Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet)

by Hilari Bell

  "Here lies Johnny Phillipini," she said defiantly, "who took back his great-to-the-fifth-great-grandfather's name when he was in college, even if he never did get around to changing it legally."

  His wife had preferred Phillips, despite the awkwardness of Dad's colleagues and students asking for Professor Phillipini when they called the house.

  He'd been a good teacher. A good husband. Such a good father.

  There was nothing more to say and she was crying. Again. She should be used to it by now.

  Kelsa dropped to her knees and pushed dirt back into the narrow hole, the muddy clay cold and soft on her bare palms. She hadn't worked long enough to raise blisters, but she could feel it in her muscles, in her hands—the simple reality of a grave in the earth.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All part of the cycle, her father would have said.

  After she'd patted down the last of the dirt Kelsa wiped her hands on her jeans, dug a tissue out of her pocket, and blew her nose. She rose to her feet. The tree's quiet spirit, the rustling darkness, comforted her more than any human presence, soothing the raw pain. But nothing could fill the aching emptiness left by her father's absence. There was one more thing to say.

  "Goodbye, Dad."

  She was reaching for the posthole digger, turning to go, when a man stepped out of the shadow of the tree trunk, almost as if he'd stepped out of the tree itself.

  Kelsa started back, stumbling, almost falling. The man—no, boy, for he looked only a few years older than she was—moved forward into the moonlight.

  His face was round, but with high cheekbones, and his straight black hair was perfect for the asymmetric wedges of his fashionable haircut. He wore jeans and gel-soles, like Kelsa did, but his round-collared shirt had buttons like a dress shirt, though the sleeves were fuller and the cut was wrong.

  He was one of the best-looking guys Kelsa had seen outside of a fashion ad, and his cocky smile told her he knew it.

  "Relax," he said. "I think you'll do. I've been looking for you for a long time. I wouldn't dream of doing you harm."

  Kelsa picked up the posthole digger. "I don't know who you are or what you're doing here, and I don't care. I want you to leave. Now."

  His smile never wavered. "But I've only just found you. I can't let you go yet. Besides—"

  He stepped forward so quickly she had no chance to back away, and he brushed the ball of his thumb over the flat spot between her eyebrows. He stepped back just as quickly, at the same time she did, and raised his thumb to his lips. "Yes, you'll do. So I can't afford to lose you. Sorry," he added with another charming smile. "But there it is."

  Kelsa raised the posthole digger, prepared to swing it if he took another step. "Look, mister, I don't know where you come from..." His faint drawl didn't sound quite like any accent she'd heard before, and his skin had a swarthy cast. "...but Utah takes statutory rape seriously. So back off and get out of here, or I'll start screaming."

  The creek might feel like a slice of wilderness, but there were houses only a few hundred yards away and the night was quiet. If she screamed, someone would wake up and report it. For all his creepy weirdness, she didn't feel like he was hitting on her. But if it wasn't that, what was he doing? She didn't lower the digger, even when his smile faded.

  "I'm not trying to ... What's the phrase? Hook up?" The amusement in his voice was clear. "Or in a way I am, though not for the purposes you think. I want to ... recruit you? Yes, that's the right way to put it."

  "A pimp's even worse than a pervert," Kelsa told him, though she didn't think he was a pimp, either. His English was fluent, but something about the phrasing didn't sound right. Maybe this was all some sort of linguistic misunderstanding.

  "You have a very dirty mind," he said. "Not that I object to that. It's the fact that you don't believe in magic that's going to make this difficult."

  Kelsa snorted. "I haven't heard a lot of lines, but that's got to be one of the worst. What part of 'go away' do you find so mysterious?"

  He shook his head sadly. "You don't understand."

  "Oh no, I got it. We'd be magic together. Or maybe it's just you that's magic, with any girl you meet. But you were right the first time. I don't believe in magic."

  The smile came back, crooked now, but still annoying.

  "Then why don't I show you some," the young man said. "It will probably be quicker than arguing."

  Kelsa stepped back once more, but he didn't move toward her. Instead...

  He began to shrink, not crouching, but actually growing smaller. His swarthy skin darkened, his whole body crumpling like a piece of paper laid on a bed of embers. His skin shredded into blackened strips. His clothes folded into a messy pile, restraining a tattered writhing thing that suddenly extended two ragged protrusions and shrieked in a voice so rough it held no humanity at all.

  Kelsa's mind was screaming, but her tight throat emitted only a strangled squawk. She threw the posthole digger at the dark shape and ran, feet pounding on the packed dirt, moving even faster when she reached the rubbercrete path, though she'd have sworn it was impossible to run any faster.

  When she reached the first streetlight the stitch in her side forced her to stop, but she didn't bend over; she spun wildly, trying to peer into the darkness in all directions at once, trying to hear over the beat of blood in her ears. She was back on the grid now, in view of the cameras whether they were scanning or not, so she should be safe. But...

  What the hell was that thing?

  She had read that people once took drugs that gave them hallucinations, long after the intended effect of the drug had worn off—and if this was what drug users saw, then they had to be even crazier than she'd thought! But one of the things Kelsa agreed with her mother's church about was avoiding drugs, so why was she seeing ... whatever it had been?

