Under a Spell (7 page)

“You did call him, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

Will cocked a brow.

“Not at all. I thought you’d be happy about that. You hate ‘Angel Boy’ and the police and all.”

Will crossed his arms and pinned me with a fatherly expression that oozed disappointment. “It’s evidence, love. You’re supposed to report all findings of any significance to the brass. And I never said I hated the angel. I just find it hard to like someone who tried to kill me.”

I wrinkled my brow. “
You
tried to kill Alex.”

“Did I?”

“And I’m not deliberately hiding evidence. For starters, I’m not sure how significant a burning Dumpster—”

“With the uniform of a missing student—”

“—is. And secondly, I’ve been rather busy here, investigating. There are a lot of students to interview, Will. Lots of crevices and rooms on this campus to check out.”

Will rolled his eyes.

“And also I forgot.”

I could see Will suppressing a groan so I rushed on.

“But it’s not like that’s going to make any difference. Like I said.” I pinched my fingers together again. “That much closer to finding Alyssa.”

“We’re a little bit more than that much”—Will imitated my gesture—“to finding her kidnapper.”

My eyebrows rose. “How so?”

Will sauntered down the aisle of desks and plopped himself down in one toward the back of the room, kicking up his professor shoes on the desk kitty-corner from him. “We know that the garbage goes out on Monday mornings.”

I flipped a desk around and sat it in. “We do?”

“Okay, I know that the garbage here goes out on Monday mornings. So we know that Alyssa’s clothes had to have been dumped within the last twenty-four hours.”

“And that means?”

Will blew out a sigh. “I thought you were the crime-fighting expert and I was just the attractive sidekick.”

I felt myself bristle and let out and audible growl.

“It means that whoever dumped Alyssa’s clothes more than likely has a connection to the school.”

“Of course—” I was about to summon up my best “duh” expression, but Will held up a silencing hand.

“I mean other than as a hunting ground.”

I felt a hot blush was over my cheeks. “Go on.”

“Why would your perp—”

“Unsub,” I corrected, feeling the stupid need to contribute something of merit.

“Why would your unsub”—Will eyed me as he said the word—“return to the scene of the crime just to light up his victim’s clothes? He could have done that anywhere.”

“Maybe he was trying to make some kind of statement?” I bit my lip, considering. “A burning uniform . . . maybe his statement is that high school is like the burning fires of hell?”

“You know, you could really use some therapy for all those non-repressed memories.”

My head was spinning—and throbbing—by the time I snapped Nigella’s door shut and trudged up the steps to my apartment.

“Same time tomorrow?” Will asked as he sunk his key into the lock.

I shook my head. “I need to run some errands tomorrow so I’ll take my own car. But I’ll see you.”

Will gave me one of those exceptionally manly head nods before disappearing into his apartment. I pulled my own keys from my shoulder bag and was about to unlock my door, but I stopped, cocking my head to listen.

Music was thumping through my front door—a weirdly cheery electronica beat. I would have chalked it up to one of Vlad’s super-vamp bands, but this particular song lacked the recorded-in-a-coffin timbre and any lyrics bemoaning an afterlife pox that included Sookie Stackhouse and the
Twilight
cast.

“Vlad?” I pushed my key into the lock and was surprised when Nina’s dark head popped up from behind my open laptop. She was stationed at the dining table, papers spread all around her, a spiral notebook thick with black scrawl in front of her. She grinned when she saw me.

“So, what do you think?” she yelled over the beat.

“About what?”

“This!” Nina stood up and did a series of funky club moves that probably looked great with low lighting and a severe buzz.

“What is that? And”—I gestured to her cira-1980s full-body snake motion—“what is that?”

She clicked the volume button off and we were dropped into blessed silence—even though the electronica beat still throbbed in my head. “What is all this?”

“Okay, remember how I said that I needed something to really make my mark?”

“Because I’m a substitute teacher, enriching young minds to the point of complete and utter disdain for me? Yeah, I remember that.”

