“Alright,” I said reluctantly.
I told him about Mrs. Chen’s phone call on the elevator ride to the first floor and what Arthur had told me.
Samuel frowned. “I better brief Cornelius.”
He called the fae on the drive home.
Dinner was a small affair. Victoria had gone out for a social function and Hugh was nowhere to be seen. Nora had just served dessert when Bo rushed in from the garden, his tail wagging in a way that meant he had something to report. He parked himself next to my chair and got distracted by my creme brûlée.
I waited a moment. “You look like you had something to say?”
Bo gave me a preoccupied glance. “Oh. Yes, I did. I talked to Marshmallow just now on our social howl.”
He focused on the dessert again, a bit of drool escaping his jowls. I carefully moved the plate away. Samuel sighed.
Bo licked his chops and gave the creme brûlée a sad look before gazing at us. “You know how my caninecircle mentioned that weird stuff going in the old industrial district lately? The lights and the vehicles?”
I nodded.
“Rosie told Marshmallow that Gigi, the cemetery groundskeeper’s poodle, has been sniffing around down there. Her owner jogs through that area sometimes so she decided to investigate.” Bo’s ears twitched. “She said one of the old warehouses smelled bad. Like, really bad. Not dead-animal bad. More like”—he searched for the word, his nose wrinkling—“scary bad. She said it was the kind of smell that makes your fur stand up and your legs want to run the other way.”
My wolf went very still. So did Samuel.
“Did she tell Rosie the location of that warehouse?” my alpha asked sharply.
“From the way Marshmallow described it, it’s probably the building on the corner of Porter and Ninth.” Bo wagged his tail hesitantly. “The one with the busted windows and the loading dock. Gigi said she’s too scared to go near it now.” The Husky studied me with serious eyes. “I think it might be that nasty magic we smelled at the clinic and in that fae-witch’s house.”
24
CREEPIER AND CREEPIER
It tookan hour to assemble everyone and make our way to the old industrial district a few miles beyond the Crossroads. I told them about Mrs. Chen’s sighting before we set off.
“Esmeralda Thornwick?” Didi asked sharply.
I nodded. “Nothing’s confirmed yet, of course.”
Samuel drove the Bentley. Didi rode shotgun, her hands already crackling faintly with defensive wards. Gavin clutched a fire extinguisher in the back seat between Bo and me.
Barney followed in his own car, the vampire having declared that he refused to be crammed in with “a dragon newt who was a fire hazard and a dog who’d been rolling in something dubious.”
Bo had protested the accusation in vain; both Samuel and I could smell Nora’s vegetable patch on his fur.
The warehouse on the corner of Porter and Ninth looked abandoned. It was a squat brick building with acorrugated metal roof, half its windows boarded up and the other half shattered. A rusted loading dock jutted from one side. The parking lot was cracked concrete and weeds.
Bo refused to get out of the car at first.
“My legs don’t want to go over there,” he whimpered, pressing his belly flat against the seat.
Gavin looked like he was having similar thoughts.
I could understand why. Even from the parking lot, my wolf was bristling. There was something in the air around the place. A sticky residue that coated the back of my throat. It tasted like copper and despair and felt worse than what I’d smelled in Melody’s home.
“Stay close,” Samuel warned as we approached the loading dock, his eyes glowing amber.
I could sense his wolf under his skin.
Didi raised a hand toward the building and murmured something under her breath. Her pupils flickered with an eerie light.
