CHAPTER SIX

FOUR ON THE FLOOR

Despite our plan, I met him on the first floor near the staircase, just leaving his office, a glossy box in hand. “What’s that?”

“A gift for Gabriel, should we end up at Little Red.” He opened the tabs on the box, showed me the neck of a bottle of what looked like good Scotch.

“Excellent. This is random, but don’t you think Paige is just gorgeous?”

We took the stairs to the basement. “I don’t think there’s a way I can answer that question without incurring your wrath.”

I smiled at him. “As long as you don’t touch her, I’ve got no problem with your agreement. I don’t think her attractiveness is debatable. And if you do touch her, I’ll slice your fingers off and feed them to a River troll.”

“River trolls are fruitarians.”

“Not the point.”

He chuckled, keyed in his code, opened the door to the garage. “No, I suppose not. Regardless, I only have eyes for you, Sentinel. Well, you . . . and her.”

I looked in the direction of his gaze, half expecting to find a beautiful woman in the garage.

But there was no woman. Instead there was a gleaming white, two-door convertible with sporty wheels, deep vents in the doors, and another vent across the back.

Hands on my hips, I glanced at him. “And what is this?”

“This, Sentinel, is an Audi.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” I could appreciate good steel, fine leather, and impressive horsepower, but I recognized the model for one singular and important reason. “You bought Iron Man’s car.”

“He’s not even immortal.” The clear disdain in Ethan’s voice made me snort.

“He’s a fictional superhero. You aren’t in competition.”

“He’s a very mortal superhero outside that suit,” he said, looking over his car with an appraiser’s eye.

“You’ve apparently put some thought into that.”

“A man carefully considers his ride, Sentinel. And his rivals. This car will get us where we need to go, and it will do so very, very quickly.”

There was hardly a point in arguing with that. It certainly looked like a fast car, so I let the comment pass and walked around the vehicle, gave it a once-over. The car absolutely gleamed, its interior deep crimson leather, its soft roof made of fabric in the same shade.

I looked at him over the car from the passenger side. “You do have good taste.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “Shall we go for a ride?”

“I mean, I’m not going to say no.” I grinned at him. “Have you named her yet?”

The faintest flush of crimson rode his cheeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him blush before. “Sophia,” he said.

“A lovely name for a lovely woman,” I said, without much jealousy, and sank down into buttery crimson leather. “Let’s see what she can do.”

•   •   •

It would have been simpler to wonder what she couldn’t do.

Her engine rumbled like hollow thunder, and she practically flew down the streets of Hyde Park. I wouldn’t call myself a car person, but it was impossible not to appreciate the ride.

We drove northwest from Hyde Park to Hellriver, crossing the Des Plaines River and moving west.

Ethan had turned on a talk radio station, but switched it off again after a ten-minute dissertation on the Problems With Vampires. They included, to quote the speaker: (1) their penchant for violence; (2) their disdain for human authority; (3) their refusal to acknowledge humanity’s innate superiority; and (4) their lack of temperance.

I wasn’t entirely sure what the last one was about. Prohibition hadn’t worked in Chicago in the twenties, and it certainly wasn’t the law now.

Gabriel had been right about the shifter’s location. Caleb Franklin’s former home was only a few houses down from the broken chain-link fence intended to block access to Hellriver. Not that there seemed to be much improvement on this side of the barrier. The homes were dilapidated, the businesses boarded up.

“Here we are,” Ethan said, pointing to a single-story house. It was yellow, the small porch white. The paint on both was peeling, and the concrete sidewalk outside jumbled and split. The yard wasn’t fancy, but it was tidy.

We climbed out of the car, belted on our swords, and took the steps to the front porch. The neighborhood was quiet. I hadn’t seen a single human, or supernatural, but a dog barked in the distance, warning its owner of something ominous in the dark.

The building was completely dark, utterly quiet. I closed my eyes, let my guards drop just long enough to check for signs of life inside. But there was nothing, supernatural or otherwise.

