Raised in Fire (Fire and Ice Trilogy Book 2) Page 24

  I rifled through a desk drawer in his disorganized office. We’d been at this for fifteen minutes and still hadn’t found anything solid. Or helpful.

  “What does he do?” I shouted.

  Darius appeared in the doorway, and I jumped, knocking the rolling chair back into the bookcase.

  “Jesus, man.” I put a hand to my heart. “Don’t just pop up like a poltergeist. I’m a little jumpy right now.”

  Darius held up a blue uniform without saying a word. The front resembled a police uniform, with a sewn-on patch like a badge on the arm. He turned it, and I saw security written on the back.

  “Where did you say that skin suit was found?” Dizzy called.

  “It wasn’t a skin suit, and it was in terminal thirty. Port of Seattle, I think. The shipping terminal.” I slipped out from around the desk and looked at the patch on the sleeve. It said security officer.

  “Shoot,” Dizzy said. “I was hoping it would be the same company.”

  “Perhaps they all work in security,” Darius said. “It would’ve been hard to get a body into the terminal in the later hours without being noticed. Unless you worked there and brought it in your car.”

  “But they said all of the staff checked out. And yes, I realize these people probably wouldn’t have any priors, but Oscar also said none of them were magical…”

  How stupid was I?

  “The MLE office was keeping their mouths shut.” I shook my head. “They must’ve known a mage was responsible, and that one worked at the terminal, but they were warned away from mages, so they weren’t talking.” I bowed in frustration. “You even asked if I wanted to talk to the security people. I can’t tell most magical species, but I know mages. I would’ve felt his or her magic.”

  “The thought had occurred to me, but I admit, it was in my best interest that you weren’t thorough,” Darius said. “I failed you there. I was thinking about feeding instead of covering all the bases. After hearing about the dangers in the area, we had new, more concrete leads. But this is telling.”

  “It is. Dizzy,” I called. “What’s the company name on that check stub?” I lowered my voice so I wasn’t shouting in Darius’s face. “They dumped one body at the port, so maybe there’ll be some activity at this other place. I mean, the guy is the lead mage, probably. Maybe he uses his place of work for the summonings and leaves the scraps for the others to dispose of…”

  “Torturing a body at one’s place of work would probably be noticed.”

  I grimaced. “Unless they used a spell to hide themselves.”

  “What?”

  Dizzy’s sudden proximity, right beyond the doorway, made me jump.

  “Would you guys stop sneaking around? I’m still coming down off a fear high.” I rubbed my face. “What is the company name on the pay stub?”

  He pushed his way past Darius. “BNSF railway,” he read, looking up at me to see if that clicked.

  It didn’t. Not yet, anyway.

  “Is it normal for mages to have jobs?” I asked, trying to weigh the significance. “I mean, the mages I get spells from in NOLA do, but they aren’t particularly powerful. Which is why they are cheap and can’t afford to live off their magic. This guy is clearly both powerful and experienced.”

  “Very few mages can afford to consistently do this full-time,” Dizzy said, stalking past me and looking around the small office. He stopped at the file cabinet, pulled out a drawer, and dumped the contents onto the ground. “It isn’t steady income if all you can do is make spells. You get surge months, sure, but there are also down months. Sometimes down years, depending on how many mages are trying to sell their wares. Most people need something steady, at least part-time, to cover the basic bills for the bad months.”

  “And you guys, who clearly don’t fall into that category?” I asked, taking a hint and resuming my search. We needed something more concrete. Or, at the very least, we needed to establish we had no other options.

  “Healing ointments aren’t just for magical people, and very few mages can successfully do what Callie does in that arena. She can sell her stuff as beauty products, and they work ten times better than whatever the grocery market stocks. You know, because of magic. It’s that business that earns us the most. Then, of course, we are reliable, hardworking, and willing to bend to strange demands, like color-coded casings. That attracts eccentric customers, like vampires who like everything just so.”

