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 theBACK IN15 MINUTESsign.
“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 wasreallycalling. 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 weredifferent. . .
“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.