“There’s no one in there,” I said after a moment, opening my eyes again. “No sound, no magic.”

“My conclusion as well,” Ethan whispered, then turned the knob.

The unlocked door opened easily into a small living room that smelled of must and animal.

We walked inside, and I pulled the door nearly closed behind us. “Nearly” so that passersby wouldn’t decide to investigate, but we could still make a quick exit.

The living room was marked by an enormous couch on the opposite wall. It was what I’d call the “Official Couch of the Seventies”—long, ruffled, and covered in cream velveteen fabric with orange and brown flowers.

There was a matching love seat, an end table, a lamp. No photographs, no curtains, no television or stereo.

“Not much here,” I whispered.

“Or maybe our shifter wasn’t into décor.”

The living room led into a dining room that was empty but for a small table with four chairs and two more doorways—a kitchen straight back, and what I guessed was a bedroom to the side.

“I’ll take the bedroom,” I said.

“Passing up the kitchen?” Ethan asked with a chuckle. “How novel.”

“As is that joke. Check the refrigerator.”

My excellent suggestion was met by an arched eyebrow. “He’s a shifter,” I reminded Ethan. “If he’s been here lately, he’ll have food.”

Ethan opened his mouth, closed it again. “That’s a good suggestion.”

I glanced back at him, winked. “It’s not my first night on the job, sunshine.”

Ethan humphed but walked into the kitchen while I slipped into the bedroom, a hand on the pommel of my sword. That the house seemed empty didn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious.

The bedroom held a matching set of white children’s furniture—lots of curlicues and gilded accents. Probably from the same era as the couch in the front room. The mattress was bare, and there were no ribbons or mementos tucked into the corners of the mirror that topped the chest of drawers. Furniture or not, no child lived here.

The bedroom led to a short hallway. Closet on one side, Jack and Jill bathroom on the other with avocado green fixtures. No toothbrushes, no towels, no shampoo bottle in the shower. There was a spider the size of a smallish Buick, and I gave him or her a wide berth.

The next door, probably another bedroom, was nearly closed, and a soft mechanical throb seeped through the crack. I flicked the thumb guard on my sword, just in case, and pushed the door open with the toe of my boot.

It was another small bedroom. A ceiling fan whirred above a black double bed with more gilded accents, the mattress covered by a rumpled duvet and thick pillows. This was Caleb Franklin’s bedroom. And if the fan was any indication, he’d been here recently.

There was a closet in the far corner. It was empty but for a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. No shoes, no hangers.

I opened the drawers of the bureau and nightstand that matched the bed. The nightstand was empty; the bureau held a few changes of clothes. T-shirts, jeans, a couple of hoodies.

Had this been the freedom Caleb had wanted? The freedom to not care about material possessions? Had he found peace in this desolate neighborhood? And if so, why would anyone have bothered to kill him?

The bedroom’s second door led into the kitchen, completing the circle through the interior. I walked through, found a small storage closet behind it that led to an exterior door. There was a mop, a bucket, and a worn pair of snow boots.

I felt Ethan come in behind me.

“Some clothes in the bedroom,” I said, pulling open the door of a metal cabinet, finding it empty. “That’s about all I’ve found. What about you?”

In the answering silence, I turned around. Ethan had walked to the refrigerator, opened it.

It was absolutely stocked.

There were bundles of produce—carrots with the green tops still attached, glossy eggplants, heads of cabbage—besides piles of steaks and dozens of brown eggs in a carefully placed pyramid. There were blocks of cheese, a dozen bottles of water, a plate of what looked like profiteroles, and several bundles wrapped in aluminum foil. The scent of spiced meat wafted out. I’d have bet good money they’d been prepared by Berna, Gabe’s strong-willed and culinarily skilled relative.

“No processed foods in this man’s diet,” Ethan said.

