Uh-oh. That sounded like Emma already.
“It’ll be strongest with those who are already attracted to him, but it could have a light effect on just about any human,” Alec continued. “But when he finds someone he wants, either to impregnate or to feed from, he’ll turn it on full-strength, and the lucky girl will… Well, she’ll need him. Desperately. Like a craving she can’t control.”
“But it’s like some kind of spell, right?” I said, uncomfortably reminded of the strength of Nash’s Influence, when he lost control of it. “She doesn’t really want him, she just thinks she does, because of this charm crap. Right?” I said, thinking back to Danica’s physical obsession with her baby’s father.
“I don’t know, Kay,” Alec said, obviously reluctant to voice whatever was coming next. “I think it’s less like a spell and more like primal physical attraction. It’s hormonal, and it’s very strong.”
“Do they actually fall in love with him?” Sabine asked, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and I was relieved to realize we were on the same page for once.
“No,” Alec said. “And most of them have no delusions about that—at least, the older, more experienced women. They know they don’t love him. They may not even like him. But they physically have to have him, like they have to have food and air.”
“So…sleeping with him is consensual?” Sabine asked.
“No,” I said, just as Alec said, “Yeah.”
I turned on him in surprise. “No, it’s not. It can’t be. This ‘charm’ of his is like a…a drug. They’re not in their right minds. Right?”
“I don’t know, Kaylee. I think they really want him. In fact, some young incubi have been mobbed, like celebrities.”
“Do they have a choice?” Sabine asked. “Can girls fight his charm?”
“Yeah. It takes a lot of willpower, but yes,” Alec said. “Definitely.”
“They shouldn’t have to fight,” I insisted, struggling with a squirming discomfort the entire discussion dredged up in me. “The fact that they have to proves that it’s not consensual. Not really. And you’re not going to change my mind.”
Alec nodded. “I’m not even gonna try.”
“So…any idea how to stop him?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know how to get rid of an incubus, other than giving him a son. Ask your dad for help?”
I shook my head. “Can’t. He has his hands full trying to save my life right now.”
Alec frowned. “How can he…?”
“He can’t. But telling him that does no good. I’ve tried, and so have Tod and Harmony. Feel free to add your voice to the chorus.”
“So anyway, we’ve only got four days to take this murdering, daughter-abandoning bastard down.” Sabine hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, you only have four days. I have as long as it takes.”
The truth of her statement hit me like a brick to the forehead, and the room swam around me. I set Styx on the couch and stood, staring straight into the mara’s eyes. “Sabine, I think he’s going after Emma. You have to promise me you’ll watch out for her if I die before we get rid of him. Don’t let her wind up like Danica. Please.”
Sabine frowned, staring up at me. “At this point, I think you actually owe me another favor, bean sidhe…”
“Promise me!” I grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet, almost as surprised as she was by my strength. “She’s human, and she’s defenseless, and she’s my best friend, which has already gotten her killed, and possessed, and on the radar of two different hellions. You’re not leaving this house until you promise me you’ll protect her when I’m gone. You can inherit her just like you will Nash. You need a real friend anyway.”
Sabine stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “Emma doesn’t even like me.”
“I don’t care! I swear if you let her get hurt, I’ll haunt your ass for eternity. I’ll turn up in the room every time you’re alone with Nash, and you’ll never get another taste of him. Ever.”
Her pierced right brow rose in interest. “How are you gonna do that?”
“I’ll find a way…”
“Jeez, settle down, Mama Bear, I’m not gonna let Emma get hurt.” Sabine pulled her arm from my grasp and dropped back into my dad’s chair, grinning up at me. “I just wanted to see how good your threat would be.”
I had to concentrate to unclench my jaw. “How’d I do?”
Her head bobbed, almost respectfully. “Not bad.”
“Not bad, nothin’, that was badass!” Alec said, and I turned to see him watching me, already on his feet, ready to come to my rescue if Sabine had decided to bite back. “That was great, how your voice got all deep and scary.”
“It did?” ’Bout time my voice did something helpful for a change.
I sank back onto the couch next to Styx, who yipped and watched me until she was convinced I was okay. Then she curled up in my lap and went back to sleep again. “Okay, so we know Beck’s hurting people, but we don’t know how to get rid of him…” I began, making a conscious effort to guide us all back onto the subject.
“Short of killing him? No,” Alec said, plopping onto his end of the couch again, soda in hand.
“Well, that’s a moot point anyway, ’cause I don’t think I could kill someone.” Except maybe in self-defense. Or Emma-defense.
Sabine shrugged. “I could.” I glanced at her in disbelief, but she only rolled her eyes. “What? He’s a bad guy.”
“By whose definition of bad?” Alec asked, and Sabine and I shot him twin looks of disbelief. Alec sighed and sat up straighter. “Look, I’m not saying he’s a saint, but I’ve seen plenty of real bad guys in the last quarter century, ladies. Monsters who would do much worse than what Beck’s done, just to watch some poor girl suffer. But so far, it sounds like your math teacher’s just trying to feed himself and propagate his own species, both of which are rights the two of you take for granted.”