“Well, this is it!” Nina flung out her arms in a measure of complete and utterly confusing joy.

“You’re teaching the snake to a new generation of club dancers?”

Nina’s sigh was so exasperated and so long I thought her chest would implode. “No, silly. Listen.” She clicked the beat on again, started her little jig again, and again, I was baffled.

“What is it?”

“It’s
UDA
,” she crowed. “
The Musical
!”

“No,” I said, my sheer terror pushing me backward. “Just . . . no.”

Nina frowned, slammed my computer shut, and slumped down into a chair, chin in hands. “It wasn’t exactly coming together like I wanted. Nothing rhymes with Underworld Detection Agency.”

“Neens, you don’t need a musical to make your mark on the world. You’ve made your mark on me. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Nina’s eyes were soft and she took my hand, shaking it sweetly. “Oh, honey, of course that counts for something. Just not something for posterity. What do you think about a live action show based on my life?”

I sat down next to her. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you go back to your novel?”

Nina had had a short stint as a vampire romance novelist. Her book was awful, contrived, and a bloody love note to herself, but on the plus side, it wasn’t set to music.

“No, Soph. That was good, but this is different. I want to help. I want to make people really
feel.”

I kept the empathetic smile on my face, thinking that the release of
UDA: The Musical
would make people feel something, all right. “How do you feel about interpretive dance?” I suggested.

Nina considered if for a second before smashing her hands against her open mouth. “Oh my God. Oh my God, I’m so awful! Here I am lamenting about myself and my contribution to the world when you’re back from your first day as a crime-fighting substitute teacher!”

Sophie Lawson: Crime-Fighting Substitute Teacher.
That’s a failed book title if I ever heard one.

“How was it?”

I kept that smile pasted on my face for as long as possible, certain the second I moved my mouth, everything would shatter into a torrent of stupid, self-centered tears.

And it did.

“Oh, Neens,” I said, unable to control the hot tears that washed over my cheeks. “It was awful!”

I fell forward, my forehead plunking against a ballad about the UDA lunchroom. I felt Nina’s cold hand on my shoulder, rubbing softly. “Oh, honey! I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think it was. Come on.” She snaked an arm under my chest and pushed me upright. “Tell me all about it.”

I huffed, one of those half-hiccup, half-breath kind of wails locking in my chest.

“Did the girls make fun of your outfit?”

I looked down at myself. “What’s wrong with this outfit?”

“How ’bout I get you some chocolate pinwheels?”

I groaned while Nina rattled away in the kitchen. “The girls are awful, Neens.”

“They’re teenage girls. Of course they’re awful. It’s their job.”

I cast a frown at Nina and pushed out my lower lip pitifully. “It hurts my feelings.”

Nina blew out a long, sisterly sigh, then threw her arm across my shoulders and hugged me close. “They’re just kids, Sophie. And each one of them acts mean and nasty as a defense mechanism. They don’t know who they are yet. Besides, what’s that saying? They’re probably more afraid of you than you are of them.”

“That’s a saying about wild animals.”

Nina shrugged. “It’s not like you don’t have a defense mechanism of your own.”

“What’s that?”

“Me.” She grinned and at that moment a tiny shard of sunlight crept through the window and bounced off her glossy black hair. With her impeccable makeup, incredible outfit and now this diffuse yellow halo, she looked like the quintessential popular girl.

“You’ll come to school and be my friend?”

“I was thinking I’d eat them, but whatever works.”

Chapter Four

I tried pulling my pillow over my head and then pulled ChaCha, my ever-trusty three-pound pup over that, but neither did anything to drown out the incessant pounding that was going on in my skull. ChaCha just rolled off me and went to work licking my eyebrows.

“Oh, ChaCha, stop. Mommy has a—” I was going to say headache, but once I sat up in the blackness, I realized the pounding wasn’t coming from my brain—it was coming from the living room.

