by D. N. Hoxa
“They have. Of course they have,” the captain said. I’d thought earlier that his cheeks had been red from anger or shame, but nope. It seemed his cheeks were always red. “This is not your case, Dumont. A wacko coming here claiming he has proof of a pattern for the magic blasts is completely ridiculous, but we did check. And there was no pattern. He was insane.”
“He was one of Christopher Ford’s students,” I said. I’d kept behind Dumont because he insisted I join him for whatever reason, while Logan had been granted the luxury of waiting outside.
“It doesn’t matter who he was,” Stannel said, never even acknowledging me with a look.
“Who checked?” Dumont insisted.
Stannel locked his jaw really tightly. “Drop it, Dumont.”
“I need to know, Captain. Who did the research?”
“Ellie,” Stannel said with a tired sigh. “Now, for the love of all that’s holy, go work on your case!”
Dumont didn’t say anything else. He grabbed the newspapers and turned around fast, storming out of the office, forgetting I was even there. I had to run to keep up with him, and when we were finally in his office, I thought he was going to start cussing, but he didn’t. He sat in his chair and pulled out his phone to type something.
Two minutes later, Naomi entered the office without a knock.
I was surprised she was still there because I hadn’t seen her in the cubicles. It was late, past ten p.m., and there were only five people in the offices that I could see.
She smiled brightly when she saw us, as if the day hadn’t even touched her energy. She was seriously envy-worthy.
“You look so…fresh.” I, on the other hand, would think twice about looking in a mirror.
“Thanks,” she said with cheeky grin. “What do you need, Detective?”
“Ellie did some research on the magic blasts. I don’t know the details, but find her report and pick it apart,” Dumont said. I didn’t know who Ellie was, but she definitely wasn’t the detective’s favorite person right now. “Take these.” He pushed the newspaper pieces toward her on his desk, and she quickly picked them up one by one. “I need to know if there’s a pattern here, if there’s reason behind these blasts, and if we can predict the next one. And be thorough, Naomi.”
“Pfft,” Naomi said, narrowing her perfectly plucked brows. “Thorough is my middle name, Detective.” She turned around to leave and then stopped. “Are you hungry? I’m making the order this time.”
Hell, yeah, we were hungry. My stomach was growling even though I didn’t want to waste time eating right now. When Naomi left, the three of us stood in front of the board we’d put together earlier that day with the reports and pictures of all the people in Sasha’s picture—except for the high priests, of course.
“So Jonah Davis was obsessed with Egyptian runes,” Dumont started, and I couldn’t help myself.
“Because Ford allowed him to fund a trip to Egypt for research, which was illegal. And Ford didn’t tell us anything about it, even after he saw the pictures,” I reminded him. We’d talked about this the whole way back from Lake Danza.
He closed his eyes. “I’ve already tried to get him to meet us again. It’s not going to happen.”
“But we can go to him. Come on, Dumont. He’s the missing piece! We’re not going to figure anything out unless we talk to him!”
“There is no way we can do that, do you understand? I’ve told you this before—we cannot force someone like Ford to meet with us if he doesn’t want to,” he said, raising his voice.
“So don’t. Let us do it,” Logan said. I was happy he was with me on this. “It’s already been more than two weeks. Even if they are all still alive, they’re not going to be for very long.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. I can’t just let you commit a fucking crime. Jesus!” Dumont turned his back on us and put his hands on his head.
“He isn’t above the law. You’re a detective. It’s your job to solve crimes,” Logan said, angrier than even me.
“Exactly. Just because he is who he is doesn’t mean he gets to get away with crimes.”
“Two members of the Order were arrested only recently in Washington. They are not untouchable,” Logan informed us. I hadn’t known that.
“This is not Washington,” Dumont spit.
But Logan didn’t intend to stop. “No, it’s not. Your system is corrupt. It’s a fucking death trap for justice.”
Damn it. This man could get my panties wet even when I was burning with anger. That sounded exactly like something Avery would say. Exactly like what I once used to believe with my whole being.
“Can we just st—” Dumont was cut off by the ringing of his phone. At that point, whenever his phone rang, we all held our breath. Dumont looked at the screen, and his lips parted. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t take anything, just headed straight for the door.
“What? What happened?”
“The dog,” was all he said and rushed to the other side of the hall, through a door we hadn’t seen before, and down a flight of stairs.
The basement was far creepier than the ground floor, with a lot less light and a lot of lifeless white all around it. There were three narrow corridors, each guarded by two officers. There were no signs on the doors in the middle corridor where Dumont took us, and even though the four white doors were identical, he knew exactly which one to open.
The sound of a machine running in the background and a loud beeping possibly designed to drive people inside filled my ears instantly. The room was pretty big and filled to the brim with machinery. And glass.
Almost half of it was divided by a glass wall with a door that whooshed as it opened and closed to let the three people out. They all wore white from head to toe, like upgraded hazmat suits. You could barely even see their faces.
