Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  “That makes me think it was something personal. Something that caused emotions to run high, that caused Samuel Radigan to cast rational thought aside.”

  Liam took out his phone and navigated to his contacts. “I’m going to put Nick on it. He might be able to get something useful off the Radigans’ home computers, assuming the ones containing hush-hush info are connected to the internet.”

  Franc grimaced. “You think it’s wise to try and hack into the computers of a state senator?”

  “We don’t have enough time to pursue any legal avenues for obtaining his computer records,” Liam said. “A warrant won’t come through till tomorrow afternoon, and by then, the demon will be back on the prowl. Remember, that thing went after two families in quick succession. If we don’t send it back to the Inferno soon…”

  Liam hit the dial button. “I don’t like committing a mountain of felonies any more than you do, Franc, but there’s too much riding on a quick resolution—and the Salem’s Gate PD isn’t equipped to solve a case like this on such a contracted timetable.”

  Franc tugged on her messy bun. “I know. That’s what bothers me. This many years after the Unveiling, the PD should be able to handle something like this. But the red tape we have to climb through to pursue cases against public officials just keeps growing thicker.”

  “By design,” Cortez said. “Mundane authorities have a major power disadvantage against supernatural authorities. To make up for that, they’ve been trying their hardest to make themselves legally untouchable while exposing their sup counterparts to more legal risk with laws that put the onus for all sorts of criminal and civil violations committed by individuals on sup leaders. A lot of sup leaders have ended up in jail thanks to those laws.”

  “I’d heard about stuff like that, but I didn’t realize the phenomenon was so widespread.” Franc clenched her fists. “That’s so underhanded, and not at all how justice should work.”

  “You’re right about that.” Cortez sighed. “Relations between mundanes and sups are never going to improve until—”

  “He should’ve picked up by now,” Liam said abruptly, pulling the phone from his ear. “Nick never lets his phone go past five rings.”

  “Maybe he fell asleep again?” Kat offered.

  “He sleeps with his phone right next to his head, and his volume is never on silent.” He tapped the speakerphone button, and the dialing noise echoed off the metal walls, producing an eerie chorus.

  Franc sat up straight. “You think something happened to him?”

  Liam stood, the legs of his chair grinding against the concrete floor. “Knowing Nick, the prospect of digging up dirt on a senator was too big a temptation to ignore. He probably went poking around in the Radigans’ home network the second he got off the phone with me earlier.”

  Hunt scratched his stubbly chin. “You think he got caught?”

  “Normally, I’d say no, Nick’s too good for that.” Liam hung up and immediately redialed. “But if Samuel Radigan has employed a magician who’s as experienced as you believe, then it’s possible they’ve got a ward-integrated home computer network. Combining magic and technology is a relatively new practice, but some of the Circle magicians aren’t half bad at it. Or so I’ve heard.”

  Hunt looked grave. “It’s a quickly growing field. It wouldn’t surprise me if a family with as much wealth and influence as the Radigans paid the high premium to add such a security measure to their personal computers and internet modems.”

  The tension in the air grew thick as Liam’s phone dialed and dialed. Until finally, it went to voicemail.

  Swearing, Liam stuffed his phone into his pocket. “We need to get over to Nick’s place. Right now.”

  Cortez shot up, her chair falling over with a clang. “I’ll go.”

  Hunt made to grab his shotgun, but Liam stopped him. “No, you stay here, with Franc, Casey, and Yun. I don’t want everyone going at once, because we don’t know what’s waiting for us at the apartment. And since only you, me, and Kat can perform teleportation spells, at least one of us three needs to hang back.”

  Hunt shot Liam a challenging look, one that stated he believed he’d be a better choice for the vanguard, but Liam didn’t back down. So Hunt, though annoyed, conceded. “All right, Mr. Crown. Have it your way. But if you run into Glasya-Labolas again, you call in backup immediately.”

  “I will.” Liam tugged his knife off his belt and gripped it tightly, then addressed Kat. “Can you teleport us there?”

