The next time they saw each other was Wednesday, when Henrietta came by to pick them all up for school. Instead of driving to Park County High, however, she pulled an abrupt U-turn and sped in the direction of her house, holding the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. Well, whiter.
"What's up?" Dylan asked, coming out of his morning daze for long enough to realize that they were headed in the entirely wrong direction.
"There's no time for school," Henrietta answered tersely. "Not anymore. Bradley's been listening to police scanners again, and he told me some kind of riot broke out at a Lemuria show in Denver. This thing is spreading."
She drove in silence for a moment, allowing the others to process this new development before adding, "Also there's a math test today."
Georgie sighed as if this whole thing was nothing more than a minor annoyance. "Man, now the attendance assholes are gonna call my house. They always call my goddamn house."
"Bigger things to worry about," Dylan gritted out. He looked thoroughly panicked by the whole situation. "How do we kill them? Can we kill them? How do we even know where they are?"
"Bradley's working on something," Henrietta answered, pulling into her driveway. She kept talking as she slammed the car door and led everyone into her house and upstairs. "He can't actually do it for us, but all his superhero bullshit will definitely come in handy."
Evan gave an incoherent grunt, his first noise of the morning, and flopped down face first on Henrietta's bed. "It's way too early in the morning for this," he pointed out rightly. "Also, there's no way we're going to be able to kill a bunch of ghosts. We can't even run the mile in PE."
"Protecting the nonconformists of the tri-state area is so not comparable to PE," said Henrietta, lighting a cigarette. "We'll be fine." Holding it carelessly between two fingers, she started digging around in the general clutter of jewel cases and dirty clothes that littered her bedroom floor until she found what she was looking for; a device roughly the size and shape of a TV remote, with multicolored blinking lights at the end of it.
"Oh my God," said Evan, sitting up to look at it. "That's hilarious."
Henrietta glared at him, brandishing the thing in her non-cigarette hand. "It's an EMF reader," she said. "It tells you when there's ghosts around. And right now it's going crazy."
-Varigo-
Even Dylan looked somewhat dubious. "So we're just gonna go around the whole state making ghost-sweeps?"
"Of course not," said Henrietta, rolling her eyes. "Bradley says he has some kind of radar thing going, and he hooked it up to a computer, so all the motherfuckers within a hundred-mile radius will show up. He showed it to me last night, it actually works."
"How many are there?" Georgie demanded.
"Six," Henrietta answered, rolling her eyes. "It's almost too much, right? I looked up the address of the closest one, it's somewhere we've played before."
Evan raised his eyebrows. "But pretty much the only people we play to are faggy vampire kids. They're all totally conformist."
"That's what I thought at first," said Henrietta, "but then I remembered which gig it was, and this was the kid who had that sister who was into Bauhaus."
Georgie thought for a second, and then nodded. "We probably have their phone number somewhere. We'll just call 'em up, ask to play another show at their house, and do some sneaky exorcising. Or whatever we have to do. Piece of cake."
"Maybe not," said Henrietta grimly. "I mean, we had to do that convoluted ritual to call them up here in the first place, right? Maybe we have to do something like that again to send them back."
"I'm sick of rituals," Georgie sighed. "You'd think we learned nothing at all from Cthulhu."
"This is different," Dylan reasoned, even though it really wasn't. "Why don't we just Google it?"
Googling, however, proved to be largely unsuccessful. Every website had a different story to tell: the only main points that at least a good number of them seemed to agree on was that the spirits fed off of or were repelled by different types of energy in turn, and that as long as you weren't ascribed to a certain faith, whatever you believed would work the best would probably be the best thing to use in order to banish them.
"So the energy part of those instructions was the only part that wasn't bullshit," Evan muttered, eyes narrowed as he scrolled through posts on a forum.
"We might as well bring everything, just in case," Henrietta said, absently reading over his shoulder for any information they might not have had already. Proving unsuccessful, she stretched her arms out and sighed. "I'll pack a bag."