Chapter 51
SARAH
Once Lachlan named Nun Island, the Moot scrying witches were able to triangulate it with their visions of Okoye’s whereabouts, and home in on a small industrial park.
Lachlan’s information came just in time, because minutes later the scryers announce Okoye is on the move out of the area – doubtless heading back to Salem, having heard he’s no longer Moot president.
He’ll find his former office warded against him, and his access privileges to the high-level areas revoked.
But all I care about right now is that he’s not going to be at Delacourt’s side to get in our way.
Barr will be though, Naomi thinks. And there’s obviously something else going on for them to have been able to take Harper in the first place. She’s a girl who fights back. Have they drugged her? Or do they have some other means we don’t know about, of countering magic?
‘We can’t see it,’ frets one of the two scrying witches, who’ve been trying to pinpoint the building within the park. ‘That whole area’s a blur. It should be getting clearer as we get closer, but it’s not.’
‘Google Maps,’ comes Maggie’s deadpan voice from where Naomi has her on speakerphone.
‘That should name most of the businesses or show any buildings that look like a clinic rather than offices. We mundanes aren’t entirely useless, even if my cop badge isn’t going to work its magic over the border here in Canada. ’
Her dry tone sends a ripple of uneasy laughter around our vehicle, but the mood soon flattens again.
It’s so hard to breathe I stab the window button to fill my lungs with traffic fumes.
Anything’s less toxic than constantly recycling my own panic.
But I’ve got to hold it together for Harper.
We’re ten blocks away. Then five. Then Naomi’s telling Maggie, Let’s pull up here and do recon on foot, as she turns the car into the kerb.
She tells the two Moot witches to stay where they are and await Lachlan.
‘Stop him charging in, hexes flying,’ she says. ‘Because we need to have a plan for this.’
We circle the outer perimeter of the small business park.
Inside lie dreary offices trying hard to resemble sexy startups.
And then I feel it. A dragging at my limbs as though I’ve run a marathon and the high is fading so exhaustion floods in.
A sleepless night and the stress of this chase are catching up with me, I think. Until—
‘Do you feel weird?’ Naomi says. ‘Because … damn.’
Maggie looks between us. ‘I’m not exactly fresh as a daisy, but nope?’
Something here is messing with our magic. Naomi makes a tick-tock gesture with her finger and we walk back and forth feeling the lead weights attach themselves, then drag, then ease, until we’ve pinpointed the precise location where the effect kicks in and where it’s the most intense.
‘Can you use your poppet’s hearing?’ I ask her. ‘To reach inside?’
‘It goes dead. What have they got behind those walls?’
Maggie holds out her phone triumphantly to show us aerial images. ‘GPS and satellite,’ she says.
There’s razor wire along a rectangular perimeter.
Within its courtyard stands a low-rise central block with two single-storey wings.
The wings have small, regular windows that give them the air of a motel.
Residential, I realise. Places for people to stay.
Experimental subjects. I taste blood in my mouth as I think of Harper in one of those rooms, and want to lob every dark spell and conjuration I know at this travesty of a medical care facility to get at her – then leave it a smoking ruin in my wake.
Naomi cocks her head, hearing something in the distance. ‘Motorbike.’ I text Lachlan the GPS co-ordinates, and a minute later, he’s with us.
‘Goddess,’ Lachlan curses, once he’s kicked his massive bike onto its stand. I see the moment he takes a hit from the perimeter. ‘That’ll be fucking Hextek.’
‘Fucking what?’ Maggie asks politely.
‘Another little government-funded research project. This one’s safe on US soil down in California, because it calls itself materials science.
No humans involved. It’s been working on a synthetic equivalent of the Moot’s binding bracelets.
Space-age materials technology in place of the enchantment that goes into a magical binding – so even if every witch in America refused to participate in binding another witch ever again, the mundanes could do it to us themselves.
I’ve been trying to get hold of a sample for ages: bribery, theft, you name it.
But nothing so far. Guess I can carve a chunk out of the walls here. ’
‘Why have we never heard of it?’ I demand, appalled.
‘Oh, the Moot has. Maybe you even have, Officer Yamakawa?’
Naomi looks shamefaced. ‘We were assured by our scientific adviser that it wouldn’t be possible.’
‘And there you have everything that’s wrong with the Moot. Oh, pardon me, Madam President.’
‘You’re owed apologies, Lachlan,’ I tell him.
‘People should have been listening to you for years, and speaking for myself, I can say the Moot will be taking the utmost interest in anything you tell us going forward. Still, none of that will help us get our daughter, who’s within those walls right now. ’
‘I’m at no disadvantage,’ says Maggie.
‘Me neither,’ says Lachlan. ‘Not really. Took me years of research to break these’ – he holds up his wrists, still circled by the Moot’s Silver binding bracelets – ‘and until I did, I had to get used to being mundane and find alternative ways to get shit done.’
‘So you were working on that in the Moot archives?’
Uncertainty flickers briefly across his face. But then he stuns me and the others to silence when he opens his leather biking jacket to reveal a belt of weapons. Two guns, and what looks awfully like explosives.
‘Like I said, I have alternative ways. Let’s go get our daughter back, Sarah.’