Good luck, me!
Chapter 12
Simon and I entered the church lot from the back end of the property. Its imploded form sat silhouetted against the street lights in the distance, leaving me anxious and sorrowful all over again.
There was no part of me that wanted to go back into that church, but I was doing it anyway.
I had wanted to be the first one to arrive, preferring to have the moderators come to me instead of the other way around. But it had taken four witches to work the illusion spell we needed to keep ourselves protected from prying eyes, so they'd ultimately taken the lead on the night's arrangements. In the end, I'd settled on being the last to show up. I would never feel entirely safe, so I might as well make an entrance. It had taken both Simon and Leda to get everyone back and forth, while Ethan and some of the others had used the rabbit hole to get back into the city, in case anything went badly.
It was safe to assume that our faction was not the only one making similar arrangements, but I couldn’t worry about that.
Through one of the gaping holes in the building, I could see people moving in the distance. The shadows left much to the imagination, but I still signaled for Simon to hold his position near the perimeter after we’d stepped inside the building through what was left of a back door.
“Is this everyone then?” A distinctly fae voice spoke in the darkness, lilting and light.
In response, a small ball of witch-light appeared in the air, hovering in front of a woman’s face before floating into the air above us. I recognized the woman as the witch who’d stood in the center of this very church during the summit, the leader of her people, at least temporarily.
Right away, the space in the center of the cathedral where we stood was as bright as it would have been in the middle of the afternoon.
Looking up at the remaining glass windows, I wondered how much of this light could be seen from outside.
“We are well hidden,” the witch assured me. The words would have been reassuring if they hadn’t come out sounding quite so annoyed.
I nodded, silently promising that I trusted her handiwork.
Now, lit by magick, the remnants of the church looked far different than I remembered. It was clear that the humans had combed through the building, moving or removing large pieces of wall and furniture, all in the hopes of finding survivors or evidence. Much of the hole in the floor had been replaced with scaffolding, possibly to help maintain whatever structural integrity the building had left.
“How are your injured doing?” I asked, not wanting to sit through too much formality with introductions and power plays.
I knew who each of the four moderators were, and I was sure they were well acquainted with my story.
Nobody answered. “Well, my people are doing okay, thank you for asking.” My eyebrows rose in a challenge. “If we’re going to help each other, a little honesty might go a long way.” I hadn’t been sure which tactic would be the best to take here, deferring to their leadership or asserting my own.
The fae woman narrowed her eyes at me, making no effort to be welcoming or even polite. “That’s none of your concern.”
Tilly had warned me that her people were unlikely to be enthusiastic about my addition to the proceedings. The fae’s power structure had been much the same for millennia now, only shifting slightly over time in response to internal power struggles and a balancing act between their two main factions. But they were slow to change in any major way and would be less open than most to sharing the inner workings of their factions with a perceived outsider.
Apparently, that included even so much as telling me if anyone had been hurt as though I could harm them somehow with that information.
But we were all here, and we all wanted the same thing. Answers. That had to be something I could work with.
“Look. I know we have no reason to trust each other. And I’d argue that I have a lot less reason to trust any of you than you do me.” I made a point of looking over at the elegantly dressed Roman man who was leading the vampires. “But my people and I have a theory about who is responsible here. And I have information that might be useful for all of this that I was able to obtain from the computers from the local police. I don’t understand much of what I found, but I have access to everything from the types of materials used in the explosion to their list of suspects.
“You were happy to utilize Simon and his sister to get here. And I assume you’d be happy enough to take our information. But I’m not looking to hand it all over for a pat on the head and to be told I’m a good girl. Give me something here, and we can all get on with things.”
“How do we know we can trust your information?” the fae woman asked.
“This information isn’t open to interpretation when it comes to its validity. I don’t know what all the facts are, but I know what the police have written in their reports. They aren’t even copies. We have a direct line onto the nearest precinct and their systems. I’ll show you what I have, you can draw your own conclusions.”
“There’s been extensive discussion of your abilities, Miss Sinclair,” Otto said. “How can we know that you didn’t go so far as to alter the original reports?”
I’d been hoping I could count on Otto as an ally, but I was going to have to prove myself right across the board. “These aren’t cold cases, reports long forgotten by the people who wrote them. They’re being looked at almost hourly by law enforcement agencies all over the country, probably the world. If I changed something, someone would be sure to see it. And it’s not like I have the power to alter the memories of the people who wrote them originally. Besides, why would I want to tamper with any of this? What I want is to find out who did this. I’m willing to share intel if it will get me there faster, but you need to do the same.”
“You’d tamper with evidence in order to protect yourself.” The vampire in the room bared his teeth as he spoke, putting me on edge in every way possible.
“You think I did this?” I asked, trying to sound completely shocked by the idea. Of course I’d known that some of the factions would want to pin this on me and my people. Even if they didn’t believe it, I made for an easy scapegoat. “So I blew up a church in my own city and then came here to chat with the very people I attacked? What could I possible have to gain from any of this? I could have easily been killed in that explosion, along with the people I brought into the church with me.”
