Hexed (6 page)

Lucifer should have figured as much. Mirrors were often used as gateways to other places, but it was very difficult to use them unless you knew what you were doing. And the only way to know what you were doing was to have the right book. Fortunately, those kinds of books were few and far between, but occasionally they fell into the wrong hands.

“Do you know what the name of the book was?”

“No. But Olivia should still have it.”

“Good. So where's this mirror then?” she asked.

“Upstairs somewhere.”

Lucifer started up the creaky stairs. The wood of the railing was soft and damp against her fingers. It was obvious that the roof did little to keep out the elements.

As David followed her up the stairs, he asked, “Aren't you worried people will think you're evil with a name like that?”

“My grandmothers were wonderful, highly respected women, and I'm proud to be named after them. If anyone has a problem with that, that's their shortcoming. Not mine.”

“How about I just call you Luci.”

Lucifer stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to face him. “How about I punch you in the neck.”

David put his hands on his hips. “You're rather violent, you know that?”

“Yes, because it seems to be the only way I can get people to listen to me.”

“Well, I don't see what's wrong with Luci.”

She wanted to hit him, but what welled up from inside her wasn't anger. It was sadness. Lucifer was her name, it was who she was,
why
she was, and yet people always wanted her to be something else.

“David,” she said, “I was named after my grandmothers because they both died saving my life when I was born. I'm alive because of them.
Both
of them. And I'm not going to disrespect their memory just to make other people more comfortable. My name is Lucifer. Not Luci. Not Jenifer. Lucifer. Accept it or go away.”

David must have seen the hurt on her face because his expression softened. “Of course. I'm sorry . . . Lucifer. I didn't know.”

She could tell he wanted to ask more questions, but thankfully he stayed silent. “It's all right. C'mon,” she said and continued up the stairs.

The top floor of the house was less cluttered with garbage and debris than downstairs. Shafts of sunlight broke through the deteriorating roof in several places, illuminating an open area in the center of a large room where tattered pillows and an assortment of mismatched cushions were arranged in a circle.

“The girls would hang out here while one of them would go in the other room by herself.”

“Where the mirror is?”

“Yeah.”

Lucifer made her way to the other side of the room toward an open doorway. The door that used to cover the doorway was now resting on a couple of milk crates, serving as a makeshift table. Melted wax from at least a dozen candles caked most of its surface, several cigarette butts sticking up from the mess like insects trapped in amber.

When Lucifer stepped into the room, she felt a noticeable drop in temperature. There wasn't any direct sunlight coming in, so it made sense. Still . . .

The rock that Lucifer had thrown through the window was lying in the center of the room, small bits of glass trailing between it and the window. Other than the rock and the broken glass, this room was completely bare except for an old vanity and mirror in the center of the room. The white paint of the vanity had peeled and cracked to reveal the wood underneath.

Surprisingly, the room itself appeared to have weathered the years far better than the rest of the house.

“So, how long have you been doing this kind of thing?” David asked.

“Longer than I haven't.”

“What made you decide to become a thief then?”

Lucifer gave him a sideways glance. “The brochure said I'd get to do a lot of traveling.” She stepped over to the vanity. She could see bits of yellow and blue paint underneath the peeling white paint, but she couldn't find any symbols etched or drawn anywhere. “Come here and give me a hand with this.”

David walked over and grabbed one end of the vanity while Lucifer held onto the other end. “No, seriously,” David said. “Thief is a rather odd occupation.”

Lucifer grunted as she slid her side of the vanity away from the wall. “It's more . . . hhnff . . . popular than you think.”

“Yeah, but you're a girl.”

Lucifer gingerly ran her hand behind the mirror as she examined the back of the vanity. “Your powers of observation are truly a wonder to behold.”

“I didn't mean it like that. I just meant that you're a bit young to be a professional thief. How old are you anyway?”

Lucifer stopped to think for moment before she said, “I don't know.”

“How can you not know?” David leaned against the vanity and said, “Oh god, are you going to tell me you're a vampire?”

