Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective

by Amsden, Christine

  My father got to do the second-floor library. It’s got shelves stretching so high that he had to install one of those wheeled ladders to reach the topmost levels. A fireplace, nearly big enough to stand in, interrupts the shelves’ progress along one of the walls. Nine high-backed armchairs, one for every member of the family, make a cozy formation in the center.

  All in all, the styles clashed badly, but it was home.

  When I arrived, drained and still a little shell shocked from the day’s horrors, the entire family was gathered in the kitchen, where Mom was brewing some kind of potion in a cauldron on the stove. It seemed a little odd that everyone was gathered in one room before dinnertime, but I knew if I stopped to investigate, I would never get to my room and the solitude I craved.

  I tried to sneak past the kitchen unseen, but six-year-old Adam spotted me and practically screamed my name. He dropped whatever snack he’d been munching on, and ran to wrap bony arms and legs around my waist.

  I ruffled his light brown hair affectionately. “It’s nice to see you too. Can’t I just slip off to my room to get out of these shoes?”

  “No!” Adam said. He smiled at me, which isn’t fair, since his gift is charisma. It’s not like mind control. You can say no to him, but it makes you feel very, very bad inside, like you just kicked a puppy. I don’t envy my parents having to raise him. “Aunt Sherry’s here!”

  My mom had mentioned something about her sister coming to visit this week, but I had forgotten. Realizing my defeat, I let Adam take my hand and usher me into the kitchen, where I had missed the extra face in the crowd. Aunt Sherry was mom’s identical twin sister, although they looked more like mother and daughter. My mom took daily potions that gave her the appearance of a twenty-something, and the older I got, the more she and I looked like twins. We had the same auburn hair, blue eyes, delicate facial features, and gently rounded curves.

  “Nice to see you again, Cassandra,” Aunt Sherry said.

  “Cassie,” I corrected, automatically. “How are you? How’s Jason?”

  It wasn’t an entirely idle question. My cousin, Jason, was a vampire hunter, and while I hadn’t seen him in years, I had been thinking about him earlier that day. If I learned for sure that we had a vampire in town, I would need to call a hunter.

  “I worry about him,” Aunt Sherry said. “He’s all I have and he hasn’t exactly chosen a safe calling. I don’t even know where he is most of the time.”

  Mom turned away from the stove and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She gave me a strained sort of smile, like she was juggling too many things and couldn’t handle it all. “Sherry reminded me that Christina needs her vampire vaccine, and Adam needs a booster.”

  “I’m not drinking that!” Adam made a sick face that made Christina giggle. She made her own face and shook her head back and forth.

  “You will drink it,” Dad said, firmly. Adam smiled sweetly at him, and Dad looked away. “That’s not going to work. It’s for your own good.”

  “What’s it for?” Elena, the nine-year-old, asked in her usual ethereal whisper. She doesn’t speak much, and when she does it’s hard to hear. I think I was the only one who heard her, because Dad and Nicolas started in on a discussion about baseball, and Mom opened the oven door to pull out some rolls.

  Elena deflated, and started to go back into her usual far-off place where, I assume, dead people dwell. Her gift is to talk to them, but some days I’m not sure gift is the right word for it. She seems to spend more time talking to the dead than the living.

  “It’s to stop the venom,” I said to Elena, taking her hand and drawing her back into the world. “The venom is what turns a person into a vampire.”

  Elena nodded. “Yes, that’s what grandpa said, too.”

  “He was a smart man.” I worry about Elena. She’s more stuck in the middle than any of the others, and no one seems to have the time and patience to draw her out.

  “Dinner in thirty minutes,” Mom said. “Elena, Juliana, set the table. Isaac, take the trash out. Adam, go wash your hands. Nicolas, you’re on dish duty tonight. Isaac–no! Just pick the trash bag up with your hands and walk it to the trash bin.”

