Geekomancy (19 page)

She abandoned the ladder and moved to the next row over. There, she found L
OVE
, which had boxes labeled for various romantic comedies, a big stack of books, a half-dozen DVD cases for
Love Actually,
and finally, the three books on the list.

Which were, of course, on a shelf too high to reach from the ground.

This row of stacks didn’t have its own ladder, so Ree found a folding number in a corner and brought it back to the section. She stared at the ladder, her breathing getting away from her.

This is no big deal, Ree. The ladder is sturdy, it’s not a long fall, and you have more important things to freak out about.

Ree wasn’t as afraid of heights as she’d been as a kid, but she still had a healthy respect for what falling damage could do to a body, and she occasionally freaked out about it. She exhaled but started to climb. The ladder obligingly stayed underneath her, making only one small terror-inducing creak.

She pulled the books out one by one, setting them a shelf down. Then she descended two rungs, moved the books, and repeated the process until the books were reachable from the floor. She stepped down to the concrete and exhaled again, snapping the ladder closed and returning it to its corner.

Ree picked up the books on her way back, and when she cleared the stacks, she saw Eastwood standing over the cauldron holding a wooden spoon to his mouth. He took a sip and then wrinkled his face.

Not tasty, then. I wouldn’t imagine a Who Is Going to Commit Suicide? recipe would be.

“Have books, will divine,” she said.

Eastwood nodded. “Put them over there, then turn to Sonnet 116. I think it’s that one. Starts with ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds.’ ”

Ree set down the books and flipped through the book to find the sonnet, which was in fact #116. “Now what?”

Still looking at the cauldron, Eastwood beckoned her over. “Come over here, then recite it at the solution.”

“Why, exactly?”

Eastwood shook his head. “It’ll take longer to explain than to do. I need to keep adding ingredients at the right intervals, so you get to recite.”

Ree cleared her throat and started reciting the sonnet. She’d read them all back in school but hadn’t touched them since. #116 turned Shakespeare’s epic writing chops to the subject of qualifying true love. True love is beyond time, it’s unchanging, so on and so forth. Ree was reminded of the passage from 1 Corinthians that was used in every single wedding she’d been to as a kid.

Eastwood hurried back and forth between the nearest shelf on the racks, looking half like a cooking show host and half like one of the “more scared of you than you are of them” customers at Café Xombi: head down, seemingly shut off from the world. And to top it all off, still smelly, as he’d forgone the shower that Ree had deemed necessary.

Though maybe he’d showered at Dr. Wells’s and smelled of only
one
sewer expedition. Ree prayed that she’d never spend enough time in sewers to be able to tell the difference. The thought almost cost her her spot in the sonnet, but after a pause, she finished the second line of the final rhyming couplet.

Eastwood scurried back with the last ingredient—the Claddagh ring—and cast it into the cauldron. The ring made more of an explosion than a splash, and Ree leaned back to avoid whatever magical colorful wooj the rising plume was made of. When the plume dissolved, Eastwood leaned over the cauldron and squinted. He pulled on Ree to lean in beside him. “Keep your eyes open, and don’t freak out.”

“Huh?” Ree didn’t have time to freak out when the liquid in the cauldron bubbled up, flashing colors more brilliant than a soap commercial, washing over her and sucking her into . . . something?

•   •   •

It started with flashes of light. Bells, then drums, then an electric-guitar riff. She felt dropped into a liquid mass, a pool or an ocean. Sensation rolled over her—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell all at once. It was overwhelming at first, but after what felt like an eternal moment, she surfaced, got her head above water. The world settled into a hazy outline, sepia-toned, and she found herself in a bedroom. The edges of her vision were wispy, dreamlike, and when she tracked her head, the side of the room she focused on became clear while everything else became hazy.

A door opened, and a young man walked in, spiky hair in a Mohawk and a half-dozen piercings in his left ear. He slammed the door and locked it, tossing a bag on his bed. The room’s decoration suggested a Millennial Goth Punk—here a Ramones poster, there a computer tower modded with skulls. As he walked across the room, Ree saw a ghostly outline of Eastwood beside her, also watching. She opened her mouth to speak, but he put a finger over his lips in the unmistakable sign of
Shhhhhh
.

The boy sat down in front of a computer and opened an email folder. Though it was across the room, Ree could read it clearly. It was a Dear John letter from someone named Jeanine to a Tomas. The words of the letter didn’t stay with her, just the feelings of dread, betrayal, and loss. There were no last names, the email addresses reading Autumn Razor and Winter Knife—notable for their teenage affected coolness but not much else.

A bitter cold rushed over Ree, and she saw a phantom shadow play across the wall, reaching out to Tomas. As she tried to process the sight of the darkness wrapping itself around the boy, Tomas pulled a pair of pliers out from a stack of tools, beginning to cry.

And then he shoved it toward his eye.

The vision shattered, and Ree felt an intense pain in her eye. When the pain faded, Tomas’s body was on the floor. His body flickered in and out of place, switching with Angela’s body and two others she didn’t recognize. Then the rooms, too, changed with the bodies, visual whiplash nearly overloading her eyes. She squinted and focused, trying to isolate one room at a time. Her vision settled back into Tomas’s. It was night, where it had been daytime.

The window opened, and a strange figure’s head peeked inside, checking the room. The silhouette scampered through the window, making no sound when it landed. It stayed half crouched and shuffled over to the boy’s corpse. Still in shadow, the figure reached into itself and produced a red-and-white sphere, generating a light that swirled and folded in on itself rather than illuminating anything around it.

Ree hunched down to get a better look, maybe catch the face of whoever this shadowed figure was.

