Chapter Seven
The refuge that Jace and his brother had found for themselves before Cyrus adopted them was a vacant hotel on East Fremont, likely dating back to when the Rat Pack was the biggest draw in town.
Or maybe older, I thought, surveying the crumbling, one-story, mid-century modern exterior, where the only things holding the place upright were weeds and graffiti.
There was no sign of anyone about, and considering that we’d had to climb over a chain-link fence posted with ‘keep out’ notices to get this far, it could be assumed to be deserted.
But what sight couldn’t do, scent could, and Jason immediately started sniffing.
“Yeah, he’s here,” he said. “Or he was. Trail’s fragmented, so it was a while ago.”
“He must have come straight from Dante’s,” Chayton looked guilty.
“Stop beating yourself up,” Sophie said. “You couldn’t have stopped him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I could have tackled him and let the damned guards drag us both inside!”
It looked like the other boys had been getting under his skin, I thought, and started to say something, but Aki beat me to it.
“Doesn’t matter. We’re going to get him back.”
I contented myself with nodding in agreement. “Fan out,” I told them. “Clan groups all take an aux with you.”
“Why?” Lee demanded, bristling. “You think we can’t handle ourselves?”
“I know you can handle yourselves. You’re going to be protecting them—”
“Hey!” That was Dimas.
“—and they you. We’re at war. Nobody takes chances, and nobody plays the hero.”
“First lesson war mage cadets ever learn,” Caleb rumbled. “Can the ego and take care of each other. In battle, it doesn’t matter who saves your ass.”
Lee blinked in surprise at that, maybe because Caleb had been doing his tall, dark, and taciturn thing since he joined us at the hotel.
And considering that he was well over six feet, black as sin, and silent as a tomb when he was disapproving—which he had been since laying eyes on me—he was doing it well.
But then Lee nodded. “Howl if you find anything,” I added.
“Why do I think you mean that literally?” Jen muttered, while I attacked a window.
I doubted Jace was going to be in the same spot where I’d helped him clean out his and his brother’s effects after Jayden’s death, but I was starting there anyway.
Even though it looked like that part of the hotel had burned recently, due to vandalism or some of the illegal fireworks people set off in this area all the time.
Or maybe courtesy of the Vegas sun, which sometimes randomly started fires just because it could.
But the entrance they’d been using still worked, after a bit of prying, as it was just a bunch of boards covering one of the windows.
The boys hadn’t wanted to remove them because it would make it too obvious that somebody was living here.
So they’d nailed them together and added hinges, making a door.
I crawled into the dark interior, a small, dusty hotel room striped with the sunlight leaking through the window boards.
Sophie, Jen, and Caleb came with me, the latter almost disappearing in the low light thanks to his coloring and the dark leather war mage coat he wore.
Enough that Sophie gave a little shriek and jumped like a cat when she accidentally bumped into him.
“Take it easy,” he told her in his usual calm voice.
Caleb was as Zen as they came, having Seen Some Shit in his years with the Corps.
I liked having him at my back right now.
I liked it a lot, I decided, as we picked our way across a mess of fallen ceiling tiles, where the fire department had flooded the area with water, but hadn’t bothered to do any cleanup.
As a result, the burned plaster, rotting carpet, and various pieces of kindling that had once been shitty hotel furniture had formed a papier-maché-like mass that made the floor uneven and treacherous, causing my bruises to ache as we picked our way along.
But not as much as they should have.
I couldn’t see myself, especially after we made it through the swollen door and into the dim corridor beyond.
But I was moving better than I should have been, with several torn tendons, a cracked rib, and a wrenched knee, among numerous other issues the healer had gone on about.
But my tendons weren’t making me limp anymore, my ribs still ached, but weren’t impeding my range of motion, and even the knee felt better.
I was grateful for it, but also faintly worried. The Change had sped up my healing, but not this much. I should have been back at the hotel where Cyrus thought I was and basically non-functional, not delving through Vegas’s underbelly like Indiana Jones spelunking through a temple.
Should probably dodge that healer when I get back, I thought, right before Caleb called out.
“Hey. What’s this?”
He had gone on ahead, after summoning an orb of sunlight from outside to use as a flashlight. At the moment, it was illuminating part of the corridor wall down the hall. Only it wasn’t just the sun that was sparkling there.
