by Ashley Meira
In stark contrast to the bright blue skies and fresh air of the world five feet above us, the underground was damp, dark, and – I think I’ve mentioned this before – smelled worse than a dead body that had spent days under a hot sun after being shit on by a sick cow. Or stunk worse than my metaphors – either worked.
A crackle of energy made the hair on my arms stand up. Alex stopped beside me, his head cocked up as he sensed the change in the air. Magic covered the area like a miasma. I don’t remember any mention of Vaughn having magical abilities, but the fact that he hadn’t ended up roadkill when he jumped off the roof told me his partner had to have been a sorcerer. Awesome. Add that on top of the fact that two of my friends were missing and that Lady Cassandra was dead, and you’ve got a recipe for the best excuse to go on a drinking binge and eat a ton of chocolate cake. And bacon. But not at the same time. Maybe.
We were in the middle of an intersection that split into three paths. A dim orange glow near the left branch caught my eye. Closer inspection revealed it was a sigil, its arcane design distorted by the ripples of the water above it. Sigils weren’t really my thing; there were always limits to how many you could set, and I didn’t have the patience – or artistic skill – to draw out and empower those kind of traps. The color meant it was fire-based, but I didn’t have enough knowledge on sigils to connect the design to a specific effect. It could do anything from letting out a small burst of flame to exploding and taking half the street out. There were a few more dim lights shining along the path, which meant triggering one could set off the others to catastrophic effects.
“Can you dispel them?” Alex asked. “Normally, I’d try to walk around, or if I’m in an open space, throw a pebble to trigger them, but neither of those seem to be an option now.”
“You mean you don’t want to purge these sewers with fire? Lame.” I stepped closer to the traps. “Let me see what I can do.”
Sigils are pretty archaic. Not many people use them, since they take time to memorize and lay out. They could have traced them from a book, I suppose. That would make the sigils lose a lot of potency because they were being cast without a strong fundamental understanding.…
I crouched down, my grimace deepening as I stuck a hand into the putrid water. It’s possible I could diffuse the sigils with a burst of the opposing element. An opposing sigil would work better, but I could barely remember the most basic of layouts. The best thing to do would be to dispel it, but that required specialized training I didn’t have. Dispelling dangerous sigils was usually left to the Cursebreakers, which was the paranormal world’s version of a bomb squad. I guess we’d just have to go with ice blasts and pray we don’t die. Luckily, elemental magic was my specialty, though Alex would have to hold up the praying end.
The temperature dipped down drastically, but I barely noticed as I channeled ice through my hands. A bright white glow exuded from my fingertips, sliding across the ground like cracks on a frozen lake. There was a muted crunching sound as the frosted lines came into contact with the first sigil. Slow and steady would work, it seemed, but I couldn’t stop my mounting impatience. It was tempting to throw a rock and bring this whole mother down. Lady Cassandra’s killer was getting away, damn it.
My focus waned and my heart leapt at the feeling of someone taking hold of my elbow. Looking up, I was relieved to see it was Alex. He pulled me up, and I stumbled slightly as dark spots filled my vision.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his presence strong and reassuring as the world turned.
“Just out of practice,” I said. “A few months ago, I could do this in my sleep. Now, I need a nap after a few minutes of this shit.”
“You’re still recovering.”
“That’s an excuse.”
There were still sigils on the ground, but I managed to clear enough of them to form a passage for us to cross. I kept a grip on Alex, just in case I lost my balance – the last thing I wanted to do was land on a sigil and ruin all my hard work. And my face. And Alex’s face. And potentially everyone’s face within a mile of where we were.
Our trip ended with a single door, its plating almost completely rusted off, revealing the sickly metal skeleton underneath. Not that I should’ve been surprised, considering the door looked like a horror movie fan’s wet dream, but it opened up into a stomach dropping room. It looked like a repurposed storage room or something, but I couldn’t tell. The walls and floor were painted with streaks of dark red, accented with puke green mold along the edges. The smell of blood, mold, and rot pervaded the air, the odors made worse by the stuffiness of the room. I gagged and stumbled out, taking in deep gulps of air. Never thought I’d be running into the sewers to breathe.
