Trio of Sorcery (12 page)

But Di was only too happy to get out of that place. Luckily, Tamara had been concentrating so hard on the
money that something had escaped her. Di had not been hysterical, and had not given her the sort of feeding that she usually got from her clients. She only hoped that Tamara was so sated on what she got from Chris Fitzhugh that she wouldn't notice the lack of response from Susan until it was too late, until Di had turned over this paper—written in Tamara's own hand, with her fingerprints all over it—to Joe O'Brian and the Bunko Squad.

Di went straight to Joe's station, hoping he was on duty. Like most precinct houses, it was a little shabby and very busy. The desk sergeant had one of those tall desks of the sort you saw in movies from the 1940s. He looked a little surprised to see someone like her walking in, and even more surprised when she asked for Joe. As it turned out, Joe was on duty, although he was not in the station at the moment. Di was sent to Joe's captain.

He raised his eyebrows when she came into his office; she stuck out her hand and introduced herself as he rose from his seat behind his desk. The office was scarcely big enough for the desk and a visitor's chair; the desk was one of those dreary gray metal things, and the visitor's chair, when she sat down on it, was enough to give someone back problems. She felt sorry for the captain if that was the sort of chair that
he
was stuck in.

The captain himself, Irish like Joe but big and ruddy, was named O'Grady. So the eastern seaboard tradition of Irish policemen was still alive and well here in Cambridge. Well, so close to Boston, she shouldn't be surprised. “There
was something you wanted to see Detective O'Brian about, Miss Tregarde?” he asked carefully.

“Yes, but you will do just as well, sir.” She smiled. “I've been doing a little poking around on Joe's behalf. I recently moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard and a mutual friend of ours introduced us; Detective O'Brian was looking for someone who could expose a phony psychic, and she suggested me. I did a fair bit of that sort of thing with my grandmother, mostly around Waterford.” She watched his eyebrows climb a little further. “If you check with Detective Gabrielli in the Waterford Bunko Squad, he'll vouch for both of us.”

O'Grady made a note of that, but she was pretty certain that when he got done talking to her he wouldn't bother calling the Waterford PD. “The woman in question is Tamara Tarasava. Detective O'Brian didn't go into details, he just told me that he'd like to have her discredited at least, and arrested on fraud if possible.” All right, that was a bit of a fib, but Joe hadn't gone into a
lot
of details, so it was technically true. “He gave me her address, I did some preliminary work, and this morning I set up an appointment with her under an alias and posing as a teenager.”

“Oh?” O'Grady looked a little more relaxed now, though his tone was still guarded.

“A teenager is naïve and vulnerable.” Di smiled. “About an hour ago, I kept my appointment with this Tamara woman, and she pulled the ‘egg trick' on me. I got you this—”

She carefully took the paper out of her purse, holding it by the very corner, and put it down on his desk. She explained in detail exactly what she had done, from the pictures in her purse to the phony ID. She finished, “I got her to write out the instructions for me. She wants me to get five thousand dollars, which I believe is in the felony range. I wore gloves, so the only prints on that paper are hers, it's in her handwriting, and it was taken from a legal pad that should be in her consultation room, so you should be able to get the impressions of these instructions from the top sheet. Will that be enough for Bunko to act on?”

The eyebrows stayed well up on the captain's forehead, but the smile he gave her was genuine. “I was skeptical when you first started to talk, Miss Tregarde, but I can see you know your business. We don't often get that kind of cooperation out of Harvard students.”

“Just call me a public-minded citizen,” she replied. “Now, if it were me, and I needed to actually catch Tamara in the act, for the second round it would be the grandmother, not the girl, that showed up with the cash. First of all, a teenager wouldn't
have
that kind of money to give her, and secondly, with that kind of money at stake, Tamara might bring in a confederate to make sure the pigeon doesn't get away if she has second thoughts about the deal. A young girl could probably outrun her and would certainly attract unwanted attention by screaming. Gramma would probably be easier to control.”

The captain nodded. “Then if you can leave your name
and address if we need you to testify—” He handed her paper and a pen, and she wrote both out for him.

“Good luck with this,” she said when she was done, and stood up to go. “Tamara is a piece of work I would like to see locked up.”

They shook hands. Then the captain hesitated a moment. “If…we needed to do something like this again, on one of Joe's cases, would you be available?”

“Possibly,” she temporized, and smiled ruefully. “It kind of depends on classes and exams. School comes first, and they aren't going to give me that degree for being public-spirited.”

“Of course.” This time his smile was quite warm. “I wish my daughter had your attitude about classes and exams. Thank you, Miss Tregarde. You've been very helpful.”

With the captain's approval, she stopped at Joe's desk and left him a note. On impulse, she picked up one of his cards from the holder on his desk.

And inwardly cursed.

Superimposed on Joe's name was the equal-armed red cross.

She wasn't off the hook yet.

The upstairs gang wasn't in; not Emory and Zaak, and not Marshal. After knocking on Marshal's door, Di began to
wonder if they were having second thoughts about being involved. They were probably avoiding her.

Not that she blamed them. What had happened last night had been pretty damned scary. Emily was probably frightened out of her mind, as well she should be, and the guys, once they got over the kind of numbed, shocky state that always followed an experience like that, might have decided that they wanted no part of her. She trudged down the stairs and back to her own place, carefully locking her door behind her, and sat down on the couch in a dispirited state of mind.

