29. Chapter 29
Chapter twenty-nine
LUCA
“Good to see you’re settling in around here so quickly,” Sheriff Ross said as I returned to the station. “Seems like you never really left the badge behind.”
“I didn’t leave by choice, but I couldn’t stay there either. Do you mind if I look into one more thing before I take off for the day? Sage asked me to look into something.”
Sheriff Ross gave a reluctant nod. “You can look it up, but you know you can’t investigate without reason.”
“Yes, sir.”
I slipped behind the desk and punched the address in, not expecting the abandoned building that came up. I must have made a face because the sheriff seemed interested.
“What is it?”
“It was a small boarding school, but it's no longer in use. Looks like there was an incident a few decades back. The teachers, headmaster, and many of the students didn’t survive. Reports of abuse and occult activity left people wary of the building.”
“Occult activity?” Ross questioned. “Sounds like that was no human school.”
I nodded. “Someone probably saw a pentacle and thought a bunch of witches were worshipping devils.” It hadn’t taken me long after becoming part of this world to realize how easy it was to be misunderstood and judged. “What are you thinking, a coven house?”
“Possibly. Does it say who owns the building now?”
“Looks like it was picked up cheap by a company called Eden Project. They’re labeled as a non-profit.”
“Your man say why he wanted you to look into it?”
“He said an informant gave him the address, but I haven’t gotten a response from him since.”
Ross raised an eyebrow. “That unusual?”
I sighed. “Not really. But I’ll probably take a drive past just to make sure he’s not there before heading home.”
“Been craving those burgers at the tavern anyway. Mind if I tag along?”
It wasn’t actually a request. He didn’t want me causing trouble, and I wasn’t about to turn down an extra nose. As long as we just took a quick peek, we could make it to the tavern before the kitchen closed.
“Sounds good. Maybe I’ll join you once we’re done.”
My easy acceptance went a long way to easing the sheriff’s concerns. He’d taken a chance in bringing me on, and with everything happening at my old station, I didn’t blame him for being cautious.
Sheriff Ross followed me all the way out to the address Sage sent. I was half expecting some kind of renovation or community center project from a property owned by a religious non-profit, but the broken building we found hadn't been touched in years. What could Sage have been looking for here?
Since we weren’t there on official business, I parked on the next block over and the sheriff pulled up behind me. The sun had set and the only working streetlight in the area was several blocks down, leaving the abandoned street eerily dark and still. But between a coyote shifter and a vampire, we didn’t need to bother with flashlights.
“We’re just going to take a walk and see if anything suspicious stands out,” Sheriff Ross reminded me.
“Sage might not have even come through here,” I agreed. “There’s probably nothing to see.”
But the second the words were out of my mouth, someone wandered around the corner of the building and I pulled Ross back into the shadows of the building next to us. There was no reason to hide, really, other than wanting to see what was happening outside that specific abandoned building.
The man turned and I recognized the familiar belt and uniform he wore.
“He’s a cop,” I murmured to the sheriff, not quite sure how his eyes measured up to mine.
“Mm,” he agreed, telling me he hadn’t needed my help at all. “Question is, what’s he doing here?”
The cop’s head turned the opposite way, looking down the street before turning our way. His eyes passed right over us, but noticed our cars parked a little further away. Good thing we’d driven our personal vehicles.
“Human,” I added, leaning in to get a better look at his face.
Turned out I didn’t need to bother. Another man stepped around the corner to join the first and he didn’t bother being quiet when he announced the other man’s name.
“Yo, Bernie, what are you doing? They said to watch the back door, not the front. It’s all chained up, no one’s coming in that way.”
I tensed at the sound of that voice. Joe Duffy was one of the cops I'd worked with in Eastbend, he was also one of the first ones suspended when their actions came to light. He’d never been shy about his abuse of power and even before I knew what a hunter was, I thought he was a shitty cop.
The man he was talking to was Pete Bernal. He was the opposite of Duffy in many ways. Quiet, cautious, I’d almost hoped he wasn’t one of them. But the friends he kept seemed to suggest otherwise. Unlike Duffy, Bernal was one of the few that had slipped under the radar and kept his badge when everything blew up.
“Those are Eastbend cops,” I told Ross.
“We’re pretty far outside of Eastbend,” he muttered.
I nodded. “The loud one was already suspended, so I don’t think this is official business.”
Ross sighed. “Guess I should ask them a few questions. Think you can handle checking for anyone else on your own?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go on then, but only go inside if you think someone’s in trouble. This is still private property, if we don't have reason to be here, we can't mess with it.”
I hesitated. If this was hunter related, they might be more complicated than we'd anticipated. After what happened last time, I didn't want to risk my job again, but I still wasn't willing to blindly follow orders if someone might be in trouble. Especially if that someone was Sage.
“I might have to break a ward to know what’s going on inside,” I finally admitted.
The sheriff cocked an eyebrow, looking more impressed than reluctant. “Can you do that?”
I held back a laugh, relief layering my words. “Layering magic on top of magic can make it unstable. It’ll break, but it’s not subtle, they’ll know. I have the spell in my car that blocks sunlight. Hopefully it’ll be enough to break their barrier.”
Sheriff Ross was familiar with the magic. I used it to work before sunset, reserving the glamour Elliot made for when I had to leave the car. It gave him a little more flexibility with my shifts, but using it now would destroy it and leave me working only when the sun was down.
“Good to know. Guess I’ll have to keep ’em busy. I suppose there are no laws about taking down wards, so if that’s what it takes to find out if anything’s not right here, that’s what you’ll have to do. It's the only way to know if anyone needs help and we still have a job to do.”
Any reservations I had left about taking this job fell away at his words. The sheriff was nothing like the people I worked for before.
