Chapter Five

Listen for a Whisper

Kami’s fingers bit into a pressure point on the arm at her throat. When the hold loosened, she went down low, keeping her grip steady, and used her body to trip the guy and flip him into the wall. “Rusty!” she snapped. “Quit doing that.”

Rusty’s eyes gleamed up at her from his crouch, laughing-bright even in the darkness. “I’m keeping you on your toes, Cambridge,” he said. “Transforming you from a simple English schoolgirl to a lean, mean fighting machine.”

Kami put out a hand and gave him a push on the forehead that tipped him back against the wall. “You’re right, I am feeling meaner.”

Rusty got up and held the back door open for her because he was a gentleman, even if he was also an incredibly annoying person who kept attacking her. Kami called out for Angela, her voice echoing off all the white surfaces in that spotless kitchen, and Rusty leaned against the doorframe as if all the exertion had exhausted him.

At first glance, Rusty was a masculine version of his sister—tall, dark, and incurably lazy. He had the same athletic frame, which he draped on walls and furniture as if simply too weak to support himself. He had the same classic features and almost the same black hair, though his was shot with the red highlights that gave him his nickname.

In reality, Angela and Rusty were markedly different. They were even lazy in quite different ways. Rusty was sleepily good-natured and thought Angela wasted energy being cranky. Angela refused to cope with being hassled by teachers, so she was brilliant at school, while Rusty had failed out of Kingston University after one term.

Rusty had also been the one to introduce Kami to her one and only boyfriend, Claud of the unfortunate goatee. She didn’t hold it against him: it was hard to hold anything against Rusty.

“Oh, Rusty, why did you let her in?” Angela said. “We could have just lain down on the floor until she went away. We could’ve had a nice floor nap.”

“Have you guys eaten?” Kami asked. “I’m starving.”

“Cooking is so much trouble,” Rusty said mournfully.

“You could order in,” Kami suggested.

“Delivery people are so annoying,” Angela responded.

Kami opened the cupboard doors and began rummaging around for supplies. She found a half-empty packet of pasta and waved it about in triumph. “I’m going to cook something.”

Rusty drifted over to the kitchen island, where he sank onto a stool. “So little and so busy,” he remarked with solemn wonder. “Like a squirrel.”

Kami threw a piece of pasta at him. He caught it and then, as if he only worked in fast-forward and slow-motion, brought it gradually to his mouth and chewed it with great deliberation.

“Rusty attacked me in the garden,” Kami announced.

“Hey, women pay good money to have me attack them,” Rusty mumbled.

“That makes it sound as if you’re running a one-man bordello.”

Rusty leaned his chin in his hand, the effort of keeping his head upright obviously too much for him. “That’ll always be the dream.”

Women really did pay good money to have Rusty attack them. He rented a room above Hanley’s grocery shop and taught self-defense. It was the sole thing in the world Rusty was passionate about, and that meant Angela and Kami had been jumped at regular intervals growing up.

“What do you have now?” Kami inquired, chopping onions. “Six clients?”

“Eight, counting you guys.”

“You can’t count us,” Angela said, strolling into the kitchen. “We don’t come to your stupid classes, and we don’t pay you.”

“My parents give me a roof over my head in return for teaching their only daughter to defend herself from predators,” said Rusty. “And I teach Cambridge because she feeds me and because she’ll need these skills to get out of situations she will inevitably throw herself into. It’s all very equitable. Which reminds me, Angela, I’m a crazed drug dealer, desperate for the change in your jeans pockets. What do you do?”

“No,” Angela commanded. “Don’t!”

Rusty tackled her at the knees and Angela fell backward with a scream of rage. Kami began to fry her onions, whistling over the noise.

“So, I was looking through websites about animal sacrifice on the Internet,” Kami announced to distract herself. “Apparently it’s a feature in Satanic rituals.”

“Wow,” Rusty remarked, his voice slightly muffled. “I sure hope this conversation continues over dinner.”

“Wait,” Angela said, expertly twisting Rusty’s arm. “I thought we were dealing with kids? Are we talking twelve-year-old Satanists?” She paused. “Actually, that makes a lot of sense. I suspect those kids from the cricket club.”

Kami hadn’t really expected Angela and Rusty to take this seriously. They knew what Kami had seen, but they hadn’t seen it themselves: it wasn’t real to them.

She aired a few more thoughts while making their pasta anyway.

“It wasn’t just cruelty. It was either a ritual or staged to look like one. If it was staged, why?” Kami asked. “If it was real, people don’t perform rituals, Satanic or otherwise, for no reason. I’ve done my research. They do it for favor from the gods, for good winds, to tell the future.”

“So the answer is that they are crazy?” Angela inquired. “Shocker.”

“Don’t think about the answer, think about the question,” Kami said. “The question is—what do they want?”

Neither Rusty nor Angela had an answer. Kami didn’t have an answer herself and didn’t come up with one during dinner or her walk home alone. Angela had offered to walk her home, which was so unheard of that it made Kami laugh.

“Just take care of yourself, you hyperactive midget,” Angela had instructed, eyes narrowed like a cross cat, and sent Kami on her way with a shove.