When I gathered myself up, I took another look around the room. “Jesus, it’s like Silent Hill threw up in here.”
“Silent what?” Alex frowned. Oh, baby, there is so much I have to teach you.
There was a dirty bed on the right-hand side next to another door that I doubted I wanted to open and a desk directly to our left with a small brewing station nearby. I began looking through it, if not for any clues than to avoid looking at the gore splattered around. There were papers related to Lady Cassandra’s schedule and a few books on potion making and spells. A picture of all this was probably in the dictionary under “damning.” I thumbed through an ancient looking text detailing a variety of sigils organized by element and difficulty.
“This isn’t a place of rest,” Alex called from the other side of the room. “It’s more likely Vaughn used this as a base of operations.”
“To use the term loosely.” I thumbed through a few of the other books. There were a few tomes here in Inferni – demon language – which I doubted Vaughn could read, but made sense if he was working with demons. “There’s a recipe here, roughly translated as ‘Draught of Abyssal Sleep.’ Ingredients include hibernation cardamom, pygmy mint, sapphire root, water blossom, void powder, king’s root, and abyssal peppermint.”
“Morgan–”
I nodded absently. “Yeah, I know. It’s all circumstantial, but give me a break – the guy is totally guilty.”
“Morgan,” Alex said more insistently. “You need to see this.”
Shooting him a curious look, I pulled myself away from the tomes and made my way to him. The door near the bed was open and exuding a sickening smell, like rotten meat and raw sugar. What I saw made me regret eating bacon – or anything – today. Underneath the hoard of cockroaches and maggots wriggling all over it, I made out a body. Human. Female. With multiple stab wounds all over, though it was possible the insects and rats had carved those out themselves. She had wavy brown hair, pale skin, and a beauty mark on the left side of her face. I bet if we opened her eyes, they’d be grey.
“Looks like you found your killer.” My words came out in a broken whisper as I tried to find something to look at that wasn’t the mutilated corpse of a woman who could’ve been my sister.
Alex knelt down in front of her body, looking it over as the cockroaches skittered away. “She’s been dead for a while. Stabbed–” he used his gun to nudge her onto her stomach, exposing her back “–through the back, it seems. From the lack of defensive wounds, I’d say she was taken by surprise. She looks a lot like you. Not up close, but at a glance…”
Unsure how to reply and unwilling to look at her, I wandered back over to investigate the desk and brewing station. Normally, I’d be criticizing the potion maker’s etiquette; the entire space looked like a disaster area. You were supposed to clean your station after every potion to avoid accidental mixing. This time, however, I was glad that they hadn’t wiped anything down.
“Same ingredients we found in Lady Cass– Maxwell’s room,” I said in a soft voice, utterly drained. “They must have been practicing the potion or something.”
“If they could’ve made it here, why use Lady Maxwell’s cauldron?”
“According to the book, the potion must be ingested within five minutes of brewing. It’s used t
o euthanize rather than murder. Quick and painless.” My voice cracked and I gripped the edge of the table, trying to take deep breaths. I suppose I should be glad that Lady Cassandra didn’t suffer, but to know that she’d truly been murdered.…
This time, I really was going to throw up.
There was a presence behind me, and I leaned back, resting my head on Alex’s shoulder. His arms wrapped around my waist, his chin against my head. It was nice. He was nice. Not a lot of people would be this accommodating to someone they’d only met a day ago. Sure, we’d slept together a few hours after meeting, but that wasn’t the same. Jumping into bed with someone was one thing, getting close to a person was a completely different beast.
