by T. S. Bishop
The thick, ornately embroidered carpet allowed me to walk around the room soundlessly, examining everything in Ingram’s office.
I went to his desk first, a huge dark antique wooden desk with several drawers…that were all locked. I sighed. This was going to take me forever.
I took out the walkie again and tapped three times, to make sure I hadn’t already run out of time through some bad luck. I received three taps back and put it back in my pocket, satisfied.
I was a hobbyist when it came to locks—picking them was, after all, my livelihood for a while. The locks in his drawer were plain old mortise type locks, which you usually saw in antique cabinets from decades ago that someone just hadn’t bothered to update. This was very stupid because while Ingram’s door had at least a little magical security, mortise locks were laughably easy to open by anyone with a paperclip or pin.
I slid a bobby pin out of my hair and folded the end in a J shape. Then I stuck that end into the keyhole of the first drawer and rotated it, feeling for the exact, satisfying snick when it un-did the mechanism keeping the lock in place.
“Nice,” I whispered to myself as I slid the drawer open. Positive feedback was important, even if it was just you giving it to yourself. Ha.
It was full of folders and papers. I flipped through a few, caught sight of rows and columns of numbers and immediately slammed it shut. Numbers weren’t my strong suit. I could have stared at those pages for hours and not come out with any useful information.
I went through the rest of the drawers slowly, one by one, but they didn’t yield anything interesting enough for Ingram to keep them locked. I found a false bottom in one and got momentarily excited, but it turned out just to have a photo of Ingram as a kid with what looked like a bunch of his friends at the Sanctum academy.
It was weird to imagine Ingram as a kid. He looked like he must have been a few inches shorter, with freckles. His hair was a little lighter, maybe from the sun. His face was softened by youth, unlike the firm lines of today. He had his arm around a girl who had thrown her head back at the exact time the photo was taken, so there was just a halo of sunlight covering her features.
Guiltily, I put the photo back. It was none of my business what he did when he was a kid or who his friends were. I was just snooping around his personal possessions now, not getting any closer to finding anything that was going to help me.
I stood up and stretched. Crouching on the carpet had left me feeling sore.
The rest of my search took a few minutes. I crawled under the table, finding only scraps of paper and some balls of dust. Oh, and also a very old, stale nacho.
I shoved at the bookcase with all my strength, managing to move it a few inches. It wasn’t hiding a secret passageway or anything obvious like that. I went through the titles on the spines of all the books, hoping for some title to jump out at me, like ‘The Idiot’s Guide to Talking to Demons’ or something like that. Nothing.
I shook open all the books, hoping something would fall out,
I checked under the three marble busts in the office—one was of Tycho Brahe, who I thought might have been an astronomer, the others were of Archimedes the guy who discovered buoyancy—I paid attention in middle school physics!--and Paracelsus who I had never heard of. There was nothing there, but the minute I tried to lift one of the busts I knew it couldn’t have been the hiding place for anything. It was just too heavy to lift over and over again.
There were lots of little decorative tables and armchairs that I went over, and found nothing. I even considered ripping the seams off the upholstery to see if anything was there but I somehow talked myself out of it.
‘Tap. Tap. Tap.’ Came from my walkie. I reached into my pocket to tap back, when I heard more, ‘Tap. Tap.’
Shit. That meant that Ingram was on the move. My time was now severely limited.
I glanced around at the wreckage of Ingram’s formerly-polished and perfectly neat office. It looked like the work of a deranged robber, all right. I felt a stab of guilt as I left and caught sight of the picture on the wall of one of the Pathfinders before Ingram. The one with sad brown eyes.
Her frame was crooked. This one thing, I could fix. I reached out and gently pushed it back into place.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, before my amazed eyes, the painting and the wall bordering it for about an inch all over, started sinking inward. I could hear the low hum of whirring gears as the painting flipped over to touch the ceiling of the little compartment that had formed, about a foot in dimension along all the sides.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered, staring.
