28. Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
SAGE
Luca and I jolted upright at the same time and it was only his fast reflexes that kept us from colliding. He must have tucked us into bed together, but I’d been sleeping practically on top of him.
“What the hell?” Luca grumbled, scrambling to grab my screaming phone from the nightstand. “That’s your ringtone?”
“Only for Chase.” I answered the call for once to make sure he hadn’t been kidnapped by the council. “Chase? Are you on your way back?”
“Sagey! The game was a blast, I wish you’d been there!”
“Sorry, I just couldn’t get away right now. Are you taking a bus back here or heading home?”
“Funny story!”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Please don’t tell me you’re back in a car with Crash and Tricky.”
“No, I’m sure they’re in Georgia by now. Do you remember that convention in Vegas I told you about? It’s going to be awesome and I found someone who was heading that way too.”
Considering the circumstances, maybe it was better that Chase was getting out of town.
“So anyway, I won’t be back just yet. Oh, and I found my phone! But I've gotta turn it off for a bit so you won’t be able to reach me.”
“What? Why would you have to turn off your phone? Just buy a new charger if you lost it.”
“Oh, ha! No, it’s not that. But where did I put my charger? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I can still call and check in from the road, but my phone will be off, I just didn’t want you to worry.”
“Stop! Why would you turn your phone off?”
“Because that’s what I agreed to for the ride out to Vegas.”
“That’s a huge red flag! Whoever asked you to agree to that is dangerous, get away from them right now!”
“No, really, he’s super nice. And you already know him, so it’s fine!”
“What? Who is it?”
“It’s that magic guy from your bar. He said he’ll take me to the convention and even show me more magic on the way!”
My heart stopped. “Do you mean August Lancaster? I told you to stay away from him!”
“Don't worry, he’s a good guy! Plus, he wants me to show him around the convention and introduce him to all my favorite characters.”
“Chase… did you willingly let yourself get kidnapped because he offered to go to some nerd convention with you?”
“It sounded like fun!”
“Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“Oh, uh, well.. there’s like, I dunno, a lot of trees and a highway and stuff here.”
“Dammit Chase. Just keep your phone on, I’ll catch up to you as soon as I can.”
“Well, my battery really is about to die, it keeps beeping at me. But don’t worry, I’ll call again soon. Okay, I gotta go for now, love you!”
“No Chase! You don’t understand how much… danger you’re in. Hello? Shit!”
“Let’s go,” Luca said. “If they’re going to Vegas, they’re probably headed for the airport.”
“They’re not, Chase can’t fly. I can’t see a council rep taking the bus, so they’re definitely in a car. And since Lancaster uses rentals, we don’t even know what kind of car they’re in.” I pulled up the friend locator on my phone, but Chase’s dot wouldn't update while his phone powered off. “They’re already on the other side of the state.”
“What about a tracking spell?”
“He’s with a powerful sorcerer. There’s no way he didn’t spell the car to prevent that from working.”
“We can meet them at the convention in Vegas,” Luca suggested.
I rubbed my throbbing temples. “Assuming August actually lets him go, that may be our only option.”
“There’s really nothing else can we do?”
“We can have Elliot keep trying tracking spells and pray Chase has enough sense to get away before he ends up in front of the council.”
“This does not look like somewhere you should be going alone,” Keir muttered.
Considering I was pretty sure I’d witnessed at least three crimes in the last fifteen minutes, it was hard to argue, but I didn't have much choice. Someone had messaged me through my employer about a tip on the recent Eastbend Police stories, but they were hesitant to talk for fear of retaliation. They’d refused to communicate electronically in case it was tracked, and were only willing to meet outside of Eastbend. They were clearly a little paranoid, but that only made me more curious about what they had to say.
“If I’d brought someone with me, the informant would have bolted before I ever got to talk to them,” I answered. “Besides, I’m not alone, I have you.”
“My abilities are limited as long as I'm trapped behind this spell. Do not be reckless.”
“We’re just going to talk to someone, not walking into battle. It should be fine.”
But even as I said the words, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck. Something about this meeting bothered me, but I wasn’t sure what. I did this kind of thing all the time. That was the job. What was so different about this particular meeting?
I came to a stop in front of a boarded up brick building standing alone on the end of the block. It was three stories, and every one of the windows was covered with rotting plywood. It might have been an apartment building at one point, but there couldn’t be anyone living in there now. Plus, I really doubted someone that paranoid would invite me to his home.
“Why here?” I wondered out loud. There were a million places we could have met, but this was the address they’d given.
“I don’t trust this,” Keir muttered a moment before he took over my body to pull out my phone and text the address to Luca.