“Nuh-uh.” Sabine shook her head vehemently. “I’m a parasite, too. If I can control myself during a meal at seventeen years old, then he can damn well do it at…however old he is.”
Alec nodded, conceding the point, but his gaze held Sabine’s firmly. “And you have no evidence that he hasn’t. All you have is a teenager’s miscarriage. I’m not saying that’s not horrible, because it is. But he didn’t mean for that to happen. Your incubus wants that baby even worse than its mother probably did, yet you’re willing to kill a man because his lover had a miscarriage?”
Sabine leaned forward in her chair, and the lights in the room seemed to dim as her eyes grew darker. “You’re twisting it all around to make it sound innocent, but it’s not,” she insisted. “This is a very old man taking advantage of teenage girls, using some kind of supernatural charisma as a weapon. That’s messed up, no matter how you look at it.”
I frowned at Alec, turning on the couch to face him more directly. “You can’t seriously think what he’s doing is justified?”
“No. And I never said I did. I’m just saying that the punishment ought to fit the crime. You’re talking about killing this man, and you have no evidence he’s actually taken a life.”
Crap. “He’s right,” I said, and Sabine turned on me in surprise. I shrugged. “I’m not saying we should drop the issue. I’m not even saying you can’t kill him.” If he lay one hand on Emma, I’d be right there behind Sabine when she threw the first punch—or whatever. “But before we condemn a man to death, we need to know that he’s actually taken a life. Otherwise…we’re going to have to find some other way to get rid of him.” Some way that wouldn’t just push him into the next school unlucky enough to have a midsemester job opening.
“Okay, so we find his victims,” Sabine conceded, obviously confident that there actually were victims. “How do we do that? Look for other pregnant girls?”
“Well, unless he’s a moron—and he’s isn’t, or someone would have caught up to him by now—he’s not going to feed from anyone carrying his child, ’cause that would drain the ba
by, too. Right?” I asked, and Alec nodded. “So, basically, we’re looking for dead un-pregnant women.”
“Can’t think of any of those, recently,” Sabine said.
“Me, neither. So we stick with what we know, which is that Danica probably isn’t the first girl he’s knocked up during this fertility cycle. Maybe if we find the others, and search the obituaries in their towns, we’ll be able to put together a pattern.”
Sabine nodded, brows raised. “Not bad, bean sidhe!”
“Not bad at all,” Alec agreed. “And maybe I can narrow your search a bit… Incubi—and succubi, too, if memory serves—tend to return to the same breeding ground cycle after cycle. If he’s breeding here now, then this is his territory, and you’re probably going to find most of his other conquests in this general area.”
“Same breeding ground, cycle after cycle…” I said, thinking aloud. “And if he’s teaching now to get to teenage girls, maybe he taught somewhere else before Eastlake.”
“So, what are you gonna do?” Alec asked. “Go question every principal in the metroplex about former teachers?”
“Poor Alec, you’ve missed so much in the last quarter of a century.” Grinning from ear to ear, I set Styx down and bent to pull my laptop from my bag on the floor. “Most schools don’t put students’ yearbook photos online, but lots of them have pictures of the faculty…” I set the laptop on the coffee table and turned it on, then sipped from my can while the system booted up.
With any luck, the face that had probably brought girls flocking to him for centuries would now lead us to his previous victims, along with the evidence we’d need to get rid of Beck for good.
10
Sabine didn’t have a laptop, and mine was a one computer household, so going through the local school districts took a while. And a lot of them didn’t post pictures of their teachers. But finally, after an hour and a half of searching and two bags of microwave popcorn—I’d sworn off everything but junk for what remained of my life—we found him.
During the fall semester, our Mr. Beck had taught advanced math at Crestwood High. Only the Crestwood students had called him Mr. David Allan.
“That’s him!” Sabine said, and I nodded while Alec leaned over my shoulder for a better look. “Does it say why he left?”
“I doubt they’d put that on the website. But…” Crestwood’s student newspaper was online, so I did a quick search for his alias, looking for some mention of why he left—or was fired.
I found it in the November 3 issue. Mr. Allan had left his position as a first-year math teacher after one semester to pursue a graduate degree, and he hoped to be back in a couple of years, better able to serve the students of Crestwood.
Yeah, right.
I was about to close the tab when a familiar—and horrifying—place name caught my attention from the short mention just below Allan’s article.
Our thoughts and prayers are with senior honor student Farrah Combs, who was admitted to Lakeside Hospital last week. Get well soon, Farrah!
What the editor of the Crestwood Observer obviously didn’t know—if she had, the mention probably never would have run in their paper—was that Lakeside wasn’t a regular hospital. It was a mental health facility, attached to Arlington Memorial. The very same mental health facility—psych ward, to the uninformed—where I’d spent a week of my life, a year and a half earlier.
Lakeside was only fifteen miles away. Maybe Farrah Combs—assuming she was still there, and marginally coherent—could tell me something about Mr. Allan. And whether or not any of her fellow students had gotten pregnant or died while he was teaching there.
But I couldn’t tell Sabine my idea, because she’d insist on tagging along, and I was not taking a living nightmare into a mental health facility.