  Kat nodded. “Inside or outside?”

  “Best do the hallway.” Liam moved to an empty spot on the floor, suitable for the teleportation spell, and gestured for Kat and Cortez to join him. “Depending on whether or not there’s been a noticeable disturbance, there might be cops crawling around on the street. And since there might be a demon inside the apartment…”

  Kat shuffled up to Liam’s side. “Right. Hallway it is.”

  “You remember it well enough to use it as the destination point?”

  Kat scoffed. “How could I forget the details of that nasty-ass hallway?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Cortez positioned herself on Kat’s other side and grabbed hold of Kat’s wrist. “It’s been a long time since I traveled by teleportation spell. I recall it being rather unpleasant.”

  “You’ll just have to deal with any side effects on your own time.” Liam took Kat’s hand. “Because we may very well be teleporting into a war zone.”

  Cortez gave him a grim look. “You think it’s going to be that bad?”

  “It was the last time we ran into the demon,” Kat muttered before she closed her eyes and focused on her mental image of the gross hallway outside Giannopoulos’s apartment. She hadn’t wanted to return to that place ever. The prospect of going back for round two when it might now look as horrific as the murder scene at the Avery house did not excite her in the least.

  Cortez fell silent, but Kat felt something thrum through the woman’s fingers, akin to an electric current, and got the impression that the jaguar was sitting very close to the surface, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

  Calling up her magic energy, Kat asked, “Are we ready?”

  Both Cortez and Liam answered in the affirmative. And so, Kat used a spell she’d once relied on to run from danger…to run straight toward the most dangerous monster she’d ever faced.

  12

  Liam

  The teleportation spell spit them out in the middle of a smoldering cloud. Thick smoke choked Liam’s lungs, and he doubled over in a coughing fit. Black dots tickled the corners of his vision, and in a panic, he extended a finger, activating the spell tucked within his gold ring. A strong current of air spun up around him, Kat, and Gabby, rebuffing the smoke and providing them with the precious oxygen they needed to breathe.

  Liam had optimized all his mediums for maximum energy storage after he so quickly expended himself during the fight with Marta and the other A9 goons last month. But each one still only had enough stored energy to utilize the embedded spell sets for ten to fifteen minutes, depending on how broad Liam made the area of effect.

  To get the most use out of the air spell, Liam kept the field tight around their small group. This meant they could breathe easy for longer. Unfortunately, it also meant they couldn’t see anything more than a foot from their faces.

  Dense smoke blanketed the entire hall, and Liam could only tell which way to go because the smothering heat from the fire spewing that smoke was worse in one direction. “I think Nick’s apartment is this way,” he said to Gabby and Kat, who were still gasping. “Use the walls as a guide.”

  Kat tugged her sleeve down over her hand so she didn’t have to touch the slimy walls, which were now covered in soot as well. “I don’t hear any sounds of struggle. Do you?”

  Liam heard nothing but the crackle of the flames that, as he shuffled along, he could just m
ake out through the doorway of Nick’s apartment. The fire was steadily creeping toward the hall. Soon, all the other apartments on the floor would be at risk. “No, I don’t. Either Nick’s dead, or he fled to safety.”

  “Why isn’t the fire alarm going off?” Gabby asked, searching the ceiling for a smoke detector. “This might not be a great building, but it has to have a fire alarm system.”

  Liam bit his tongue. “It must’ve been sabotaged.”

  “But why?” Kat, a step ahead of Liam, peered around the doorframe to Nick’s apartment. The door itself lay inside, splintered from the powerful kick that had torn it off its hinges. “Why try to burn down the whole building just to kill one man?”

  “Because the fire wasn’t meant to kill Nick.” Liam joined her at the doorway, wincing as a wave of intense heat washed over him. “It was meant to destroy his equipment so no one could figure out what he was working on.”

