The Culling (Book 2): The Hollow:

by Bell, A. C.

  ***

  Peter took a step back as Gabriel stepped out of the shadows.

  “What the hell do you want?!” Peter bellowed.

  A grin twisted his lips. “To hurt your father. Make him lose something so he’ll know how it felt when he took Mina from me.” He started circling Peter, inching closer and closer. Peter let him. “I got close, you know. When you were a baby. Some shabby little apartment in Syracuse. But Elias moved you up to New York and I lost you again.”

  Peter frowned. “Syracuse? I wasn’t a baby when we lived in Syracuse, I was two. That wasn’t me.” Ben had been the baby Gabriel had seen.

  Gabriel froze and his face went slack. “Two…?” His glance shot down as he thought back. He took an unstable step away from Peter as his eyes moved once again to Peter’s face. “It had been two years since Mina had run off.”

  A chill ran through Peter until his entire body felt cold. “No.” The word was a plea through Peter’s lips.

  “He really did take everything from me.” Gabriel dug his fingers through his hair, his eyes wide and fixed on Peter. “You. You’re--And I tried to--”

  Headlights drew Peter’s attention. A semi barreled toward them. Gabriel stepped back into its path, never taking his eyes off of his son.

  “No!” Peter lunged forward, but it was too late.

  Peter jolted awake. A warm hand was against his cheek. He looked up into Nikki’s warm hazel eyes. She smiled and he felt his racing pulse slow. Her thumb started stroking his cheek and his pulse picked up again.

  “Are you okay?” She asked, brows furrowed in concern.

  “I am now.” He reached up, grazing his fingers across her neck and into her hairline. Her cheeks flushed but she leaned into his hand. They sat like that for a few moments. Peter fought every muscle in his body to not sit up and kiss her. He tried to convince himself that it was because if Nikki was here, then Adeline was too, limiting their privacy. In reality, he was just terrified that Nikki would react as she had the last time he’d kissed her.

  He drew breath into his lungs in a failed attempt to slow his heart rate. “Is Adeline here, too?”

  Nikki nodded. “Downstairs. She and I found some weird books at her work. We’re gonna go through them.”

  ***

  All eleven books were fanned out in front of me. Three were in languages I couldn’t identify, seven were in German, and the other was in English. The repeating subjects were the history of magic, Purgatory, and the Viesci.

  I started on basic history since it was in English. The glowing notes were still visible when I flipped it open. In my first attempt of trying to decode them, I had jotted down each shorthand to see which ones appeared the most so I could try to connect meaning to them. The first thing I deduced was that he always labeled which groups were involved in a conflict. Sorcerers seemed to be involved in most of them. Not surprising. As was evident in the way they had set up their government, they liked to be in control. There was a civil war among magic users in the 14th century between those who wanted other supernatural races protected and those who wanted them prosecuted. The latter, calling themselves Maleficarum, only took a few months to stamp out.

  The plagiarist had taken it upon himself to “correct” a lot after this point. He was apparently convinced that the Maleficarum was not gone, but was instead working in secret by tipping the Hunters off to the whereabouts of those they found “mutually undesirable”. I jumped when Peter flopped down into a criss cross position on the other side of my mess of books.

  “You know not to startle me when I’m reading,” I scolded irritably. He chortled.

  “Have you figured anything out yet?” Nikki asked as she sat beside me.

  “Apparently this guy is a conspiracy theorist about something called ‘the Maleficarum’,” I said dramatically.

  Peter snickered. “Maleficarum? That happened eons ago! As far as wars go, it was tiny.”

  “Oh, I read about that,” Nikki chimed in.

  “I guess his reasoning is that the sorcerers didn’t actually fight that hard to stop the ‘Maleficarum’ because they just decided to let them do their stuff behind closed doors and kept it under their hats.”

  Nikki leaned against the couch, nodding her agreement. “I can see how someone might think that. It only lasted a few months, right? They couldn’t have fought that hard.”

  Peter’s brows rose. “You think they came to some kind of agreement?”

