Summoning the Night (12 page)

My phone chimed again. Lon was probably having a panic attack at this point, wondering why I wasn't answering. I thought of the glass talon he'd bought to save me in the incident last month, and the $15,000 he'd shelled out for it. Fifteen thousand dollars that now sat in Jupe's new savings account. But even if I could somehow negotiate a cash price for Hajo's services, I couldn't afford them, and I couldn't ask Lon to pay up again. He'd helped me when I needed it, and now it was time for me to return the favor. It killed me; went against everything I knew, deep within, was right. But I obviously wasn't about to consider Hajo's original barter, and I didn't have much more to offer.

“I only have half an ounce,” I said.

“Can you brew up more by tomorrow?”

I shook my head.

“No deal,” he said.

I gritted my teeth in frustration. “What about half an ounce, and I'll bind an Earthbound for you.”

His eyes widened in surprise. He studied my face, thinking. “I'll take the half ounce and three bindings. Night or day, I call and you come. You keep your mouth shut and don't ask questions.”

I hesitated. Hajo's quiet threat of being able to track me down added to the pressure.

“Two,” I said. “And no weird shit—I'm not binding someone for you to molest, rape, torture, or kill.”

He laughed brightly, with far more casual happiness than I was feeling at that moment. It was the laughter of someone who'd just won and knew it. “I'm not a monster, Cady. Just an entrepreneur. I'll gladly agree to your terms. Deal?”

His hand extended. I lowered my caduceus, but I didn't
shake. “You'd better track down what I need, or the deal is off.”

“I'll find the dead body for you. And in the meantime,” he added, “we'll get to spend some quality time getting to know each other.”

My phone rang. “Meet me at the Singing Bean in the Village tomorrow at two.”

“No can do,” he said. “I've got another job. Day after tomorrow is the earliest I can do it.”

I started to argue, but he cut me off.

“I really can't,” he said firmly. “Day after tomorrow. Same time and place. And just to put you at ease, I'll even bring Bob along,” he suggested, zipping his racing jacket back up to his throat. “Besides, I'll need a test subject for your vassal potion, just to verify the quality.”

Fine by me. The rat fink deserved it for selling me out.

“I'm so sorry,” Bob called out behind me as he ran to catch up outside Hajo's building. “You've got to believe me.”

Lights from a city bus danced across the sidewalk as it passed. I turned the corner and headed in the direction of my parked car. A man had already yelled at us from a second-story apartment window to shut up. Last thing I needed was for someone to call the cops, so I increased my stride.

I was furious. At Bob, at Hajo, and at myself for caving in to Hajo's bartering. For feeling terrified that he could track me one day. My parents were dead, but I was still the same scared girl I was when they were alive, hiding in shadows. You'd think, at the very least, that their deaths would release me from the lie I'd been living on their behalf for the past seven years. That I could relax and be normal. That an idle threat from a junkie wouldn't rattle me.

But it did. Because I was still living under an alias. Still on some FBI list or another.

Still afraid.

“Please listen.” Bob's hand gripped my shoulder. I pushed it off and spun to face him.

He launched into a rapid explanation. “Hajo asked about the vassal when I called him earlier to set up the meeting. He'd heard stories about you. I tried to tell him that I didn't know anything, but he hung up on me. So I called him back. I told him that I remembered you mentioning it, but I didn't know what it was. I still don't.” He wiped his hand on the front of his blue Hawaiian shirt and looked at me with pleading eyes. “I swear, Cady. You've got to believe me. Please!”

“But you told him you've slept with me?” I said, my voice a higher pitch than I intended.

“What?” His hand stilled in the middle of running it over his slicked-back hair. His mouth opened. He was genuinely taken aback. “Did he say that? I never said that. Never! He's lying, and—”

“All right, all right,” I grumbled, waving him away. I don't know why I even cared. It wasn't important.

“I wouldn't talk trash about you—I mean, we're friends . . . aren't we?”

“I thought so,” I snapped. But when he flinched in response and his face fell, guilt wormed its way into my chest. “We are,” I amended after a pause. “Friends, that is. So don't sell me out to someone like Hajo again.”

“Never. Give me a lie detector test. I'll do anything.”

I stopped in front of his car, suddenly bone-weary.

Bob pulled his car keys out then paused in front of me. My gaze rose from the hula-girl print of his shirt until I met
his eyes. They were tight with grief or regret. Maybe both. “I'm
so
sorry, Cady.”

He wasn't the only one. I shouldn't have agreed to give Hajo the potion. God only knew what despicable things he'd end up doing with it.

I wasn't the only one upset about the barter with Hajo. Lon was livid, more at Hajo—and Bob—than at me, he said, when I called him on my way back to my place with a report of what had transpired. He didn't say much, but he never does on the phone. I could hear the anger in the loaded combination of grunts and poignant silences. And it was still bugging him the next day when I drove to La Sirena to meet up with him for some reconnaissance.

Bishop's former house address was in Dare's box of paperwork, so we decided to check it out. Maybe we'd see something useful, some clue that pointed to where he would've corralled seven teens in the weeks leading up to All Saints' Day. Dare said that he and Lon's father found no indication that they were kept inside the house when they searched it thirty years before, but at least we'd have a point of reference from which to start.

“Do you have Hajo's phone number?” Lon asked as he made a turn into a small neighborhood on the east side of La Sirena, a few miles inland from the coast. Traffic hummed in the distance on the main highway leading to Morella—the one I drove back and forth to work.

“Bob has it.”

“What if he doesn't show tomorrow? We have to send Bob to track him down?”

