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  He looked at me and added, “I need answers, Sam. I need to feel comfortable on this lake. And I need to warn people, if necessary. Okay, you’re hired. Sherbet says you’re the Queen of Strange, and this is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  We discussed rates, right there on the open water, and he suggested a barter. Half my rates for a week’s use of his best cabin. I grinned and thought about Kingsley, a fireplace, and more snuggling than any woman had any right to hope for. My own lake monster.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Chapter Five

  Detective Hillary Oster returned with my driver’s license and investigator’s license. She had, I noted, made copies of them. She folded the copies and slipped them under her keyboard.

  “You check out, Ms. Moon,” she said. I couldn’t tell if checking out was a good thing or a bad thing, based on her expression. Detective Oster was in her mid-forties and didn’t smile much. In fact, she seemed to go out of her way to frown. Had I been sitting on my head, Detective Oster would be grinning like a fool. Right side up, not so much. I found all her frowning perplexing, since I’m adorable.

  “I was holding my breath.”

  “I wasn’t.” She laced her thick fingers in front of her. No nail polish. No rings. Chewed her nails. She was the picture of calm, even while the department behind me was a beehive of activity. “Now, what’s your interest in the missing boys?”

  I slipped inside her thoughts and saw the wall. It wasn’t directed at me, not entirely. She didn’t like private dicks, but she mostly didn’t like the FBI agents who’d come in here and taken over the place. She was the lead investigator for both missing boys, but now, she didn’t know her place. She’d never before had a case that had interested the FBI, and she hoped she never did again. She was in a bad mood and not about to open up to me. It was time I exerted myself, to the delight of the demoness within me.

  My reasons are perfectly reasonable, I thought, planting the words directly into her thoughts. I have nothing but the boys’ best interest and well-being in mind. Do you understand?

  There was a pause, necessary for her subconscious mind to realize it had just been taken over. A moment later, she nodded.

  Good, I thought. Now give me a smile.

  She nodded again, and her lips quivered in what appeared to be a rictus of pain.

  Scratch that, I thought. No smiling. As you were.

  Her lips dropped with relief, and all was right in her world again. I said, “Could you tell me more about the boys’ disappearance?”

  She nodded, blinked. “Their disappearances have been tough on everyone. We’ve been working overtime on this. I’m not sure I’ve slept in a week.”

  She gave me the rundown. The boys were the same age: twelve years old. Both were Caucasian. Both were troublemakers. Both had had run-ins with the police. Usually for smoking pot or ditching school. Once or twice for tagging. Once for a minor break-in.

  “What’s a minor break-in?” I asked.

  “They broke into their history classroom and urinated and defecated on the teacher’s desk.”

  “Hey, when you have to go...” I said. “They were friends?”

  “The best of friends, apparently. Quite frankly, they were just rotten together, although everyone seemed to adore them.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Teachers, fellow students, the girls in class. They were bad boys with a heart of gold.”

  “Even the teacher whose desk they turned into a toilet?”

  “That’s just the thing, Ms. Moon: the boys never did anything too outlandish, or too hurtful to get into any real trouble. Even when they were tagging they were simply tagging over other graffiti, and just using their initials. Anyway, they have been missed and, although they are a couple of boneheads, there’s great worry for them. Truly, they didn’t deserve whatever has befallen them.”

  I nodded, and tried to think when the last time I’d heard the word “befallen” used in an actual sentence, and couldn’t. I said, “Any chance they ran away?”

  “Anything’s possible. But why leave seven days apart? Why not head out together?”

  “Maybe they went their separate ways.”

  “The possibilities for the disappearance are endless. We are following all leads, Ms. Moon. We’ve talked to everyone they’ve ever known. We actually talked to every single high school student at Elsinore High, every single teacher. Every relative we could find, every neighbor within one square mile. We’ve passed out flyers asking for tips. The local TV media have been a huge help, and so have the radio stations. And that’s not taking into account the hundreds of follow-up calls, leads that don’t pan out into anything, and just general agonizing over the case. The word is out there... but so far, nothing.”