The little compartment looked like a modern day pirate’s treasure chest. Glittering in the low light were stones that looked like diamonds and sapphires and rubies, all carelessly tossed into an open box. I touched them, unable to resist, and let them fall through my fingers. They felt cold and hard and beautiful.
Then there were wads of cash which didn’t interest me nearly as much, but a lifetime of being obsessive about money made me pocket one of the sheaves of notes just in case. There was a leather envelope holder with blank passports for a dozen different countries, and a case that was shaped like it held a gun. I left that one alone.
Behind everything else was another safe, this one looked like it meant business. It was made of high-grade steel, too heavy to cut out of the wall if you thought of trying, and the face of it bristled with electronics locks and biometric scanners. That one was hopeless, and probably held the thing I was looking for.
If I’d tried straightening the painting sooner I would have had more time, I thought bitterly, combing through the contents of the outer safe, hoping something would prove useful.
Something caught my eye then. Hidden under a stack of bullet cartridges was a piece of cloth that peeked out limply. It was a sleeve. I pulled it out from under the boxes slowly, my heart thundering in my chest. My limbs felt like they were frozen.
I stared down at the cloth in my arms, unable to believe my eyes.
“What the fuck,” I whispered to myself.
I’d been ignoring the walkie tapping desperately in my pocket for some time now. In a daze, I removed it from my pocket.
It took me a moment to remember what to do. I turned it on from my end and tapped back three times. The frantic tapping stopped.
I tucked the cloth into my jacket and slipped out of Ingram’s office. When I walked down the corridor I took care to keep my face looking relaxed and unconcerned, with my hands in my pockets. It looked like I’d left without a moment to spare, since Ingram turned the corner at the same time as me, deep in conversation with Estella.
I nearly bumped into him, and I struggled to keep the tell tale guilt and shock off my face.
“Steady there,” he said amiably, catching me by the shoulder as I stumbled.
“Watch where you’re going next time,” Estella rumbled, and they both strode off without another word, leaving me to apologize to the air.
When I got to our meeting room—it was the lounge assigned to our team, the place I’d first met Noah and Dominic—they were waiting for me.
Chapter 29
“You’re back!” Dominic exclaimed, leaping out of his seat in an uncharacteristic show of excitement.
“I am,” I said, looking around at Adrian and Noah. Adrian fist pumped the air, eyes glittering with pleasure and Noah just slumped over, putting his face in his hands. As soon as I met Adrian’s gaze though, he looked away. He must have remembered what happened last night between us. Or more like, what had nearly happened. I wondered if he felt it like a stab in his chest too, when he thought about it.
“Did you get it?” Dominic asked eagerly, leaning forward.
“What was his office like? Did he have a lot of cool books?” asked Noah single-mindedly. His Archivist parents would have been proud. He put down a remote-looking thing that he’d been fiddling with.
“He had a safe,” I said, “It had some stuff—diamonds, cash,
passports. And this.”
I took the cloth out of my inner jacket pocket and placed it on the table in front of them. Dominic and Noah looked blank but Adrian looked at it, a line forming between his eyebrows.
“It’s a jacket,” he said slowly. “I feel like I’ve seen it before.”
“It’s mine,” I said.
My hands were trembling, so I put them behind my back, but they weren’t fooled.
“Why would your jacket be in Ingram’s safe?” asked Noah uncertainly.
“Is this…the jacket you wore the day those men abducted you the first time?” asked Adrian in a hushed voice. He looked up and met my eyes, and in a flash I knew we’d made the same connection.
“What—but that means…”
“That means Ingram was the one who hired those guys to go after you in the first place,” said Adrian grimly.
“We have to tell someone,” said Noah at once. “We can clear this up, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.”
“How can you be sure it’s your jacket?” asked Dominic, shrugging when Adrian glared at him. “We need to be sure, we can’t go around accusing people of things they didn’t really do. Not to mention we’d look like idiots if we turn up with a different jacket and have to explain how we got it from Ingram’s safe in the first place.”
