Chapter 3
Miles woke up to a message written in blood on his bedroom wall.
“It’s too early for this shit,” Charlee grumbled, squinting up at the words. She hadn’t been thrilled when he sprinted to her room and yanked her out of bed. “What kind of freak does this before nine o’clock on a Saturday?”
“This isn’t funny,” Miles snapped. He couldn’t look at the crimson smears anymore, but it didn’t matter. They were burned into his brain.
I HAVE GAbrIEL
COME AND GET HIM
Beneath that was an address for somewhere in Seattle. Neither of them had looked it up yet.
“You’re right, it’s messed up. Who would do something this unhinged?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did they get in here and do that without waking you up? And how do they know who you are? Or where you live?”
“I don’t know!” He was already on the verge of a full meltdown imagining some creep sneaking in here with a tub of Gabriel’s blood.
She held up her hands. “Excuse me for trying to get the facts straight.”
“That’s blood, Charlee. Blood.” Miles could hear the panic in his own voice.
“What if it’s Gabriel’s? What if they’ve hurt him?
Oh God, this is some crazy serial killer thing, isn’t it?
Come and get him? They’re clearly baiting us; it’s going to be a murder trap where he’s strung up in a warehouse and—”
Charlee flung a hand over his mouth. “Calm down. You’re freaking yourself out. We don’t know anything yet.” She steered him to his bed, shoving him down. “We need to figure out who this is and what they want.”
Miles pushed her hand away. “I told you he was taken. You thought I was being stupid, but I knew it. He probably got a message like this telling him to take that bus.”
“Yeah, yeah, you were right, congratulations.” Charlee stared at the message, twisting one of her curls around her finger. “Why tell us where he is? It can’t be a hostage thing, we don’t have any money. Unless you have something they want.”
Unbidden, Miles’s attention slid to his desk, where Florence’s grimoire was locked away.
But that didn’t make any sense. No one knew he had it.
And if they wanted him to bring it to trade for Gabriel, wouldn’t they have mentioned it in the message?
It seemed like a crucial piece of information to forget.
“What if it’s someone in Gabriel’s family?” he suggested, trying to calm down enough to think. “They found out Gabriel and I are snooping around, trying to break the curse, and they’re going to threaten him until we agree to stop.”
“Could be.” Charlee snatched his phone from his bedside table, tossing it to him. “Let’s see where they want us to go.”
Miles typed the address in three times to make sure it was right.
“I don’t get it.” He showed her the search results.
Her eyebrows scrunched together as she read. “Sage and Starlight? What is this, a tacky occult shop? It doesn’t look legit.”
Occasionally you came across the real deal, carrying more than herbs and crystals. Miles’s mom liked to visit one a few cities over when she ran out of the rarer ingredients for her protection kits.
“It could be like, a neutral place to meet?” Miles had seen that in movies before. “Somewhere public.” Fear gripped him by the throat. He didn’t know what to think of this, but he knew one thing—they couldn’t just leave Gabriel to fend for himself. “Charlee… we have to go.”
“I know. But first, we need to get this cleaned up. If your mom or sisters see it”—she gestured to the bloody mess smeared across his wall and dripping down his art—“we’re done for.”
Thank God Charlee was here. “And then what? We’ll head over to this place?”
“We don’t have any other choice.”
Miles wasn’t too proud to acknowledge the jolt of terror that went through him. “We don’t know what we’re walking into. I’ve never even been in a real fight, or—”
Charlee silenced him with a look. “You’re freaking yourself out again. No one’s going to fight us, this is just a cheap intimidation tactic. Whoever did this is trying to rattle you, okay? Don’t let them.”
She was right. All that mattered was getting Gabriel back safely.
* * *
When they slipped out of the house—his mom and Aunt Robin had gone on a supply run, and his dad was snoozing away upstairs—Emily was waiting for them on the sidewalk with a purple bike.
“I was just about to text you.” She sounded slightly out of breath. “Sorry for the at-home ambush, but this couldn’t wait. I think I figured out where Gabriel got off the bus.”
“Oh. That’s—” Miles fumbled, trying to gather his thoughts. “I mean, that’s great, but it doesn’t really matter anymore.”
Emily’s face lit up, and he realized how that sounded. “He’s not back,” Charlee explained curtly, zipping her coat up. It had rained all night, turning the whole world soggier and grayer than usual. “But there was a message in blood on Miles’s wall telling us where to find him.”