I glanced at the onscreen clock before closing my laptop and was relieved to realize it was almost six o’clock. “Okay…” I stood and slid my computer back into the bag. “I’m gonna find something to eat and you’re going to go home.”
“Why?” Sabine said, physically resisting as I tried to guide her toward the door. “We’re on a tight schedule here, Kaylee. I thought you wanted to nail this bastard.”
“I do. Figuratively. But I can’t think when I’m hungry, so why don’t you go home and go online and see if you can find any more of Beck’s former employers.”
“I don’t have internet at home.”
“Then go to the library. Sometimes people fall asleep there—I’m sure that’s an untapped market for you. We can exchange information in the morning.”
“What information are you gonna have?” she demanded, as I pulled the front door open and pushed her half-empty soda can into her hand.
I scrambled for another well-meaning lie until my gaze settled on an obviously amused Alec, and the answer slid into place. “Alec’s going to help me come up with a plan B for getting rid of Mr. Beck, in case murder starts to look a bit extreme.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” Sabine insisted, eyes narrowed at me now from the front porch.
“Well, just in case. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I closed the door in her face.
Alec laughed out loud. “What was that all about?”
“You have to take the direct approach with Sabine—she doesn’t understand subtlety.” I peeked through the blinds until her car drove away, then I turned to Alec. “Your turn. How’d you get here, anyway?”
He crossed both arms over his chest and suddenly embodied the immovable object. “I took the bus.”
“Good. I think there’s another one at six-fifteen. You need change?”
Alec frowned. “I’m gainfully employed, Kaylee. And I’m not leaving. I promised your dad I’d stay with you.”
“I don’t need a babysitter, Alec.”
“I know. But your dad’s afraid that whatever’s supposed to kill you could hit early and leave you lingering on the brink of death for the next few days. And he’s pretty determined not to let that happen.”
“Then he should be at home, not out chasing possibilities that don’t exist.”
“You can’t rationalize with grief and denial, Kaylee.”
“I’m trying to rationalize with you. I have something important to do, and I need you to go home.”
Alec dropped into my dad’s recliner, and I knew with one glance that he wasn’t going to be moved until he was damn well ready. “If this is about Nash…you’re as grown as you’re gonna get and it’s not my place to tell you what not to do with your boyfriend. You two can go back there and close the door and make the whole damn planet quake for all I care. I’ll even wear earplugs, if you think it’s gonna get loud, but—”
“No! This has nothing to do with Nash.” In fact, if I told him, he’d try to talk me out of it. I sighed and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “I swear, I’ll kill you if you tell my dad, but…I’m going to sneak into Lakeside and talk to Farrah Combs. And I need to be back before Nash comes over, so you have to go!”
“You’re gonna sneak into Lakeside? I thought you hated that place.”
“I do.” With a fierce and glorious passion. “But that’s my best chance of finding the bodies in Beck’s closet, and I am not going to die without knowing he’s no threat to Emma, or anyone else at school.”
“Fine. I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t. It’ll be hard enough to get myself in, and bringing you will only double our chances of getting caught.”
He shifted in the chair and it groaned beneath his weight. “How are you going to get in?”
I stared at my hands in my lap, avoiding his gaze. “I have an idea, but it only works for one person. Me.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to get yourself committed.”
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, trying to catch my gaze. “I’m pretty sure your dad would actually kill me if I let that happen.”
“No! How am I supposed to help anyone if I’m tied to a stretcher?”
??
?They really tied you down?”
“We have that in common,” I said, and he burst into laughter, no doubt remembering what was probably the most embarrassing moment of either of our lives.
I couldn’t quite decide why I was reluctant to admit the next part, but when I realized he wasn’t going to go without more information, I knew I had no choice. “I’m going to see if Tod can get me into Lakeside without being seen.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Alec asked softly, watching me closely, and I couldn’t tell if he meant breaking into the hospital, or asking Tod for help.
“I’m not sure about anything anymore, Alec. Except that I’m going to die. But not before I take Beck down.” I stood and gestured toward the front door. “Now please go home so I can be reckless and brave for possibly the last time in my tragically short life.”
Alec rolled beautiful brown eyes. “No fair playing the deathcard.”
“No fair having it to play,” I shot back, holding the front door open.
“Fine.” He stood and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“But if your dad finds out, tell him you overpowered me and left me for dead.”
“Got it.” I pushed all six-foot-two, one hundred eighty-plus pounds of him over the threshold with both hands.
“Be careful, Kaylee,” he said, and I nodded solemnly as I closed the door in his face. He hadn’t even made it to the sidewalk when I pulled my phone from my pocket and autodialed.
“Kaylee?” Tod answered on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”
I hesitated on my way to the kitchen with Alec’s empty soda can. “How do you know something’s wrong?”
“You only call me when you want something Nash can’t do for you.”
My face flamed, and I was suddenly glad he couldn’t see me. That I knew of. “That is not true.”
“Oh, yeah?” he teased, and I could hear the challenge in his voice. “So…you don’t need anything?” Was it true? I had kind of come to count on him…