  The darkness no longer seemed peaceful. Kelsa took the streets back to her house, jogging from one circle of light to the next, her every sense alert for some sign that the thing might be following her.

  Assuming he was still alive after ... after being burned to charred rags, in a lightless, heatless fire, in front of her eyes.

  Kelsa began to run again.

  The PID card in her pocket unlocked the front door as she approached it, and she burst into the house and gasped, "Lights!"

  The hall lights responded, filling the room with a harsh glare.

  "Kel?" Her mother's voice came from the kitchen. "Is that you?"

  Kelsa dashed for the safety of her mother's company as if she were Joby's age.

  Her mother's hair was tousled, and she was wearing her husband's well-worn bathrobe. She frowned when she saw Kelsa in the doorway. "I didn't know you'd gone out. I don't think it's safe for you to go out at night without"—she took a breath and finished it—"without your father."

  The annoyance in her eyes deepened as they ran over Kelsa—Lord only knew what she looked like—and the words grief counseling hung in the air between them.

  If she told her mother what had happened tonight, it wouldn't be grief counseling. Her mother would have Kelsa sitting on the steps of a psychologist's office before the secretary opened the door in the morning. Unless she just called for the men with the tranqs and skipped the intervening steps.

  "I couldn't sleep," said Kelsa. "So I went for a run. Sorry if I worried you."

  Her mother shook her head, guilt replacing the angry concern in her expression. "I didn't even know you'd gone out."

  Kelsa couldn't deal with it now. "I'm going to get a shower. I'll see you in the morning."

  ***

  She left for school earlier than usual, and she was probably going to arrive late; the cottonwood bend was almost a mile out of her way.

  In the early-morning sunlight it was hard to believe that ... whatever-it-was had happened the night before. The guy was probably some sort of magician, Kelsa thought, who got his kicks out of terrifying strangers. In a couple of days she'd see an ad for the great Creepo, Master of Il
lusion, performances every day at three and seven.

  She was still going back to check it out.

  The glade looked as it always did in the daylight. The posthole digger lay in the dappled shade where she'd thrown it. How was she going to get it back to Mr. Stattler's shed? The flickering light made it difficult to see details on the ground behind the tree, and the dry mud was too hard to take an impression. There were a few scuff marks, but that proved nothing except that someone had been there. And Kelsa and her father weren't the only people who hiked down the creek bed.

  Maybe she'd imagined the whole thing. Though if she had, she'd better take her mother up on that grief counseling! If she was hallucinating something like that, she really was crazy.

  Kelsa didn't think she was crazy. If she was going to hallucinate anything it would be her father, or at least his spirit. But he was gone.

  Should she put some stones on the grave to mark it? Stones weren't common in the flats around Utah Lake, but she could find some. Or perhaps she should just smooth some wet mud over the top, scatter a few of last year's dead leaves, and let nature reclaim it?

  She was looking for stones as much as at the grave, so it took her several seconds to realize that the circle of disturbed earth was larger than the neat hole she had dug. What in the world...

  She fell to her knees and brushed away a handful of leaves, revealing the circumference of this much-wider hole. Outraged fury welled up in her heart, blunted by confusion. Kelsa could think of no reason why even the burned-up creep would have dug into her father's grave.

  CHAPTER 2

  SHE WAS LATE FOR SCHOOL, barely reaching the building before the automated security gates closed. Closed gates meant she had to check in through the office, and too many tardies counted against your record.

  As it was, she was able to slip into the classroom and log on to her deskcomp in time to keep from generating an official notice. Her teacher frowned at her, but having to go to your father's funeral in the middle of finals week earned you a little slack. After this weekend there were only two days of "school spirit" activities before the summer break.

  Before her father's illness, Kelsa would have gotten sympathetic glances from several students to make up for the teacher's frown, but in the stresses of the last year she'd pretty much abandoned friends. No one wanted to hang with someone who was more involved with dying than with dates. Kelsa planned to pick up those friendships again, eventually, but she didn't have the emotional energy to work on it now. She'd be lucky to pass today's tests.

  She managed to focus on the life studies final because she liked biology. The human studies teacher (whose classes the students called history about half the time) was still trying to help some of the slower kids understand the political tangle that had led to two Asian wars, so Kelsa's mind was free to wander. Only now, for the first time in months, she found it straying not to her father but to the creep. Had he really dug up her father's grave? Why?

  If she kept the main window on her deskcomp open to the lesson, she could launch a side window to the greater net without its showing up on the teacher's board as a turnout—which was why some teachers powered off all the deskcomps and re-sorted to old-fashioned lectures rather than try to compete with v-chat.

  According to the net there were several stage magicians in the greater Provo area who could be hired to perform at parties and business openings. None of them bore any resemblance to the guy she'd seen last night—who hadn't looked much older than her own fifteen. Too young to be a professional magician. Kelsa was searching through various magic tricks, hoping to find the one he'd used on her, when the chime sounded for class change. For her number studies final (which even the teachers still called math), she had to go to her locker to get her notes.