  “It means a lot to you.”

  “It means a lot to all of us here. These kids were funny. They were clowns, yes, but they often had most of us in stitches. They were ruffians on their way to figuring out how life works, but meanwhile, having a little fun in the process. Sometimes, too much fun. Hell, it wasn’t uncommon for those of us here at the station to share stories about those two. Story after story.”

  That last part got to her and she turned her head and collected herself. I waited. Some cases hit us harder than others.

  When she had gotten control of herself, she said, “Anyway, we all have a soft spot for them. We all sort of looked out for them, too.”

  She gave me the rundown. Luke, twelve years old, had been the first to go missing. From all appearances, he had been asleep in his bedroom, and simply decided to get dressed, put on his shoes and jacket and slip away into the night. No one had come to his door, no evidence of anyone coming to his window. His mother was asleep. They lived in an apartment complex. No one had seen him go. No surveillance cameras anywhere.

  One man, a bum who lived on the streets, claimed to have seen Luke heading down Lake Street, toward the lake itself. But that was it. No one else had heard anything or seen anything. No other leads. The bum had checked out, too. No indication of foul play. They dug deeper. No stolen cars reported that night. No evidence that Luke had purchased a ticket at the local Greyhound depot. There were no trains into Elsinore. Neither Uber nor Lyft nor any of the taxi app services indicated they had picked him up. The last call on his cell had been to another friend in the early evening. According to the friend, they’d talked girls and a party coming up that weekend. His last text had been to a girl. It said “Sup?” Luke had left his phone behind in his bedroom.

  I blinked at that. A soon-to-be-teenager with no phone? A sure sign of foul play. I said, “Hitchhike?”

  “Possible. Might even be probable. Except he’d made no mention to anyone of wanting to run away.”

  “Teenagers are not known for planning ahead, at least beyond their next Taco Bell run.”

  She shrugged. “He hadn’t been fighting with his family, or with his friends.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “None yet, but he was trying. We read his text messages.”

  “Scary,” I said.

  “We had to bring in a translator. Literally.”

  “Who was the translator?”

  “A local high school student.”

  “Any theories?” I asked.

  “Someone picked him up. Someone had somehow made arrangements with him, outside of phone calls or text messages. Someone he perhaps knew on the streets. Someone offered him drugs or money or a good time, and Luke got in the car with him.” She thought about it, then added, “Or her.”

  I saw where she was going with this. “Perhaps an older man?”

  “Seems probable.”

  “Well-to-do pervs with a penchant for young boys have been known to trawl high schools, and seem to have a knack for finding pre-teens up for anything. Usually there’s lots of partying promised. The pre-teen quickly realizes he’s in way over his head, that there’s a lot more expected of him than he’d realized.” />
  “Tell me about the bum who reported seeing him,” I said.

  “Known by the police. Harmless. Drunk most of the time. His statement has been agonized over. Problem is, it’s been changing with time.”

  “What’s the gist of it?”

  “Luke was alone. Seemed to be walking in a sort of daze. Heading down toward the lake. The time ranges from midnight to four in the morning. His clothing went from shorts to jeans.”

  “What does that mean, a sort of daze?”

  “Apparently, his arms were straight down, and so was his head.”

  “He was looking down as he walked?”

  “Apparently straight down. But you ask me, it sounds like bullshit.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking. “And Johnny would disappear a week later?”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me about Johnny’s disappearance.”

  She did. Detective Hillary was certain the clue to Luke’s disappearance lay with his friend. Surely, there was someone they’d met along the way, someone who had shown an interest in the boys, someone who had offered them the world... and all they had to do was leave with him for the weekend. Or just for the night. Hell, just for a few hours. But Johnny was adamant: they’d met no one, at least no one he was aware of.