Twelve computer screens were on our left, six mounted on the wall, and another six on a long L-shaped desk with three different keyboards, stuff that would probably make Travis Chase drool. All of them showed different things, data, numbers and letters, shapes I couldn’t make sense of. The machine that made the humming sound was right next to them, half of it extending through the glass wall that separated the room. The beeping seemed to come from the other side of the glass, though. To our right were three tables with wheeled legs, and shelves with trays under the tabletop. On them were different tools, a lot of them pointy, like something you'd see at the dentist, only much scarier. Also, there were pools of blood on the third table, and I would have guessed that someone had probably cut off an entire finger accidentally except that the blood was black.
Until he got that message, I’d completely forgotten that Dumont had actually caught one of the dog-like creatures when I first came to the MM building. As we slowly approached the glass wall, I could finally see how it had ended up.
In pieces. More than fifteen separate pieces.
One of the people in hazmat suits approached us while the other two stayed behind. He handed us masks and latex gloves. Dumont didn’t question it, so neither did we. Like it wasn’t enough to have an eye patch on at all times. The mask was even more annoying.
“What have you got for me, Paul?” Dumont said, his voice muffled through the mask. And that beeping sound—God!
“We’ve studied everything in the animal’s body,” the guy said and waved for us to follow him to the glass wall.
There, we could see the pieces of the dog clearly. Its organs had been cut out completely, and they lay separately on a long metal table. Each piece had a transparent box covering it. Each of the boxes had red dots on them, blinking in and out of existence every few seconds, together with that annoying beeping. It was coming from a machine attached to the underside of the tabletop, with lots of wires and lots of blinking lights on it. There was blood on the floor as well, just as black as the blood that had dried on my jeans and sneakers.
“As you can see, we’ve torn apart everything that could be examined separately
, and it’s the most fascinating thing,” said Paul, a smile on his face that I could barely see through the plastic mask covering his face. As if he’d read my mind, he pulled a zipper from behind his neck and pulled it all the way around to take off the headpiece of his suit. His face was thin, his green eyes small and upturned. His skin was full of bumps, like he’d had a nasty case of acne in his teens that had yet to heal completely.
“What’s fascinating?” Dumont asked.
“They’re…alive,” Paul said, looking at the pieces of the creature with pure awe. “Even though they’re picked apart, each one of these organs is alive. It has its own source of life, of magic, and all we’d have to do to reconnect them is put them close to one another.”
This didn’t surprise me all that much. “Yep. Tried killing them once or twice. The fuckers just wouldn’t die.”
“It’s incredible because we’ve never encountered something like this before. My report is being sent to every MM station in the world, and some of the most well known scientists of our time are already on their way here,” he said, his eyes bright with pride and excitement. I just hoped he wouldn’t start crying happy tears while we were there.
“What else have you found? Do you know why they have separate sources of power?”
Paul smiled brightly. “I think I do.” Putting the head of his suit back on, he zipped it all the way. “Stand right here.” He then walked to the door that could barely be made out because it was identical to the glass wall. Paul pressed a finger on it, and a green light appeared right where he’d touched the glass. He then pressed it four more times, possibly seeing something we couldn’t see from a distance, and the door hissed before opening. Paul stepped inside and pushed the door closed. He walked over to the table, to one of the many pieces of the dog creature. He put his gloved hand over the transparent box, and it beamed green again. Paul pulled it up and slowly reached for what looked like…a heart? I wasn’t so sure. It was as big as both Paul’s hands and didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.
But then Paul brought it closer to the glass wall and showed it to us. At first, I was disgusted, my stomach rumbling at the sight of the sticky surface and the gooey blood that hadn’t dried for some reason, but then I noticed the cuts.
The more I focused, the clearer they became.
They weren’t exactly cuts. They were runes. Egyptian runes.
We were shocked and speechless as Paul proceeded to show us three more of those organs with different runes cut onto their surfaces. When he came back to our side of the room, he was even more excited.
“It’s amazing how the tissue hasn’t healed around the cuts, though. I believe that’s the source that sustains them,” Paul explained.
“Are you saying they’re immortal? Like, for real?” That was crazy. Even vampires weren’t immortal, and they lived pretty damn long if they fed regularly. Eventually, they died. Just like all living things.
“Yes, exactly,” Paul said, as if that was something to be happy about. “We still don’t know enough to make official assumptions, but look at that.” He walked over to the monitors and showed us the second one mounted on the wall. The image was divided into about thirty small squares, and in each one of them were three lines I couldn’t understand. “They’re giving off heat continuously, they show no signs of decomposition, and cells are still circling within each organ, like they’ve created an independent, dormant organism of their own.”
“You’re not going to put it back together, are you?” Logan asked.
“Of course not,” said Paul with a fake laugh. “No, that would be unwise. But we will continue to study the data.”
“What do the runes mean? Anything specific?”
“They’re individual letters,” he said. “Nothing that makes any sense when put together, but the translators are working on it. So far, all we have is meaningless words.”
