“Just… that’s not much of a plan, there, Penny. We need to make a plan to make a plan?”
“That’s not what I said.”
He sighed. “No, I know. I guess I don’t know if we even can prepare for the Green King. He’s going to attack, and we’re going to have to fight. And that’s all there is to it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe he’s got a weakness. Or maybe we can be doing something now to make ourselves more powerful.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. We need to find that out.”
We were quiet.
I sighed heavily. “Okay, okay. But until then, I guess it doesn’t make sense not to call Adam.”
“You sure?” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Are you saying it’s fine when you don’t really think it, and then you’re going to punish me for it later?”
“Lachlan.” I glared at him. “Call him, damn it.”
“Fine.” Lachlan picked up his phone. He put it on speaker phone and dialed.
Together, we listened as it rang.
“He’s probably going to let it go to voicemail,” I said. “He doesn’t recognize your number.”
“Yeah, probably,” agreed Lachlan. “But at least we tried, right?”
Abruptly, the ringing stopped. “Hello?” said a male voice.
“Adam?” said Lachlan. “Is this Adam Day?”
“Uh, yeah.” Adam sounded wary.
“I’m Lachlan Flint. You might remember me from years ago. I was Tim Abbott’s stepfather.”
“Tim who?”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. “Don’t play dumb, Adam. You spent every other weekend sleeping over at our house. You remember me. You and Tim were best friends.”
“Uh… sorry, man. I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
“I don’t,” said Lachlan.
But the kid sounded convincing. I wondered if Lachlan had remembered wrong or gotten the wrong kid’s number off Facebook or something.
“Look, if you’re talking about that Tim kid that shot his sister? I did go to school with him. But I barely knew him. We weren’t friends or anything like that.”
“I wonder if we could meet. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I don’t see why. Like I said, I didn’t know that kid.”
“Well, you did know him for one thing. And I want to talk to you, because he was murdered, and—”
“Seriously, I’m not the person you think I am. I was not that guy’s friend. Now, I’m sorry, but I’m going to hang up now.” The connection was severed.
Lachlan sucked in breath through his nose. “That little shit was always a really good liar.”
“Are you sure you don’t have him confused with someone else?”
“Oh, positive,” said Lachlan. “And if I didn’t suspect that brat before, I sure as hell do now. We’re going to his house. He also left his address on Facebook for everyone to see.”
* * *
The door to the apartment opened and a young girl in her early twenties stuck her head out. We were up on the second floor. The apartments all opened onto a covered concrete walkway that ran around the house. The doors were all dark green with numbers on them.
“Hey,” said the girl, who was wearing a dirty black tank top and pair of jeans. “Can I help you?”
“We’re looking for Adam Day,” said Lachlan.
“Oh, yeah, I’m his roommate,” said the girl. “He’s not here right now. Should I tell him you stopped by?”
“Do you expect him soon?” said Lachlan.
“Uh… well, he usually gets home around this time, but he’s not exactly predictable.”
“We’ll come in and wait,” said Lachlan.
“Yeah…” The girl swallowed nervously. “Who are you exactly?”
Lachlan flashed her his badge, too fast for the girl to see that it was from a completely different state.
“Holy shit,” said the girl, stumbling back from the door. “What did Adam do? Did that girl he was seeing send you? Did he actually hurt her, because he said he was joking, but the way he was yelling at her that night…” Then the girl seemed to think better of what she was saying. She swallowed again. “I mean… you didn’t hear that from me. You gonna tell him I said that? I have to live with the dude, and he’s going to be so pissed off—”
Lachlan pushed past the girl into the apartment. I followed him.
The girl sunk her hands into her hair. “Oh crap. Oh crap.”
I shut the door behind us. We were in a standard living room, mostly empty, with the kind of bland beige carpet and beige walls one expects from an apartment complex. The only piece of furniture in the room was a saggy couch. There was a TV hanging on the wall, and the beige carpet was a little stained.
“Where’s Adam’s room?” asked Lachlan.
“Uh, through here,” said the girl, taking us back there.
“Are you really afraid of him?” I said to her.
“No, he’s cool,” she said. “As long as I leave him to do his business, he leaves me to do mine. So, you know what? If you want to wait for him, that’s fine. But I’m not going to be here when he finds the cops in the house.” She stalked down the hallway, gathered up a backpack next to the door, and left.
Lachlan pushed open the door to Adam’s room.
“If that girl is afraid of him, then maybe she’s in danger,” I said. “Should we do something for her?”
“Well, she’s gone now,” said Lachlan, shrugging.
I chewed on my lip. Was his cavalier attitude a sign of some inner darkness?
Adam’s room was very sparse. There was only a bed and a desk in the room. The rest of the space was bare. The carpet in here was the same beige as in the rest of the apartment, but it was spotlessly clean. Next to the bed, the door to the closet stood open, revealing rows of shirts and pants, all hanging on identical black plastic hangers. All the hangers hung the same way. All the clothes were equally distant from each other.
