by Alex Steele
Griswold's face had healed up nicely. His attitude, however, had not.
“I don't know shit. And I ain't saying shit.” Unable to move his arms, he rubbed the side of his head against his shoulder. His skin was still inflamed, which the doctors informed us was due to his addiction to a certain magical drug that werewolves were allergic to. He'd probably been addicted before he was changed and hadn't managed to kick the habit.
“Who changed you?” I asked, crossing my arms. Griswold was not what shifters looked for in a potential pack mate. They liked to change powerful, good-looking, or rich people. And their significant others if they happened to fall for a human.
Drug addicts were not on the list.
He snorted and looked at Swift. “Is he deaf or something?”
She planted both hands on the table, her scariest smile on her face. “You know, we have you on a crazy number of charges. First the warrants, then the drug paraphernalia we found in your apartment and on your person, and resisting arrest. It's in your best interests to answer our questions. Do those drugs belong to someone else? Or do we just have to pin it all on you?”
His eyes narrowed at her. “Like you ain't gonna pin it on me anyhow.”
“We won't if you give us the real dealer. You didn't make that stuff, that requires someone a hell of a lot smarter.” She straightened and crossed her arms, waiting for him to make up his mind.
For a moment, I thought he was going to tell her off. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and glanced at me, then back at her. We had him cornered, figuratively and literally. He would either take the fall for his boss, or make the smart decision, and give them up.
“I don't know much,” he said uneasily.
“Start with who changed you and who you're selling drugs for,” I said.
Griswold sighed and shifted in his seat. “Look, I can tell you my alpha’s name, but I don’t know who makes the drugs.”
Swift slid a notepad and pen across the table. “Name and address.”
He grabbed the pen and scribbled down the information awkwardly, not able to lift his hand very far off the table due to the shackles.
“Where do you get the drugs?” Swift asked, taking the notebook and pen back.
“I get a text with GPS coordinates, show up, there’ll be a box or locker or something, and the drugs are in it. They give me a week to move them all and then give me another drop location for the money. It changes every time,” he said with a shrug.
“When would the next exchange be?”
He snorted. “Half of Infierno saw me get arrested. There won’t be another exchange.”
I resisted the urge to sigh in frustration. “Where was the last one?”
If we knew that, we could at least go through surveillance videos of the area and hope to catch a lucky break.
“I don’t quite remember––”
“Try again,” Swift interrupted.
Griswold mumbled something under his breath, then said, “In a locker at some gym. Give me the notebook and I’ll write down the details.”
Swift slid it back toward him.
This was better than nothing, but I remained frustrated. This organization went to great lengths to keep everyone blind. They were smart.
Twenty-Two
I frowned at the note attached to the surveillance video. Sergeant Lopez, the shifter who had helped us with the warlock case, had already gotten a warrant for video at this same address. There was a list of others she'd pulled at addresses I didn’t recognize, but they were all in Las Vegas as well.
“Hey Swift, Lopez has looked at this same location recently,” I said swiveling in my chair.
She looked up, a frown creasing her brow. “The same date and time?”
“Technically yes, but she pulled two days’ worth of footage.”
“That’s too much of a coincidence. Our cases must overlap. Was she looking for Griswold?” She set her tablet down and walked over, leaning against the corner of my desk while I looked up the information.
“Hmm, his name isn’t anywhere in here. She might have been looking for someone else.”
“Let’s go talk to her before she leaves for the day.”
I nodded and followed Swift to Lopez and Danner’s office. The door was open, so we strolled in.
Danner glanced up from his paperwork and grunted in lieu of a proper greeting.
“Hey Swift, Blackwell, what’s up?” Lopez asked, swiveling around in her chair to face us.
“We picked up a guy named Griswold connected to our drug ring case. The guy who exploded.” Swift passed Lopez her tablet and pointed at the surveillance video we’d pulled. “You looked at surveillance at the same address, a gym just north of the Strip, on the same day Griswold said he picked up drugs from an exchange with people he works for.”
Lopez’s posture changed immediately. “Danner, this is probably the lackey, the one we couldn’t identify.”
“Huh,” Danner said with a complete lack of excitement. “That still doesn’t tell us who the dealer is.”
“No, but it’s something.” Lopez turned back to her computer. “Three weeks ago, this bad batch of drugs goes through Los Angeles. Ten people died. We traced the drugs back to Las Vegas, but we have no idea who is making them, or even dealing them. It’s just one dead end after another.”
“Are there any ties to uh...Russia?” I asked.
Lopez looked back over her shoulder, incredulous. “What would make you ask that?”
I shrugged. “Just an intuitive leap.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Riiight.”
“Griswold did give us an exact time for when he picked up the drugs. That should make it easier to find who dropped them off,” Swift said, turning the conversation back to a safe topic.
“Yes, that would,” Lopez agreed, checking the time Swift showed her again. She rewound the video to a few minutes before the time Griswold had given us.
