Trio of Sorcery (9 page)

Joe nodded slowly.

“Despair's not as common an emotion as anger, but it's just as strong. If that's the case, Tamara won't care that her leads turn out to be nothing. From her point of view, it's even better to raise Chris Fitzhugh's hopes, then dash them again. That might be why she keeps bringing Chris these so-called leads, to keep her on that emotional roller coaster.” Di pulled a strand of her ponytail over her shoulder and wrapped it around her finger. “If that's the case, she'll stay glued to Chris Fitzhugh for as long as she can milk what she wants.”

Joe made a face of disgust. “Great. Just great. So—”

“So if that's the case, the solution is to get the poor woman so tranked up she isn't a tasty meal anymore,” Di said bluntly. “If I were you, I'd call in the family physician. Talk her husband into it. Hell, get her checked into the hospital for a while. It shouldn't be hard, and it's not as if she's any use to the case at this point.”

Joe groaned a little, but nodded. “All right. Thanks. I'll be in touch.”

It seemed that Di's hunch was right. There was not one damned useful thing in any of those so-called “leads,” and between them, she and what she was beginning to think of as her “gang” managed to run down every possible interpretation of each one. The whole group was in on it now, even Zaak, and despite Zaak's sometimes credulous nature, he had a good mind. He came up with possible interpretations even
she
hadn't thought of.

A lot of them were just ridiculous. This was Cambridge, and “look by flowing water” not only could mean the river, it could mean sewers, gutters, even water pipes. There was absolutely nothing to be done with anything that vague, but the gang sat down and made a
list
of every possible interpretation, and every possible location in the city that it fit, in exacting detail, just to prove how ridiculous it was. As Marshal pointed out, it wasn't always
going to be necessary to do an actual search. It was only necessary to prove how impossible a search would be.

But what Di hadn't counted on was how personally involved all four of them were getting, including Zaak. Particularly Zaak. There were times when an outsider would have thought that Zaak was Melanie's older brother, not a complete stranger. Unlike Marshal, who was still focused on debunking the leech, Zaak was getting more and more impatient with them for not doing something about Melanie. He kept trying to talk them all into doing a “ritual of finding,” though how he expected to get any real results when he had nothing personal from the missing girl, Di had no idea. Zach didn't always think rationally.

In retrospect, Di should have expected him to try something on his own. But hindsight is always perfect, and it wasn't as if she had—yet—appointed herself as his mentor.

When the time came for all of them to get together one evening, Zaak was nowhere to be seen, even though Di had come bearing the gift of pasta.

“He said he's tired.” Emory shrugged. “I think he's more frustrated than tired. He wants to actually work on the kidnapping case, and that's not what we're supposed to be doing, right?”

Di nodded, and dumped cheese on her spaghetti.
“Joe's made that pretty clear. The department doesn't even want
him
doing anything serious about this case, much less a
bunch of meddling kids.
”

“Ro-roh, Raggy,” said Marshal in a Scooby-Doo voice.

Honestly, Di didn't much blame Zaak. She was frustrated too. Was there more to Tamara than the fact that she was a psychic vampire? Di had gone out to her house three times now—though she had never yet dared to go in—and still had not come up with anything more conclusive than
this woman is bad news.

She thought she knew what Zaak thought. He had said several times that he thought Tamara was behind the kidnapping. And yes, that was certainly possible, but why? Tamara didn't have a motive, not even as a psychic vampire; there were plenty of other desperate people in this city without taking the risk of kidnapping a little girl. And how had she done it? Had she used a confederate? The little girl had been taken by a cop; the other children were unshakable on that point. If she had a confederate, by now the cops should have gotten some clues to that, because surely they were as suspicious of Tamara as Zaak was. And you would think, with all of the publicity about the case, a confederate might be getting nervous.

It just seemed unnecessarily complicated.
Occam's Razor.

Zaak wasn't sulking, he was in his room attempting something magical; Di could feel the energies building up in there. She figured he was trying a ritual to find the
little girl, probably using her photo from the newspapers and a dowsing rod or a pendulum. He wasn't nearly trained and focused enough to pull that off, so it was going to be about as effective as walking the streets and calling her name. In fact, that was a pretty good analogy. She debated interrupting him, but it didn't seem all that important and doing the ritual would make him feel effective.

Joe had another so-called “lead” for them to check out; this one was a bit more specific, and it was going to require some good maps and possibly some legwork. Supposedly Tamara had “seen” Melanie in a room, crying and screaming; the room had a tall, narrow window that faced south, and she had heard a train in her “vision.” She was sure it was in Cambridge proper. So they had to check neighborhoods near enough to train tracks to hear trains, looking for late-Victorian buildings with tall, narrow windows. This was, of course, a lot.

However, buildings where someone would ignore a strange child crying were a lot fewer, especially now. One of the other teams that the cops had was literally investigating every single report of someone hearing a child crying. Nothing had turned up, of course, except for a lot of exasperated parents and children delighted that they'd gotten so much attention for a tantrum, but this did narrow down things considerably, not the least because they could cross off
their
list every building that team had visited.

