I reach out in the darkness and find the lip of the newly revealed door. It’s heavy, but the hinges are new and well oiled, so it swings open with one hefty pull.
Naturally, the secret room beyond is as dark as the basement, so I can’t make heads or tails of what dangers might be inside before I step in. Slowly, I inch forward, searching the wall and ceiling for any lights. This time, I find one: a single naked bulb with a metal string hanging nearby to switch it on. I tug the string, and the bulb flares up with bright white light.
The secret room is full of clocks.
And by full, I mean there are hundreds of them. Stacked on a dozen worktables spread across the cramped room, piled up in the corners, some even strewn randomly across the concrete floor.
From what I can see, the clocks are identical in design, plain and rectangular, nothing like the fancy, antique-inspired clocks Slate has upstairs. It’s like an entire shipment of mass-produced, five-dollar, bargain-bin clocks from China magically teleported themselves into Slate’s basement.
As if that isn’t weird enough, the clocks are also doing the creepiest thing. They’re all running, second hands moving around and around and around their faces. But not a single one of them is ticking.
The secret room is silent.
My hand drifts down to the phone clipped to my belt. I need to call Amy and Ella down here.
Because there’s something seriously wrong. I can feel it, beyond the general eeriness of the room, wriggling toward a special kind of sense in my head. My magic sense. I don’t know what’s up with these clocks exactly, but there are spells in this room, many, many spells. Thick like syrup on the air, sticking to my tongue. I don’t even need to fully activate magic sensing mode this time. There may not be a visible aura, but I’m a hundred percent sure that anyone, no matter how normal, could feel the magic in this room, heavy, humid—foul.
I unclip my phone from its holder, and in so doing, accidentally brush the doorframe with my elbow.
And that’s all it takes.
To activate the ward.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…?
“Aw, crap.”
There’s a spark of power in the air. My heart skips a beat. Then my flight response goes into overdrive, and I leap backward into the basement, spin around in midair, land in a half-crouch, and dive to the right with all my strength, aiming for a stack of cardboard boxes. Behind me, in the secret room, there’s a shrill whine, like a building charge, and a split second after I hit the floor—the magic bomb goes off.
And by bomb, I mean all the clocks explode.
They burst open with immense force, slinging wooden shrapnel through the secret room and out the door. I cover my exposed face with my hands, narrowly avoiding an eyeful of sharp splinters. Hundreds of concussive blasts tear into my eardrums simultaneously. My world becomes a rain of charred wood accompanied by a high-pitched ringing noise.
Several wood chips make it past my gloved hands, biting into the skin on my neck and ears. Blood wells up and pools in my ear canal, drips onto the floor.
When the shrapnel barrage finally stops, I unfurl to take a peek at the secret room. Trembling and unbalanced, hearing still compromised, I rise to my knees and observe the carnage.
The ward on the doorway is now visible, a black line of symbols burned into the cinderblocks, where the magic had been stored before it burst forth. Past the door is a wall of gray smoke slowly billowing toward the basement, the taste of ash already on my tongue. And past the smoke is…is…I blink several times, trying to figure out what it is I’m seeing. Shapes. Moving shapes. Moving people-like shapes.
They aren’t people though. Not living people anyway.
As the wall of gray smoke settles, the truth beats against my chest like a wave. The reason why the magic in the room freaked me out so much. The reason it felt so thick and concentrated. The reason it felt so wrong.
In the secret room, where hundreds of clocks used to be, stand in their place…
…hundreds of shades.
The souls of dead people. Are standing in Arthur Slate’s secret, warded clock storage room. Dressed in whatever they were wearing when they passed. Business suits. Fancy dresses. Skiing equipment. Ice skates. Pajamas. People from all walks of life, who were doing all sorts of things, when Death came knocking and pulled their souls away.
There’s no rhyme or reason to them, no pattern I can see. They’re a random assortment of people, who somehow ended up stuck in clocks, instead of passing on to the other side like they should have. And there’s no way it was natural, no way this many ghosts got trapped on Earth because they had unfinished business.
