The North Valley Grimoire by Blake Northcott

Author:Blake Northcott [Northcott, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kindle Document
Publisher: Digital Vanguard, Inc. (Ontario, Canada)
Published: 2019-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

The next day at school Maisie breezed past Calista, exchanging half-smiles as they crossed paths. They hadn’t spoken since her abrupt seafood-related exit, and a frostiness lingered between them.

Calista couldn’t shake what she’d seen. The sudden appearance of Maisie’s social media accounts was one thing, but the fact that she’d been living in a near-vacant house was something else. She considered asking about her family, seeing if she could catch her in a lie, though it would only confirm what she already knew: Maisie wasn’t who she claimed to be.

Right now Calista had the advantage, and she didn’t want to tip her hand. This is what detective work was all about: finding different angles. Looking for ins. Maisie might suspect that Calista had a connection to magick, but Calista had something more concrete. She had a plan.

She decided that whoever was picking up Maisie’s mail, and wherever they were taking it, led to answers. And in recent weeks, answers had been in short supply.

With a few taps of her phone she was online, ordering a tracking device roughly the size and shape of a candy bar. It was inexpensive spy-tech outfitted with a GPS, and a magnet designed to attach to a car’s undercarriage.

After the weekend her order arrived. She yanked it from the packaging, stuffed it inside an unmarked box, taped it shut, and printed Maisie’s name and address across the top. It was mid-week, and Frank had the day off, so Calista asked if she could borrow the Civic for a trip to school; she made her case that it would be a nice treat to leave the chewing gum-encrusted seats and mystery smells of the city bus behind for a day. He begrudgingly tossed her the keys.

With her getaway car and her package, Calista skipped school and made her way to Maisie’s house. She parked around the corner, got out and picked along the snowy street, placed the box on her porch, and returned to her car.

It was gloomy that morning, bitterly cold and darker than usual. Heavy flakes blanketed lawns and trees. The routine of intermittently staring at the clock on the dash and back at the GPS app on her phone grew tiresome after twenty minutes, and it became clear why her uncle was no longer a private detective. This was the job: monotony.

“You get paid to sit on your ass,” he’d say. “You take the pictures for free.”

Her phone blipped to life around hour five of the stakeout. A jagged green map of North Valley appeared, and a small red dot traced along Maisie’s street. She flipped her wipers in time to clear a sheet of powder and saw the cobalt pick-up rumble past. The monotony she’d suffered through suddenly felt worthwhile; the payoff was a rush of adrenaline, zapping her like a defibrillator.

Moments later she was racing down the highway, knuckles white as she gripped the wheel, wiper blades at full speed to keep up with the pelting snow; the flakes had grown fat and spattered on impact like miniature water balloons.

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