by Jenn Bennett
As the car’s tires crunched over the circular gravel driveway in front of Lon’s house, I spotted two figures with aqua halos standing together at the front doors. Mr. and Mrs. Holiday lived in a small house at the edge of Lon’s seaside property. When his parents died nine years ago—just before his divorce—he hired them full-time to help take care of Jupe and tend to the house and land.
I was a little shocked the first time I met them. “Mr.” and “Mrs.” were, in actuality, two women in their late sixties. They’d been together for forty years and married in the Netherlands before it was legal in the States. Jupe was the one responsible for nicknaming them Mr. and Mrs. when he was younger. They found it endearing, so it stuck.
“Oh, damn,” Mrs. Holiday called out to Jupe as we exited the SUV. “I was hoping you’d been kidnapped again. Then I could set fire to your room and be done with cleaning it.”
“Dream on, woman.”
“Jupe,” Lon complained crossly.
“Dream on, old lady,” Jupe amended with a teasing smile.
Mrs. Holiday tried to swat at him, but missed when a dog barreled from behind her and lunged for Jupe. Foxglove was a sleek chocolate Lab with a purple collar, and she spent half her time patrolling the clifftop property, the other half trailing Jupe.
“Managed to survive the school day, Jupiter?” Mr. Holiday inspected Jupe’s face while her partner reached for his backpack. They sported similar short, silvery hairdos and looked a bit like Martha Stewart circa 1995, dressed in khakis and billowing, long-sleeved shirts with the collars extended.
“Where’s Mr. Piggy?” Jupe asked as Foxglove gave him one last lick on the cheek.
“Probably burrowed inside the garbage dump you call a dirty clothes pile,” Mr. Holiday said.
I glared at Jupe. “He’s loose?” The last time Jupe let my hedgehog roam free in their house, Lon stepped on a shed quill with his bare feet. He was not happy.
“I closed him up in his crate before school, I swear!” Jupe’s eyes darted between me and Mr. Holiday.
“He must’ve picked the lock with his tiny claws,” Mr. Holiday suggested dryly.
“I don’t think he’s gone far,” Mrs. Holiday added. “He seems to enjoy the smell of your soiled underwear, and God knows there are plenty of pairs scattered around your bed.”
“God, Mrs. Holiday!” Jupe snatched the backpack out of her hand. “Do you enjoy embarrassing me?”
“I live for it, darling,” she answered, gripping the sides of his face long enough to plant a kiss on his nose before he squirmed away and ran inside.
Mr. Holiday waited until he was out of earshot, then turned to Lon. “Anything we should know about your visit to Mr. Dare?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and kicked a chunk of gravel. “Both of the kids taken were Hellfire.”
Mr. and Mrs. Holiday murmured in surprise. They knew about the Hellfire Club. They weren’t members themselves, and I don’t think they quite knew everything that went on during their monthly bacchanales inside the Hellfire caves, but they knew about Lon’s transmutation ability.
“Do you remember a Hellfire member named Jesse Bishop?” Lon asked. “He disappeared after the kids were taken thirty years ago.”
Mr. Holiday thought for a moment. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“For me, either,” her partner agreed. “Why?”
“Dare wants Cady and me to find out if he’s still alive—wants us to track him down, but didn’t give us much to go on.”
Much? Try anything. Dare’s box was full of useless paperwork.
“Well,” Mr. Holiday said, “if the man was a Hellfire member, you might try looking through your father’s things. Your mother always complained that he could fill a warehouse with all the garbage he hoarded.”
Lon grunted. “That’s not a bad idea.”
Jupe’s muffled voice called from within the house. It sounded like he said, “I found him.” I hoped that meant my hedgie hadn’t been eaten by the dog.
“Where do you keep your dad’s stuff?” I asked.
“In the Village. If we leave now, we’ll be back before dinner.” He lifted a brow at Mr. Holiday. “Can you make sure he doesn’t leave the house ward?”
“If you’d let me install that padlock on his bedroom door like I wanted, we wouldn’t have to worry about the ward.”
