Witch Eyes (17 page)

“Now’s not the time to play loyal lapdog,” a younger, deeper voice was saying.

“You don’t have any idea what Catherine can do when she’s pissed off. She’s like Dark Phoenix and Emma Frost combined,” said the other sulkier, wavering voice.

“If it wasn’t for the kid, that thing would be roaming around the town right now, stirring it all up again. The last thing Jason needs is to come back and see Catherine just itching for a fight.”

“Jason’s too scared of her, he won’t do anything.” The voice was whining now. I walked back toward the other room, seeing Drew pacing the way I knew he would be, and Gregory sitting in a computer chair, his head in his hands.

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I walked into the room and stared at both of them.

“Planning committee for your execution,” Drew announced without missing a beat. “How about we skip the catering a
nd just g
et everyone Happy Meals?”

Twenty-Five

“Drew, what are you doing here?” Riley pushed past me, her neck craned backwards to look at him. “And what do you mean, execution?”

Gregory looked like he was about to jump out of his chair. Or piss his pants. Hopefully, not both at the same time.

Drew’s blasé attitude didn’t last long. He actually looked mollified for a second.

“You just stay away from me.” Gregory looked more nervous than I’d ever seen him before. Gone was the arrogant comic book owner. Something had happened.

“He’s been sucking off your girlfriend’s son, Greg. I’d think you’d be happy to see him.” Drew’s discomfort didn’t last for long. His arrogance put Trey to shame.

I looked at him in shock. “What the hell did I do to you?”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Gregory muttered, but no one was listening.

“Hey, you’re the one that’s working for the lawyer,” Drew said with disdain. “Not my fault you’ve got shitty taste in guys.”

“I’m not working for Lucien Fallon. He’s my uncle’s lawyer.”

The look he gave me was patronizing, and just like that, I realized,
He knows who I am.
“You should talk to my buddy Greg. He’s got you all twisted up, focusing on the wrong bad guy. Or girl, I should say.”

Riley stomped her foot on the ground. “I’m talking to you, Drew. What are you doing here? I thought you said it wasn’t safe for you to be in town.”

I turned to her. “Riley, take him somewhere and hash this out. I need to talk to Gregory.”

Gregory’s eyes went wider, and he tried shuffling his chair backwards. Like distance was really going to make a difference. All it did was make him look like some cracked-out chicken kicking his legs out.

“I told you to stay out of this, Riley,” Drew growled. Lucky for me, he took the hint and stalked out of the room. Even luckier, Riley started chasing
him
around like a dog looking for a bone. I could hear her voice getting louder and sharper the further they got, until the door chimed, signaling they’d gone outside.

But there was still tension in the room, and a shop owner who still looked terrified. Why? I hadn’t really done anything
that
bad to him. Something had to have happened since yesterday. Something had made him terrified of me. Drew?

“If you start casting spells on me again, Catherine’s going to be really mad,” Gregory started saying, but I held up my hand and he cut off.

“Listen,” I said gently, “I need information. And everyone in town knows that you’re the go-to guy if anything is happening here, right?”

The calming tone must have worked, because some of the stiffness left his posture. “R-right. I mean, I don’t like to toot my own horn, y’know. But it’s true.”

“That’s what I’ve been hearing all over town,” I assured him. “But we don’t have time for that. I need to know everything you’ve got on Lucien Fa
llon.”

¤ ¤ ¤

Half an hour later, Gregory came sauntering back into the room. Riley and Drew had never come back, and I’d spent my time paging through some of the more esoteric grimoires on the shelf.

“One of the city’s most interesting anomalies,” Gregory announced, a stack of computer papers in his hands. “There isn’t a lot out there,” he warned. “Just a lot of speculation.”

“But there’s something,” I pressed. “So he’s definitely off somehow.”

“
Well, I’m guessing you don’t care about how many secretaries he goes through?” I shook my head. “
It’s strange, though. Hiring so many local girls. You wouldn’t think the turnover would be as high as it is.”

“So he’s got a thing for young girls. Gross, but that doesn’t help me.”

Gregory huffed, plucking a sheet from the stack and dropping the rest into the garbage can. “That’s fine,” he mumbled. “Only spent three weeks cross-referencing hair color to height.”

“Greg, he’s supposed to be in his forties or fifties,” I announced impatiently. “But he looks like he could be attending his ten-year high school reunion. There has to be something there, right?”

