“I’m on the volunteer schedule. I’ll do an auric reading.”

  “Ah, maybe I should be there too. If his energy isn’t rebounding, I want to look at his other drawings. Could be a clue in there.”

  “We’ll need your cat for that. Will she be game?”

  Throughout the conversation, I’d been watching Tabitha in my peripheral vision. After two years, I’d come to learn her various looks and postures well enough to recognize her veiled show of interest. As much as she complained about the kids, she’d savored the attention—especially Oliver’s.

  I just couldn’t let Tabitha know that I knew.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I replied.

  “Hey, I’m sorry for earlier.”

  “Huh?”

  “My reaction when you asked about Clark?”

  I’d almost forgotten the frosty state in which she’d left my apartment. “No worries. My fault for prying.”

  “He didn’t take me seriously. That’s why we broke up.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “I know I’m different, and I know I say odd things, and I know you don’t always agree with me, but at least you listen.”

  A wave of guilt hit me for the times I’d written her off—if not to her face, then in my mind.

  “Well, you were right about your dad,” I said. “And Oliver. And I’m a better wizard for having listened.”

  “My dad’s alive because you listened.”

  The appreciation in her voice bordered on intimate. This was getting intense.

  I cleared my throat. “So, ah, I’ll meet you at the Superhero Depot tomorrow at four?”

  “It’s a date.”

  The following afternoon, Tabitha went through the motions of being difficult before agreeing to return to the Superhero Depot. That didn’t stop her from grumbling the entire way. She had to keep up appearances.

  As we neared the store, I spotted Kayla out front, her upper body thrust toward Clark, whose hands were raised defensively. I picked up my pace.

  “…because of you!” Kayla was shouting in his face.

  “I did what I had to do, what I’m required to by law.”

  “You screwed up everything she worked for!”

  “What was the alternative?” he asked bitterly. “Trusting the happy little spirits that it would all work out?”

  “All right, whoa, whoa,” I said as I arrived. “What’s going on?”

  When Kayla wheeled toward me, tears streaked her thick eyeliner. “Oliver’s been taken from his mother.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Ask him!” she shouted.

  Clark, who’d subbed out his shirt-busting look from yesterday for a red cape and shiny boots, blinked from her to me indignantly. “When Oliver came in earlier, he had scratches on his neck. I called the police—as I’m required to by law—and he was removed from his mother’s custody.”

  “Maybe the scratches happened at school,” I said.

  “Oliver’s mother claimed he inflicted them on himself.” He gave me a tired look that said, C’mon, we all know what’s going on here.

  Kayla caught the look too, and her small hands clenched into fists.

  “Janelle had nothing to do with it,” she insisted. “I told you something was feeding on him.”

  “Well, I can’t run a non-profit on your mystical visions,” he said, making woo-woo motions with his fingers.

  “She might be right,” I said.

  Clark snorted. “What do you mean, ‘she might be right’?”

  A horrifying thought hit me. Turning from them, I lifted Tabitha’s carrier to my face. “In the drawing Oliver showed you yesterday, where was the closet in relation to the bed?”

  The worry in my murmuring voice must have stoked a flicker of concern because in a Tabitha first, she didn’t play hard-to-get with her answer. “Across from the foot of his bed. Is that a problem?”

  “Crap,” I spat.

  Kayla pulled me back around to face her. “What?”

  “Oliver hasn’t been drawing the bedroom at his mother’s place—that closet is beside the head of his bed.”

  “How would you know that?” Clark demanded.

  I ignored his question. “In his drawing, the closet is opposite the foot of his bed.”

  Kayla’s eyes widened in understanding. We turned to Clark at the same time and asked, “Is he with his grandparents?”

  “I-I don’t know,” he stammered at the joint show of force. “I assume so.”

  “We need the contact info,” Kayla said.

  “I don’t have it anymore, and if I did, I couldn’t just give it to you.”

  “Then we need to contact his mother,” I said to Kayla.

