“Could they also talk through the dead in the same voice?”
He cocked his head in thought. “The same voice or the voices of the host.”
It had been the same. I think. I tried to remember. The wolf shouldn’t have been able to form real words, not having the same vocal cords as a human.
“Yes, same voice. It was also able to make itself bigger. It attacked me in the shape of a wolf and what I think was a dryad.”
“You think?”
“I’ve never actually encountered a dryad, just heard them described.”
“You are unbelievably useless,” he muttered.
Said the man unable to use magic due to a copper bracelet blocking his powers.
He stared at the ground, rocking from side to side like a boxer getting ready for the ring. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Something I said must have triggered a memory or provided a clue.
He shot past me, heading past the receptionist desk. I blinked at finding it empty. Where had she gone? Now that I thought about it, it was a little odd she hadn’t come to investigate during our argument.
“Where’d your receptionist go?”
He paused and looked at the empty desk, then continued into the next hallway. “She must have gone on break.”
“And we didn’t see her pass us? There’s only one way out of here, and we were standing in front of it.”
He sighed. “Why does it even matter?”
I stared at him open mouthed. Was he kidding?
“Uh, maybe because there’s a murderer running around the city and your receptionist just disappeared.”
His shoulders tightened as he sped up, hitting the double doors at a dead run. Instead of the star filled conference room of before, we stepped into a cozy office lined on three sides with shelves and shelves of books. The carpet in here was the same as the hallway, but that was about the only thing that looked like it belonged.
I turned in a circle. The room looked like it had been crammed with artifact after artifact, some of it quite old.
“Good,” the teenager sounded relieved. “I was afraid this had disappeared too.”
Disappeared too?
“There never was a receptionist, was there?”
It made sense. I’d known there was something off with her. She’d never moved from the desk, instead repeating the same types of tasks over and over. Kind of like a recording. Even her interaction with me had been one sided, like a prerecorded message. How could I not have seen it before?
The sorcerer shot me a look and hurried to one of the bookshelves.
I was right. I’d stake money on it.
“Ah ha.”
Ah ha, what?
I crossed the room as he pulled a book, placing it on the desk with a thud. It was old, the kind of old that looked like it had been put together by monks in a monastery somewhere, complete with intricate drawings and bound by hand. The kind of tome that should be sitting protected in a library archive in a temperature controlled room, handled by people wearing gloves, not being tossed around in some dirty office.
I looked at where he was pointing but couldn’t read the words. It might have been Sanskrit to me as it looked like a bunch of chicken scratch. Luckily there were pictures. The hand drawn portrait was of a man in armor, clawing his way out of a grave with purple flowers on it. The man was dead, his nails and teeth black with the flesh hanging in strips from his face. The eyes looked crazy.
“And what is it?”
A picture of a zombie creature told me nothing I didn’t already know.