“It’s definitely my jacket,” I said stubbornly. I picked it up and checked the inner pockets, scattering the contents on the table.
“That’s the tazer I always carry around with me,” I said, pointing it out, “And those are tampons, that’s my wallet and phone and that’s the pocket watch that I ‘acquired’ the day I was kidnapped. It’s all of the things that I had on me.”
“You’re right,” said Dominic reluctantly after a moment. He exchanged a glance with Noah, who looked freaked out.
“We could tell Adele—“ he began in a small voice, when I cut him off.
“We can’t tell anyone,” I said firmly, “We don’t know who’s in on this and who isn’t. For all we know, Adele could be working with him. In fact, the entire Sanctum except the four of us could be part of this secret plan they’ve got going.”
“Even our families?”
“We just don’t know,” said Dominic, his forehead creasing, “I don’t honestly think your parents or Adrian’s would know about this and keep it quiet, but there’s no way of being sure without doing some more research.”
“So what’s the plan?” asked Adrian restlessly. “We can’t just sit around and wait for them to come after Sophie again.”
“I don’t think we’ll need to wait very long,” I admitted, “Ingram’s bound to suspect something. He saw me near his office and he will have seen the state it’s in by now. Even if he doesn’t accuse me directly, I don’t think I’m safe for very long.”
“He’s not going to come after you again,” said Dominic, surprising me. “If he knows you suspect something, he knows you must have told us as well. When you were on your own, you were easier to pick off. Now you have us, and Adrian and Noah’s families too. It’ll be harder to do anything to you.”
“But he just had me kidnapped again!”
“While you were on a mission,” he pointed out, “Outside the Sanctum, away from any other witch who could help you.”
“I still think we should tell someone if it’s true that Ingram’s the one behind all this,” said Noah, his mouth pulled into an unhappy line. “But I’ll go alone with whatever you guys think is best.”
They all turned to me expectantly, waiting for a decision. I bit my lip. This was going to be difficult to say.
“I think we should wait,” I said reluctantly. “Even though we know about Ingram now, we don’t know why. Why he’s after me, what he wants, none of it. I don’t want to run when I don’t know what I’m running from.”
“If you did,” said Adrian clearly, looking into my eyes, “We’d run with you. No questions asked.”
“Adrian,” I said, surprised but touched, “What about your family—your mom--?”
“She’s say that I should stay by the side of my witch,” he said, quirking his mouth up at the side.
“Mine too,” said Noah. “I just don’t understand anything!” he burst out after a moment. “Why the hell would Nathan Ingram want to kidnap a random, feral—no offense, Sophie—witch who couldn’t activate her powers?”
“It looks like we’ll have to stay here to find out,” said Dominic. He sighed heavily. “Well, I guess I should’ve known that Nathan Ingram was always too good to be true.”
“Did you like him?” I asked curiously. I’d never heard Dominic talk about Ingram before.
“He talked a good talk,” said Dominic darkly. “About equality between the witches and everyone else. It felt like the beginning of something new, when he became Pathfinder.”
“Well, in a way it was,” said Noah fairly. He started laughing as Dominic rolled his eyes. Adrian and I joined him, laughing until our sides hurt. It just seemed too absurd, that the place I thought I could finally call home was trying to kill me all along.
“And what’s this thing, anyway?” I asked, pointing at the remote controller that Noah had been fiddling with before I came in.
“It’s a demon sensor,” he said, brightening with enthusiasm like he always did when he got to explain something nerdy. “You press the button and point it in one direction and it’ll tell you if there’s a demon around. See?”
He pointed it at Dominic. The light turned green.
He pointed it at himself. The light stayed green.
He pointed it Adrian. The light stayed green.
He pointed it at me. It turned red.
Bonus Scenes from ‘Renegade Witch’
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Book 2- Rebel Witch
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