Missing, Suspected Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

  “Got anything you want to talk about?”

  “Oh tons. The whole werelion trafficking thing and how I should handle it when I get back. But I figure you’ve got stuff on your mind, too. If you want to go first…”

  “No, you start, we’ve got six hours, right?”

  “At least.”

  We talked for the half an hour it took to get to I-5, where we stopped for the bathrooms and fresh coffee. He started driving and the conversation meandered, turning back to the traffickers every so often. At nearly nine, just two hours into the trip, my phone sang out the “Ballad of the Green Beret.”

  “That’s Mom,” I announced before I picked up.

  Instead, Gina’s voice returned my cheerful good morning.

  “Hey have you been on celeb-blogs this morning?”

  “No.” I didn’t bother to tell Gina my morning routine didn’t include checking the paparazzi sites.

  “Someone caught Jeremy and me going to the wedding planner’s place yesterday. They called me an unknown beauty.”

  “Nice.”

  “Would it be okay with you if I wore Mom’s wedding dress?” She sounded like she was seven again and asking me to go into a scary Halloween maze with her.

  “That sounds like a great idea to me.”

  “I mean, I’ll need to alter it and then it might not fit you.”

  “Go ahead, Gina, you’ll look great.”

  “Thanks.” She sounded so relieved my heart swelled but not enough that I agreed to her next demand. “You want to come into LA with me to return the other three dresses?”

  “No, and you’re not going either. Call the wedding planner, have her deal with it.”

  “But she’d have to come all the way out here…”

  “That’s her job.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Not having to deal with that sort of thing is really cool.”

  “I’m glad, just don’t get used to it. I bet Jeremy isn’t willing to have maids and butlers for the rest of his life.”

  “Probably not,” Gina laughed. “What’s going on with you?”

  It was a rare burst of unselfishness for her to ask. I glanced over at Ted who watched the road. “I’m going to get away for the weekend, help Ted handle some stuff with his mom.”

  “Will you be home for church?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’ll run interference for you with Mom. She’s itching to talk to you about the witch thing.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, and for the first time in a while I really meant it.

  “No problem. Have a good time.”

  I told her I’d try, but suspected that was probably impossible.

  Four coffee breaks and one mediocre pancake house breakfast later, we pulled into the snarl of traffic going into San Francisco. I’ve traveled around the world, seen Eastern and Western Europe, but the Golden Gate bridge still made me gape. Ted teased me as I took cell phone pictures, including a few of him at the wheel. My fun evaporated as we pulled up to a five-story brick building. Like the others on the busy street it boasted a set of black steel fire escapes and white painted windows. More importantly, the front door and every street level window on the block hid behind heavy bars.

  “Not the nicest neighborhood,” I mused. The parking lot across the street proclaimed itself the safest in the city, with twenty-four-hour security. It didn’t look like it. We took the chance and paid our money. Before Ted knocked on the front door, I gave his hand a quick squeeze for support. This was when the tough stuff happened.

  The girl who opened the door wasn’t what I expected. Blonde and petite, she smiled at me with teeth that needed braces. I put her age around fifteen, and guessing from the romance novel in her hand, she didn’t feel too threatened.

  “Uh, we’re not really a hotel,” she said, looking at our backpacks.

  “I know.” Ted pushed past her and I followed him into a very hotel-esque lobby. “I’m here to see Susan Falconer.”

  She looked at Ted a little confused. “Um, we don’t have a Susan Falconer.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, really, I know like everybody and I’ve never heard that name.”

  “He means Sue, Sue Rice,” a man in the back of the lobby corrected her, but stayed far enough back that I couldn’t make out more than a large rectangle. “She didn’t think you’d be here this early.”

  “I’m happy to surprise,” Ted replied. Tension came off of him, but the other man just a had a wary feeling of competition. “She took his name?” Ted asked.

  “After he died,” the stranger said. “Well, after your friend executed him.”

  The girl in front of us swallowed hard and looked around nervously.

  “Why don’t you head upstairs, Amber?” His voice made it an order, not a question.

  “Because it’s my shift,” she told him. I was proud of her for standing up for herself.

  Just a few feet inside the door and already there were dominance games. I wasn’t about to be subjugated. I talked to her, not him. “I’m Elisabeth Hicks, this is Edward. Sue asked us to come for the weekend. Maybe she set up rooms?”

  “Oh yeah, she did. Totally.” Amber ducked behind the counter and pulled open a drawer. “You’re on the second floor, lucky you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t want to be on the fifth floor when the elevator breaks,” she confided.

  “Good to know.”

  “Amber.” The guy from the shadows used her name as a warning. “They didn’t need to know that.”

  “I guess not,” she stuttered. “I’m sorry, Jason.”

  “Jason?” I turned from her to him. At the sound of his name, Jason stepped out of the shadows. He’d grown up to look a little like the man from Ted’s nightmare, tall and hairy, with the face of a brute. Jason was smaller though, and without the bulk of the man from the nightmare, younger, too, mid-twenties.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “No,” Ted said, stepping between us. “She’s mine.”

