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“They’re lucky you found them,” Janet said, taking me aside.
“I just can’t believe someone would attack them. Bill and Camilla are wonderful people.”
“This isn’t the first attack like this. All the others have been found dead.” Janet whispered to me. “The first was about three months ago, in Alton, Illinois. “The family was gassed with silver. Someone came in while they were helpless and drove ash wood stakes through their hearts.”
“Vampires?” I asked.
“Yes.” Janet nodded. “The second family was killed last month. They were all fey; someone gassed them with iron shavings in their air vents and then came in and burned them all. I feel that if you guys hadn’t gone over to check on them, someone probably would have come by later today and put silver bullets in all of them.”
“They weren’t up and about,” I said. “Normally, they are a family of early risers. Valerie said the package was delivered early this morning, and it was still there. Being weres, they don’t need eight hours of sleep and rarely bother with it unless it’s a full moon. I got concerned they hadn’t gone for their morning run. All of them go for a run every morning, usually before I bother to get out of bed.”
“The police have no leads,” Janet said. “The only clue is the metal shavings or whatever they use to kill the victims, but there’s never any fingerprints and no one ever hears or sees anything suspicious.”
“Staking a vampire rarely works,” I said dryly.
“It was the silver first that made it possible,” Janet told me. “None of them have been really old. They haven’t gone after any supernaturals like Lyzette where even poisoning with silver wouldn’t make them very vulnerable.”
“Bill and Camilla are both in their fifties,” I said.
“The other families were all under a hundred as well.” Most supernaturals became less sensitive to things like silver or iron as they aged. Although I didn’t blame Lyzette for not wanting to come in.
“Did the others live in a non-diversified neighborhood like mine?” I asked Janet.
“Yes,” she said. “I was about to ask that. I know you said Valerie was the only human, but was it built and marketed as a haven for supernaturals?”
“It was.” I said, nodding. “It was actually built by a firm of angels that worked in real estate development and families don’t move out very often. We have pretty lax building codes, and it’s easy enough to tear down a house and build a bigger one on the site if needed. Every lot is at least one acre, most are closer to two. All four of these houses are built on three-acre lots, not counting the neighborhood park and woods. Those are considered common use but still private property of the neighborhood.”
“What about the vacant house?” Janet asked.
“We aren’t sure. The elementals that lived there didn’t like living next door to a wizard. They sold the place—it was only on the market a couple of days. No one heard who bought it and no one ever moved into it.”
“I’ll have the detective check property records, maybe the new owners can’t move in because of the protection spells I put up for Valerie and Jerome.”
“Huh, I hadn’t considered that,” I told her.
“Maria, Lyzette, and a few others are going to walk through the woods with a police officer to see if they can pick up how the silver got into the house, can I go with them?” Jerome suddenly ran over and asked me.
“What did your mom say?”
“She told me she didn’t understand the magical stuff that much and I needed to ask you,” he said, sighing. Valerie and I had many discussions about Jerome’s magical future. She hadn’t known his father was a wizard when they’d started dating and that fact had driven her from her family when they had gotten married. She occasionally joked about being a mere mortal trying to raise a wizard child, but I knew it bothered her that Jerome was as powerful as he was, and she couldn’t do anything to help him. She had concluded that since I understood magic better than her, I was in charge of that stuff. I felt her plight; I didn’t understand Jerome’s magic very well either.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“We’ll all go,” Janet offered. “I’d like a look, too, because there’s no other way they got to that house. Jerome may notice something I don’t.”
We were lined up in Bill and Camilla’s backyard with about six feet between each of us. Janet and Penelope told me to just let myself be an angel and take everything in. I’d been practicing being an angel because I wasn’t very good at it. One of my old teachers from high school was tutoring me to use my angel powers beyond just exorcism.
I was born to be an exorcist. Sending the demonic back to their own realm of existence was something I’d been good at from birth. I could also summon the demonic like no one else on the planet. I’d even managed to put my Uncle Lucifer’s soul back into his original body and then exorcised him back to the Stygian the week I’d met Jerome and Valerie. The ultimate goal of the coven that had cursed Valerie was to merge the Stygian with our reality, freeing demons. They'd needed Lucifer’s true form to do it.
Because I’d been so good at that one thing, and I mean really good at it, I’d never bothered to learn how to effectively use my other powers. Having a wizard in the house required me to be more aware of what I could and couldn’t do, for my own sake as well as Jerome’s.
