Chapter 18
The open door stretched before us, darkness pooling like spilled ink across the threshold. Every muscle in my body tensed, bracing for the stench of blood, the whisper of shadows, the wrongness that had saturated the apartment behind us.
I got Febreze and Pine-Sol.
“What the fuck?” I whispered, tightening my grip on Angel’s hand as the NHVs poured into the apartment ahead of us, weapons drawn.
Everything looked the same as my dream, if that’s what it had been.
Overly clean for a guy who hadn’t seemed all that keen on wiping his own ass.
No coffee cups on the counter of the high-end kitchen or signs of recently abandoned living.
Except my Taser, which sat on the counter, displayed like a trophy.
Everyone’s gaze flicked back to me.
“Sweep the rest of the apartment,” Angel instructed. “Dust the Taser for prints and document it.”
I gaped like a fish as the team moved, spreading out to canvas the entire space, my gaze locked on the Taser. Bobby and Wade took up space around the counter, scanning with different readers, taking pictures, and examining the Taser as if it had walked there by itself.
Remi followed behind the NHVs at a slower pace, keeping his distance. Looking for runes, maybe? I couldn’t sense anything. He briefly met my gaze and shook his head after stepping out of the main bedroom.
What did that mean? No Brandon? No closet of equipment? Why was everything so ordinary when the apartment across the hall had been murder central? Was this a new adage to the whole “don’t shit where you eat” thing?
“The bedroom is normal,” Victor said after a moment.
“Normal how?” I asked.
He stared at me a long moment. “Same as the registered floor plan.”
I blinked at him, letting the words process, then ripped my hand out of Angel’s grasp and stalked toward the bedroom. My shield fizzed out, as if me trying to hold it by myself was impossible. But the apartment remained unremarkable, without a hint of magic, even as I stepped into the bedroom.
Inside, it was showroom perfect and not at all what I remembered from the few times I’d visited Brandon here.
Granted, he hadn’t liked me in his space, probably because it meant acknowledging that he actually liked dick, but I remembered the strangely small room—my tiny apartment had a bigger bedroom than his.
“What the hell?” I cursed, stalking around the space and opening the door to the very benign walk-in closet. No monitors, no sign I’d been there, and it was on the opposite wall from where the one I’d envisioned had been.
“Any magic residue?” Angel asked, having slid in behind me, his hand hovering above my arm as if worried he shouldn’t touch me.
“No. Are my eyes a different color?”
“No,” he said.
“Maybe he kept his weird shit in another space?” Bobby remarked, using his scanner to document every inch of the space.
I cursed the rising frustration roiling my gut with unease.
Was I missing something? I stalked the apartment, scouring every inch for anything that might rouse my magic or tip our hand at Cassidy’s intent.
Even the guy’s bookshelf housed a handful of what I considered ordinary titles.
No red flags likeOccult Rituals for Dummies or How to Get Away with Murder.
I ran my fingers along the spines, finding true-crime paperbacks and police procedure manuals arranged by height.
A display rather than a sign the guy actually spent any time reading.
“It’s too perfect,” I grumbled, annoyed. The apartment wasn’t just clean; it lacked any real sense of life, personality, or individualism. And while I knew that sometimes people lived that way, Cassidy didn’t. He’d been more frat boy than showroom sheik.
“Trash is empty, so is the fridge. Like he was gone before the building crossed the Veil,” Wade said.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? How would he know? Would he have expected us to look into him and cleared it out? Or would he know the Veil would swallow the whole building, and the crew from the other side would ignore the sterility of his place?
I glared at my Taser on the counter. He’d left it for me to find like a breadcrumb or a taunt. If there was one thing I was known for in Homicide, it was my tenacity. I looked at Remi, trying to gauge if he saw something I couldn’t, but he shook his head at me.
“If he was doing magic, it wasn’t here,” Remi said.
“What about the rooftop deck?” I asked, recalling the time we’d run into him in the elevator.
“Would he do something that easy to find?” Angel asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s like a lot of the extras these high-end places offer, rarely used.” As I recalled the dream, I wondered why I’d gone up a thousand stairs. Was it indicating the roof deck? Or simply trying to get me to give up?
Angel stared at me for a long minute, then nodded.
“Let’s split teams. One larger team to comb the rest of the building, and one smaller team to look at the roof deck.
” He studied the teams for a minute. “Victor, Kerry, Jude and me, with two wolves as backup. The rest to clear the rest of the apartments.” He glanced at Remi. “You’ll be able to see magic residue?”
He nodded. “For the most part.”
“You’ll call if you think you need our scanners?” Bobby asked, holding up one of his many devices.
“Yeah. If Jude sees something, we’ll call. Be careful.”
Angel gave the signal, and the teams moved fast melting into the stairwell to sweep the lower floors while our group turned toward the roof access.
The werewolves took point, their noses twitching at the stale air as we climbed.
Though any sign of the weird smoke I’d seen on the lower floors had vanished, even without maintaining my shield.
Each flight of stairs felt heavier than the last, because with every step, the dream came rushing back. The endless stairs. The weight in my lungs. The certainty that something waited for me at the top. I had a long heartbeat of worrying again about Ivan and had to remind myself he was safe.
When we reached the landing for the rooftop access, the door stood slightly ajar. No lock, chains, or any sort of coded entry. Just a sliver of twilight bleeding through the gap.
Victor pressed a finger to his lips and nudged it open with his boot.
The roof sprawled before us, clean white concrete, a sterile display of lounge chairs, and a fancy bar setup closed off with a padlock. Everything empty, untouched, and unremarkable.
Except for the strange, wriggling wall of shadow in the corner.