“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bark at you before. And yeah, I want to go now. You coming?”
Alaska Avenue was only a few blocks long, but Gil and The Gate could have been in any of the many buildings on the street. Dee parked his car and we got out.
“Can you feel where they are?” he asked.
I’d met The Gate and Gil a few times, but I didn’t know either of their signatures, the unique frequency every living thing had. If I’d known their signatures, I could have homed in on them specifically. As it was, I was going to have to feel around for disturbed energy, presuming that the men had been taken against their will and were angry or upset over it. And feel for magic. If magicals had the two men, they’d surely ward the building.
We were lucky it was night and most of the businesses were closed. Otherwise I could pick up a pissed off clerk just as easily as an upset wizard. I centered myself, closed my eyes, and sent my senses out looking.
The sigil on my arm tingled. I opened my eyes and looked at Dee. I tapped the spot on my chest that corresponded to where he wore the sigil that represented my power. He knew what I was getting at—was his sigil waking up?—and shook his head.
It was just me, then. The sigil only woke up when I needed to convert negative energy into positive power for myself. I couldn’t imagine who would be thinking evil thoughts about me on this street.
Almost a year after meeting Dee there were boatloads of things I didn’t yet understand about magic or know how to control. Maybe the sigil’s magic turned on when I needed a little burst of energy and power—like now, to help me find the missing men.
The sigil grew warm and power rushed through me. My inner eyes, already open and searching, seemed like search beams illuminating the street and buildings around us. I felt late night workers in offices, a mechanic working on his own car afterhours, and the nervousness of a thief reconsidering the break-in he’d come to do—but not magic practitioners, and not The Gate or Gil.
My ears popped, and I heard Diego’s name on many lips—some angry, some desperate, some hate-filled. The sounds were faint, echo-like, and seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A ribbon of nerves wound through me. Why couldn’t I locate where the sounds were coming from?
“Something’s going on here,” I said. “Something weird.”
Dee turned his palms up in clear question.
There was no point telling him I heard his name being called if I couldn’t find the sources and had no idea of the reason. Without specifics, it was useless information. The anger and hate flowing over me made my head pound until it felt ready to burst.
“Do you remember how to follow a person’s signature?” I said.
I’d taught Dee this trick—half surprised, honestly, that a non-psychic could do it. He wasn’t great at it, but he knew The Gate and Gil far better than I did. If anyone could follow the men’s frequencies, it would be him.
His eyes lit at the suggestion and he nodded. He centered himself and muttered, giving himself a little burst of magic to help along what native psychic ability he had, and slowly turned in a full circle, looking for the signatures.
I experienced a person’s signature like a scent that grew stronger as I came closer to whoever I was seeking. Dee had said he sensed it like a thin beam of light. He seemed to have spotted that beam. His back straightened, and he strode off with purpose.
We crossed the street and headed around to the back of what looked like a warehouse of some sort with an office facing the street. There was a sign on the front door—likely the name of the business—but Dee had bee-lined around the side to the back and I followed.
The voices calling Dee’s name grew louder as we headed toward the back of the building. My head felt ready to split apart. My stomach knotted.
A large metal roll-up door and a small, metal regular door with a small window graced the back of the building. Next to the small door stood two of those large, industrial trash containers, both with their lids down. Bits of paper trash and empty bottles lay near the trash containers as if spilled at the last pickup. My heart did a quick double thump as Dee quietly and cautiously lifted the container lids and looked inside. I’d seen too many TV cop shows with bodies stashed inside trash containers.
He set the lid down easily, so it wouldn’t clang then moved over to try the small door. So, no bodies in the trash bins. That was a relief. And the building didn’t feel warded—a surprise but also a relief.
The door was locked. Not that locks meant much to Dee. He muttered a few words and flicked his wrist. The click of the lock opening was loud enough to easily hear.
We stood quietly outside, listening for approaching feet or voices. I sent my senses into the building.
“There’s no one here,” I said, keeping my voice low anyway.
Dee glanced at me. “But there’s left-behind magic.”
“Left behind?”
“A spell meant to linger long after the wizard is gone but hide what was done at a place.” He drew in a breath, thinking. “Any wizard, or psychic, would know magic had been practiced here but the left-behind spell obscures what kind of magic it was. Could have been someone conjuring up a glass of water, or this place could be a portal to other lands. Could be an apprentice’s first spell or a wizard’s one millionth. Could be someone who doesn’t realize he or she’s truly magical at all, reciting a spell they got off the internet. The left-behind makes it all feel the same.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t been able to trace the two men’s signatures, but I felt their echoes now. And left-behind spell meant to obscure things or not, I had a pretty good, if confusing, sense of what had gone on emotionally in this building. “Adepts were here, one of them stronger than the others, but all of them good at what they do. I feel anger and jealousies. I feel anticipation and glee.” I ran my hands through my hair. “Gil and The Gate were here, but they’ve moved.”
Dee crossed his arms over his chest. “Where to?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
His frustration hung in the air like a heat mirage—frustration and irritation. Dee was a goaltender on the ice and by nature. Not being able to make the save was screwing with his focus.
