Under a Spell (20 page)

I scanned one after the other, a vague recollection of headlines blaring news about a Black Friday movement, the parks in peril. “There’s nothing here.”

I began clicking through page after page of the paper, getting further and further away from blaring headlines and moving closer to the not-as-noteworthy news.

“Here!” I said, strangely triumphant. “The police blotter.”

“‘Sixteen-year-old high school student Gretchen Von Dow was reported missing by parents Lola and Howard Von Dow after failing to return home from school Thursday afternoon. Police are investigating
.
’”

My stomach turned in on itself. “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I yanked the article down the screen and maniacally scanned for something else, something with more meat on Gretchen and her disappearance. “There isn’t even a photo. Or a ‘she went missing from here.’ Didn’t anyone care?”

I could hear the crack in my voice, could feel the hot sting of tears behind my eyes. “Didn’t anyone look for her?”

Will’s voice was soft. “I’m sure someone looked for her, love.”

“But—but—” I flopped the cover back on my iPad. “No one did anything. And I—I didn’t even know her. I didn’t even know she went missing. None of us did.”

“It’s not your fault, love,” Will was saying, his voice soothing. “You were just a kid.”

“And I was totally wrapped up in my own stupid issues. I was giving myself home perms and crying over the Backstreet Boys while my classmate was snatched. Probably hidden away somewhere. Tortured. Words carved into her flesh.” The image of Cathy’s ravaged body flashed in front of my eyes and I heaved.

“You need to relax. You couldn’t have done anything even then. You thought she was a foreign exchange student.”

I suddenly stopped crying and used the back of my hand to swipe at my wet cheeks. “Yeah. I did.” I pinched my bottom lip. “Why did I think that?”

“What do you mean?”

I slumped back against the locker. “Well, why would I just assume—I mean, we had foreign exchange students, but Gretchen—” I squinted, remembering. “She didn’t look all that foreign.”

“Maybe she told you she was from a different county. I used to tell birds I was Australian. Upped the mystique. Every girl wants to bed a bloke from Oz.”

“No.” I shook my head, using my fingernail to trace a line of grout. “I was social napalm. No one told me anything. At least not directly. And you’re disgusting.” I sighed. “Maybe it was just a rumor.”

“Who would start a rumor that a girl who had gone missing was actually just a foreign exchange student on her way back to the mother country?”

I bit my lip. “The person who made her disappear.”

At that moment, the bell rang. I pushed myself up from the linoleum as students flooded out of their classrooms, the bell soon drowned out by the flurry of conversation and the general din of movement.

“A bunch of bodies,” I heard someone say.

“Bones, like, thousands of them,” someone else whispered.

“Hey, Ms. Lawson!”

I looked up from the sea of navy blue to see Miranda, arm raised, a wide grin on her face. I took one step closer to her and then she was gone, girls closing over the small hole she made in the crowd.

“Miranda?”

“I think she needed to sit for a spell.” Fallon’s lips were right at my ear, her voice serpentine, like a black snake winding its way into my brain.

Just as I was about to respond Fallon was washed down the hall, too, the only remainder of her a high-pitched giggle mingled with Finleigh and Kayleigh’s.

“Miranda!” I yelled, pushing my way through the crowd. “Miranda!”

Miranda was on her butt on the ground—just as I had been—and probably with the same dumbfounded expression. Her books were strewn around her and I crouched down hurriedly, gathering her things, feeling every bit like I was stepping back into my own high school life.

Miranda pushed herself up, her cheeks blazing red. “Thanks, Ms. Lawson,” she said, taking the books I held out to her.

I smiled. “You can call me Sophie. I’m not working here anymore.”

Miranda’s face fell. “You’re not?”

“No. I’m needed elsewhere.” I sounded like a dumb superhero, but Miranda didn’t seem to notice. “Did Fallon just shove you?”

“No. No, I just tripped. I’m clumsy.”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “I was clumsy in high school, too. You don’t have to take that, Miranda. Bullying is a crime. Or, you know, a lot of what bullying has become is. You can talk to me.”

