Under a Spell (6 page)

“What if it’s some kind of animal? What if it eats my leg?”

He clamped down on my wrist. “I’m willing to risk that.”

I gritted my teeth while he yanked; my foot came free and so did I, barreling into Will’s chest and laying us both out on a black garbage bag, ash raining down around us like snowflakes.

“Still have your foot?”

I yanked my leg up and examined it. “It wasn’t Salisbury steak,” I said, yanking the cloth wrapped around my foot. “It was this.”

Will pulled us both to standing and climbed out of the Dumpster. I followed him.

“And what exactly is that?”

“It’s fabric. Or the remains of fabric.” I turned the charred remains in my hands. “Here’s a zipper. Oh, and a tag.”

Something broke inside of me.

I felt my whole face blanch, felt my chest tighten as my heart seized up. I gripped the fabric, holding it so hard that my nails bored into my palms.

“It’s—it was—a skirt. From a uniform. A uniform from here.” I licked my impossibly dry lips. “Will, someone was trying to burn this uniform.”

Will blinked at me, then disappeared back into the Dumpster.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for whatever else remains of that uniform.” He paused his mad shuffle through the trash, but didn’t look at me. “Or whoever owns it.”

I gently laid the remains of the once grey tweed skirt aside, touching the fabric gently as though showing this inanimate object a moment of tenderness could soften the blow for its owner.

“Find anything yet?” I asked, once I got back in the Dumpster.

“No. I don’t know if that’s bad or good.” He stepped back. “This is where the fire was centered. See that?”

He pointed to a blackened circle, then toed the small mountain of grey-white ash in its center.

“I was here when I found the skirt,” I said, using my hands to dig through the spaghetti. The stench was overwhelming—burnt plastic and garbage—but I was so focused on finding the rest of the charred uniform—and hopefully not the girl who had worn it—that I didn’t care.

“Wait.” My hand closed around something soft and I pulled. A stretch of fabric that used to be white slid through the debris. I winced. “It’s a blouse. Part of it.”

Will leaned in. “It’s not burned.”

“No. It’s torn.” I rubbed my finger across the sodden, frayed edge of the shirt and pulled back when something sliced across my flesh. “Ow!”

“Something get you?” He took my hand in his and rubbed the tucked tail of his shirt over my thumb. “You’re bleeding. That’s not good.”

“What got me?”

Will took the fabric scrap from my hand, then produced a small, filthy pin attached at what looked to be the shirt’s collar. He rubbed the muck from the pin and I could see that it was made of a cheap gold fashioned into a tiny lock with a key inside.

I took the fabric and examined the pin. “It’s a Lock and Key pin. It’s a club on campus. Every member gets one of them.”

I laid the piece of fabric on the end of the Dumpster, smoothing it out and shining up the pin. It glinted in the sunlight and my heart ached. Lock and Key was a club you had to be admitted into— only students with the best grades and community service records were allowed and it looked great on Ivy League applications. When I was at Mercy, Lock and Key was basically a country club for the already perfect, a tiny golden promise to keep the classes pure.

“What’s this?” Will yanked something then stood upright, offering it to me. My heart thudded.

“It’s a girl’s shoe.”

His face was sallow, his eyes glassy and rimmed with red. “You found a sock earlier.”

Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them fall. “Keep searching.”

We worked in frenzied silence, tearing open bags and tossing aside contents, and when there was nothing left to go through, we climbed over the side of the Dumpster one last time. I laid the shoe next to the remains of the skirt and blouse.

“Well, there was no body in there, so I suppose that’s good.”

“And we don’t even know who this skirt belonged to. It could be anyone. We should still report it to the police, though. Call Alex?”

“Sure,” I said, trying my best to convince myself. “But the whole thing could be nothing at all. Just common . . . uniform . . . burning.”

Will’s eyes flashed. I appreciated him not trying to rush me to the obvious.

“I mean, this shoe could be—” I stopped, biting off my words, keeping them back with my gritted teeth. Though the sole was melted completely on one side, it was untouched on the other. Untouched by fire, at least.

“Alyssa,” I whispered. I fingered the name drawn in fat letters and decorated with ballpoint ink stars and hearts. “Someone was trying to get rid of evidence.”