  Isaac had his eyes closed and, I assume, was working a spell to try to levitate the trash. He opened his eyes and scowled. “I was just practicing. Besides, it’s not fair. Cassie doesn’t have a job.”

  “Cassandra just got home from work and hasn’t even had the chance to set her purse down,” Mom said. I let her call me Cassandra. I lost that fight a long time ago.

  “Pfft,” Isaac said. “What work? She just surfs the net and reads trashy romance novels all day.”

  I froze, my mind flashing back to the young girl and the pool of blood. Isaac teased me all the time, more so than any of the others, and most of the time I took it in stride, but when I closed my eyes and still couldn’t shut out the vision of death, I lashed out almost at random, swinging my purse and catching him in the back of his head.

  “Ouch!”

  “Cassandra!” Mom scolded in a tone she hadn’t used with me in years.

  “I’m sorry, I just—I had a bad day. I’d better go.”

  As I walked away, I heard Isaac muttering the words to a curse, so I stopped by the dining room table to remove a fresh snapdragon, a protection from most curses, from the vase in the center. I made sure Isaac saw it before I headed upstairs to my bedroom.

  I suppose I should have been nicer to Isaac. He’s the only one of my siblings, aside from me, who was born without a gift. Oh, he’s got plenty of magic, but his lack of a special gift left him with a serious inferiority complex. He liked to take it out on me, because he thought he could, but there really wasn’t anything he knew how to do to me that I didn’t know how to block. At least, not yet. In a few years, if we didn’t work out our issues, I could have some serious problems.

  My bedroom was the entirety of the north tower, a place I liked to call my fortress of solitude. It was a circular room with a single window that looked out over the lake, providing a breathtaking view. From that height, I could imagine I existed above the world, rather than in it.

  I hadn’t decided if I preferred Mom’s modern style or Dad’s extreme retro, so I chose black. Everything from the walls to the bedding was a dark monochrome. I thought of it as my blank slate. The only color in the room was in my drawers and closet. I’m sure there’s some deep, psychological reason that I did that–paint the walls black and myself in living color–but I’m not sure what it is.

  I took a full thirty minutes to compose myself before going back downstairs to the noise and the chaos. You would think that, as the oldest of seven, I would thrive on it, but the best I can say is that I’m used to it. I always retreated to my fortress when I needed to.

  Back in school, I used to retreat to my fortress when the others were taking their after school magic lessons. I sat through them for a few years, especially when Nicolas started learning, always desperately hoping to find an ounce of repressed talent, or maybe uncover a gift, but nothing manifested.

  My parents’ bedroom lay directly beneath mine, which was significant only because I could sometimes hear them talking through the vents. They had said some interesting things, unaware that I was listening. The entire family knew they’d had seven children, each of us spaced three years apart, because seven and three are powerful magical numbers that protected the family from evil magic.

  What they didn’t know was that Mom, and to a lesser extent Dad, weren’t sure if I counted as one of the seven. I had heard them discussing it shortly after Christina’s birth, when I was eighteen.

  That summer, I had sat in on magic lessons again. I told my parents I just wanted to know what was out there, and how to protect myself from it, especially using herbs and potions that require knowledge more so than power, but in the dark of the night, in my fortress of solitude, I tried once more to call forth repressed magic. I no longer tried nightly, but every once in a while, when I got in a mood, I sti
ll made my futile attempts.

  * * *

  Dinner at the Scot house was mandatory family time. We ate in the dining room around a modern, straight-legged rectangular table with an espresso finish. The two leaves were not optional features for a family of nine, but even with both leaves in place, the large dining room did not feel at all cramped. Nine upholstered chairs in white (I’m sure magic was involved in keeping them that color) normally surrounded the table, but that night, they’d brought in the spare for Aunt Sherry.

  There were always fresh flowers on the center of the table, such as the snapdragons, and they usually became the focus of a dinnertime lesson. That night was no exception.

  “Elena, Adam, what are these called?” Dad asked, pointing to the flowers.