  Jason smiled at this, a slick smile that almost dared Ted to prove it. The tension filling the room went up a notch, making me glad for the heavy weight of my gun on my hip. I let my hand rest there, just above the grip.

  “Jason, that’s enough,” Sue called down from the stairs. “Quit acting like an animal and fix those lights”

  At the sound of her voice, Jason disappeared back down the hallway.

  “He’s my stepson,” she told me. “Edward’s step-brother, they always fought like siblings.”

  “I’ve got a sister. I know the score.” It felt like more than that to me, but I’d never felt two siblings fight the way Gina and I used to. Then again, Gina and I never had things like what I’d seen in Ted’s memory. “Who takes us upstairs? I’d like to dump my stuff before we get the grand tour.”

  “I can,” Amber offered.

  “That’d be great. I’ve got to deal with the cops, get the report finished.” Sue’s lips formed a thin angry line. “We lost someone Wednesday night.”

  12

  Sue left the lobby after dropping her dramatic fact, leaving us alone with the teen. I gestured to the upstairs, and Amber left the counter to take us to our room.

  “So tell me about living here, is it cool?” I asked.

  “Uh, it’s, yeah, I guess it’s cool,” she decided.

  “You don’t talk about Pack life with people outside of the Pack,” Ted told me.

  Amber’s eyes widened as she looked at him, “How’d you know?”

  “I grew up here. Well, not here, back at the camp ground.”

  Her eyes went bigger and her lips parted in a deep breath. As her chin came up, I felt the first stirrings of hero worship come from her. “I was born there but I never saw it. I mean, not really. We got moved out when I was little, then I went into foster care. We were here before I got to come home. I’ve only ever known this place.”

  “But you like it?” I prompted her.<
br />
  “It’s okay,” she shrugged, reminding me that teenagers rarely felt the need to explain themselves to total strangers. “Sometimes I wish my parents had a place of their own instead of just a two-bedroom suite, but then I wouldn’t have anyone else to hang out with, anyone that knows what it’s like, you know.”

  Ted nodded. He did know. I didn’t so I kept my mouth shut. The faded lobby carpet had been red; the walls had a newer coating of white paint. Up here the red carpet was just as old, and the walls hadn’t been painted. Furniture pieces dotted the hallway: a low book shelf, a table, a few other odds and ends. None of the styles matched, but someone had stripped and refinished them all in the same blond wood color. The workmanship was pretty good, better than the paint job on the door to our room.

  “It’s one of the smaller ones. It, um, hasn’t been redone yet. We’re working our way down.”

  “From the fifth floor?” I asked her.

  “Yeah. My parents and I are on the fifth. More families on the fourth, then the third is like apartments for everyone in high school. I’m going to move down there soon,” she finished with a wistful voice.

  The space was smaller than my bedroom with a clean but worn carpet. The furniture had the same gleaming new polish look.

  “Who set it up?”

  “Some of the guys moved the furniture in. You’re like the only people on this floor. Creepy, huh?”

  Now I shrugged. Not creepy at all. Sue wanted us isolated. Maybe she even thought it was a kind gesture.

  Ted thanked Amber for her time, and thanked her again when she told us we’d missed lunch but dinner was in a few more hours. He tried to get her out of the room but she wanted us to know the kitchen probably had extra food if we were hungry. Then she asked if we wanted a tour. Finally she got the hint and left us alone.

  “What do you think so far?” I asked him. In response, he headed to the bathroom, and turned the knob on the faucet.

  “Well, they’ve got hot running water, so it’s a step up from what I had,” he said. “But I don’t think they’re civilized. Jason was still trying to be alpha down there.”

  “I caught that.” I lay back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. The room needed to be painted, a web of cracks above my head looked older than I was. “What exactly does alpha mean in a werewolf pack?”

  “I’m going to guess you don’t want to talk about an actual wolf pack. Here it means they bully you. If you roll over and let them win, they keep bullying you.”

  “So pretty much like alpha everywhere else,” I sighed. “This is going to be a fun weekend.”

  “Leave your gun on, all the time.”

  “Wasn’t planning on taking it off.” I fished around in my bag. “Should I carry the wolfsbane, too, just in case?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “Anything comes at you, shoot it.”

  We took the stairs down, ignoring the old-fashioned cage elevator. At the bottom we found Amber so engrossed in her book she didn’t notice us. As much as a guide would have helped Amber made too much noise for us to see anything we weren’t supposed to. We slipped by without interrupting her reading. We started with a door marked “staff only” that led to the kitchen. I noticed the cleanliness, the way the trays of food for tonight’s meal were wrapped in cling wrap, and how industrial posters encouraged proper hand washing.

  “They’ve literally cleaned up their act,” I joked, pointing them out to Ted.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.” He headed to the walk-in freezer and started checking packages. From what I could tell it was standard issue industrial-size products like ten pounds of frozen broccoli and a box with thirty hamburger patties.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “People.” He kept the search up through the freezer and all of the refrigerators. After twenty minutes, he seemed ready to give up.

  “Satisfied?”

  He shook his head. “They liked them better fresh.”