  “No.” I held up the book and pointed to the luminescent notes. “This guy does.”

  “You know, for someone who’s been part of a hidden supernatural community since birth, you don’t seem very open-minded,” Nikki teased.

  Peter pinched his lips together and dipped his chin in resignation. Nikki and I laughed. Fleetwood Mac started playing from my phone, indicating I had a call from an unknown number. I turned the ringer down and ignored it.

  “Look at this one.” Nikki held up a small tomb, maybe 100 pages. Its black leather cover was more or less pristine. Metal tips protected the corners and a thin metal ring was set into the center of the cover like a giant “O”. “This one feels more tingly than the others,” she observed.

  “Hmm,” I mused.

  My phone started vibrating and I ignored it, returning to the book. Unrecognizable symbols filled the pages with their intricate script as Nikki flipped through it.

  “Is that Sanskrit?” Peter asked.

  Nikki turned back to the title page and removed the concealment enchantment as she had with the others. Glowing letters appeared below the foreign title. “Solstice” it read. Peter scooted closer, eyes wide in awe.

  “How did you learn to do that?”

  “Just sort of did it earlier,” She said with a lift of her shoulders. She wiggled her fingers like caterpillars beneath the book. “It’s still tingly. The other ones stopped after I removed the charm.”

  “There must be another enchantment. Should you remove it?” He asked.

  I frowned and shook my head. “Not without knowing what it does. Maybe Renenet could figure it out.” My phone started to jingle again. By now I had a feeling I knew who it was. I ignored it again. A few moments later, Slade called. I smirked and hit the green button.

  “Adeline, hey, Kendra’s been trying to get a hold of you.”

  I knew it. “Sorry, she hasn’t deigned herself to give me her number. Thought it was a scammer.” I was sure to add plenty of sass into my answer.

  Slade started to speak when the sound of static interrupted him. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Kendra snapped.

  “This is me answering my phone,” I retorted with an abundance of snark.

  She made a grumbling noise. “I meant before.”

  “This isn’t the 90’s; I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t know.”

  She exhaled exasperatedly. “Another Viesci went missing. I’m gonna check it out. You can come if you want.”

  “Wait, what are you doing?” I heard Slade ask in the background. Kendra shushed him harshly.

  “What do you mean ‘another’ Viesci?”

  “Oh, he didn’t tell you.” Her taunting tone made me want to smack her through the phone. “I’ll text you the address.” The line clicked, dead.

  “I gotta go,” I told Nikki and Peter.

  ***

  Kendra was leaning impatiently against the bumper of Slade’s midnight blue Chevrolet Silverado when I pulled into the spot behind them. Slade stood beside her with his arms crossed across his pecs looking rather more agitated than usual.

  “Took you long enough,” Kendra sniped as I climbed out of Farrah.

  I bristled at her rigid demeanor. The address she’d given me was for an apartment building all the way over in Concord, MA, two hours from Norwich. “Oh unclench,” I bickered. “We’re two states over. I didn’t have enough gas.”

  “Enough.” Slade sauntered between us toward the building.

  The interior of the building was f
ar more modern and rundown than the pristine colonial architecture of the exterior. The dark red carpet had browned over years of foot traffic and the fluorescent lights gave the yellowed walls an almost green hue.

  “Who are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Warren Heinrich,” Slade answered almost brusquely.

  “Who else has gone missing?”

  “Barret Schulte and Irma Pohl. We lost track of Barret six months back and Irma a month later. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Warren for a few weeks, but he never got back to me.” His shoulders stiffened as we trudged up a stairwell.

  “Do you keep tabs on all the Viesci like that?”

  “Yeah. They’re my family. I like to know they’re safe."

  I nodded in understanding, noting Kendra’s silence behind me. Warren’s apartment was the first at the top of the stairs. Kendra picked the door easily. Nothing seemed out of place inside, though I did notice that, although he had a tiny kitchen table tucked in a nook beside the kitchen, there was no chair to go with it. However, there was no sign of a struggle anywhere to suggest that Warren hadn’t just left and not come back. A birdcage by the window appeared empty until I got close enough to see the deceased blue budgie at the bottom of the cage. His food and water dishes were empty.