The pounding started again and ChaCha jumped to attention, a stripe of hair zipping straight up along her back. She curled her little black lips back, exposing frightening—if miniscule—incisors, and growled.

A stripe of fear went down my own spine and I stopped breathing, listening.

Another three raps.

“Go get it, ChaCha,” I said, pointing. “Go defend your turf!”

ChaCha made a second fearsome growl followed by a pitiful yip as she disappeared under my sheets.

“Useless dog,” I grumbled.

I was halfway through the living room, on my way to our sword closet (it’s not
that
weird), when the pounding came again. It stopped and I stopped, my every living fiber taut with adrenaline.

“Nina?” I hissed.

There was no answer.

“Vlad?”

Again, silence.

Finally, the front door tore open in a Lucasfilm-style haze of whooshing wind and spitting fire.

“Holy crap!”

I stopped, dropped, and rolled. Somewhere in my subconscious I knew that was for earthquakes or bomb raids, but it didn’t seem to matter as chunks of my doorframe blistered and turned to charred dust on the ground. I was being choked by smoke and my eyes stung, but I worked to keep them open until I saw the figure walking through the flaming frame coolly, as if he didn’t feel the heat.

“Who are you?” I screamed. “What do you want?”

“Sophie?”

My heart was clanging like a fire bell and the soft voice saying my name only terrified me further. I knew that voice, I remembered that voice. I gulped, sour saliva dripping down my throat.

“O-o-Ophelia?” I asked, my lips burning from the heat. “Oh, God.”

Ophelia was a fallen angel. One whom, until apparently right this minute, had been dead, killed by yours truly, staked with a trident to a UDA corkboard. The fact that she was the baddest of the fallen angel brigade made her death warranted. The fact that she was my half sister made the whole thing incredibly complicated.

“Oh God, ohGod-ohGod-ohGod,” I mumbled to my hands.

“No, Sophie, it’s me!”

The darkened form came closer and I could clearly make out slim hips, a tiny waist, and thick braids. I squinted. “Kale?”

She did some sort of Samantha Stephens move and suddenly everything—the fire, my charred doorframe—was fine. I took the opportunity to roll out of the fetal position and thank my lucky stars that in my last few years of being surprised, attacked, and
other
, my bladder was starting to strengthen up quite nicely.

“What the hell are you doing here at”—I glanced at the suddenly non-melted clock next to the door—“three a.m. and what”—I flailed wildly at the door—“was that? Why the hell are you trying to burn my apartment down?”

Kale seemed to shrink into herself and her blue hair as a Corvette-red blush blanketed her cheeks. “I’m really sorry, Soph. But look—” She knocked on the doorframe. “No harm no foul. It was all magik. An illusion.”

“Great. Please tell that to my cardiologist because I’m about to drop dead. Why are you burning shit—illusion or otherwise—at this hour? And why my shit? I thought we were friends.”

Kale rushed toward me and took my hand in hers. “Oh, Sophie, of course we’re friends! This wasn’t for you.” It took a microsecond for the sweet, apologetic look in her eyes to change to one of fiery rage. “It was for Vlad.”

“Vlad’s not here,” I said, my teeth gritted, my breath coming out in spitting gasps. “He and Nina are probably at Poe’s.”

Vlad and Nina—and the rest of their vampire brethren—have no need for sleep and, really, abhor relaxation of any kind (another reason I’m A-okay not being one of the pointy-fanged undead). As the majority of the breathing world fell asleep during the wee hours, some shopkeepers saw their niche in the market and started opening up a select group of shops—bars, coffeehouses, etc.—specifically for their all-night clientele. Vlad and Nina had a special fondness for a little hole-in-the-artery place called Poe’s and spent at least a couple of nights there each week, brooding and drinking blood out of giant cappuccino bowls.

“So sorry about that. And you know, this.” Kale’s bottom lip started to wobble as I prayed for her to leave so I could drop back into my blissful dreams about sexy men and not murder. But I was a pushover. “Come in.”