Chapter 6 #3
I take my normal seat across from Dax and next to Caelan. Gav’s obviously showered and changed already, his dark hair’s still damp and hanging loose to his shoulders.
“Alright. Now that we’re all here,” He leans forward, resting his forearms on the table. “Vae and I were out on patrol, and we stopped by Redmark after Riven reached out to pass on some information.”
Gav recounts the events of this evening as he pours himself a glass of whiskey. Without asking, he passes the bottle to me.
I don’t add anything, content to let him do the talking.
“Riven said there was talk around the gym,” Gav continues.
“A couple of his fighters had been down by the docks, running night gigs, consulting on shipping routes. Said they saw a blacked out SUV pull up to a warehouse they knew was abandoned. It would stop, a guy would get out, go in for about ten minutes, then drive off. This happened a few times. The car would stay idle with all its lights off while it waited.”
“So Riven thought it was suspicious?” Caelan asks.
“He was right to,” Gav replies. “Riven knows everything that happens in his district, and everyone it happens to. This was an anomaly.”
I pick up the thread from there.
“We got to the warehouse, and it was definitely abandoned. Blacked out windows, padlocked doors. No reason someone would be coming and going unless they were up to something sinister. We broke in, naturally.” I smirk, like I’m totally fine and not still reliving the fucking mass destruction I caused not an hour ago.
Totally well-adjusted.
“We were just going to have a look around. Dax was on comms backing us up, and at first, we didn’t see shit.”
Dax hasn’t glanced up. His jaw’s tight, and since we walked in, he’s been scrolling furiously on an iPad when his fingers aren’t flying over the keyboard of his laptop.
At my words, though, his eyes snap up, and he angrily tosses one of his iPads on the table with a little too much force. It skids across the wood and only stops when it runs into the bottle of whiskey with a thunk.
Caelan reaches out to steady the bottle before pointedly moving it away from Dax.
“My thermals missed an entire swarm of Severed that were fucking squatting in the place,” Dax snarls.
He doesn’t need to growl and bare his fangs like a Count Dracula caricature for me to tell how pissed off he is.
I can feel his guilt radiating through our pack Bond.
It’s heavy and dark and full of poorly-suppressed self-loathing.
I take a second to thank the Fates; everyone’s wearing descenters. We rarely go without unless we’re not leaving our personal quarters, but Dax sometimes forgets, and his scent would choke me right now if I could smell it.
“Low-level Severed don’t normally slip under the radar,” Caelan says thoughtfully. One of his hands is clenched around the arm of his chair so tightly his knuckles are white. When he notices my gaze, he releases the wood and self-consciously flexes his outstretched fingers.
Yeah, something’s up with him. Has been since his recon last night. I’ve been thinking it’s because he and Dax got into it, but….
That doesn’t feel right.
I’m totally cool with poking around someone else’s issues. If we can all just ignore my literal bomb for another thirty years, I really won’t mind.
“No, they don’t,” Dax agrees. “Which is why it makes no sense.”
He pushes up from his seat and starts to pace.
“Scans didn’t register movement or heat signatures. Deadwalkers always give off a signature. They’re not ghosts. Low-levels aren’t much more than reanimated meat sacks corrupted by black magic, but they’re still alive.”
“Do you think there was some kind of interference?” Gav asks.
“Had to be. I’m running back through footage, but so far it hasn’t picked up anything.”
Dax stops, fists planted on his hips. “There’s been one other time this happened, and it was recently.”
His gaze flicks warily toward Caelan. He scrapes a hand through his messy black hair and sighs.
“It was when I was doing preliminary recon on Varenthrall’s Estate.
At first, there was jack shit around the whole place.
No heat signatures inside or out, but my drones were clearly clocking live bodies. I assumed it was some kind of glitch.”
Caelan leans forward, planting his elbows on his knees. “You didn’t tell me that.”
Dax shrugs. “I didn’t think I needed to. That’s the entire reason I run preliminary checks. So the fuck ups happen before the mission.”
“You told me the wards were causing minor glitches in the scans,” Caelan scowls. “Not that you couldn’t even read the damn things.”
There’s a moment of thick tension as my packmates stare each other down. Finally, Dax looks away.
“Give me a second to show you what I mean before you lose your shit,” he replies, crossing to one of the wall monitors. He flicks it on and presses a button on his laptop. An aerial view of a huge Gothic mansion surrounded by acres of land covered in thick, dark forest flickers onto the screen.
