“Fuck,” Marvin said again, and sighed as if he had made a mistake, though it was likely the icing on the cake that continued to make the staff believe in Marvin’s lack of control. “Sorry, ladies,” he said.
Before the guards showed up, Dani quietly told them what she had seen out the window.
The moment Zeddie poked his head out the door, Sandra slapped Marvin with the magazine. “You nasty man. You stop messing with my drawers!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose! It was an accident! Stop whacking me, you religious nut!”
“There ain’t nothing wrong with being a religious nut! God loves religious nuts!”
“Then go whack your God with your magazine!” Marvin yelled. “Zeddie. Help me!”
There followed loud accusations from Sandra and Dani, and Zeddie spoke into his small radio. Moments later, they were graced with an appearance by the warden, Margorie Devoe. Devoe was tall, a pale-skinned magic user in her forties, a former model with a master’s in business, and the patter of a snake-oil salesman. She wore her hair long, dyed a metallic red, and still walked as if she owned the runway. Her word was law.
Holding up her pants, Dani waded up to Devoe and demanded that Marvin be gagged. Marvin cussed and blustered. Dani glared. Sandra prayed for them all at the top of her lungs,one hand in the air, the other holding up her clothes. Mable simpered, her panties around her ankles.
It was a good act. The warden fell for it and placated them all with promises of ice-cream tomorrow night, especially Marvin, heaping attention on him, though remembering to offer commiserating glances at the rest of them.
Marvin’s talent was a cash cow, if Devoe and her staff could, “teach him how to harness his power.” Devoe’s words. She gave him special attention in magic classes. He was teacher’s pet, through and through. Even after the Bentley incident, where the expensive car transmuted into mostly soil.
When the kerfuffle was over, Tridevi’s team all stomped silently to their rooms.
That was the only moment of unobserved conversation they would have until they all joined up for pre-breakfast tea and coffee in Marvin’s room. There was nothing else Dani could do tonight.
When Mable originally hacked into The Sevens’ security system, she had created a one-hour window when the dorm’s internal security system wouldn’t work. It was driving the IT team nuts. Mable was wonderfully evil. But an hour was all they had each day for a debrief.
Until morning, Dani had a spell she needed to pretend to work on and a lot of thinking to do. And she fervently hoped that the laptop had been smuggled into the school at last.
Sandra
Just before eight a.m., Sandra returned from checking on her emu husband. Harold looked better today and had eaten a nice breakfast of eighty percent emu ratite pellets, with the twenty percent balance being a sliced apple, alfalfa pellets, and beets. She tried to switch it up every day with seasonally availableveggies because human-Harold had been a food-loving man with a craving for soul food cooked the way her mama taught her. Emu-Harold was less particular. One day she saw him snatch up a mouse and swallow it whole. The sight had made her sick to her stomach. But that day . . . That had been the day she realized she might never get Harold back. That had been her first day of real grief.
After the mouse-eating-day, she had let Dani persuade her to join TriDevi to take her mind off her woes and bring in cash she sorely needed. Though younger than the others in the firm, she had trained as a forensic accountant—someone who tracked down missing money—back when she was younger, before she and Harold were called by God to start the church. Doing Tridevi’s books, working with people who weren’t afraid of her, had been a spiritual lift. Even with Marvin’s mouth.
The elevator opened on the fourth floor of the dormitory building, Dorm Delta. Sandra stepped out, caught a glimpse of the camera in the corner, and checked her watch. Instead of going briskly to her room, she slowed as she walked the hallway toward her room at the end.
Dorm Delta was the hallway of suites where they had all been placed, having arrived within seven days of each other. The clock passed eight, the cameras went dead, she stopped, tapped on Marvin’s door, and he let her in. Mable tucked in behind her and lip-locked her beau. Sandra missed Harold with soul-churning misery.
Marvin had tea and coffee waiting for each of them. Despite his spell-cussing mouth, he was a good host and was never selfish. If Sandra had allowed herself the sin of hard liquor, she had no doubt that Marvin would share his stash with her.
Sandra took the hot tea he offered and sipped with pleasure. It was the good stuff, not the cheap teabag fanningsand dusts offered by The Sevens’ management. “Thank you,” she murmured to Jesus, her eyes closed. And because Marvin had finally figured that out, he waited until she opened her eyes and said, “And thank you, Marvin.”
“You’re welcome,” the old coot said.
In minutes, Dani joined them, shutting the door quietly. She took her place beside Sandra and drained half her coffee in a big gulp. “Thank God,” she said, breathing in the steam. “Decaf is not cutting it.” She opened her eyes and said, “I need to tell you all about the truck yesterday and the two guys in hazmat suits.” She added details about the suits and descriptions of the men—height, weight, and their hair color, which she noted when they removed the suits. She added, “The truck deliveries might actually have something to do with our case. Or not. But it’s all we have and right now anything is better than nothing.
Before anyone could reply she asked, “How’s Harold?”
Dani always remembered to ask about Harold, and it made Sandra’s heart happy. She smiled gently and said, “Better. And I have news too. The head keeper at the barnyard told me they had a former human—currently a two-hundred-pound boa constrictor—who is now a widow.” Sandra had everyone’s attention for the moment. She wasn’t often the center of attention anymore, having lost her congregation when she magicked-out. And people who could turn others into emus had a hard time making friends. “Buck Hackenmeister supposedly passed away yesterday. Eloise is now permanently a snake.”
Dani nodded thoughtfully and shoved a strand of steel gray hair back behind her ear. “Buck used to sit at Table J. Him being dead is a different story from the one concocted by the school, about J all getting a contract together. And yesterday, at supper, is when I saw all the transfers of the white truck, and not a sign of a coroner’s van or Ubers taking people to new jobs.”
“You think they lied about Buck and moved him to Building Z?” Sandra asked.
“I think someone messed up on the story they told, so yes, I think Buck was moved yesterday,” Dani said.
“I got an email from the office on that useless tablet,” Mable said. “Our intern noticed a sudden increase in The Sevens’ special account to the tune of seven hundred, fifty-two thousand dollars, and change. It coincides with Buck’s mostly liquid assets.” Mable looked at Sandra and lifted her cup in a toast. “Good work setting up that AI watchdog over The Sevens’ financials.”
“We need to find a way over to Building Z,” Dani said, not for the first time.