Among the peeling paper, smoke residue, and water stains was the golden outline of a wolf. It was faint, with the magic that imbued it days old, but still perfectly visible. Which meant that it was still active.
I put out an arm to keep my students from getting any closer to the sparkly ward, and Caleb shielded his hand, then delicately touched the surface.
There was no reaction. He pulsed a little magic through it, which only caused it to glow brighter and more cheerfully. But nothing lashed out at us, no shields were thrown up, and there was no other response that I could see.
Which made my hackles rise, as there was a lot of magic in there just for decoration.
“Detego?” I suggested, referring to a common spell used to cause an enchantment to show its function, but Caleb shook his head.
“Not a chance, not with the rest of you in here.”
“What? Why?”
“The most recent briefing said to be careful opening any suspicious spells, even innocuous-looking ones, as the dark have been booby trapping them. Had one blow up in Johnson’s face the other day. Thankfully, he was shielded.”
“Great.”
“He still lost his eyebrows. Been walking around looking like a cartoon character ever since.” He nodded at the kids. “Get ‘em out of here, and I’ll take a look.”
“Yeah, only if it is booby-trapped, it could blow this whole place up, and I don’t know where everyone is—”
“Then call ‘em,” Caleb said.
“—not to mention that there could be other people living here—including Jace. We can’t risk bringing the roof down on their heads—”
“Too late,” Sophie muttered.
“Then we backtrack,” Caleb said stubbornly, “and find another way around. I don’t trust this thing.”
“Or we call it in,” I said. “See if anybody at HQ has any familiarity with—”
“Protection symbols,” somebody said, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Jen holding up a phone. She had it pointed at the wall, and somebody was talking on the other end of the line. “That’s what they are,” the voice clarified. “Only they’re kind of all over the place.”
“Chay,” Jen told me. “I sent a picture to everyone, and he recognized the symbols.”
I took the phone. “Chayton? What do you mean, all over the place?”
“Well, they’re native, but not from any one tribe,” he said. “I mean, the wolf is kind of universal—a lot of tribes view it as a protection symbol—but the Rainbow Man is Navajo, the dreamcatcher is Ojibwe, and the spider web down below is Dakota or Lakota.”
I squinted at the wall again, having not paid attention to the much fainter and non-magical tags behind the wolf.
But now that I did, I could see a guy with both his head and feet on earth and his body forming an arch—a rainbow, I guessed—in between; a crudely drawn dreamcatcher above that; and the sketch of a spider web almost hidden in the muck at the bottom of the wall.
There were also a couple of arrows, one pointing right and one left.
“Walk me through it,” I said.
“I... Well, I’m not an expert. But the wolf symbolizes protection and connection to the spirit world. A medicine man might put a small carving of a wolf in a jish—you wear it around your neck,” he added, rightfully assuming that I knew nothing. “Or on a drum, to add its energy to a ceremony.”
“So somebody was trying to protect something.”
“Maybe,” he sounded doubtful. “The Yei symbol—the Rainbow Man—is like an intermediary between the people and the gods. He protects against both physical and spiritual attacks. The dreamcatcher is similar, except it wards off attacks in dreams, when someone is more open to the spirit world and vulnerable. And some warriors used to wear the spider web on their shields when going into battle, as it’s all about invincibility, like how an arrow can pass through a web and leave it untouched. ”
“There are arrows here,” Caleb said, tracing one with a warded finger.
“Yeah, they can be protection symbols, too, only it’s overkill, you know? It looks like somebody put every native defense symbol they’d ever heard of on there, like hanging up crosses and garlic and holy water and hawthorn to ward off vampires.”
“Those don’t work,” I agreed. Too many Corpsmen had found that out the hard way.
“And neither would this. Putting a wolf symbol on something is about imbuing it with the wolf’s energy.
So, like, usually something small. A necklace, maybe, or possibly a teepee, but not a whole hotel!
You’d need a lot of medicine men for that, and an area where wolves were known to have lived for a long time. ”
“Unless it’s not a whole hotel,” Caleb said. “Shields.”
“What?” I said, and then hastily threw up a shield across the corridor before he pushed his hand into the center of the wolf and through the wall, which wasn’t a wall at all, since his whole hand disappeared past the wrist. For a second—before he was flung back out, across the hall, and into the next room.
And he didn’t use the door.