Chapter 14. Jenny
Jenny
I ended up stalling until eleven in the morning. I told myself California was three hours behind Salem and it would be rude to bother people so early in the day.
Finally, I asked Annette to cover the store, retreated to my bedroom, and made the first phone call. After four rings—just enough to make me hope no one would answer—a raspy voice with a hint of old Valley Girl accent said, “Jennifer? Is that you?”
Not the best start to our conversation. “You know I prefer Jenny.”
“I was just thinking about you the other day.”
I very much doubted that. “How have you been, Mom?”
“Well, my doctor says my blood pressure is too high, but I don’t know how that could be. You know I only eat organic. And I had to go in for my colonoscopy last month. They found three polyps. Is that a lot?”
I was already regretting this call. “That’s a question for your doctor. They should have sent the polyps to the lab to be checked.”
“They did, but I don’t trust that doctor. He’s not family.”
“Mom, you know I’m not a doctor, right?”
She hesitated. “Oh, totally. But you got that certification.”
“As an emergency medical technician. Not a doctor.” I’d also trained and studied with things that would make most doctors wet themselves, but none of that had given me the qualifications or the slightest desire to interpret my mother’s colonoscopy results.
I sat through six more minutes of updates about her health (not bad for a seventy-seven-year-old woman), her cats (Porgy and Bess), the wildfires last season (so much worse than when she was a child), and her neighbor’s lemon tree (which produced eighteen lemons this spring).
She didn’t ask a single question about me or the shop or Temple and Annette. I was fifty-six years old, and she still didn’t see me. I pushed the old pain aside the best I could. “Mom, I need to talk to Felipe. Is he around?”
She hmphed but didn’t argue. “Felipe? Your step-daughter wants to speak with you.”
The words triggered a full-body clench. In my mid-twenties, I’d been foolish enough to believe the worst was over.
I’d survived monsters and magic and all of the killing.
I’d gotten away from the Guardians Council and begun to live my own life.
And then Felipe had opened up a whole new world of trauma by marrying my mother.
By the time he came to the phone, I’d repacked most of those emotions enough to offer a civil, “Hello.”
“Jennifer? Are you all right?”
I didn’t bother asking him to call me Jenny. “I’m fine. When are you going to get your own phone?”
“Never,” he said firmly. “Those cursed things are the work of the darkest devils. They erode the brain and entrap the soul.”
I hadn’t spoken with Felipe in four . . .
no, five years. His accent had thickened with age, and his words were a little slower, but he spoke with the same confidence and conviction I remembered.
It was both comforting and infuriating. “I need to know if anyone’s taken Nabu-rihtu-usur’s spellbook from the Council’s library. ”
He paused before answering. “Why are you interested in that particular book? It’s not the kind of thing you can sell in your little store.”
“I can’t tell you that.” I knew how the Council treated potential threats. If they thought one of my former friends had gone to the dark side, they’d send Hunters after every surviving member of the Slay Team. “It’s important, Felipe.”
“I am sorry, Jennifer. Like you, I am retired.”
As if either of us could ever fully escape that world. “I know you better than that. You’re probably going out to breakfast every week with other old mentors, reminiscing and catching up on Council gossip.”
“It is brunch. With the senior discount, the buffet is a very reasonable eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.”
I had him, and we both knew it. “Either help me or I’ll tell Mom about the time you shot an arrow at my head.”
“I only did that because I trusted you to deflect it. It was a sign of my faith and confidence in your skills.” He let out a great, long-suffering sigh.
“Very well. I may have heard Reginald DuPuis complaining about the library’s annual first-quarter audit last month.
It required much overtime, and two librarians suffered minor injuries when relocating an improperly stored pair of seven-league boots.
However, the audit found nothing missing, and there have been no attempted thefts or break-ins. ”
“Thank you.” That wasn’t the only copy of Nabu-rihtu-usur’s book in existence, but it was the one the Slay Team knew about.
“I know that tone. Tell me what’s troubling you. Let us solve it together, like in the old days.”
A part of me wished to do exactly that. Felipe had a lifetime of experience with these things. I missed the security of having him and his resources in my corner, just like I missed the comfort of Artemis’s voice and presence as I went about my day.