“And a big appetite. Of course, he’s a shifter.” That meant he was an animal of some type, although we wouldn’t ask Gabriel. The animal variety was considered very personal among Pack members.

“So we have an empty house and a stocked fridge,” I said. “By all accounts, Caleb Franklin slept here, ate here, stored the barest necessities here. Didn’t seem to do much else here.”

“No,” he didn’t,” Ethan agreed.

I looked around. “Whatever got him killed, there’s no evidence of it inside.” I glanced back at Ethan. “You want to finish up in here? I want to take a walk around the yard.”

Ethan nodded. “I’ll take a pass. Be careful out there.”

I promised I would and walked back to the front door, then outside. I needed to think like him. He might not have had a Pack, but as the stocked fridge showed, he was still a shifter.

I hopped down the steps, walked around the house. There were shrubs in front of the foundation every few feet, and a few trees just beginning to bud around the edge of the narrow lot.

The backyard was small, bordered by the back neighbor’s chain-link fence, which was covered in brambles and vines. There were a couple more trees back here, as well as a cracked and peeling redwood picnic table. A swing hung from one tree, a simple wooden plank attached to an overhanging branch by a thick, braided rope, probably hung for the same child who’d once owned the white bedroom furniture.

I tugged on the ropes to check they were solid, knocked on the wooden seat. I gingerly sat down, pushed back in the soft earth with the toes of my boots. The swing moved back, then forward, then back again, the rope creaking with effort. I stretched out my arms and leaned back to look up at the tree limbs overhead.

The child would have played out here, the trees creating the walls of the castle only she could save. That was how I would have played, anyway. Our backyard had been empty of fun—no trees, no swings, no sandbox. Just the lawn my father paid someone to trim into a perfectly manicured rectangle.

I sat up again, head buzzing from the motion. That was when I saw it—a square piece of plywood stuck over the painted brick foundation. The plywood was new, still showing its price in bright orange paint.

Maybe our shifter had a den, I thought. I walked toward it, knelt in front in the soft, new grass. There were no screws or locks; it had merely been set in place, propped up by a concrete block. I moved away the block, then the plywood, and peered into the crawl space. The ground beneath the house was packed dirt and dotted here and there with rocks and broken bricks. It smelled of wet earth.

The plywood had been larger than the void it covered, which was only about sixteen inches square. Big enough for pests to crawl into, but Caleb Franklin didn’t strike me as the type to care overmuch about something nesting down there.

The hole wouldn’t have been big enough for him to slip through. But maybe it was big enough for him to reach into.

With a silent prayer to whatever gods would keep the rest of the house’s spiders out of my hair, I braced my hands on the foundation and poked my head inside.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to darkness-inside-darkness—and just a moment more to spy the metal cashbox just inside the foundation.

If I’d been a child in my imaginary castle, this would have been my long-lost treasure.

I reached inside, fingers grasping at something stringy before my fingertips landed on cold metal. I found the handle and pulled it out just as footsteps echoed behind me.

I stood, dusted the dirt from my knees with one hand, and walked to the picnic table. I set the cashbox on top of it.

“And what do we have here?”

“There was new plywood,” I said. “I was hoping I’d find a hidey-hole, and it looks like I did. Or found something, anyway.”

The box was rectangular, closed with a metal latch. I unhooked it and flipped open the lid.

There was a small manila envelope inside, the flap still gummed and open. I picked it up and emptied into my palm a small brass key. Its working end didn’t have the typical angular hills and valleys; instead there were square notches. A number, 425, was inscribed on the head.

“Well, well, well, Sentinel. Look what you have there.”

I glanced at him. “I’m looking but have no idea what it’s for. Do you?”

Ethan smiled. “That is a key for a safe-deposit box.”

A hidden box that led to a vaulted box. That was a pretty interesting find.

