Nina waggled her brows. “I think we’ve found our morally bankrupt companion.”
“Vlad!” Nina and I went tearing into the living room, catching Vlad wide eyed, a half-smashed blood bag in one hand, a tiny trickle of velvet red dribbling down his chin. He caught it deftly with the tip of his tongue and my stomach lurched. “What?”
“Can you help me out with something?”
I yelped as Nina body checked me, shoving me aside. “Here is your mission should you choose to accept it,” she said, hands on hips, legs akimbo. “And you have to accept it or we’re kicking you out. You are to break in to the SFPD computers and filch a couple of case files for us.”
“Please?” I said, poking my head over Nina’s shoulder.
Vlad regarded us coolly, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and cocked out a hip. “So you’re asking me to break into the city’s computer system.”
“It’s a matter of life and death.”
“It’s illegal,” he said, as though he had suddenly sprung a conscience.
I gaped. “You care?”
“No, I just want to make sure you know what I’m risking.”
“Can you do it?” Nina wanted to know.
Vlad scoffed. “Of course I can.”
He crossed the room to his laptop, and I nipped at his heels behind him. “You can do it without anyone knowing, right? The police”—Alex, I thought—“absolutely can’t know. Will they be able to trace this back to us?”
Vlad sat down, minimized the CGI vamps in the middle of his BloodLust game, and glared at me. “I need some space. You need some toothpaste.”
I snarled, backed away, and did one of those huff-breaths into my cupped hands. I was a little dragon-breathy. But then again, it was nearing 4 AM.
As Vlad’s long, thin fingers weaved deftly over his keyboard, my heart thumped, the adrenaline shooting like ice water through my veins. I paced, then finally grabbed my shoulder bag and upturned it on the table, spreading out the preliminary files that Sampson had given me, the receipt, my sparkly unicorn notebook containing all my notes, and an etching of the protection symbol carved into the desk. I sat down, grabbed a pen, and waited for Vlad to feed me information. Instead, he poked his face around the side of his laptop screen and narrowed his coal black eyes at me. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting. You find the files, shoot me any pertinent information and I’m here”—I waggled my pen—“waiting for it.”
Nina came up on my left, her arms wrapped around her as if she was chilled. “Are you sure about this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Alex, Sampson getting pissed at you?”
“Yes,” I said, standing. “I’m way more worried about the forces of evil schoolgirls raining down on me.”
Vlad popped around the computer again. “Schoolgirls?”
“Keep working.”
Nina pulled out a chair. “So it’s officially schoolgirls, not witches?”
I nibbled my bottom lip, considering whether or not to share my bathroom experience.
“Will said you got locked in the john,” Vlad murmured.
Nina clapped her hands over her mouth, her small body collapsing in giggles. “Is that true?”
“It was magic! I was magically . . . locked in the john. Have you found anything yet?”
Vlad pursed his lips and crinkled his nose. “Okay, here they are.” He looked up at me, his dark eyes fixed and steady. “You sure you want to do this?”
I looked from Vlad to Nina and back again. “For once I have the opportunity to help on a case in which I am not the deadliest catch. Print, dammit.”
I took the pages out of the printer as it spit them out, stacking them carefully. I divided the two files on the kitchen table, laying the preliminary files I had gotten from Sampson next to them, and topping each side with a photo of one of the girls. My evidence pile looked substantial and Nina came up over my shoulder, nodding, impressed.
“Looks like you have a lot of information.”
“Yes.” I slipped into my room and came back with four years’ worth of yearbooks. “And these, too.” I started to pace. “Now we know that a student may have disappeared my senior year of high school, and that there is a legacy”—I glanced at Nina and Vlad to see if either of them were impressed with my witchly knowledge—“of spell casters. Cathy goes missing last year, Alyssa goes missing this year.” I flipped open the files. “The dates the girls went missing are within days of each other and each feature the number seven.”
I put the kitchen calendar in Nina’s hands. “Look up these two dates. Did anything significant happen on the days the girls went missing?”
I took my seat and opened my sparkly unicorn notebook, ready to write.
“Yes,” Nina said. “Cathy went missing on the seventh, which was a Tuesday, and was officially declared Birds Eye Frozen Foods Day in 1957.”
“I think I remember that,” Vlad said with a nod. “There was a parade.”