  I touched the cage in remorse. “Poor guy. No one was here to feed him.”

  “So, junior detective, what do you see?” Kendra asked. She was leaning against the archway to the tiny kitchen with her arms folded.

  I felt myself flush like I was suddenly in the middle of an oral exam I hadn’t prepared for. I shrugged and waved toward the table. “Aside from the missing chair, I don’t see anything out of place.”

  “Which tells us what?”

  “The most obvious answer is that he left voluntarily.”

  “And the less obvious answer?”

  I paused. “Someone cleaned up.”

  “Exactly.” Kendra pulled a small spray bottle from a messenger bag at her hip and stepped over to the reclining chair in front of the television and Slade and I moved the chair out of the way. She flipped the old rug out of the way and sprayed the area with a healthy dose and then snapped toward the window. “Get the light.”

  Slade rolled his eyes and walked over to shut the blinds and pull down the curtain while I hit the light switch. The room went dark. Slowly, blue stains began to glow on the floor. I’d never seen luminol work in person before. Despite the horror of what it was depicting, I couldn’t take my eyes away. Blood stains were splattered across the floor. One blotch, in particular, was large. While it wasn’t enough to be fatal, it was enough to imply that whatever had happened to Warren had happened here.

  “I’m sorry, Slade. I don’t think we’ll find him alive,” Kendra muttered in the dark.

  I turned the light back on. Kendra was frowning down at the floor. Over at the window, Slade appeared frozen, staring at the now invisible stains with a grief that was difficult to look at. Kendra sighed at our discovery and stood, tucked the bottle back into her bag, and pulled out a metal detecting wand.

  “Warren was paranoid, right?”

  “Yeah,” Slade whispered hoarsely.

  After a brief scan of the room, she moved over to the bookcase and began to scan it. I looked on curiously and offered what I hoped was a comforting smile when Slade stepped up beside me. He didn’t look over, anyway.

  “Hey, what’s with the cold shoulder?” I asked quietly, anxious about the idea of interrupting Kendra.

  Breath puffed from his lips in a downtrodden wisp. “I just didn’t want to get you involved.”

  “She’s not a child,” Kendra said idly over her shoulder.

  Slade scowled at the back of her head; the first outwardly negative look I’d seen him give her. “I know she’s not.”

  I tapped his arm with my elbow to draw his attention back to me. “Then why?”

  “Because the last time my people started mysteriously disappearing, the hunters were involved and ended up subjected my people to genocide. I didn’t want to bring you into it and risk putting you on their radar.”

  “Our people,” I reminded him lightly.

  He blinked a few times in surprise and finally looked my way. “What?”

  “They’re our people. Mine too. I know I don’t know them, but if I can help, then I should.”

  “I’ve got something,” Kendra interrupted.

  Slade and I looked to her at the bookcase. There was a small plant beside a bookend on the middle shelf and her metal detector beeped every time it passed. She set the wand on the shelf below and picked up the plant. A cord trailed out of it. She traced it with her finger to a tiny camera tucked into the plant.

  “Maybe we can call the company, try to get the video from their servers.”

  “Might not need to.” I pointed to an internet router on the top of the bookcase.

  “It’s just a router,” Kendra snipped. “It’s just for the computer.”

  I pointed over to the desk, opposite the cage by the window. “But he already has a router over there.”

  Slade slid her a smirk. “Admit it, you didn’t notice that.”

  I ignored the annoyed grunt she made and pulled the bookcase away from the wall. Two narrow cords poked through a hole in the back of the unit. One went down to plug into the wall and the other trailed up to the router. I grinned victoriously and pulled it down to pop it open. An external hard drive was nestled inside. Slade was already hurrying over to turn on the computer and Kendra begrudgingly followed without a glance in my direction. We got the hard drive hooked up and Slade opened it on the desktop. Forty or Fifty folders were labeled with a date and inside each was twenty-four videos, one for each hour. Slade started at the beginning, watching each in fast forward to find out when Warren had gone missing.