“So our murdered shifter, who defected from the Pack, has a hidden cashbox and a key to a safe-deposit box.” I glanced at Ethan. “What does an unaffiliated shifter keep in a safe-deposit box?”

“I’ve no idea,” Ethan said, eyes gleaming with interest, “but I’m eager to find out.”

I slid the key back into the envelope and put the envelope in my pocket. Then I put the cashbox back where I’d found it, pulled the plywood and brick back into place.

And realized we weren’t the only ones to have been here. The ground here was as soft as it was near the swing, so it had saved the impressions of the large, rough footprints.

I pointed them out to Ethan. “We aren’t the only ones poking around out here.”

“Then we’d best be the first to solve the mystery.”

•   •   •

We made a final pass through the house, looking for information that might identify the bank Caleb had used, the location of the box. But we found nothing.

We turned off all the lights and walked outside, setting the lock on the doorknob to deter intruders. We were on our way back to the car when I heard a faint murmur of sound, a voice carried on the wind. And with that voice came the buzz of magic.

“Listen,” I said quietly, when Ethan joined me on the sidewalk.

He tilted his head, and when he caught the sound, alarm crossed his face. “Magic,” he said.

“Our sorcerer?”

He flipped the thumb guard on his katana. “Someone is doing magic in this neighborhood. Let us be prepared either way.”

I nodded, kept my hand on my katana’s handle as we walked across the street and down the block, pausing every few yards to check our position in relation to the sound. Silently, I touched Ethan’s hand, nodded toward a small cemetery, the graves surrounded by a chain-link fence. Unlike much of the rest of the neighborhood, the fence and grass beyond it looked well tended.

“Longwood Cemetery,” Ethan whispered as we reached the front gate. It was a double gate and standing open, large enough for cars to drive through.

I stopped at the entrance, gathered up my courage. I didn’t like cemeteries. My brother, Robert, and sister, Charlotte, and I had held our breath when we passed them on car trips as kids. I was the youngest and always held my breath the longest. I had been completely terrified by the thought of all those people underground waiting, Thriller-like, to thrust out their dirty hands and grab my ankles. If I stayed quiet and still, they’d stay happily asleep beneath the earth.

The wind shifted and moved, directing the clear sound of a voice on the wind. We were looking for a sorcerer, and this definitely seemed like a potential hit. That meant I had to suck it up and walk into Longwood like the goddamn Sentinel of Cadogan House, with my head held high, my senses on alert, and my bravery intact.

But even still, and knowing what I knew now, I decided to take exceptionally quiet steps.

The gate led to a crushed-stone path that led straight through the cemetery and branched off to secondary trails.

The cemetery wasn’t very large, but it was well kept. Marble gravestones sat at perfect intervals along shorter rows, and there were neatly pruned peonies and rosebushes every dozen yards or so.

I stayed close enough to Ethan that our arms brushed when we walked. “Freaking Thriller,” I murmured.

“What was that?” Ethan whispered.

“Nothing,” I said, and stopped short when a figure became visible in the darkness. There, I said silently, gesturing toward her.

A woman stood in front of a grave, silhouetted in the moonlight. She was tall, slender, and pretty, with dark skin, high cheekbones, and dark, braided hair pulled into a knot atop her head. She wore a cropped white cardigan, white sneakers, and a long, pale pink dress of sharp, narrow pleats that fell over her swollen abdomen.

Ethan stepped forward, broke a twig in the process. The crack was as loud as a gunshot. She turned around, one hand on her belly, fingers splayed in protection, another in front of her, threatening magic.

I’d seen Catcher and Mallory throw fireballs before, and didn’t want any part of that. I put my hands in the air, and Ethan did the same.

The woman stared at us for a moment. “You don’t look like ghouls,” she said, but didn’t seem entirely sure about it.

“We are not,” Ethan said. “And you don’t look to be an evil sorceress.”

She snorted. “I most definitely am not. Could you move forward, into the moonlight?”

