Demons & Dracaena by A.L. Tyler

Author:A.L. Tyler [Tyler, A.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

~~~~~~~~~

I slept all night and through the alarm. Gates had to wake me up, which she did by creeping up close to my ear and whispering an obscenity. I threw on my clothes while she delivered a prepared speech on how I was to personally kick the ass of anyone who wasn’t her friend and pretended to worry about her disappearance. When I asked her what I should say to her parents, she only laughed lightly.

“Tell them I’m in Silicon Valley learning to run my own startup. That’s where they think I am now.”

I paused, and then finished pulling my shirt down. “What?”

“I called them first thing last night after Charlie paid his visit,” she said, and the image of a cat trying to dial the cordless handset in my room immediately came to mind. “But first I called my uncle out there. He’s still in his twenties and he always told me I should travel the world and have an adventure before I settled down and became an adult. So, he thinks I’m backpacking in Poland right now, and he’s covering with my parents, who would never let me go backpacking in Poland.”

I turned back to face her, raising my eyebrows. “You’re an evil genius, Gates.”

“Anise?” My dad knocked on my door before opening it, and Gates jumped under the bed. “Were you just talking to…?”

He looked bewildered. So did I.

I pointed at the clock radio on my bedside that I had left on to cover our voices. His eyes scanned the room, and seemed to settle on the conclusion that it must have been a commercial playing. I was too much of a nerd to sneak someone into my room, and the reputation came in useful on the rare occasions when I needed it. Like last night, when he hadn’t assumed anything about my staying out late, except that I must have been taking extra care in sweeping up the greenhouse floors.

His eyes relaxed. “That girl from your school, the one with the rare peanut allergy, is on the news right now. Her parents are organizing a candlelight vigil by the school tonight if you want to go.”

I wasn’t sure that I was someone they would want there if they knew. “Thanks, I’ll think about it.”

That day at school was hardly any better than the first. Gates seemed to have stopped the alert on her disappearance just in time, as none of her teachers seemed to note her absence anymore. Her mother must have notified the school that she had chosen to skip graduating in favor of becoming a computer whiz like her uncle. Her dad wasn’t going to be happy about it, but he lived in San Antonio—it was hard to make a big deal out of it from that far away. If everything went according to plan, she would be back from her “trip” and her “internship” before Friday, anyway.

I sat through my classes, but I had completely forgotten my regular homework assignments in favor of learning how to perform a magic spell that hadn’t worked.

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