CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
She grinned. Snarled, really. “Oh, I can’t promise that at all. Everything in this town, I take personally. Every look and whisper, every secret and lie. They’ve been waiting for me all these years, ready to fuck up my entire life.”
What life? he wondered. She’d been in prison for ten years and out for only a few. What kind of a life did she even have, this half-demon, disgraced ex-nun?
“Let’s just be professional, then,” he temporized.
“Keep our focus.” He shifted on the wobbly stool, hooking a heel on a rung, still embarrassed by his earlier lapse.
That he hadn’t recognized such a powerful enchantment left him with a bad taste in his mouth.
A fucking demon had helped him break it.
He was an embarrassment to his profession.
And here he was lecturing her about being professional.
“Listen, Keen, older, more experienced PKs are working under that enchantment without a clue. You managed to break it, didn’t you? I couldn’t get through to Dewey at all.”
There she went, reading his mind again. “My potions won’t work on Dewey,” he said quietly, aware of nearby listeners. “I don’t know how we break them out of this.”
She grimaced. “We can’t. Not until we find the source and tear it out at the root.”
“It starts at Bright Renewal Academy, doesn’t it?”
Their pints appeared before she could answer, golden and sparkling with a healthy head of foam. Jerry Braun was scowling. “Did I hear you mention Bright Renewal?” he demanded. “Black Lilith take that place!”
Keen exchanged a glance with Hero. “You have an issue with that esteemed institution?” she asked carefully.
“Esteemed?” He snorted. “It’s a pit of darkness, that place. All the kids that go in there never come out the same. Most of them our kids.”
“ Your kids?”
He shook his head, arms crossed over his chest, muscular forearms bulging.
“Not my kids, personally. I mean ours, the neighborhood’s.
Those are the kids that get sent to Bright Renewal.
So-called troubled kids. Kids whose parents can’t pay their bills so they might steal a piece of bread from the grocery store, kids who talk back or maybe drink a fifth in the alleys.
Stupid stuff. Kid stuff. They get swooped up and taken away. To be reformed .”
“I take it you don’t think very highly of their reformation,” Hero said dryly.
Jerry scoffed. “They make a big deal of it – the graduates of Bright Renewal. Bunch of automaton little fascist brats. They come out preaching the Academy’s screed, all righteous, upstanding, soulless citizens. I suppose they seem like the lucky ones, if you ignore the dead look in their eyes.”
“And what happens to the unlucky ones?” Hero pressed. She looked at Keen, and he saw she was thinking the same thing he was. Catarine had been investigating missing children.
Suddenly, Jerry became very interested in wiping down the bar.
“There’s always a report,” he muttered, leaning toward them subtly and keeping his voice low.
“A condemnation. Unable to handle the curriculum, too violent, too drug-addled, too demon-touched, or some other nonsense. The PKs mark them down as runaways, no matter what the parents might say. No matter how much they beg for help.”
“The PKs do nothing about missing children?” Keen asked, aghast at the idea.
“The ones who disappear are always the most troubled, the least likely to be reformed, anyway, so no one cares enough to investigate.” He hesitated, throwing Hero a nervous glance. “A lot of them are rumored to have bad blood, if you know what I mean.”
Keen understood all too well. It was all he could do not to look at Hero, too.
“Whenever parents make complaints, half the time the PKs blame them for the kid’s disappearance,” Jerry continued, grimacing. “No one in Havenside believes there’s even a problem. Half of them are either funding the Academy or profiting off of it.”
“Profiting?”
“Tuition,” he said flatly. “Some of the kids sent there do need help, I’ll admit it, and their parents are desperate.
They will pay almost anything to save their children from going down the wrong path.
The ones too poor to pay petition the Realm for help.
Either way, Bright Renewal’s benefactors get their gold. ”
Finally, Keen looked at his partner. Could this whole thing be about greed?
A profit-making scheme targeting desperate parents and their wayward children?
Horrible, unethical, perhaps even evil, but worth murdering someone over?
It seemed the whole town was already fully on board with the scheme, anyway.
There had to be more to it. He raised a brow, watching Hero’s expression grow smooth.