Something caught his eye. He walked over near the large, metal roll-up door, picked up something from the ground and held it tightly in his closed hand. I couldn’t see what it was but knew from his body language and his vibe it was something important. Something he hadn’t wanted to find.
I walked over and stood quietly beside him. “What is it?”
Dee opened his hand and showed me a silver dollar-sized star on a silver chain.
“It’s The Gate’s,” he said. “A power object like the ring I took from his apartment, except he never takes this off. Without it—it’s like he’s naked in the snow.”
Chapter Eight
The implications of that were obvious. There had to be a reason for it to have been removed. To rob him of his personal protection and power seemed obvious. But what if the obvious wasn’t the reason at all?
“He might have taken it off himself and left it for you,” I said. “He’d know you’d come looking for him. Maybe this is his way of showing you you’re on the right track.”
Dee closed his hand around the necklace again. “Maybe.”
“Or maybe,” I said, “He left it to share his power with you.”
Dee opened his hand and looked down at the silver star. I felt him thinking over what I’d suggested, running it against the man he knew and what The Gate was likely to do. He shook his head.
“The Gate would never take this off,” he said. “He’d never voluntarily leave it in the vague hope I’d find it. He certainly wouldn’t hand over this much power to anyone.” His voice dropped low. “Not even to me.”
He clenched his fist around the necklace again and stowed it in his pocket.
If Dee was right and The Gate had been forced to take it off, we were dealing with some
one with more power than The Gate himself had. That was a scary idea. But why leave it on the ground? To show The Gate how very little his abductor thought of him?
My throat felt dry and my head was still pounding. I fished in my purse and made sure the prescription Norco I always carried was there. I didn’t think particularly well when my head hurt this much. I needed to find some water, get the pill down and calm this migraine if I was going to be any help in finding the missing men.
“You were right about something,” Dee said. “We need to get Jack in on this. We need his help.”
Diego Adair admitting he needed help wasn’t something you heard every day. He was good, though, at admitting when I’d been right.
He cast a glance at the small metal door again. I knew what he was thinking and agreed with him: we had to go in and check out the building or spend time later wondering if there had been a veil after all and the men were there all along. I didn’t feel any current magic beyond the left-behind spell and I didn’t think Dee did either, but there was only one way to know for sure.
I swung the door open and stepped inside a small kitchenette. Lights flicked on, blazing bright in my eyes after the darkness outside. I froze where I stood and cast my senses out, feeling for living beings.
Nothing. No one was here to have turned on the lights.
Motion sensors, I realized.
I looked around the room as Dee came in behind me. Dirty dishes and coffee cups littered a large, stainless steel sink. Empty take-out boxes cluttered the table and garbage can. No ants or flies feasting on the rubbish, though. Whoever had left this mess had done so recently.
Another door stood open on the opposite wall. Through it I could see a large warehouse area empty of anything but a few high stacks of wooden pallets. Lights had come on there as well. Probably the motion sensors that had brought lights on in the kitchen turned on lights throughout the building, a good deterrent to burglars. The concrete floor was clean-ish—no oil stains, no marks where heavy machinery had been. The pallets seemed to indicate the space had been used for product storage.
A second door in the kitchen led to the office we’d seen at the front of the building. I had a good sense of the place’s layout now. Maybe a fifth of the total space was the front office with the kitchen straight behind it. The rest was open warehouse.
Dee strode across the kitchen and stood in the open doorway to the warehouse. He pulled The Gate’s necklace from his pocket, held it to his mouth and whispered to it. He straightened the arm that held the necklace, so the star dangled at the chain’s end, arm’s length from his body. I stood slightly behind and to the side of him. We stood still long enough that the motion sensors decided no one was in the room. The lights went out, leaving us in nearly total darkness. In that dark I saw that the star glowed with a very faint orange light.
Dee pivoted and stepped toward the door that led back to the alley. The lights switched on again. “If The Gate was here, the star would have reacted. He’s not. They’re not. Let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we call Jack?” I said.
“Outside.”
Dee had once told me that using magic to open a locked door counted as breaking and entering. We’d meet Jack by the front door and claim we hadn’t taken a look around inside. I should have thought of that. Dee and Jack were friends, but I thought Jack was magic police first and foremost.
We shut the door behind us. Dee muttered a few words and flicked his wrist. No telltale click of the lock engaging broke the night’s silence. I felt worry slide through him. He bit his lip, sucked in a breath and tried again. No click. He reached out and tried the doorknob. The door opened.
He slammed the door shut in frustration just as his phone started ringing.
This wasn’t good. His magic failing him again, right now. . .it was only going to make him second-guess every spell before he cast it. I had no idea how to counter the failure of confidence he felt deep inside himself.
Dee cursed under his breath and shut his eyes a moment, composing himself, before he answered the call with a calm, “Hello.”
His brow furrowed, and he put the phone on speaker. A woman’s nearly hysterical voice came through.
