She headed back to the living room. All the electronics were off. A foray into the kitchen revealed a plate with a few crumbs in the sink. A glass with milk residue sat beside it.
Juliana scanned the room looking for anything out of place, anything that caught her attention. Her arm still throbbed, but she did her best to ignore it. She gestured with her good hand to the tennis shoes on the mat by the door. “His shoes are still here. His boots are in the closet, too.”
He only owned the two pairs of shoes that she knew of, so wherever he’d gone, it was somewhere close. Most likely in the building. Her brow furrowed in thought. There was only one place she could think of.
She’d kept him company while he washed his clothes more than once. She went back down the hall to the bedroom. His hamper and detergent were gone from the closet. Jeremiah waited for her in the living room and she gestured for him to follow as she left the apartment. She shut the door and ran her fingers over the lock. She wasn’t leaving Nathaniel’s apartment open for whoever just happened to wander by. It wouldn’t take anything much for her to open it again if she needed to anyway.
They got on the elevator and Juliana pressed the button for the basement. The apartment had a hookup for a washer and dryer, but Nathaniel had never bothered to get them. He said he just hadn’t found a set he liked. More likely, he didn’t want to take the space away from the books.
“Not that I wouldn’t follow wherever you chose to lead, but where are we going?” Jeremiah finally asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
The corner of her mouth curled in a smile. “Sorry. Laundry room.”
The elevator dinged and they stepped off into a well-lit basement corridor. The laundry room stood in front of them. Juliana walked through the door and the aromas of fabric softener and mold immediately assailed her. Chairs ran back-to-back down the center of the room. Washers and dryers alternated the length of the two side walls. A bottle of detergent sat on top of one of the machines. Directly across from it a book lay open on a chair, the pages face down. She picked it up.
“
He leaned against the doorframe, his dark eyes watching her.
She ran her hand over the cover. “This is Nathaniel’s favorite book. He says there’s been a whole study of whether Stevenson was a shifter. A lot of people think he wrote the book about himself.”
“I didn’t know that.” Jeremiah’s voice broke her from her reverie. It was no time to be maudlin.
She walked over to the dryer and laid the book next to the detergent. She opened the door and pulled out a sock. The clothes were still wet. Whatever happened occurred before he even had time to start the machine. She tossed the sock back in and frowned at Jeremiah. “Unless he got a phone call telling him to go somewhere else, whatever we’re looking for is down here.”
He pressed the earpiece. “The two teams closest to the basement report there immediately.”
She moved past him and out of the room. There were four more doors in the short hallway. The first door on the left opened onto a rather dingy bathroom and she made a mental note to go upstairs if she needed to use the facilities. The other door in that direction bore a padlock and a large yellow sign proclaiming Danger. Probably the boiler room. She left it for now; she could always go back if she needed to.
Jeremiah leaned against the wall next to the laundry room waiting for the agents to emerge from the elevator. Just beyond him was a marked stair access. The remaining door stood at the end of the hall—Storage emblazoned on it in thick black letters. Trepidation dogged her steps as she approached the room.
The smell hit her when she was still a foot away. Cinder and ashes mixed with blood and death. An aroma she’d smelled too much of that morning. The elevator announced the arrival of the other agents with a ding as she drew her gun.
“Get some techs down here,” she said to no one in particular. She twisted the knob—locked. She looked over her shoulder at the other agents. “Go to the other end and check out those rooms.”
As soon as their backs were turned, she ran her fingers over the lock. There was no reason for everyone to know doors weren’t always unlocked like she stated in her reports. A glance back showed Jeremiah purposely looking away from her. He couldn’t comment on what he didn’t see.
She already knew she wasn’t going to like whatever awaited her in the room. She took a deep breath in through her mouth and swung the door open. The full impact of the odor was like an ogre punch to the gut. She snapped her head to the side as she gagged. Her eyes watered. She coughed as she holstered her weapon and covered her nose with the neck of her shirt. It didn’t help much. Her eyes flicked around the room taking in the whole scene, but avoiding the details for the moment.
Two bodies, a summoning circle, candles, blood...lots of blood. The shreds of a shirt to the side indicated where Nathaniel shifted into his half-form. Juliana fired up her gift and the room swam in the black of the summoning magic mixed with the orange-yellow of the spell caster. A witch.
“Gods damn it.” She spat the words.
“What?” Jeremiah asked as he moved up behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder to find him smearing vapor rub under his nostrils. He held it out to her and she snatched it gratefully from his hand. It didn’t completely obliterate the smell, but it helped. She jerked a thumb in the direction of the circle. “Would-be mages.”
His forehead creased. “Witches summoned a demon? Idiots.”
She nodded her agreement. More witches died trying to do magic beyond their ability than anything else. Humans with some magic ability were witches; they could be male or female. Mages, however, were Altered and their signatures leaned toward reds or pinks. Witches scanned orange and the weaker their magic, the more toward human-yellow the color.
She stepped into the room to get a better look at the circle. Drawn on the floor in thick, charcoal black strokes, it took up most of the room. Several symbols around the perimeter—four larger than the others—caught her eye. Icy fingers of fear crawled up her spine and dampened her palms. This was dark magic they played with, even for a summoning. She stepped into the center of the circle and spun, viewing the room as the demon would have when it answered the summons.
It was times like this that she wished she’d undergone formal training for her mage abilities. She’d picked up a trick or two along the way, but not enough to be of any real help. She had studied enough about magic, both for her job and just out of sheer curiosity, to know what she was looking at, however. She pointed on the symbol on the floor between her and Jeremiah. “Master.” She spun clockwise pointing to each of the larger symbols in turn. “Witness. Summoner. Sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice? How did they get someone to agree to that?”
She eyed the body near the symbol, the wash of color protecting her from the grisly details of his demise. “Most likely they didn’t tell him. The Master may not have told anyone.”
He scratched his head. “Wouldn’t the Summoner be in charge?”
Crouching to get a better look at one of the symbols, she shook her head. “Not necessarily. Have you looked at our vics? They’re young.”
“So?”
Standing, she brushed her hands off on her jeans. “This is old magic. Fae magic. They shouldn’t have known the spell, let alone attempted to perform it.”
She gestured to the symbol for Master again. “Masters don’t become hosts. They give the commands, they don’t take them. The Summoner would have called the demon, the Master would have told the demon the reason he had it summoned and the Sacrifice would have tied the demon to the Master. Either of them might have killed the Sacrifice depending on the nature of their agreement.”
“And why exactly do you suppose it was called?”
“Why are they ever called? Either someone was stupid enough to think the demon could grant a wish, or to think the demon would give him power, or smart and sadistic enough to know precisely what the demon would really do.” She shook her head. “They summon them to go on killing sprees, to kill wives, to murder bosses, who knows. We obviously aren’t going to get any answers out of the practitioners.”
With a sigh she ran a hand through her hair. “I would assume once the Sacrifice was killed, that’s when the other one ran. Nathaniel must have heard something, came to investigate and ended up demon-ridden for his
