Chapter 25
He hated having to use the damn thing, and not just because there was no point, since it wasn’t like Taavi was going to take off after a squirrel or some shit.
But it was humiliating to have to leash his fiancé. Especially since this wasn’t some kinky shit, it was a goddamn hike. But the park had all-dogs-must-be-leashed rules, and Taavi liked the nature smells better in dog form.
Part of him thought that since shifters had to fucking register, they should get something that said they were shifters and could walk around as whatever they wanted, with whatever that was keeping the fucking jackasses out there from shooting them thinking they were wild wolves or bears or whatever.
But he knew better than that.
Some bigoted asshats would shoot them because they were shifters.
Besides, the obvious answer would be some sort of collar, which was almost as bad, if only because it didn’t have to be attached to someone on the other side.
I pulled my hand back from the end of the leash sitting on Hart’s back seat next to a dog harness that was presumably what Taavi wore instead of a collar.
I couldn’t help agreeing with Hart’s dislike of the notion, but I also knew that if shifters were allowed to run leash-less that some people would claim their dog was a shifter just to not have to put a leash on them—and that would lead to both more dog-bites of other dogs, people, and other animals and shifters getting an even worse reputation for violence, and nobody needed either of those things.
I’d figured the leash was probably Taavi’s because this was Hart’s car, and I’d wanted a distraction from my own thoughts.
Raj’s request for two backup teams had been denied. He got one, and this spurred a debate about where to send the backup team, since—to Hart’s point—dividing them would only waste half of them and make the other half potentially ineffective.
Everyone had agreed that the Church of Holy Judgment’s core group was most likely to want to protect the church itself—rather than their storage facility—so the backup team had gone with Raj and Drew, who were also more likely to be useful if violence broke out, given that they were both apex predator shifters.
That left me in Hart’s backseat with Cass riding in the front as we headed to the warehouse.
Hart did have a warrant so that we could inspect whatever we found there, and my job would be to touch anything that seemed like it might yield any potentially interesting thought-evidence.
Or that might help in building a case against Preacher Dale or the members of his congregation who had committed murder.
“Maybe one of the cars will be in there,” Cass said, suddenly.
Hart glanced over at her. “The—oh, those fucking cars.”
Cass nodded. “I know we got one, but there are two more, and maybe they decided to take them off the streets. So another one doesn’t get pulled over.”
Hart nodded. “That’d be helpful,” he replied. “Which probably means, with our fucking luck, that we’ll find a golf cart from somebody’s stupid Florida vacation.”
Cass laughed.
I tried to ignore the churning in my stomach.
The doors had been padlocked with heavy chains that had broken the tool meant to cut through them, leading Hart to produce a rather creative string of curses.
Cass had pointed toward a cracked window up a fire escape, which had led to more swearing on Hart’s part, since he’d had to help both Cass and I climb to reach the bottom of the ladder, then jump himself.
He’d had to try twice, and had spent the whole time climbing the rest of the fire escape muttering about how ill-prepared we were to be doing this.
They’d had me come up behind both of them, and Hart pulled open the window farther to let Cass climb through.
“Clear,” she called back, keeping her voice fairly low, just in case there was someone—like a lone guard—in the warehouse.
Hart squirmed through next and did a sweep of his own, then came back to hold the window for me. As he helped me clamber inside, Cass gasped a little, her eyes wide and unseeing.
“Shit,” Hart hissed, immediately moving to her side, leaving me to awkwardly clamber over the desk, and I winced when I knocked a small pile of files off the corner.
“Cass, come back to us. C’mon, Cass, don’t fucking do this right now.” Hart’s voice was tight and insistent.
She gasped again, focused on Hart’s face, and tears immediately started streaming from her wide blue-grey eyes.
She didn’t have to say anything. Both Hart and I knew immediately what that meant. She’d explained to me when we’d first met how her seer abilities worked.
Unless we somehow managed to change our fate, someone was going to die.
“Us or them?” Hart asked tightly.
She just stared.
“Us?” he asked, and more tears ran down her cheeks. My heart, which had already been pounding, raced even faster, and I could feel my hands shaking.
“Not gonna happen, Cassie,” is what Hart said, his voice low and firm. I couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t cursed, and it was that, almost more than Cass’s horrified face, that made me realize how truly dire the situation actually was.
If something didn’t change, we were going to die.
