Chapter 16

Tonight Jakob’s suit was black, the shirt a thin blue pin stripe and the tie diagonal slashes of blue and gray. As always he looked hot. He also looked a little out of place. Most of the men at the play wore artfully distressed jeans and untucked shirts.

We found our seats, comfortable ones in the middle of the fourth row, a perfect view of the show. By the intermission, I was willing to switch seats with someone in the back. At least there, in the dark, I could make out with Jakob instead of paying attention. It wasn’t bad, just too much: avant-garde ultra-modern costumes with huge French wigs from the 17th century paired with a Restoration comedy. I applauded when it was over, more because it was over than because it was good.

“So what’s next?” I asked, positive our next stop would be more fun.

“I was going to—”

My cell phone interrupted him. “Hold that thought.” I pecked him on the cheek before I picked up the phone. We were still leaving the theater and I struggled to hear the voice on the other end in the noise of the crowd. It was dispatch, the officials onsite at a fire were asking for me.

I got directions and gave them to Jakob. A fire and someone asking for me usually meant E. I hoped this wasn’t like the last arsons we’d worked.

When Jakob pulled up to the scene I realized it wasn’t. It was much worse because E wasn’t the officer there, Reilly was.

“Reilly, what are you doing here?” The play had been fine, dinner before it had been great, and even getting called to check something out didn’t really spoil my evening, but Jakob running into a guy who’d been seducing me by fire light; that would spoil things.

“I’m covering for Fire Inspector Miller. Is this Jakob?” He stretched out his hand with an open and welcoming smile. “Nice to meet you.”

“Uh, yeah.” Bad idea, Reilly, very bad idea, do not let my incredibly jealous boyfriend know about the beach scene. “We were at a play. Is it magical?” I gestured to the fire hoping my question would distract Jakob from asking how I knew Reilly.

“In a way. It’s fire and death, like the other night. Fire and death but the magic isn’t fire witch magic. I thought we could go get coffee and talk about it. I didn’t realize you’d be busy.”

Apparently, Reilly was trying to commit suicide by vampire. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Well I am busy,” I said, stressing the last word. “Really busy, so fax the report to my office.” If I could keep this professional there was a chance it wouldn’t end badly. A small chance but hey, it was a chance.

“I’m not sure we have a report to cover this. Why don’t we do breakfast?”

Was the fool actually trying to make a date with me in front of my boyfriend? Oh Sweet Jesus did he want to die? “Uh, not a breakfast person.”

“Really, the other day at Sunshine’s you seemed okay with—”

I cut him off. “You know, I’m not really dressed for the cold. If we need to talk about this call me at the office later, okay?” Get the hint Reilly, get the hint please.

“Will do. You two have a good night.” The smile didn’t leave his face as he turned to Jakob. “It was nice to meet you.”

I was sorry Jakob was driving. If it was my Jeep I could have driven, putting all my energy into it and avoiding the conversation. We pulled out of the curving driveway and away from the crime scene that had once been a plantation-style home.

“So Reilly is…” Jakob began, his voice surprisingly level.

“The fire witch Raya sent to convert me.” Why not go with the truth? What’s the worst that could happen? Well other than clueless but sweet Reilly turning into vampire bait by morning.

“You two talked about me?”

“You’re my boyfriend; I talk about you to a lot of people,” I teased, keeping my voice light. Jakob was handling this pretty well. Maybe I was being silly, maybe he wasn’t jealous after all.

“At Sunshine’s?”

“Er, no.” I paused, hoping to come up with something to distract him. “What did you think of the play?”

“I thought the pacing was off but after intermission they pulled it together. You know I’m not going to get upset about Reilly.”

“Really?” I asked surprised.

“He’s been sent by a god; he had no choice in the matter.”

“Uh-huh.” He was entirely too calm. “And the whole thing, the offer to make me a fire witch, doesn’t bother you?”

