Skye gave him an exasperated look. “You’re going to wake them if you keep whispering like that.”
I glanced down the hall to where I knew Wyatt and Rafe were sleeping on the couches in the living room. It was dead silent and dark as hell, but something told me Rafe would hear a mouse tip-toe, so I chewed my lip nervously. I turned back to the siblings, deciding that if Rafe heard something and woke up, at least it wouldn’t be my fault.
Zephyr rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Hey, so, feel free to tell me to shut up–”
Skye cut me off. “Never.”
I went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “–but, wouldn’t it bereallybad if we were found in the middle of a closed-off crime scene?”
“We won’t be found,” Zephyr said a little ominously.
“I know y’all can teleport, but–”
Zephyr cut me off with a sharp laugh, then looked at Skye apologetically before speaking. “I don’t teleport.”
My eyebrows rose. “Oh? So…what the hell was…” I waved my hand around the kitchen, as if that gave any indication as to what the hell I was talking about.
Zephyr smiled, and it was a little scary. “Hopefully we won’t have to use my affinity.”
“Knock it off,” Skye hissed, batting him on the back of his head. Zephyr scoffed in disbelief. Skye grabbed my hand gently, then roughly grabbed the back of Zephyr’s collar. “Let’s go.”
Teleporting was wild.
One moment, we were in the apartment kitchen, the next, we were next door in the neighbor’s kitchen, almost identical to Skye and Zephyr’s. Except…
“Oh, my God.” Skye whispered.
Ohmygodwas right. The place had been…trashed.
Kitchen cabinets hung off the hinges, and the trash had been knocked over so garbage littered the floor. I took a single step, and my boot crunched on some broken ceramic plates. The table was broken in half, with unmistakable singe marks across the top.
At least one fire affinate had been here.
“Jesus,” Zephyr whispered. “What the fuck happened in here?”
“They were taken, clearly,” I breathed, carefully moving from the kitchen to the living room, where I was met with a similar scene of disarray. More singe marks lined the hallway walls, burnt family photos curled and blackened in their frames. “And they put up a hell of a fight.”
A bookcase was toppled over in one corner, and books were strewn across the floor, with many loose pages on the couch. It appeared as if a book had sailed into the massive television, busting the screen.
But it was the space where a coffee table should sit that caught my attention.
Namely, how there were globs of what seemed to be melted glass scattered around a large metal plate of some sort.
I moved closer, nearly tripping over my own feet when I realized I was looking at the remnants of a glass and metal coffee table.
Melting something of this magnitude had to be the work of an incredibly powerful fire affinate. I could melt metal if I really tried, butglass?
A cold chill went down my spine, and it wasn’t entirely mine. I whipped around, looking for Skye, immediately knowing it was her.
I didn’t have to look far.
Skye stood, unblinking, near the door to the little boutique shop, an exact match to her and Zephyr’s café door.
There, a dark, dripping liquid had been used to carve out a shape on the wall.
Two crimson triangles, meeting in the middle to form an hourglass.
