“Ezra!” Chase’s loud voice snapped him out of his epiphany. Chase and Harlan were frowning in worry, and Raum was looking at him as if he were a mystery he wanted to unravel.
“Who buried the relic in the first place?” Ezra asked, looking between his companions, matching expressions of dawning realization growing on Chase and Harlan’s faces. “The entire expedition and the outpost they made disappeared completely, lost until Simmons and his excavation team found it in themodern day. Everyone in the original expedition died, right? So who the hell was left to put the storm skull in the reliquary chest and then bury it, wrapped in chains and locked? And it was buried deep, several feet at least, and no amount of erosion and topsoil buildup over the centuries would account for its depth.”
Chase set aside the MERS laptop Grendel had issued him and reached for his phone. “Let me pull up the files we have on that. Everything Simmons had in the way of research on his excavation and the grant proposal to the university was uploaded to our system. I don’t trust him to have shared everything pertinent now that we know he was the asshole that unleashed it this time around.”
“Does it matter who buried it?” Harlan asked, though not unkindly, more genuinely confused as to Ezra’s urgency. Ezra nodded, though he held a hand out and waffled it back and forth in amaybekind of way.
“Whoever buried it did so in such a way that made it clear they knew it was dangerous, they knew it was the source of the storm, and people were dying. Whoever locked it up did their best to make it as hard as possible for it to be found again and opened, though Monica and Simmons had no magic of their own, so either locking spells were cast that long ago wore off, or it was probably a mundane human or someone of a species without overt magical abilities who buried it. It was sealed and hidden in a very non-magical way. How did that person survive the apocalypse long enough to get their hands on the skull, lock it up, and bury it? That speaks to me of either someone extremely desperate, extremely durable, or they had some working knowledge of the cursed relic and how to manage it without getting drained like Monica did when she opened the chest. Maybe a combination of all those traits.”
Ezra paused, then took a deep breath and thought about it. “I could be wrong, but my gut says that’s what happened, or closeto it.” He grimaced, then shrugged. “Or they had a fortune in nullifier charms like Simmons.”
Harlan nodded thoughtfully at Ezra’s explanation. “Someone like that might’ve known more about the skull, like its origins, or how it was made, maybe who it once was.”
Ezra nodded sharply in agreement. “And hopefully they lived long to tell others or write it down somewhere. A journal, a diary, business records if they made it back to Fort Edmonton.”
“Or maybe that person is still alive,” Raum said quietly, fingers slowly tapping on the cover of a book in front of him. “It might have been two hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean much when it comes to an immortal, or one of the sentient undead. Maybe even a fae, or an indigenous supernatural being.”
That was enough to make Ezra nearly giddy with excitement. Many different fae peoples were gifted with longevity and endurance, with physical strength and stamina that far outdid even the strongest of humans, and even if they had little in the way of overt expressions of magic like a practitioner did, they were still impressively capable and adaptable. And the knowledge of indigenous supernatural peoples of the New World was held close by the remaining First Nations peoples, and what little was known was skewed by biases from white colonizers.
“That’s true!” Ezra explained, and he flew to his feet in excitement. Lilith immediately stole his seat and sat in the warm spot.
He paced, restless, needing to move, and he watched as Chase scrolled through files on his smartphone, moving through them faster than Ezra could manage on his own.
Chase stopped scrolling, thumb stopping on the screen, and he frowned hard. Ezra knew there was nothing in the files before Chase even looked up and confirmed it. “Nothing in Simmons’sfiles. Seems like an odd oversight to have, right? He went right to the spot where the chest was buried, too, remember? There wasn’t anything around to warrant digging there, and the first hole they dug up in that random location happened to contain a reliquary with a cursed artifact of extreme power. Ain’t no way.”
Ezra nodded. “Simmons knew where it was. There is a record of it being buried somewhere, which means that the person who buried it survived long enough to write it down, or told someone else and they wrote it down, or hell, maybe Simmons talked to the person who did it face to face.” He paused, shaking his head. “I want to know how Simmons learned about the skull. That can lead us to the source of the information, and maybe even give us some insight into how to handle the storm skull now.”
“I’ve got everything the university has access to, and Simmons’ office and apartment are being searched as well,” Chase said. “We can go search both places any time you want, say the word. We’ve also requested his phone and internet use from the past year, and we can get analysts working on it ASAP. We can’t account for anything he took with him, but what he left behind we’re searching through.”
Ezra nodded quickly, his mind spinning as he thought about what to do next, and it wasn’t until someone shouted that he realized he was listing to the side and about to hit the floor.
CHAPTER TEN
RAUM
Raum lunged across the few feet between him and Ezra, catching the slimmer man as he fainted gracefully, complete with eyes rolling back in his head and face gone corpse-white. Lilith yowled and jumped down from the chair, running toward Raum as he scooped Ezra up in his arms.
“Shit!” Chase swore loudly, jumping up from the table and running over, minding Lilith at the last second, avoiding the cat twining around Raum’s ankles, crying piteously. “Is he okay? Harlan, call for a medical team.”
Raum hefted Ezra easily in his arms, the sorcerer’s weight nothing to his strength. He opened his senses and Ezra’s aura bloomed bright, vibrant shades of reds and purples, and the graying hues of an overworked body and spirit.
“Ahh. Exhaustion. He’ll be alright,” Raum declared softly, and Lilith stopped crying instantly, as if she understood. Considering how intelligent familiars tended to be, she likely did understand him to some degree. “Watch your toes, little queen,” Raum warned as he headed deeper into the stacks, carrying Ezra while minding his head and feet so they didn’t smack against a shelf of books.
He heard Chase and Harlan pounding after him as he reached the long, comfortable couch in his office and gently set Ezra down. The two MERS officers got to the door of his office and tried to fit through at the same time. Chase grumbled and Harlan stepped back, letting the smaller man slip through first.
“How do you know? Is he okay?” Chase demanded, worming his way between Ezra on the couch and Raum, who stood directly in front of it. He smiled and stepped away, letting Chase have that spot, and he unfolded a soft quilt from a nearby shelf, handing it to the officer.
“His aura shows signs of depletion, the kind practitioners get when they’ve done too much magic and drained themselves to the dregs,” Raum patiently explained, arching a brow at Chase, who glared at him in return, but after a short staring contest, unfolded the quilt and covered Ezra, gently tucking him in.
Harlan crossed his arms over his wide chest, eyeing Raum with suspicion. “You’re not a practitioner, and your file said nothing about you having medical training to read auras.”
The unspoken question was there, and Raum heard it. He eyed Chase and Harlan for a moment, then shrugged. They had the resources to learn the truth eventually if they wanted to know. “No, I’m not a practitioner. As you guessed earlier, my family lineage isn’t entirely human. Reading an aura is a skill I have acquired naturally through birthright, thank you very much. No classic villain trickery is afoot, I promise you.”
“We should get him back to the hospital,” Chase said, uncertain.
“Hospital?” Raum demanded sharply, eyebrows rising fast in disbelief. “He was in the hospital recently, and still recovering from magical depletion if this fainting spell is indicative of his current state—what the hell?”
Lilith jumped onto the blanket covering her master and sniffed at Ezra’s face, whiskers pricked forward, ears prominent, tail arched, her displeasure obvious to see.