  Detective Hillary had been knee-deep in Luke’s investigation when she’d gotten word that Johnny was gone, too. Similar circumstances. The boy had left his apartment in the middle of the night, an apartment he shared with his mother. This time, there was footage: the apartment surveillance camera had caught the boy leaving at 3:18 a.m., walking alone, head down, arms to his sides.

  I asked if I could see the video. She didn’t seem so inclined. I gave her a mental nudge, and she inclined. She moved over and asked me to come around to her side of the desk. She spent a half-minute bringing down files and opening new ones, and soon, the video played out before me.

  A blond kid, wearing jeans and a Beatles t-shirt and no shoes, emerged from an apartment complex. Arms straight down, head down, he also looked like he might be turning away from, say, a dust storm, or rain. But the night seemed clear, although the video was a little grainy. Most interesting was the boy’s steady gait. He walked carefully, slowly, one big step after another, never looking up, never raising his arms, never appearing to see, in fact, where he was going.

  He didn’t have anything in his hands. No headphones. No shoes. No reason to be acting the way he was acting. In about twenty steps, he was out of frame.

  “Play again?”

  “Yeah.”

  She did... three more times, in fact; each time, it seemed stranger than the time before it.

  “Looks a bit like a zombie,” I said.

  “You’re not the first to say that.”

  “Sort of backs up what the bum saw.”

  “It does.”

  “Where’s he headed?”

  “The apartment’s main gate.”

  “You seem pretty sure about that.”

  “Only feasible exit. Not to mention, he stepped on some glass. We followed a trail of blood for nearly a mile before it congealed or got clotted by dirt and grime.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “We tested it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  She waited, perhaps subconsciously getting me back for digging around in her brain. Finally, she said, “He was heading toward the lake.”

  I looked at her. “Just like Luke?”

  “Exactly like Luke,” she said.

  Chapter Six

  We were at Alicia’s in Brea, our lunch headquarters.

  Alicia’s is a cute place, which might be why maybe 98 percent of its clientele are women. Not that guys don’t appreciate cute, it’s just that, well, they don’t. Not cuteness of this magnitude. There were flowers everywhere, on tables and counters and walls. There were paintings of flowers, and of grapevines. As in, grapevines crawling along the wall, with painted bunches of grapes. So. Damn. Cute. Yes, Alicia’s might have been located in an industrial center—wedged between a computer repair shop and a photo studio—but she had done her best to help you forget that unfortunate fact.

  “Since when were you so girly?” asked Allison.

  “I’ve always been girly. Mostly.”

  Allison snorted. “Says the girl who’s packing heat in her purse.”

  “Old habit,” I said. Concealed handgun permits were hard to come by in California. Luckily, I knew people in the right places. That, and I’m an ex-fed. Anyway, I didn’t use the handgun much. Or at all. These days, I tended to be a hands-on kind of girl.

  “Or fangs-on,” said Allison.

  “I don’t have fangs.”

  “Metaphorical fangs,” said my witchy-poo friend. “And why don’t you have fangs? I thought all vampires did.”

  “All fictional vampires,” I said.

  “They don’t even, you know, appear when you are, you know, feeding?”

  “You should know better than me,” I said. “Remember, I can’t see myself. And I’ve fed on you God knows how many times.”

  She shook her head. “This conversation has gotten creepy fast.”

  “We are the Queens of Creepy,” I said, continuing Sherbet’s metaphor.

  “Hard to deny that. And as far as fangs, you have none that I’m aware of. Besides, you usually opened my skin with your” she shuddered all over again—“crazy-sharp fingernails.”

  “Which, if you think about it, is more effective. Two puncture holes in the neck aren’t going to yield much blood. And aren’t the fangs, you know, plugging up the very holes they opened?”

  “Are we really having this conversation?” asked Allison. “We sound like a couple of fan boys.”

  “Or fang boys,” I added.

  “Fang girls,” said Allison. “And are we okay joking about this?”

  “Why?”

  “As you’ll recall, not very long ago, we were both sort of addicted to the whole... process.”

