“Why is this knee scab in my room?” Asha asked with several blinks at me. “I mean I can put the bitch out–––”
“Knee scab when you’re the one with the scars–––”
“Enough, both of you,” I interjected like a mother to her two bickering daughters. “We don’t have time for that.”
Clementine walked around the room, nose high in the air and silently judged her surroundings.
“So this is how the less unfortunate live,” she muttered to herself, running her finger across the desk only to rub the bits of dust off. When she whipped around, she leaned against the dresser and crossed her arms against her chest. Asha stared at her while slipping a strip of gum in her mouth to chew.
“Look at you, standing next to my dresser…like an addict,” Asha said as Clementine stared at her. “You trying to get a whiff of my panties now–––”
“First of all–––”
“Enough!” I snapped. “This is serious!”
“Okay then what are we doing?! Who are we waiting on?!” Asha fussed.
Harvey walked back in with a scrunch of his nose as he closed the door and adjusted his maroon tie.
“How long is this going to take?” He asked, looking directly at me.
“Not too long,” I said as I began to lock the room down. I drew a silent X in the air with my finger before going to each wall to trace it. “No watcher peers, no whisper crawls. No breath escapes these guarded walls. What’s spoken here draws its last breath, and then dies with us, touched by death.”
I repeated the same lines over and over, drawing my hand from the top of the door to the bottom as Clementine began to do the same. When the room became silent, I pulled out the small folded black note that was given to me by Solomon.
“You have a koeori,” Clementine let out with her eyes wide. “Those are banned from the school.”
“A what?” Asha asked.
“That is practically illegal–––”
“Which is why I protected the room and before they catch on to a spell being done outside of a classroom, we need to hurry up and listen.”
“A koeori is like a recorder or a live note,” Isis whispered towards Asha. “Records conversations…recalls events. It’s something that can’t be manipulated. It’s ancient traditionalJapanese magic. My brother used to confiscate them when he was on the job.”
“Alright so let’s hear it,” Harvey said. I tossed the note to the center of the room as it began to snap and crack open, unfolding like popcorn in the bag. You could hear the distant conversations of men talking and laughing, music, and even footsteps as we drew closer to the note. Even Clementine had to lean against the dresser, staring at it like it would answer every question about life. When the black note began to take the shape of a wolf, I knew immediately it was Nanir.
“I’m not waiting anymore!” Namir shouted. “I don’t give a fuck about this job anymore. I’ve have every nose on the ground looking for her and they can’t even pick up a fucking scent! All of this doesn’t matter if she’s not–––”
“You’re not the only one that wants to know where she is but right now? It’s best she stays where she’s at until we can get this situated. Did they confirm the body is still buried in the backyard?”
The black wolf began to flatten on the carpet before tearing and splitting into two wolves talking to one another before one shifted into a man standing on two legs.
“How do we know we can trust these people? So this man claims to be her uncle? How do you even know? You even said you couldn’t tell he was First Family,” Namir said.
“He’s our mother’s older brother. He is Marvin’s first-born child. He is only helping us because his daughter is at risk too. Yes, we confirmed the body of the student is still there. That’s where we have to go and dig her up.”
“What’s her name again?” Another voice asked.
“Hillary,” Namir responded as my eyes widened. I felt the tightness grow in my chest as I looked at the girls. “Hillary Jenkins…”
The note began to shift into a flat surface on the floor, flattening out the lines and wrinkles as the voices before small pieces began to form around it like men sitting around the table.
“From my understanding,” another voice said. “You said this has happened before with Maggie.”
“I’ll…” Namir’s voice was so loud and clear that it was hard not to miss him. “I’ll wake up sometimes and she’s gone…she’s outside somewhere. Sometimes for hours or even minutes and she’s outside of herself. I can’t explain it. I want to say this is it but the fact that we can’t find her…No scent, no trace of her scent anywhere?”
“You think her mother may know something if she remembers her daughter?”
