Geekomancy (8 page)

Victor Moorely sat back in the chair, a mix of anger and friendliness passing over his face. “He’s a good kid—he gets good grades, he’s funny. I was excited for Angela, thought maybe she’d been one of the lucky ones to meet a good guy so early. My wife and I didn’t meet until we were in our late twenties.”

Ree nodded. She’d need to talk to William as well
. Sigh.
This was going to become a full-time job, and all for what? The chance to LARP her favorite TV shows?

“Have you spoken with William since the dinner?” she asked.

“Alex called him after . . .” Instead of finishing his thought, the man broke down in a fit of sobs.

Crap.
Moorely hunched forward, looking down. She waited a few moments before trying to probe again, but he just sat there, folded over himself. Ree sat up as straight as she could, armoring herself with the role of the FBI agent, immune to the raw human emotion of a man broken by grief.

“Mr. Moorely, are you all right?”

He made another short choking sound, then breathed deep. He sat up and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The investigative questions had come easily, popping up in her mind like she was being fed a script. This time the words were her own. “No need to apologize. It’s the only sane thing to do.” He nodded, so she continued. “Can I see her room?”

Probably eager to do anything other than talk, the bedraggled man stood and led her upstairs to a room decorated in posters and signs that read
Parents Keep Out
and
Twihards Only
. Ree opened the door and took in the room all at once, like a panorama photo in 1080p plastered in her mind as she unleashed the Sherlock Brain.

Slightly messy. Pastel colors. Layers of blankets and colorful sheets on a simple wooden bed frame. White faux-wood desk with shelves built in. A flat-panel screen and desktop below. Speakers flanking the screen.

The pop-up text returned:
Average media consumption.

Small TV on a dresser. Guitar in the corner on a stand. Posters of sparkling vampires, androgynous boys, and famous divas lined the walls in equal proportions.

Sexually inexperienced.

Everything was as it should be for a normal teenage girl.

Except for, that is, the bloodstain on the floor beside the bed. It was two feet wide, slightly oval-shaped.

For a moment, Ree saw Angela’s body on the ground, in photo-realistic detail, the blood pooling beneath.

Ree closed her eyes, forcing the sight out of her mind. She opened them again, and the body was gone.

Died here. Wasn’t moved,
popped up in Sherlock text.

Ree scanned the room for another few seconds, taking in data. Nothing was relevant.

No signs of struggle.

More Sherlock text:
No secondary pool from a bloodied weapon.

Ree returned to her own thought processes, holding back the Sherlock Brain.

Where was the weapon? How quickly had the parents found her—what had she done that would let her bleed out without anyone hearing? Eastwood had said there was a trace of magic on the death, but what kind, to what effect?

She was floundering in deep water here. She felt her Sherlock-ness receding, and looked around the room one more time, her eyes passing over a silver locket she hadn’t noted as relevant before. A bit of text popped into shape above the dresser, reading
Locket,
fading out as soon as it appeared.

Ree gave the locket a once-over. It contained an old picture of a woman who could have been Angela’s mother or grandmother. Ree briefly searched for connections, then filed the image away for later.

With the Sherlock Brain gone, she was left with exhaustion and the sense of needing to smoke. Which, since she hadn’t smoked since college, she blamed on the detective. Use the effects, get the needs. Made sense, if in a disturbing way.

Eastwood damn well better teach her every single trick and give her a pony for this.

She stepped around the room, taking extra care to avoid the stain on the carpet. Moorely stayed at the door, like he couldn’t bring himself to cross the threshold.

With all the magic gone, Ree was left on her own. Pulling the door partly closed, she tried to assemble her thoughts, figure out how to put the pieces together.

What did she need? Emails and other online messages, maybe lists of friends to talk to for a third-party perspective.

Ree opened the door a crack, seeing Mr. Moorely standing outside, his eyes unfocused.

“If possible, I’d like to get access to her computer, check to see if there were some hidden factors.”
Hidden factors? The hell was that? This is going to fall apart fast without the magic. Less talking, more snooping.

Moorely didn’t respond at first, so Ree opened the door all the way, blocking the blood as best as she could with her body, and stepped out into the hall.

That broke him out of whatever reverie had been holding him. He shook his head, then nodded. “Sure. Her passwords probably have something to do with Justin Bieber, or maybe Tyra Banks.”

Ree nodded and opened the bedroom door again. “I’ll work here until your wife arrives. Thank you for your help, Mr. Moorely.”

She closed the door, sealing herself in again. Ree heard steps in a slow descent. A shiver ran over her body at the thought of losing a child. She didn’t even want kids, but the idea of losing them was far worse. To have the ghost of a person who was part you, part the person you love, haunting you for the rest of your life.

Shit. Ghosts.
Were they real, too? Was Angela’s spectre hanging around in the room? Ree looked over her shoulder, realizing that while she didn’t have a clue about how to deal with spirits, she still didn’t want to be surprised by one.

Uncertain, she spoke aloud to the room. “Angela, if you’re here, I’m doing what I can to understand what happened to you, so you can move on . . . or whatever the ghosts of suicides do.”

She waited but received no response.

“And don’t ask me for answers. I’m new at this.”

She turned her attention to the desk and the girl’s computer and started the creepy process of learning about someone’s life from the inside, scrolling through status updates and friends lists.

Note to self: Better passwords so that people can’t snoop through my life when I die.