Half a lifetime ago, I’d cut out parts of myself to keep the whole from rotting. That didn’t end the longing.
After a long silence, Felipe asked, “Is it because of what happened with Hope Lyons? How many times must I apologize and ask forgiveness? You were right, and I am sorry for my part in that tragedy.”
Apologies didn’t bring back the dead. They didn’t silence the screams. He wasn’t the one who’d killed a sixteen-year-old girl. “I have to go, Felipe.”
“It’s unhealthy to hold on to so much guilt and anger, Jennifer.”
“Give Mom my love.” I hung up before he could push more.
And to think, that had been the easy call.
· · ·
I had three possible suspects to talk to. Three Slay Team survivors: Thalia Ravenwood, Alex Barclay, and Emily Arenberg. Three former friends. We’d saved each other’s lives more times than I could count.
I’d thought I was saving them again when I left.
By the time I finished my calls, it was twelve-thirty in the afternoon, and I felt like I’d gone twelve rounds with a mountain ogre.
Thalia was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, taking care of her father with end-stage renal failure. Her second divorce had been finalized in September of last year, and she shared custody of two teenagers with her ex. She’d been sober for fourteen years.
Alex had moved to Toronto for a job as a quality engineer working on the next generation of electric-car batteries. He was dating a chemistry teacher he’d met at a local pickleball league. He promised to send me a bottle of maple syrup next Christmas.
Emily was married and working as an analyst for the Idaho Treasurer’s Office. She and her wife would be celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary later this year. Their youngest was in college, while the middle and oldest kids were out in the world, starting their own lives.
None of them said they hated me. All of them made the usual noises about how it had been too long, and we should talk more often, and one of these days we should all meet up. All of us knew it wouldn’t happen.
None of them confessed to running side gigs dealing shoggoth drugs or working to bring about the apocalypse.
The worst moment was when Emily quipped, “Raising teenagers makes me miss the simple, laid-back days of fighting evil beach gnomes.” For a moment, it felt like old times, joking and quipping together.
But before I could respond, she’d added, “My wife freaked the first time she saw the bite scars from those little bastards. I told her I got attacked by a pug when I was in high school. I hated lying to her, but it’s what we do, right? ”
She wasn’t wrong. Having to constantly lie to people you loved and betray their trust was number forty-seven on my list of Hunter of Artemis annoyances.
I missed my friends. I missed us. The laughter and the energy and the drama.
I missed Alex humming the A-Team theme like an absolute dork while we broke into the school.
I missed the way Thalia would play up her “small-town farm girl” bit, then turn around and spout off some obscure, genius-level thing she’d read in her free time.
It had all felt so right. So simple. We were the good guys. The things we hunted were the bad guys. We did our job and saved the world, week after week, year after year.
I’d walked away believing I was protecting us. Saving my friends from the constant injuries and threats of death. Saving us from losing our souls to the darkness we fought. Only, I hadn’t even managed that much, because one of my friends was lying to me.
I needed to check their stories. Annette was so much better at this. She had the detail-obsessed focus I lacked, but I couldn’t ask her for help. Not for this. I readjusted my position on the bed, stuffing another pillow behind my back before opening my laptop.
After a short but frustrating battle with the Idaho state government’s mobile website, I found Emily Arenberg listed as an employee, which seemed to confirm what she’d told me.
Alex and Thalia were harder to verify. We’d all learned to guard our privacy and limit what we shared online to protect ourselves and our families. Of the three of them, Alex was the only one with a social media presence, and he hadn’t updated it for more than a year.
I took a break and picked up my phone to replay each conversation. Yes, recording them without permission was a violation of their trust and privacy, not to mention a lousy friend move. It was Annoyance Forty-Seven all over again.
I listened again, trying to think like Annette. Listening for missteps and hesitations and inconsistencies. Thinking of these people as suspects rather than friends.
When I was finished, I closed my eyes and sought comfort in the familiar sounds of the house.
Annette had a line of three tourists at the shop counter.
I heard Ronnie downstairs using the weights.