“Here, look.” He dropped the sheet in front of me, a picture of Lucien that could have been taken yesterday. “Key Festival, circa 2006.” Another sheet got dropped, this one in black and white. “Key Festival circa 1906.” And finally one more, the quality on this one a lot worse. “And a painting from 1853. Right around the time Belle Dam was founded.”

I lined the three pages next to each other. The two photographs were taken from almost the same angle, facing the town square. In one it was a haphazard mob, but my father and Lucien were clearly noticeable on the courthouse steps. In the second, a group was posed together. Off to one side, in a top hat like the one in my dream, was
Lucien.

I squinted at the painting, which had apparently been scanned from a picture of the painting, then printed up, ruining most of the quality. There was a large distortion in the middle, splitting the group in two. On one side were
a group of men, but on the other side I immediately recognized Lucien and a woman in white. “Wait a second. Is that … ?”

Gregory nodded. “Grace Lansing. The Widow herself. They just folded the original in half, hoping no one would ever notice those two were missing. The founding fathers of Belle Dam, gathering together for the first time.”

Lucien hadn’t changed a bit in one hundred and fifty years. Even the hair styles in all three were nearly the same. Short and slicked back. “So why doesn’t anyone notice? If this guy’s been walking around Belle Dam for over a hundred years and never gets any older, then someone had to catch on.”

“Why would they?” Gregory pulled the pictures back into his stack. “In case you haven’t noticed, people in Belle Dam try to remain as ignorant of the truth as possible. Why do you think no one’s ever tried burning a Lansing at the stake?”

He rolled his eyes and continued. “As far as they were concerned, Lucien Fallon, or Lucas Fallon as he was in the ’50s, worked in town for a decade or two and then supposedly left for New York. When he came back pretending to be his own son, no one batted an eyelash. Everyone thinks his family’s been working for the Thorpes for generations. But this time around, Lucien didn’t disappear after showing up.”

“So how’s he do it? Some kind of spell?” My head was already buzzing with ideas. Magic was possible, but how would he have sustained the effect? Hypnotizing the entire town permanently would take a lot of juice. An impractical amount of juice.

Then I remembered the shadow eye—both the visions I’d seen and that dark blanket of energy curled atop the town like a tourniquet. Was that what it really was? Some giant spell over the town? Stretched so tight over everything that I couldn’t see it for what it was?

“Probably.” Gregory shrugged. “Or there’s something else going on. Maybe he’s cursed, forced to live out his life over hundreds of years trying to right the wrongs done to him in search of atonement. Or he could be of a race of immortal men and women who must fight to the death.”

He didn’t have any idea how ridiculous he was sounding. “What about the downtime? Any idea what Lucien’s doing when he’s not in Belle Dam?” I asked, but Gregory immediately shook his head. “He’s got to be doing something, right?”

“Sleeping? That’s what I’d do, if I could live forever. Take a nap for a few of the boring years. Like the seventies, or the boy band era, y’know?”

Think, Braden. Figure out what he is, and maybe that’ll help figure out how he did it.

I’d seen him in daylight, so he wasn’t some sort of vampire. Courted fey were immortal, but I’d spoken to Lucien, and
he was too … sane to be one of them. Plus they preferred chaos to order, and Lucien was all about his timetables.

Demons didn’t have the power to just … hang out. They could be summoned, but they were too strong to stay here. Gravity dragged them back to where they came from. Anything else was too powerful to even care about this dimension.

“Besides, he’s not the most interesting part of that legend,” Gregory went on. “You know the stories about Grace, right?”

“More than you think,” I muttered.

“Highly doubt that,” he sniffed. “She’s our very own Dumbledore. Until she vanished, never to be seen again.”

“I know all this. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Well, did you know that Grace was the one that picked this spot?” He waited pointedly while I didn’t say anything. “Grace wanted the town built here, and so it was. She picked the location, and while the public records don’t give her the proper credit, they do frequently mention her sketching ability.”

“So she could draw?”

Gregory smiled. “I wouldn’t imagine you could understand. She was an artist. Some may say an architect. It’s notable that right from the start, Belle Dam was organized in a way most other towns were not.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that the popular theory among people in the know,” Gregory puffed out his chest, “is that Grace designed the town. The layout, the mix of residential and commercial areas, the local parks. Belle Dam’s been the same size it’s always been.”

