The Trail of Ruins

by Shannon Reber

  I smiled, not sure what to say to that. The idea that Quinn’s family might start to feel like my family as well was an amazing feeling. And all the peace that had been mine the day before flooded back. Family. It was the answer to all the problems in my world.

  FOURTEEN

  I glanced at Daw as we stepped out into the parking area. “Erkens has informed me that my car stands out too much. Any chance you might have something less noticeable than mine is?” I asked, pointing out my car.

  He laughed and gestured to a sporty, gray SUV that was parked in the direct center of a spot. It was such a perfect parking job, it was like a ruler had been used. “I’m cool with driving so long as you tell me your plan on how you’re getting Quinn out of the PSA,” he said, unlocking his door and leaning over to unlock the passenger side for me.

  When I was in and the doors were closed behind us, I held up a finger to tell him to wait. I opened the satellite menu in Quinn’s app and set it to scan Daw’s car. My mouth hung open as I saw. There were no bugging devices in his car. But around both of us was what looked like a cloud.

  “Holy bluescreen,” I whispered, staring at the screen. “Our protections don’t just hide us from the paranormals. They hide us from everything.”

  Daw raised his brows, then gave me a slow smile. “Let’s get something to eat before we head to that store. I’m starving and it looks like you and me should ask each other a bunch of questions.” He turned on his car and pulled out of the spot, his movements quick and precise.

  I stared at the cloud around us for another moment before I finally put my phone away. “My plan for Quinn is to talk to a shaman a friend used in a case we worked in Boston,” I told him, my voice a little weaker than usual because of the hope that flared inside me.

  “Will you let me help?” he asked, his voice a little pleading.

  I sniffed. “Daw, I’ve known Quinn for a grand total of three weeks. You’ve known her for six years. Dawson’s known her his whole life. She’s your sister as much as she is mine.” I stuck out my tongue at him. “What that means is, duh. Of course you can help.”

  Daw let out a belly laugh and wiggled his brows. “Madison, I always wondered what it would be like to have a little sister. Now I know. It’s both hilarious and irritating.”

  “I suppose that is easier than calling me your adopted sister’s biological sister.”

  “A lot easier, yeah.”

  I held out my hand between us. “Family?” I asked, hoping it was true.

  He didn’t shake my hand but wrapped his around mine so they were clasped together. “Family,” he agreed, pulling his hand back as he started to pull into the parking lot of the best sandwich shop in Pittsburgh.

  It surprised me how comfortable I felt with him. It was probably the simple fact he was Quinn’s brother or maybe it was Daw himself. He’d had what sounded like a hard life but there he was, a good man with a loving family.

  Daw did indeed prove the point Quinn had been making. Despite how messed up his childhood had been, he had come into a home where he was taught what was right. There was no way he would be anything like the guy Quinn and I had run into the night before.

  My stomach rumbled as the wonderful smells of fresh bread and coffee hit me. That was when I remembered we’d skipped lunch. And then I remembered why.

  So many things had happened that day. Skylar. Phyllis. Even Bertie. But it was the fact that Ian and Spencer were following Knox that really made me worry.

  What if he had been with the summoner? And if he HAD been there, who had been with him? What was the point of bringing back a ten-year-old boy?

  I took out my phone and got back into the police file. I had been so focused on figuring out if my theory about Phyllis was right, I had closed the file before reading the last name. There had been three bodies exhumed from that cemetery.

  The third was a woman. Iris Libben had died a few months before, leaving behind a husband and a two-year-old son. It took me all of three seconds to get into her medical file.

  Iris had died of pneumonia. I stopped and stared at my phone. I’d had pneumonia as a kid. I knew something about it.

  It was an infection that inflamed the air sacs in the lungs. She would have basically suffocated to death. But something else occurred to me.

  From what I’d read in Phyllis Beo’s file, she had died of liver failure. Her liver wouldn’t have grown back while she’d been in the ground. That was why she had re-died so quickly. The body can’t function without a liver.