“It bothers me a great deal but it’s your choice.” We pulled into the driveway and he turned to look at me. “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to live your life for you. If Reilly has some offer to convey, I won’t stop him.”

“And you’re not going to give me advice about the offer?” I cocked my head to the side trying to understand how this worked. Normally, Jakob was extremely jealous of other men and ultra-protective of me.

“No.” He paused for a second, choosing his words carefully. “I watched E grow up torn between the people who loved her and the goddess who chose her. I won’t give you advice because if you decided not to follow it I’d lose you. If you did follow it, and something went wrong, you might blame me. There’s no good way for me to win this battle, so I’ll stay out of it.”

“Don’t stay too far out of it. I need you.” I laughed and hugged him. He turned the hug into a kiss, and the kiss into an embrace. The mating fire we’d shared this morning had been passionate but this embrace was something else. I could feel his fear of losing me, and I moved to reassure him with my touch.

“Are we going to have sex in the car again?” he asked after I stopped kissing him.

“Again? We had sex in the car once, months ago!”

“Is that a yes?” I could tell from his smile he enjoyed my outrage.

“Well, we were, but we sure aren’t now.” I did my best to sound upset but he didn’t buy it.

We ended up on the couch but made it to the bed eventually. I went to sleep thinking about Jakob and how much I loved him, how lucky I was to have him and how I never wanted someone else. I had a few fleeting thoughts of him finding me in a dream, but unfortunately, dreams don’t always go the way we want them.

“You’re not busy anymore, right?” Reilly looked up at me with his dopey grin. It was cute, it was adorable, but I wasn’t willing to risk returning it. I knew how quickly things could get out of hand with him.

“This is a bad idea.” I stepped backward and realized we were back on the beach. The fire wasn’t the same, it didn’t have the same force behind it. Maybe this fire was more of a dream fire and the other night I’d actually been there? I didn’t understand and it didn’t matter. “This location is a bad idea.”

It was my dream and I changed it. Unfortunately, when there was a problem in my dreams I tend to escape to the same place: Jakob’s mill.

“Uh, this isn’t any better,” I gulped. Jakob might be here. I didn’t think the rational, non-confrontational mood he was in would last if he found Reilly with me in a dream.

“I agree. Too much river and woods, we need a fire,” he said, and a fire appeared next to us. It ruined the landscape, the wonderful alpine meadows of medieval Germany were a carpet of green grass with mountains behind them, not a place for a campfire. “That’s better.”

“No, it’s not better. You don’t understand. Things could get really out of hand here. You need to leave before—”

“Father says you’re to come with me.” The cherub in a long white dress next to me said, slipping her hand into mine. She pulled me gently toward the stone building by the river. Usually I loved going with her, seeing the mill in action, playing with her by the sides of the river but tonight was different.

“Hi, Hedda,” I said realizing how bad things already were. She was Jakob’s youngest daughter, a vision of happiness with dark curls and sparkling blue eyes. She’d never lived past six. On occasion, when I had an incredibly bad day, she distracted me from the world. The problem was she didn’t normally show up alone.

“You like kids?” Reilly dropped to her level to say hello but she looked at him like he was evil incarnate. “That’s got to be weird being with a vampire. I mean, he can’t have kids, you like them.”

“Okay, you need to leave now.”

“Why?” He stood up, giving up on the idea that he could get her to say hello.

“Jakob really wouldn’t like it if he found you here, and I’d much prefer we talk when I’m awake.”

“You know overly controlling boyfriends tend to become abusive,” he said, his voice touched with genuine concern. He reached out to put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“Reilly don’t-” I woke up before I could finish the thought. I was awake, but Jakob wasn’t. He wasn’t asleep either, but something in between. His eyes were open but he didn’t see me, didn’t respond when I called his name. I paced, repeating “we don’t use magic on each other” like a mantra. What was Jakob doing to Reilly? I kept pacing and repeating.

The daylight shutters rumbled into place around the rest of the house. The bedroom was under enough rock that their noise was the only signal it was morning. I glanced back at Jakob whose eyes had closed.

