Page 6 of Dark Stars

Bobby reached out and dragged Alejo close, carrying him along as he made for the rocks. He dragged them into the deepest parts behind them just in time, as the faint wash of approaching lanterns or flashlights broke up the dark.

He pressed Alejo against the rocks and whispered to the darkness, which happily reached out to enfold them like someone laying a blanket over their sleeping loved one.

"What is that?"

Alejo asked softly.

"What's happening? What did you do?"

"Shush,"

Bobby said, lips not quite touching Alejo's cheek.

"Everything is fine. I told you, I'm good at darkness."

"You said you were a shadowmancer!"

Alejo hissed.

"No, you said that,"

Bobby replied as he pressed a hand to Alejo's mouth.

"I just said it's sort of like that."

Alejo glared.

Bobby grinned.

Before he could taunt Alejo further, though, voices grew closer, three men arguing in whispers that were louder than merely talking quietly would have been.

"Where did they go!"

"Maybe they're already gone."

"Some of those tracks looked fresh."

"Both of you shut up and keep looking, they're here somewhere. If they showed up on foot, or left their vehicle some distance away from the church, we'd have seen them. We haven't been gone that long."

Alejo's brow drew down, but he wisely didn't ask why they hadn't noticed Bobby's pick-up parked right out front. As if he was the only one who hid his car from view. Bobby just wasn't all fancy 'I made it invisible' about it.

A lantern abruptly shone behind the rocks, making Bobby flinch and Alejo tense—but then the man huffed and moved on.

"I don't see so much as a fucking rat down here, let alone people. Whoever the fuck they were, they're long gone."

"Maybe they swam for it and got dragged down,"

the first voice said with a mean laugh.

"Come on, let's get the fuck out of here. Have to do something to close that door up better if it's being found that easy."

"I told you the farm book was a stupid idea."

"Shut your stupid mouth before I break your jaw."

The voices faded off, and after a few minutes of absolute silence, when he was certain nobody had lingered, Bobby dismissed the cloaking darkness with a silent thank you and pushed away from Alejo.

"They're gone. We're safe. Ish, I guess, since I don't think being down here is safe at all."

"What did you do?"

"I asked the darkness for help."

"You're a weirdo."

Bobby grinned.

"Are you flirting with me?"

Alejo jerked back like he'd been zapped by an outlet.

"Why did I ever want to partner with you?"

"Come on, let's get while the getting is good."

Muttering something that sounded like pendejo, Alejo nevertheless followed him back the way they'd come.

Once they were safely in the truck and away from the church, Bobby asked, "So what have we learned?"

"That you're an asshole with weird powers who likes to show off but not say anything."

"Tell me what's up with that hidden mark on your neck."

He grinned at Alejo's mutinous look.

"There we go then. Now actually answer the question."

Alejo blew out an irritated breath.

"Fine. So far we know seven people are missing. The preacher is clearly involved in whatever is going on, not a victim. So he could be missing simply because of his role, or maybe because he betrayed someone, or any number of other reasons. They, whoever they are, have an underground lair straight out of a bad horror movie. That water isn't as placid as it seems. They weren't pleased about finding evidence of intruders, but they weren't particularly fussed about it either, which means they don't think they have anything to worry about."

He stared out the window, face turned fully away, but Bobby didn't need to see his face to read the tension drawing him taut.

"It's not a demon,"

Bobby said after the silence had stretched on.

"We're dealing with something terrible, but I promise it's not a demon."

Alejo jerked like he'd been backhanded, face pale as he stared at Bobby.

"What? Why would you say that?"

Bobby pulled into the first parking lot he saw and threw the car into park.

"Alejo, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's a demon that has you so scared and tense. Tell me what's wrong?"

"Leave it alone!"

Alejo said, tangling his fingers together at the back of his neck, as though if he hid the mark well enough the whole problem might go away.

"You can't fix it, I don't want to talk about it. My family will take care of it, and everything will go back to normal. Please,"

he added on a whispered plea.

"As you wish,"

Bobby said with a sigh.

He didn't really need Alejo to tell him, after all. Once they figured out this whole cult problem and he could use his powers without fear of giving his presence away, he'd take of whatever trifling demon was making Alejo miserable. Demons were difficult even for him, but not necessarily impossible. Throwing the car in drive, he headed off again, following the GPS to the school.

Everything was quiet, the school deserted at this hour, a liminal space calling to transients from across many planes. Hands still trembling faintly, Bobby pulled out the file, flipped through papers, and said, "The teacher is Ms. Wilcutt, ninth and tenth grade English."

