by Jessica King
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Sunday, April 2, 2017, 2:17 PM | Central European Standard Time
Ivy and Vince entered the apothecary shop, the scent of oil sand smoke surrounding them in an invisible fog.
“What are you doing here?” Amara asked. She was wearing heavy boots and a lowcut shirt that showed a new collection of delicate flower tattoos along her collarbone. They were a stark contrast to her dark makeup and glowering expression.
Ivy raised an eyebrow. “We came to try to help,” she said. “If the Kingsmen are getting a foothold in Italy—”
“They are not,” Amara insisted.
“Well, I thought we could tell you some things we’ve been doing in California as precautions,” Ivy said. She remembered the smile Amara wore at the Witch Pride parade, the obvious love she had for her coven.
“Why would I use those?’ she snapped. “You can’t keep them safe there; what makes you think they would work here? You don’t even know the culture surrounding witches here.” She shook her head. “Thank you, but no thank you. We knew what we’re doing, showing ourselves at the parade. We knew the risk of it.”
Ivy nodded. She couldn’t force the Roman coven to listen to them.
Her phone buzzed with a voicemail; she must have missed a call. She nodded at Amara. “Sorry to intrude,” she said. She and Vince saw themselves out, and Ivy breathed in the fresh air outside. “Voicemail,” she said, pulling the receiver up to her ear.
“Miss Hart. Father Simon will be receiving two of the people he regularly meets with after the four o’clock mass. Perhaps this is something you would like to investigate? He indicated there would be an exchange of money.”
Her phone had been on speaker, and Vince’s shoulders dropped dramatically. “We’re going to church twice in one day?”
Ivy nodded. “Yup.”
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Sunday, April 2, 2017, 4:55 p.m. | Central European Standard Time
Ivy wasn’t feeling very under-cover. After the crowds left, Father Simon met with the same two girls he’d seen on Tuesday, but this time when he led them to the back door, he followed. Ivy and Vince skirted out of the row they were hiding behind and made their way down the aisles and through the door.
When Ivy pulled open the door to a dark hallway, Simon turned in his tracks, his eyes surprised and guilty all at once. The two women with him looked as though they were considering darting away. The blonde said a name in a heavy Italian accent. Lerolli? When neither Ivy nor Vince responded, she looked at Father Simon, who shook his head. Her tense shoulders visibly dropped.
“He looks like one,” she said in English, indicating Vince, who looked both confused and insulted.
“Detectives,” Father Simon said uncomfortably.
Ivy looked at the envelope in the woman’s—Sophia’s—hand. “Can I see that, please?” Ivy said.
Sophia’s lips pursed tightly together as she handed it over. “I know it’s generous,” Father Simon said. “But it is necessary.”
Ivy opened the envelope. No Kingsmen cards, but lots of money. Plenty to raise eyebrows among the others, for sure. Plenty to pay someone to complete a rather unsavory job.
Ivy eyed Simon. “Tell me the truth, Father.” She swallowed. “Are you using this money to pay off Kingsmen?” Ivy said, her voice growing shaky with rage. “Is this blood money?”
Simon turned a sickly shade of gray. “Never,” he said. “I’d never…” His voice stuttered, and his feet shuffled against the carpeting.
“It’s okay, Father Simon,” the blonde said. “They can know.”
Simon tilted his head at them. “Are you entirely certain?”
She shook her head. “They’re clearly not part of the family,” she said, giving Ivy and Vince one more look over. “The accents.” The woman turned to Ivy. “Can you keep a secret?”
Ivy and Vince followed after the two women. Theirs was a good story, but quite frankly, she hadn’t believed them. There were far more than just three priests who served in St. Peter’s, but Dominick, Nicholas, and Simon were the only three in the building at the time of the murder, they’d confirmed it. And the idea that Simon had been acting secretively without being involved with the Kingsmen as well, it seemed unlikely. They’d need to see the proof.