  All of Nick’s computers had been ripped to shreds, piled up in one corner, and set ablaze. Nothing remained but a pool of half-melted metal and plastic.

  “If the fire department had gotten here before the computers adequately burned,” Liam continued, “the cops might’ve been able to retrieve some data about Radigan from the hard drives.”

  “So Radigan was willing to kill everyone in this building?” Kat hissed, fury flashing through her bright-green eyes. “What a bastard.”

  Liam didn’t disagree. “We need to find a water source to douse the flames,” he said to Kat. “There’s not enough moisture left in the air to put out a fire this big.”

  He glanced at the ceiling above the burning computers. It looked ready to collapse, the beams holding the structure aloft warping under the heat. “Gabby, you got a burner phone?”

  She pulled out a cell phone with an actual number pad, a model that was at least ten years old. “I do have occasions where I need to be discreet. You want me to call the fire department?”

  Liam nodded. “A passerby might’ve already called it in, but in this neighborhood, that’s a toss-up. Just tell them you were out walking your dog or something and noticed a fire in one of the apartments.”

  “Will do.”

  Kat frowned. “You don’t think we can put the whole thing out?”

  “It’s already up in the ceiling. And look there.” He pointed at a bowed section of the floor with a hole in the middle. “Some burning debris has fallen through to the underfloor. We might be able to put out the flaming mound of computers, but I doubt we’ll be able to get every little lick of flame.

  “We’ll leave that to the professionals. In the meantime, let’s do what we can to reduce the intensity and slow the spread. Once the fire truck arrives, we’ll make our exit.”

  “Okay.” Kat peeled her eyes, searching the walls. “Where’s the bathroom in this place?”

  Liam pointed to where he approximated the bathroom door was, all the contours of the wall obscured by smoke. “Bathroom’s pretty cramped. Think we should just break a pipe. You remember that spell that controls the flow of water?”

  “Yeah, I remember. I’ll work on that.” Kat’s hand brushed his. “You focus on keeping our air fresh. The oxygen’s getting a little thin.”

  Liam had noticed that too. He was feeling woozy despite repelling the smoke. The fire was greedily eating all the oxygen in the apartment. “All right. I’ll expand the field to encompass the bathroom so you can get to work.”

  Tapping his ring, he accessed the embedded spell and modified it in two ways. The first widened the bubble so that the bathroom was included, allowing Kat to crouch next to the sink and examine the water pipe. The second created a small funnel that wound out of the apartment, down the hall, and into the stairwell, where the smoke had not yet penetrated, allowing Liam to pull more oxygen-rich air into the field.

  About half a minute after the changes took effect, Liam’s wooziness subsided.

  In that same half minute, Kat used her superhuman strength to bust a pipe open, and water came flooding out of the bathroom, soaking the floor. Using the water flow spell, Kat mentally “grabbed” the stream of water and directed it around the bathroom doorway, toward the burning pile of computer equipment.

  At first, the extreme heat turned the water to steam, white vapor mingling with gray smoke. But eventually the continuous bombardment overpowered the fire, and the writhing flames hissed loudly as the spray began to beat them down.

  While the fire slowly waned, Gabby made a lightning-quick call to 911, saying only that there was a fire at this address. After she hung up, she tossed the burner phone into the fire, where it melted into a puddle of goo that was indistinguishable from the rest of the wrecked computer parts.

  At Liam’s raised eyebrow, she said, “I have a whole box of burner phones.”

  “You do a lot of clandestine work that you don’t want ‘the law’ to know about?”

  Gabby smiled. “The shifter community is not as…” She paused. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Liam listened for a few seconds, but only heard the grumbling roar of water and fire duking it out. “There’s nobody in the hall, is there?”

  “No, the sound didn’t come from the hall.” She scoured the detritus scattered across the floor. “It was like a knock or a bang. It sounded intentional—”

  The bang came again, and Liam heard it this time.

