Trevor and Rachel were over on one side of the crowded living room talking to Sandoval. Connor eavesdropped for a moment, hearing Rachel asking questions about where Cheyenne Owens went to school and who her friends were. While asking about school and friends was Missing Persons 101, Connor doubted they’d be lucky enough to find such an obvious connection between their latest kidnapping victim and the first two. Things never worked out that easily.
Cheyenne’s parents were too distraught to notice two more people wandering around the large apartment, and the other cops acted like Connor and Kat didn’t even exist.
They found Hale in an upstairs bedroom, a teenage girl’s given the colors and decorations. He looked up and smiled when he saw Kat.
“Hey! I didn’t think you were coming with Connor,” he said. “Trevor mentioned you were too tired.”
“I thought I could help out,” she said, walking past the bed and over to the open window.
Kat flinched a little when she glanced out and no doubt saw how far they were above the ground. But instead of immediately pulling back from the window, she instead stood there with her eyes closed, like she was meditating. Connor supposed she was trying to pick up residual magic. She swayed a little on her feet, and he instinctively moved to steady her, but Hale caught his arm.
“Let her do her thing.”
Connor definitely didn’t want her doing herthing. Whatever herthingmight be. She’d been too exhausted to do it ten hours ago in Addy’s bedroom, and she sure as hell hadn’t slept enough since to get back to 100 percent. Actually, Kat looked worse now than she had earlier. He wouldn’t be surprised if she passed out.
But then her eyes snapped open. “Someone used magic in this room. The residue is strongest right here around the window. Cheyenne put up a hell of a struggle.”
“Against what?” Connor asked, moving closer to Kat and the window. He fought the urge to place an arm around her, focusing on the task at hand. “Does that mean a witch or warlock was involved in the kidnapping?”
“They used a compulsion spell to force her to jump out,” Kat answered, looking out the window again, as if she expected to see something in the darkness. “And while it could be any kind of magic user, I’m almost certain it was either a witch or warlock.”
Connor closed his own eyes, trying and failing to pick up any sense of the compulsion spell she mentioned. But he did pick up a faint trace of blood. Opening his eyes, he leaned in to look out over the sill. That’s when he saw a few tiny beads of dark red blood along one of the sharper sections of the frame.
“We got blood trace here,” he said. “I’ll let the detectives downstairs know. It’s not much, but they can at least check and confirm it belongs to the girl. That will tell us for sure she climbed out the window.”
“I can get better results out of it,” Kat said, reaching out to rest a hand on his forearm. “There’s not much here, but if it’s fresh enough, I might be able to use it to track down the girl. Especially if she cut herself fighting against the compulsion spell. Her efforts to resist it will make the magic inherent in her blood even stronger.”
Connor didn’t have to think about whether this was the right thing to do. He simply nodded and stepped back, giving Kat space to do herthing, as Hale called it.
He and Hale watched as she hunted around Cheyenne’s room, coming up with a glass jar with a screw-on lid filled with the girl’s hair barrettes and ponytail holders. Kat dumped the contents on the desk in the corner, then grabbed a paper clip, untwisting it and reshaping it into an elongated triangle.
After moving back over to the window, Kat used the tip of the paper clip to scrape up some of the blood from the sill, then dropped the clip in the jar and closed the lid. Without a word, she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the window, one hand on top of the jar and the other cradled underneath. Then she closed her eyes and silently began to move her lips. The inside of the jar immediately began to glow with a soft green light even as Kat started to sway. Connor had to once again bite his tongue to keep from telling her to stop. Why the hell was she pushing so hard? Was she trying to hurt herself?
For a while, he thought nothing was going to happen, but a minute later, the paper clip began to dart around in the jar, clinking against the sides like a living thing trying to escape. By the time Kat finally stood up, her slow movements betraying obvious weakness, the paper clip was thumping constantly against the side of the jar closest to the window.
Damn.
It was magic.
Real frigging magic!
“Let’s go,” Kat said, heading for the door of the bedroom. “This is a simple spell, but with the limited amount of blood I had to work with and how exhausted I am, it’s doubtful I’ll be able to hold it for more than an hour. So let’s not waste the opportunity we’ve been given.”
Kat hurried down the steps so fast that Connor had to take her hand to keep her from running and gathering too much attention. As they crossed the living room, he caught Trevor’s attention, making a motion toward the door, slowing down so he and Rachel could catch up with them just as he, Kat, and Hale left the Owenses’ condo.
“Kat has a lead on the kid’s location,” Connor said, jerking a thumb toward the jar in her hands. “We’ll take point in my truck while you guys follow. Try to keep up, huh? Kat can only hold the spell for a little while, so we don’t have time to waste if we get separated in traffic.”
Chapter 10
Hale had decided to jump in the back seat of Connor’s Silverado and ride with them, saying he didn’t want to chance getting split up by a light. Rachel had driven with Trevor for the same reason, though it was also possible that she simply liked riding in his mint-condition 1957 Ford Thunderbird. Candy-apple red, of course. Looking in his rearview mirror, Connor could see Trevor’s car right on his tail, keeping close as the morning commuter traffic started to fill the highway.
Keeping one eye on the road, he glanced at Kat and the jar in her lap. She kept her eyes on the thing the entire time, occasionally calling out to turn left or right. In the dim interior of the truck, he saw that the soft green glow he’d seen when she’d first started the spell—or whatever it was called—was still there. The illuminations rippled and grew brighter every now and then, and the paper clip would thump the glass a little more energetically, but he had no idea what the thing was trying to tell them. He left that for Kat to translate.
“Does that thing tell us how much farther we have to go?” Connor asked.
He wondered if maintaining the spell was as taxing on her as it appeared. Because she was looking more exhausted by the minute. He’d come damn close to telling her to shut it down half a dozen times already. He wanted to find Cheyenne, but not at the cost of Kat’s life. The only thing that held him back was the knowledge that she’d probably tell him to pound sand if he tried to dissuade her. So short of chucking the jar out the window, there wasn’t anything he could do.
“It’s a paper clip in a jar with a Find Me charm stuck on it, not a GPS tracker,” she said with a soft snort. “We’ll know we’re close because the clip will start going haywire trying to get out of the jar. That’s all I got for you.”