She looked up from her inspection and stared at him. She shook her head and said, “Abestado,” before opening the drawers in the vanity to look inside.

“Abestado? What's that?”

“It means ‘idiot' in Portuguese.” She pulled one of the drawers completely out of the vanity and tipped it over to see the underside. Still no symbols.

“Well, I just thought that if you didn't know your age it might be because you're too old to remember. You know. Like a vampire.”

“There are a million ordinary reasons why someone might not know how old they are, but your first instinct is to go with vampire?”

“You were the one that brought up the supernatural.” He was smirking, and the corner of his mouth was doing that curling thing again. She thought his mouth would be almost handsome if such stupid things would stop coming out of it. “So how come you don't know how old you are?” he asked.

“I don't remember my birthday.”

“Everybody remembers their birthday.”

“I'm not everybody.” She said it a bit harsher than she meant to. “Pull those drawers out for me, please.”

“How come?”

“I want to see if there are any symbols underneath.”

He handed one of the drawers to her as he said, “I meant how come you don't remember your birthday?”

“You ask an awful lot of questions, you know that?” He just shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Lucifer sighed and said, “I grew up in Recife, Brazil, in a favela. It's . . . well, I guess it's what you'd call a shantytown. Only poorer than anything you could imagine. My parents died when I was young, and without my grandmothers . . . I had to live on the streets. And street kids don't have much use for birthdays. After a while, I just kind of forgot. But if I had to guess, I'd say sixteen or seventeen.”

David watched her, his face expressionless. Lucifer didn't wait for him to respond and examined the last of the drawers. No symbols anywhere. And that was a serious problem. If there were no symbols on the vanity, that meant the gateway was somehow opened from the other side. But exactly who, or what, had the power to do that?

Lucifer couldn't help but feel as if the ground was opening beneath her and trying to swallow her whole.

“So, no symbols? No bubbling cauldrons? No dark, ominous words scrawled on the walls in blood?” David waved his hands about like a Vegas magician.

“No.” Lucifer put her hands on her hips as she gazed around the room, hoping some clue would reveal itself. But other than a general feeling of “wrongness” about the room, she couldn't see anything.

David's sarcastic tone disappeared. “You sound disappointed.”

Worried,
more
like.
“It's not that. I was just hoping there would be . . .
something
.”

“Not to be rude, but maybe you're not that good of a detective.”

“I told you, I'm not a detective. I'm a thief.” She took another glance around the room but saw nothing of significance. “All right, where's this Olivia girl? The one with the book. I need to talk with her as soon as possible.”

“Home, probably. I can drop you off.”

Once Lucifer stepped out of the room, the feeling of unease lifted, as if a cold, wet towel had been lifted from her shoulders. She looked over at David and watched him reach back and squeeze his neck muscles, trying to loosen them. He felt it, too, though he was obviously unaware that it had anything to do with the room. Lucifer thought it best to leave it that way.

Outside, she and David got into his car. David slid behind the wheel but stopped just before turning the key. “Lucifer,” he said. “I need you to be honest with me. Is Gina in trouble? I don't mean in trouble with her dad, like she's grounded or anything. I mean . . .”

Lucifer tried her best to smile. “I'm sorry, David. I wish I could say this was all just some hoax. But it's not.”

His skin went pale again. “So she's really in danger.”

She reached over and patted his arm. Lucifer was surprised at the firmness of his triceps. “Not enough for you to lose any sleep over.”

“You promise?” he asked.

Lucifer glanced up at the second floor of the Worcester House to see that the window she shattered with a rock was now back in place and completely unbroken.

“I promise.”

CHAPTER 6

It was Olivia's mother who answered the door. Her hair was shaped and curled within an inch of its life, and her bright blue dress was so tight Lucifer could have sworn someone had just stood over her with a bucket of paint and dumped it over her head. But the thing that immediately struck Lucifer was the overwhelming smell of perfume.