Miranda took a step away from me, a cold front going up. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself. But thank you for the public service announcement.” She whipped around and ducked into a classroom.

I sighed, and turned just in time to see the swarm of girls parting like the Red Sea, their voices dropping away until only silence remained.

And then I knew why.

Framed in the open doorway and against the mid-day fog was Vlad. His eyes scanned the crowd and he licked his lips, a tiny triangle of blood-red tongue running across them. As gross as it was, he was stunning against the gray backdrop, his usually helmeted hair slightly mussed by the wind outside, his thick, deep navy peacoat buttoned up over what I was certain was an unattractive Dracula-style puffy shirt. I saw his dark eyes scan over the sea of ardent adorers before he caught mine.

The door snapped shut behind him, and it was like every girl had been released from her silent trap. The murmuring started and reached nearly deafening levels immediately, ponytailed heads snapping between Vlad and the girl he may have been looking at, a plethora of whispers of “how’s my hair?” and a Sephora’s worth of lip gloss being whipped out and applied.

“Sophie!” Vlad’s deep voice cut through the crowd and all was silent again, though every mouth was open, every eye fixated on me, every onlooker completely floored that
he
was looking for
me.

If he hadn’t been Vlad—my manager, my roommate, Nina’s
BloodLust
-playing teen nephew—I would have kept up the mystique, let the girls ogle me in wonder while I rewrote what never happened in my high school past. But it
was
Vlad and I was miffed.

“What are you doing here?”

Vlad edged his way through the girls and I held my breath, half-expecting a series of fainting spells as he made contact with the girls.

I bent my head when he approached me and pinched my lips together, trying to talk as discreetly as possible. “You better not be using a glamour.”

Vlad grinned at me. “That’s the funny thing. I’m not.”

I rolled my eyes and cocked out a hip. “What do you want?”

“Nothing, but Lorraine said I should give you this.”

He held out a royal-blue velvet shoulder bag. I wrinkled my nose. “I already have a purse.”

“It’s not the purse. She wanted you to have what’s inside.”

I frowned, then popped open the purse. I immediately snapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, what is that?”

Vlad just shrugged and tossed some senior one of those “how you doin’?” head bobs.

The smell that was coming from the innocuous-looking bag was noxious to say the least. Kind of like a cross between Steve’s socks and flaming garbage.

“She said you need it for protection.”

“From what?” I pulled the bag shut. “From anyone with nostrils in a forty-five-mile radius? And why does she suddenly think I need protection?”

“I don’t know.” Another head nod as the girls went back to normal motion—although the majority of them seemed to find one reason or another to brush their breasts up against Vlad. “She said you put something on her desk and there was something dangerous in it or something.”

I gaped. “She said there was something dangerous in the photos
or something
? What was dangerous, Vlad?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Something. What’d you put in the photos?”

“There was a picture of Battery Townsley, a picture taken here at the school, a receipt—”

“I definitely remember that she didn’t say anything about a receipt.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great.”

“And I’m doing you a favor bringing this here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re doing me a favor?”

Vlad nodded.

“Out of the goodness of your black heart?”

Vlad’s eyes narrowed.

“And you got nothing out of it. Nothing except the satisfaction of knowing that I will now be safe against not-receipts.”

Vlad blinked. “I may have gotten something out of it, too.”

I waited and Vlad sighed.

“Fine,” he groaned. “Lorraine is going to talk to Kale. Maybe try to smooth things out so I could talk to her without her, you know, cutting off my head and spitting fire down my throat. Oh, and Lorraine said there’s something in there that you have to wear.” He took the bag from me, reached in, and yanked something that looked like a cat horked up, tied to a piece of twine. “This thing. You’re supposed to wear it all the time. Under stuff. It’s supposed to touch your skin.”

I took the charm from Vlad. As I brought it closer to my face, my mouth started to water with that familiar pre-vomit saliva. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Lorraine said you would get used to the smell.”

“Not likely.”

I held my breath and put the thing over my head anyway, immediately pushing the cat-hork end under my shirt, hoping that would stamp out the smell.

Vlad smiled. “Gotta go.”

