Chapter #20Disposing of Lucy by: Seuzz   You put the book away for latter perusal and gather up the rest of the items from the closet. Nothing looks obviously like a talisman of power, but such things (Blackwell has taught you) don't often look like it.
As for Lucy, well, it's a sad but unsurprising discovery: you find one of her socks on the ground directly beneath the work room window; her shoes are some distance away; her skirt hangs from a branch of the yew tree. You never find her other sock, her undergarments, or her blouse. Apparently, in its rage at being baffled by you, the guardian took out its fury on her things and scattered them. The girl herself, of course, has vanished from this realm, spirited away by things even scarier than the guardian.
Not until much later does it strike you as being odd that her clothes had been so scattered: only items tinged or bound up with some kind of magic are prey to that kind of physical desecration by a guardian. But you finally write it off as a side effect of the chalk dust from the sigil she'd been making.
You never much liked Lucy (lusting after her was quite a different matter), so your feelings of regret, guilt and horror are tinged with a kind of ambivalence: you feel bad because you know you should feel bad, not because you really cared for the girl herself. For your own protection, you ritually burn her remaining clothes, take her car keys (which she had providentially left in the work room), and drive her SUV back into town to leave abandoned in a rough neighborhood. You then call your Prescott clone and get it to take you back to Blackwell's.
"You're gonna be in a shitload of trouble," he tells you on the way back.
"How," you ask impatiently. "It's just going to look like she just disappeared. No one can connect it to me."
"Blackwell's gonna take one look at your face and know something's wrong."
"So I won't wear my own face," you retort. "He never sees your ugly face. I go back to his place as Yumi or whoever, and upstairs I change into Jared. You can't read anything on this face—" you point to Jared's mug, which you're wearing "—because he already looks like a thug."
"What about when the cops get involved? They'll find fingerprints or shit."
"So let 'em find them. I was wearing Jared, so they won't find mine or yours."
"What if they find Jared's? I mean, the real guy that Blackwell copied for you."
That gives you a little pause. You don't even know his name, but ten to one he'll have an alibi.
Or probably he won't, since there will be no clue as to when she went missing.
You make a face. It would be just like your golem to play Jiminy Cricket and prick your conscience.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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