Sorry-in-the-Vale by night was different, the small streets seeming to narrow and twist, the Georgian and Victorian houses becoming specters from horror movies. Above the town Aurimere House stood, windows bright but narrow, making the great black edifice look awake and aware. As if the house was a giant’s head, watching them all with sly eyes, and soon the giant’s hand would rise from the earth and scoop their whole town away.

Kami reached for Jared. You there?

Always, he said, and her uneasiness faded. Kami never really walked anywhere alone.

The next day was Friday. Kami felt strongly that Fridays should not be full of disappointments.

The disappointments started when their headmistress, Ms. Dollard, stopped by the newspaper office to say: “Friday also means that the entire school closes promptly, including Room 31B.”

“I’m calling it my headquarters now,” Kami said, looking around proudly.

“I’m ignoring that,” Ms. Dollard said. “And I’m shutting everything up at five sharp. Do me a favor and go out and perform one of the activities I hear the youth enjoy this Friday, like defacing public property.”

Kami was sad to be parted from her headquarters, but it struck her that the library had both the Internet and reference books.

The disappointments continued after school. Kami had arranged to meet Holly, who was supposed to bring Ash’s delinquent cousin, on the school steps. At five sharp, she was outside the school with a notepad and pen in hand. It wouldn’t take long to type out the interview later, Kami thought. She expected him to talk mainly in surly grunts.

It was one of those September days when the sunshine was mellower than summer sunshine but still warmed you. Kami was leaning against the balustrade at the bottom of the steps, basking, when she heard the doors of the school open.

Holly was on her own. She held her hands up. “I tried, boss. I did establish contact with him at lunch, had a little chat with him about our motorbikes.” She smiled. “And I think I was right about him.”

“That he’s crazy?” asked Kami.

Holly’s smile spread. “That he might be fun.”

“So he’s not crazy?”

“I didn’t say that,” Holly said. “My current verdict would be: Crazy eyes. Nice ass.”

“I think I want that on my tombstone,” Kami said. “Remember my last wishes, if I get involved in a tragic accident with a fruit cart before I can put it in writing. So, what happened?”

Holly shrugged, bouncing down the steps two at a time and going over to her motorbike, sliding her helmet over her curls. “He slipped through my fingers. We were talking about motorcycles, a friend stopped me, and then I looked around and he was gone. Let me tell you, that usually does not happen. Usually I can’t lose them even if I’m trying.”

“I believe you,” said Kami, and sighed. “Well, never mind. We’ll get him on Monday.” She waved as Holly pulled into the street, then headed on to the library. Guys might disappoint, but she knew journalism would never let her down.

The Sorry-in-the-Vale library was one of the ugliest buildings in town. It was a squat brown-brick building that did an amazing impression of a bungalow from the outside and had three stories inside. The roof tiles were crumbly and a strange apricot shade. Inside, the worst part was the carpets. They were weirdly mottled orange and brown, as if someone had skinned a vast diseased orangutan.

The best part was a computer with an Internet connection that Kami did not have to share with two brothers, one intent on watching every funny cat video the Web had to offer, and the other having a star-crossed love affair with Wikipedia. It was also full of books, though that side of the enterprise proved trickier than Kami had hoped.

“Hi,” Kami said to Dorothy, the head librarian, who bought bread at Claire’s every morning and instantly returned Kami’s smile. “Can you tell me where I could find books on Satanism?”

Twenty minutes later, she had Dorothy convinced that it was for a school project, and she really did not have to telephone Kami’s parents. When she finally got away from Dorothy and into the nonfiction section on the top floor, she didn’t find any books called Animal Sacrifice: Why We Do This Completely Disgusting Thing and Who We Sacrificers Are Likely to Be, but she found a few books that she hoped related to the topic. She piled them by her computer and spent time alternately leafing through them and feeding the printer change so it would print her articles as well as truly horrible pictures of people trying to tell the future with goat entrails.

Kami really didn’t think what she’d seen was Satanism. Satanism seemed to involve a lot of specific symbols, and there hadn’t been any of them at the hut. This left Kami with absolutely no idea what was going on, her hair frizzed up in the sticky heat of the stuffy room, and a printer coughing and stealing the last of her money.

It was closing time at the library. Kami gave up her day as totally unproductive. She gathered her giant stack of paper and the few books that seemed helpful, and decided that she would rather risk the creaky lift that was a fire hazard than the dark steps that might break her neck.

This meant, of course, that when she walked out of the nonfiction room, she saw the lift doors closing. “Hold the lift!” Kami yelled, and charged forward.

The guy inside pulled the little trick of punching the air as if it was the button to open the lift.

Kami shoved her stack of paper and books between the closing doors. “I said hold the lift, ass**le!”

The doors opened, giving a low whine as they did so. Kami knew just how they felt.

“Oh, is this the lift?” the guy said in a bored voice. “We call them elevators in America.”

Kami curled her lip at him. She couldn’t retreat now. There was the principle of the thing to consider, and also the fact that she had left pages scattered on the lift floor. “Do you know what we call guys like you in England?” she asked. “Wait, I believe I may have already mentioned the word.” She stepped into the lift with Ash’s delinquent cousin.