“There’s no sign that anyone else has been kept here,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“Maybe they were just killed and thrown away somewhere else. Tracking spells don’t provide proof of life and–” I cut off, trying to block out images of Lily and Trish in the same state as that girl. Poor Lily, her round hazel eyes cloudy as maggots crawled out of them. Poor Trish, her tanned skin picked apart by rats. Oh God. My eyes stung and I gripped Alex’s arm, trying to stop from trembling. How much more of my family was I going to lose?
His hold on me tightened. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t like false platitudes,” I sniffed.
“We’ll find them.” He sounded so certain that I wanted nothing more than to believe him. “I promise.”
“I don’t like empty promises, either.”
The tip of his nose brushed against the shell of my ear as he whispered, “Then, I’ll have to work extra hard to keep this promise.”
8
Rowan was already home when we returned. She shot me a curious look as I dragged Alex up the stairs, but thankfully didn’t follow. The trip back had been quiet and tense. Lily was gone, Trish was gone, Vaughn was in the wind, and we had no leads on any of them. What the hell was I supposed to do? Alex tried comforting me but didn’t know how. That was okay, I’d show him.
I was sure the old me could’ve solved this by now. The competent hunter that always caught her target efficiently. But I wasn’t her anymore. In the few months I’d been away, I managed to become a shell of what I once was. Great, I was even a bigger drama queen than before, too. Pathetic, absolutely pathetic. I tightened my grip on Alex’s arm. It may have been like putting a Band-Aid against a crack in a dam wall, but it would drown out the pain for a little while.
He didn’t say a word as I pulled him into the bathroom, pulling off horrid-smelling pieces of sewage soaked clothes and dropping them wherever. By the time I got the water to the temperature I liked, he was already undressed and coming towards me.
That was the kind of initiative I could appreciate.
I tied my hair up in a wet ponytail and began rummaging through my drawers for something to wear. It was late, but I settled for a pair of jeans and a tank top, deciding it was better to be prepared for any emergency than have to run out into the streets – or sewers – half naked. When I turned around, I noticed Alex was watching me get dressed.
He looked absolutely gorgeous lounging there on my bed with just a white towel hanging loosely around his waist. Rivulets of water dripped down from his hair, migrating through the chiseled planes of his abdomen, some choosing to settle against the divots of his muscles while others continued their journey south, past the V of his hips to soak into the towel I was beginning to hate.
I imagined how amazing it would be to just shut out the world and spend the rest of my life in bed with him. Or someone. He was certainly a fine specimen, though. It was more than just physical attraction; Alex was actually a really nice guy. I liked him. Not to the point where I was about to throw everything away so we could live in Tahiti – it’s a magical place – or anything like that, but I could see us being friends. With benefits, which is as far as I go with anyone. Domesticity and romantic bliss was a nice fantasy, but it didn’t change my mind; falling for someone was dangerous when you lived this kind of life. I refused to put anybody at risk if I could help it.
“Not that I’m opposed to the view…”
“Neither am I.” He smirked as his eyes roamed over my body. The smirk left his face when he looked over at his clothes, his nose wrinkling in that way I found adorable. “I have no desire to put on any of my clothes, however.”
I faked astonishment. “You mean you aren’t into smelling like a gas station bathroom?”
“I know, I know,” he played along. “I’m full of surprises.”
“I think I have some baggy clothes in my closet that might fit.”
“Are you two quite done?” Rowan asked as she entered the room. Her furry face scrunched up to the point of impossibility as she approached the pile of dirty clothes. “We need to burn all of that.”
“Agreed,” I said, taking a seat next to Alex. “And if we weren’t done, I doubt you’d have come in.”
We recounted everything that happened after Vaughn ran away. We didn’t have any immediate leads as to where he might be. All we had was a cat with a trampled tail – which I did not laugh at for fear of being smothered in my sleep – two missing people, a decomposing body covered in bugs, dead guards, and a mess of research materials.
“Did you look through everything?” asked Rowan.