“Don’t you dare even think about going to sleep,” I demanded.

“Why not?” He asked without opening his eyes. He rolled over exposing way too much gorgeous flesh. There was something distracting about the way his blond hair looked against his pale skin, especially those tight blond curls on his legs. I pulled myself back to the matter at hand.

“Because I want to know if Reilly’s okay.” I stopped my pacing and sat on the bed. My fingers wanted to run over those curls and I didn’t bother to stop them. Sure, Reilly was cute and I’d be upset if something happened to him but I didn’t love him. Callous as it sounded, Jakob was the guy who mattered to me.

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“Oh I don’t know, you, your jealous streak, him being in a dream with me.”

“In a second dream with you, don’t forget the one on the beach.”

I swallowed hard. “I didn’t think you knew about that one.”

“His mind is surprisingly open.”

“Uh-huh, but he’s okay?”

“We came to an understanding.”

“One that didn’t involve bloodshed?”

Jakob rolled over and looked at me. I couldn’t decide what the look was. “What do you know about fire witches and the magic they do, my love?”

“What I’ve picked up from E and a little from Anna, almost nothing really.”

“What about their magic and spellwork, when they invoke the goddess, those sorts of rituals?”

“Not a clue.” I didn’t think Raya was the type of god to come when you called. She seemed more like the show up when She wanted to, leave you to die when She didn’t type.

He casually crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back. “Then you wouldn’t know that most fire magic starts with sex.”

“Really?” I knew Raya was a sexual goddess. Hell, a few nights ago She’d come on to me and Her followers all seemed, well, sexy.

“Indeed, most rituals involve sex, they greet each other with a fivefold kiss that can be fairly erotic, and there’s the mating fire like you had the other night…”

“Huh, I had no idea.” I really hadn’t. I should have studied witches more for work. “What does this have to do with Reilly?”

“He didn’t understand I don’t share you with other men. Now he does. It won’t be a problem.” Jakob slipped back down to his pillow. “Am I allowed to sleep now?”

“Well, you could,” I said, sliding my hand farther up his thigh. “Then again now that I know I don’t have to be mad at you, you could stay up a bit longer.”

****

He stayed up long enough to put a smile on my face. The smile stayed until I got to work. It was Thursday, at the end of the first week in February, and my case still wasn’t solved. Danny and I went over the details, what we knew and what we guessed. The more I thought about it the more I knew there was something obvious, glaring, that I was missing. I decided to distract myself with coffee in hopes I’d remember it.

“Hey,” Danny started before I sat back down with my mug. “I have an idea and I think since I had the idea you should do the work.”

“You think?” I asked a bit incredulous.

“The Pilates place Christine went to had cameras on the parking lot. I’m going to call and see if we could get the tape. So I figure you should—”

“Be the one who watches it,” I finished for him.

He grabbed the phone to call the studio and I went back to trying to see what I was missing with our case. The press hadn’t written a new article so the pressure on us eased up a bit. The case wasn’t just yesterday’s news; it was last month’s. No one seemed to care much. I was trying to decide if that was karma coming back to Christine when Wilson from across the hall handed me a call sheet. I spent a good minute remembering his first name, Sam, instead of reading it.

“What’s this?”

“Call came in, you talk to ghosts, right?”

“Not for fun.”

“Yeah well, all we got was ‘there’s blood in the hallway and the ghosts are crying.’ If you talk to ghosts you’re the person for the call.” Sam was sixty-four. I’d eaten his birthday cake back in December, and he should have retired two years ago. I avoided him, because when I didn’t I got stuck working his cases for him. I sighed and took the call slip.

Danny got off the phone and I told him to grab his notebook.

“Where are we headed?” He asked as we stepped into the elevator.

“Academy of St. Joan, the call came in on the anonymous line. It’s probably nothing.”

“Why are we checking it out then?”