“You sure you can handle them with no backup?” I asked, not liking the idea of splitting up. If it was only Duffy and Bernal lurking around, he’d be fine. But we had no way of knowing how many were hiding around back.
“Think I might call in the locals,” Ross said.
We were well outside of Eastbend, so the local cops here wouldn’t be the same trouble we were used to dealing with, but they would most likely be human. If we were dealing with hunters, there was a possibility some kind of magic was involved.
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
The Sheriff shrugged. “Suppose it could go bad, but I’m not the only non-human interested in protecting my home and plenty of others have taken up the badge in my county.”
I watched Bernal and Duffy wander around the back of the building again. That was going to make my job easier, but not the sheriff's.
“The local cops in this town are non-human?” I asked.
“Just one or two in most cities across the county. Eastbend was one of the few with nothing but humans among the ranks, though I suppose the hunters saw to that. I made sure to introduce myself to the non-humans working in law enforcement in my county, helps to have friends in convenient places. This here is Thornridge, couple of the local pack wolves work for the department. Think I’ll send ’em a quick note to see if they know anything about this place.”
Ross sent his message and a notification came within seconds.
“What’d they say?”
Sage still hadn’t responded to my texts and the longer it went on, the more convinced I was that something happened. I’d been reassuring myself all day that he had Keir and between the two of them, they’d be fine. But the hunters had managed to trap him in that facility, and they'd caught up with him in that alley too. And if Eastbend’s cops were here, the hunters were involved this time too.
“They said this is a rough part of town and that building's been empty for decades, no one should be messing with it. Eastbend isn’t here on official business, they didn’t know anything about it. They’ll be here in five, so you go ahead and do what you gotta do before they arrive. I’ll find someone to put the wards back up if it’s a false alarm.”
Sheriff Ross stood and headed for his car. “Try not to cause too much damage, hm?”
“Understood,” I agreed, slipping away to the front of the building while he took his car and circled the block to pull up to the back.
I knew the moment the Sheriff made his presence known that things weren’t going smoothly. A round of suspicious voices told me there were at least five men watching the back. Aaron Ross was an infinitely patient man and his tone remained calm and even as he questioned the increasingly hostile group of hunters.
He probably could have used a hand, but I had to take the ward down before the locals showed up and kept me from messing with the property. I clutched the heavy crystal in my hand with a touch of regret, it’s subtle magic brushed against my palm. Hopefully Elliot would be able to make another, but even if he couldn’t, Sage was more important. I needed to know if he was in there.
From what the others explained, if the wards were built by witches they wouldn’t have an explosive reaction to sorcery. They would become unstable, unable to hold the power of a sorcerer’s spell and collapse. If the ward was built by a mage, it would spark and grow volatile once exposed to a sorcerer’s magic and the two would clash explosively because the two magics were far more incompatible.
We suspected this was once a coven house, so if the wards hadn’t been messed with by a mage, they would simply collapse under the weight of the new spell. With a heavy sigh, I brushed my fingers over the boarded-up window, feeling the resistance of the ward, and placed the crystal on the ledge within the field of magic.
I barely got my hand away before the magic reacted. Murky red and black clouded the ward and my eyes widened as I backed away. Similar to shifters, vampires could only see barely there glimmers of magic. We could feel and smell it, but never had I been able to watch it fight back against an intruding spell like this. What the hell kind of magic was this?
An explosion of sparks shot back at me and I ducked out of the way, hiding around the corner while the spells made way too much noise. A crack of breaking magic filled the night like a gunshot, and a few windows on the apartment building down the street slid shut. The voices at the back of the building grew louder when some of the men tried to find out what was happening, but Sheriff Ross insisted they stay put.
“This is not your jurisdiction, and most of you are supposed to be on suspension. You’re in enough trouble already. Thornridge police will be here any minute to deal with everything. Stay where you are.”
The words were barely out of his mouth before the resisting ward finally fell and a barrage of smells hit my nose. Mold, dust, magic, blood. Sage.
I didn’t need anything more than that. If his scent was completely gone from the outside of the building, then he’d gone inside a while ago. I pried the boards off the nearest window and hoisted myself inside, not bothering to be quiet as I rushed through the lower level. The whole place reeked of stale blood, but it wasn’t his. It was old and pungent, like the house was steeped in it a long time ago. A thrum of magic vibrated below my feet, but I had no idea how to get down. There didn’t seem to be basement stairs anywhere.
I passed a broken door to one side of what looked like a large dining room and paused. A trickle of hunger pulled at my stomach and I stepped further inside the room. Three steps in, I recognized the smell of Sage’s blood. Just a hint of fresh blood layered over the old, musty scents. Faint among the other smells, but familiar enough to make my teeth ache and my heart pound.
Sage’s scent led me to a large safe in the closet. The door was broken and the safe was empty, but I had no doubt he’d been here. The smell of his blood lingered on the bent metal of the frame. He couldn’t have been locked inside with Keir to get him out. So had Sage broken in to steal whatever had been in here? Something had obviously gotten his attention, his scent wasn’t just on the outside of the safe, traces of his blood were smeared along the back as well. Like he’d been looking for something.
I took a step inside the safe and ran my fingers along the trails he’d left behind, nearly falling forward when the back of the safe disappeared beneath my hand. Or rather, my hand disappeared into the safe. The back wall was an illusion. The static feeling of magic brushed my skin, but unlike the outside wards, it didn’t keep me out. I had a feeling it kept something else in.
This was a bad idea, but what choice was there? If Sage was in there, I was going too. I pulled out my phone to message the sheriff and Silas, but my signal was shit. There was no way to know if they’d get it, but I didn’t have time to find out.
I stepped into the darkness and stepped out into hell.