  Clark’s role in this was done as far as I was concerned.

  “I tried,” Kayla said. “She’s not answering her phone.”

  “Then we need to go to her place.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Clark seized my arm. “I can’t just let you go over there.”

  “Move your hand, shiny boots, or lose it,” I growled. “This is a matter of a boy’s life.”

  Ley energy stormed around me, batting my coat and his cape. Uncertainty grew in his blue eyes. He felt the energy too. He looked to Kayla, but she only stared back at him defiantly. Clark released me and backed up against his store.

  “We’ll take a cab,” I said to Kayla as we started down the street.

  Finding his voice, Clark shouted after me, “Who are you?”

  “A real superhero,” Kayla shot back.

  9

  “She must be out,” Kayla said after mashing the buzzer for Oliver’s unit a fourth time. “Do you have any spells for finding him?”

  “Not without something belonging to him,” I replied.

  And the only thing I’d had was the copper button, melted now and purged of all residues, including his. I peered up at the four-story housing project, then along the decaying street. It had taken an hour to find a cab willing to drive us into this neighborhood, only to arrive at a dead end. Unless…

  “Will you be all right if I leave Tabitha here for a couple minutes?”

  “Where are you going?” Kayla asked.

  “Is no one going to consult me?” Tabitha pouted. “Or am I just the chattel?”

  “There’s a fire escape around back,” I said, setting down her pet carrier on a step. “I can use it to get into the unit and grab something of Oliver’s. A hunting spell will lead us right to him.”

  I didn’t say it, but if the original artifact was at his grandparents’ place, I doubted Oliver would survive the night. Kayla, who may have been thinking the same, nodded gravely. “Only if you’re okay with that.”

  “Well, don’t expect me to carry on a conversation while he’s gone,” Tabitha interjected.

  “I’ll be quick,” I assured Kayla.

  The back alley was less sinister in the light of day. More importantly, it was devoid of people because I hadn’t prepared more stealth potion. No time. I dragged the recliner that had concealed me the night before under the fire escape and climbed onto the armrests, but I was still well shy of the platform.

  Aiming my cane at the ground, I uttered, “Vigore!”

  The force blast sent me into the underside of the platform. It was a wonder I didn’t break my neck, and even more of one that I managed to grasp a rusted rail. Swearing, I pulled myself over and scampered up the steps—basically last night’s escape in reverse. At the window, I unlatched the security gate with another invocation and drew the window open. I listened a moment before stepping in.

  The apartment had been straightened since my tussle last night with the Babaroga. I thought of Oliver’s mother, someone who had overcome personal hardship to create a stable, caring environment for her son, only to have him taken from her again. I forced down the sentiment, needing to focus on the task at hand. I was almost to Oliver’s room, when the floor creaked behind me.

  “Freeze!” a woman ordered.

  I wheeled to find Oliver’s mother standing in her bedroom door, glaring at me over twin shotgun barrels.

  “Wait, let me explain,” I stammered.

  “Down on the ground!”

  “This isn’t what it looks—”

  Blam!

  The blast slammed into my shield of hardened air, spilling sparks and knocking me back. A second shot followed, this time blowing sparks across my face. As the shield wobbled, I dropped to a knee.

  When Janelle saw I wasn’t hurt, she angled her head above her smoking weapon. “Are you some kind of damned demon?”

  “No, no,” I rasped, showing a hand. “Just someone who wants to help.”

  “You’re the guy who was at the tutoring center yesterday. The one with the cat.”

  “I’m a friend of Kayla’s,” I said hurriedly, remembering the pleasantness she’d shown her. “She’s the one who’s been buzzing you. It’s about your son.”

  When Janelle fell silent, she appeared to be debating whether to believe me or unload another blast. I winced in anticipation of the latter, but she sidestepped to the front door and pressed a button on the intercom.

  “Kayla?” she asked. “You out there?”

  When no response came, her eyes narrowed at me.

