Page 15 of Wicked Deeds

“Wanna come play predator?”Lizzie asked.

“Are you talking about gaming or Cestis business?” I hadn’t expected to hear from her again today. On the datapad screen, the circles under her eyes were deep, despite her makeup. After we’d left Berkeley, she’d gone to Spark. I’d come home to Damon’s place where I’d worked for a few hours, crashed for two hours and then gone back to work, eating dinner at my desk because Damon was still at the office. Now it was nearly nine p.m. and I’d been contemplating an early night when Lizzie called.

Lizzie swept a hand at herself. “Do I look like I’m dressed for gaming?”

She wore black. A long-sleeve tee. When we went to gaming clubs with Zee, Lizzie usually dressed in an even brighter version of her neo-anime-meets-chaos-witch style. Not black. I sighed. “No. So what’s wrong?”

“A friend called me. She’s worried about a house in her neighborhood.”

“And this requires me? Not say, Zee or Trick or Cassandra or Ian?”

“Zee has a tournament. Trick is out of town. Cassandra and I discussed it, and she said it would be educational for you. Callum’s coming, too. So, are you joining us?”

That made me feel slightly better. Callum could deal with just about anything we might encounter. And Cassandra wouldn’t send me with Lizzie if it was something she thought I couldn’t handle yet. “This is one of those ‘it’s really more rhetorical’ questions, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” Lizzie said with a tired grin.

Guilt twinged. I doubt she’d managed to work a two-hour nap into her day

“Sure,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“Sea Cliff. We’ll swing by and pick you up,” Lizzie said. “Callum’s on his way. Have coffee ready.”

From the outside, the house, though small, was nothing out of the ordinary. Nondescript even. White, boxy, two stories, with a grayish roof and front door.

The grass was mown and the low maintenance bushes planted in the garden beds trimmed, but there were no plants on the small porch or any other signs of life.

This section of Sea Cliff was hanging on so far, but we passed one other empty house in the street, and there’d been more than a few vacant blocks on our way.

The ocean-view mansions that had lined the cliffs before the Big One were a thing of the past. The cliffs were crumbling and unstable. The houses that survived the earthquake had been declared unsafe. So it had gone from being an enclave for the rich and famous to one for regular people, full of rebuiltproperties that attempted to mimic something of the area’s original style but in sensible, smaller, quake-proofed homes.

The fact that some of those were empty in a city that had lost a chunk of its residential space told me people weren’t so keen to make a bet on a suburb so close to the ocean.

It wasn’t a part of the city I’d ever spent much time in. I’d done the obligatory school trips to the old Legion of Honor Museum and the bus drivers had always driven us past all the ritzy real estate as part of the experience, but they’d moved the museum further in toward the center of the city when they’d rebuilt it as the New Legion of Honor, so I hadn’t been back. But even though it wasn’t as upscale as it had once been, it also was nothing like Dockside. It was still a livable neighborhood where people worked, raised families, and played. Quiet at this time of night, but only because most people would be sleeping or getting ready to. It wasn’t the ‘no one’s here because it’s abandoned’ or ‘no one’s out because it’s not safe’ vibe of Dockside. Just an average-looking suburban street.

Hardly the kind of place you’d expect magical oddities to spring up. And it didn’t seem like a place you’d find afrit running around. Certainly I couldn’t sense any trace of magic.

But what did I know?

Lizzie was studying the house, hands on hips, her expression tightly focused.

“You said your friend told you this place was empty, right?” I said.

Lizzie nodded. “Yeah, she’s lived about a street back from here for nearly a year, but she walks her dog in this street. She said this house has never had anyone living in it all that time. No cars or people. No lights at night.”

Someone was cutting the grass, but all that proved was someone was paying for lawn maintenance. “Someone’s taking care of the lawn. I guess that means it’s not just abandoned?”

“Probably.”

“And what bothered your friend?”

“She said she saw lights a few nights ago, but no signs of anyone having moved in. She told the police, but they came around and couldn’t see anyone.”

“Did they go inside?”

“No. I checked their report. No cause to enter. And then yesterday she felt something weird as she was passing.”

“Weird?”

---