  “One of those vampires is standing right here, you know. Listening.” I grinned at Dizzy before shifting my gaze to Darius, who wore a blank face.

  “All of this comes as no shock to him, I’m sure,” Dizzy said, unperturbed. He emptied another drawer on the floor before shaking his head. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything of importance in the office. This guy isn’t all that organized. He probably has the important things randomly stuffed on some shelf.”

  “Like you would?” I shoved a desk drawer shut, agreeing with Dizzy. I’d found zero.

  “Exactly, yes. So let’s move on to the living room or, better yet, find his work room.” Dizzy left the mess and moved to the door.

  “You know,” I said, following, “the mage’s house we busted into the other night didn’t have a work room. He had a place where he kept his spells, but I don’t know where he actually made them. That should’ve occurred to me.”

  “Why would it?” Dizzy led us into the living room, then glanced around. After a moment, he shook his head and started upstairs. “You don’t cast spells, so you wouldn’t think to look for the place where it’s done.”

  It was a weak argument, but I let it go.

  Fifteen minutes of searching the three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and we’d still found nothing.

  “Was there a shed out back?” Dizzy moved to the window of the master bedroom, which overlooked the back half of the property. “I don’t remember anything besides Reagan battling a demon midair.”

  “No, no shed.” Darius stood in the doorway. “We are wasting time.”

  “We don’t have any strong leads,” I said, frustrated. “They are surely trying to build up power as we speak. If we head to that railway, and we’re wrong, that’s it. He’s gone.”

  Dizzy gave me an apologetic shake of the head. “It doesn’t look like we have anything else, Reagan. Not a key, or a leasing agreement, or a pen, or…anything. Certainly no GPS.”

  “Computer.” I blinked. “We didn’t come across a computer.”

  “We’ve got her,” Callie yelled from what sounded like the bottom of the stairs. “She wants to know where to head. She’s in a small town north of here, so it’ll take her forty-five minutes to get into the city. At least.”

  Urgency ate away at me. That demon would be in a blind panic to get out of the Brink. It had what it came for and knew it was in grave peril. It would be bending the mages over backward to get everything ready.

  “What to do,” I said, chewing my lip.

  Silence fell on the room, all eyes on me, until Callie finally yelled out, “Well?”

  “Let’s go to that rail yard.” I broke for the door. “If it’s a ghost town, then we’ll circle back to the terminal, or maybe go hang that bartender up by the feet to see what else he knows. We’re running out of time.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “This is close to the place they dumped that other body,” Callie said as she peered out the passenger window. We slowly rolled into the mostly deserted employee parking structure at the southern corner of the huge rail yard. “It’s just across the freeway.”

  “Yes, it is.” I looked at the map on my phone. “Two of the mages work within ten minutes of each other. What do you want to bet they both work night shifts?”

  I tried to peer out through the opening slats of the parking structure to get a better sense of what we were getting into. Fat chance. A building stood between us and the rail lines, and if it hadn’t, there would have been an abundance of crates and cargo to block our view. This was a large rail y
ard that likely dealt with hundreds of shipments a day. I was no expert, but I bet someone could easily get lost in the shadows if they knew where to hide. Especially if they were the security.

  “I have a good feeling about this,” I said into the quiet car.

  “I feel sick.” Dizzy cleared his throat.

  As Darius parked a few floors up, a long, forlorn horn sounded in the night.

  “I didn’t know trains ran this late,” I said softly, letting the somber feeling of the empty parking structure press on me. I climbed from the car.

  “Freight carriers certainly do,” Callie said, getting out the other side. She looked at her phone. “Penny is on the first floor.”

  “How’d you get her to come?” Dizzy asked. His gaze swept the area and his hand firmly gripped the strap of the satchel that draped across his chest. His eyes settled on the exit sign on the far wall.