I shook my head. “I took a quick glance over it all, but the murder room we found them in was not conducive to studying, so I brought them here to look at further. The body wasn’t anyone we knew, so Alex took a photo of her to send off for identification. She had to have been a hunter, or as well trained as one, to be able to kill a caravan of demons. If she killed that caravan, but c’mon, let’s be real here.”
“You wouldn’t happen to be framing that poor girl, would you, Morgan?” Alex’s lips quirked up to tell me he was joking.
“Look, Rowan, we finally found someone less funny than me.”
“Will miracles never cease?” she said in amusement.
I smirked at Alex’s man-pout and stood up to gather the books I’d thrown to the ground when I stripped off my dirty clothes. Cat and Man spoke as I gathered the materials up, sorting them by purpose and importance. The potion books wouldn’t really help ascertain anything on their future plans and neither would the book on sigils. Unless Vaughn or his partner were really stupid and scribbled their plan in the margins. They didn’t, unfortunately. Besides those, there were a few books on ancient rituals, a book on demons, the notebook filled with information about Lady Cassandra, and a variety of maps detailing ley lines and places of power around America.
Each Order capital city was highlighted, probably because they were all built near immensely powerful ley lines. I traced over the names of the four cities: Whitefall, California; Ivywood, Louisiana; Dovesport, Maine; and of course; Haven, Minnesota. Out of all of them, Haven was the only circled, but we’d need to alert the Council and warn the other family heads to keep an eye out for strange happenings.
“Start with the notebook, I guess,” I mumbled to myself. “Unless Vaughn’s planning on skipping town. Crap, we need to call the Guard Captain and tell him not to let anyone out of the city.
“We did that yesterday when you were sleeping,” Alex said.
“Oh. Good. Let’s pretend I thought of doing that yesterday instead of just now, okay? I’m going to get something to drink,” I added, rushing downstairs before they could say anything. Talk about embarrassing. Locking down the exits is the first thing you do, genius.
The doorbell rang as I smacked myself on the head for being such a dumbass. I yelled that I’d get it and shouted up at Alex to look through my closet for anything that might fit. “But stay out of my underwear drawer!”
“No promises.”
I opened the door to see Ipos standing there. “God, please tell me you have news.”
“Well, I’m not God, but…” He shrugged, lips quirked up in his usual way. “Now, just to clarify, are you asking for news on th
e murder or on your underwear drawer?”
I pursed my lips, ducking my head sheepishly as I held up one finger to signal the former.
He let out a rich, throaty chuckle. “Sometimes I forget how cute you can be, kind of like a puppy.”
“This puppy bites,” I said flatly, all embarrassment gone.
“Save it for the foreplay, Mori,” said Ipos as we walked into the living room. “The surviving demon from yesterday woke up, and after some convincing, I managed to get him to spill his guts.”
“Literally?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Prude.”
“Anyway, he said he was working with his now dead friends to swipe things from incoming shipments. They had another partner, a human that used to work with them on the wall, that would help fence the items. His name is–”
“Vaughn.” I nodded. “We’ve met.”
Ipos arched a brow, looking amused. “I’m guessing I missed out on some action. Is that what the underwear drawer comment was about? Was Vaughn trying to auction off your unmentionables on the black market?”
“I thought that was your job.” We took a seat on the couch. I criss-crossed my legs under me, facing him, and explained everything that had happened today. Well, up until the part where Alex and I came back and had sex.
When I was finished, he helped me fill in the blanks with his own information. The demons we killed were selling things they swiped to Vaughn, who either paid them cash or in rare loot, like that ruby ring. Recently, Vaughn was looking for some potion ingredients. He’d hooked up with a potion maker capable of brewing rare potions that he could sell for even bigger money. Vaughn contacted them a week ago looking for the ingredients for the Draught of Abyssal Sleep, saying he’d pay them five times the amount for each item they got for him. They managed to get their hands on some, but stuff like void powder never passed through them, so Vaughn had to get the rest of the ingredients somewhere else. Who the potion maker was, however, the guards didn’t know; none of them ever laid eyes on the mysterious figure.