I opened my senses, both normal and magical. We were instructed to walk a straight line for as long as possible. They were hoping one of us would be able to track the perpetrators. It was Maria, Lyzette’s 17-year-old daughter, who found the trail. She was apparently hypersensitive to silver and found minute traces of it on the ground. She’d taken off her shoes for the walk and suddenly began screaming as smoke rose from her feet.
Jerome was busy creating water to cleanse her burning, blistered feet while Lyzette lectured her on being careless and taking off her shoes. But once Maria found the trail, Jerome was able to keep track of it using another spell. Thanks to his spell, it now glowed a dark red and we could see it disappear into the woods.
“He really is quite marvelous,” Janet whispered to me. “At 14, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I’m not even sure I could do it now. And to think he hasn’t even taken the class that teaches how to create tracking spells.” I gave her a look, but if she noticed she didn’t react to it. Sometimes, people seemed to forget that Jerome was an angsty teenager, not just a super-powerful wizard.
“He has moments,” I finally said just to fill the silence. Police officers in uniform were following the red, glowing trail of silver. Jerome was still sitting with Maria and I noticed her feet were looking considerably better.
“Thanks,” Lyzette said, putting her hand on Jerome’s shoulder. He smiled, the corners of his mouth widening until it looked like his face might split in half and the top of his head would fall off. It was his goofy, pleased with himself, happy to be useful smile. I’d seen it a lot when I’d first met him. He’d been a bystander at a mass possession case.
I touched the necklace I was wearing. Jerome had picked out a sun pendant for me and imbued it with magic to protect against demonic possession. Like me, battling the demonic was just something he was very good at and had been since birth. He’d been selling cheap pendants to protect against possession when I’d met him, and he’d never been trained how to do it. He’d just known. I was trying to convince him that he needed a better understanding of magic than just how to battle the demonic, no matter how good he was at it. I didn’t want him to end up like me, trying to learn how to use his other magic at nearly 40.
There was commotion and police ran past us. We were all still in Bill’s back yard. Lyzette frowned at us. The trail had been picked up at Bill’s back door and we’d been standing shoulder to shoulder to walk the line to track it.
“They found an entrance point beyond the park,” she told us. Lyzette had amazing hearing. I was positive she could probably hear us in our houses.
Our private woods backed up to a state park that was also wooded. There was a dog park there as well as access to the Mississippi River to allow public fishing. However, there were only one or two parking lots and the two areas were separated with a massive iron-barred fence. It had been barbed wire when the neighborhood was first built, but the state replaced it with iron bars after a group of deer hunters accidentally shot a werewolf that was roaming through the private part of the woods. A witch had come in and put a spell on the fence, preventing bullets from traveling between the bars or over the top of the fence.
Penelope went off the way the police had gone.
“Well?” I asked Lyzette after a moment.
“They stopped using their radios,” she said after a short time.
“I’m going to go reinforce my spell,” Janet said.
“Need help?” Jerome asked.
“Sure,” she replied and the two headed toward the road.
“You’re frowning,” Lyzette said to me.
“It’s been a while since a car caught fire coming into the cul-de-sac, so why would the bad guys go through the woods unless they knew it would happen?” I asked her.
“Maybe they were worried about being seen,” she offered. I considered that. Most likely the other neighborhoods would have had wooded areas. It was part of the appeal of living in one of these—easy access to nature. However, it still seemed like a roundabout way to come, especially carrying a bag of silver shavings. I It also seemed harder to do surveillance on the neighborhood and Bill’s family from the back, rather than the front. I walked the hundred steps or so through the backyard and entered the woods. I could see Bill’s and Lyzette’s houses just fine. I actually could see Lyzette’s house better than Bill’s. Both houses looked ordinary. Unless you met them, you couldn’t tell just from the house who or what lived in it. While it was true these types of neighborhoods catered to supernaturals and mine didn’t currently have any mortal people living in it who weren’t married to a supernatural, we were the exception, not the rule. Mortals wanted big yards and places to walk their dogs and take their kids for bike rides and jogs, just like supernaturals did.
The difference was the presence of a natural born exorcist in this neighborhood. People tended to be leery of supernaturals that could summon and exorcise demons on a whim. I didn’t blame them. If someone like me went rogue, we could do a lot of damage to mortals in a short time.
That had been part of the reason Jerome’s father had been murdered and his mother cursed with cancer. Jerome was a natural born exorcist; he could summon a demon just as easily as I could, and in the wrong hands his talents could be weaponized. Someone’s desire to weaponize Jerome was the reason Janet had protected our home and road with spells to keep out those with evil intentions.