  “Great,” I sighed. Cannibalism made my stomach curl up and weep. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Another staff-only door led to a storage cabinet. Ted pronounced all of the chemicals normal, and brushing by his hand I caught a memory of using some of them in very not-healthy ways. I swallowed hard; life with these people had made him a torturer. If he could do that after just three years, what could someone who stayed do?

  The dining room was a pleasant enough place with round tables spread out around the room and a sideboard that held condiments, napkins, and silverware. It fell somewhere between my first Army mess hall and a mall food court on the comfort scale. I suspected the food would be about as good.

  “How many rooms do you think the hotel has?” I asked Ted as he continued checking cabinets.

  “There were twelve doors on our floor, five floors, so less than sixty.”

  “No rooms on the first floor so far, so less than forty-eight.”

  His head disappeared in a cabinet, leaving me to assume he agreed.

  “How many members of the pack you think? Forty? Thirty?”

  “Forty. But not all of them are wolves, maybe thirty? Remember, they don’t change teenagers and Amber said the kids have taken over the third floor. Most of them are new, too; all but a few members of the Pack I grew up with went to jail or were executed.”

  “So twenty werewolves, not a big number. I’ll bet the disappearances took out a big chunk of them.”

  “Not big enough,” he replied. “This room’s clean. Let’s check across the hall.”

  We found an empty library, the walls lined with neat shelves of books. A fair amount of fiction, an old encyclopedia set, and a section of the kind of educational books adults buy for kids. I noticed no Bibles, no Koran, and no new age-y religious stuff but lots of books on wolves, along with wolf fiction like Call of the Wild and White Fang. I was about to ask Ted about it when he shushed me, and pointed toward a door. Opening it just a crack let us hear the voice in other the room.

  It was Vincent, but not the tone he used talking with us, “Now, you try.”

  “Good morning, Governor. My name is Casey Simmons, may I introduce my teacher, Mr. Vincent?” a young voice spoke with uncertainty.

  “Very good. Remember, we always introduce the more important person to the less important, and the stranger to the familiar. Who can tell me how it would go for the President and Sue?”

  Noises filtered back to me and I imagined dozens of hands shooting up in the air. When I pushed Ted out of the way, my imagination got a few corrections. Nine children, the oldest only ‘tweens, strained to answer their teacher. Vincent picked a girl with a long blonde braid going down her back.

  “Good morning, Sue, this is the President.”

  “Hmm, what do the rest of you think?”

  The class consensus was split, leaving Vincent to inform them that the leader of the Pack didn’t outrank the President. The debate over it was enough to make me grin. I must have laughed to, just a little, because Vincent looked up and caught me.

  “We have guests,” he said, and nine heads swiveled our way. “Everyone this is Ms. Hicks and—”

  “Edward,” my boyfriend cut him off.

  Vincent nodded. “Can you all say hello?”

  A chorus of “good afternoon, Ms. Hicks” was quickly followed by “good afternoon, Edward.”

  “They’re visiting us for the weekend. Edward is Sue’s son.” The glances at my boyfriend became downright stares. “They’re going to be looking around and asking questions. If you promise to answer anything they ask you, I’ll let you go early.”

  The room erupted into noisy promises, and Vincent dismissed them. I walked into the immediately empty classroom with Ted trailing behind me.

  “I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

  “It’s all right. By now they’re not paying much attention. That’s why we have etiquette on Friday afternoons.”

  “Etiquette?” Ted asked him.

  “Along with how to balance a checkbook, how
to apply for a job, how to talk on the phone. Not the kind of things you learned, is it?”

  “Not at all,” Ted agreed. He’d put his hand on a globe, idly spinning it. “Is this the one?”

  “The very same. Only thing I took from the camp site.” Vincent leaned back on his desk and smiled at me. “Would you believe I used that globe to quiz him on geography?”

  I shook my head.

  “Vincent taught me all the capitals, states and other countries. Along with algebra, chemistry…” Ted stopped. “Was there anything you didn’t teach me?”

  “How to be brave. You knew that all on your own.” The older man’s eyes shined with wetness for a second, but he caught himself and blinked. “I never did say thank you for making that phone call.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I didn’t. Not until just now.”

  They laughed, both of them completely relaxed.

  “Do you still teach chemistry?” I asked when they finished.

  “Oh sure, in the lab; let me show you.” He unlocked a door behind his desk and let us into a small room set up with Bunsen burners and everything else you needed for a lab. “The kids go to school here until high school. That means I have to cover everything from kindergarten to eighth grade.”

  “What’s there?” I nodded at a door in the back.

  “It’s going to be a computer lab if I can ever get the money. So far we’ve only got one machine. It’s ancient. I used it to put up the Pack’s website though, so it’s helping.”

  “Website?” Ted asked.

  “Helping how?” I asked before Vincent could answer him.

  “We’re an IRS registered charity now. The website talks about how we help any newly turned werewolves, give them a place to live. People can make donations online.”

  “Do they?” Ted sounded surprised.

  “A few. Enough to pay for new school books and the desks you see in the classroom.” My magic told me he was lying. That didn’t make sense, but the magic had never been wrong.

  “All of this came from donations?” I spread my hands wide, encompassing the lab set-up, the neat rows of wooden school desks, and the blackboard.