He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, of course. You’ll tell us if you find anything?”
“I promise.”
• • •
The moment Zack left, I shut the door and turned in a slow circle, trying to get a feel for whoever or whatever was watching. I’d been stalked by my share of nasties who wanted to eat me, kill me, or worse. This was different. I felt like a frog waiting to be dissected.
“Who’s there?” I whispered.
I stilled my body and quieted my breathing. I heard Zack descending the stairs. Blake’s voice was a muffled murmur as he spoke with Liz.
Every physical sense told me I was alone in the room. The blood racing through my veins and the chill of my skin said otherwise. Not for the first time, I envied Jenny and her supersenses.
My limbs were numb. I stopped breathing.
Had I set off a trap, something like the salt-and-pepper binding circles Ronnie had set up in his room at the Maule House? No, the police would have tripped that when they came through.
A touch on my arm made me jump. Blake jerked back, bumped a set of shelves, and knocked over a LEGO Volkswagen Beetle. The car broke when it hit the floor.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Blake.
“No, it’s fine.” I stepped back and shook the feeling back into my arms and hands. “I’m glad you did, actually.”
“Zack asked me to check whether you’d found anything yet.”
I bit back my retort. I’d be impatient too if my family had gone missing. “Give me a chance to look around first.”
Blake frowned. “You’ve been up here for ten minutes. What have you been doing?”
Shit. Losing a stretch of time was never good. “Stay back by the doorway. Better yet, the hall.”
I crouched to study the spot where I’d been standing. Broken LEGO minifigures were scattered around a four-inch-wide triangle of mismatched long, flat pieces. “What the hell is that?”
The sense of being watched was stronger here. Within the triangle, strands of carpet moved like seaweed in the waves. The air just above the floor was cold.
Smaller pieces, long and thin, were arranged around the triangle. The way they were pressed together resembled writing. I didn’t recognize the symbols, but many were smeared with dried blood.
The longer I looked, the more impossible the shapes became, like Sage had brought a series of MC Escher designs to life in bright, primary colors. It created the illusion of endless pathways and geometric impossibility.
“Is it me, or is that creepy?” asked Blake.
“It’s not you.” I snapped a series of pictures with my phone. “I’ll have to consult with Temple to be sure, but I think Sage was trying to craft some sort of portal spell with LEGO.” I put my phone away and squatted to touch the open space at the center of the triangle.
Ice shot through my bones. “Motherfucker!”
“Mom!” Blake lunged into the room, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me back.
“I’m fine.” I double-checked my hand to make sure. My fingers were still attached and worked the way they were supposed to. I clasped Blake’s arm for support, then dragged my foot through the plastic bricks, breaking up Sage’s creation.
The patch of carpet went still. The cold air dissipated. I wiped my sweaty palms on my shirt and bent down again, this time studying the broken minifigures surrounding the now-broken spell. I’d assumed the damage was the result of overuse or carelessness: arms and heads and legs snapping off from getting stepped on, things like that. But none of the figures in other parts of the room were broken. Sage had done this deliberately, creating a scene of death and dismemberment around his magical construct.
“When I was young, LEGO was just bricks and blocks,” I muttered. “That’s not enough for these kids. No, they need their fancy modern sets with spaceships and robots and dragons and real, working portals to hell.”
“Hell?”
“Figure of speech.” I flexed my fingers. “I hope.”
“Do you think Sage disappeared through the portal?” asked Blake.