  “Snapdragons,” Adam said, without hesitation. Elena echoed him a second later, and in a much softer voice.

  “Sap-gons,” Christina ventured.

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “Now, why does Cassandra have one tucked behind her ear?”

  “Cause Isaac tried to curse her,” Adam said.

  Dad shot Issac an evil look, but did not publicly reprimand him. A few years ago, he probably would have, but I had convinced him that I needed to be able to stand up for myself, or no one would ever respect me.

  Aunt Sherry leaned over and whispered, “Have you tried nettle? It sends the curse right back.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Too bad we don’t have any right now. I may have to pick some up in town tomorrow.”

  “Isaac, stop!” Mom shouted. I wasn’t sure what Isaac had been doing to earn a reprimand, though I could take a guess, but at that moment, no one was looking at Isaac. We were too busy gaping at Mom’s deeply flushed cheeks. Suddenly, the snapdragons in the middle of the table burst into flames.

  “Uh oh,” Christina said.

  Now, small accidental fires in the Scot household weren’t all that unusual. Both my father and brother, Nicolas, were gifted fire starters, but Nicolas hadn’t lost control in years, and Mom hadn’t set a fire like that since she had been pregnant with him.

  My fork clattered to my plate as I realized the truth. Mom wasn’t a fire starter. Her gift was an eidetic memory, but she has been known to channel the gifts of her children during pregnancy.

  Apparently, she had decided that I did not count.

  Nicolas and Dad both rushed to put out the fire, but Dad got there first. With a quick wave of his hand, the flames were gone, but the room still felt hot to me.

  Smoke curled around Mom’s ears. “I, um, was going to say something tonight about-” She stopped and looked at us each in turn, though I think only Nicolas and I understood what was going on. Her gaze lingered on me, but I had no idea what she was trying to tell me with her eyes.

  “Mommy had accident,” Christina said, clearly oblivious.

  “What’s going on?” Juliana, my fifteen-year-old sister, asked.

  “I’m pregnant,” Mom said. “Due in December. I was just looking for the right time to tell everyone.”

  My mouth felt dry, and I wasn’t hungry anymore. Congratulations were the furthest thing from my mind.

  “You’re going to have another baby?” Isaac said. “But didn’t you say we were protected because there’s seven of us?”

  The weight and import of an overheard three-year-old conversation thudded into my head, and I couldn’t be in that room anymore.

  “I need to go,” I said, standing. “I’ve got to finish a job.”

  “What job?” Mom asked. “Cassandra, come back.”

  Damn. I hadn’t wanted to mention the job in front of my parents, not with a Blackwood involved. “It’s not important—just delivering a subpoena but it’s not done.”

  “It is important,” Mom said. “It’s your first customer. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I don’t get it. What’s wrong with Mom?” Adam asked. “Cassie, sit down, please. We’re eating dinner.”

  “No, Adam.” In my mind, a puppy whimpered, but I ignored it.

  “Cassandra,” Dad said, “it doesn’t have to be now, does it?”

  “It was nice to see you again, Aunt Sherry,” I managed to say as I fled from the room.

  5

  AS I MADE MY WAY back to Belinda’s house, I tried to calm down and gain some perspective. A new baby wasn’t the end of the world. There were a hundred reasons they could have decided to have another baby that had nothing to do with me. Maybe Mom just wanted another one. Maybe they had decided that three by three would be a more powerful protection for the family. It could even have been an accident, since neither scientific nor magical protections were one hundred percent effective.

  Even if, worst case, she had decided I did not count as part of the protective seven, it wouldn’t change much. I would still be a part of the family in all the ways I normally was. Magically speaking, I had always been an outsider.

  I also realized I’d been rude, so I called the house to apologize. Dad answered the phone with his usual formal greeting. “Scot residence.”

  “Dad, it’s me. I need to talk to Mom.”

  “Good girl,” Dad said in a hushed voice. Then, more loudly, “Sheila, Cassandra is on the phone.”

