? That someone raided a storage locker. Maybe there’s security footage of the break-in, or an inventory list of what was stolen. It might not be much, but it could help.”
Malek had mentioned that he lacked the security clearance to gain access, and (as per usual) told Calista not to pursue it.
“If there is an inventory list,” Calista said, suddenly brightened by her idea, “I’m pretty sure I know who can get it.”
Kaz waved his arms wildly. “No way, Callie. Not again.”
She sprang from the bed, trampled the clippings and went to her closet, yanking her red hoodie from a hanger. “Let’s go. If you’re lucky he’ll ask you to take off your clothes this time.”
A cab shuttled them to Oswick. During their first trip to Oz the darkness had masked some of the more advanced decay, but on a cloudless afternoon it was magnified; deep potholes pocked the streets, and tufts of grass sprouted through shattered sidewalk tiles. The sunlight didn’t do the real estate any favors, either; peeling paint and riven aluminum siding highlighted decades of neglect. Each absent shingle stood out like a missing tooth.
They stepped up to the porch and Kaz rapped the screen door. Going through The Cobbler’s security protocols was déjà vu: a pantless Melody answering the door and failing to recognize them; Wyatt screaming at her to use the intercom; and standing outside the ominous steel door at the foot of the staircase, waiting for it to open.
This time they were permitted entry without being searched or having their cell phones flattened. It was the closest they’d get to hospitality.
Wyatt’s basement was more chaotic than usual. He’d packed most of his monitors and computer towers, duct taping them into cardboard boxes piled against the wall. The rest of his belongings, including his meager wardrobe, were in various states of disorganization. A suitcase sat open on his cot.
“You’re leaving?” Calista asked.
/> He returned to his remaining workstation, plopped into his chair and began clacking the keyboard. “You must’ve gotten your private detective license since the last time we met.”
“Where are you going?”
“Away from here,” he said. “Let’s just say I’m a believer.”
Kaz and Calista exchanged a furtive glance.
“Believer in what?” She was still talking to the back of his head. Not unusual while carrying on a conversation with Wyatt, she’d learned.
“I caught wind of an internal memo floating around the Pentagon. Turns out Jackson’s house was photographed and inventoried the same night it burnt down. I did some digging, and apparently, he was working on a ritual. As in magic. That sounds like some grade-A bullshit, but if the Feds thought it was worth erasing his family and initiating a Cleansing Protocol over, they must know something that I don’t.”
Calista was about to ask how he’d seen internal Pentagon documents and memos, but was pretty sure she knew the answer.
“It’s getting too hot around here,” he continued. “If the Feds were onto Jackson, it’s a matter of time before they trace his activity back to me. I’m not gonna wait for a battering ram to smash down my door. I’m going underground.”
Kaz rolled his eyes from side to side. “You literally live underground.”
“I mean ‘off the grid,’ idiot. The bodies are piling up, people are getting disappeared … for all I know The Valley is primed for a full-blown riot. When that happens, I plan to be elsewhere.”
“If there’s a riot the police will break things up,” Kaz said.
Their host let out a derisive grunt before turning back to his computer. “Maybe in your neck of the woods, Sweater Vest. But look outside: this ain’t a country club. Cops don’t roll into Oz unless it’s to kick down a door. If this entire town were burning to a crisp, they’d wait it out and show up the next day with a dustpan.” He clacked his mechanical keyboard as he spoke, opening windows and filling them with reams of code. “There’s also disturbing chatter on the dark web.”
The North Valley Grimoire Page 27