Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(10)

Mrs. Frazer turned very slowly toward Dana. “If this is a joke,” she said in the coldest voice in town, “it’s neither funny nor appreciated.”

The other girls moved away from Dana and regrouped around the teacher. There was doubt on some faces, anger on others. A few leaned their heads close to each other, whispering and giggling.

“But I saw her,” insisted Dana. “She was hurt. She was bleeding all over. She was right there.”

“Right where?”

Dana hurried back to the row of lockers against which the girl had stood and placed her hand on one closed door. “Right here. She had this locker open.”

Mrs. Frazer stiffened, and Dana heard several of the girls gasp. Dana looked at the other girls. No one was laughing now. Some stood with hands over their mouths, eyes wide. Two of them had tears in their eyes. A few looked really angry, like they wanted to hit her.

Mrs. Frazer stepped close to Dana. She was only half an inch taller, but she seemed to tower above Dana, her eyes hot, cheeks flushed, one finger hovering like a snake inches from Dana’s face.

“If this is some kind of cruel prank, girl…,” she said, and left the rest to hang, the meaning quite clear.

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Frazer suddenly slapped her hand against the locker so hard it was like a gunshot. It shocked everyone to silence and tore a yelp of fear and surprise from Dana.

“That poor girl may have made some mistakes,” said Mrs. Frazer. “Maybe she shouldn’t have been at that party, and maybe she was smoking dope. We don’t know what went on … but that doesn’t give you the right to play a horrible joke like this.”

“Joke? I don’t … Wait, what girl? Whose locker is this?”

But Dana already knew.

She looked at the closed and locked metal door, then down at the floor where the blood had pooled, and then up into Mrs. Frazer’s hard eyes.

“Maisie…?” she whispered.





CHAPTER 9

Craiger, Maryland

2:19 P.M.

“Hysteria?” said Melissa. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Dana growled. They were outside the school, walking along the street toward the center of town.

“What did they do?”

Dana snorted. “First they took me to the office so the principal could bark at me.”

“Mr. Sternholtz is an orc. I don’t think he ever smiles. Not sure he can.”

“Then they made me lie down for an hour in the nurse’s office. And they called Mom, of course. Not sure what she said, but when he hung up, Mr. Sternholtz looked like he’d been mugged in an alley.”

“That’s Mom.”

They both nodded. Their mother was generally a quiet, almost passive woman, but not when someone said anything about her children. She never raised her voice, never cursed, never made threats, but somehow the message was always conveyed. Back off.

They reached their destination, which had become the center of their lives over the last few months. It was an old peach-colored building that stood alone on the corner of what passed for the center of Craiger. The name BEYOND BEYOND had been painted on the wood above the front window, the letters swirling with rainbow colors and dusted with glitter. There were two doors. The big one on Main Street led to a store that sold incense, healing crystals, albums of Tibetan monks chanting, folk instruments like Australian didgeridoos and Chilean pan flutes, bead jewelry from Africa and Costa Rica, and icons from every religion in the world and some, Dana suspected, that had been made up recently. Long glass cases lined the walls, and lots of small display tables created a haphazard maze for browsers. A smaller side door on Calliope Avenue was used mostly for students and participants in the various groups and classes that met there, which ranged from yoga and meditation to Reiki massage and even a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. The two halves of the store were separated by an arched doorway, above which was a sign for the COFFEE BAR, flanked by dozens of hand-painted Malaysian flying figures—sphinxes, dragons, and bats.

The girls went in the side and straight to their favorite booth, which was right past the arch. There were two checkout registers, one up front for the store and one under the arch, separated from their booth by a thin canvas screen, so the cha-chings punctuated everything Dana and Melissa said.

Beyond Beyond was often a very busy place for so small a town, with people regularly coming from all over the region. Apart from their school, which served the whole county, the store was the only “busy” place in sleepy Craiger.

Dana loved the store, even though a lot of it was too far in the post-hippie new age lifestyle for her. But the people here were nice. Their focus was on positive energy, peace, and advancement of the soul, and it was hard to find fault with that.

They sat for a while and dissected the entire freaky occurrence at school, trying to make some sense of it. Melissa had Dana go through every detail.

“Crucified like Jesus?” she said when Dana was finished. “That is so sick.”

“You have no idea. And she said something about something called the Red Age.”

“Red Age?” mused Melissa. “What’s that?”

“I have no idea. I don’t have any idea what any of this means.”

Dana noticed that several times during their talk Melissa had touched the front of her blouse, right over where the small cross she wore under her clothes would be. Dana wondered if Melissa was aware that she did that a lot. It was a habit both of the sisters had developed ever since Mom had given them the crosses. Melissa wore a string of crystals over her blouse, each in a different pastel shade, each supposedly representing some kind of spiritual power. Dana wondered which mattered more to her sister, the cross or those crystals.