"I thought teachers usually stuck to like, one year."

"Depends on the subject and the budget cuts."

Alejo gave him a weird look.

"Were you homeschooled or something?"

"Something,"

Bobby said with a laugh.

"My dad tried to teach me things the human way, but my mother did it her way."

"Dare I bother asking?"

"Do you know how baby birds feed?"

Alejo gave him a look of alarm and disgust.

"The parents eat and then regurgitate it, basically vomit right down their throats."

"Yeah, that's basically what my mom did, but with knowledge."

Though he looked like he had roughly a million questions, many of them about what prison his mother was in, Alejo only sighed and slumped in his seat.

"You're so fucking weird."

"Let's get to work."

"How do you hide your car?"

"I ask the darkness nicely to keep it unnoticed."

Alejo rubbed at his temples.

"Obviously."

Snickering, Bobby led the way to the nearest entrance, which led directly into the school offices. Though arcana would have opened the doors easily, he settled for good old fashioned lockpicking.

Alejo slid in ahead of him as the door opened, going straight for the board by the door that led to the rest of the school, lined with teachers and numbers.

"Angela Wilcutt, room S-209. If we don't find anything here, we can check her home, but she was taken here so this is where we're likeliest to find something."

"Sounds good. There, that office has HR written all over it."

A quick second lock-picking and they were in, Alejo firing up the computer while Bobby pawed through filing cabinets.

"Looks like Mr. Rocca is about to be fired for being too flirty with the girls."

"Should have fucking fired him already,"

Alejo muttered as he typed furiously.

"What sort of dumbass keeps their password on a sticky note on the monitor? These people deserve what they get."

Bobby snickered.

"Ah, here we go. Angela Wilcutt. Makes… almost two dollars more than most of the other teachers, well, well, well."

He pulled out his phone to take pictures of everything, then kept the whole file because she was missing, probably dead, so who was going to miss it? "Find anything fun?"

"Maybe,"

Alejo said, frowning as he kept staring at the computer.

"Wilcutt has been leaving a lot. She's way over her sick days and vacation days. She's been having a passive aggressive fight with HR, one of those white women fights where everyone is nicey-nice, but you can tell they're calling each other stupid fucking bitches who should be set on fire."

"The ol' Southern Manners,"

Bobby said.

"What else?"

"I think the principal might be mixed up in all this. He keeps letting Wilcutt off the hook, and doesn't seem super worried she's just vanished into the ether. But I'd have to dig into his emails to see what else might be going on."

"Well stay here and do that. I'll go explore the classroom, see if that gives us anything. Wait here for me when you're done, though."

Alejo gave him a look.

"You seriously think we should split up?"

"This isn't an eighties horror movie high school, I think we'll be all right,"

Bobby replied dryly, lifting a hand in farewell as he headed off.

"You're the worst!"

Alejo called after him.

Bobby laughed as he climbed the stairs he found about halfway down the hall, up to the second floor, where it was easy to find the south wing, room 209. The door was covered in 'students' favorite quotes' like they hadn't all just Googled something and scrawled it on their little speech bubble before handing it off.

He wasn't surprised when he opened the door and immediately felt primordial residue. He traced it the podium, the desk, and what proved to be a closet behind the desk. Where he also smelled blood. Not fresh, but not terribly old either. A matter of days.

He found it on the edge of a shelf, as though a head had been slammed into it, with more blood splashed and dripped and pooled elsewhere. There was no trace of death in the air, but humans were soft and fragile. A head slammed against an edge like that…

Why had no one cleaned it up? There wasn't any crime scene tape, so they would have been allowed to do so. Stranger and stranger.

A stack of paperbacks shoved all the way to where the shelf was cut off by part of the wall—shoddy workmanship at its best—caught his eye. The priest had gay romance in his office, and the English teacher had a stack of reverse harem. Such a flagrant disregard for 'there's a time and place' was a small, easily overlooked sign of the corrupting effect of his relatives. Not corrupting them to be 'naughty' but to not care about boundaries—rather, to forget about them. Much like no one noticed the warnings signs of things like Alzheimer's until too late, much was the same for the slow breaking of the cultists' minds.

Today, it was bringing erotica to school to read at lunch. Eventually it would be kidnapping children to have as a snack, when all other food ceased to be as appealing.

He explored the classroom some more, but found little else, only that the primordial residue seemed to have visited, so it didn't belong to Wilcutt. She must have been a threat, then.

Returning to the closet, Bobby slithered out his long tongue to get a taste of the blood. Not very good, but he would recognize it easily if he came across it again, no matter what state—or form—it was in.

