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Precious, Ajax, and I gathered in my office. I locked the door. John Doe hadn't shown his face this past week, but I didn't want unwanted ears stumbling in on our conversation. I figured as long as the monsters didn't eat any of the load bearing support beams, the No Spell would hold.
I began lighting tapers in the room as Precious rolled out a map of the city.
"So, you found something?" Ajax asked.
"And it is even worse than you can imagine," she replied.
"I can imagine some terrible things."
"Tell me after I finish." She waved her hand over the parchment and it caused the inky lines of the city to shift to a new location. She pointed. "This is where that Jane Doe's house was." Ajax and I peered at it. From the flat page, a burned-out shell where a building once stood took three-dimensional shape. Precious moved her hand and the map shifted again. "There are sites, specific sites, that the World Walker organization has put bids in to take over. They say they are places with weaknesses in the boundary. But I talked to William and he said there is no repair work going on there." Precious leaned forward. "In fact, he thinks they may actually be doing things to weaken boundary."
"That makes no sense," I said. "The World Walkers' job is to ensure the monsters who want to eat the humans stay here and the monsters who want to snuggle the humans can go to Earth."
"And yet..." said Precious with a knowing look. "I started with Jane Doe's house and then all of the other homes on the World Walker's real estate wish list. It’s all women. They are sent papers saying that they must vacate for the security of the Other Side. If they don't... okay, this is where it gets weird."
"Just get on with it!" Ajax snapped.
"To a person, they suddenly revise their will stating that they wish to leave all their property and wealth to the Other Side World Walker authority, and then they mysteriously disappeared."
"Every one?"
"Every one!" she said, widening the picture on the map so we could see the entire landscape. "And I think there's a pattern to it."
"Five points around a circle. And four points in a circle inside," remarked Ajax.
"It's the ley lines," she stated. "All the houses were convergence sites where the ley lines overlapped."
I pointed to the missing point that would make up the fifth. "Oh, look. I can see our house from here."
"What if the missing women are the women in your windows? What if John Doe was messing with your head to get his hands on the No Spell to complete this pattern?" Precious hypothesized.
Ajax and I exchanged glances.
"That's pretty bad," he said.
I straightened my red blouse. "Well, I suppose I shall just have to go investigate what exactly is going on in each of these spots that makes them worth dying for."