The Nightmare Affair (11 page)

I trotted up the steps to the third floor, eager to strip out of my wet clothes. I thought I might even try to take a nap before dinner.

But when I came through the door into the living quarters, a girl I didn’t recognize was sitting on the couch across from Selene at her desk. The girl was tall with broad shoulders that sloped down from her neck, giving her a stooped appearance. In sharp contrast to her sturdy body, her face seemed made of porcelain, the features smooth and delicate. She was very pretty. Especially her eyes. They were so big and bright they looked like a pair of Christmas bulbs. Her small, pointed ears told me she was a fairy.

“Hi, Dusty,” Selene said, waving me in. “This is Melanie Remillard.”

It took me a moment to place the name. “Oh, you’re Rosemary’s best friend.”

“
Was
her friend,” Melanie corrected me.

I swallowed guiltily. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

Melanie shook her head. “No, it’s my fault. I’m still getting used to the idea that she’s gone. The past tense helps.”

“I understand.”

An awkward silence descended, and I wondered what to do with myself. A puddle of water had formed on the floor around my sneakers, and I was beginning to shiver from the cold.

Selene stood up. “Here, let me help.” She waved her hand over me and at the same time sang a couple of notes, invoking her siren magic. A burst of hot air swept over me, making me shiver harder. But a moment later, I was perfectly dry and warm.

“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t help being envious—Selene made everything about magic look easy.

She waved me off. “Melanie’s here to talk to you, Dusty.”

“Oh, right.” I crossed the room to my desk chair and sat down. Even though it was against my nature to be patient, I managed to sit quietly, waiting for Melanie to begin.

“Go on,” Selene prodded. “Tell her.”

Melanie bent forward and picked up her shoulder bag from the floor beside the chair. The bag was covered in bright sunflowers, so at odds with its owner’s glum mood. Melanie reached inside and pulled out a small, tan-colored book. She handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

“Rosemary’s diary. I thought it might help.”

“With what?”

“Finding her killer.” Melanie’s voice trembled as she spoke, her anger coming off her in hot waves.

Selene said, “Melanie thinks there’re clues in there.”

“Then why give it to me? I mean, the police are investigating, right? You should give it to them.”

“Rose wouldn’t have wanted them to have it,” said Melanie. “There are personal things in there nobody should know about. Especially her parents.”

I nodded, having a pretty good idea of the sort of stuff she meant. I’d kept a diary myself until two years ago when a girl from our rival soccer team stole it from my backpack and posted an entry I’d written about my first kiss online. Lesson learned: writing about personal experiences in the Information Age—not such a good idea.

“She was seeing somebody,” Melanie continued. “In secret.”

I sat forward on the edge of my chair. “Who?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. But she talks about him a lot in there. She calls him by the initial
F
. I don’t know what it stands for.”

“But you two were best friends, right? So why wouldn’t she tell you who it was?” I said.

Melanie grimaced. “She couldn’t risk anybody finding out even by accident. Whoever this guy is, she would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for dating him.”

A forbidden love affair?
I suddenly felt like the guest star in a cheesy police procedural TV show. “Was it a teacher?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I frowned. “Well, who else could it be?”

“A nonfairy,” said Selene.

“Huh?”

“That’s right,” said Melanie. “Her parents would’ve disowned her if they found out she got involved with a darkkind or witchkind.”

“But why? I mean, I know interkind dating is a bit of a no-no, but lots of people still do it.”

“The rules are more rigid when you’re the
consul
’s daughter,” said Melanie.

“When you’re
any
politician’s daughter,” Selene added with a note of bitterness in her voice. “Or
son
for that matter.”

Melanie sighed. “You would know.”

I looked between them, not understanding.

“Lance’s dad’s objection to his son dating a siren was just one of
many
reasons why we broke up,” Selene said. “The rest were all because he’s a jackass.”

I snorted.

“Anyway,” Melanie said. “Rosie was pretty serious about this F guy. You’ll see it for yourself in there.”

