“Take it easy,” he told her in his usual calm voice.Caleb was as Zen as they came, having Seen Some Shit in his years with the Corps.I liked having him at my back right now.I liked it a lot, I decided, as we picked our way across a mess of fallen ceiling tiles, where the fire department had flooded the area with water, but hadn’t bothered to do any cleanup.
As a result, the burned plaster, rotting carpet, and various pieces of kindling that had once been shitty hotel furniture had formed a papier-mâché-like mass that made the floor uneven and treacherous, causing my bruises to ache as we picked our way along.
But not as much as they should have.
I couldn’t see myself, especially after we made it through the swollen door and into the dim corridor beyond.But I was moving better than I should have been, with several torn tendons, a cracked rib, and a wrenched knee, among numerous other issues the healer had gone on about.But my tendons weren’t making me limp anymore, my ribs still ached, but weren’t impeding my range of motion, and even the knee felt better.
I was grateful for it, but also faintly worried.The Change had sped up my healing, but not this much.I should have been back at the hotel where Cyrus thought I was and basically non-functional, not delving through Vegas’s underbelly like Indiana Jones spelunking through a temple.
Should probably dodge that healer when I get back, I thought, right before Caleb called out.
“Hey.What’s this?”
He had gone on ahead, after summoning an orb of sunlight from outside to use as a flashlight.At the moment, it was illuminating part of the corridor wall down the hall.Only it wasn’t just the sun that was sparkling there.
Among the peeling paper, smoke residue, and water stains was the golden outline of a wolf.It was faint, with the magic that imbued it days old, but still perfectly visible.Which meant that it was still active.
I put out an arm to keep my students from getting any closer to the sparkly ward, and Caleb shielded his hand, then delicately touched the surface.
There was no reaction.He pulsed a little magic through it, which only caused it to glow brighter and more cheerfully.But nothing lashed out at us, no shields were thrown up, and there was no other response that I could see.
Which made my hackles rise, as there was a lot of magic in there just for decoration.
“Detego?”I suggested, referring to a common spell used to cause an enchantment to show its function, but Caleb shook his head.
“Not a chance, not with the rest of you in here.”
“What?Why?”
“The most recent briefing said to be careful opening any suspicious spells, even innocuous-looking ones, as the dark have been booby trapping them.Had one blow up in Johnson’s face the other day.Thankfully, he was shielded.”
“Great.”
“He still lost his eyebrows.Been walking around looking like a cartoon character ever since.”He nodded at the kids.“Get ‘em out of here, and I’ll take a look.”
“Yeah, only if it is booby-trapped, it could blow this whole place up, and I don’t know where everyone is—”
“Then call ‘em,” Caleb said.
“—not to mention that there could be other people living here—including Jace.We can’t risk bringing the roof down on their heads—”
“Too late,” Sophie muttered.
“Then we backtrack,” Caleb said stubbornly, “and find another way around.I don’t trust this thing.”
“Or we call it in,” I said.“See if anybody at HQ has any familiarity with—”
“Protection symbols,” somebody said, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Jen holding up a phone.She had it pointed at the wall, and somebody was talking on the other end of the line.“That’s what they are,” the voice clarified.“Only they’re kind of all over the place.”
“Chay,” Jen told me.“I sent a picture to everyone, and he recognized the symbols.”
I took the phone.“Chayton?What do you mean, all over the place?”
“Well, they’re native, but not from any one tribe,” he said.“I mean, the wolf is kind of universal—a lot of tribes view it as a protection symbol—but the Rainbow Man is Navajo, the dreamcatcher is Ojibwe, and the spider web down below is Dakota or Lakota.”
I squinted at the wall again, having not paid attention to the much fainter and non-magical tags behind the wolf.But now that I did, I could see a guy with both his head and feet on earth and his body forming an arch—a rainbow, I guessed—in between; a crudely drawn dreamcatcher above that; and the sketch of a spider web almost hidden in the muck at the bottom of the wall.There were also a couple of arrows, one pointing right and one left.
“Walk me through it,” I said.