Meaningless? I didn’t think so. Our knowledge of Egyptian runes was very limited, at best. Whoever had done this to these creatures knew way, way more than we did.
“If you come up with anything else, text me right away,” Dumont said, pulling the gloves off as he headed for the door.
“Of course, Detective,” said Paul.
Logan and I took off the mask and gloves, too, and put them in a bin next to the door just like Dumont did, before following him outside.
We went back to his office without a word. My anger built, ready to explode. I looked up at Logan, wishing I could somehow read his mind. He looked just as angry and as desperate as I felt. If there was any doubt before, now it was pretty damn clear that whoever made or spelled those creatures was the same guy who kidnapped Nana and the others. And we still weren’t anywhere closer to figuring out where he was keeping them.
“Where is Ford right now? Is he in the city?” I asked.
“He is,” Dumont said, then raised a brow. “I won’t tell you where.”
“You’ve got to see what’s going on here, Dumont.” He was deliberately turning two blind eyes to this.
He was silent for a little while and then shook his head. “Let’s just focus on the case.”
I wasn’t happy with that. Not at all. “You’re a coward.”
“No, I just know how the world works. Apparently, you don’t.”
I’d heard that before. From Nana. Many times. She’d tried to talk me out of trying to help people so many times. She’d tried to explain to me why bad people didn’t end up in jail and got away with hideous crimes all the time, but she never really made sense to me.
“You’re a straight arrow in a crooked world, Ruby. If you don’t learn how to bend, you’ll never hit your mark, and eventually, you’ll break. Everyone breaks,” she said to me once.
I broke. In so many places, all at once. And for the longest time, I didn’t even think I could heal.
But what if I could? She had to give me a chance to try because I couldn’t do that without her. And without my magic. She was part of me and I was a part of her, whether we liked it or not.
“The world only works how we let it work,” I said through gritted teeth. “But fine. Let’s waste some more time staring at the same things over and over again. That’ll get us right where we need to be.”
Dumont didn’t comment, and neither did Logan. We just went back to reading the reports again and trying to connect dots we had no idea how to connect, with nothing but hope for the best.
22
Hope did a lot of things, but it didn’t magically make things make sense. I dreamed about hope when I fell asleep in Dumont’s chair, having gone over the reports and everything else the ogres had told us a thousand times. We were still no closer to the answer.
The hope in my dreams was bright, like a miniature sun bathing me in warmth. At the other side of it was Nana and all the other people who’d been kidnapped, and if I stretched my arms long enough, I could reach them.
Reality though…it was far worse.
I woke up to find both Dumont and Logan asleep in their chairs, just like me. We’d been exhausted, but now the night was over.
It was all over.
It felt surreal, like nothing but an illusion. I only had to wait for a few more minutes before I heard the footsteps outside the door.
It opened with a jolt, and both Dumont and Logan jumped to their feet. We saw Howard Stannel and four MM officers, and we knew that my time was up.
I’d turned myself in to the MM hoping to use them to find Nana and the others. I really thought I could do it. I believed it with all my heart. Now, none of it mattered. All those people would die, and I would, too, locked up in a cell somewhere.
Maybe Nana was right all along. Maybe this time, I would break for good.
The officers came for me with handcuffs in their hands, while two held their guns aimed at my head.
Logan stepped in front of them lightning fast before they could get to me.
“Step aside,” Stannel ordered Logan, but he didn’t move
a single inch. I grabbed his hand from behind and squeezed.
“Step aside,” I whispered.
“What the hell is this, Captain?” Dumont said, furious.
“You had twenty-four hours to give us a location, and I’ve received nothing yet,” Stannel said, his cheeks even redder than usual.
“We need a little more time. We’re so close,” Dumont said, but the captain didn’t want to hear it.
“Step aside, sir,” he said to Logan, who let go of my hand a second before his skin caught fire.
“Logan, no,” I insisted, pulling him to the side. He wasn’t going to get locked up with me. I wouldn’t allow it. “We had a deal and I agreed to it.” It was all on me.
“It was a crap deal,” Logan said through gritted teeth, but now the officers could get to me.
As soon as one of them touched my arm, Dumont pulled him back. “Don’t touch her!” he spit. “Captain, you can’t do this. We need more time!”
“Don’t make me suspend you, Dumont. You’ve gone far enough,” Stannel said, but Dumont refused to let go of the officer.
I wanted to tell him that it was okay. We’d tried. We’d failed. This thing was meant to ruin me since the second it started, since Marcus said my name in the hallway of my apartment building in Nashville. And now all these people…I looked at the board at my side, at the picture Sasha had left for me with her students. All those people were going to die because we couldn’t find one man. Ah, the desperation, the disappointment. I never did know how to not judge myself. Avery told me that my first and most important mission in life should be to learn how to love myself, but how could I, when I constantly failed at everything I did? I realized it wasn’t fair to put all the blame on me, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it out of my head that all these people were going to die.