“. . . how he got away. He barely had time to say he was in the parking lot at Alpine Village. I heard angry voices and, and, and I think someone hit Gil, and then the phone went dead. I don’t know what to do. Oh, God, Diego. You have to find him.”
He pressed the speaker off and soothed the caller as best he could.
My mind spun. Alpine Village was a faux Bavarian village with shops and restaurants on an outer edge of Torrance. The place was known mostly for its raucous Oktoberfest celebrations each year and boasted it had LA’s finest sausage kitchen. It also had a giant parking lot.
“We’ll find him,” Dee said into the phone. “I promise.”
He thumbed the phone off and took a deep breath. He tried the locking spell again. Again, it failed. His jaw clenched. Frustration rolled off him like lava, hot and bubbling, threatening to destroy everything in its path.
“Can I help?” I said softly.
Dee raked his hand hard through his hair. I felt him control his feelings and stuff down his worry. His clenched jaw relaxed—some.
“Sure,” he said. “See if you can push some of your magic my way.”
I didn’t think it was more magic he needed. What he needed was focus. I felt how scattered his mind was. How could he focus his magic and his will with his thoughts skittering hither and yon? But if he couldn’t get that under control, I’d be glad to give him some of my magic if he thought it would help. I’d never tried to share it, but Dee had done it to me several times. I put my arms around him, breathed into his face, and willed my magic into him.
He smiled gamely and tried to lock the door again.
As soon as the lock clicked, he turned and headed toward his car. I was pretty proud of myself for having pulled off the power transfer. Dee had walked off without a word of thanks or congratulations. It wasn’t like him. He had to be pretty worried to drop his manners like that. Yeah. Scattered.
“What about calling Jack?” I said as we reached the car.
He shot me an impatient glance. “Later. Right now, we’re going to try to find Gil.”
“He won’t be there,” I said, knowing it as a fact. “If someone caught up with him, unless it was some random mugger, it was the people who’d taken him and The Gate in the first place. They’re not likely to let him stay wandering around loose.”
Dee had pulled his keys from his pocket and pointed the lock fob toward the car. The light beep-beep of the fob sounded loud in the night air.
“Probably not,” he said. “But maybe you’ll pick up his trail. Or maybe I will. Or we’ll find something that will tell us where The Gate is.”
Or maybe we’re off chasing will-o’-the-wisps and false hopes, I thought but didn’t say.
∞∞∞
This late at night, or more accurately early in the morning, Alpine Village’s huge parking lot was completely empty of cars. Dee drove slowly up and down each lane, the white lines of the marked parking spots glowing faintly under the radiance cast by his car’s headlamps. It took a while to cover the entire stretch of asphalt, the expression on Dee’s face growing grimmer as the minutes passed with no sign of Gil. A heavy lump of worry settled in my chest near my heart. Worry for the missing men but more for him.
I cast my senses out, feeling for Gil. I felt he’d been here but was gone now. I felt him but couldn’t catch Gil’s signature enough to follow his trail.
No, that wasn’t quite it. The last glimmers of magic still hung around the parking lot. Another left-behind spell meant to hide who had been here and what they’d done—and was doing a good job of it.
Dee stopped the car, opened his door and stepped out. I threw my door open and hurried over beside him.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I want to check around behind the fen
ce and over there.” He cast his glance toward a trio of large, blue, metal industrial trash containers.
“Okay,” I said, walking beside him as he strode toward the bins, “but if you want to go mucking around inside them, you’re on your own.”
I’d hoped for a smile, but he might as well not have heard me.
“There’s something there,” he said, quickening his steps. “Behind the last container.”
A few more steps and I saw it, too—a pair of man’s legs in jeans and running shoes, visible from the knees down, the rest of the body hidden behind the can.
“Shit,” Dee said, breaking into a run. “No, no, no.”
Please. Not The Gate or Gil, I prayed to whatever powers may be.
Dee reached the trash container and threw his weight against it, pushing it away from the body. I came up behind him a moment later and looked down.
Not The Gate. Not Gil. Relief poured through me.
Dee stared down at the man’s body. I felt the anger vibrating through him.
“Do you know him?” I said.
He shook his head. “But I know who did this.”
The sound of a car’s engine cut the silence. I spun around. A large, black sedan was coming fast straight toward us. I tugged at Dee’s arm. He turned and swung his hand up, already chanting the words of a spell.
The car kept coming. My heart beat so hard it seemed it might fly out through my skin. We couldn’t get behind the big metal containers and push them toward the car. All that would do was make us wind up smashed between the containers and the wall behind them when the car hit. We could run in separate directions, making the driver choose one of us over the other, so maybe one could escape.
Except I could see into the car now—it was that close—and there was no driver. Someone was operating the vehicle by magic.
There hadn’t been any vehicles other than Dee’s in the whole parking lot when we pulled in. Which meant this car likely was conjured on the spot. Conjured and real for a limited time—or only an illusion, meant to scare but not hurt us? Conjured by whom?
Vulture Moon Page 6