"It's a god-damn conspiracy," I say, once the tow truck's driven off with my Cav. We're all piling into Kelly's Impala, spare symbolism whacking our thoughts as we bump into all the Tarot cards and good luck charms.

"You keep sayin' that and I keep on disagreein'," Paul says around a pair of cigarettes. "What the hell makes you so sure?"

"He is right," Kelly says to the rear-view. The whole car shudders as she tries to start it up. "This is looking broader and broader the more we discuss it."

I don't let myself think what comes next; in my mind Kelly's got a dozen puppets tied to her fingers, and one of them looks like me. "The tags are connected, somehow." I snap my fingers, try to make sense of the jumble. "We need to talk to that kid. Only one high school in the area, right?"

"Three," Kelly says.

For just a second my enthusiasm dips, but I'm not going to let her stop me. "Still, not exactly a needle in a haystack, right?"

"Unless he's homeschooled." Paul lights both cigarettes. "Or playing hooky. Or not actually a teenager and you're losing your touch—"

"Paul." Count my fingers: One, two... "The guy in the tag read young, okay?"

"So where do we start?" Arabella groans. "Fort Bragg High?"

"Yes." I look around the seat, smirk. "That's precisely where you start."

She cocks her head at me, but she's got it in under a second. "Oh. I've got the age range."

"And so does Kelly. If she'll let me drive."

Kelly fires an empty stare through the windshield. "Wild goose chase," she says without interest. "We cannot just walk into the high school and start asking who is committing crimes."

"No," I say, grinning to myself. "But we can talk really obviously about it."

There's a moment of silence. Kelly gets it. And a second later, so does Arabella. Paul got it immediately, but he'll feign ignorance just to be a dick.

"So we talk about it," Arabella says, almost reciting, "in as public and obvious a manner as possible—"

"—and we scan peoples' thoughts for evidence," Kelly says.

"And then you collar the guy at work and go Sam Spade on him."

"Wear a trenchcoat and talk like Bogart?"

Paul's not getting food on this one. "You've got until 3pm, I think, assuming school hours haven't changed. Paul and I will take the Impala, and we'll go see this Foreman guy."

"Foreman lives out in the hills," Kelly tells me, "he will not like you showing up and—"

"Well nuts." I smirk. "Guess I'll have to not care."

She stares at me as we come to a red light, and gives me a smile I think is intended as agreement. I feel like a cockroach just buzzed my ego.

"Keep yourselves shielded," I say.

"We know what to do," Arabella responds. Not even off on her mission and she's already snapping.

There's a gray and white eyesore rising up in the middle of suburbia, several enormous buildings flanked by trees they must think make it woodsy. Their mascot is apparently the timber wolf. I lied; I love this town.

Kelly pulls up across the street, hands the keys to me fresh from the ignition. Her smirking into the rear-view is even more unsettling then her smile. "Ready to rouse some rabble?"

"With you?" Arabella purrs. "Always."

As she slides out, I catch the yellow flash that tells me I'll pay for this later. Paul and I step out to play Chinese fire drill, me getting directions while Paul admires first the Impala and then the girls' departing asses.

"This plan is stupid," he says, as he fishes a cigarette out of his coat.

"So is taking two teenaged girls to meet a redneck conspiracy theorist."

Paul glances at me sidelong. "You fucking serious?"

"Cardiac. This might actually work, too, you know; but either way, if things at Foreman's house go pear-shaped, they aren't in the line of fire."

"Boys' night out." Paul flicks his lighter, and puffs a massive column of smoke as he stares out over the exterior of the school. "I'm getting anger...depression...and a general sort of grayness. Place feels like someone's grading them on ennui."

I get into the car, start it up. It doesn't give me a second of grief. "Yep," I say, as Paul climbs into shotgun. "Sounds like high school."

Our directions lead back south of Fort Bragg, left just past the second bridge and up a two-lane road Kelly tells me is called "409" but which I will be referring to only in expletives. The road is murderously hot, Thompson-in-Barstow-level sunbeams pounding down through the glass, and the scenery makes me want to curse God: tall ochre redwoods and low square shrubs, set in a soil that's fifty percent dust. By the time we hit our target area gnomes are building a suspension bridge in my scapulae.

Foreman's place is an old farmhouse, complete with a barn, set at the back of an empty field that hasn't seen a mower in months. The bone-dry wooden fence flanks a pasture that's more cracks than dirt, little clutches of grass screaming for help in the middle. The fence posts are wrapped in barbed wire and topped with cattle skulls, little American flags and First Nations adornments thrown on here and there; the whole place says "ranch" so thoroughly that I have to assume it's psychic shielding. The house itself is a simple two-story, I'm guessing three bedroom from its size, with nothing in the driveway but a tarp-covered pile of logs. The doubled front doors each have a dream-catcher on them, in case I didn't get the idea.