The corners of Lon’s mouth curled. “Don’t tempt me.”
Lon’s mother died of cancer around the time that he and his then-wife, Yvonne, were splitting up. His father died a few months later, of loneliness, Lon thought: cause of death was never determined. His parents weren’t rich exactly, but they had a respectable amount of property, including the plot where Lon’s house was built. They also owned a couple hundred acres of farmable land outside the city limits, which Lon sold, and his parents’ home in the Village, which he didn’t. The plum-colored Victorian house sat on a quiet block, snug between two other newer homes that would’ve dwarfed it if it weren’t for the trees standing between the properties. Their extensive canopy enveloped the home, adding to the privacy that a tall iron fence provided.
Four gas-burning lamps bordered the crumbling sidewalk, and another hung near the painted front door. The fence locked behind us with a weary squeak as we headed inside.
“I keep the utilities on,” Lon said as my eyes scanned the pale light glowing through the covered first-story window. “Most of the residents in this neighborhood know it’s empty, but I don’t want it to look abandoned and vulnerable to prowlers.”
“You grew up in this house?”
“Yeah.”
Kind of spooky, if you asked me. Like an overgrown gingerbread cottage with lacy decorative trim around the eaves, spindly banisters, and crescent moons punched out of the black shutters—the complete opposite of Lon’s modern house. Like other Victorians on the block, his childhood home fit right in with the fairy-tale vibe of the Village, but the fact that it was empty gave me the creeps. When we stepped inside, the dry, dusty smell that permeated the walls didn’t help, nor did the creaking wood floorboards.
Most of the furniture had been donated to charity, and what little that remained was covered in sheets. I sneezed several times as we headed up three flights of stairs to a locked attic door.
He clicked on a bare bulb that hung from the rafters. I looked around. It wasn’t a finished attic. A ten-by-twenty strip of plywood had been hammered down over ceiling joists and exposed pink insulation, creating a runway of sorts leading away from the stairs. Boxes and wooden crates lined both sides.
“Over here,” Lon instructed, leading me to a separate stack of boxes. We sat on the plywood walkway and sifted though several boxes of paperwork, mostly photos and old Hellfire bulletins. The esoteric organization I grew up in, Ekklesia Eleusia, more commonly known in the occult community as E∴E∴, printed up bulletins that were passed out during classes and meet-and-greets. They mostly advertised things like equinox energy raisings, rituals for members moving up a grade in the order, and the monthly performance of something called the Sophic Mass: think Catholic mass with a naked priestess on the alter while a quasisexual magical play is being reenacted. It’s more pompous and less interesting than it sounds. Drinking wine and gagging on a dry homemade wafer while staring at untrimmed pubic hair and sagging breasts isn’t exactly my idea of holy—and you don’t even want to know what’s in the wafer.
The Hellfire bulletins, however, were a thousand times more amusing. I thumbed through a colorful stack of them from the 1970s and ’80s. They featured inventive Masonic-like symbols, weird drug-fueled poetry, interpretive cartoons of demons in silly Kama Sutra positions, and local restaurant reviews based on the sexual attractiveness of their servers. I noted that the chain fondue restaurant in the Village rated only two smiling penises, but the Alps Fondue Chalet inside Brentano Gardens got an enthusiastic five. That was an awful lot of proverbial dick—we were so going to eat there.
While leafing through one of the ol
d bulletins, a small picture slipped from the pages. It was a group photo of three men and four children. Three smudged names were written on the back: Dare, Merrimoth, Butler. I flipped it over and recognized Dare and a teenager who clearly was his son, Mark. Standing beside him was Lon’s dad, Jonathan Butler. Lon definitely favored his father in the broad build of his shoulders and the way his eyes were eternally creased into slits. And speak of the devil . . . Jonathan had his arm around a wickedly attractive teenager whose light brown hair fell halfway down his back. He was skinny and long, his arms tight with sinewy, lean muscle. No trace of facial hair. A Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell T-shirt clung to his torso. He scowled at the camera like he was trying to break it. A total badass.