No, this was intentional.
This was…a collection.
And—
My heart seizes in my chest, and I choke on air. Because I find a familiar face in the crowd. Near the front of the silent, ghostly huddle is a woman. About thirty. Medium brown hair. Pale skin with a mild sunburn. Wearing a full array of winter gear, from a warm knitted beanie to heavy boots. And even though she’s transparent now, I still see them—the mottled bruises speckled across her face and neck.
It’s the woman who died in Wilcox’s office building.
I gasp out, “Holy shit.”
And it’s like my voice activates something. One by one, the shades start to disappear. They fade away like the thin wisps of smoke now curling along the floor.
Their faces are contorted with looks of fear and confusion, as if they don’t know where they are, as if they don’t know that they’re dead. But they don’t even have a chance to comprehend the situation before the Eververse grabs hold of them and guides them away from Earth once and for all. Most of them won’t realize the truth of the matter until they arrive in their designated afterlives.
It’s clear from their behavior that none of them know how they ended up magically sealed inside clocks in Arthur Slate’s basement.
None of them. Except one.
He loiters in the corner of the room as the ghosts around him vanish into thin air, his face obscured by the haze. He stands there, solemn and still, until every other soul in the room, the office woman included, has moved on to their final destination. Then he looks through the open doorway of the secret room. He looks at me. Before he walks straight through the basement wall and far out of my reach.
I’m still sitting in the darkness, mouth stuck open in a failed attempt to call out to the man, when Amy, Ella, and Liam rush into the basement.
“Cal,” yells Ella, “what the hell happened?”
I don’t know what to say except the truth.
“Arthur Slate was collecting human souls.”
Chapter Eleven
A car crash is not my favorite way to end a conversation. But considering that I’m DSI, it could always be worse.
On our way back from Slate’s house, Ella sits next to me, with Amy driving and Liam in the front passenger seat. The back of the SUV is stuffed with evidence from Slate’s office and basement. The desktop computer is secured against the wall, his MacBook Air tucked in with it. A blue bin chock-full of charred clock fragments sits on the opposite side, hooked to the wall with plastic ties.
Ella is perusing a folder filled with printed pages containing all the encrypted emails Amy ran through the black box program. She also has the camera roll open on her cell phone, displaying pictures of Slate’s secret basement room and the ward in the doorway. As she flips through the email pages, skimming the contents, she occasionally swaps out the image set as well. The last set of pictures is the one I took four weeks ago, at Wilcox’s building (before it blew up). She’s comparing the scenes to see if there are any similarities.
About halfway back to the office, Ella slaps the folder on the seat beside her and glances my way. “Are you absolutely sure the woman you saw in the basement was the same one from last month’s cold case?”
I dab at my bloody ear with a wad of gauze Amy scrounged from the first aid kit. “Positive. It
was her, Ella. She was in one of the clocks.”
Ella bites her lip. “So the two cases are actually one.”
Amy peers at us through the rearview mirror. “That’d explain the chalk circle. It wasn’t a summoning at all. It was…”
“…meant to capture the woman’s soul,” I finish. “Whether he murdered her or not, Halliburton trapped her soul in a magic circle so she couldn’t leave for the Eververse. Then he used one of Slate’s clocks as a permanent—or semi-permanent—prison, forcing her shade to stay on Earth until such time as he needed it.”
“And she was far from the only one.” Ella raps her fingers against the folder. “You said there were hundreds?”
“Yeah.” I press my cheek against the cold window and sigh. “There were so many shades in that room, they were overlapping each other. And they were so lost. So confused. They had no idea what was happening to them.”
“Hey…” Ella grasps my shoulder. “They’re free now, Cal. You saved them.”
“Which is a damn good thing,” Amy says as she tugs the wheel to the right. “Considering Slate and pals were planning a summoning. If all those shade-filled clocks were Slate’s ‘side of the bargain,’ like that last email mentioned, then more than likely, those poor ghosts were meant to be sacrifices to whatever nasty monster the trio wanted to conjure up.”