“Wilson got it.” I pushed the call sheet at Danny. He read it and nodded. A few minutes later we were crawling through the morning traffic to the school.

“Do you know anything about this place?” I asked.

“A little, we thought about sending the girls here.”

“Really?” The girls went to a small charter elementary school, one with less than twenty kids in a grade and lots of volunteers. Danny was constantly worried about what would happen when they grew out of it.

“It’s an upper level school, seventh through twelfth grade, and all girls. I don’t mind the idea of an all-girls school.”

“Even if they’ve got ghosts?”

****

St. Joan’s occupied enough rolling acres you could forget the highway bordering the front of the school. A bronze plate attached to the building told me it started life as a convent and church. The large gothic buildings with their flying buttresses and stone fronts looked out of place in Louisiana but I didn’t think the women who ran the school cared. The noise coming from inside could only mean it held a teeming mass of girls. A bell rang and they spilled out into the hallway all clad in knee length navy blue skirts and starched white shirts.

We waited a few minutes for the insanity to calm down, then followed the signs to the head mistress’ office. We introduced ourselves to the woman in charge, Miss Magnum, and received a less-than-friendly reception.

“We did not call the police,” she enunciated in a frosty tone. The headmistress was tall and prim, her brown hair shot through with bright silver strands and cropped close to her head. Her face was lined but not unhappy. Something in her brown eyes told me when she wasn’t correcting errant detectives she liked to laugh.

“I understand,” Danny soothed. “But someone did. Do you know anything about the message?”

He passed the call sheet over to her and she took out a pair of large plastic reading glasses. She read it twice before setting it down. Then she very took off her glasses, folded them and set them on the side of the desk.

She primly interlaced her fingers and put them over the sheet before saying, “We do not have ghosts.”

“But the blood?” I asked, realizing she’d avoided that part.

“Very well. I’ll show you where the blood was though I suspect it has been removed by now.”

We walked through the same hallways that had held so many loud girls, only now that class was in session they were quiet. The smell of a school, of lockers and books, freshly sharpened pencils and cafeteria food took me back to my own time in high school.

My school had been rural. I’d known everyone even if I hadn’t liked them all. It felt friendly and safe, while this school felt firm, like a disciplinarian. I wondered if the girls in the classrooms would agree with me.

“You don’t know who called?”

“We have over four hundred students, Detective Mors. I don’t know which one played this prank but I assure you I will find out.”

“You think it’s a prank?”

“Ghosts in my school?” She sniffed loudly. “Oh yes, that’s a prank.”

“Do you get lots of pranks?” Danny asked. I could feel him assessing the school as a parent while we walked.

“No, we have good girls, they behave.”

“No problem kids, then?” I couldn’t imagine every one of them was a little angel.

“They are all problem children before they come here, Detective Mors. We specialize in hopeless cases. A number of our boarding students come from the foster care system.” She turned sharply standing in front of a door. “This is the hallway.”

Four-foot-wide but only eight-foot-long, the tile-covered floor ended at a doorway. It smelled of bleach and something else, a chemical I couldn’t place. I looked at Danny who answered the question before I asked it.

“Formaldehyde.” Turning back to the headmistress he asked, “Are we next to the biology classrooms?”

“Yes, both of them are outside this door. In fact, this hallway is an emergency egress should an experiment go wrong or a chemical spill. It’s rarely used which makes it all the more curious that the prank was here.”

“And the prank was spilled blood?” I’d played a few pranks in my day and they normally were more complicated than spilling something. Even spilling something and calling the cops seemed pretty dumb.

“They were interrupted. One of the maintenance staff came in earlier than usual to work in this area.”

“Can we talk to him?”

“May we talk to him, Detective,” she corrected and I had a sudden urge to snap back at her. Instead I retaliated officially.

“We’ll need to interview the janitor who cleaned up the blood, and any students who are regularly in this area. You’ll need to inform their parents before we talk to them. What time did the incident take place?”

“It was discovered at five.”