  Iris had a chance to survive, though. The infection that had damaged her lungs would have died when her body did. It was altogether possible she would be able to go on.

  “What’d you find?” Daw asked, raising his brows at me.

  “I found where we’re going next,” I answered, sticking my phone back in the bag.

  He nodded, apparently understanding that I didn’t want to talk about it in public.

  “Yeah,” a voice said from behind us. “What did you find, Madison?”

  I closed my eyes and let out a slow breath before I turned to face the guy. The last time I’d seen Kip, it had been in the middle of the night but I recognized his voice immediately. It was one that would be burned into my mind for the rest of my life.

  He was a guy who could be attractive if it wasn’t for the hateful sneer plastered across his face. He wore a ratty t-shirt and torn jeans, his body on alert. It was like he thought I would attack him or something.

  I wanted to. The guy had held a shotgun on me and my little friend. I wanted to kick him in the cojones, actually.

  I plastered on a wide, fake smile. “Kip. How nice to see you,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm.

  His sneer grew even more ferocious as he cursed at me. “You think you’re funny, don’t you? Well, I’m the one laughing now. Hope you like trying to do your thing from prison.”

  I gave him a slow nod. “I might visit you in prison. It would be really good to see a psycho like you behind bars.” I opened my mouth in feigned shock. “Oh, wait. Are you under the impression that getting your daddy to look into me was going to get me arrested?” I coughed out a genuine laugh. “FBI trumps local law enforcement and guess who’s on the new task force the FBI has here in Pittsburgh.” I raised my hand like a kid in class.

  Kip’s face turned so red, he looked like he was about to have a heat stroke. He did some more swearing, enough that the manager took a step toward us, ready to boot all of us out. Kip’s eyes flashed as he reached behind himself like he intended to grab the shotgun he usually carried.

  I knew he hated me. The feeling was mutual. But the idea that he would reach for a weapon, if it was there or not, that changed things.

  He was suddenly a physical threat. The look on his face told me clearly he had every intention to make me pay for the crime of not allowing him to kill a paranormal creature he’d set his sights on. And for the first time in a long time, genuine fear of a person filled my belly.

  Before I could say a word, Daw cleared his throat loudly. “There was this kid I went to school with. Utter dick-face. Liked to hurt people who couldn’t fight back. It made him feel big and strong. Turned out, he had a teenie little weenie and used to cry himself to sleep every night,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s okay that you’re little. Some girls don’t mind that. You don’t have to yell to make yourself feel big,” he finished in a patronizing tone like he spoke to a little kid.

  Kip’s neck corded as he jabbed a finger at Daw. “Watch your back, man. Your girl is going down. Hate to see you get in the line of fire.” And on those ominous words, he whirled and walked out of the shop.

  I stared after him for a few seconds before I looked at Daw. “Teenie weenie?” I asked, trying to smile like I thought the whole situation was hilarious.

  He gave a negligent shrug. “Best I could do,” he said, motioning me forward as the people around us all went back to ordering and receiving their sandwiches.

  Afte
r we’d finished our food, Daw sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Okay, so Teenie Weenie is the son of the Chief of police and you now work for the Arcane?” he clarified the quiet explanation I’d given him while we ate.

  I nodded.

  “But the Chief would have to know his kid’s a psycho. Whose side is he on?”

  “No idea.”

  He did a drum roll with his fingers on the tabletop. “You know, I was under the impression that being an investigator would be mostly boring. I figured we’d be sitting in the office, researching spooks. But it turns out I’m in the middle of a cops versus FBI versus hunter versus hacker kind of story.” He laughed. “This is awesome.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and moved to rise. “Come on. Let’s make your first day on the job even more exciting. We have a revenant to interview.”

  I thought about it as we walked back out to Daw’s car. If Iris Libben really had been brought back to life, that wasn’t her choice or her fault. Someone had done that to her. What we needed to do was figure out why.