Grace designed the town. My mind flashed back to the image of Belle Dam from above, ebbing and weaving with energy. “How is it no one knows about this?”

“There’s a … separate archive for sensitive information,” he said slowly. “Certain information would only stir up trouble in town.”

“So you’re censoring the info that’s out there,” I reasoned out. “Trying to keep the Lansings happy?”

“It’s not like that.”

I crossed my arms in front of me. “Really? Because everyone else in town’s picked a side. Why not you, too? But you
are
going to give me everything you have.”

His face was turning a deeper red. “I don’t work for you. Besides, this is why things need to be carefully monitored. Or something like Carmen would happen again.”

“Who’s Carmen?” The name was familiar, but there was so much I’d picked up since coming to Belle Dam, it was hard to remember where I’d heard it.

“She worked for me, too. I mean, Catherine employed her,” he said, almost dismissively. “Brought her to town and all, but she wasn’t just here to do witch stuff. She worked here in the shop.”

Of course. The two witches who’d come to Belle Dam in hopes of a freelancing job or something. One had gone to Jason, the other to Catherine. And now both were dead.

“What happened to them?”

Gregory shook his head. “No one’s really sure. Drew was too young then, and Catherine wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me what happened. But it must have been pretty bad. She was in some kind of fury. Said that the town had gone nuclear the night before. Whatever that meant.”

I wondered. Witches could sense magic, like a tingling on the skin. Nowhere near as well as I could, but they could feel a tremor when powerful spells were being worked. For Catherine to say it was “nuclear” meant it was some serious magic. “She came here the other day, right? After the spell I cast?”

Gregory nodded. “She was concerned.” I saw the connection finally trigger, and his eyes lit up. “I thought summoning things was powerful stuff. So you’re thinking she should have been more concerned?”

I shook my head. “No. I think she was just concerned enough.” Which was really making me worry. If what I’d done had amounted to a grenade explosion, then what happened to Carmen and the other one would have been a nuclear bomb. How would second-rate witches have raised that kind of power? And if they hadn’t, then who had?

“Can—can I interview you for the site?” Gregory asked with hesitation. Like I would really waste the time to blast him across the room for it or something.

“Trust me, if things don’t get better, you’re not going to want to.” And it was true. If the truth got out, then half the people in town were going to wash their hands of me. Trey, Jade, and Gregory for starters.

“Do you have any idea what kind of megapocalypse we’d have if things really heated up?”

“Mega … ” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“Belle Dam history is full of genocide. They’ve just got really good press.” Gregory started typing away on the laptop. A few minutes later, he swiveled it around to face me. “The last big struggle was in the twenties. The Armstrongs were siding with August Thorpe at the time. Jason’s grandfather.” On the screen was an image of a newspaper clipping.
Floods Swallow Town.

There was a picture in the yellowed clip, an image of the Belle Dam docks nearly submerged. I said the only thing I could in that situation. “Oh.”

So if it got bad, then we were talking major damage. Not just to me, but to everyone in town. Until then, I needed Gregory. Him and Riley both. “Listen, I need you to start pulling out anything even marginally related to the feud. Anything that you’ve taken off that website.”

“But what about Catherine?” He seemed shocked. The idea of going against her was nearly blasphemy.

“Greg? If you help me?” I struggled for some description he would understand. “You’d be like Jimmy Olson jumping in to save Superman before the world ends. You’d be doing everyone in town a favor. They’d owe you.” My geek-fu was sadly lacking. It was the best I could come up with.

I could see the idea taking root in his head. Slowly, the gears started turning, and he got behind the idea. “So I’d be a hero.”

“And then some,” I agreed. “There’s a really good chance something bad is going to happen in the next day or two. Just be careful.”

The idea of being a hero was new to Greg. He was staring off into the distance, the lines of his forehead thick as he lost himself in thought. I took the opportunity to start heading out, taking the pictures with me.

When I got outside, Riley wasn’t there. I’d figured she and Drew would have stuck close, waiting for me, but no.
Leave me alone to figure out my next move. Perfect
.

I started heading for the library, not even sure if it was open on Sundays. I’d barely started to cross the street before my cell phone rang. I left it in my pocket until I crossed, then finally slid it out.