Student Bodies (14 page)

“I'm not sure what to do about this,” I said.

Marcus shrugged. “We could report this to the school, but with Travis not even in the ground yet, how much do you want to bet the school isn't anywhere ready to deal with a bombshell of this magnitude? Damn it, Julie, this is bullying on an
epic
scale. There might only be two ringleaders, but every
Like
posted by each person who has seen the pictures of Willard means that in their own little way, those people are condoning it.”

I nodded and closed the computer. I draped my arms around Marcus and embraced him. “Tell me what it's like,” I said quietly. “Tell me so I can understand what Willard is feeling.”

Marcus' eyes darkened. “It's like a siege,” he said, exhaling heavily. “You go to school knowing that you stand out because everyone knows you're the target. You hear the whispers behind your back and you're constantly looking over your shoulder; when you open your locker, when you're changing after gym… when you're peeing in the urinal or sitting on the toilet. Adults don't remember what it was like to deal with the BS that goes on in the crowded hallways or behind the dumpster at lunchtime. They've forgotten how a bullied student was the worst-kept secret in the world because when they were our age, they saw it every single day and did nothing to stop it from happening. It was far easier to let someone else get slammed than to become a target themselves. Everyone at Crescent Ridge used to see me getting trashed all the time and you try to numb yourself from it all.

“And parents are partly to blame. Having forgotten what it's like to be fifteen, they seek out information on how to help their little darlings survive each day. There are talk shows and books and radio phone-in programs devoted to the subject. There are gazillions of websites and government programs that are supposed to help parents teach their children how to cope… But, Julie, I mean, how to
cope
? Coping means that you've accepted being a victim and besides, there is nothing those websites and bullying programs could have taught me because there is only one strategy that actually works and it has to do with moving away to another school and hoping that it doesn't start up again.”

This was the first time that Marcus had ever opened up to me about something so deeply personal. He'd given me a heartbreaking explanation of how bullying affected his life and I was so proud of him for trusting me enough to talk about it. It took a tremendous amount of courage for Marcus to share this terrible, dark secret with me. A secret that was laced with a sense of hopelessness because like it or not, he was right. Everybody at every school knows who the bullies are and no amount of intervention is going to stop it from happening any time soon.

And that's when I gently placed my hands on his cheeks and gazed into his eyes. “I love you, Marcus,” I whispered. “I honest-to-God love you with all my heart.”

He kissed me softly and then wrapped his arms around me. “I love you too, Julie,” he said quietly.

 

CHAPTER 15

 

We climbed into Mom's car shortly after six in the evening with me in the passenger seat and Marcus stuffed into the back alongside a panting Betty the dog. We'd shared the information we found on Mike and Travis's Facebook pages and it was all we could do to stop my mother from calling the school right then and there.

“How in the hell could the staff
not
know about this kind of harassment?” she snarled as the car bounced down the snowy streets.

“It's really complicated, Mom,” I answered. “I imagine there are rules about teachers who check out their students' Facebook pages.”

Betty sneezed from the back seat. It was followed quickly by Marcus cursing under his breath. “And how is this Willard Schubert involved in that boy's death? Clearly he couldn't have killed him, so what is his role?”

I shook my head and stared out onto busy Deerfoot Trail as Mom pressed the accelerator. Her car snapped into a higher gear as I sunk back into my seat. “That's the big question, isn't it? He's a piece of a much larger puzzle.”

Mom reached over and turned up the heat. Frost was forming on the windshield because she hadn't taken the time to warm up the car properly. “Your father might have something say about it… He'd better,” she said threateningly.

And so we drove on along the busy freeway. I gazed out at the weir and noticed the ice fog drifting above the splashing water as the Bow River flowed over the makeshift dam and I wondered for a short moment just how much energy was being produced by the thousands of gallons of water each minute that poured over the blunt spillway.