The murderer returned? Some scavenger?

As she looked the figure eye to eye, she saw no light, no shadow of black on black, just a mask of darkness. She reached into her coat, hoping to find a flashlight, a lighter, anything. When she brought her hands back out, she had nothing.

She looked sideways to the dream-Eastwood, who stood frozen as he watched the interloper.

The figure waved its hand over Tomas’s body, the body that Ree saw but refused to register, wouldn’t analyze or examine. She took it as a gestalt, keeping it distant so that the pain couldn’t pour through the cracks in her emotional armor that had been left by the sympathetic pain in her eye, the memory of Angela, and a hundred other emotional scars from her life.

An attenuated string of light seeped out of Tomas’s mouth and nose, a dead ringer for every TV show or movie she’d seen in which a creature took someone’s soul out of their body. The light floated up and began swirling around the stranger’s sphere, seeping in and joining the captured light. Ree lunged forward, trying to stop the process, half-knowing she couldn’t affect anything in the vision and half not giving a crap because she had to do
something
or yield to the pain that was peeling away at the edge of her vision.

Let go,
said the pain in a sharp, gravelly voice.
Let us in, and we’ll take it all away. You don’t have to hurt. We can take it away from you, leave you in peace.

Instead of pain, a warm dullness started to enfold her, wrap her up in nothingness. The vision faded away, the sepia tones fading to black and white, shifting grayscale.

“Aw, hell no.” Ree shook off the blanket of numbness, grabbed the edge of the pain, and yanked hard. It hit her like electricity, and the sepia vision rushed back in on a tide of pain. Still holding on to the pain, she tried to focus it into light, blasting the energy at the shadowed figure.

The light cast on the figure, illuminating the features of a middle-aged man with dark hair in a fedora and long coat, and a set of surprised eyes. The dream-Eastwood tackled her, shouting something incoherent. In another scattershot avalanche of sensation, she was torn out of the vision and dumped onto the floor of the Dorkcave.

•   •   •

She came to with a start, as if woken from a bad dream, that is, with a scream. She was back in the Dorkcave, her hands on the edge of the cauldron. But this time she felt like she was going to vomit.

Good gods, let’s not do that again.

“Are you all right?” Eastwood asked, looking green around the gills.

“What the hell was all that? Who was that guy, and did you see the shadow on the wall just before he—? Was it something that could be making these kids take their lives?” Questions popped up in her mind and spilled out of her faster than she could check them through the internal censor in her brain.

Eastwood held up his hands to stop her, then rubbed at his temples. “Hold on for a sec. Prophetic hangover sucks Bantha pudu.”

The room continued to spin, though she was standing still, and her ears were hot. She felt like she’d just slammed three doubles of tequila and needed a fistfight chaser. She paced back and forth, looking for something she could kick without consequence. Instead, she grabbed the lip of the cauldron and squeezed as hard as she could, digging her nails into the wrought iron until they scratched along the surface, biting into her palms.

Ree turned back to Eastwood. “We need to go now. I have his email address. You can track that and a given name to an address, right?”

“Theoretically, but that depends on the ISP, email provider, a lot. Hold on a minute, okay? This hasn’t happened, and it may not ever happen, or at least not like you saw. The ritual gave us a look at what
might
happen.”

Ree closed on Eastwood. “Or it could happen just that way, could be happening now, right? Who were those figures, the phantom and the shadowed figure? Is this some kind of magical serial killer or what?”

Eastwood backed up a step. “Give me a minute to sort things out.”

Something was wrong. Not just the situation. Eastwood.
Something in his eyes. Those eyes.

Ree’s nostrils flared, and she felt lava-hot anger pour through her veins. “It was
you
I saw in there—the shadow with the sphere!”

Eastwood’s eyes went wide for a moment, then cast to the side. “No, no, no, of course not. Let me look up that address, you say you remembered it.” He turned his back on her, headed for the computer.

Oh, hell no.

“It sure looked like you, unless you have an evil twin—and I don’t think you have an evil twin. So if you do have an evil twin, you better let me know, because it really seems to me that you’re involved with this somehow and you’re trying to change the subject.”

He turned around again quickly, an argument playing out on his face. He changed his mind several times, almost starting to speak twice and stopping himself.

Ree continued to press forward, stepping to within a hand’s span. She had to look up to lock eyes, but she felt for all the world like she was looking down on him.

“You better sit down,” he said.

Ree gave him the stink-eye and he stepped back again, gesturing to a desk chair. Not one time in her life had someone prefaced good news with “you better sit down.” She’d been told to sit down when Mom left, when Grandpa died, when Dad got fired by the state of California (both times), and if there had been a chair available when Jay was dumping her, he’d have asked her to sit down.

She took a seat. Channeling her inner petulant child, she crossed her arms and leaned back, eyes locked on the man who she was
certain
was the same as the stranger she’d seen in the dream vision. But what had he been doing there that he felt guilt about it now, buckling under the barrage of her indiscriminate rage?

“It all starts with a girl,” Eastwood began.

Chapter Eleven

Revelation Station

“Branwen nic Catrin was the most powerful genre specialist I’d ever seen. We met around ten years ago, when she was new to the city. The dot-com bubble was bursting, and I was getting out of the computer business, burning my bridges with the EFF, and setting up shop here.” Eastwood gestured to the Dorkcave, then took to pacing. “She was good then and was even better by the end. When she vanished two years ago, I turned over the whole rutting magical Underground looking for her. I called in markers, knocked heads, and padded wallets. But she was gone.”

He made the universal magical sign of
poof
. “No one could place her anywhere later than Howard Park on October 31st. I kept digging, turned up more and more sources.”