“This can’t be all about money,” he said. “We have missing children, spectral chains, that shield…”
“They’re sacrificing children for a few pieces of gold,” Hero said flatly. She wrapped her long fingers around her pint glass, squeezing hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Subtly, I suspect, only a few here and there. Kids that won’t be missed, at least not by anyone important. Right?”
This she directed at Jerry, who nodded, his lips pressed hard together.
Hero lifted her glass, her long face still smooth, but Keen could see flames licking at the edges of her glasses. He didn’t know her very well, but he recognized cold rage when he saw it.
“I believe you,” she said after a long gulp of ale. She settled her glass carefully on the bar, those flames tickling the air. “Whatever is going on behind those gates, I will stop it, I swear to the Goddess.”
Jerry’s rigid shoulders relaxed at her vow and a look of relief crossed his face. He nodded gratefully. “Thank you, Inspector. You’re the first person of authority who actually seems to give a damn. Everyone else who’s tried to help–” He stopped abruptly, lips tight, and shook his head.
Keen blinked, staring hard at his old friend. “Do you mean Sister Catarine? Do you know something about her case, Jerry?”
“No!” he blurted, a little too quickly with a look of panic. Keen could hardly blame him – no one wanted to be connected to such a brutal murder – but he couldn’t ignore the stirring in his gut. Jerry definitely knew something.
Was he the mysterious Mr B?
“I mean,” Braun tried again, “I knew her. Everyone did! Half of Otherside attends services at Clementine’s chapel. She’s very popular.” He grimaced. “Was. She was popular.”
“Hey, Braun! We need another, you slacker.”
Laughter and jeers erupted from the other end of the bar. A man in a thick sweater and rubber boots was waving his empty pint glass in the air. The two men with him set up a rhythmic pounding on the top of the bar with their empty glasses. “Jer-ree! Jer-ree!”
Jerry scowled. “Hold your horses, you lousy drunkards,” he said and gave Hero and Keen an apologetic look before moving away to deal with his rowdy customers. Keen thought he looked more relieved to be escaping their questions than annoyed by the men’s demands.
“We might have to bring him in,” he murmured. It bothered him to think his friend might be involved in all of this, but they couldn’t ignore any lead.
Hero twisted on her stool to face him. “Sister Catarine was starting to investigate Bright Renewal Academy,” she said.
He frowned. “Possibly, but we have no proof. Just speculation and rumor.”
“We have missing children. We have spectral chains. We have a powerful shield and a spell of Fog.” She ticked off each item on her impossibly long fingers, flickers of flame running along each digit.
“You said as much a moment ago. This isn’t about mere greed.
Something far darker is happening here and it’s affecting the entire town.
Cassie must have told Sister Catarine something truly terrible, what with the two of them whispering together and having private meetings – Molly said as much.
It got her killed, and Cassie Graham, too. ”
“We need to talk to Catarine’s brothers,” Keen said. “Maybe the family can give us permission. It would get us into the Academy without having to wait for a warrant.”
Hero was silent for a moment, her face unlined porcelain but for a tiny grimace at the corner of her red, red lips.
“Not without Dewey’s cooperation, and I don’t think he’s going to give it.
Besides which, I’ll never get past that shield if we go in through the front door.
We’ll have to find some other way inside. We might have to get… creative.”
She cracked a smile, and he winced at the ghoulishness of it. “Anything we do outside of legal avenues will be inadmissible when, or if, we go to trial,” he pointed out.
“That’s a problem for the barristers,” she said breezily, but seemed to reassess the statement a moment later. “I suppose it will end up our problem, too. Okay. So. We can’t do anything rash. Not until we run out of options, anyway.”
He blew out a breath. “We can expand our investigation in the meantime, include the locals here in Otherside – the parents of missing kids, especially. They’ll appreciate the effort, I imagine. Be eager to talk.”
Hero’s eyes slanted to him, flame-red irises peeking out from the sides of her tinted glasses. “We’ll start with the Grahams. Both their children are caught up in this. Why?”
Keen nodded, giving his old friend another glance. Jerry Braun was suddenly very busy with his other customers. “Fine. We start with the Grahams.”