With the advent of runetech, surveillance videos had changed from stilted, staticky videos to high definition. A man walked in, his face obscured by a dark hoodie. It would have been impossible to tell it was Griswold except for the way he kept scratching his arms.
“That’s him,” Swift and I said in unison.
“Alright. Let’s see where he goes.” Lopez tagged the time he walked in, then sat back.
Griswold meandered through the locker room, looking over his shoulder every few seconds. This guy was not good at playing it cool.
Finally, he stopped in front of a locker and leaned in to conceal the code he typed into the lock. It popped open and he pulled out a duffel bag, then hurried back out.
“Now to see who else has visited this locker,” Lopez said, setting the video to play in reverse at three times speed.
A stream of people came in and out of the locker room, but none of them went near the locker. The time stamp showed an hour before Griswold had arrived and was counting backward fast.
I shifted impatiently. Swift seemed equally annoyed. The light in the locker room dimmed at around five a.m. when the gym normally opened. The locker room was empty now.
“Maybe they work there?” Lopez said, not sounding convinced.
“That would be hard considering how often they change the places they use for these exchanges,” Swift said.
“What about––”
The blare of a siren cut me off. Everyone jumped into motion immediately. That siren was only used for one thing. An attack on Moira.
It was happening again.
Twenty-Three
Smoke filled the air. It was so thick we couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead. My lungs and nose burned with every inhale. The silence pounded at my ears. No one was screaming or crying out for help.
We’d arrived before the Mage’s Guild. The attack was close to the IMIB office, but we’d still shown up too late. Perhaps there was something lurking in all this smoke, but I suspected that just like last time, they were already gone.
An unnatural breeze picked up at our backs, sweeping the smoke away. Strewn ahead of us were bodies. Hundreds of them. A building had been reduced to rubble, long claw marks rending stone and steel into chunks.
In the center of the destruction was that same, blackened ring I’d seen down on the Rune Rail platform after the first attack. I wasn’t sure if it was from the creature that did this, or from the valkyrie.
“What the hell is doing this?” Swift asked quietly, turning in a slow circle.
I tightened my grip on my katana, wishing there was an enemy in front of me I could fight instead of this carnage. I was tired of being too late.
The air shifted in front of me for a split second, revealing a glimpse of white wings and a face I couldn’t quite make out.
“Did you see that?” I asked Swift quietly.
She whipped around. “See what?”
I frowned. “Nothing, I’ll explain later.”
The valkyrie didn’t leave the Rune Rail, and they didn’t police Moira, but I knew what I’d seen. If they’d stopped this monster I wasn’t going to complain, it’s just that none of this made sense.
What were they fighting?
I knelt down next to a woman who lay face down, her hands pressed to her ears. Her skin was cold as I checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one.
Many of the bodies were burnt or torn apart, but she looked unharmed. That hadn’t saved her apparently.
Fear. That’s what Swift had said could make all of these mages incapable of fighting back. What might cause a parent to watch their child be killed without a fight.
“Is she alive?” Swift asked, her voice subdued.
I shook my head. “No, she just laid down and died.”
“The Mage’s Guild is here,” Swift said, gesturing behind us.
I stood and raked my hands through my hair. The rest of us would get run out of here soon then.
“We need to see if the cameras were cut before this attack too. I’ll text Bootstrap.”
Swift nodded. “There has to be something else we’re missing though. Some reason this place was targeted, or some sign the attack was coming.”
“I agree. I just have no idea what it is.”
Danner walked up, his expression uncharacteristically angry. The old mage wasn’t big on expressing his emotions and lived by the motto –– if it ain’t my problem, it ain’t my problem.
“I haven’t seen a massacre like this since the war.” His eyes strayed toward the Mage’s Guild. “There’s something we aren’t being told.”
“That’s nothing new,” I muttered.
“What do they gain from this? Moira is the heart of the Mage’s Guild. If they do know what’s going on and just aren’t saying, they still have to be scrambling for a solution. This is the worst thing that could happen to them,” Swift said, glaring at the magisters as well. “I don’t trust them, but I don’t think they are behind these attacks.”
Danner twisted the toothpick hanging from his lips. “Half the shit they do doesn’t make sense.”
Bradley caught our attention and waved us over. Lopez, who had been a few yards away talking to another agent, jogged to catch up and join us.
“Did you see anything?” the Chief asked.
I shook my head. “It was over by the time we got here, which was maybe five minutes after the siren went off.”
Swift nodded in agreement. “Were there any witnesses?”
“Not so far. No one alive was close enough to see anything,” Bradley said, exhaustion clear in his voice. “The team assigned to this is taking over. Get back to the office.”
For once, I didn’t bother arguing. We could wander this crime scene for hours and not find anything new.
We needed to find Yamashita or figure out who killed Patterson. They were the only leads we had on either of these cases.
Twenty-Four
“Hold on, let me,” I said just before Swift reached for the door to the Manor. Gently, I turned the handle and pushed it inward, waiting for an alarm or other chaos.