I opened the diary and scanned the first couple of pages. Thankfully, Rosemary’s writing was big and neat, easy to read. I looked up at Melanie. “So what makes you think this secret boyfriend is the one who killed her?”

“She had a habit of sneaking out of the dorm to see him. It was what she was doing that night, according to the last entry.”

Well, that put a different spin on things. It didn’t seem likely a secret boyfriend would be connected to a Keeper spell. Maybe it was a case of bad timing. She might have been on the way to meet the boyfriend when the killer attacked. If so, it was possible the guy had seen or heard something.

“Did you tell the police about the boyfriend?”

A guilty expression crossed Melanie’s face. “Only that she might have been meeting someone.”

I debated whether or not I should hand the diary over to Sheriff Brackenberry. In the ordinary world, this would be considered evidence and not handing it over could get me in big trouble. But this was the magical world. All the rules were different here.

“Please,” Melanie said, her voice trembling again. “You’ve got to help. The police are just going to screw up like they always do.”

“What makes you think
I
won’t screw up?”

“You’re Moira Nimue’s daughter. She can do things nobody can.”

Melanie’s attitude toward my mother was so different from the norm, I was taken aback, unable to respond.

She went on. “And you’re a dream-seer. That gives us a better chance than the police. I want to find the killer and make sure he gets what he deserves.”

I shivered at the menace in her tone. It reminded me why The Will restricted the use of combative magic. Melanie Remillard would kill the guy if she got a chance, no question.

“So will you look into it?” Melanie asked.

I considered the question. Since I was already looking for the killer, I didn’t see how taking a more hands-on, detective-like approach would hurt. Besides, the idea was sort of appealing. I might actually get somewhere. It would certainly be easier than trying to muddle my way through Eli’s dreams.

“I’ll try,” I said. “But I’ve got a couple of questions.”

Melanie sat up, looking eager. “Ask me anything.”

“Do you know if Rosemary was wearing a ring on her right hand that night?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why are you so sure?” asked Selene.

“Because she only had one ring and she never took it off, not since her father gave it to her last summer for her eighteenth birthday. She loved that thing—don’t know why. It was pretty enough, but it was made of
iron
, of all things.”

Iron had lots of magical properties, including the ability to repel ghosts and other spirit-based creatures. “Hang on. I thought iron was poisonous to fairies.”

Melanie shook her head, a slight grin on her face. “Nope. That’s just a rumor fairykind started back in medieval times to trick ordinaries into believing we’re less dangerous than we really are.”

“Oh.” I should’ve guessed that. Magickind started rumors about themselves in the ordinary world all the time, the latest example being the ordinary pop culture obsession with vampires as misunderstood victims who’d rather kiss a human than kill one.
So
not true.

Melanie said, “But it’s not completely false. We’re not fond of iron, in general. Especially as jewelry. It has a way of messing with our magic. It doesn’t block it exactly, but it can sometimes make a spell go awry. Nobody wants to set the sofa on fire when you’re trying to light the lamp, you know?”

I understood the dilemma all too well. Shame I couldn’t blame my magic going awry on something as simple as an unfortunate piece of jewelry.

“What did the ring look like?” asked Selene.

“Just a band with a couple of imbedded diamonds, and a silver coating on it so you wouldn’t know it was iron.”

If Rosemary had only gotten the ring last summer, then she hadn’t been a Keeper for very long. Did that mean the Keeper spell was new, too? I tried to think of the most current events among magickind, but nothing struck me as significant. Not that I paid a lot of attention to that sort of thing. Then again, it was possible the spell wasn’t new at all. She might have been made part of a preexisting spell through a transference ritual. Given what Lady Elaine had said about the Keeper ring being a rite of passage, that seemed more likely.

“Do you think the ring has something to do with her murder?” said Melanie.

“Maybe.”

A loud crack of lightning made us all jump.

Melanie glanced at her watch and blanched. “I’ve got to go.” She stood up. “If you have any more questions, let me know.”

“Okay.”

She picked up her bag and slid it over her shoulder. She looked back at me, her expression deadly serious. “Promise me something. I want to know who it is. I want to be the
first
.”