  They needed to be stopped. If they hadn’t dug up Deke’s body, it was possible Teresa Holtz wouldn’t have chosen to kill herself. It wasn’t that person’s fault but they did bear some responsibility for it.

  My biggest question was still, why those bodies? There had to be a reason. It couldn’t have been easy getting into the cemetery in the middle of the night, digging up the graves, then doing some spell to shove the soul back into those dead bodies. It would have taken work and a lot of planning.

  We needed to go to Erkens’ supplier before we went to do that interview . . . but we also needed to inform Erkens about everything that had happened. I knew he preferred phone calls to texts, so I had to suck it up. Hopefully, Erkens wouldn’t be too upset about the Kip encounter.

  Turned out, he wasn’t upset. He was enraged. He was so angry, he hung up before I could finish telling him what I planned to do.

  I shrugged when Daw pulled into a parking place in front of the weird little junk shop downtown. “I have a bad feeling about Kip just happening to show up where we were having lunch,” I told him, grimacing as we got out of the car.

  Daw jingled his keys in his hand before he shook his head. “See, I don’t think that guy’s a threat. I think he’s angry and never learned how to deal with it. A supe killed his mom, so he believes supes are evil. The fact you stood up for one probably made him think when he didn’t want to.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, ignoring the cheerful tinkling of the bell attached to the door.

  Daw turned his head in wide-eyed wonderment as he looked around. “I mean he probably does have a teeny weenie,” he joked.

  I rolled my eyes, deciding to finish our discussion later.

  The shop was so packed full of junk, it was hard to identify what all was there. I didn’t look around as we weaved our way through the displays, my eyes fixed on a door in the back. That door held a symbol I had always been fascinated by. It was two birds huddled together, protecting the sacred circle. It was a fae symbol of protection.

  Daw gaped at it, his eyes flitting around the shop some more. “I had no idea,” he half whispered, slowly laying his hand over the symbol.

  As he did, the door opened. I didn’t understand that until I saw the pendant under his shirt glow. He’d said he was protected. If the King of the fae had given him that amulet, he certainly WAS protected.

  I wasn’t sure what it meant. It didn’t look like Daw knew either as we stepped into the room at the back that was more like a broom cupboard than anything else.

  The guy who stood in that small space appeared to be nothing more than a statue. He didn’t move. It didn’t even look like he was breathing. He stood ramrod straight, waiting for the password.

  Daw stepped forward and nodded to the guy. He didn’t speak. All he did was stand tall and wait.

  The guard guy blinked before slowly, he lowered himself into a bow. “Welcome, Daw,” he said and without further ado, he opened the trap door at his feet.

  And everything clicked into place. Daw had said he’d been raised by Angelica, the daughter of King Adair. From birth to the age of fourteen, he would have been like a prince to the fae.

  We walked down the dark, stone steps into what could only be described as an arsenal. Weapons of every size and shape were there, ones that ranged from silver to iron, everything coated in salt.

  Behind a counter sat a woman with long, gray hair and sad eyes. She didn’t look at either of us but lifted a box from under the counter and set it down. “To stop the dark power of a witch, you must destroy their book of spells. If they don’t have a book, they are using the power of a demon.”

  I swallowed hard and stepped over. “Did Erkens tell you what’s going on?” I asked, aware he had called ahead for us.

  She nodded. “If it is a demon, you know what to do.” She slid the box closer to me and turned away. “Good luck, Madison Meyer. I pray the light of wisdom shines on you this day.”

  FIFTEEN

  Deke Holtz blinked, confused by everything around him. He wasn’t in the basement anymore. He was on a couch in a messy living room.

  If his mom had come home and found their house messy like that, she would have made Deke and Skylar stop whatever they were doing to clean it up. She always said ‘If you hate cleaning so much, you shouldn’t have made it so dirty.’