I pressed the button to lower the passenger window so I could see the houses we were passing. “I suppose. But he'll show. He wants the damn vassal medicinal.”

Two slits of green slanted in my direction. “I still can't believe you promised him that.”

“Me either, but my options were limited.” No way was I telling him about Hajo coming on to me. I squelched that thought before Lon had time to figure out what was on my mind. “He's not country-club material, Lon. He's a junkie. You wanted a dowser, I got you a dowser. If you want someone more respectable, Bob says you'll have to go out of state.”

“‘Bob says.'” His hand hung loosely over the top of the steering wheel as he slouched in his seat and stared straight ahead like he was daring the road to piss him off. “I must remember to thank Bob and his big mouth.”

“He's excited to meet you, too.”

No answer. A muscle in his jaw flexed. The long hollows under his cheekbones deepened.

Two blocks of crowded, boxy homes sailed by my window before he spoke again. “I wish you'd driven to La Sirena last night after all that.”

I blinked several times, trying to decipher what he meant, which was often more than what he said. “I was tired. And mad at myself. I didn't need you mad at me too.”

“I wasn't mad. Not at you. I was worried.”

“No reason to be. I could've shocked him if I had to. But I didn't.”

Another grunt. Another block driven. “I don't like sleeping alone anymore.”

I glanced at him, but his concentration was on the road. Stoic. “Me either,” I admitted.

The tight angle of his shoulders loosened. Just slightly.

As he rounded a corner onto Dolores Street, where Bishop used to live, I said, “Look, I'm over being mad at Bob, but if you want to challenge Hajo to a duel when we're finished with him tomorrow, I'm totally cool with that.”

That got me a light grunt. Then another askance look. Then the tiniest twitch of mustache at the corner of his mouth. Finally. I grinned back.

Bishop's one-bedroom house clung to a steep hill in the middle of the block. The siding looked brand-new, and the inclined driveway was darker than the street, freshly resurfaced. Public records said it had been empty for nearly twenty years before it was resold several times, bank-owned, then purchased earlier this year by one Simon Cleeton.

We parked on the street and glanced around before exiting the car.

“These old houses are being bought and fixed up by people who work in Morella and commute,” Lon noted. “Easy access to the highway on-ramp, cheaper property taxes than living in the city, low crime rates.”

“Except for that pesky child snatcher.”

“Except for that.”

Lon exited and set the car alarm. I sniffed the air. Burning leaves somewhere nearby. I always liked that smell. Sort of comforting and pleasant. As I walked around the SUV, I eyed the houses on either side of Bishop's place, then the ones across the street. Cute, well-kept. We'd looked up the property owners of those, too. Everyone who'd lived here thirty years ago had long since sold their homes. No one left with memories of their neighbor at 658 Dolores Street. A pity.

“Nothing unusual,” Lon noted as he stuffed his hands in the pockets of a tailored brown jacket.

“No deserted playgrounds or creepy ravines,” I agreed. The house itself was small and square. “One bedroom. He never married or had kids, huh?”

“Nope.”

We climbed stone steps that cut up the hill to the front door. Lon peeked around the side, over a shoulder-high wooden fence, which still had lumber tags stapled to several boards. “Tiny backyard. Barely worth owning a lawn mower,” Lon said.

I stood on tiptoe and peered over the top of the fence. “No ominous old shed back there. No John Wayne Gacy crawl space under the house.”

Lon pivoted and surveyed the block. I did the same.

“What's that at the end of the street behind the fence? Looks like a parking lot.”

Lon squinted. “If I didn't know better, I'd say that's the back of La Sirena Junior High.”

“Really?” I must've been turned around. I didn't know La Sirena all that well, but I'd dropped off Jupe at school on occasion. And there was, of course, the time when Jupe had been held hostage by a rival magician, Riley Cooper. But I wasn't paying much attention to the school's location that night.

“We normally come from the other side,” Lon said. “This whole area's changed. I didn't realize this street butted up to Madison.”

“Was the junior high here thirty years ago?”

“Yep. The same one Cindy Brolin attended.”

“You mean to tell me that Bishop lived a block away?”

“It looks that way. Come on.”

We walked back down to the sidewalk and headed in
the direction of the parking lot, crossing over Madison, and stopped at the chain-link fence. It was Jupe's school, all right. And the bit we could spy from Bishop's old house was faculty parking. The roots of a knotted cypress had buckled the sidewalk here. An old cement bench sat beneath the tree, its back touching the fence. The parking lot exit was only a few feet away.

“Jesus, he probably scouted out his victims from here,” Lon said.

The hair on my arms rose at the thought. But the new missing kids didn't go here. They attended the private school across town. I was reminding Lon of this when a woman with a pale blue halo exited a door at the back of the school. An alarm beeped. She was heading toward a car parked nearby, on the other side of the fence.

“Ms. Forsythe,” Lon said in greeting.

She glanced up, confused, then smiled and stepped up to the fence, speaking through it. “Mr. Butler. I was just headed out to lunch. There's nothing wrong, is there?”

“No, we were just in the neighborhood and thought we'd walk by the school.” He put his hand on my lower back. “This is my girlfriend, Arcadia,” he said, then turned to me. “This is Grace Forsythe, one of Jupe's teachers.”

She was Earthbound, both a couple inches taller and decades older than me. She wore no makeup and was dressed in a flowing poncho-style shirt over polyester pants. Her hair was in a long, dark bob with straight bangs that covered her eyebrows. A little frumpy, a little flower-power. Exactly as I'd pictured her. Not only was she Jupe's science teacher but also his homeroom teacher
and
his favorite. He talked about her all the time.

I held my hand up and waved once. “Nice to meet you.”