Not hardly, I thought as I gave her an unenthusiastic nod. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But I had a sinking feeling it was too late to back out now.

8

Wannabe

I didn’t read any entries in the diary during school the next day since I was too afraid of getting caught with it. The day went by quickly and smoothly all the way until sixth-period alchemy, by far my worst subject. Alchemy was basically chemistry, but with magic ingredients. I just didn’t have the right temperament for it, unlike my lab partner, Britney Shell.

Britney was a mermaid with curly strawberry blond hair and eyes the color of aquamarine set in between a rather large, bulbous nose. Like all mermaids, her pale, almost translucent skin held a natural sheen that made her glisten in strong sunlight as if she was wet. And also like a lot of mermaids, she was painfully shy, almost socially comatose. It was this same shyness that made her so good at alchemy. She had no trouble ignoring distractions while she carefully counted the number of stirs and added the right ingredient at the right time.

If our teacher, Ms. Ashbury, would only allow Britney to do all the hands-on stuff for us all the time, my grade would’ve been a lot higher. But Ashbury was an equal opportunity teacher, which meant today was my turn to do the mixing while Britney read the instructions for the cooling draught we were tasked with making.

“Add this on stir twenty-one,” Britney said, holding out to me a vial of pureed bladderwrack leaves. I took it from her when I reached nineteen, trying not to be distracted by the odd webbing of skin in between her fingers. She never bothered to hide it with a glamour. You’d think I’d get used to stuff like that, but it seemed I never did.

Still, I managed to dump the bladderwrack into the beaker at the right time, turning the bubbling liquid from gray to dark green.

“Good job,” Britney said in her tiny, musical voice.

I beamed at her, delighted with how well I was doing. But then my gaze fell on Eli at the next table. He was watching me with an expression that sent jitters bouncing along my nerve endings. It wasn’t hostile, exactly, but inscrutable and full of that intense vibe I usually got from him, as if he were more physically present than everybody else in the room. All day yesterday and today he hadn’t said a word to me about getting him in trouble with Lady Elaine, but he just might be thinking about it now.

I ripped my gaze off him, running a nervous hand through my hair. When I dropped the hand to my side, I hit the ragwort jar on the table, knocking it to the floor.

“Crap,” I said.

“We need to add that next!” Britney sounded close to panic as she stooped, trying in vain to gather up the minced leaves strewn among broken pieces of clay. “Don’t lose count,” she added.

“Twenty … seven, twenty-eight.”

“Here, use ours.” It was Lance. He set a jar full of dark leaves on the table in front of me.

Without thinking, I picked up the measuring cup, dipped it into the jar, and then dumped the contents into the beaker just as I reached thirty.

Boom.

A streak of lightning exploded from the beaker, shattering it. Hot liquid splattered my hair and forearms, which I had managed to raise in front of my face just in time. I yelped in pain, and ran to the sink, quickly rinsing off the liquid before it could burn my skin.

“What’s going on here?” Ms. Ashbury stomped over to us, her face livid with anger, and her dark eyes blazing in between her hooked nose. I’d never seen a witch look more like a witch in my life. Even her dyed-purple hair looked menacing. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Uh…” I sputtered. “I have no idea. I just added the ragwort, and it exploded.”

“
What
ragwort? Show it to me.”

I looked at the jar Lance had brought over, realizing my stupidity.

Ms. Ashbury picked it up and smelled it, her nose wrinkling. “This is mountain ash, not ragwort. What were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t her,” Britney said. “Lance gave it to us. He did it on purpose.”

I smiled at her. It took a lot of courage for someone like Britney to call out Lance on one of his tricks.

Ms. Ashbury glanced at Lance, who was barely holding back a grin. She pointed a long, crooked finger at him. “You know better, Mr. Rathbone. Detention. Monday morning. My office.” She looked back at me. “Be more careful next time, Dusty. Now you and Britney clean this up.”

The bell rang a few minutes later, and Britney and I were only halfway through sweeping up the mess. Eli came over, carrying a dustbin. I glared at him, convinced he’d played a part in what happened.