This was a quiet area, for the most part populated by moderately well-off pensioners with small, well-ordered homes. Aurelie found what she wanted soon enough. One such home, painted white and with a neat garden in ordered rows, with an elderly lady gardening outside it. Sighing inwardly, she readied herself.
Phyllis Brimer enjoyed the fresh air. Even after her husband had died, weeding was still a chore that she kept to firmly as her own. She knew that a lot of the other ladies on Cherry Close employed part-time gardeners, but not Phyllis.
Something about the earth, the fresh loam and the digging, made her feel young again. Made her think of happier times. She busied herself contentedly, and then was surprised when a shadow fell over her.
She looked up to see a ruffian blocking her view. A young man. He looked a bad sort, but what was most noticeable was his eyes. They were bright red, his hair a vivid white. An albino then, she supposed. There was a hideous maroon tattoo all over his right cheek, like a J’, and it stretched as he grinned at her.
Then he started kicking down her newly-painted fence. Deliberately. Staring at her, as if challenging her to say anything. “What are you doing?” she protested, tremulously. Hoping that he wouldn’t notice her trembling. “What the – ”
He smirked. Then he drew a knife, which he spun idly in his fingers. She screamed, and began to back off for the safety of the house.
Slamming the door shut and the safety latch on behind her, Phyllis steadied herself. Somehow it barely seemed real. Outside she could hear the vandalism and destruction continuing. The cops. She had to call the cops. She lifted the receiver, and dialled 911.
It took longer for the patrol car to arrive than Aurelie had expected. Presumably they still had their hands full dealing with the day’s events, and were a little short on numbers. She watched as one of them got out, the other remaining in the car.
As the old lady opened the door for the first cop, Aurelie stared hard and concentrated on the second.
Officer Beckley remained in the car. By the sounds of it the punk had long gone, but it wouldn’t be a smart move to leave the car unattended so that Vlad could take a joyride in it. Honestly, Beckley was actually surprised. He’d threatened the old lady, sure, but from what the dispatcher had told him he hadn’t even made the effort to rob her.
The kid had been just a regular dumb punk until a couple of years ago. During one arrest he’d pulled a gun... the cop who’d survived had sworn that he’d been searched already, but somehow there’d been an explosion. They hadn’t been able to prove it was him. Any judge would throw out a case where the officer at the scene had said on tape that the kid had been stripped of weapons and cuffed...
Since then he’d been caught up with a few times, and each time he’d been able to disappear without trace, losing his tails with ease.
Not that he, Chris Beckley, had ever met the kid himself. Actually, he supposed he’d better check the records. He moved over a little to better access the computer, then brought them up...
Yeah, there was the last mugshot they’d been able to get of him. ‘Scythus, Vladimir. Wanted for...’ A whole string of offences there. Wanted for questioning too. Lived with his older brother Damian, a bastard far worse than Vlad was. No cop wanted to go pick either of them up though, in case they were the ones that got killed in some mysterious... accident. He looked through the files. Usual haunts... former gang allegiances... currently registered for schooling at Oakley High?
That, Chris remembered, was the school that had been blown up. Regular set of delinquents there. His Julie, and he smiled as he thought of her with her pretty blonde hair, his Julie went to Everwood. He’d never allow her to even speak to the kind of kids who went to Oakley. Not that they were all bad, he had to admit. The few ruined the place for the rest of them, though.
He suddenly focused, and stared at the screen. Then he began to punch in a new requests.
S – A – T – O – S – H- A.
Oh, yes, he thought, as the records were flagged up. Quinton, Satosha. The kid went to Oakley too. He’d been in trouble a few times for fighting, nothing serious. Satosha struck Chris as the kind of kid who was a decent sort, a guy who could maybe straighten out with the right support. Still, he did have enough of a record to be on the system.
I – M – M – I – G – R – A – N – T R – E – G – I – S – T – E – R
G – E – R – M - A – N
K – L – A – U - S
Green card registration. Chris was... sure he’d heard the name before, maybe someone at the station had mentioned it or something. It was important. Definitely. There. Gemetzel, Klaus. Also registered at the same school and residing with his uncle. Questions over their residential status, which had been queried but not resolved.
Suddenly Chris shook himself mentally. Good that he’d checked on the details. His partner was coming back. Maybe they could go file the report and then grab some doughnuts.
“All right, we’re done here,” Aurelie said to Miraze. She felt bad for the old lady – it’s not like the fright had been good for her heart or anything – but it had been necessary. They could always send her money later, or even try and repair the damage. And it had been useful. Her head ached again, from the intensity of the control she’d needed for her dream-sharing. Reading was difficult in dreams, so she’d had to fade in and out to allow him to look at the records and then sink back into another dream. It would have taken forever with him typing in at the speed of a sleepwalker.
“We have names, addresses, convictions... even phone numbers. Old ones anyway, for all of them that picked up a record at least. We know they all went to the same school.
Apparently it was blown up this morning, which might explain the gathering of mages we saw.” She passed over the notes she had made on them all. Maybe later they could get back to their apartment and transfer them to a proper computer rather than read them off the cramped phone screen.
The other participant had been surprisingly easy to uncover. In fact, Aurelie had thought she’d heard the name Zador before, and a quick search on her smartphone during the taxi ride had confirmed it. There was an article in Forbes describing him as one of the state’s most eligible bachelors. Another, a little more recent, hinting at his possible engagement with some socialite. Minor articles, for the most part. Still, that made him rich, with all the attendant power. He probably lived on some big estate in the better part of town, with serious security. Big gates, fences, patrolling guards, dogs. Whilst she hadn’t been able to dig up anything on Nicholas, his whole demeanour had screamed ‘professional bodyguard’. Presumably Zador was his employer as well as his mage.
‘Lord Zador’. She snorted. What a phoney. What an affectation.
The only person she had no information on yet was the Asian girl. It was possible that she’d be on some networking site, but she didn’t know the second name and she hadn’t spotted her picture on all the regulars.
Since Aurelie had become Miraze’s Spell-link, they had been living kind of outside society. Well, insofar as possible - few people were ever really zeroed in this day and age. At the moment they paid cash in hand to an old guy who rented cheap, crappy apartments, no questions asked. Sometimes they were on the streets, usually not, but they were always people who avoided the authorities...the electronic and paperwork trails that most people left behind. With Miraze’s shadow magic to disguise them when necessary and the money Miraze kept safe, they never even had to give their real names.
And neither of them went to school. Miraze had been a wanderer for a while now, from what Aurelie knew, and both of them caught up with home study whenever they could. Occasionally some obnoxious wealthy guy would sudden be overcome with generosity towards a huddled beggar, so they never starved. Aurelie even had a pre-paid credit card under a fake name, that she’d gotten registered by a businessman who honestly remembered it as legitimate. She topped up herself when it was needed.
All in all, good work. And yet there was something still niggling at her.
The dead girl.Bonnie Payton.
Aurelie still had the purse that she’d taken from her before she was vaporised. She’d left the phone. She hadn’t wanted to take it and keep any sort of link to the people who would miss her. She hadn’t even wanted to touch the body, except that it had been necessary.
...Well, the dumb punk had evaporated it now anyway. Aurelie had looked her up too, found her on her social networking sites. No memorial pages for her. She’d be a missing person instead, her friends stopping leaving their comments, her body never even found as life went on without her...
Why had Bonnie Payton died?