“Lo-o-on,” I purred, biting my bottom lip as I flipped the photo around in my fingers to show him.
He tried to take it away from me, but I wouldn’t let him have it.
“You were all kinds of adorable,” I said.
He grunted.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen, I think.”
“Fifteen?” I repeated in disbelief, turning the photo back around to inspect it. “Were you still a virgin at that point?”
“Mostly.” A playful smile tugged up one side his mouth.
“Man oh man, my fifteen-year-old self would have been all over that.”
He snorted. “When I was fifteen, you weren’t even born.”
I stuck my tongue out, then fought him off while pressing the photo to my breast as he tried to pry it out of my hands again. “Stop! This picture makes my heart flutter. Can we take it with us, please?”
“There’s several photo albums’ worth of the same thing at home,” he said.
“You promise?”
He nodded and gave up the fight, returning his attention to the pile of papers in front of him. “I can’t believe Jupe hasn’t forced them on you already.”
“Any from the time you were in the seminary?” I asked.
“That sexy Jesus thing again?” he teased without looking up. “You’re a filthy girl, you know that?”
“I’m being serious.”
He grunted, then answered after a time. “Maybe. My hair was short in the seminary.”
I tried to imagine a devious nineteen-year-old Lon with short hair, playing at being pious. What a shock it must have been for his instructors to realize what Lon really was.
I slipped the photo into the stack of bulletins as he stared at a photocopy he’d found inside a file folder. A strange look bloomed on his face. “Read this list and tell me what’s wrong,” he said as he handed the piece of paper to me.
It was a wrinkled copy of a handwritten journal entry dated October 29, the year the first group of kids was taken. A few things were illegible, crossed out. Seven names were written in bold caps. “Jesus. These are the original kids’ names. Do you think this is a copy from Bishop’s journal? I thought Dare burned all that stuff.”
“Could be. What about the last name on the list?”
“Cindy Brolin . . .” I read. “Wait, that’s supposed to be—”
“Janice Grandin.”
He was right. According to old newspaper articles we’d perused in the banker box Dare had given us, Janice Grandin was the last kid taken, not this Cindy person.
“The other names are all the same, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Did you know Cindy Brolin?”
“No. I didn’t know any of the kids. I went to private school. Back then, all the missing kids were from the public school.”
A reverse of what was happening now. After a few moments of staring at the piece of paper, I noticed something. “Janice Grandin was taken on October thirty-first. This was dated two days before.”
“Huh.” Lon pushed the box away and looked at me, his brow knotted. “If Cindy Brolin was originally on the Snatcher’s wish list, what happened to her?”
Moved out of town.
Cindy Brolin apparently left La Sirena shortly after the original seven teens disappeared. Lon made some phone calls to the La Sirena police, but they didn’t have a crumb about this mystery girl in their records. She was never part of the original investigation, and there was no mention of her in any of the newspaper clippings—nothing online either.
We almost chalked her up as a dead end until a broader search uncovered one Cynthia W. Brolin listed at a downtown address in Morella. Before my 4:00 shift the following day, Lon followed me into the city in his SUV and parked at my house. We took my car and headed downtown.
Morella is a sprawling, flat city. La Sirena’s coastal cliffs are only about ten crow-flying miles to the west, and the Santa Lucia Range cradles the land to the southeast. On a clear, smog-free day, you can see beautiful crinkled mountain peaks stretching around the city in the distance. Most days, however, all you see is concrete and steel.
Cindy didn’t live in the best part of town. On her street, we drove past abandoned storefronts plastered with sun-bleached posters for psychic phone readings, two sketchy Circle Ks, and a rim shop with barred windows and doors. If I thought the Metropark garage near Tambuku was bad, the one attached to her high-rise apartment building was downright sinister. It reminded me that I needed to rework the temporary wards on my car. And maybe it was time to start investing in something more longterm on the underside of my hood.
We found a space on the second level. After parking, I reached over Lon’s knees to the glove compartment box and pulled out a silver plastic angel that fit in the palm of my hand.
“A wind-up parking goddess?” Lon read from the discarded packaging.
