Firestorm (Smoke & Ashes Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  As for Chelsea’s shifting…we were going to figure it out. There was time. Just…later.

  “This isn’t right,” Feather Girl said after a little while, looking out the window.

  “What’s not right?”

  “This. I can’t feel anyone,” she said in wonder. She opened the window and stuck her head out for a minute. “I can’t feel anyone at all. It’s like there are no paranormals out here.”

  “And the bitch? Can you feel her?”

  When she looked at me, her eyes were full of panic. “Yes. It’s like she’s the only thing there is out there. I can’t…” She breathed deeply. “I can’t even feel you—or Chelsea—anymore.”

  Chelsea stuck her head between the front seats. “Wait. Could that mean that I’m not a shifter anymore?”

  “No, that’s not possible,” Abraham said. “I can’t turn you back.”

  “So fucking weird,” Feather Girl said, touching her chest as if she were looking for something in there. A feather sprung from her knuckles—a really big one, and she hissed as it came out. That must have hurt. I saw her skin opening and closing, and it looked pretty painful.

  “Relax. We’re on our way to her right now. She can’t hide forever.” Nobody could.

  “That’s assuming that she’s doing this. I just don’t see how,” Chelsea said, falling back in her seat.

  “Evil spirits can do a lot of things,” I reminded her—and myself. I didn’t see how one witch could have this effect on an entire city, but it had to be her.

  Or Abraham.

  Because let’s be honest. When I first heard of the nocturnal bitch, everything was normal. Things started going sideways when Abraham showed up at that bar. My instincts had never failed me before, but there was a first time for everything. It wouldn’t surprise me if Abraham wasn’t who he said he was, and that light he made with his hands could be nothing more than a trick. Magic. Almost everything was possible with magic.

  I watched him through the rearview mirror, but he was looking out his window, concern marring his features. For a second, I wished Lexar was in the car with us so I could ask him what he thought about the whole thing.

  Then I got my shit together.

  “Whatever this is, I hope it’s over soon,” Feather Girl whispered, more to herself than to us. She wasn’t the only one who felt that way, but we didn’t say anything else for the rest of the way.

  The house we were looking at was covered in yellow police tape. The witches of the Alliance were certainly smart. That tape was going to keep humans away, no doubt, but me? Do Not Cross my ass. I grabbed it and ripped it apart and stepped onto the lawn, looking ahead. The lights were out. The one-story house was wide. Big grey bricks made its exterior and the white screen in front of the door was torn. The neighborhood was quiet, the dense woods at our back. There were no people near us that we could see, but the lights were on next door.

  With every step we took toward the house, the hope that we’d find the bitch here dimmed. I was sure that she would come back here after the Alliance was done searching the place, but what if she didn’t?

  “I can feel her all over here,” Feather Girl said as she walked beside me. At least her magical sense had gone back to normal now.

  “She’s not here,” Lexar said from my other side.

  “How do you know?” I couldn’t feel or hear or see shit yet.

  “She hasn’t gotten away this long by being stupid. She knows the Alliance know about this place. She knew we’d come here looking for her,” he said and pulled the screen open before trying the door. Unlocked. He ripped the yellow tape in front of it in one swift motion and stepped inside.

  If the tape didn’t make it clear enough that somebody had been here, the inside did. I doubted the bitch alone had made that mess all around her kitchen and living room and bedroom, but everything seemed to be on the floor. Cabinets and drawers open, furniture pushed to the sides, and they’d even turned the coffee table in the living room upside down. The bitch hadn’t had that many things in the house to begin with, but everything had been thoroughly searched. The Alliance didn’t kid around.

  We searched every inch of the house for almost ten minutes before I was ready to admit that she really wasn’t here. There had been a computer in there at one point. We could see the cables on the desk of a small room next to the bedroom. The drawers were full of small crystals, which the Alliance hadn’t bothered to take with them, but if there had been any documents there or spells she’d used, they were now with them. There was no basement, nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the pantry except some crackers that I took the liberty of eating just to keep myself distracted with something.

  There was nothing there.

  “You need to focus,” Lexar said to Feather Girl when we met back in the foyer. My head was filled with the sound of my chewing the crackers, but my mind still buzzed. “Try to pinpoint a location. She could be hiding nearby.”

  I didn’t think so. It was obvious she hadn’t done any work from here. She’d instead chosen the basement of an abandoned house to summon evil spirits. Just how many empty houses were in Philadelphia right now, and how long would it take us to search all of them?

  “I can’t focus. She’s everywhere. Her energy is hanging in the air,” Feather Girl said, then started choking. I almost panicked until I saw the tip of a feather coming out of her lips. Ugh, she threw up feathers, too. That must have sucked. Cursing under her breath, she spit the wet feather out and let it fall on the floor.

  “Can we go now? This place is creeping me out,” Chelsea said, rubbing her shoulders.

  “There has to be a lead here somewhere. If she lived here, she left something behind,” Lexar said, going close to the walls, inspecting them.

