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"Who's he?" I pulled off my jacket and sat on the corner of the sofa arm.
"Kaylin Chen. He's a goth-type computer geek. He's also a martial arts sensei. He could probably snap your neck with one blow. Quiet. Intense. Independently wealthy. And he can sing and play kodo drums like there's no tomorrow. He teaches martial arts at the conservatory." She glanced over at Leo. "I bet he'd get along with Cicely."
Leo snorted. "You might be right."
Feeling simultaneously left out and picked on, I folded my arms across my chest and tapped my toe. "Don't count your chickens before they turn into KFC. Just why do you think he might be able to help us?"
"Because he's a rebel, and his best friend was a member of the Society. He was killed in a car wreck, though I suspect now it was the Indigo Court." Leo's face went dark. "Kaylin . . . is a special sort. He's far more than he lets on to be. He went into hiding. Right now, nobody knows where he's at, but I bet I can get him over here. I'll give him a call."
I stared at Leo as he fished out his cell phone. It began to dawn on me just how far things had gone. People were missing, people were dead, the cops couldn't be trusted . . .
"Why haven't the Feds sent in an investigation team?"
Rhiannon shook her head, a grim look on her face as she stood up. "My guess is that the news never hit the major papers. Heather thought . . . I think information's being squelched."
"Conspiracy?"
"Think about it. The cops don't give a damn that people are dying and vanishing. Grieve himself told you that Myst controls the town. She must have some way of controlling the authorities. It's probably easy for her to keep stories like this from ever making it out of this burg." She began searching through the desk.
"But surely people talk . . . What are you looking for?"
"Anything that might help us. Anything my mother might have written down or hidden that we can use." Pausing, she glanced over her shoulder. "We should go through the entire house. Can you check out the buffet over there?" She nodded to an antique buffet standing against the wall.
I slowly opened the drawer and began rifling through the papers inside, feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur. This was my aunt's home and I was pawing through her stuff like a common thief. Not that I wasn't familiar with copping a wallet here or there, but this was different.
But then I happened to look up and found myself staring through a slight part in the curtains. The trees were dark and shaded in the growing dusk, and something about the path leading to the forest gave me the creeps. Like a frost-covered open mouth, waiting to gobble up anybody who got too near.
I went back to my search.
"What's this?" Rhiannon said, pulling out a small notebook. She held it up. "This looks like . . . hmm, see what you make of this, would you?" As she returned to the table, I shoved the drawer shut and joined her.
The notebook was a field study book--filled with page after page of diagrams, figures, and notations on the graph paper. I frowned. As I flipped back to the beginning, I glanced at the inscription on the inside cover: Heather's name, and the words A Magical Study of New Forest. And then something clicked as I studied the pages.
"It appears to be a diagram of the town." I pointed to a schematic that looked very much like what I imagined Vyne Street to look like from above. "Isn't this our street? And there's the house."
"You're right." Rhiannon tapped her nails on the table. "But what's that mark--and that?" She gestured to a dark circle over where the wood and ravine were indicated. In the center of a diagram of Veil House, a pentacle had been inscribed.
"Dark circle. Dark moon, maybe? The new moon?" I shrugged.
"At least the pentacle over the house makes sense, since it's a magical symbol."
Leo interrupted, flipping his phone shut. "Kaylin will be over tomorrow morning. He doesn't like to travel alone at night."
We showed him the book and he recognized it.
"Your mother was using this when I was practicing my wildcrafting. Heather told me that New Forest is built over a very powerful energy field and that's why the plants here are so potent. She said the Society sources a lot of energy from the land around here and she keeps track of the ley lines."
"You've got to be kidding." Rhiannon looked up.
"No, I'm not." He shook his head. "New Forest is built over a powerful series of ley lines."
Ley lines were energy grids that traveled through the earth. I could feel them when I was near a mountaintop or at high elevation, and sometimes around ponds or streams or lakes. But since my powers were sourced from the wind, I couldn't always pinpoint where they were.
You haven't tried to feel them in the air, Ulean whispered.
They can be felt through the slipstream?
Of course.