He wound his way through the crowd and out the front doors. I briefly expected a rush of girls pressing their noses against the windows, pound-puppy style. Instead, I came eye to eye with Fallon.

“You know him?”

“Of course I do, Fallon. And you know what? I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk to you about something.”

Fallon looked over her shoulder and then back at me. She paused for a beat, then wrinkled her nose. “What smells?”

I took a deep breath and then instantly regretted it, visualizing my insides turning into withering blackness as the stench whipped through my lungs. “I don’t know. Come with me.”

I was surprised when Fallon did, falling into step with me. She pressed her palm against her nose. “It’s like the smell is getting worse.”

I pulled open the door to my old classroom and ushered Fallon in. She looked around as though she hadn’t been in that room every weekday of her junior year. “You’re not working here anymore. Are you allowed to pull students into an empty room like this?”

“Look, Fallon, I know what’s going on between you and Miranda.”

For the first time since I’d known the girl, Fallon’s eyes widened, her perfect façade cracking just slightly. She recovered almost immediately.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I put my hands on my hips and did my best to stare down and intimidate her. “The hall the other day? And then today? You said she wanted to ‘sit down for a spell.’ What did you mean by that?”

There was a miniscule twitch at the edges of Fallon’s mouth, the infinitesimal start of a smile. “She wanted to sit down.”

I inched closer. “You said, ‘for a spell.’”

“It means for a while.”

“I know what it means. What I want to know is why you chose that particular phrase.”

Fallon took a step back and waved her hand in front of her nose. “Is the smell coming from you?”

“Fallon, at least two girls have gone missing from Mercy High in the last two years. And according to things uncovered by the police—and by me—possibly a lot more. You know this is all tied to witchcraft.”

Again that tiny, twitching smile. “I do?”

I cocked my head, pinning her with a glare. “Why would you say ‘sit for a spell’?”

Now it was Fallon who stepped forward, suddenly uncomfortably close to me. “Are you accusing me of something, Ms. Lawson?”

“Tell me about Cathy.”

“She was murdered. Before that, she was alive.”

I blinked, and Fallon blinked back at me, as if daring me to ask her to elaborate.

“Alyssa?”

Fallon held her ground for a beat before turning stiffly, her hair fanning out behind her. “I don’t have to—”

She stopped when I grabbed her arm. Her eyes sliced over her shoulder and narrowed, first staring at my hand on her arm, then looking directly up at me. “Get your hand off of me,” she said sharply.

I let her go as if her skin had burned my palm.

Once Fallon disappeared into the hall, I slid up on my former desk, resting my face in my hands.

Did I really believe that Fallon was some kind of witchy serial killer?

At least three bodies
. . . Will’s voice echoed in my head.
Gretchen Von Dow . . .
I hopped off the desk and started shoving things in my shoulder bag, humming a riff from a Bon Jovi (my era) tune when there was a knock on my door.

I didn’t look up when the door opened. “Nice, Will,” I said, grabbing a sheaf of papers. “You knock on my classroom door but barge in on me in the bath—” I stopped, my eyes wide. “Tub. Kayleigh, hi. I was just—can I help you with something?”

I was fairly certain that the abject horror in Kayleigh’s eyes—
Teachers have lives outside of school?
—mirrored my own. She went beet red from the tips of her ears all the way down to the tops of her UGG boots.

I cleared my throat and blinked at her, flashing a pleading “let’s pretend this never happened” look.

“Can I help you with something?” I said again.

Kayleigh’s hands went from fingering the strap on her crossover bag to fumbling in front of her. She licked her already glossy lips and took a tentative step forward without saying anything.

I laid my shoulder bag back down on my desk and practiced one of those “open stances” that supposedly welcomed communication—or so Dr. Phil said.

“Do you want to talk to me about something?”

Kayleigh glanced over her shoulder—quickly, nervously—before stepping all the way into the room and pulling the door closed behind her. She waited until it clicked shut to let out a shaky breath.

“It’s about Fallon,” she said, her voice a low whisper. “And Miranda, in the hall the other day.”

I felt my ears prick as my hackles went up. I was instantly protective of Kayleigh, of whatever it was she needed to tell me.