I was so shocked that I could only watch it happen. He’d never stolen control unless I was unconscious or in trouble. I didn’t even realize he could just take over at will.
“What are you doing?” I hissed under my breath. “That was incredibly unprofessional.”
“Then why didn’t you stop me?” he muttered back. “I just asked him to look into the address, I didn’t tell him to come here. Besides, he’s working.”
Luca started with the Sheriff’s Department earlier in the week and he already planned to take time off to help me track down Chase, so calling him away from work now was out of the question. At least Keir seemed to agree on that much.
“Looking into things is my job,” I said. “He’s going to wonder what’s going on just because you asked for help.”
“Only because he knows you never would,” Keir grumbled back irritably. “It’s a bad habit.”
There were chains and a lock wrapped around the long handles of the double doors, so I started around the building to look for another way in. I doubted the informant picked a place at random and there was no way they wanted to have a conversation out in the street. The back of the building had another entrance, a plain metal door that pulled open with a rusty screech.
As soon as I stepped inside, broken pieces of drywall, plywood, glass, and nails crunched under my sneakers. My chucks were maybe not the best choice for this outing, but to be fair, most of these meetings happened at coffee houses or parks. This was my first time being called to an abandoned building.
The only light in the place was peeking through the gaps in the plywood over the windows, and I flicked on the flashlight on my phone to get a better look. Even with the light, I couldn’t tell what this building once was. It looked a little industrial from the outside, but inside was more like a residence. The back hall had a few closed doors and I followed it until I reached the front foyer.
A wood staircase hugged the wall to the left, leading up to a second floor railing. A peek through the doorway to the right showed a large open room, but it was hard to say what it was with no furniture filling the space. To the left, before the stairs, was a broken swinging door barely hanging on its hinges.
I pushed past the splintered wood and found another large room. A couple of broken chairs remained, giving the impression that this was once a large dining area. Was this some kind of boarding house or dorm at one point?
Plain doors toward the back probably led to a kitchen, so I headed toward the wood door straight ahead instead. Like the swinging door, it was broken like it had been kicked in, and when I slipped past the threshold, my fingers brushed strange dents in the wood on the doorframe.
Most of it had been destroyed, but I paused to let my fingers trace the spell carved into the wood. It was common for witches to carve protection spells into the entryway of their homes. The room beyond the spell looked like it might have been an office at one point, but it could have been a bedroom. Was this place run by a witch? Maybe it wasn’t a boarding house but a coven house. In Eastbend, covens didn’t usually live together, but it wasn’t unheard of.
A chill ran down my spine. Was the informant a witch? Why would they ask me to meet them here, of all places?
Suddenly wary, I left the office and backtracked toward the foyer. My phone showed no signal, but it was working fine before we walked in.
A low chuckle filled the empty dining room behind me and I froze. There’d been no one there a moment ago. In fact, I still didn’t sense anyone. Dust filled my nose as Keir tried to pick up on the presence, but even he didn’t know where to look.
“Did you figure it out?” Mars asked, his presence filling the room from nowhere. One moment I was alone, the next it was like he’d been standing there the whole time. “What this place is? Or should I say was… before I killed them all.”
“You killed your own coven?” I guessed.
Mars’s lip curled in disgust. “These people were not my coven. No matter what they claimed, this was nothing more than a place to throw away unwanted mystic children.”
Unwanted? “But your mother—”
“Was far too accommodating to any man willing to take care of her. When her new husband came to her shortly after we moved with the idea of sending her son to a school for developing magic users, it was far too easy to convince her. I killed him too, after I finally escaped this place.”
I looked around, masking my desperate search for an escape as curiosity. “This was a school for magic users?”
Mars snorted. “You’re as gullible as she was. This place was run by a coven obsessed with blood magic. Who do you think has blood so full of life and energy it would make their spells all the more powerful?”
I felt my eyes widen in horror. “They bled the kids for their spells? But what about your parents? Didn’t they get you out once you told them what was going on?”
“You can’t be that stupid. No one wanted to know what was going on. No one cares if they stop hearing from their delinquent kid, it’s nothing but a relief. The school sent monthly updates to the parents, ensuring them we were making great progress. You know as well as I do that hearing what they want to hear is far more important to people than the truth.”
It was hard to argue that in my field, but why was he telling me this?
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I offered.
Mars laughed, but it was a broken sound that sent shivers down my spine. “Did you think I wanted your sympathy? It was merely a history lesson. Now you’ll understand the years of blood magic energy that feed into the wards on this place. I don’t have to explain that there’s no escape. A decade of pain and resentment, blood boiled in rage and fear. Makes for a pretty strong spell, hm?”