“Neat freak,” said Lachlan. “Control freak.”
“Well, he’s going to love finding us in his room then,” I said.
Lachlan smirked. “Yeah, it’ll probably piss him off.”
I wondered if that was a typical Lachlan thing to do or if he was behaving differently.
Before I had too much time to consider it, though, Lachlan was tugging black fabric boxes out of the top of the closet and looking through them. The were full of knick knacks, baseballs, playing cards, and other various sundries.
Then Lachlan took out a smaller box from within the bigger fabric box. This was a different sort of box. It was covered in leather and it had a hinge lid. It was about half a foot square.
Lachlan took it over to the bed and carefully opened it up.
Together, we peered inside. The box contained a pair of woman’s underwear, a cell phone, and a lock of brown hair tied off with a ribbon. The cell phone had a sticker on the back of it, the swirling wings of a butterfly.
“Creepy,” said Lachlan, taking out his own phone. He snapped a few pictures of the contents of the box.
“You think that means something?” I said.
Lachlan shrugged. “I don’t know. His roommate said he might have hurt the girl he was seeing, didn’t she? Maybe this is evidence.”
“Well, if it’s evidence, should you be touching the box?” I said. “I mean, you probably left fingerprints on it, and we’re searching without a warrant—”
“We’re not here in an official capacity,” said Lachlan. But he shut the box and wiped it down with his sleeve anyway.
The door to the apartment slammed.
“Crap,” said Lachlan, shoving the box back inside the fabric box.
We had just gotten the fabric boxes back into the top of the closet when a guy appeared in the doorway. He had blue skin with scaly ridges around the top of where his hairline should be, but he didn’t have any hair, j
ust more scales on the top of his head. “What the hell?” he said by way of greeting.
The kid was a drake!
Lachlan turned away from the closet. “Hi, there, Adam. Now that we’re face-to-face, you’ll remember me.” He cocked his head. “You look different, however.”
“What are you doing here?” said Adam.
“How long you been a drake?” said Lachlan.
Adam shoved his hands in his pockets. “Isn’t it like against the law for you to be in my house without permission?”
“Your roommate let us in,” said Lachlan. “So, you get into an accident with dice in your system, or did you do this to yourself on purpose?”
Adam fingered the blue scales on the top of his head. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about that.”
“You still going to deny that you were best friends with Tim?” said Lachlan.
Adam sighed. “What do you want? Tim’s dead, isn’t he? What does it matter what we did when we were kids?”
“Maybe it doesn’t.” Lachlan spread his hands. “Or maybe you had some beef with him. Where were you the night of May thirtieth?”
“I don’t know,” said Adam. “I don’t even know what day that was.” He dug his phone out of his back pocket, and swiped his screen for several seconds. “Let me look at a calendar.” He was quiet a minute. “Why you asking anyway?”
“That’s the day that Tim was murdered,” said Lachlan.
Adam’s chin jutted out. “You don’t think I killed him? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. I’ve never even been to see him in jail. I definitely couldn’t have gotten in there in the middle of the night.”
“Well, you’re a drake,” said Lachlan. “You’re a magical creature now. You wouldn’t have needed to be inside the prison at all. You could have used magic from outside.”
Adam gaped at us. “No way. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. I was with a friend that night. We hung out all night.”
“You have a name for this friend?”
“Peter Marsh,” said Adam. “Go talk to him. He’ll tell you.”
Lachlan took out his own phone and made a note of the name. “Thanks for your time, Adam. We’ll be in touch.”
* * *
“Kid’s suspicious, you can’t deny that,” said Lachlan.
He and I were in the living room at his father’s house. Since we didn’t have a whiteboard, Lachlan and I were looking at a list of suspects on his laptop’s screen.
“Especially since he’s a drake,” I said. “Easier for him to get magic if he has dice connections. With the guys in the jail, we’ve got to prove that they got talismans somehow.”
“Right, and that’s why we think Simon Wells the drug dealer is most likely.”
“Plus, Wells is an ass.”
“Plus that.”
We squinted at the screen. There were three names on there. Simon Wells, Adam Day, and Levi Bradley.
“So, who’s most likely for you?” said Lachlan.
“I don’t know, I guess Wells,” I said. “You?”
“I gotta go with Adam,” said Lachlan. “Kid always gave me a bad vibe.”
“Well, I don’t know about vibes,” I said, “but he’s definitely up there for me too. It’s only that I’m not sure how easy it would be to do magic from outside the jail.”
“Yeah, it does seem a little weird,” said Lachlan.
“I mean, if he couldn’t see what he was doing, how would he possibly smother Tim? That kind of magic takes precision. You can’t go in blind.”
“Well, maybe he got himself up to Tim’s window.”
“Like, how?”
“I don’t know? Using magic to lift up the fences or something?”
“Wouldn’t that trip alarms?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we should find out if there are alarms on the fences. We’ll ask the next time we go back to the jail.” He leaned his head back on the back of the couch and looked at the ceiling. “Maybe he got the alarms turned off somehow.”