The creak of Temple’s La-Z-Boy meant he was back in his library again.
Hopefully putting even more security around “Slimey” so that none of us would have to deal with the fallout from shoggoth-infected nightmares.
I waited for Annette to finish scanning items and helping one person figure out how to use his debit card. Once all three tourists had left, I headed downstairs, closed the front door, and hung up the BACK IN 15 MINUTES sign.
“Well?” she asked.
Better to rip the band-aid off quickly. “It’s Alex Barclay.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” I leaned against the wall. “But when I talked to Emily, it was less than a minute before she asked why I was really calling. Thalia took a minute and a half. Alex and I caught up for ten minutes, and he never asked.”
Annette pursed her lips. “That’s not exactly hard proof of supervillainy.”
“We know each other too well,” I said. “None of them would believe I was calling just to say hi. We don’t do that. Alex was trying too hard to act like everything was normal.”
“All right.” Annette pulled out a notebook and flipped to a blank page. “Alex Barclay. Why would Alex come to Salem and start dealing shoggoth drugs?”
“He wouldn’t.” My voice cracked. “The Alex I knew liked kids. He used to volunteer as a Big Brother. He was super protective of his two younger sisters. He’d stand up to bullies even when it meant he got his own butt kicked.”
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was a rogue Guardian from the Council or an obsessed one-shot villain from my past that I’d forgotten about or an evil alternate-universe Jenny Winter who dressed in all black with too much makeup and those clichéd violet streaks in her hair to make sure everyone knew how rebellious she was.
No, the odds of that happening again were astronomical.
I needed to be logical and follow the evidence, like Annette. The evidence pointed to one of my friends. To Alex.
“Any idea how to find him?” asked Annette.
“He told me he was working in Toronto,” I said numbly. “I haven’t been able to verify that.”
“I’ll run some searches.” She turned back a page in her notepad. She’d been chewing her pen. That was never a good sign. “Your selkie friend called half an hour ago. I could barely hear him over the noise. Music and people talking and yelling. Who parties in the middle of a Monday afternoon?”
“Hjálmar does.” I’d asked him to look into Sage’s disappearance. Another dollop of guilt joined my ample supply. I’d been so caught up in my phone calls, I’d forgotten about Ava’s missing friend.
“He heard from a kappa about a drug the police are calling black magic because they’re utterly lacking in imagination. It sounds like our shoggoth pills. He said the stuff has put four kids in the hospital.”
“Have the police gotten hold of any samples?” That was just what we needed, a police lab messing with pills they didn’t understand and infecting themselves with shoggoth-induced madness and nightmares.
“Thankfully, no. I spoke with a contact at the station. He wouldn’t give me any names, but he let it slip that all four kids attended Salem High School.”
I noticed the tension in Annette’s shoulders. Morgan was a student at Salem High. If this stuff was making the rounds among the students, and if it let them see people who were different . . .
“The kids who jumped me at the Gauntlet were high school-aged, too,” she added.
“Sage is only twelve,” I pointed out.
“Maybe Alex is expanding distribution.”
When I was seventeen, Felipe had taken me on a “field trip” to a San Francisco high school. One of their Science Bowl stars had gotten his hands on a dusted vampire. Half the team was snorting the stuff. It made them stronger, faster, and very antisocial.
Treatment involved a series of ass-kickings, administered by me, followed by six-hour IV drips of holy water cut with colloidal silver, administered by Felipe.
I’d asked Felipe why so many of my missions involved kids messing with spells and making bad deals with devils and djinns and experimenting with artifacts that animated the skeletons of old pets buried in the backyard.
He told me young people were more open to such things, more willing to believe. They also had more time to experiment.
Was that why Alex was using kids? Because they were easier to convince? Or maybe they were just easier to control.
“You know what comes next, right?” asked Annette.
“I’ll make sure Temple and Ronnie don’t have plans for tonight.”
It always struck me as peculiar how often my duties as a Hunter, my sacred duty to seek out and destroy evil, involved breaking into schools.
“Jenny Winter, is that you? It’s been ages. No, I’m not busy. How have you been?”