“What?”
“Lying.”
“Grading on a curve I’ll pull an easy B-plus in bullshittery any day.”
“You know I’ll share what I know with Zayvion,” she said as we walked down the stairs.
“Sure. Send him my way if he has any questions.”
We walked out into the living room and Zayvion shifted in the love seat, making room for Allie to sit next to him, his arm around her.
He gave me a questioning look and I shrugged. She’d tell him what we were talking about or not. Lady’s choice.
Dash and Terric sat as far apart from each other on the couch as possible, looking just as uncomfortable as it sounds. Sunny leaned against the bookshelf picking at a plate of fruit.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“This is it,” Zay said.
“I expected as least Mum to stay,” I said. “Not like her to miss out on a hunt.”
“I asked her to give us some time,” Zay said. “This isn’t her mess to deal with.”
And by that, he meant Mum wasn’t a Soul Complement, and therefore wasn’t a walking magical weapon.
Interesting.
I took the open chair. “Dashiell, mate, you’re on. Tell us what you know about Davy.”
Dash bent and pulled a file folder out of the messenger bag at his feet. “There’s a company up in Spokane that handles testing for agricultural chemicals. Pesticides, fertilizers, that sort of thing. We’ve been getting the word out that we’re looking for Davy, Eli Collins, and Krogher, the man who we think is keeping Eli under his employ and using him to kidnap the people who were infected with tainted magic back before the apocalypse. But we’ve been careful about our investigation, using only verified channels, verified people. So the search has been slow.”
I glanced over at Sunny. She just stood there, a grape in her fingers, eyes trained on Dash. She was pretty much running the Hounds in Portland now that Davy was gone, but not every city was as organized as she was when it came to freelance magical P.I.’s.
Portland was one of the first to make strides in the Hounds being compensated fairly for their work, and for their work to be legitimized.
We might have a network of Hound eyes and ears here in town, but it wasn’t the same everywhere. I was pretty sure the Hound situation in Spokane wasn’t nearly as well run as what Allie had started and Sunny and Davy had perfected.
“We finally got eyes on the ground,” he continued. “One of our people got into the plant and took a look around. “The entire place was cleaned out. Not a desk, test tube, or latex glove left behind. No record of a sale. Wasn’t bankruptcy. One minute the company appeared to be in full operation. The next, it was gone.”
“Odd,” Terric said, “but not that unusual. They could have pulled up tent stakes for any number of reasons.”
“Overnight?” I shook my head. “I’m going with Dash on this one. Company that size doesn’t blow out of Dodge without some warning. So why do you think Davy was there?”
“Our person on the ground got this.” He pulled out a photo, handed it to Terric instead of me.
Old habits die hard. Sure, both Terric and I had been Dash’s bosses, but Terric had stuck with it twice as long.
“A Containment spell?” Terric said. “Anyone could have drawn that.” He handed the picture to me. Concrete warehouse floor, yellow safety tape marking x’s and t’s where equipment or maybe pallets would have been.
But it was the spell on the floor—not drawn, burned into the concrete—that drew my attention. “This isn’t Containment,” I said, turning the picture upside down. “This is Crossing. See the faint double arc?”
Zay leaned forward and I handed it across the coffee table to him. Crossing was a spell that could be used for getting over a river or across a border safely. But Crossing could be used for other sorts of difficult passages if you had the will for it. Might even be used for getting out of shackles, getting out of a jail cell, or getting out of a warehouse.
And Davy had a hell of a will.
“It’s both,” Zay said. “Containment and Crossing. One on top of the other. Sunny, are they Davy’s signature?”
She walked over, took the photo, her gaze tracing through the lines of the spell. “The Containment isn’t him, but the Crossing? Yes.” She handed Zay the photo. “Are we done talking about this? Every minute we waste here is a minute we lose finding him.”
“Give us fifteen minutes to come up with a plan,” Allie said, “and get some backups in place.”
“You do that.” Sunny walked toward the door. “Shame, you’re with me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You owe me,” she said.
Terric looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. “What do you owe her?”
“And I’ll pay up,” I said, ignoring him. “But I’m not driving three hundred and fifty miles to an empty warehouse without a little more info.”
“What else do you need to know?” she asked. “That’s his signature. He was there. Now he’s not. You and I go find out where he went from there.”
“Shame’s not a Hound,” Allie said.
“Meaning?” she asked.
“He won’t be any good at tracking Davy.”
“Hey,” I said.
“You don’t need Shame to help you find where Davy went anyway,” she said. “You can do that. All you need Shame for is to kill the people holding him.”
“I’ve got guns,” she said.
“Guns won’t be enough,” Terric said. “And neither will Shame.”
“Oh, come on, now,” I said. “Right here. I’m sitting right here.”
“We tried it that way.” Terric threw me a look. “Shame and I together, we tried stopping Krogher and Eli Collins and the kidnapped people they’d carved up to hold magic. It didn’t work.”
What he was omitting was that we’d pulled on Life and Death magic against them and taken down half a hospital defending against the magic and tech Eli was using with his boss, Krogher. Terric had nearly died. Dessa Leeds had died. I’d come out of the entire event in a killing mood that wasn’t anywhere near done yet.
“We’ll find Davy,” he was saying. “But no one is going to walk into a trap.”
“How can this be a trap?” she said. “That warehouse is empty. You have eyewitness confirmation.”
“Maybe,” Terric said. “But if I were a government agency that wanted to get rid of Soul Complements who could stop it from using people—people like Davy, people like those they’ve kidnapped and turned into weapons—I’d start by luring a couple Soul Complements out into the middle of nowhere, then picking them off nice and easy in an empty warehouse.”
“One Soul Complement,” Sunny said. “You aren’t invited, Terric.”
“Where Shame goes, I go.”
They had themselves a little staring match. Terric won.
Well, this was fun and all, but that hunger inside me wasn’t backing off. Time to move this along.
“Dash, do you have someone on this?” I asked. “A Hound or two?”
“Try a dozen,” he said.
Sunny exhaled loudly. “I’m going.”
“They don’t need you there,” Zayvion said.
“Davy needs me.”
“Alive,” Allie said. “He needs you alive.”
“So we sit here?” she demanded. “Do nothing?”
“We make a plan,” Terric said. “And we gather information so we’re not going into something blind. Dash, have the Spokane Hounds uncovered anything yet?”
Dash pushed his glasses closer to his nose and glanced at Sunny. “We have three leads saying they disappeared in three different directions. The moment they find out which one isn’t a wild-goose chase, they’ll call.”
“And that’s when we’ll go get Davy,” Terric said to Sunny.