Everyone in the SUV cringes at the thought.
I lean my head back against the seat. “Just what we need. Another Charun rampaging through the city.”
Ella clicks her tongue. “Let’s hope not. The mayor still hasn’t forgiven us for the boathouse explosion in Holden Park.”
“Wasn’t that the Tuchulcha spirit though?” Amy asks. “That’s what the case file said.”
“Yeah,” I reply, “but then Charun showed up afterward and beat my ass again.”
Ella snorts. “Happens to the best of us.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ve never let a magic monster kick my butt before.” Amy pulls us to a stop at a red light, then sticks her tongue out at Ella. “But hey, Kinsey, don’t feel too bad about it. You got your déjà vu thing out of that case, after all. And without it, who knows how long it would have taken us to find the hidden basement room? A nice time saver, if nothing else. You know, when you’re not hawking up your breakfast or fainting into walls.”
I kick the back of her seat. “Your backhanded compliments are always appreciated, Amy.”
She smiles at me through the mirror. “Thanks!”
“Back on task, guys,” Ella chides.
“Right. Sorry,” Amy says. The light changes, and she eases off the brake, taking us through the intersection onto Lombard Street, a narrow back road to the DSI office rarely used by the general public. “What’s next on the agenda?”
Ella picks up the folder again and starts reorganizing the papers. “When we get to the office, I’ll go grab the captain, and we’ll review all the evidence we have so far. Hopefully, Delarosa’s team will have returned already with some info on the dead Wolf. If not, we’ll wait for them and then work up our next moves. If we get lucky, maybe Burbank will push the ICM to allow us into Halliburton’s place, and—”
A massive Ford pickup truck blows through the intersection and T-bones the SUV.
Fun fact: DSI vehicles are tanks disguised as SUVs. So when the front of the Ford truck plows into the back-end driver’s side of our vehicle going fifty miles per hour, the cabin doesn’t crumple like a tin can. Instead, the force of the impact sends the back tires reeling across the snow-covered asphalt, and all the evidence we collected from Slate’s house goes flying.
The bin of clock bits tears free from its ties and smacks the ceiling. The top comes loose, and ten thousand splinters slice through the air in every direction, pelting everyone in the car. Slate’s computers fly out of their straps as well, the desktop screen shattering, the MacBook Air bouncing off every wall it can find until it soars past the back seats and up to the front, where it nails Amy in the arm—right as she’s trying to correct the SUV before we crash.
Her hand slips off the wheel, and we flip.
The world morphs into static. White fills every window. Wooden chips bite at my skin. Deafening screams surround me. My stomach does a U-turn as we roll three-sixty, back onto our tires, and then over again onto the roof. Upside down, the SUV coasts across the snow, until we crash headlong into a light pole that overturns on impact. The pole careens into the display window of a closed department store, and I swat splinters away from my eyes just in time to see the glass shatter inward, ruining thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise.
The SUV, slowed by the impact, jolts to a stop as one of the bent front tires bumps into the brick wall next to the store window. We come to rest with the back end of the vehicle sitting high up on a snow bank created by a recent plow pass, the front of the SUV tilted downward at an awkwardly sharp angle. The clock splinters that didn’t stick in skin flutter down to the ceiling, while us lucky souls with our seatbelts dangle painfully, pinned in place.
When everything in the SUV finally stops moving, there’s a long, shocked moment of silence.
Ella is the first to react. She braces her feet and one hand in strategic positions, releases her belt, and drops gracefully to the ceiling in a practiced crouch. Then she unfastens one of her holsters and pulls out her handgun, thumbing off the safety. Peering out the tinted windows, she scans the snowy world around us for three seconds only and leaps into full-on battle mode before anybody else can get a word out. “That wasn’t an accident. We’re under attack. There are two more trucks pulling up along with the first. We need to get out of the vehicle and into defensive positions now.”