  After a brief shuffle, Mom took the phone from him. “Is everything all right?”

  “It’s great, but I just realized I’d forgotten to say congratulations before I left. So, um, that’s why I called. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Mom said, though her voice still sounded tense. “Did you finish your job?”

  “Not yet. I may be out late.”

  “Well, take your time, but we need to talk when you get home.”

  That didn’t sound good. “What about?” I asked.

  “Not over the phone,” Mom said. “Just find me when you get in tonight, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.” Mom disconnected before I had a chance to question her further. I stared at the phone for a moment before shoving it back into my purse.

  A minute or two later, Belinda’s house came into view, looking still and empty in the darkening twilight. The police had gone, leaving behind yellow tape as the only evidence of their presence, and of the gruesome scene I had stumbled upon earlier that day.

  Evan was already there, or at least his car was, so I parked my car behind his, and headed for the house. Getting inside took no time at all the second time around, despite the more obvious barricade of the police line, but I paused inside her shop, listening carefully for movement, and wondering if I knew what I was doing. I did need to find Belinda, and searching her house seemed like the most logical place to begin, but it worried me that I no longer had the same qualms about breaking into her house that had plagued me earlier in the day.

  I heard someone upstairs, either in the guest bedroom or Belinda’s study, so I carefully moved through the house, feeling my way in the dim illumination until I found the staircase and made my way up. I found Evan in the study, leafing through a thick scrapbook.

  “Hi, Cassie,” Evan said. “I heard you pull into the driveway.”

  “Have you found anything?” I asked.

  “She’s very clean. No blood, no nails, and no hair. I didn’t even find a hairbrush.”

  “You didn’t?” That struck me as odd. “What about a toothbrush?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if she packed up and left.”

  Evan shrugged. “It’s possible, but I’m short on magical ideas to figure it out.”

  “Then let’s try some non-magical ones. What’s in the scrapbook?”

  Evan glanced at me, uncertainty evident in his eyes. It was an expression I hadn’t seen on him in years. “She seems to have kept careful records of her conquests over the years.”

  “Really?” I admit it, that piqued my interest, and not just in a professional way. “Can I see?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Why?” I entered the room fully and walked the short distance to the
oversized desk, leaning over Evan to get a look at what had him rattled. He could have kept me from seeing, but he didn’t.

  He didn’t move, either. To see the book, I had to lean over him, close enough to feel the heat of his body against mine. For an instant, I wondered if that had been such a good idea, but then the picture staring up at me from the scrapbook shoved away all other concerns.

  “Isn’t that your dad?” I asked.

  Evan nodded. Then he turned the page, and I gasped, taking a step back, because the picture staring up at me from the next page was my dad.

  “Looks like she was playing with both of them about twenty-four years ago,” Evan said.

  “Think that’s why they hate each other? I never actually asked.” I had been curious, but mentioning a Blackwood to my father was never a good idea.

  “I did,” Evan said, “but I didn’t get much of an answer.”

  There was an awkward silence for a minute or two, but then I shook it off. What did it matter, really, if our fathers had both run afoul of the same witch a quarter century ago, even if they hadn’t mentioned it? Knowing my father, he was probably too embarrassed to admit to such a thing. In the meantime, we had far more important things to worry about.

  “Who else is in there? Is it recent?”

  “Pretty recent,” Evan said.

  “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  Evan stood and offered me the chair, but he didn’t leave the room while I scanned the records of over two decades worth of conquests. It made me feel as if I were under a magnifying glass, but I didn’t ask him to leave.

  Belinda had gotten around, no question about that. She had records of at least a hundred men, some local, some out of town. She tended to have two to three men at any given time, and her tastes varied widely. She would see older men, younger men, tall or short, small or large. They tended to be rich or powerful, but that wasn’t always true, either. She would make notations, sometimes indicating that a man made her laugh or was good in bed–with details that made my face burn. At least Evan couldn’t see my reaction, and I didn’t turn to see his.