We did, hands still lifted in the air. It seemed safe enough movement; I’d yet to meet an evil, gestating supernatural.

“You’re vampires,” she said after a moment. “I recognize you. You’re Ethan and Merit, right?”

Ethan nodded, but his gaze stayed wary. “We are. How do you know us?”

She smiled guiltily. “Gossip magazines. They’re my guilty pleasure.” She cocked her head at us. “You’re in them a lot.”

We couldn’t argue with that.

She glanced at me. “And Chuck Merit’s your grandfather, right?”

That was a much better reason to be famous. “Yes, he is.”

“I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” she said, putting a hand on her chest. “You startled me. Sorry about that, everyone,” she added, looking around, hands patting the air like the simple movement was the thing that would keep the bodies in the ground.

Fear speared me, and I tried to logic through it. Surely her petite hands weren’t the only thing keeping not-yet-walking dead from rising. Still, just in case, I moved a little closer to Ethan, ever the brave Sentinel.

He was going to give me so much crap about this.

“I’m Annabelle Shaw,” she said. “I’m a necromancer.”

“Mortui vivos docent?” Ethan asked.

“Very good,” she agreed with a smile, and must have caught my look of confusion. “The phrase means, roughly, ‘the dead teach the living.’ In this case, the dead speak, I listen.”

“I didn’t know that was possible,” I said, thinking of Ethan’s temporary death and the possibility we might have communicated during it. “Necromancy, I mean.”

“There aren’t many of us,” she said. “It’s a pretty rare magic, which is probably a good thing. The dead are talkers.”

Dread skittered along my spine.

Annabelle winced suddenly, lifted a hand to her belly. I caught the flash of concern on Ethan’s face. He stepped forward and gripped her elbow to help keep her steady.

“I’m okay,” she said, and patted his arm. She smiled a little. “Thank you. Peanut kicks like a mule. If I wasn’t certain her father was human, I’d wonder. And I’m still fairly sure she’s destined to be a kickboxer.” She winced again, staring down at her belly as if her narrowed gaze could penetrate to the kicking child within. “You know, we’ll both be better off if I have a functioning bladder.

She rolled her eyes, blew out a breath, seemed to settle herself. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m a registered necromancer, affiliated with the Illinois MVD Association.”

If there was anything I’d learned about supernaturals, it was that they loved bureaucracy. Magic wasn’t worth doing unless a supernatural could throw a council or code of conduct at it, slap it on a T-shirt, and charge a due. And supernatural bureaucracy was just about as effective as the human version.

“How does that work, exactly?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“Well, I take commissions, usually work on retainer. People have questions—they want to know if the deceased was faithful, where they put the garage key, whatever. Or they have things they want to tell the deceased that they didn’t get to say while they were living.”

“That’s nice,” I said, trying to unknot the tension at the base of my spine.

“Sometimes,” she agreed, resting her linked hands on her belly. “And sometimes they just want to tell off the—and I’m quoting—‘rotting, whoremongering, philandering, dickless bastard who, if all is right and just in the world, is spending his days in the embrace of Satan’s eternal hellfire.’” She grinned. “I memorized that one.”

“People are people,” Ethan said.

“All day every day. Anyway, I try to balance out the commissions with public service. Sometimes I get a vibe that the deceased have things to say, like Mr. Leeds here, even if nobody’s requested a commission. I give them time to get it out so they can rest peacefully.”

If there was anything I wanted, it was a peaceful ghost.

“You were singing to him?” Ethan asked.

“I was.” She lifted a shoulder. “Every ’mancer has his or her own style. I like to sing. It calms them, makes them a little more cooperative. And that means I don’t need to use as much magic to keep them in check.”

“What do you sing?” I asked, fascinated despite myself.

“I generally use slow jams,” she said. “Classic R and B from the eighties, nineties has a nice, relaxed rhythm and sets a nice tone.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Just don’t tell my grandmother that. She’s in the business, too, and she’d be pissed if she learned I was singing Luther Vandross to clients. She says gospel’s the only way to go.”