“With magic?”
“Sure. Or maybe he’s good with computers or something.” Lachlan turned to look at me. “Hey, didn’t Zach say that the doors are electronically controlled?”
“He did,” I said. “But he also said that they’re manned at all times.”
“Maybe somebody could hack the system, though?” said Lachlan.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t really know. I guess I could call Connor and ask.”
“Yeah, do that,” said Lachlan. “I think that might be an angle we should look into.”
“What about Levi Bradley?”
“I don’t know, everything with him is thin. I’m not even sure why they suspect him of killing other inmates if they have no evidence that he did,” said Lachlan. “But if that other guy—that Poole guy—was killed by another inmate, and Bradley’s got magic, then maybe he did both Poole and Tim. Of course, it could have just as easily been Wells. Maybe Poole was bad into drugs too.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to say much at this point,” I said. “We are making progress, aren’t we?”
“Sure,” he said. He brightened. “Hey, maybe if someone hacked the doors, it’s not magic after all. Then it’s still a cool locked-room mystery.”
“But if we figure out how the doors opened, it’s solved,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, sagging back into the couch. “I guess you’re right.”
We were quiet for a few moments.
“Lachlan?” I said.
“Huh?”
“Can we talk about your dad?”
Lachlan huffed. “I don’t see why.”
“What is it that he did? Why are you so angry with him?”
Lachlan put away his phone. “Penny, come on.”
“I just… I don’t understand. You know that I don’t have contact with my family either, but if my grandparents came back and they were apologetic, if they wanted a relationship with Wyatt, I feel like I’d have to at least hear them out. But your dad came and tried, and you burnt the toaster.”
Lachlan groaned. He got up from the couch and walked over to the window. He peered out into the darkness of the evening. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, I know that, but I need to understand.”
He sighed. He rested his forehead against the window. “Look, it’s not like he did one thing. It’s a whole bunch of things, over the years. He was awful to my mom when they were married. Took her for granted, called her names. I remember they’d get in fights, and he’d scream at her that she was lazy, just because she’d been too busy with dinner to vacuum or whatever. He was a dick. And when he moved out, I didn’t miss him. I felt like, ‘Good riddance.’ I know a lot of teenagers have trouble when their parents split up, but I didn’t. I never wanted him back in my life, and mostly he’s kept his distance, which just cemented to me that he didn’t want to be part of my life at all either, so I was fine with that.”
I waited, wondering if he would say anything else. But he only stared out the window. “He, um, didn’t know Hallie?”
Lachlan sighed. “I guess that was the one time I ever saw him make any effort at all. And I was young and dumb then, so maybe I did let her see her grandfather, but…”
“But you won’t do that for Wyatt?” I asked.
He turned to look at me. “That’s not fair.”
I twisted my hands together. “We live on opposite sides of the country, Lachlan. When are we ever going to have the chance to see your father again? If he wants to reconcile, this could be your only shot.”
“Don’t care,” said Lachlan, turning back to the window.
And now, I saw what it was he was looking at out there. He was looking at the dragons. There were nearly twenty of them now. They were all standing outside the window in a V, with one multi-colored blue and red dragon at the point and the others all fanning out behind him. They stood at attention, and they were solemn and beautiful.
Lachlan cocked his head
to one side, and the formation of the dragons changed. Now, they were making a W, with two points.
“What are you doing with them?” I said. “You can’t just play with them. They aren’t toys.”
“Sure, they are,” said Lachlan. “These rogues have never been anything other than rogues. They’re soulless nightmares that were sent to this world from some other dimension, a curse that’s been put on us. The fact that I can control them is a blessing. It gives us an advantage, and we need any advantage we can take.”
I licked my lips. “Lachlan… do you ever wonder if this power is making you… different?”
“Different how?”
“Well, the way you’re making those dragons move—”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “It’s like they’re part of me. I feel them all the time. They’re… extra toes or something. Things I can wiggle if I want.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound disturbing,” I said.
“Does it?” He gazed at the dragons.
I went over and pulled the curtains shut. “Do you remember when we were deep inside the blood bond, and we ordered those vampires to their deaths like it was nothing? Maybe we felt as though they were extensions of us too.”
“Not remotely the same thing,” said Lachlan. “Those were beings with free will and personality. These dragons have none of that. If I don’t control them, they’re monsters. If I do control them, I can do some good.”
“So… you don’t feel any different?”
“No,” he said. He gave me a worried look. “Do I seem different?”
I twisted my fingers together more. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think…”
He reached out and grabbed both of my hands, forcing me to stop twisting them up. “Okay, well, keep an eye on me, all right? If you see something, speak up.”
“You sure? It won’t make you mad?”
“If it does, you’ll know something’s wrong.” He pulled me close and kissed my forehead.
I wrapped my arms around him. We stood there together, next to the window. Behind the curtains, I could see the outlines of the dragons, standing like sentries, their black eyes staring at nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Connor laughed. “Man, when Felicity finds out you called me instead of her, she is going to lose it.”
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