  The halls had been tiled and painted in relaxing earth tones, but the students who flooded down them in their neon-trimmed stretchies more than made up for the put-students-to-sleep atmosphere the architects were trying for. Kids with long hair had braided flashing neon-cord into it, and one boy had glued rippling red and silver strips into his eyebrows.

  Kelsa had cut one of those sticky strips out of Joby's hair and knew how effective that adhesive was. She was still smiling when she reached her locker ... and found the creepy stranger leaning against it.

  "What are you ... How did you get in here? This is supposed to be a secure building!" Though once he got past the scanners, no one would have questioned him. He looked like a student, though he still wore the same retro cotton shirt he'd had on last night. The crumpled fabric made Kelsa wonder if he'd slept in it. In the daylight he wasn't frightening; just another teenager in the crowd. But there was something in his expression, as he looked over the surging mob, that had Kelsa upping her estimate of his age.

  "With everyone dressed the same, isn't it hard to tell boys and girls apart?" he asked.

  Kelsa blinked in surprise. "No." In truth, there were times when she had to look closely to determine a person's gender. Where did a question like that come from? Was he from some foreign country after all? But even in places like India women wore stretchies and jeans as often as they wore saris. His skin tone might have been Indian, but the bone structure didn't seem quite right.

  "Are you from some other country?" Kelsa asked.

  His curious expression grew more guarded. "You might say that. On the other hand, you might not. Are you ready to believe in magic yet?"

  "Ahhh!" Kelsa buried her hands in her frizzy hair and tugged, a gesture of frustration she'd inherited from her father, along with the hair. "You're not supposed to be in this building! Get out, now, before I—"

  "How do you know that?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "How do you know I'm not supposed to be here? If I was a new student who'd just moved to the city, I could be enrolled in this school."

  Kelsa frowned. No one would come in this late in the year, but it was a big school. She'd been so caught up in family traumas over the last few months, she might have missed any number of new students.

  "Are you enrolled here?" she demanded.

  He hesitated so long the warning chime sounded. "No."

  "Then you shouldn't be in the building," Kelsa repeated. She punched in the numeric code, and her locker door opened. The hall was emptying, the noise diminishing so rapidly she could hear his exasperated sigh.

  "I've told you nothing but the truth. Doesn't that count for something?"

  Kelsa found her note chip in the clutter of readers, book cards, and batteries, and closed her locker before she turned to face him.

  "Did you dig up my father's grave?"

  His dark eyes shifted. His lashes were very long. A couple of the girls who were hurrying past seemed to have noticed that too. They whispered to each other, and one turned to stare at him before they vanished into their classroom. He really was gorgeous. If Kelsa hadn't just buried her father, she might have cared. Right now grief was using up so much of her emotional energy she couldn't even maintain friendships—let alone fall madly in crush with some strange guy.

  "I can explain that," the stranger said. "Look, we got off to a bad start, but I was so happy to find you I didn't think it through. My name is Raven, and I didn't mean to frighten you, but I really need to talk to you. I need your help. I need you to trust me."

  He met her gaze now, eyes full of pleading sincerity. But he hadn't explained, and Kelsa had never met anyone she trusted less.

  "No," she said. "I don't trust you, and this magic you keep talking about is pure carp! Get out of here, or I'll call one of the teachers and have you thrown out."

  The hall was empty now, all the teachers in class, and in the safety of a populated place she hesitated to interrupt them—though you should interrupt a class to report someone stalking you! But weird as he was, she didn't feel stalked. Not exactly.

  His shoulders sagged. "All right. I'll go. For now."

  He turned and walked away, trailing his hand over the long row of lockers ...
and every door he touched popped open down the length of the hall.

  Kelsa's math final was a disaster.

  ***

  Those lock pads were so old, they didn't open half the time even when you punched in the right code!

  Kelsa rolled over in bed and thumped her pillow into a more comfortable shape.

  After struggling through dozens of equations, which never added up the same way twice, Kelsa had spent every free moment of the rest of the day studying magic tricks—the art of illusion, magicians called it. Most of the tricks were clever, and some were totally 'treme. Some could even be performed on the street, without the props filled with hidden compartments or holo shields that most "magicians" relied on.

  But not one of those tricks would enable someone to open a whole row of cranky lock pads—locks that usually failed by stubbornly refusing to let even their owners open them.

  No, not magic. Not even a magic trick. But there were ways to do what he'd done. There were burglar tools that would bypass a cheap lock pad, some of them small enough to strap onto your wrist under a rumpled cotton sleeve.

  Of course, lock trippers, particularly the small ones, were illegal. And they were reported to be horribly expensive even on the black market, which was the only place you could buy one. They were also hard to make, according to the respectable net sites, not something an amateur electro-geek could cobble up in his basement.

  According to the nut-net sites you could build one with old transistors and rubber bands—well, not quite, but the nut-net's claims were almost that wild. On the other hand, if it was easy to put one together would the authorities admit it?

  Either way, that Raven creep was not only a creep but a criminal. And crazy too. He probably made a habit of digging up graves! Kelsa rolled over again. It was warm, but she'd still shut her door against the air chiller and opened her windows to catch the natural cooling of the night.