Swift looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What is wrong with you?”
“Bootstrap said he was going to try to fix the wards today. Every time he says that, something weird ends up happening when I first walk in.” I stepped over the threshold, still wary. Nothing shocked me and the wards didn’t spring to life. “Looks safe, come in.”
She walked inside, shaking her head at me. “Where is Bootstrap?”
“Probably in his room. He doesn’t leave it unless he’s finding something to eat or bothering me.” The relief at getting space from Yui had been short-lived when I realized I had a new barnacle.
I led Swift upstairs to the same room I’d found Bootstrap scuttling around in the day I’d gotten the Manor back from the High Chancellor. Not wanting to risk walking in on anything I might need eye bleach for, I knocked loudly, then waited for the hacker to let us in.
There was a crash, then a shuffling noise. “One second!”
Swift shrugged out of her trench coat and draped it over her arm. “We should order take-out after we talk to him. I’m starving.”
“Sounds good. I wanted to finish reviewing the security footage at the gym. Food will make that less miserable.”
The door was yanked open and Bootstrap stood there, breathless, with his shirt on backward. “What’s up, guys?”
I raised an eyebrow. “The attack…”
“Oh, right, right, come on in.” He stepped back and waved us in, then hurried back to his computer. With two clicks, a still shot of the scene of the attack prior to the devastation popped up on his biggest screen.
“The camera feed definitely went out again,” he said, pressing another key to play the video. Just like last time, everything was normal until the video went dark and skipped forward to the aftermath.
“No surprise there,” Swift said with a sigh. “Any sign of who the hacker doing this is?”
“Actually, I noticed something weird,” Bootstrap said, swiveling around in his chair dramatically. “The cameras aren’t getting shut down the second before the attack. The video stops the exact moment the attack starts.”
“What does that mean?” Swift asked.
“Timing something like this would be really hard unless the attack itself somehow interferes with the cameras.” Bootstrap sat back in his chair looking particularly smug. “There’s something weird going on. That whole theory that the Edge is leaking into Moira is starting to make a lot of sense.”
“The Edge?” I asked, confused.
Bootstrap nodded solemnly. “This guy was talking about how that darkness out there is just pure, destructive magic. Maybe there is no creature, maybe it’s just magic killing those people.”
Swift rolled her eyes. “There is definitely something behind the attacks. Maybe it’s coming from the Edge, but it’s not just magic. Do you have any proof there is magical interference with the cameras?”
“Nah, just a hunch since nothing else I’ve looked at has turned up any clues. Whatever, or whoever, did this did not use the normal means of hacking a surveillance system. There is no sign of tampering, unless they are better than me. And let’s be real, no one is better than me.”
“Alright, we’ll keep that in mind. Have you tracked down Yamashita yet?” I asked.
Bootstrap shook his head. “Nope. She went completely off the grid. If she’s still alive, she is living off cash and avoiding magical areas.”
“You think she might be dead?” Swift’s hand tightened on her trench coat.
“I mean, not really? It’s just super hard to be this much of a ghost in this day and age.” Bootstrap shrugged and twirled back around. “I’ve got everything possible flagged. If she shows up, I’ll know. And then you’ll know. Because I’ll tell you.”
“Great.” I nodded my head toward the door and Swift followed me with a sigh. Bootstrap couldn’t tell us anything else right now. I hated waiting, but there was nothing else we could do right now.
“Pizza sound good?” she asked, holding up a Papa John’s menu.
“It sounds amazing. Want to just work in here? It should only take them about twenty minutes to get here. They have one of those rune-tech ovens that cooks the pizza in a minute.”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
I propped my tablet up on the small kitchen table, syncing it to display on the table, then pulled up the surveillance footage. It was paused where we had been interrupted by the attack.
The video continued playing in reverse at three times speed. I pulled a chair out from the table and settled back to watch.
Swift rummaged around in the fridge then sat down as well, handing me a cold beer. “This seems like a night that requires a drink.”
“I think you're right.”
The lights in the locker room of the gym flicked back on. It must be the night prior to the day Griswold picked up the drugs now.
People began moving through the locker room once again, though it was still fairly empty. Most people didn't go to the gym at ten pm, which made it the best time to go in my opinion.
Swift leaned forward abruptly and slowed the video, then let it play forward at a normal pace. A man in a hoodie walked past the locker, opened it, and tossed in a bag so fast it would have been easy to miss in person.
“That's our guy,” she said, zooming in on the side of his face. It was mostly obscured by the hood.
“Now we just need to figure out who he is.” I zoomed out slightly and moved the still image to focus on an emblem on the sleeve of the hoodie. “That patch looks sewn on. Could be a shifter, maybe even a werewolf pack.”
“It will be in the System if it is,” she said, searching for it on her phone.
The doorbell rang, then a loud wail rent the air as the wards sprang to life. Swift jumped to her feet, summoning her mace in a blaze of light, but I got up slowly and strolled toward the door.