  He sniffled, wishing his mom was there. He didn’t feel good and even though she cried all the time, his mom always tried to make him feel better. He needed his mom so bad.

  His whole body hurt and he was so tired. All he wanted to do was sleep. But no. He had to wake up. If he wasn’t in the basement, that meant he could go into the woods again.

  He knew the house was right on the outside edge of Dead Man’s Hollow, not far at all from the Ruins Trail. All he had to do was get outside and he could hide in the woods.

  He flinched when he heard a phone ring not far from him at all. He looked toward it and his body recoiled in a mix of shock and fear. The mean man was standing there, staring at a book.

  The guy took a phone out of his pocket, his voice distracted as he answered it. “Yeah?” the mean man asked.

  Deke cringed when he heard somebody yell so loud, the mean man took the phone away from his ear. It was scary.

  “Knox, shut up. This isn’t my fault. I told you it was a bad idea to drive the van from the Hollow.”

  Deke scooted himself into a seated position, his eyes falling on a sandwich and a bottle of chocolate milk on the table in front of him. He knew it was a bad idea to take food from some mean guy but he was so hungry. His hand moved of its own accord.

  The first bite had so much peanut butter, it was hard to swallow. He opened the bottle of chocolate milk and took a drink, amazed by how good it tasted. Even the peanut butter sandwich was good. It tasted like it had honey or syrup on it too.

  He finished it off as fast as he could, his stomach aching for more. He almost asked the man if he could have another sandwich but he was still on the phone.

  “Listen to me,” he was saying. “Those investigators were doing their job. You’re the idiot who drew their attention. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut.”

  Deke drank more of the chocolate milk, his eyes fixed on the guy as he stood there, staring at the book. It was like he thought the book held the secrets to the best video games and he wanted to win super bad.

  “What did you do with her, Knox?” the guy asked in a low voice.

  Deke stood up, swaying as he did. His head hurt really bad and he felt hot and cold all at the same time. All he wanted to do was lay on the couch and cry.

  He had to get away. Just a few steps and he could get out the back door and into the woods.

  “I need you to stay here,” the man said from just behind Deke.

  Tears rose in his eyes. He didn’t look back at the man. “I want my dad,” he said, not caring how whiney he sounded.

  “Sit down, plea
se,” he said in a voice that made Deke flinch with fear.

  He stopped but didn’t sit. His eyes stayed fixed on the trees out the window as a dry cough shook his body and his head swam.

  The mean man stepped around so he was between Deke and the door. “Sit down before you fall,” he barked, groaning as his phone rang. He didn’t answer it right away but pointed at the couch.

  Deke slunk back, terrified of whatever was going on.

  The man took a package off a messy shelf in the kitchen and set it on the empty plate where the sandwich had been. He didn’t say anything to Deke. He simply answered his phone, continuing on in his argument with what sounded like the same guy.

  Deke stared at the cookies for a minute before he tore the package open and devoured as many as he could. When he started to feel sick, he lay down on that couch and fell into a fevered sleep.

  “You ate my cookies,” the boy’s voice whispered in his ear.

  SIXTEEN

  “What did you mean about Kip?” I asked Daw as we got back into his car a little while later.

  We had only been in the shop for twenty minutes or so, although that time had been very beneficial. Daw had the information he needed on the case. I had worked my way through one or two of the questions we’d need answers to. I’d also informed Ian and Spencer about the need to be careful if they saw Kip.

  Daw rested his hands on the wheel for a few seconds before he started the engine and pulled out onto the road. “When you’re a kid and you go through something traumatic, it changes you. I’d guess he feels guilty because he couldn’t save his mom. So the guilt makes him mad because deep down, he knows he couldn’t have saved her. What he does is kill supes indiscriminately because the kill allows him to justify to himself that he’s saving somebody else.”

  I thought about that for a minute, sorrow engulfing me. I had felt bad for Kip but I’d never really tried to understand. The fact Daw understood so much said a lot about him.