“She doesn’t wind anymore. I stripped out her insides and stuffed her with powdered angelica root.” On the flat base was a simple warding sigil. Nothing fancy, but effective. I dug out a piece of gum from my purse and chewed it until it was soft. Mumbling a quick spell, I pressed the chewed gum, now chock full of Heka-rich saliva, over the sigil. A brief wave of dizziness passed over me. I exhaled slowly until it passed, then stuck the newly charged angel on my dash. “It won’t last long,” I explained, “but I’d rather not get my car out of impound after hoodlums decide to take it on a joyride.”
Lon narrowed his eyes at my low-rent magick and made a little noise of appreciative surprise. “You’re kind of turning me on.”
“Just wait until you see what I can do with a balloon and some consecrated Abramelin oil,” I said with a wink.
His low laughter reverberated through the garage as we exited the car.
In the ’70s, Cindy’s building had probably been a swinging bachelor’s dream home. Orange shag carpet lined the lobby and cracked mirrored tile ran down the center of the walls. Whatever it was in its glory, it was just depressing and dirty now.
Cindy’s apartment was on the sixteenth floor. Lon and I exchanged leery glances as we paused in front of her door, listening to the sounds of daytime TV roaring from the apartment to the right, and an angry domestic dispute in the one on the left. Stale cigarette smoke and rancid cooking oil permeated the hallway. A dark spot the size of a basketball stained the carpet near our feet.
After ringing the doorbell twice, the door finally creaked open. Female eyes peeped through two cheap chain locks.
“Cindy?” I asked.
“Yeah?” Her voice was wary.
“Hi,” I said brightly. “My name is Cady and this is Lon. We’re from La Sirena Historical Preservation. We’re writing a book about the history of schools in La Sirena, and we’ve been tracking down alumni for interviews. We were wondering if you had a few minutes to talk to us about La Sirena Junior High?” Probably not the best lie we could come up with, but it was better than our original plan, to pose as cops.
As if it would help prove our story, I held up a copy of the society’s book about coastal farming in the 1800s, taken from Lon’s library. Why Lon owned it, I had no idea. He owned a lot of strange books—and I’m not talking about the ones on demon summoning, either; his a
vid interest in irrigation and composting was far more peculiar, if you asked me.
Confusion swept over the sliver of Cindy’s face peeping through the door crack. “I haven’t even stepped foot in La Sirena in thirty years.”
“Even better,” I chirped, smiling as big as I could. “You’ll have a different perspective. We’ve talked to about ten people so far, and the interview only takes five minutes.”
“I don’t really remember much—”
“You’ll get credited in print,” I suggested.
“No. Sorry.” She started to close the door.
“Or you can be completely anonymous,” Lon offered quickly.
The door stilled.
“It would mean a lot to us if you could help us out,” I added. “We drove all the way out here.”
She blinked at us for several seconds, giving my silver halo a suspicious glance, then shut the door and slid both chains off the locks. When the door reopened, a thin woman with dyed red hair, a dark green halo, and leathery skin stood in front of us. Dressed in a blue Starry Market shirt with a red name tag, Cindy gestured for us to come inside.
Her small apartment was cluttered with small porcelain figurine animals with big eyes: owls, cats, and dogs lined cheap brass étagères along the walls. Two variegated spider plants hung from beaded macramé holders, blocking the view from a single dirty window.
“Hope we’re not catching you on your way to work,” I said, nodding at her name tag as we sat down on her couch. “We’ll only be a second.”
“No, I’m just getting home. I usually work nights, but I had to pull a double.”
“Night shifts for me too,” I said, hoping to make some sort of connection. “My day job is a night job—bartender.”
This seemed to put her at ease. She nodded and sat down. “Working nights is exhausting.”
“Sure is,” I confirmed.
“So what do you want to know?” she asked as she whipped out a red leather cigarette pouch. After popping the clasp, she paused and asked an obligatory, “You don’t mind?” before tugging her lighter out of a small pocket. We didn’t, but I was surprised by the scent of tobacco smoke. Not many Earthbounds preferred it over valrivia.