While the creepy-intruder feeling didn’t go away, Ree did manage to pull up some information that gave her leads on Angela’s emotional state. She’d seemed fairly happy and teenager-in-super-mega-greatest-love-ever, though “teenager” automatically indicated “hot mess.” The hormonal soup of adolescence was vicious, viscous crap, and even skimming it through someone else’s perspective was enough to give Ree flashbacks to being the skinny nerdy girl with the big glasses and no friends except a circle of a half-dozen geeky boys. Every last one of whom wanted to date her and would eventually reveal that in their own marvelously clumsy ways.

Ah, memories.

Reaching her digital-voyeur limit, Ree left the computer behind and took another look through the room, making sure she hadn’t missed anything. She treaded lightly through the house, returning to the main floor, as if it were 2 AM and she was returning from a late party.

Fuck, this place is depressing.

She promised herself a solid evening of goofing off once this was done, which would have to come at some imagined future after laundry, cooking, cleaning, and paying bills (which was its own kind of magic, trying to stretch a tiny wage across all those bills each month without letting her life collapse while simultaneously walking the tightrope of Sandra’s goodwill). At times she felt like the lost member of the Flying Graysons—and then wondered whether that story line had already been done.

Chewing on that bone of Bat-trivia, she found Angela’s father at a desk, hunched over a computer. Still no sign of Alexandra.

Her smooth-talking mojo was failing her, and it was rapidly becoming food-o’-clock, as Ree’s blood sugar was plummeting. Her stomach grumbled in agreement in a most unprofessional fashion. She waited for another half hour, her stomach protesting all the while, but eventually, Alexandra Moorely returned.

Alexandra’s telling of the story took several minutes, as she broke down into sobbing repeatedly—she’d tried to keep the sight from her husband and failed, though the police had come quickly when called. Alexandra gave William’s phone number to Ree, and Ree took the opportunity to excuse herself and try not to look too obvious in fleeing from the downtrodden site of tremendous emotional anguish.

Outside, she made the first turn available and then stopped to sit on a bench and clear her head, shivering for every reason except the cold.
The blood, gods, the blood. And her parents.

Caught in a gut-wrenching thought loop, Ree popped in her earbuds to mainline happy-bouncy music until she could close her eyes and
not
imagine Angela on the floor of the room amid a pool of blood.

Rocking to Florence + the Machine, Ree walked back home to change and call Eastwood to figure out the next step. Could she quit now—would that even be allowed? This shit was too real by half. But it never worked that way in the movies, did it? At least that’s how it was in the (Narrative) World According to Joseph Campbell. But why her? She didn’t have to do this. There were real cops and feds, and she was thoroughly out of her depth.

Trying to keep herself in a loop of pleasant thoughts as insulation from the nasty reality, she reflected on the fact that there was no case of sad in the world that could stand up to a pint of ice cream and a few hours of
Super Mario Bros
. She’d once made a pie chart to prove it. And by pie chart, she meant a pie. Which she’d eaten.

Perhaps another pie was in order.
Pumpkin. No, maybe apple.
Bit by bit, she shook off the feeling of the Moorelys’ house.

As Ree walked down the empty street pondering what pie to make, she was, as a result of such pleasant thoughts, left woefully unprepared to make a Perception Check and thus avoid surprise.

As a result, she was completely blindsided by the furry paw that slammed into her shoulder, sending her crashing to the ground. She heard the mystery thing howl as it leaped after her, blocking out the early-evening vestiges of twilight.

Just what I wanted,
was all she had time to think,
an ambush.

Chapter Five

Blood and Cocoa

Ree hit the ground hard but then rolled with the shot as her training kicked in. Pain flashed up her arm like a grease fire, and her vision clouded.

She wished she’d kept Eastwood’s lightsaber, realizing that the closest thing she had to a weapon was a pen in her pocket.

Turning to face her attacker, Ree was instantly split between an impulse to scream and one to burst out laughing.

Her attacker was a werewolf. But not a CGI werewolf or a good-FX werewolf. This was a crappy-body-suit-with-a-super-fake-headpiece werewolf.

For all its ridiculousness, the damned thing managed to climb a brick wall to about ten feet up and then jump at her, which put some more fuel into the scream impulse.

Instead, she pushed off with one foot and leaped to the side, throwing a jumping roundhouse kick as the Hammer reject landed.

Ree expected a yelp, maybe a snarl or a growl. Instead, she got an
oof
.
Huh?

Ree hopped back when she heard the all-too-human sound, and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

The response began as a guy’s impression of a growl, but a moment into the sound, an animalistic voice joined the human one, then drowned it out as the wolfman charged her again, its jaw opening wide.

Okay, not funny anymore.
She snapped out a front kick that caught the werewolf in the jaw but sent the left shoe of her Respectable Person outfit flying up and out of her line of vision.
Where are the witnesses? Fuck the Doubt, right in its ear.

If she weren’t alone, it wouldn’t be jumping her. Going with that totally shaky but reassuring logic, she decided to try shouting.

“Fire! Fire! Fire in the alley!” She’d read that shouting “Fire!” was more likely to get a response than anything else, though that was a while ago, and maybe “Terrorist!” would do the job just as well.

Looking back out of the alley into the street, she saw a frustrating lack of passersby and turned her attention to the decreasingly laughable werewolf as it swiped at her with claws that Ree could have sworn looked more fake a second ago. It was tall, tall enough that she didn’t have a reach advantage with her kicks. Infighting would be stupid, since, y’know, claws and teeth. To prove her point, the weresuit’s claws tore at her blouse, leaving three gashes just under the bust.