  “I’m here!” a breathless voice crackled through the speaker. “It’s Kayla!”

  “Thank God,” I sighed.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Janelle asked her. “And who’s this fool in my living room?”

  “It’s all right, he’s a friend. We know you didn’t harm Oliver. Can we sit down and talk?”

  Janelle hesitated, then pushed the button to let Kayla in the building.

  “I want to phrase this in the most respectful way possible,” Kayla said. “I’m worried your weapon is impeding the potential for positive communication.”

  We were seated in the living room, Kayla and I crammed together on a cheap loveseat, Tabitha’s carrier wedged beside me. Oliver’s mother faced us from a rattan chair, the shotgun perched across her knees.

  When she replied to Kayla, it was in a voice that was dangerously calm. “I haven’t had a very good day, honey, and the place where you work had a lot to do with that. Finding your friend creeping toward my little boy’s room in a trench coat hasn’t improved things. So excuse me for not caring about your feelings toward my weapon. In fact, you have about two minutes to start making sense.”

  Kayla nodded for me to begin, to which I raised my eyebrows: Are you sure?

  “When in doubt, let the truth flow from your lips,” she counseled, as if quoting a New Age maxim, “like wind whispering wisdom through the ages.”

  “Kill me now,” Tabitha muttered from the carrier.

  I blew out my breath. I would be confessing to arson, theft, and two counts of breaking and entering, but Janelle was our only lead to her son, and the clock was ticking. I studied my clasped hands and began.

  “Yesterday, Kayla asked me to take a look at Oliver. She was concerned about his health. I’m a professor of mythology, but I also dabble in magic. I help people with supernatural afflictions. Sure enough, his aura was depleted in a way it shouldn’t have been. Not for someone his age.”

  I couldn’t imagine how Janelle was looking at me, and didn’t want to. I forged on.

  “He was also drawing pictures of a creature in his closet, a horned hag. There’s a name for her—a Babaroga—and she was feeding on his life force. Believing her essence was stored in an object, I manufactured a fire alarm to get you and your son out of the apartment and searched Oliver’s room.”

  Janelle grunted knowingly.

  “I destroyed the object, a copper button, but it only held some of the Babaroga’s essence. The lion’s share is in the original artifact, which I believe is at his grandparents’ place. The rest is in Oliver himself—only a little,” I hastened to add, recalling the way he’d looked at me last night when he and his mother were evacuating. “But enough that the Babaroga could compel him to scratch himself so he’d be sent back to his grandparents’ and the original artifact. Just now I was trying to retrieve something of his from his room, something I could use to find him. I can track energies.”

  “It’s all true,” Kayla put in.

  “We just want to help him,” I finished. “I promise.”

  When I lifted my head, I expected to find Oliver’s mother staring at me like one would a drooling patient in an asylum, maybe even pointing her gun again, but she was squinting thoughtfully.

  “That actually explains some things.”

  I blinked in surprise. “It does?”

  “Not just the way he is, but his fear of closets. Most nights he comes into my room to sleep. And I started having these nightmares of an old woman trying to drag Ollie away from me. I thought they came from the pictures he was drawing, ’cause they bothered me, but you’re saying it was an actual witch?” She broke off and wiped a tear from her right eye. “And then when he scratched himself this morning… He’d never done anything like that before.”

  “None of this is your fault,” Kayla reassured her.

  Janelle’s eyes blazed with anger, but no longer at us. “You say this old hag is at his grandparents’ place?”

  “Most likely in an old artifact,” I said. “Can you think of what it might be?”

  “Those are his father’s parents,” she explained. “He died in a shootout, and they’ve been fighting for custody of Ollie since before he was born. Me and them don’t get along real well. I’ve only been in their place one time.”

  “Do you know if they collect antiques?” I pressed.

  “Not antiques, but his grandfather combs the beaches on weekends. Wait a sec…” She drew her phone from a pocket. “To keep tabs on Ollie, I friended his grandpa’s page through a fake account. He’s always posting his latest findings …” She tapped and scrolled for several moments. “Yeah, here it is. He’s got an album full of that crap.”