Whatever their next argument was going to be, I had a plan to defend myself. But before anyone had a chance to speak, the sound of shifting stone came from somewhere below us.
Silence followed, but I'd already turned back to Simon. He started moving toward me, sprinting to my position to save himself the power of two jumps too close together.
I moved at the same time. "Meet me downstairs," I said to the others, with no clue whether or not they'd follow me.
In seconds, Simon and I had reached each other, our hands extending out toward one another until they made contact. As soon as they did, we jumped.
We landed in near perfect darkness. Only a little of the witchlight from the main floor had filtered down to the basement.
I could see Simon's form in the darkness. So I knew it wasn't his body that slammed into mine, tackling me at the waist.
My fingers were ripped from Simon's hang as my body flew backward, crashing into a wall behind me.
My hands grasped at nothingness for only an instant before my body registered the attack. I'd left my gun behind, knowing I'd be surrounded by the supernatural—and that if we ran into humans, being caught with a gun would only amplify my problems.
I'd managed to grasp the knife within seconds of hitting the wall, my body shifting downward to grab it in the same moment that a foot sprang out, colliding with the wall behind me.
The sound of footsteps echoed overhead as Simon lunged toward whoever had attacked us, barely missing the body that was still over me.
Rolling to the side, I tried to give
myself more room to move and counter-attack.
I didn't see the next attack coming, but I felt a boot slam into my back, sending me back toward the floor.
Pushing up from my elbows, I tried to steady myself enough to stand before someone else's foot hooked into my own, sending me off balance all over again. Reacting on instinct, I kicked out, trying to clear the surrounding space to give myself enough room to properly defend myself. I'd have rather done it with my knife, swiping out as a clear message for any attacker not to get too close, but with such low light and Simon nearby, it wasn't an option.
Without warning, witchlight flared to live overhead, temporarily blinding my as my eyes forced themselves closed.
I found my feet again and took two hesitant steps backward, suspecting there were now already more people in this already cramped space.
By the time my vision settled, the fight was over. I opened my eyes to find a man kneeling on the floor, hands held roughly behind his back by Otto while Simon and the others formed a semi-circle nearby, blocking the exit.
"Everyone alright?" I asked, not remotely expecting most of the people there with me to be honest about if they'd been hurt. Simon gave me a terse nod, so at least that was something.
Satisfied that we weren't in any immediate danger, I looked down to study the man we'd found and recognized him immediately.
Sebastian.
I'd met him at the same time as Nina and so many of the other people I now counted as allies and friends. He'd been part of Aoife's inner circle, enough to have left with her after Aoife left Ireland.
"Who are you?" Otto snapped, tightening his grip as he hoisted Sebastian to his feet, pain etched itself onto the man's face.
I stood there, agape, knowing I had a decision to make. I looked at Simon, but he was still fixated on our attacker. The two of them had never met, he'd have no way of knowing what I was faced with.
Did I give Sebastian up to the others, explain who he was and who he associated with? If so, that would all but seal the verdict on our people having been responsible for the explosion. It had already confirmed my own suspicions.
If I shared what I knew, it was unlikely that Sebastian would be treated well by the moderators or anyone else. There was a very good chance I would be signing his death warrant. Still, I knew he'd signed it himself by getting involved with any of this. If he'd been involved and people and died, he deserved whatever was coming to him.
Sebastian had never had a real chance of just walking away from all of this. My confession would likely save him a world of torture for information I already knew.
"He's one of Aoife's," I said, my mind made up. "Sebastian."
At the sound of his name, he looked up at me. Both fear and anger hid behind his eyes, forcing me to look away.
"Aoife?" the fae woman asked.
"A lesser, er, undefined magick user. She'd tried to undermine the summit before, and we have good reason to believe that she was responsible for what happened here.”
"Information that you didn't think was worth sharing."
"It was a hunch, nothing more. And you know what, I'm not going to dignify this with any more of a response. I'm the one trying to share info here. But before anyone asks, no I don't know why he's here or anything else remotely along those lines. So let's divide and conquer here. Two of you can continue to hunt down any evidence the humans might have missed. Two of you find out if Sebastian here can tell us anything useful. And then we can regroup and find a way forward with the rest of summit. Clearly, the explosion was meant to put a stop to our proceedings, so I'm voting we don't let it."
I expected the next words out of anyone's mouth to be some variation of reminding me that I didn't get a vote. Instead, Otto asked me, "And what will you be doing after this?"
"I'm going to find out where Aoife is. If Sebastian has a phone on him, I'm going to need it."
Chapter 13
We called Leda in to help with extracting everyone who now had somewhere more pressing to be. When Simon deposited me a few blocks away from the church he promised to let me know if there was any trouble, then disappeared into the night.