Vince decided to try his hand at driving their rental, and Ivy still had no clue how he was managing to follow the two women in front of them without endangering everyone in the vicinity. But Sophia and Laurel, as the blonde had introduced herself, kept to their word to keep the car moving slowly, and they eventually arrived a small home in Vitinia. The entire thing was painted a bright yellow with waving orange Spanish roof tiles.
“He’s helping us with some of the extra costs of running this place,” Sophia said. “We each work two jobs, and most of our girls work, but some of them are too young.”
“Many of them are too young,” Laurel said. “We’re trying to get them back into foster care and things like that, but, you know, that’s how a lot of them ended up here after getting picked up by the Lerolli family, so—” That had been their story, the mafia’s decades-old prostitution ring. It sounded like fiction to Ivy, but her voice was so solemn…
Sophia unlocked the door to an over-stuffed house filled with young women and girls. The youngest among them scurried away at the sight of newcomers, eyeing Vince with horrified eyes. Ivy couldn’t blame them. With the Italian heritage and the smattering of tattoos, he likely could have fit in as a mafia man. If only she could convey that he was the goofiest officer in all of California. “We’ve gotten them out of the Lerolli prostitution rings,” Sophia explained. “Most of them lived on the streets.”
Whispers in Italian raced across the room. A girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve had come racing down the steps and stopped when she had reached the bottom.
“Hi,” Ivy said, trying to look kind. “What’s your name?”
The girls’ dark brows lowered, and she glared at Ivy, racing back up the steps. “Almost none of them speak English,” Laurel said. “The two of us can,” she said, moving a pointed finger between Sophia and herself. “A few of the older girls can. But the ones who got pulled out of school and into the life, they didn’t have the same chances.”
“You ended up in prostitution when you were older?” Ivy asked.
Laurel nodded. “It’s my fault we ended up here,” she said, her gaze sweeping the floor.
Sophia made a “tsk,” sound as if that weren’t true, but Laurel shook her head.
Laurel pulled her gaze back up. “We made it out of our secondary education, and Sophia and I were friends with the wrong crowd for a bit. I fell for a boy who wanted to be a capo one day, and he asked me to do a few favors. Said I’d get paid and would get paid more if I got another friend in on it. Turned out, he didn’t actually want to be with me but wanted to strengthen his family’s prostitution ring. I was still seventeen. And I told Sophia I was making good money, just working a few hours a day.” She shook her head and looked at Sophia, who smiled, even though it was a sad smile.
Sophia turned to Ivy and Vince. “My family was struggling, and cash that quick seemed like the only way to keep our house and feed my siblings. My father’s job just didn’t pay enough, and my mother was sick, and I just… I didn’t think I had a choice.”
Laurel nodded. “A few of the older girls did it for the money. Then I learned about the younger girls. The ones picked up out of foster care and off the street, and it all seemed so awful. I wanted out, but they threatened us. The family works out of Naples, so I managed to escape their eyes in Rome and come hide here.
We ended up getting ahold of a lot of the younger ones who didn’t have families over time, bringing them here with us. Some of the older girls with families offered to move to help us pay for all this. Food alone is taking up so much of our money, and we were threatened to be evicted. We’re already so far overcapacity.”
Ivy eyed the main living area, covered in air mattresses and mism
atched quilts.
“I remembered about the goodwill offerings at the church,” Laurel said. “I went a lot when I was little, and I thought maybe we could get help from there without going through any government programs that would check on where the girls actually belonged, which was either nowhere, in the system that allowed them to fall into the hands of the Lerolli family, or with abusive families. They’d surely make us move out of such a small house with so many girls. I asked Father Simon after mass. He said yes.”
Ivy looked around the room. At the clump of teenage girls huddled in the kitchen, speaking rapidly to one another in melodic tones, and at the eyes barely peeking out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs. “I see,” she said.
“I understand if you have to tell the polizia about this. But some of them are just a step below made men themselves,” Sophia said, biting her lip. “The Lerolli family has a far reach.”
Vince looked at Ivy, and she nodded. “This isn’t our jurisdiction,” he said, a smile forming on his lips. “I don’t see why we would need to say anything about this.”