Then it hit me.
Energy
.
Black magic requires a hell of a lot of energy – malicious energy, possibly even a blood sacrifice. A practitioner would have had to possess a tremendous amount of power to enthral two people in as many days; to suppress their victim's survival instincts to the point where the target could be compelled to end his or her life. But why
those
two people? Why Mike Olsen and Travis Butler? Why not the Mayor or the weather lady on the evening news?

No, Mike and Travis had been selected for a reason and what better way to fuel a spell than to draw on someone else's ill-feeling? Willard Schubert must be someone who carried a boatload of it. After all, he'd been the target of a humiliation conspiracy since the first day of classes. Maybe this black mage was drawing on the malice that Willard held toward his tormentors.

Could Willard Schubert hate that much? Could he possibly be a fountain of malice that could provide a black mage with an energy source to fuel his vile plans?

And he was seeing a shrink to learn how to deal with his anger. Willard sure as hell had every reason to hate and I couldn't blame him one bit if that hate morphed into malice, but he would have had to make some kind of dark bargain with a practitioner to take down the pair of them – assuming he could actually find a magical bad guy. I'm a witch and even I don't yet know who all the good guys and bad guys are. If I didn't have a clue, Willard wouldn't either.

We drove on for another fifteen minutes and eventually the gates of the Prince of Peace Cemetery came into view, so Mom parked the car on 4th Street and we all climbed out. The moon was fat and full and the night sky was a blanket of twinkling stars. This was the first time I was going to meet with my father and mother at the same time. My Dad, as mentioned before, is a ghost. He lingers on in the mortal realm; bound to the confines of the Prince of Peace Cemetery until my mother joins him in the afterlife. He's the one who gave me my Shadowcull's band – of course we had to dig it out of his empty grave first. He was also the one who started telling me the truth of what my life was to become; that I was to follow in his footsteps as a Shadowcull.

Since the battle with the Witchfinder General, I'd been visiting the cemetery under the cover of darkness to meet with him; to reconnect with the one missing piece of the puzzle known as Julie Richardson. He'd been dead since I was four and we had ten years-worth of catching up to do.

But not on this night.

The wind kicked up curls of snow that twisted between the hundreds of headstones stretching out before us in tidy rows. All around me the spirits of the departed who still clung to the mortal world appeared and disappeared; their vaporous forms keeping vigil on their final resting places. Marcus slipped his gloved hand into mine as the snow crunched loudly beneath our feet. Betty took the lead, followed closely behind by Mom. She was dressed in her Hudson's Bay coat; the fur-trimmed hood covered her head to protect her face from the freezing wind.

Moments later, I felt my father's presence. Each spirit carries with them the spiritual imprint of the person they were in life. It's why ghosts manifest looking exactly like the person they once were right down to the clothes they wore at the moment of death. This was the first time Marcus had come back to the cemetery – the last time we were here, we came under attack from a monster comprised of body parts from the graves. He'd seen me don my Shadowcull's band for the first time and his mind was blown by the fact that for a short while, I actually managed to defy gravity using a spell called the
volatilis.
But there wouldn't be any floating witches on this night. We came to the cemetery for answers and it was high time that my father provided them.

We spotted my father's vaporous form sitting atop his headstone, dressed in the last thing he'd worn when he was alive: a Spider-Man T-shirt, shorts and socks with sandals. As we approached, his visage flickered; then he turned to face us and threw us a wave.

“Uh-oh,” he said with a smirk on his face. “This looks like trouble. It's a damned cold night to be wandering around a cemetery. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Being dead is boring as hell, but at least I don't feel the cold.”

Marcus and I stopped about twenty feet from his grave as Mom walked through the snow until she stood in front of him. She lowered her hood and then held out her hands, palms-up.

“Hello, Stephen,” she said with a hint of sadness in her voice. My father's spirit drifted off the headstone and hovered before her. He held his ghostly hands over my mother's open palms and then a warm golden glow appeared between them.

“What are they doing, Julie?” Marcus whispered.

“It's an embrace,” I whispered back. “This is what undying love looks like, Marcus, and it's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen in my life.”