Or maybe just Hart. Or Hart and Cass. Or me. Or… It didn’t matter. At least one of us was going to die if we didn’t somehow stop it, and I didn’t want to have to choose who.
There were already enough dead in this city.
This whole damn city was built on the dead, sport. Archie’s words echoed in my mind.
We might not be in Richmond, specifically, since the warehouse was on the outskirts of Chesterfield town, but this whole area had been built on the backs of enslaved people and in the aftermath of genocide by both disease and violence.
I’d heard enough of Mason’s conversations with our clients to know that there wasn’t a block or square mile in the area that hadn’t been touched by both.
I took a deep, shaky breath, trying to calm myself enough to get control of my magic as Cass and Hart moved through the office space toward the stairs that led down to the warehouse floor below.
I flinched at the report of a gunshot that sent both Hart and Cass scrambling for cover—Hart behind a filing cabinet and Cass under another desk, away from the now-shattered glass of the office window that looked down over what had once been a factory floor.
Seeing them taking shelter, I immediately did the same, tucking myself under the desk closest to me, then looking back toward Cass and Hart, to see if I’d done the right thing.
Hart looked angry. Cass’s face was a mask of pain, her hand over one bicep. Blood began to ooze out between her fingers.
I wanted to ask if she was okay, but I didn’t know if that would break some sort of rule about what you were supposed to do when someone was shooting at you. Hart hadn’t said anything, so I didn’t, either.
“Come out, sinner!” came a booming voice. “Come out and face God’s judgment!”
“Fuck that,” Hart muttered, drawing his gun and thumbing the safety. “Any fucking judgment I’m accepting ain’t yours, dickhead.”
“Hart…” Cass had also drawn her gun, but she looked scared. And pained.
Another gunshot made all three of us flinch. And then two more came in rapid succession.
“Any idea how many dickheads are down there?” Hart asked Cass.
Her lips pressed together. “Too many.”
“Any chance you can be more specific?” he asked her.
“A dozen? Two?”
He let out a heavy sigh, grabbing the radio from his belt and thumbing the button. “This is Hart, we’ve got upwards of a dozen armed assailants at the warehouse off Dock, shots fired, requesting backup.”
The radio crackled. “Sending backup, Agent Hart. ETA twenty-nine minutes.”
Even I knew that was way too long.
“Fucking hell,” Hart muttered, letting his head fall back against the half-wall. “This is not how I want to go out.” He looked guiltily over at me. “Kid—”
More shots. More glass shattering. Hart flinched as a shard nicked his arm, red seeping through the white of his shirt sleeve.
I heard the sound of feet on metal stairs.
This city was built on the dead.
I wasn’t ready to join them yet.
From where I huddled half-under the desk, I took another deep breath, closed my eyes, and reached out.
Archie hadn’t lied.
The whole area was full of dead.
And that left me with a very different conundrum.
I wasn’t sure how many undead I could control at the same time. Raising spiders and flies and, yes, Victor, was different. The shadow of their lives was very small—it took much less to raise them than it would a person, to say nothing of multiple people.
But when you raised a corpse, you raised only a corpse.
Supposedly.
I’d raised the husks of spiders and flies under Archie’s very careful supervision after I’d accidentally resurrected Victor—because Victor wasn’t just a corpse.
But what would happen if I life-cast into human dead on purpose, the way I’d accidentally done to Victor?
I had no idea.
But my life casting was much, much stronger than my death magic. For all I knew, I was actually doing both at once, which, now that I’d thought of it, might actually make the most sense out of anything we’d come up with so far. Not that it really mattered at this point.
All that mattered was that I’d be able to do what I had to.
Three more bullets ricocheted through the windows overlooking the warehouse floor, making me flinch.
“Okay, Cassie, you with me?” Hart asked.
“Here,” she replied, although her voice shook.
“The plan is for you to scoot your pretty ass over here and we try to pick some of them off. Preferably the fuckers on the stairs so that nobody kicks down the door. Got it?”
“Got it,” she replied, but despite the words, her voice was anything but confident.
Hart popped up and fired first, dropping back down with a curse after only a few shots. “A dozen, maybe more,” he said, and his voice was flat. “They’re mostly behind the machine guts.”
“Got it,” Cass repeated.
It was bad when I—a human—could smell the sour scent of sweat-soaked fear.