  “That could just be something breaking under the floorboards. The fire’s done some pretty serious structural damage,” he said. But even as the words rolled off his tongue, he didn’t quite believe them. “Though maybe we should double-check, just to be sure. Where do you think it originated? Under the mattress?”

  Nick’s mattress had been pushed out of its usual spot and now lay atop a pile of crumpled snack bags, used paper plates, and empty aluminum cans. Nudging the air spell’s field to extend it slightly to the right, far enough to encompass the whole mattress, Liam sank down on one side of it. Gabby kneeled by the other side, and they each tucked their hands under the edge, preparing to heave it up.

  Liam grunted at the effort of maintaining the air spell so far outside its original parameters. The energy he’d stored in the ring was already gone, and he was draining his internal store at a rapid rate because the air around them was so severely toxic. But he hid that strain beneath the physical strain of lifting the mattress, as he didn’t want Gabby or Kat to worry about him.

  Not counting Franc, who was the only mundane among them, he was the weakest member of their ragtag team by a wide margin. As embarrassing as that was, pride wasn’t the only reason he didn’t want anyone to notice his struggle. If his friends realized he was overexerting his magic, they’d try to take on more of the burden themselves. And he didn’t want them to do that.

  If Liam was to grow his magic store, he had to regularly push himself to his limits. He wasn’t going to become a stronger magician if he kept allowing Kat to do all the heavy lifting. He had to run up against his wall over and over, as often as he could, until that wall began to creep back, increasing the amount of space in his soul where magic energy could coalesce.

  Normally, a magician would go through this rigorous process during their apprentice training, until, at the very least, they reached the average energy level of a full-fledged Circle magician. Not only had Liam missed out on that training as a consequence of being barred from the Circle, but he’d let his magic store wane for so long after Julia’s and Hayden’s deaths that it had shriveled into something that resembled a child’s magic store. And he only had himself to blame for that.

  He’d allowed grief to become depression and depression to become alcoholism. Along with the withdrawal headaches and the unfulfilled cravings, this strain on his soul was part of his penance for allowing himself to fall from grace.

  Liam could not and would not remain so weak—his friends needed him to be stronger, especially when there were enemies like rogue magici
ans and demons prowling the streets—so he would take the spiritual beatings, as many as were needed, to restore himself to the man he was before.

  Flipping the mattress and leaning it against the wall, Liam and Gabby swept the food waste away to expose the dirty floor. A wrinkled rug the color of vomit sat there, one corner folded over on itself. That fold revealed a section of tile flooring that didn’t look quite normal. One of the seams between the tiles was slightly too wide, as if the tiles had been inexpertly removed and then replaced at a later time.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Gabby murmured.

  “God, I hope so.” Liam grabbed the folded corner of the rug. “Help me move this.”

  Together, they pulled the rug aside, revealing the wide seam in the flooring formed a perfect square. On one side of that square, there was a small but obvious lip.

  Liam shoved two fingers into the lip and tugged hard. With a dull pop, the whole square came free, and Liam slid it across the floor to uncover the dark space beneath.

  Inside the insulated coffin-like room that had been discreetly built between the floor and the ceiling of the apartment one story below, Nick Giannopoulos lay curled up in the fetal position, desperately clutching a laptop. At the sudden intrusion of light in the dark space, Nick cracked an eye open, and his entire body relaxed when he saw Liam peering down at him.

  “Oh, thank god,” Nick said. “I was starting to think I was going to suffocate in here.”

  Liam let out a dry laugh. “Really, Nick? A panic room?”

  Nick unfurled and held up his laptop. “Well, clearly, it was a good idea.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” Liam took the laptop and passed it to Gabby, then offered Nick his hand. “Still, don’t you think an escape route would’ve been a better choice, given that your apartment was set on fire?”

  Nick took the proffered hand and hauled himself out of the space. “I’ll have you know that I’ve got several modes of escape from this building, all primed and ready to be used at a moment’s notice. Thing was, I didn’t have a moment to grab my go-bag and skedaddle.