Tamara might have overstepped herself this time. She was adamant that the location was in Cambridge—not
Boston, not outside the Cambridge city limits—and there actually were not as many places that qualified as the “psychic” might have thought.

And as they worked their way across the map, cross-checking with the police reports, they discovered that up to 90 percent of that ground had already been covered. What hadn't been covered was beginning to look like a wash. The buildings were the wrong sort, industrial, windowless, too modern, or the windows were the wrong shape.

Di gathered up the plates and took them to the sink, and was just turning back to say as much when—

Every internal alarm she had shrilled at her. A fraction of a second later, an icy wind literally tore through the apartment.

Bloody hell!

The lights flickered and dimmed. It wasn't an illusion, either, the wind picked up papers and sent them all over the living room. Di's breath streamed away from her in a mist of ice crystals, it was suddenly that cold in the room.

Em shrieked, Emory reacted as any good boyfriend would by trying to shelter her; Marshal looked frantically around, trying to find a source for the wind and failing.

Reflexively, Di called up mage-sight and immediately put up her shields, because the place was literally full of malevolent energies, razor-edged dark things—

They're hunting—but for what?

She didn't have a chance to think further, as in the next instant, they all arrowed straight through the door of
Zaak's room. The wind died. The temperature dropped further.

And the door burst open.

Any other time, she might have laughed, for Zaak was wearing what he probably hoped were ritual robes, though in fact they looked like nothing so much as an old-fashioned granny nightgown. His hair was standing straight out too, giving him the look of someone trying to ape an Afro and not doing too well.

But she was not going to laugh. Because there was something
in
Zaak—and it was not nice, and definitely not happy.

It glanced wildly around the room, and its eyes lit first on Di.

It couldn't have liked what it saw, because it immediately switched its gaze to Em. With a horrible laugh, Zaak leaped at the girl before Emory could react, and tore her out of the other man's arms. Em opened her mouth to scream, and so did Zaak, though his scream was silent—

And a thick column of oily black smoke laced with that same malevolent energy poured out of Zaak's mouth and into Em's.

Zaak staggered back as Em straightened, looked around, and laughed harshly, angrily.

It was a male laugh, a horrible baritone.

And with that, Di's thoughts solidified from
what the hell is this?
to
oh, hell no
—

Di knew what it was. Or what it likely was. She'd been
studying these things long before she ever came to Harvard, and an interest in old horror movies had led her to
this
particular menace years before she was ever a Guardian. It hadn't been easy, doing that research in a small town, but Memaw had access to the libraries of a lot of friends, and many of them had books going back a long, long way.

This was a dybbuk, a kind of angry ghost, laden with hate and guilt, that walked the earth until it could find someone to posses. Whatever Zaak had been doing in his room had called it and given it an opening, but dybbuks never permanently possessed anyone of the same sex, and this one was male. With only two females in the room to choose from, one of them protected, it had leapt to Em. And it was a good thing that Di had obsessively researched them back when she first discovered they were real and not the figment of some movie writer.

Sulfur! I need
sulfur!

She also needed to keep it
here,
and there was one good way to do that quickly; the means were even close at hand.

Di snatched up the familiar blue-and-white cardboard container of table salt from its place next to the stove. With a fast gabble of the words of consecration, she blessed the stuff, and before the dybbuk could run out the door—gods only knew where it was going to go if it got out of the apartment—she jumped over the couch and poured a line of blessed salt across the threshold. And then, in quick succession, she poured more lines across the windowsills, the
fireplace, and the doors into the bedrooms. Only then did she turn, heart pounding, to see that there was no danger that it was going to escape at that moment.

The dybbuk was chasing Zaak—and in Em's hand, the spirit clutched the knife Em had been using to cut up the garlic bread. Whatever Zaak or Zaak's family had done to tick off this particular spirit, it clearly wanted Zaak's head on a platter.

“Grab her!” Di shouted. Zaak was shrieking. And Em was screaming furiously in that low baritone and waving the knife. But the dybbuk was not used to Em's body yet, so it wasn't so much chasing Zaak as stumbling after him like a movie zombie. So far Zaak was able to keep well out of reach.

She dashed into Zaak's room, hoping that she was going to find what she needed in there. Behind her, she heard Emory and Marshal shouting Em's name, and the thing that was in Em roaring furiously. She blinked in the dim light, trying to get her eyes to adjust to only candles.

Zaak dashed into the room and slammed the door, panting and leaning on it. “Light!” she snapped, and he flipped on the light switch reflexively. The overhead bulb, like all the overhead lights in this old building, was dim and very yellow, but at least now she could see. More to the point, this was Zaak's room and he was in it.

“I need sulfur, a shofar, a Bible, and candles.
Now!”
she snapped. He blinked at her for a moment, then began scrambling in a cupboard by the door. His bedroom was
as big as her whole studio. The bed was up against the wall, and the cleared floor held his “ritual space.” Di looked at his ritual circle and gritted her teeth. Idiot. Candles, little brazier with charcoal and wormwood, circle drawn in paint on a piece of oilcloth, candles at the cardinal corners. She recognized the glyphs chalked in around the periphery. A kabbalistic summoning circle and he didn't even specify
what for!