Page 16 of Dark Stars
He didn't reallyneedAlejo to tellhim, after all. Once they figured out this whole cult problem andhe 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 GPSto the school.
Everything was quiet, the school deserted atthis hour, a liminal space calling to transients from across manyplanes. 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 budgetcuts." Alejo gave him a weird look. "Were you homeschooled orsomething?"
"Something," Bobby said with a laugh. "Mydad tried to teach me things the human way, but my mother did ither 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 rightdown their throats."
"Yeah, that's basically what my mom did, butwith knowledge."
Though he looked like he had roughly amillion questions, many of them about what prison his mother wasin, Alejo only sighed and slumped in his seat. "You're so fuckingweird."
"Let's get to work."
"How do you hide your car?"
"I ask the darkness nicely to keep itunnoticed."
Alejo rubbed at his temples."Obviously."
Snickering, Bobby led the way to the nearestentrance, which led directly into the school offices. Though arcanawould have opened the doors easily, he settled for good oldfashioned lockpicking.
Alejo slid in ahead of him as the dooropened, going straight for the board by the door that led to therest of the school, lined with teachers and numbers. "AngelaWilcutt, room S-209. If we don't find anything here, we can checkher home, but she was taken here so this is where we're likeliestto find something."
"Sounds good. There, that office has HRwritten all over it." A quick second lock-picking and they were in,Alejo firing up the computer while Bobby pawed through filingcabinets. "Looks like Mr. Rocca is about to be fired for being tooflirty with the girls."
"Should have fucking fired him already,"Alejo muttered as he typed furiously. "What sort of dumbass keepstheir password on a sticky note on the monitor? These peopledeserve what they get."
Bobby snickered. "Ah, here we go. AngelaWilcutt. Makes… almost two dollars more than most of the otherteachers, well, well, well." He pulled out his phone to takepictures of everything, then kept the whole file because she wasmissing, probably dead, so who was going to miss it? "Find anythingfun?"
"Maybe," Alejo said, frowning as he keptstaring at the computer. "Wilcutt has been leaving a lot. She's wayover her sick daysandvacation days. She's been having apassive aggressive fight with HR, one of those white women fightswhere everyone is nicey-nice, but you can tell they're calling eachother 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 inall this. He keeps letting Wilcutt off the hook, and doesn't seemsuper worried she's just vanished into the ether. But I'd have todig into his emails to see what else might be going on."
"Well stay here and do that. I'll go explorethe classroom, see if that gives us anything. Wait here for me whenyou're done, though."
Alejo gave him a look. "You seriously thinkwe should split up?"
"This isn't an eighties horror movie highschool, I think we'll be all right," Bobby replied dryly, lifting ahand in farewell as he headed off.
"You're the worst!" Alejo called afterhim.
Bobby laughed as he climbed the stairs hefound about halfway down the hall, up to the second floor, where itwas easy to find the south wing, room 209. The door was covered in'students' favorite quotes' like they hadn't all just Googledsomething and scrawled it on their little speech bubble beforehanding it off.
He wasn't surprised when he opened the doorand immediately felt primordial residue. He traced it the podium,the desk, and what proved to be a closet behind the desk. Where healso smelled blood. Not fresh, but not terribly old either. Amatter of days.
He found it on the edge of a shelf, asthough a head had been slammed into it, with more blood splashedand dripped and pooled elsewhere. There was no trace of death inthe air, but humans were soft and fragile. A head slammed againstan edge like that…
Why had no one cleaned it up? There wasn'tany crime scene tape, so they would have been allowed to do so.Stranger and stranger.