What the hell is that place, and why’s it so… secluded?
“This is the Varenthrall estate. Five hours before Caelan went in last night,” Dax answers my unasked question.
“What am I looking at specifically?” Gav squints at the footage.
“A fuck ton of nothing,” Dax mutters. “This is one of my drones running a search for heat-sigs. There are acres of forest, and a heat-sig check should be lit up like the fucking Fourth of July. Normally, I’d have to go in and recalibrate so it wasn’t picking up smaller bodies.
You should see little orange and red blips.
Rodents, squirrels, raccoons, and even birds nesting in the canopy would show up. But look at it.”
The screen is completely blank. Just a dead sheet of blue and nothing else.
“There’s nothing there,” I murmur.
“Exactly.” He switches screens. This one shows the same aerial view, but the colors are inverted.
“This scan checks for Bio Signatures. Heartbeats, blood, designation scent markers. Once again, nothing’s showing up.”
Another flip of the screen, then another, and another.
“Sound frequency, Electric Interference, Structural Mapping. All reading like the fucking apocalypse happened and no one told us.”
No one speaks. Caelan’s still, but Silas is cringing like he knows where this is headed. Gav finally speaks, voice low, tight, and pissed.
“You gave the go-ahead to send Caelan in. Why?”
Now it’s my turn to wince, but it’s totally in sympathy. I can’t remember the last time someone questioned Dax’s decisions.
He flinches—not hard, but it’s enough for me to notice.
“Because it was weird, but not unheard of. The first drone I sent in was low-band, passive scans. It’s silent and fast. When that first scan came back blank, I reset it and ran it again. Still nothing. So, I switched to a modified Recon Hawk. It’s loaded with an active echo-mapping protocol.”
He switches the screen to yet another view.
“What the fuck is active echo-mapping protocol?” Silas asks, still clicking that damn pen.
I let him ask, because I’m wondering the same, and no chance in seven hells am I interrupting Dax when he’s in full tech nerd breakdown mode.
“It pings the environment like radar,” Dax explains. “Except, instead of just bouncing off surfaces, it uses electromagnetic and infrared sweeps. If anything is cloaked in magic, it makes the caster queasy. Even if the wards were placed years ago, it disrupts the resonance.”
He swaps screens one more time.
“This time it came back distorted,” he points out a new image of an aerial view, and now, it’s clear the drone was picking something up. It still looks halfway to glitching out, though.
“Weird, but not blank. Something was disrupting the signal, which is normal when there are wards involved.”
He turns to Caelan, his expression hesitant.
“I didn’t like the data. But there wasn’t enough to pull you.
Ward magic changes almost as fast as technology.
It can vary depending on the user, the ritual, and the intention when it’s cast. When I finally started getting readings, I just assumed Varenthrall hired some new age Vamp Mage, and I hadn’t run into wards like those before. ”
He sits back down, still glaring at the scans. “None of the data made me believe I should pull the op, so I gave the green light.”
“I didn’t feel anything when I was there,” Caelan adds, frowning. “No wards at all.”
Dax pins him with a look. “Exactly my point. I told you before you left that I’d run into low-level interference that might be ward-based.
You told me you’d feel anything long before you walked into a trap.
” He turns back to Gavran. “It could have been anything. Residual magic from an old foundation, or even a spell cast on the property decades ago. It didn’t read like a trap, so I didn’t treat it like one.
I gave Caelan the information and trusted him to make the call. ”
“What about tonight?” Gav pours another drink and leans forward. “What happened then?”
“I sent the first drone out earlier—before you left Redmark and as soon as you told me where you were headed. It was fine. Registered everything expected and then some.”
I narrow my eyes at him in frustration. “So what the fuck caused the glitch, then? How did those Deadwalkers get the drop on us?”
Why go through all of that shit from the recon last night if it has nothing to do with what happened tonight?
For a second, shame burns bright in our Bond, but he mutes it quickly and starts flipping through data on his screen, re-syncing it to the wall monitor.
“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” he responds coolly. “This is the scan from tonight. It’s all normal. Heat signatures, Bio signatures, all of it. Whatever was in that warehouse was so targeted that it was only affecting a maybe fifteen-foot radius.”
“Maybe we’re dealing with a different caster?” Silas suggests.