Laurel let out a breath, her eyes glittering with thanks. She turned to their audience, releasing a string of Italian. Most of the girls smiled, a few tilting their heads in appreciation.
Apparently, Father Simon had been keeping his own version of the goodwill offering books. Every payment matched with Laurel and Sophia’s expenses.
“Why hide it and keep it as anonymous?” Ivy asked. “This seems like a good thing.”
Father Simon smiled sheepishly. “Several of the other priests of the basilica looked down on the idea when I presented it to them. The church connected with any type of prostitution is easily skewed in today’s media. But I felt like I had to help them. I was being called to do it. I kept it a secret, and I plan to continue to keep it secret.” His eyes plead with them. “I’m sure you know the scrutiny the church has come under in recent years. Not all our members or even our leaders are the good, honorable people we wish them to be. If it comes out that the church has been handing money to prostitutes, that’s one thing. If it comes out that the church has been actively helping combat the mafia…” he shook his head.
“Oh,” Vince said.
“They’ll go after the girls. They’ll come after us, even. The family doesn’t do much business in Rome, but they know enough people.” He held his hands in his lap. “I knew that risk.”
“Your secret is safe with us,” Ivy said.
“Thank you.”
“So, we just have to ask you one more time,” Vince said. “Do you know anything about the Kingsmen? How one maybe got in here that night? Or if anyone on the staff seems to have a sort of ill-intention toward the idea of magic?”
Simon shook his head. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Monday, April 3, 2017, 8:40 a.m.
Cameron had managed to slip past his parents after returning home with a black eye and a puffy lip. He’d pretended to sleep through dinner despite the growing hunger pangs in his stomach and finally rummaged for snacks in the early hours of the morning after his parents were in bed.
Even though his lip had de-swollen a bit, there was no hiding the discoloration around his eye or the fact that his eye still wouldn’t open all the way.
Hats weren’t allowed inside at Kensington, especially inside the classroom, but Jeff Singleton had already seen the darkness before he’d even taken it off.
“Dude!” Although this was Jeff’s normal way of addressing another person, it had an extra air of disbelief to it that made the rest of the class jerk their heads up and search for what was wrong with Cameron’s face.
Cameron slumped down into his chair, stuffing his hat in his bookbag.
“Oof,” Aleah said. “Baby, you look bad.” She wasn’t wrong. A thorough inspection this morning had revealed that it wasn’t only dark red below his eye, but the red bloomed out into a collection of purples that turned green and yellow at the edges. His face looked like someone had dumped all the most disgusting shades of a rainbow onto his face, not to mention the redness in the white of this eye collecting around the iris. Must have broken a blood vessel.
“Yeah, it does not look good,” Vanessa said, reaching out a finger to poke his face.
“Nessy, you can’t just…” Aleah pulled Vanessa’s hand away from his face and raised her eyebrows. “Want me to fix it?” she asked Cameron.
“I know how to fix it,” Vanessa said. She tilted in as though she were whispering a secret, but she kept her voice loud. “My sister got a black eye once when she got in a fight with Kaitlin Castings. Do you remember her? Three grades above us.”
Cameron didn’t remember Kaitlin Castings, but he said he did to avoid further explanations.
“Ness,” Aleah said. “You think he can wear your makeup?”
“Yeah,” said Michael Newman. “How did you get the black eye? You get in a fight?”
“Sorta,” Cameron said. He turned to Aleah, who had pulled out a makeup bag so large that it couldn’t have possibly fit in the bookbag to begin with. Aleah had fished out a series of bottles filled with brown goop—and one filled with green that made him feel weary of the makeup process in general.
“Do you want to go to the nurse?” Amanda Suggs asked, and he could see two boys behind her pretending to act out a punch to the eye. Cameron shook his head. He’d already taken a near-lethal dose of ibuprofen in an attempt to get the swelling down and heal the fact that he could hardly breathe through his nose.