Paul's squinting as he gets out of the car, his aura squirming in reaction to his discomfort. "Astrally speaking, this place is a fortress." Paul eyes the top floor windows as he says it. "Guy must be paranoid."

"Out here?" I drawl. "Naaaah." I turn away from the Most Annoying Demon, and knock.

Nothing.

"Car's not here," Paul says with a shrug. "Maybe he's out buying ammo."

"That'd be a nightmare come true." I pound again on the door. "Mr. Foreman?"

Paul saunters away from me, sways out toward the side of the house. "You sure Foreman's his last name?" he jibes, as he sways into the shadow of the carport.

"I'm not in the mood, Paul."

"Exactly." He disappears around the side of the house, smirking to himself.

I grimace, rap my knuckles again on the door. There's a rustle of cloth and a bright red flash over the link-up, and Paul is sprinting back into view.

"Door," he says as I run over to him.

We wheel around the corner, head for the pile of wood. There's a single step up, bare concrete, no welcome mat. A busted cattle skull lays in pieces on the top step, in front of a door partially splintered and lolling off its hinges.

"Mother of fuck."

"Say that again," Paul mutters. "Scanned the place, there's no-one in it."

"That you can feel."

"No-one at all," he insists. "I scanned the place, nothing inside keeping the damn thing shielded, no skulls, no Tarot cards, not even a freaking Jesus candle. House is naked as a baby in a white van."

Even I twinge at that one. "Right." I square my shoulders. "I'll take that out of your ass later."

Paul simpers as I squeeze past the door. "Be careful of your choice of words."

The side door opens onto a storage room, a cabinet full of cleaning supplies and another empty except for what looks like a gun rack. There's dust, thick enough to see the streaks where something was moved. I creep through the storage room and into a cavernous main house, a high vaulted ceiling made of deep orange-brown redwood. The stairs up are in the dead center of the room, bookshelves and the kitchen buttressing the other sides of the column—the layout gives my heart a nice workout as I circle around to take in the entire place.

Couch, tables, nice big TV; drifts of beer cans on every surface you might use to prep food; Chinese food in the refrigerator that doesn't yet smell like a merman's jockstrap. But there's nothing but dishes in any of the cupboards, one knife missing from the wooden block by the stove; I can't find any food that's meant to last more than a week, no jackets on any of the coatracks...and there's still that empty gun rack by the front door.

"He left recently," I say, as I take a tentative step up the stairs. I come back to the ground floor, back up until I'm hidden from the railings above me. "Paul, you mind going first?"

He scoffs. "I told you we're alone here."

"I just want to stare at your ass on the way up."

He flips me the bird and marches double-time up the stairs. I follow behind with my fists at my sides, debating exactly how I'm going to deal with it if someone attacks us.

Upstairs is two bedrooms and a bath, and a spare room that seems to be where the boxes live. I check the bathroom—towels but no toothbrush—and the bedroom at the left end of the hall—bare mattress, nothing of import. I head into what I'm guessing is the master bedroom, and stop dead in the doorway.

"Jackpot?"

There's a desk in the far corner, next to a bed with a tangle of wool and pillows in its center. The desk used to have a heap of papers on it, with a few pens and a decorative letter opener to complete the look. I'm guessing there was even a laptop computer. But that's the past; now the papers are strewn all over the floor, the letter opener is laying at the foot of the bed, and there's just a square of lighter brown where the laptop used to sit. The contents of the drawers are piled at the center of the room.

"So Foreman bugs out," Paul says, sucking an unlit cigarette. "And then someone shows up, knocks like we did—"

"—gets a little more terse about it—"

"—and rolls the place like an unarmed john."

"Is this your new tactic? Bawdy analogies?" I shake my head and walk over to the pile, my numb fingers twitching against my palm.

"It a good idea to leave evidence at a crime scene?"

"I'll take my chances." I ball my hand up in my sleeve, and press my knuckles into a piece of junk mail.

I get flashes of angry faces, people arguing as whoever I am rifles through the mail. I'm seeing a crucifix, a Tarot card, psychic smears that leave the voices little aural John Does, absent of meaning; but then whoever's looking swerves to shout at somebody, and for a second I catch an unmistakable pair of linebacker shoulders glowering at the searchers from the doorway. I exhale, and sit down.

"Jackpot." I look up at Paul, feeling like I just ran a marathon. Endorphins run manicured fingers across my chest. "Whoever was here, they were taking orders from Milk."

"Milk." Paul scoffs. "And he wasn't shielded?"

"I'm guessing he didn't handle anything. Didn't reckon on one of the mooks looking his direction."

"Then he's even more of an idiot than his face lets on. I have to wait until I get outside to smoke, don't I?"

"Rope it in, Joe Camel." I start to get up, and pause with my eye on the bric-a-brac.

The heap is mostly junk mail: credit cards, Netflix offers, a couple menus for places I'm pretty sure have closed. But in among the pulp paper is a calendar, glossy but well-marked with appointments—and near the upper left, next to the square for the first of October, is a picture of a pentagram with "ogre" written underneath it.