Chapter Three

I was congratulating myself for nearly getting through my first day at Mercy while my last class of the day was filing in. I went to turn around and found myself nose to cosmetically perfected nose with Fallon.

I cleared my throat and gripped my briefcase so tightly that I could feel my fingernails digging little half-moons into my palms.

Think, Sophie, THINK!

My mind sprung into action and I pasted on a grin, then relived—in rapid succession—every humiliation I had ever suffered in these halls, at the hands of girls in identical skirts.

I felt myself start to tremble.

You’re the grown-up.

I quickly whipped up a memory of staking a big baddie vampire, of defeating a couple of crazed psychopaths, of having the super-popular-girl luck of seeing a fallen angel
and
a Guardian naked.

I was pretty kick-ass.

“Are you mute or something?”

The snark in the comment—and Fallon moving toward her seat—thunked me back to the classroom and I blew out a sigh.

“No, sorry, ladies. I was just thinking about when I was a student here at Mercy.” A few girls leaned forward, a few raised their eyebrows, showing vague interest. Fallon whipped out a file and went to work on her right hand.

“My name is”—I paused, scanned—“Ms. Lawson, and I’ll be taking over for the time being while Mrs. Prusch is on medical leave.”

“You mean in the nuthouse.”

I was beginning to recognize Fallon’s voice with every part of my body. Just the sound of her spitting words poked at my stomach.

“Shut up, Fallon.” The mumbled quip came from a girl sitting in the front row. I smiled.

“Hi, again.”

Miranda looked up at me. Sitting in front of me at her desk, she somehow looked much smaller than she had in the cafeteria. She didn’t greet me, just went back to her book. I scanned my girls, then looked back at Miranda.

In real life, she was pretty. She had deep olive skin with thick, black brows and a head of fuzzy, dark curls that rolled over her shoulder. In high school world, however, she may as well have been wearing a kick-me sign: she was enviably thin (from a thirty-three-year-old’s point of view) with curves that the mean girls would call fat. Her curls were gorgeous and natural but neglected and unruly (similar to my own, which had earned me the quaint nickname Electric Head), and she bore the high school equivalent to leprosy: a decent case of acne that peppered her nose and chin.

“I had the pleasure of meeting Miranda at lunch today.” I looked up, thinking my connection to the obvious outcast would make her seem adult and cool. But the mention of her name—as if it were the punch line of some untold joke—caused a quiet ripple of laughter through the classroom. I felt myself bristle, then grabbed Mrs. Prusch’s role book and went through the hallowed high school ritual of butchering the students’ surnames and, in this decade of Ja Net (pronounced
Jenae
), Niola, Suri, and Jacita, their first names as well.

Didn’t anyone name her kid Jennifer anymore?

“Uh, Kayleigh?”

“Here.” A strawberry blond raised her hand as if it weighed eight hundred pounds and her one-word response would be the last she’d ever utter.

“Finleigh?”

Kayleigh’s neighbor to her right gave me a finger wave and a dazzling smile.

“And . . . so—I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to pronounce this.”

Big blue eyes rolled backward like a slot machine. “It’s pronounced
so-fee
,” the other girl sandwiching Kayleigh groaned. “Sofeigh.”

I wouldn’t have believed it if it weren’t there in ballpoint and white. “Interesting. I’ve just never seen it spelled that way.”

Sofeigh gave me another eye roll and then exchanged the are-you-kidding-me gaze with Fallon and the other ’eigh-ers. I felt sweat beading at the back of my neck.

You’re the adult, Sophie.

“Okay.” I snapped the roll book shut and slid up on the front desk à la every sexy actress playing a teacher in every film I’d ever seen. “We’re talking today about
The Scarlet Letter.
Who wants to explain to me a little about the book?”

A heavy silence washed over the room and every eye was turned on me, every pair blank.

Where is a swirling vortex of hell when you need it?

The bell rang and it was the single most sweet, welcome sound that I’d ever heard. The girls were up with laptops, iPads, and English books packed, iPhones whipped out and already in mid-text before the thirty-second bell ceased.

“Remember to read the Prufrock poem in its entirety,” I said to the backs of their heads. I could have raised my voice or rapped my hand on the desk to get their attention, but truthfully, watching the herd of teenage girl heads filing en masse out the door took my breath away. Their desertion of my classroom was a thing of pure beauty.