Aleah held out a teardrop-shaped sponge. “Close your eyes.” He did as he was told, and a cooling cream spread around his eye, which she dabbed away at furiously. He slit his eyes as he heard her rummaging through the bag again, worried about disturbing the new layer of goo on his face. She pulled out something that looked like lip gloss but, as that seemed unlikely, probably wasn’t.
The class’ volume dipped. Mr. Forsyth must have entered the room. Cameron stifled a groan. The teachers would talk. They’d talk about him because they would be concerned, which would likely end with a call home.
“Experimenting on Cameron today, Miss Goldman?”
Aleah stopped dabbing for just a second. “Ah—”
“Cameron’s got a shiner to cover up,” Michael said. “We’re trying to fix it.”
“We?” Aleah asked, going back to patting. “You mean me.”
Michael had been trying to reenact how Cameron might have gotten the black eye, which didn’t seem very much like trying to help at all, to be fair to Aleah, who was the only one doing anything productive. Her bracelets jingled with the motion of her patting it.
“Cameron, is that true?” Mr. Forsyth’s footsteps approached.
“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” she said, picking up on his hope of lying. He sighed.
“Yeah,” Cameron said.
“Were you in a fight? Is someone hurting you?”
Cameron shook his head as Aleah dumped all her makeup back in the bag. She handed him a palm-sized mirror, and he aimed it at his eye. It wasn’t bad at all. He could hardly see the dark circle around his eye. He might even get away with this in front of his parents if he didn’t look them right in the eyes.
“No one hurt me,” Cameron said. “Just some rough-housing. It was an accident.” It nearly hurt to say the words, to move at all. Even his lungs hurt when breathed, the motion of it disrupting the flower patch of purple and blue along his ribs and stomach.
“Was it someone in the school?”
“Nah, he doesn’t go here,” Cameron said, trying to wave him off. Mr. Forsyth dropped it, but after class, he waved Cameron over to his desk as the rest of the students filed out of the room.
“Cameron, you’re a smart kid,” Mr. Forsyth said. “I know you’ve been going through a lot recently.” He erased notes from the board and set the eraser on the stand, turning to Cameron. “But whatever that is from,” he pointed to his eye, “ needs to stop.”
&nbs
p; “It’s nothing, I—” he began.
Mr. Forsyth held up a hand. “Look,” he said. “I know a lot of these kids live in a bit of a bubble. Sherman Oaks is a nice area. But I know it’s not a big bubble. My sister-in-law teaches at a school hardly twenty minutes from here. Her kids show up looking like you all the time.” He clasped his hands. “From gang initiations.”
Cameron swallowed.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Mr. Forsyth said. “I’m going to tell you that you do not need to do that. And if you need any type of help…”
Cameron waved his hands, trying to shake off the offer. Mr. Forsyth held his palms up in surrender.
“If you need it, I’m here. The other teachers are here. No one’s gonna expel you for asking for help or counseling.” He sighed. “But if that’s what’s going on, you need to consider your life beyond this current pain, okay?” he said. “That adrenaline rush you have now from it is a temporary fix that might cause you a world of hurt.” Cameron stared at his shoes. “Grief isn’t worth risking your record, okay? Not worth pulling other kids into it, either.”
Cameron just nodded while looking at the multi-colored carpet.
“All right, man,” Mr. Forsyth said. “Get to your next class.”
Cameron hadn’t thought about the fact that he might be asked to recruit other kids to the Underworld. He was popular. He did know plenty of guys who were constantly trying to prove how tough they were with no outlet. Sports were too regulated for them to get into real fights, and he wasn’t entirely sure there was anyone else in his whole high school who knew how to throw a proper punch.
When he got to his next class, he was greeted with a new crowd who had been informed of Cameron’s condition. He tried to play it off, but people were begging to know who he’d fought. A senior? And they really wanted to know why he’d gotten in a fight. Did he like someone?
Cameron wished it were so simple. He’d never tell them he voluntarily was beaten by three people, and he wouldn’t be showing anyone his ribs and back with a teacher standing at the front of the room. His teachers eyed him all day as his peers tried to wheedle information out of him.