“We’ll keep your secret,” Ethan said. “And sorry we interrupted you.”

She waved it off. “No worries. Some of them like to listen in, and cemetery conversations are usually pretty morose.”

“Do you do a lot of work in this neighborhood?” I asked, thinking again of Caleb Franklin.

“We work territories. Not many want to work this close to Hellriver.” She shrugged. “I don’t tend to get bothered. And if I do, I know how to protect myself.”

“Fireballs?” I asked, thinking of Catcher.

“Screaming ghouls,” she said, her expression so serious I had to choke back a silent, horrified scream.

She must have sensed my concern. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. They don’t typically manifest physically, so they don’t usually cause any physical harm.”

“I’m stuck on ‘typically’ and ‘usually.’”

She smiled. “Job hazard. And speaking of which, did you say earlier I didn’t look like an evil sorcerer?”

“That’s actually why we’re here,” Ethan said. “We’re looking for a sorcerer—someone not of the Order, but actively practicing. The magic is likely to be dark, or at least unusual.”

“What kind of unusual?”

“Alchemy.”

Annabelle’s eyebrows lifted. “Alchemy. That’s not a word you hear very often.” She frowned. “I’m doing the darkest magic around here that I’m aware of, and that’s only because it’s literally dark,” she said, waving a hand in the air to indicate the nighttime. “You’ve checked with the Order?”

“One of our colleagues is doing so,” Ethan said. “Although we’ve found them to be relatively useless.”

“No argument there. The MVD Association exists because the Order didn’t consider us sorcerers. In Europe, in Asia, India, magic-doers of all types are part of the same conglomeration. But in the good ol’ U.S. of A., we are not good enough to join their party.”

“Supernaturals pick the oddest swords to fall upon,” Ethan said.

“You are preaching to the choir.”

“What about a shifter named Caleb Franklin?” I asked. “He lived nearby. Did you happen to know him?”

She pursed her lips as she considered. “Caleb Franklin.” She shook her head. “No, that doesn’t ring a bell, either. And I don’t think I know any shifters.”

“How about this man?” I asked, pulling out my phone and showing her the grainy photograph Jeff had captured.

She frowned. “Hard to tell from the picture, but I don’t think so. I feel like I’d have remembered the beard.” Her eyes widened, and she lifted her gaze to mine. “Is this about what happened to that poor shifter at Wrigley? I mean, they didn’t release his name, but a vampire and shifter were involved, right?”

“Caleb Franklin is that shifter,” Ethan confirmed. “We believe he was killed by a vampire, and may have been involved in the alchemy. Alchemical symbols were found nearby.”

“I’d have liked to have seen them,” she said. “I mean, I’m sorry for his death, but it’s interesting the way that rare magic is. Like walking down the street and seeing, I don’t know, a diplodocus or something.”

It was the kind of joke I’d have appreciated, if a concussion hadn’t immediately shaken the ground beneath us. I gripped Ethan’s arm with clawed fingers.

What. The. Hell?

He patted my hand supportively, but I could tell he’d gone on full alert.

“And that’s my cue,” Annabelle said, moving closer to the gravestone and resting a hand on a marble curlicue. “Mr. Leeds knows I’m here and thinks I’m ignoring him, so I need to let him talk. I don’t, he’ll get angrier and angrier. And that’s when ghouls become a real possibility.”

I managed a weak smile. “That must keep your dance card full.”

“It does.”

“Do you mind if we observe?” Ethan asked. “And please say no if it would disrupt your process.”

“Or add to their potential ghoulishness,” I added. “Because we don’t want to do that.” God, did we not want that!

Annabelle smiled. “I don’t mind at all. But you’ll want to take a step back and cover your ears. Sometimes they come up screaming.”

Every cell in my body shuddered in simultaneous horror.