My breath caught in my throat as I turned and ran. Mars’s laugh followed me into the foyer as I stumbled over debris in my dash for the back door.
He was completely right about what strong emotion could do to a spell. Witch lines used that fierce sense of love and protection passed down through their ancestors to power their spells, but while those were strong emotions, they weren’t the only option. Not by a long shot.
Blood magic in itself wasn’t all that unusual, but the kind of thing they were doing here was horrific. In general, blood should be fresh to be used in a spell. It could come from the recently dead, residual energy would remain for a short while, but if it sat in a vial waiting to be used, the effectiveness would diminish significantly. Blood just couldn’t hold magic and emotion on its own, not for long, anyway. But bled fresh from someone’s vein, it would be plenty potent. Bled from someone full of life and magic and strong emotion? All the better.
I hit the door, praying it would open, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier that hadn’t been there when I’d come in. The energy in the magic was sinister and cold, it made my stomach twist with disgust and I shuddered as I shuffled back.
“Can you get us out?” I whispered.
“The ward is too strong,” Keir answered. “The one on his house was newer, this one is steeped in years and years of strong energy. It feels like he rebuilt it rather than replacing it. I can’t go around it. We have to find the source and destroy it.”
I went to the nearest door and pushed it open. My feet carried me over the tile floors as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. A few broken chairs were left behind and shattered picture frames littered the floor along the walls. At first glance, I guessed it was a classroom and the frames held various spell components. The crumbling herbs and shattered crystals hadn't survived whatever happened here. One wall of frames was dedicated to insect wings, or at least that was what I thought until I moved closer and realized at least half of them were not from insects at all but pixies and various small flying fae.
What the hell were they teaching these kids?
I moved to the next room, fully aware that Mars was playing with me, giving me this much time to explore. More classrooms, more horrors. He’d obviously had the place sealed by wards this whole time because some of the scraps left behind couldn’t have been left for humans to find. Why preserve this place?
“This is pointless,” I grumbled. “Where would they control the wards?”
A typical witch house would anchor them at the threshold of the home, making the entry point the strongest, but this wasn’t a typical house. They couldn’t have left the spell in such an easily accessible place if they were trying to lock the kids inside.
“Office, attic, or basement,” Keir answered simply.
Before I could ask if he could move within the wards, he stepped into the shadows and reappeared in the foyer. My head spun as the foyer vanished and I stepped out into the office I’d peeked into earlier.
The office was another bust, everything inside had been destroyed. Scorch marks blackened the walls and floor and whatever happened in there left only splinters of furniture behind aside from the old filing cabinets that had been crushed like tin cans. Whatever had once been inside them was long gone.
A door at the back corner of the room led to a closet that concealed a huge safe. The door had been broken open, likely with magic, the metal bent and twisted in ways no human tool could have managed. But it too, was empty. I turned to leave, but Keir pulled to a stop. He turned to look at the safe again, then stepped inside.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, grabbing the edge of the safe to pull us back out again and cutting my hand on the jagged metal in the process. Refusing to let go, I held on tighter. No way did I want to get trapped in a safe.
Keir sighed. “Even if that door could close, I could get us right back out,” he reminded me, yanking my hand back and licking the blood from the cut on my palm.
The coppery taste of blood lingered in my mouth and I made a face, feeling a little stupid. That was a pretty dumb thing to forget in a moment of panic. I stopped resisting, though standing inside a coffin sized metal box was still not my idea of fun.
“This safe wasn’t for holding items,” Keir said as he reached out with my other hand to press against the back wall of the safe. I’d expected my hand to meet cool metal, but instead it passed right through. “It was for hiding something else.”
I felt around the back of the safe, finding the opening large enough for a person to fit through. And as much as I was usually the one to jump right into a mystery, going in there seemed like a terrible idea.
“We don’t know where that leads, we could end up trapped,” I pointed out.
“We’re already trapped,” Keir answered. “The wards must be controlled in there. Once they’re disabled, I can get us out.”
I let out a breath. “Just remember, this was your idea.”
“It’s either this, or we keep playing cat and mouse until Luca eventually shows up.”
Keir had only asked Luca to look into the address, who knew how long it would take him to realize something was wrong. The two of us weren’t constantly in contact, he had his work and I had mine, it wasn’t unusual for us to go hours without checking in. He would figure it out eventually when he couldn’t get ahold of me, but even then, Luca might show up and end up just as trapped as I was.
“Let’s go,” I agreed. “If we’re lucky, we can get out of here before Luca even realizes anything happened.”
But luck was such a fickle thing.