The color drained from Emily’s cheeks. “Holy moly. Was it… real blood?”
“I mean, we didn’t test it or anything, but yeah, I’m pretty sure. It was all drippy and gross.”
A car flew by, sending up a spray of water that narrowly missed splashing Miles’s jeans. “It’s a trap, right?” Emily said.
“Probably, yeah.”
Charlee crossed her arms with a huff. “It’s not a trap. Some jerk is just messing with us.”
Emily didn’t look convinced, but she leaned her bike against their fence and adjusted her backpack. “Are we going there now, then? What’s the plan?”
Miles could have hugged her. Squeezed the air right out of her. “You want to come along?”
“Of course I’m coming.” She hesitated, biting her lip. “It’s not an empty parking lot behind an abandoned warehouse, is it? Where no one will be able to hear us scream?”
Jiggling her keys, Charlee led them over to her car and unlocked the doors so they could climb in. “You’re both so dramatic. Miles and I looked it up, it’s an occult shop in Seattle.”
Emily froze as she was sliding across the backseat. “What occult shop?”
Pulling up the address, Miles passed his phone to her. “It’s called Sage and Starlight. I’ve never heard of it before.”
Emily swore. “That’s what I came here to tell you. After I went home yesterday, I started thinking over where Gabriel got off the bus. Somewhere with a protective spell didn’t really narrow it down since there are like, loads of psychic families in Seattle, right?”
Miles had hit the same dead end. “Right.”
“But then I remembered what Blake said about the bus: it had ugly purple seats.” She wiggled out her own phone and showed them the website for Whirlwind Transit, leaning over the center console.
Miles recognized their buses—he’d seen a few wheezing their way downtown, electric blue with purple-and-gold swooshy wind art on the sides.
“They’re the only buses around here that have purple seats.
And I was like, hey, these buses have routes they have to follow.
So, I printed the ones that go through Seattle”—she pulled a paper from her jacket pocket, unfolding it to reveal a map with highlighted lines and bright red dots—“and cross-referenced them with all the addresses I had of psychic families in the city.”
Woah. Miles traced the highlighted lines weaving around Seattle, tilting the paper so Charlee could see it too. “Where did you get the addresses?” she questioned.
“My mom. She’s got them all on a spreadsheet on her computer. She says they’re for holiday cards and parties, but I think she’s keeping tabs on my prospective marriage options.”
Ew.
“I added all the addresses to the map, and look… none of them land on any of the Whirlwind routes. None of them match.” She jabbed the red dots. Most were scattered on the outskirts of Seattle, in the neighborhoods, while the buses went downtown.
But there was one stop that had been circled furiously.
“When none of the addresses matched, I figured, okay, he didn’t get off at one of the families’ houses, but he did get off somewhere with protective spells set up.
I started looking around for anything else that could be in the area, on one of the bus lines.
And I found a certain occult shop with a reputation for all sorts of bad stuff.
” She lowered her voice, despite them being alone in the car.
“The family who runs it, they’re big-time bad news.
They sell all kinds of haunted and cursed stuff to normal people and let gifted families clean up the mess.
My dad’s been trying to get them shut down for years, because the owner doesn’t care who gets hurt. She’s like… the mistress of evil.”
Felicity Hawthorne had someone coming for her crown.
Charlee’s hazel eyes narrowed. “So, it’s not just a meeting place?”
“No way. They’re responsible for taking Gabriel for sure. I wouldn’t put anything past this woman.”
Miles’s stomach sank. What would someone like that want with Gabriel? This was the worst-case scenario.
“I can’t believe you did all this.” He studied the map again. It must’ve taken Emily all night. “Thank you.”
“Well, yeah… we need to find him, right? Especially now we know he’s in trouble.”
She made it sound so simple.
“It’s amazing. You’re like, a super sleuth.”
She glowed pink, glancing away to look out the window where the mailman was parking across the street. “It really wasn’t that hard.”
But she’d bothered in the first place. For Miles, and a guy who’d been a jerk to her the first time they’d met.
It wasn’t her fault they were apparently planning to enter a lair of nightmares, run by the mistress of evil herself, but good news would’ve been nice. When Miles had wished earlier for a better idea of what they were walking into, he should’ve specified something reassuring, for once.
Emily put her hand on his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’re going to get him back, okay?”
“Damn straight,” Charlee muttered, starting her car with a rumble.
Maybe it made him a naive fool, but Miles believed them.