  When she extended the phone, I nodded for Kayla to take it. She wasn’t a smartphone user either, but her aura didn’t fry sensitive circuits. I looked over her shoulder as she scrolled clumsily through the images. The photos were of bottles of different shapes and colors, cans for vintage brands, and artistic-looking lengths of driftwood, but then she scrolled past something dull-white and oblong.

  “Wait, go back,” I said.

  Kayla squinted. “That’s a seashell, isn’t it?”

  “No.” A cold force wrapped my heart. “Worse.”

  Janelle came over to see. “How is that thing worse?”

  “We’re no longer looking for an artifact. That’s an actual Babaroga’s horn.”

  Janelle read off the date stamp. “He took that the day before I brought Oliver home.”

  “That’s when the transfer to your son’s button happened,” I said. “Explains how her energy ended up in your apartment.”

  Kayla’s eyes widened. “According to your book, a Babaroga can emerge from her horn fully formed.”

  Which makes it far more dangerous than a mere artifact, I thought. She intends to consume Oliver, body and soul.

  Outside the window, the afternoon light was beginning to slant toward dusk. I needed to locate that horn ASAP and reduce it to powder, but everything depended on Janelle.

  “We don’t have much time if we’re going to stop her,” I said.

  Shotgun in hand, she jerked her head toward the door.

  “Follow me.”

  10

  The sun had dipped behind the surrounding rooftops by the time the cab dropped us off at Oliver’s grandparents’, a small house with a neat yard in Queens. We hurried to the front door, where Janelle began pounding.

  “Can you do that a little louder?” Tabitha complained.

  At the sound of door bolts being drawn, I switched her carrier to my other hand. The door opened on a chain, and an elderly man with receding hair and a round belly peered out. A smaller woman wedged herself in front of him, her face drawing to a shriveled point around pink-frosted lips.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said to Janelle.

  “I need to see Oliver,” she replied in her calm, dangerous voice. “He’s in trouble.”

  “Yeah, from your fingernails,” the grandmother snapped. “You’re not coming near him.”

  Her gaze shifted from Janelle to Kayla and then to me. I attempted my most disarming smile, which only caused her eyes to crinkle further before dropping to my pet carrier. What she made of our motley crew, I had no idea, but like a lioness defending a cub, her focus returned to the perceived threat.

  “You have ten seconds to leave,” she told Janelle. “And I count fast.”

  “Then I’m gonna ask you to hand over something that’s harming Oliver.” Pulling out her phone, Janelle held up the photo of the Babaroga’s horn. The grandfather leaned in for a closer look.

  “How about that,” he said in surprise. “The seashell I found at Rockaway Beach.”

  “Get back, Clifford,” the grandmother grunted, shoving him away. “Call the police.”

  Janelle blocked the closing door with her foot, drew her concealed shotgun from behind her leg, and aimed it at the grandmother’s face.

  “Bring us the horn,” Janelle said from a set jaw.

  “All right, okay,” I said, stepping forward. “Let’s be careful where we point that, huh?”

  The grandmother stood her ground, a smile pinching her lips in a way that said, I win. Indeed, when this got back to the judge—that Janelle threatened her at gunpoint—she would lose her son for good. In another second, Janelle was going to come to the same realization, making her even more dangerous. I was reaching for the barrel when, from inside the house, a child’s cry pealed out.

  The grandmother started. Fear exploded through my gut.

  “Oliver!” Janelle shouted.

  She slammed the stock end of the shotgun into the doorframe. The chain burst, knocking the door open and the grandmother into a backpedal. Janelle raced past her. I followed, steadying the grandmother before chasing Janelle down a hallway, the pet carrier swinging wildly from my grip, Tabitha swearing up a storm. We passed the grandfather, who had obediently gone into the kitchen to call the police.