  “If she left something behind, the Alliance took it,” I reminded him. They’d done a really good job raiding this place. There was nothing here, and we weren’t going to know if they found something useful until they went over everything they took first. More waiting. Still, I was trying not to panic, so I ate some more crackers instead.

  “What about your parents? Can’t they search for her? You make them sound like a big deal,” Feather Girl asked Abraham. She did have a point.

  “They are searching for her. That’s what I’m doing here,” Abraham said, and for once, he didn’t sound very relaxed.

  “Well, you’re doing a really shitty job,” I told him and started walking out the door. There was no point wasting time here anymore.

  “I need to go back Downstairs,” Lexar said. “Whoever she’s working with, they’re really good. Nobody disappears without a trace like this.”

  “Unless your daddy—or mine—decide to do the work for us, I doubt you’ll find anything useful Downstairs,” I said reluctantly.

  “A spell. Mine won’t even begin to search for her, but their magic is stronger,” Lexar said. Of course, it was—magic was them. But that bitch knew exactly what she was doing with her own spells, if even the Alliance couldn’t find her through them. It’s why I hadn’t even tried to track her with mine at all—I really do suck at magic.

  “Even if Tobias did the spell?” I wondered.

  “You don’t know that it’s Tobias,” Lexar said.

  I didn’t, but I was betting on it. Tobias was the biggest asshole I knew, and that was saying something. But Tobias was also powerful—he lived in Hell. Plenty of magic for him to access easily to make his spells work.

  “Maybe we should try the Joey guy again. The bar manager.” It was the only lead we had left, when…

  “Sassy, wait.”

  I turned around to see what Chelsea wanted. Lexar and I had been walking toward the car and his bike, and we hadn’t even realized that the others had stopped. Feather Girl couldn’t be seen anywhere, but Chelsea and Abraham were looking at the side of the house, drenched in complete darkness.

  My heartbeat tripled. Was it the bitch?

  I ran back to the side of the house, two knives alrea
dy in my warming hands. Feather Girl was in the back, close to an old wooden fence that separated the yards, half of it broken. It was too dark to see anything properly because the light from the lampposts at the side of the street didn’t reach all the way to the back, but I could make out Feather Girl’s silhouette as she looked around the empty yard.

  “What? What is it?” I searched with my own eyes. Aside from some pieces of wood practically thrown against the back door—what I’d already seen from the inside of the house—there was nothing there. Patches of dried grass here and there on the mostly flat yard. No trees, no nothing.

  “It’s almost like there’s more of it around here,” Feather Girl said. “I don’t know, it feels like it’s more focused.”

  “What’s more focused?” Abraham asked.

  “Her energy,” Feather Girl said. I sighed. There was clearly nobody out here. The yard was small—it was easy to see. “It’s coming from below.”

  Lexar strode toward her, eyes on the ground, and I did the same. Abraham wanted to come after me, but I put my fist with the knife in it to his chest and stopped him.

  “We could really use some light here.”

  My fire provided more than enough light, but flames never stood still. They danced around, creating a lot of shadows and distractions. Not ideal for when you were trying to find something small.

  Abraham nodded. By the time I reached Feather Girl, still in the middle of the yard, bright white light spilled all over us, as if a really strong light bulb had just gone on over our heads.

  “Try not to look at it,” Abraham called from behind me. Not a problem. But now, we could see everything in perfect detail. It was like daylight was paying us a visit in the middle of the night, illuminating every strand of grass on the ground.

  We started searching for whatever it was that we were searching for. I had no clue what, but anything out of the ordinary would do. Anything that could give us a clue about the nocturnal bitch, I’d take it.

  “Over here,” Feather Girl called from the left side of the yard. She’d kneeled right next to the fence and was trying to pull something up from the ground.

  A fence rail. I put my knives away and squatted down to see better. “A bit of light here!” I called because our shadows wouldn’t let us see anything. Soon, Abraham was right behind me, the light a bit dimmer so as not to hurt our eyes, and we could see. Feather Girl pulled out the rail from the ground. Not hard to do because it hadn’t been buried too deep at all. Barely a few inches. And once it came off, we could see a piece of metal, like a hook in the dirt, linked to a chain.

  Feather Girl let the rail go, but it stayed in place, supported by the rest of the fence, and she pulled up the hook. The thick chain attached to it pulled up, and it went right under my foot. I stood up and watched as Feather Girl kept pulling at the chain. It went on for another two feet before it stopped—at the edge of another fence rail. One last pull and the ground moved. There was a bit of grass on there for a few feet, and that’s probably why we hadn’t noticed shit. But Feather Girl pulled the chain again, and a square piece of ground about two feet wide pulled up.

  I grinned at her. “I’m really glad I haven’t killed you yet,” I told her and went to see what was under our feet.

  22

  A room. Maybe more like a basement, except it wasn’t under the house. It was under the yard. And it was most definitely where the nocturnal bitch had spent most of her time.

  It was a gold mine there—of crystals and cauldrons and weird-looking ingredients—like the grains that looked like miniature eyes filling half a plastic bucket on a long table in the middle of the room. There was no electricity there—no switch and no light bulb overhead, but there were candles, and I lit all thirteen of them. Abraham’s light was too bright for indoors. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face because we had finally caught a break. This was the bitch’s lair, and there was no way she hadn’t left a clue for us here—unintentionally, of course.