  “It wasn’t a very healthy process,” I said. “And the more I don’t drink human blood, the less I crave it. And the less I crave it, the more the bitch inside me disappears. The more she disappears, the better I feel. The better I feel, the more human I feel. The more human I feel, I feel.”

  “No, I get the idea. But isn’t being human, you know, boring?”

  “Being human keeps me from killing the UPS deliveryman. Being human keeps my kids safe at night. Being human keeps me sane. Being human is a godsend.”

  “Are you quite done?”

  “I am.”

  Part of my attempt at normalcy was to keep any telepathic communication to a minimum. Allison didn’t like it. She had gotten quite used to reading my thoughts. Or mind speak, as she called it. Apparently, this was how she communicated with her ghost friend, Millicent—a ghost who had once been my friend, too, although in a different lifetime. Many lifetimes, apparently. Rumor had it that we had all been witches. I had no memory of these past lives, and neither did Allison. For the most part, we were taking a ghost’s word for it.

  “Not exactly, Sam. I’m remembering more and more. And Millicent is giving me some of her memories.”

  “Ghosts have memories? And I thought we agreed no mind speak.”

  “I only half-heartedly agreed. And she’s more than a ghost, Sam. She’s a spirit, as in not bound to any one location, or even to this Earth, for that matter. She can come and go as she pleases. As such, she has access to many, many lifetimes of memories. And the three of us are most definitely in most of them.”

  “A trifecta of witches,” I said, repeating her earlier words.

  “Exactly.”

  “But I broke the circle, so to speak, by becoming a creature of the night.”

  “You did, Sam, and wouldn’t this conversation be best discussed, you know, in our minds?”

  “No,” I said. “Not for me, not any more. And not if I can help it. I feel better and better these days.
More alive. Happier. Lighter. I won’t sacrifice that for convenience.”

  “Fine, except I’m pretty sure that redhead over there is listening to us again.”

  I recognized the slender, pretty redheaded woman from the last time we’d eaten here. Yes, we had her attention, but she was all human, with a rich and vibrant aura. How much she heard, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t worried. My inner alarm stayed quiet, which was always a good sign. I smiled, and she smiled. Hers wasn’t an awkward smile either. Geez, did I know her from somewhere? I didn’t think so. More than likely, she could read auras—and saw that I lacked one. But shouldn’t that make her nervous? Perhaps even afraid? Not all immortals are as friendly and cute as me. Then again, not all people “get” their gifts. If this woman could read auras, she was probably curious as to why I didn’t have one. Perhaps she had never seen a freak like me. I was her first. Lucky her. I dipped into her mind and confirmed my suspicions.

  “She can see auras,” I said.

  “Or lack thereof.”

  I shrugged. “It’s true. I am rather aurally challenged.”

  “That might be a double entendre. And a not very complimentary one, either. Sam, we should be having this conversation privately.”

  “Because of all your sex talk?”

  “Because we can. Because it’s safe.”

  I shook my head. “The less I use her...”

  “I know, I know. The less you use her, the weaker she becomes, I get it. But there has to be a way to get rid of her once and for all.”

  Getting rid of her meant the demon bitch could possibly use my daughter as a host. Or my sister. Or any of my other blood relatives, quite frankly. I wasn’t so sure it had to be a female. I opened my thoughts up enough for Allison to pick up all of that.

  She did, nodding. “Let me ask around, Sam. I might know someone who might know what to do about her.”

  “Would this someone happen to be a ghost?”

  “Maybe, does it matter?”

  “Nope, I’m all ears.”

  After the waitress delivered our food, we spent the next few minutes ‘getting our eat on,’ as Anthony would say. My sandwich was heavenly, and I could just kiss the Librarian all over again—not an entirely undesirable thought—for creating the medallion rings (one of which restored my ability to consume real food). But as I ate, Allison was harshing on my vibe, with bad vibes of her own. I could literally feel the pain leaking out of her.