The supernatural glow intensified, bathing both their forms in shimmering golden light. My eyes filled with tears as I watched my parents bridge the gap between the world of the living and the great beyond. My mother's magical signature hummed as the pair rekindled their bond, proving that not even death itself could separate them.

“We need your help,” she said quietly as her hands dropped to her sides. “Something terrible has happened.”

Dad drifted back to his headstone and said, “I know. They're preparing a grave for a kid's funeral tomorrow. I expect it's why you're here.”

Mom nodded. “Soul Worms. The boy that will be buried here tomorrow was infected with them and we're convinced there's a black mage on the loose. We need to know if it's someone you once knew.”

My father's visage disappeared and then reappeared only a few feet in front of me. “Hiya, baby girl… and a boyfriend, now? Jeez, I'd get all choked up here, but you know, I'm dead and all.”

Marcus snorted. “Creepiest family ever.”

“Tell me about it,” Dad groaned. “A talking dog, a pair of witches and a ghost. There's a Tim Burton movie in all of this, I swear.”

Betty chimed in. “So, you know about the boy who was killed?”

Dad nodded. “Yeah, and a big cluster of residual energy floating around the city to boot. This bears all the earmarks of someone I once knew – Adriel. Nasty-ass black mage, she was. A hewer of the living spirit that dwells in children, she fed on the death energy from each of her kills, nourishing her spirit and keeping her alive well past her best-before date. I wasn't much older than Julie when they sent me out to take her down and I barely survived our encounter. She was too powerful for me and the best I could do was to lay a mark on her spirit so that I could always tell when she was coming – sort of the Shadowcull equivalent of the Mark of Cain. Unfortunately my spell disappeared from Adriel's spirit the moment I kicked the bucket.”

“Adriel,” Betty rumbled. “I know that name and I've not heard it in a long, long time. She coveted that which she could never obtain no matter how many children she'd killed. She wanted to be an immortal.”

I shuddered at my father's revelation. A black mage who killed children? Someone who taps their victim's living energy at the moment of death so they can keep on living? The implications were massive; no wonder my father couldn't defeat this Adriel in a duel to the death, she'd been killing for hundreds of years and that meant hundreds of years to perfect her craft.

“She'll have an adherent, a second that she's put in place to scope out the lay of the land,” my father said ominously. “She'll also have blood coven witches who've sworn a blood oath of allegiance to her. Each one will possess enough skill to lay a death curse that will stop your heart where you stand.”

“I think you're right, Dad,” I said as my heart sank a little. “Last night I went to question the boy who survived and a police car was parked in front of his house. I think the cop was a practitioner. There was malice dripping out of that cop car.”

Dad appeared to sigh heavily and he gave my mother a hopeless look. “Donna, you know what this means.”

My mother glanced at me over her shoulder and from the grim look on her face I understood what my father was saying. A skilled black mage is one thing, but a blood coven was another thing entirely. I'd have my hands full just trying to survive a showdown with Adriel and I didn't stand a ghost of a chance against a blood coven of witches.

Marcus coughed. “Blood covens are bad, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it's a nightmare scenario. Witches who've bound their fate to that of their Maven by spilling their own blood and taking the blood vow. They'll sacrifice their immortal souls to protect her. It's more than a single Shadowcull can handle.”

“And that means?” he asked.

Mom spun around in the snow to face me. Her eyes narrowed and she said, “It means that I must contact my coven and plea for their help. It means that we're going to have to begin preparations
immediately
.”

“Preparations for what?” asked Marcus.

I turned to face him and took his hands in mine. “Everyone is in danger. I can see it now as clear as day. Adriel is here for one reason, to kill as many students as she possibly can. If Betty is right, she means to make a bid for her own immortality. Tomorrow night is the Christmas dance and that's where she's going to make her move – Mike Olsen and Travis Butler were the equivalent of Adriel dipping her toe in the water to check the temperature. She wanted to see who might try to stop her and you can be certain she knows there's a Shadowcull in this city because she probably caught a whiff of my magic when we saved Mike from getting splattered by the C-Train.”