With nothing left to investigate, he closed and locked the classroom door and headed back toward the stairs—and stopped.

Something was there. The faintest hint of primordial essence. A trail so weak it was no wonder he'd missed it the first time. Whisper soft. A hint. Something a mere child might leave behind.

Or a newly inducted acolyte.

Humans were so charming and sweet and fun. They were also breathtakingly stupid. Unlocking the door to this new classroom, he stepped inside. The nameplate had said Peter Johnson, about as generic a name as you could get. By the look of the room and its contents, Mr. Johnson was a math teacher.

The barely there scent trail grew a teensy bit stronger by the desk, and then stronger still by one of the drawers. Unlocking that took no effort at all, and there it was. Black cloth, faintly iridescent, to most beings it was slimy and cold to the touch, and left them feeling vaguely ill and unsettled.

Wrapped within that protective, muting barrier of null skin would be a relic, or piece of one, that would give him an idea of which relative he was up against. Taking the object out of the desk, the null skin tingling pleasantly against his fingers, he unwrapped it gingerly.

A chunk of stone, the distinct look of having been carved at some point, the straight edges on one side too perfect to be anything else. He would bet every book he owned that it was the corner of a pedestal, that there were at least three more pieces similar to this that would form the base of a statue. That the statue had been purposely broken apart centuries or millennia ago, either to save people or keep the people who'd owned it safe. Always so hard to tell.

Why give such a valuable item to a brand new acolyte? Maybe he was giving the holder too much credit. They could simply be a mule or something.

The stone was similar to that which his mother had given him, save that it was mottled blue and purple instead of green and black flecked with gold. As he'd hoped, that did narrow things down slightly. Three strong possibilities, including a grandparent.

Wrapping the item back up, he restored it to its place and left the classroom, heading quickly back downstairs to the office.

Where he found Alejo, but a not very healthy looking Alejo. No, this one looked like he'd come down with a sudden and vicious case of the flu.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm fine,"

Alejo said, in the world's most unconvincing lie.

"What did you find?"

"A broken chunk of a statue, something that'd be no more than a foot tall, and probably not more than eight inches. That was in the classroom of a math teacher, though. Peter Johnson. In Wilcutt's room, I found where she was probably murdered. They hadn't cleaned up the blood or anything, which is weird. What about you?"

"Not much. I think the principal is definitely high up the food chain in this mess. Would explain what you found, why they don't care about clean-up. I bet they use the auditorium or cafeteria for some of their meetings. Nice and innocuous. I jotted down some other things, took pictures on my phone. Go make sure the HR office is set to rights, and I'll take care of Principal Thackery's office."

Bobby snapped to attention and gave a salute.

"Yes, Captain Young One."

"Fuck you,"

Alejo muttered, but he was grinning slightly as he vanished into Thackery's office.

Humor fading beneath worry once he was out of sight, Bobby hastened to make certain it looked as though no one had been in the HR office. Despite his haste, when he returned a few minutes later to the main area, he was too late.

Alejo had finished before him, but right outside the closed door of Thackery's office, he lay in an awkward heap, as if he'd collapsed midstep.

"Damn it!"

Bobby said, bolting across the room and dropping down beside him. What had gone wrong in just a matter of, what, twenty minutes or so? He hadn't been gone that long! And he'd been in the office less than five.

He gently pulled Alejo into his lap, not remotely surprised he was hot and clammy. The back of his neck was so hot it nearly burned. Something was wrong with whatever binding his parents had put on him, that was clear.

"Alejo, you ridiculous boy, you have to tell me what's wrong."

"Don't let him get me,"

Alejo replied, eyes closed, the words barely discernable they were mumbled so low. Tears slid down his cheeks, tugging at something in Bobby's chest. Normally he liked when humans cried. Anguish and fear and pain were such sweet tastes.

Not this one, though. He didn't like Alejo's tears at all.

Pulling Alejo more securely into his arms, Bobby heaved to his feet. Get somewhere safe, and then—

Slamming car doors. Voices. Footsteps. Shit, people were coming. A woman and two men. Something primordial clung to them, faint but true. Which meant, unlike the lackies in the secret cave, they might sense him if he used his powers to hide them from sight. If he was going to take that risk, he'd rather just use his powers to get them the hell out of there—but that would tip his hand to whichever relative was behind this cult.

So he either hid the old-fashioned way and hoped for the best, or used his powers to get them to safety and gave away his presence. What fun choices.

In his arms, Alejo sobbed quietly, still unconscious, pressing his face into the hollow of Bobby's throat, tears falling hot on his skin. "Help me."