I still had Sebastian’s phone in my hands when I made it to the pub where I’d agreed to meet some of the others, not entirely sure what to do with it.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t used my gift with technology to search for Aoife before. But every email chain I’d followed, every profile, every contact list had turned up a dead end. I’d even gotten so far as finding some of the people she was in touch with, finding messages she’d sent. But every time I tried to back track, she was already gone.
My only real hope was that now that Aoife’s plan was in full swing, she’d have less time to worry about covering her own tracks.
But Sebastian had been in those ruins. I couldn’t guess at why he’d felt the need to come back, but whatever they had been it would have been on Aoife’s orders. There was no way to know if she realized Sebastian had been captured yet, but if she’d noticed someone was gone, we might have already missed her window.
“You’re back early,” Taya said when I slid into the booth beside her.
Across the table from us, Nina sipped her beer, reminding me of a time not long ago. It wasn’t the same booth; it wasn’t even the same pub. But the first time I’d met her, the situation hadn’t been so different from the one we were in now. Except back then, she and her friends had been trying to convince me that we could all help each other. That I was better off sticking around Galway and trying to make things better.
I’d listened to what they had to say and look how my life had turned itself inside out since.
But my life couldn’t be the only one whose path had taken some significant turns since that first day. Looking at Nina and Tate I needed to remind myself that Sebastian had once been someone they considered a friend. Even Aoife. “It’s Sebastian,” I said as gently as I could. “They captured him at the church. I’m guessing he was there doing something for Aoife, but I don’t know for sure.”
Nina’s shoulders slumped at the same time that Tate’s expression became completely unreadable. “Is he dead then?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know. Probably not. They took him to see if they could get information out of him. Anything that might be helpful.” I wanted to ask if they thought Sebastian was the kind of guy who would give up information easily. Except, it wouldn’t have helped anything. Nina and Tate would end up with the same horrible images in their minds that were already in mine, and Sebastian would be no better off.
I put his phone down on the table in the middle of the four of us, withdrawing my hand only far enough so that they could see it, my fingers still connecting with the corner of the screen. “Watch my back,” I asked. “I’m going to see if he had anything on his phone that might actually help us track down Aoife. If I can find a location, be ready to move. Be ready to end this.”
My eyes shut tight as my magick connected to the phone, infusing itself into every circuit and wire until I found... no internet connection. My hand withdrew as my eyes popped back open. “Uhh..,” I picked up the devices, unlocking it with a quick spell. As soon as I’d opened up the settings, my fears were confirmed. Despite being a fairly recent model, there was no data connection and no wifi. Both of the small panels that should usually have been clickable to turn those features on and off were grayed out.
"They killed the internet on this thing," I explained, frustration welling up in my chest. With a huff, I slammed the device back on the table, hard enough that the table behind us all turned around to look. "Damn it. Why even bother having a phone if it wasn't connected to the internet?"
In spite of everything else that was going on Tate, the oldest person at the table by almost a decade actually laughed. "Really?" he asked. Neither myself or either of the other women sitting with him said anything. I was sure I was missing something painfully obvious, but that wasn't actually helping me to get to anything useful.
"Phone
calls," Tate deadpanned. "Once upon a time people used to have to call each other if they wanted to exchange information. When I was growing up, we still thought it was pretty damn cool that you could dial someone up from a device you could keep in your pocket. And then text messaging showed up and the world was never the same."
I knew Tate was mostly teasing. I still ended up smacking myself on the forehead when faced with the obvious answer. Maybe it was my connection to technology itself, or the rush I felt when I was plugged in to the internet, but I mostly tried to avoid calling people whenever possible, preferring just to send a message.
Of course Aoife would have cut her people off from the net as much as possible. We'd seen evidence of as much already, as we'd worked through endless files and emails trying to figure out where she was. But that didn't mean she was going to resort to homing pigeons or telegrams in order to stay in contact with people, especially not while they were in the midst of all their big plans finally unfolding. I was sure she would have seen my next move coming as well, knowing I could access calls as easily as anything else created digitally, but at least we had something to go on.
I picked up the cellphone again and worked my way through to the phone app and text messages. The messages were empty, but I found the call log right away. The phone Sebastian had had on him was being used exclusively to make and receive calls from one number. There was no name attached to it, but I had my guesses.
As soon as I found the number, my mind switched gears to start using the same tracking spell I'd done a hundred times before. The thoughts started in my mind before flowing like electricity into the device. But no name came back to me. No location. Not even a ping recognizing that my spell had found the phone I'd been looking for.
Nothing.
Granted, when tracking between phones, my spells usually relied pretty heavily on all the ways a person's phone connected to the internet. I could see everything from the path an Instagram photo took to the endless stream of Messenger conversations. I'd used phone numbers specifically before as well, but I'd never gone after a number that belonged to someone that didn't want to be found.
Magic In My Blood Page 8