  “I have a way with people.” Callie clearly didn’t see the irony of that statement. “She had to sneak out of the house to duck that atrocious mother of hers, but the…incident a couple of months ago left her wanting to learn. She trusts me.”

  “She won’t after this,” I said, taking out my gun.

  “I doubt this is going to be worse than a circle of women turning themselves into zombies, like at that mage battle.” Callie sniffed. “She’ll be fine. She’s a natural.”

  I walked to the front of the car as the others started off toward the stairs. Above the wall in front of the car, which stopped at my chest, I could see a train passing below us, moving out of the vast, empty space lined with railroad tracks. To my left, on the other side of the long, low building, the tracks continued in the other direction. Leaning out, I could just make out the rail yard, lined with containers and crates similar to the ones we’d seen on the shipping port on the other side of the freeway.

  “It won’t tell us much, but it’ll give us an idea,” Darius said, waiting patiently. He never seemed to feel the urgency the rest of us did. Though seeing into his head had somewhat changed my perception of that. He was a lot better at hiding his feelings than the rest of us were.

  “It’s a huge space.” I backed away from the wall and headed toward the stairs, which Callie and Dizzy were already making their way down. “With the buildings, and the rail cars, and the containers… If they’re here, how are we going to find them?”

  “They will be using large quantities of magic, not to mention the demon’s power. Feeling magic is your specialty, is it not?” Darius’s hand settled on my lower back. “Don’t let what happened earlier make you second-guess yourself. Learn from it, and move on.”

  “Thanks, coach.” I took a deep breath, starting down the stairs. “But it’s not that easy this time. I don’t know how to defeat this thing.”

  “We have three of the four most powerful mages I’ve ever met. One might not be trained, but she is a natural, as Callie said. If you immobilize the demon, they can work with us to kill it. The trick will be wiping out the mage circle before the demon escapes.”

  “Yes, that will be the trick, all right.”

  Penny was sitting in her car, staring down at her phone, when Callie knocked on her window. The girl, about my age, jumped and flung up her hands to cover her head.

  “Step one, work on those reactions,” I mumbled as I waited with Darius off to the side.

  “As I said, untrained. Give her time,” Darius murmured as Penny exited her car.

  “Wait, when did you meet her? You were gone by the time we got her out of the closet at that mage battle.”

  “I occasionally have business in this part of the world. Like I do in many parts of the world.”

  I frowned. Cryptic. Or was this part of some greater design? Vlad had told Darius he’d give him the professional courtesy of steering clear of the area because Darius had something cooking…

  I pushed the thought away. It wasn’t important right now.

  Penny tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear before looking up at everyone through her thick black lashes. I couldn’t get over how much she looked like a Disney princess, with her large, luminous blue eyes, little pixie features, and plump lips.

  What she didn’t look like was a girl who would storm buildings, take down enemy mages, and dole out punches like they were business cards.

  “Listen,” I said, holding up my hand. “She might be a natural, and she might want to learn, but this is the big time. We can’t bring in someone who freaks out halfway through and tries to run and hide. She could get herself, or one of us, killed.”

  She straightened up a little as irritation crossed her expression. When she met my direct stare, though, her spine bowed once again.

  “Reagan, you’re giving her crazy eyes,” Callie said, grabbing the girl by the upper arm. “But she’s right, Penny. This is the point of no return. There is going to be some serious danger in there.”

  “Assuming we’re even in the right place,” Dizzy muttered.

  “I take it you didn’t mention any of this when you spoke with her?” I asked Callie.

  “Then she wouldn’t have come,” Callie muttered. “I definitely told her we were going to banish a demon, though.”

  “It’s okay.” Penny sighed and straightened up again, her eyes flicking to Darius. She looked away just as quickly. “I owe him, so…”

  I looked at Darius, something weird and hot rising through my chest. It didn’t take long for me to identify the foreign emotion.

  Jealousy. Super. Can this day get any worse?