  “What’s this thing?” Chelsea asked, a candle in her hand as she looked at what seemed to be a hand-drawn map pinned on the white wall. I continued to search the bags of crystals, and the dishes full of herbs and strange things, trying to figure out what on earth the bitch had needed all that stuff for.

  Probably to do things for people in trade for their souls—like she had with Feather Girl. I wondered how much of herself she had had to sell first—every bit of her rotten soul? Probably.

  “She slept here,” Feather Girl said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of a couch that had seen much, much better days. A blanket and a pillow were on it, the pillow with a big brown stain smack in the middle of it where the bitch had probably lain her head. A stain that screamed that that pillow hadn’t been washed in…ever. Apparently, you don’t need clean pillows and personal hygiene to collect souls from people and summon evil spirits. Who knew?

  “She’s long gone from here,” Lexar said. He was standing in front of the map with Chelsea. I reached the end of the table where the bitch apparently had kept her stuff and saw the books. They were old, it was plain to see, but more than that—they were Books of the Fallen, and they were full of spells.

  I dove into them eagerly. Whatever spells were in there, they needed to disappear. Whatever gave that bitch the power to take souls and grant impossible wishes needed to be burned out of this world altogether. The first book had a sage stick smack in the middle of it, as if the bitch had used it as a bookmark. It was on a spell about the Shadow Element—which apparently granted the subject an elemental power temporarily. The spell alone was about sixteen pages long.

  “Sassy, come see this,” Chelsea called, and I had to put the book down to go check. Everybody was already by the wall.

  It was an old map of Philadelphia, and if the bitch made it herself, she needed some drawing lessons. The lines were jagged, some of them not right at all. The funny thing was, there were only shapes. No street names, no building names, no letters at all.

  “This,” Lexar said, pointing his finger on the right side of the map. “All these roads seem to lead here.”

  But there were no names. “Where is that?”

  Chelsea stepped closer. “That’s the northwest. It could be Andorra, or even farther up, outside of Philadelphia.”

  “She only drew the ones that lead there,” Feather Girl said, her phone in her hands, a map application on her screen. She looked up at the map and down to her screen every few seconds, trying to figure out what that place was.

  In the meantime, I went back to the Books of the Fallen, curious to see what exactly the nocturnal bitch had been working on. Most of the spells in the four books I found were nocturnal spells, connected to the night, to the moon and the stars—magic that was considered too powerful and violent to be controlled. She had had no trouble doing it, it seemed, because she’d successfully taken Feather Girl’s soul in exchange for piano skills, then killed her, too. I had no doubt about it—that was her. And even if I hadn’t known that, the fact that she’d been able to summon an evil spirit so perfectly, almost effortlessly, was a great indicator that she knew magic a lot better than I ever would. The spells in these Books were dangerous, and if they fell in another pair of wrong hands, it would be disastrous. That’s why they needed to go.

  “Just like Chelsea said. It’s either Andorra or Lafayette Hills, according to the map,” Feather Girl said.

  I closed the book, shivers washing down my back at the spell I’d been reading. It could literally melt the bones inside of your body—while you were alive. What the hell was the purpose of such a thing? Who was so fucked up in the head to even come up with it?

  People like my father, that’s who.

  When I turned around and almost slammed my forehead onto Abraham’s nose, a string of curse words was ready to spill out of me. “What the hell?” He’d been standing right behind me, and I hadn’t noticed a thing.

  “I was curious, too,” he said, nodding at the books on the table. “You
can do magic, right? You can tap into the Ley lines.”

  “Actually, I can tap straight into the main source.” Meaning Hell. “But spells are not my thing. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” he said.

  Before I could tell him to cut the shit and tell me what he was thinking, Chelsea spoke.

  “I’d really like to get the hell out of here now,” she said and made for the old wooden stairs that would lead us up and out of this shit hole. Abraham followed her without another word, and so did Feather Girl.

  “I’m burning this place down,” I told Lexar while he took another look around, hoping to find something that wasn’t there. “These Books are dangerous. This whole place is dangerous.” Who knew how many more things the bitch could have hidden in here? No way was I going to let her come back and find everything as she left it.

  “We need to separate, but I’m not comfortable with that guy being here while I’m not,” he said, nodding his head at the ceiling.

  “Abraham?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what it is about him. It doesn’t feel right,” he said with a flinch.

  “Don’t you worry about us, Nevermore. I assure you I can kill him seven different ways before he can land a hit on me.” And most of those seven different ways involved hellfire. It would be really ironic for Abraham to die like that, don’t you think?

  “That’s not what I’m worried about. He won’t attack you—he’s no fool. But I’m more concerned with what else he can do. How he can manipulate a situation—because healing and light? That’s not all there is to it. You and I are children of angels, too, and both of us can do magic on top of our inherited powers,” Lexar said, and he was right. The truth was bigger than even he knew—I also turned into a phoenix.