Not that
she
was to blame for any of this—she'd tried to keep their involvement strictly mundane—but they probably wouldn't remember it that way. Until she showed up, the worst thing that had ever happened to Zaak would have been acute embarrassment if someone walked in on him while he was wearing that ridiculous “ritual robe.” It was unlikely that he would ever have tried anything as ambitious as conjuring a “wandering spirit,” another new thing would have caught his interest soon enough. There had never been any manifestations of anything outré in their lives, and if they had not gotten involved with her, there never would have been.

Then Di had moved in downstairs and all hell had broken loose. Literally. She wasn't personally to blame, but on the other hand, it wasn't difficult to make the connection.

I wouldn't want to be around me either.

And if she was going to be honest with herself…
avoiding her from now on would be the best possible thing they could do. She could not honestly say that her presence was not in some part the catalyst for what had happened last night. She was dangerous to be around. Trouble followed Guardians, and even if they didn't know that there were such things, their instincts might be warning them. And if she, with all her potential Guardian power bottled up inside her, had somehow served as a kind of magnet for the dybbuks, then she actually was obliquely part of the reason why things had gone so pear-shaped for Zaak last night. She couldn't say for sure. She didn't
think
so; she was pretty sure that with Zaak's own high potential, eventually he would have attracted something bad anyway—

But she could not honestly swear that the fact that she
was
something of a beacon wasn't a contributing factor.

If that was the case then, the best thing, in fact, the only thing she could do in good conscience was to stay away. If they all shunned one another, if she put heavy shields on them, they might get normal lives back.

She rubbed her eyes with one hand, then got up to get water boiling for tea, fighting down an unexpected lump in her throat.

It wasn't as if she couldn't do this without them. She
could.
She'd been flying solo, more or less, since she'd become a Guardian. It was more that…she'd liked hanging out with them, and it had been kind of fun working things out with them, even though it was a serious situa
tion. They all—even Zaak—had sharp minds, and different angles on the problems than she did. It was good being able to bounce things off them. Marshal's knowledge of stage magic was priceless.

But beyond all that, she
liked
them. She had assumed that they were friends,
her
friends. She liked having friends; she actually hadn't had any since—well—grade school. In a way, Zaak blowing things up had been good; while it added to her burden of worry that they would insist on helping her, and she would have to keep
them
safe as well as herself, it meant she would not have to hide her secrets from them. Well, other than being a Guardian; no one really needed to know that but another Guardian. But for the first time since Memaw died, she'd have someone she didn't have to hide her magic from. And for the first time
ever,
someone her own age would know she was a witch. But instead, it seemed that once again she was going to be the weird one, the one people avoided.

She wasn't particularly worried that any of them would spill the beans—who would believe them? Despite the popularity of horror movies, no one really wanted to know that there were such things as dybbuks and demons and vampires. Usually people who got a glimpse of such things quickly made up some rational explanation for what they had seen. And the few people who
might
believe them were…well…a few tacos short of a combo plate.

“Bloody hell,” she said aloud, near to tears. She was just so damn tired of being alone….

At least, before, she'd had Memaw. Memaw knew her, really
knew
her. Now she had no one. She was going to end up like Lavinia, behind a façade that she never dared crack. And one day she was going to have to face off against something she couldn't handle, and then she'd die the same way she had lived.

Alone.

She turned away from the stove, leaned her forehead against the glass of the windowpane, and cried quietly. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself, and right then she didn't care.

The cold glass was soothing, and the sound of the water coming to a boil at least forced her to turn away and pay attention to it. She had no appetite, so she poured part of the boiling water into her tea mug, got a hard boiled egg and a banana out of the fridge, and ate both and drank her tea without tasting any of it. It was completely dark when she finished, and she stripped to her underwear and crawled into bed without bothering to go back upstairs to see if one of the others had come back. What was the point? Even if they were there, they'd probably pretend not to be.

She cried herself to sleep, which was stupid, and again, she didn't care. Tomorrow she could cowboy up and be the big bad brave Guardian who was bothered by nothing. Tonight she was going to feel sorry for herself until she got it out of her system.

She didn't stay asleep—not truly asleep—for very long.
A Guardian's dreams were seldom “just” dreams, and especially when a Guardian had been Called, her dreams were as much a part of the job as anything done during the waking hours.

She woke to the sound of a small child crying; the child sounded exhausted and hopeless. She sat up, and as she did, she realized that she was still asleep; she wasn't in her own bed. She wasn't in a bed at all but on a nasty smelling couch, a broken-down piece of furniture that stank of cat pee. There was no light and she couldn't make out a lot in the room, but she could tell that it was cold and mostly empty. The crying came from the left-hand corner of the room where there was something piled up on the floor; Di got up and cautiously felt her way to the source.

There was a small mattress there, or at least something shaped like a mattress. As she concentrated on it, she was able to see a little better. Definitely a mattress, maybe from a kid's bed or a crib; it was smaller than a twin and looked as dirty and stained as the couch. There was a heap of ratty blankets there, a child huddled in them, sobbing.

As her foot moved
into
the mattress, Di knew something else; nothing she could do here would affect anything. She wasn't actually
present
in any way; this was a vision. What she would be able to learn would be limited by a lot of things—for instance, she might not be able to move past the walls of this room to find out exactly where she was.