“Is that a garden?” Danny interceded, distracting her with the question.

“One of our rose gardens,” she began and they were outside before she finished. I’m sure she assumed I would follow and I was just as sure Danny meant for me to be alone. I closed my eyes, standing in the center of the hallway, in the clean spot left behind by whoever cleaned the blood.

I took a deep breath and folded my concentration inward, opening myself to the hallway. A minute passed and there was no noise. I formed a sentence in my mind, a hokey “spirit speak to me” phrase worthy of a séance but before I could say it out loud the sound hit me.

Wailing, a baby was crying, loudly. I stumbled, knocked down with the force of it and my hands hit the floor. It was a mistake; touching the floor made the magic stronger. The baby cried louder, joined by others, too many others. I struggled to my feet, and pushed open the door, trying to get outside, away from the sound.

A second mistake, I could see Danny in front of me, could make out the black dress the headmistress wore but I could also see death. Lots of it. Smothering death, desperate for air, the power of it made me wobble and Danny grabbed my arm.

He led me to a marble bench where my feet touched the ground and I instantly shook my head. Not the bench, the death was there too. I couldn’t hear the outside world; the magic was too much, the sense of smothering too strong.

I started to breathe too fast, trying to get enough air for my lungs and the dead lungs around me. The world threatened to go black when a sharp stinging pain brought me back.

“She was panicked,” Magnum said sharply, but Danny wasn’t having it.

“You do not strike an officer of the law. I could have you arrested,” he shouted.

I could hear them which meant I was back in the real world, and explained why the death and the crying had stopped. I took a few shaky breathes, let Danny scare her a bit more and then interrupted them.

“Could we talk about this away from the dead bodies, please?”

“There are no dead bodies!” Magnum looked positively unhinged, her eyes wide and wild.

“There are.” I felt around for it, opening just a finger of that supernatural hand, trying to keep myself grounded. “Five, maybe six, dead infants buried in this garden.”

The tough-as-nails headmistress rolled her eyes back in her head and fainted.

****

We called forensics to the scene. The expert turned out to be an earth witch I liked who operated a thumper, a heavy machine that beat the ground and sent up pictures of the bones underneath. He helped us find a body not too long ago and between thumps he told us about his daughter. I stayed by the van with his equipment, casually sipping a Dr. Pepper from the school’s lone soda machine. My eyes had gone white for a while, which meant I deserved some sugar in my system.

Magnum recovered by then, her hair stood up on end but her expression was back to normal. She ordered all students into an assembly, and went with Danny to talk to the students who had gone to sick call. Five of them were legitimately sick, but one of them was obviously recovering from delivering a child.

The girl was seventeen and desperately in love with her science teacher. Their relationship took place in the biology lab, in his office, and the biology classroom. She was proud of the details, and more than proud of the way he’d helped her when the stillborn child came early. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t stillborn.

Back at the assembly Magnum asked whoever called the police to come forward; of course no one moved. I stood in the back, trying to think of a more comforting way to find a frightened girl but couldn’t come up with anything. Feeling useless I ended up back by the soda machine, wanting a second Dr. Pepper even if I didn’t really need it. I sat down in a too-small orange plastic chair, sipping softly in the quiet room.

“Thank you for making the babies stop crying,” a voice said softly. The girl seemed young, too young to be at this school, with the round face of child, not the angles of an adolescent. She had a friendly smile and smattering of freckles stretched across her nose. Her brown hair was secured with a single navy ribbon, matching her skirt, tied in a bow.

“You’re welcome, honey, but why didn’t you say anything in the assembly?” I tried my best to sound comforting.

“They didn’t invite me.” She nodded a little and faded completely from my view.

“Mal?” Danny called and I turned to him still confused. “Your eyes are gone again. Please tell me there aren’t more of them.”

“There aren’t but the girl who called us may have been a ghost,” I puzzled out loud. “Can ghosts use the phone?”

“Why not?” he asked grimly and I didn’t have a good answer.