  On July 2nd, a handyman came to the door. Once the front door was shut behind him, it became obvious he wasn’t actually a handyman. The feed was in grayscale with rather poor quality, but it was clear that his hand was empty when he threw it out toward Warren. Warren froze and fell back, stiff as a board. Slade stopped fast forwarding. The man set down and opened his toolbox and another man, though much too small, climbed out and began to grow to normal size. They made fast work of setting up the room. The first pushed the recliner and rug against the wall while the second grabbed the presently missing kitchen chair and set it in the middle of the cleared space. Together, they lifted Warren and bound him to the chair.

  I’d never seen someone tortured before and it was worse than I could have imagined. Whenever they paused to ask him questions, he didn’t give them their answers. One man stood behind him and muffled his screams with a spell that caused wind to swirl around his head while the other systematically cut off his toes with each question Warren failed to answer. I flinched each time but refused to shut my eyes like I wanted to.

  “Where is solstice? We know you found it in Berlin.” The interrogator demanded.

  An uneasy feeling coiled my stomach into a knot. Did he mean the book? Warren didn’t tell them where it was, but just the fact that Nikki and Peter were near the book made me feel like they were suddenly in danger. I gnawed on the tip of my thumb anxiously. Warren’s muffled screams as another toe was removed pulled me back to the room.

  “Solstice?” Slade questioned indignantly. “Is that a codeword for a location?”

  “I—”

  “Sh!” Kendra snapped.

  The torture stopped again. “We have photographic proof of your meeting with an agent of Rurik Tanikov. How long ago did you start working for him behind our backs?”

  Warren set his face in stone. “I’ll never give him up to the Hunters.” The torture continued, now with his fingers.

  “What did you get yourself into, Warren?” Slade muttered.

  “Isn’t Rurik Tanikov the man who supposedly betrayed you?” I asked.

  Kendra whirled on me, face contorted in rage. “What do you mean ‘supposedly?’”r />
  I backpedaled in shock. “Well, it sounds like Warren was working with the Hunters and then turned on them to work with Rurik. If Rurik was the one who sent the Hunters after the Viesci, then why would he be working against them?”

  “He’s probably gone rogue since then and they’re looking for him.”

  “What if he was never guilty in the first place?”

  She got in my face and her mouth and brows curled lividly. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand. I was there, you weren’t. Three-quarters of our people died that night and their blood is on his hands.”

  I stood my ground and glared into her dark eyes. “Being there doesn’t mean you’re right. No one was able to find proof, right? Not even your father.”

  Her hard eyes stayed fixed on mine, unblinking for several tense seconds. Then she turned and marched for the door.

  “Kendra, wait.” As Slade stood to follow her, he gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze.

  I exhaled sharply as he shut the door behind him. Why was he even bothering? She was impossible. Growing up, I’d wondered what it might be like to find more of my family, but I’d never thought that one of them could dislike me so much or be so infuriating.

  I sat in the vacant chair and resumed the paused video. We would certainly review the interrogation later, so I set it to fast forward. We needed to know what had happened to Warren. After another hour of interrogation, the second sorcerer suffocated Warren. The men got to work cleaning up by casting a spell that caused Warren’s body to shrink until it was small enough to be dropped into the toolbox. They cleaned up the blood and everything and shrunk the chair to bring with them as well, probably so no one would realize he’d been tortured for intel if they looked for blood. After they rearranged the furniture, the torturer walked over to the bird cage and opened it. He used the same wind spell to suffocate the poor thing. Did he kill the bird so it wouldn’t make noise and draw people to the apartment?

  A light rustling caught my ear and something small moved in my periphery. Inside the birdcage. A dreadful alarm went off in my brain and I looked over. The dead bird was upright, staring at me. As it wedged its beak below the door to lift it, I lunged away from the desk. The bird redirected and flew at me and began to shift midair into the form of the torturer from the video.