“May I help you?” she asked with a smile as fake as the flesh spilling from the top of her dress.

“Hi. I'm here to get a book from Olivia. For school.”

“A book. From Olivia.” The incredulous look on the woman's face left no doubt in Lucifer's mind that this was probably the first time she had heard the words “Olivia” and “book” in the same sentence for quite some time.

The woman turned and shouted, “Olivia! Olivia!” After getting no response, she turned back to Lucifer, her frown creating deep cracks in the thick makeup she wore around her eyes. “Come on in. She's upstairs in her room. And you tell her I said she has to be home by eleven tonight. I'm serious! When I call, she better be here to answer the phone or she'll be wearing an off-the-rack dress to the Homecoming Dance, I swear! You tell her that!” she said, putting her finger in Lucifer's face.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Good.” The woman grabbed her purse off the back of a suede couch, adjusted one of her heels, and then whisked out the door.

Lucifer took a moment to get her bearings. The house looked relatively new and was clearly decorated by someone with more money than taste. She scanned the abstract paintings on the walls, the trinkets on display here and there, but didn't notice anything of mystical value. Not that she expected there to be, but on more than one occasion, Lucifer had found potentially dangerous objects in the homes of people who hadn't the first clue of what they had.

She made her way upstairs past a dozen framed family pictures. Some were of individual people, but most were Olivia and her mom on various vacations: at the beach, on the ski slopes, posed in front of the Eiffel Tower. And in each photo, Olivia looked about as excited as someone visiting the dentist. For everything she had, she seemed to be committed to misery.

When Lucifer reached the top of the stairs, she heard voices coming from behind a closed door at the end of the hall. The voices stopped when she knocked. Without waiting for an answer, Lucifer stepped into the room.

The room looked just like Lucifer expected a typical girl's room to look like. It was bright but cluttered with posters of boys and pictures of friends, though everything was a bit . . .
pinker
than she was expecting.

Olivia and another girl were sitting on a large bed, a cache of outfits strewn between them. Olivia was covered in as much makeup as her mother. It was heavy, bright, and thicker where she wanted to hide her blemishes, blemishes no doubt caused by her heavy use of makeup. Lucifer could see her harsh blue eyes staring at her through a shock of stick-straight blonde hair.

Lucifer recognized the other girl from Gina's yearbook but couldn't recall her name. She was much more attractive than Olivia but seemed to work at trying not to overshadow her friend. Her brown curly hair was pulled back in a haphazard way, and her fashionable clothes were at least a size too big. But whoever she was, she smiled at Lucifer until she noticed Olivia scowling. Then her smile dissolved, silently waiting for permission to return.

“Who the hell are you?” Olivia asked.

“Lucifer. David just dropped me off. He called and told you I was coming.”

“For the book, yeah.” Olivia made a show of examining Lucifer from head to toe.

“Is your name really Lucifer?” the other girl asked, leaning forward, a small smile of wonder across her face.

As a thief, Lucifer had to learn how to blend in, how not to stand out in a crowd. The way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, the way she carried herself, all of it was designed to make her completely forgettable. So it was odd having someone stare at her with such pleasant fascination. Even so, Lucifer couldn't help but smile back. “Yes, that really is my name.”

“You're a friend of Gina's?” Olivia asked. “I've never seen you at school.”

Lucifer didn't have the time or the desire to explain why she had never set foot in a classroom, but she knew that the truth always led to more questions. So she said, “I don't go to your school. I'm . . . homeschooled.”

Both girls sat up straight and exchanged uncomfortable looks. “Don't worry,” Lucifer said. “I'm not going to brainwash you into joining a cult or anything like that. I just need the book and I can get out of your hair.”

Olivia got off of the bed and walked over to a desk just large enough to hold the massive computer monitor resting on it. She opened a drawer and pulled out a large book, bound in dark aged leather. When Lucifer saw it, her heart went cold. Even from across the room, she could tell that it was bad business. Mostly because it was bound in human skin. But that was a detail she thought best to keep to herself.