"What the fuck?" I pick up the calendar, and get smacked with a storm of excess meaning, crosses and Seals of Solomon and the dull roar of an anarchy symbol all vomiting their subtext straight into my spine. I come back to the material world with my eyes pointed toward the ceiling; the carpet's so unclean it's gritty against my back.

"Time to smoke," I say, shoving up to my feet. "We need to pick up Arabella."

We spend the drive back half arguing and half silent, me postulating and Paul playing Devil's Advocate while I speed. We're in Fort Bragg before either of us realizes it, that same stone fisherman staring down at us before we cross the bridge.

Paul's still gesturing like a bug crawled up one of his sleeves. "I'm just sayin', Gary's bitch-boy wasn't necessarily there to do anything wrong—"

"In the very specific sense we are using wrong here," I say.

"Still. Point stands. The guy might have been checkin' in. Foreman might have been the one doin' wrong, you know, the psycho who sicced a girl with a gun on us? Could be he's the one we should be watchin' out for."

I make the right toward the high school and give him a look. "How likely do you really think that is?"

Paul leans back, plucks at one of his ears. "Man, I know you think Master Gary is shady. And you think that because Master Gary is shady. But we're all shady around here. The trick is figuring out which ones are actually dark."

I tighten my grip on the steering wheel, and after a long teeth-grinding moment, relax it. Just because he's a smartass doesn't mean he lacks a point.

We come into view of the high school right as my cell phone goes off; I nudge it toward Paul, and have less than a second to regret it before he's answering in a cloud of smarm.

"Hello my little buttercup. Loverboy's busy driving." He chuckles to himself, and claps the phone shut with all his teeth showing. "She's out at the curb."

They're standing not too far from the main office, Arabella cross-armed in her wedding kimono and Kelly looking blankly disaffected. I pull up alongside and pop the door; my nerves are riveted steel as they clamber in behind me.

"How was school?" I purr.

Arabella cracks her knuckles. "Informative. How was your display of chauvinism?"

My nerves don't even try to lock up. "How long have you known?"

"You bled into my palm two days ago, Randall." She puts extra emphasis on my name, and extra bile.

Now I'm tense. I put the car in gear and try to shrug it off. "Can we have this fight later? Important Shit just went down."

"So you acknowledge this is worthy of a fight?"

"When's the wedding?" Paul chuckles.

"Boy's name is Byron McDonough," Kelly says, uninterested. "He is exactly as you suspected, but he is not doing this for himself."

My head's full of shadows. "Someone's paying him."

"Good guess," Arabella purrs. "Thought-scan didn't say who, just that it was a guy."

"Foreman," I growl. I exhale so hard I can feel the growth of my nostrils.

"Were you reading my mind?" She speaks with ice-crystal brightness. "Because that doesn't really seem very likely."

"We went to Foreman's," I say.

Kelly seems interested. "Did you talk to him?"

"No-one there to talk to. The place had been rolled, and Foreman cleared out in a hurry."

"We're guessing before the rolling," Paul says helpfully.

My brain spikes. "Yes." I frown as I make the turn onto Main.

"Okay..." Arabella drawls. "So what'd you find?"

"A calendar." The road is suddenly very interesting. "With a Seal of Solomon next to August."

"And an anarchy symbol in July," Paul says. "And a crucifix in June, really, Randall, you don't need to be so theatrical."

Arabella goes cold with adrenalin. "They're varying the symbols."

"Like fucking clockwork," I spit.

"They're communications," she says. "Stuff no-one will notice, more petty crimes—"

"But petty crimes that are neon road signs for psychics," I pronounce.

"And demons," says Paul.

"The attacks..." Arabella locks up; she's thinking it, but even in this company she thinks saying it will be what makes it true.

"The graffiti are signposts." I mutter. "Ways to tell the demons where to go. It was Sunflower and Walt until last night, I'm guessing they got taken out of the rotation—"

"Because a peacekeeper caught them at it," Arabella says.

"By George I think she's got it," Paul says with mock pleasure.

"Fuck you." I stop as we approach the north end of the city, and pull into the parking lot of the Denny's. "Whoever Foreman was working for, whatever reason Gary's goons were there"—I grunt as I put the brake on—"they wanted those crimes to happen in specific places. And they had a method that would expressly require psychics and demons to make it work."

"I guess it is a conspiracy." Paul stares at the restaurant in boredom. "So what's the plan?"

"A tag went up this morning," I say. I pull the keys out of the ignition, and gesture for everyone to get out. "And the demons only come out at night. So tonight, ladies and gentlemen"—I twirl the keys—"we bust ourselves some chops."

Arabella sniffs, gathers her kimono. She's not interested in my posturing. "Alright folks," she says, stealing the words from my mind, "who wants pancakes?"