Until I noticed it wasn’t completely deserted.

“Everything okay, Miranda?”

Miranda was hunched at her desk, shoulders sloped, massive waves of frizzy curls tenting whatever it was she studied. She looked up, surprised. “Is class over?”

I nodded silently, and though I knew should do something teacher-ly and admonish her for reading during my lecture, I felt a certain kinship for her, could understand the overwhelming desire to dip into an artsy world when the real one echoed with monikers like Super Dork and Forever Virgin.

I smiled softly at her. “So, was it as bad as I thought it was?”

Miranda looked up from the paper she was doodling on with a shy smile. “No.”

I held her eye and a blush warmed her cheek; she broke my gaze and studied her notebook. “Well, kind of.”

I bit my lip. “And to think the only thing I was worried about subbing here at Mercy was . . . well, you know.” I watched Miranda’s eyes for any new flicker of recognition/witchcraft/avoidance. She just blinked at me, her face blank.

“You know, the kidnapping?” I paused, breathing deeply. “And the other stuff we were talking about earlier.”

Miranda nodded her head, solemnly. I tried a more nonchalant tactic, sliding up onto my desk, letting my legs dangle. “So, did you know her?”

Miranda went back to doodling, a blanket of hair hiding her expression. “Alyssa? Or Cathy?”

“Either,” I said, my heartbeat starting to quicken. “Or both.”

She continued moving her pencil across her paper, not bothering to look at me. “Alyssa was in this class. Fallon’s sitting in her seat right now.”

“Fallon took over Alyssa’s seat already?” I tried not to gape.

Miranda just shrugged, pushed a lock of hair between her lips and sucked on it. “I didn’t
know
know Cathy, but she’s kind of a legend here now.”

“A legend?”

“You know,” Miranda made air quotes. “‘The girl who was sacrificed.’”

“So that’s what kids here think? It was a sacrifice?”

Miranda raised her eyebrows in the universal sign of “duh” and went on. “Because of the pentagram. And the stuff carved into her.”

I swallowed sour saliva, hating the image the word “carved” brought up. Then I straightened. “How did you know there was something carved into her skin? I don’t remember seeing that in the paper.”

“Welcome to Generation Internet.”

“So . . . do they think it was witches, because of the carvings? Or Satan worshippers?” I tried to force a lightness into my tone—as light a conversation about a dead girl and human sacrifice could be, anyhow.

Miranda dropped her pencil and perched her chin in her hand. “Do you know that there has never been even one bona fide instance of Satanism or Satanic sacrifice in San Francisco?”

I did know that, unfortunately, and could have corrected Miranda—there’s never been a documented case of true Satanic sacrifice in all of the U.S. But I just played dumb.

“Wow. Well, what about the witch stuff? I heard some of the girls saying that maybe the—what was carved—was, like, a spell.”

Miranda didn’t answer and I rushed on. “When I went here, there were always a few girls messing with that stuff. You know, pentagrams and charms and stuff.” I stifled a manufactured oh-how-silly chuckle. “There was even a rumor about a coven on campus.”

Miranda carefully closed her notebook and laid her pencil on top. My throat went dry and a shot of adrenaline zinged through me.

“Yeah. You told me that already.”

Of course it couldn’t have been that easy.

The sun was beginning to dip and gray fingers of darkness stretched across my classroom when Will came across the hall and knocked on my open door frame.

“Ready to head out?”

I looked around my empty room as though some sort of clue or explanation would pop up, but there was nothing. I sighed and pulled my bag over my shoulder. “I feel like today was a total waste. I floundered in front of three classes and we’re no closer to finding Alyssa.”

Will pulled Alyssa’s burnt clothes—which were now carefully packed in Ziploc bags—from his satchel. “We found her clothes.”

“So now we know that she may or may not be dead. Great.” I held my thumb and forefinger a smidge apart. “I stand corrected. We’re this much closer to finding out some information about Alyssa.”

“What did Angel Boy have to say about it?”

“What? You mean Alex?”

Will shook his head slowly. “What’d he have to say about the uni?”

I paused, fairly certain I was wearing one of my most attractive deer-in-the-headlight looks.