  But, of course, the answer was yes, it could get worse. It could get a lot worse. Was about to, in fact, because either we were in the right place and were heading into battle, or we weren’t and a demon with my secrets would escape to the underworld and tattle to my father.

  “If you’re coming, Penny, harden up,” I said, walking. “Otherwise, get out now.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Callie said. I could hear pats, probably Callie trying to comfort her. “Just hex the hell out of anyone who isn’t on our side.”

  “Hex, shoot, stab, eye-gouge—whatever.” I walked out into the crisp night, a wonderful change from the sticky humidity of New Orleans. “This is the easy part. Finding some meddling mages.”

  “Meddling is not the term I would use for a group of serial killers.” Dizzy jogged up to me. “So, Reagan, can you walk me through your method?”

  “Sure. I walk around, usually quietly, and look for evildoers. Sometimes I find magic instead. So I tear down the magic and then find the evildoers. Generally, a battle ensues, and I kill said evildoers, often accidentally. I always blame this on them, of course.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He watched my face. It was awfully distracting.

  “Dizzy, why don’t you look around for anything odd?”

  “The rest of the group will do that. You are infinitely more fascinating. Your unique approach to danger always gives me ideas for new spells.”

  Fabulous.

  “That must be the yard office,” Callie whispered, pointing at a squat, rectangular building up ahead. “Beyond it will be lots twelve through fourteen. I assume… Ah yes, there we go, various cargo. Companies must rent this space out. There are other lots on the other side, but I can’t remember the numbers.”

  “Why do you know so much about this place?” Penny asked.

  “I looked at the map, dear. There are several online.”

  “Oh.”

  I paused in the shadow of a quiet checkpoint, my gaze focused on the building Callie had called the yard office. A man stood outside, just beyond the edges of a beam of light trained on the ground from a corner of the building. His gaze swept in an arc, surveying the area. Though his head was moving, and his eyes were no doubt scanning, no one was home. I could tell he wasn’t taking in what he was seeing. Boredom from inactivity would do that to a person.

  Continuing on, sticking to the shadows around the large check-in structure that was shut down except for one guard also asle
ep at the wheel, we skirted by without a problem.

  I gritted my teeth as we made our way through the lot, looking at the various containers and other cargo. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, and more importantly, I didn’t sense any magic.

  “What’s beyond this, Callie?” I whispered.

  “Um.” A soft glow illuminated her face as she studied her phone. “On the other side of the road, which we can’t see from here—”

  “I can’t see anything at all,” Dizzy whispered.

  “—is the other lots.”

  “Are,” Penny said. It sounded like an afterthought.

  “What?” Callie looked at her.

  Penny shook her head in fast jerks. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “My mom always corrects my grammar. It rubbed off.”

  “Wonderful. A fellow wordsmith.” Dizzy beamed, now pointing his phone at the ground with the flashlight function on. His jolly attitude indicated he was completely ignoring the coming danger.

  “Dizzy, that is probably making it worse,” I told him, pushing his phone toward his chest. “Let your eyes adapt.”

  “Easy for you to say. You can see in the dark.”

  “You can see in the dark?” Penny asked. “Is that because of…” Her gaze flicked to Darius.

  “Focus,” I said, and not just because of what she was alluding to.

  The stacks of cargo ended and the tracks cut in—a wide expanse of space occasionally lined with a train waiting for go time. “So far, not so good.”

  I crossed the road leading to the other lots. The moonlight had a better opportunity to reach us—helping the others see and allowing me to pick up the pace. We passed more cargo, but I was still coming up empty.

  “How big is this place, Callie?” I asked into the hush. I’d seen it from the car, but it had been impossible to judge the size at the speed we were going.

  “Big. We’re not even halfway through.”

  “Is the walking okay, Callie? Dizzy? You guys doing okay?” I asked, worrying about hips and bunions and whatever else they might have going on. “Penny, how’s the daintiness? Freaking out because you’re breaking a sweat?”