Seatbelt tight against my chest, I reply with a strangled, “Yes, ma’am.” I unclip my belt and drop to the ceiling with much less grace than Ella, but I can worry about bruised knees later. As soon as I grab my own gun, Ella pops a panel below the door handle and flips the red switch underneath. The window on her side of the vehicle blasts off into the snow bank.
Ella grabs the window frame, then hauls herself out into the blizzard like she’s done this a hundred times before. Mimicking her, I clamber around the seats and drag my bloodied, sore body out into the snow world beyond.
Behind me, I hear Amy, whose arm must have been busted by the laptop, swearing as she struggles to disentangle herself from her seatbelt. Liam, on the other hand, makes no sound at all. Ella notices this at the same time I do. So as we’re sliding down the snow bank toward the front end of the SUV, we both glance at the passenger seat.
Liam is slumped against the window, unconscious. His face is drenched in blood. He must have slammed his head into the dashboard or the console during the crash. He’s down for the count.
“Damn it,” Ella mumbles. “Cal, you’ll have to be my sole support until Amy gets free. Don’t use your beggar rings unless you have to, okay? I don’t want them to backfire on you again. But if push comes to shove, use those electricity attacks like you did against Charun.”
“Got it.” I unclip the pouch on my belt containing the rings and quickly slip them on. “I can usually get a few good shots off before they break. I’ll try to be as strategic as possible. Where do you want me?”
She raises her free hand and points past the front of the SUV, to a blue USPS drop-off box sitting next to a stubby tree. “Take cover there. I’ll shoot first to scramble them, break down any formation they might have. When you see a good shot, take it. Center mass. Do not hesitate. Under—”
Buckshot pings off the underside of the SUV above our heads and bounces off into the ruined department store behind us. We drop low. Through the gap between the hood and the snow bank beneath, I glimpse three trucks lined up in a row. The one that hit us is in the middle, its front end crumpled like aluminum foil.
The man who took a shot at us stands next to the damaged truck, his shotgun dangling at his side, his top half out of sight, too high for me to see with the hood in the way.
As I observe the scene, several more people emerge from all three vehicles, and…they’re not wearing clothes?
“Uh, Ella, do you see what I see?” I whisper.
She’s crouching next to me, watching our enemies as well. Her mouth stretches into a thin line. “Yes, I do. They’re nude. Which can only mean one thing.”
“Clothes would get in the way during a fight.” I grip my gun tighter in my gloved hand. “Wolves.”
“Precisely,” she spits. “It’s a damn ambush.”
The shotgun disappears from my view, and a moment later, more buckshot rakes across the SUV.
I murmur, “But why? What the hell do they want from us? We already sent Delarosa to talk with them.” The faint image of a bloody massacre starts to coalesce inside my head. “You don’t think…?”
“No, I don’t,” she answers firmly. “Proceedings with the Wolves are always very slow. Delarosa probably left the community center minutes ago—if he’s not still there speaking with the Wolf rep and his inner circle about the murders. And since Wolves don’t move without their leader’s approval, then these guys are…”
“From out of town?”
“That or they’re a rogue splinter group we haven’t been informed about.”
“Great.”
Ella adjusts her grip on the gun. “When I say move, I want you to run as fast as you can to the USPS box, okay?”
I nod and maneuver around her, getting into position to leap over the front end of the SUV and dash toward the drop box. Buckshot guy will mow me down if I hesitate, if I trip, if I’m a second too slow. My heart pounds in my chest. The cold air creeps down my throat and throbs in my lungs.
This is the most dangerous situation I’ve been in since the Etruscan Incident, and a screw-up here will have the same consequences as my screw-ups there: pain, suffering, and imminent death. No pressure, Cal. Just do what you did with Charun and Tuchulcha. Except the losing part. Avoid that.
Ella stiffens, both hands on her gun, and takes a deep breath. Then she springs up and fires off a volley of flawless shots. “Move!”
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