Jahla took another deep breath and hesitated as she tried to think over what possibly could have happened. Realizing Ollie may need her help if whatever happened was witch-related, she did the only thing she could…she lied. “I’m there now. We are dealing with the situation, just give us a day or two to figure things out.”
“You’re there?! Let me talk to Ollie! Or maybe I should just come in?”
She cringed at the idea. Whatever was going on, Ollie was likely stressed, and Elias turning up would just add to it.
“No, no, stay home. Ollie is busy at the moment and can’t come to the phone. But like I said, give us a few days to sort things out. You will know what happened soon enough.”
The man let out a frustrated huff. “Fine, fine! Just let me know as soon as you can. Bye!”
Jahla sighed as soon as Elias hung up. She stared blankly for a moment before trying Ollie’s phone.
“Fuck,” she swore when it went straight to voicemail. Tossing her phone on the sink, she rushed to get ready, because the sooner she could leave the better.
“May you find what you are looking for in life, Harbinger. Though I do hope, in the end, you find your way back to us,” Samuel stated.
Noble Vincent rolled his eyes at the comment and hung up, not bothering to respond. ‘Looking for’? Ha—he wasn’t looking for anything. He was more just planning to shift his focus from indiscriminately murdering witches, to protecting one little witch that he was too selfish to let go of. There was, however, the question of ‘now what?’, considering his lack of an actual life outside of hunting.
Powering off the phone, Noble took the time to pull out the sim card, as Red sat there watching him. The black Bombay cat with white paws looked bored. Crushing the small card, he pocketed both that and his now useless phone. He’d melt themboth down later… Though, he probably would need to get a different untraceable phone…soonish.
“So, that’s it? You’re no longer a hunter?” the familiar asked.
“Yeah, killing Mikael was my last task.”
“Loyal bunch, aren’t you?”
Noble chuckled. “As loyal as a bunch of serial killers can be.”
Red just snorted in response.
His gaze flicked around the room, before zooming in on just one of the small cameras affixed to the ceiling, as he asked, “Have you taken care of the surveillance footage yet?”
“Yes. I did it at the same time I sent the messages about the library closing. If anyone checks, it should appear as if the system glitched. Luckily, the system is closed off, and the footage isn’t actually sent anywhere else.”
He frowned. “Did you leave any of it behind to explain the damage?”
“Too much of it was questionable.”
“I doubt he’ll be able to go through insurance anyway, but he is still going to need to explain everything in some sort of way. So…what excuses are we coming up with?”
Red tsked. “If he avoids people long enough for the bruises to heal, we likely could get away with saying a pack of coyotes broke in?”
“It’s as good an excuse as any, I suppose,” Noble mused, before eyeing the circular-ish black scorch marks on the wooden floor. It was the exact spot where Ollie had been standing while on fire as he taunted and played with Mikael. “You really can’t just magic it away?”
“I feel I really shouldn’t have to say this, with you being what you are, retired or not, but the thing about arcane fire, or magical anything really, is that usually the residue is a pain to clean up. Our best bet is scrubbing, or in this case, sanding may be better, since it’s wood.”
He shrugged. “To be honest, I’ve never actually attempted to clean up magical residue. Anytime it was questionable, I would just take care of it with more fire, after cleaning whatever bodily fluids I could. Though, in the old days, we’d do the bare minimum with the latter since the technology wasn’t exactly there yet.”
Noble’s gaze flicked to the claw marks on the floor. While the deep gouges in the wooden floorboards were a problem, the bigger issue was the darkness that spread about three inches around the marks, as he knew it was rot. “What about the claw marks? Those aren’t going to buff out.”
“They won’t. The wood has rotted. And we won’t know how deep it goes until part of it is removed. Which is what I assume we will have to do to fix it. Cut the area out and replace it.”
“If we are going to have to replace one part already, wouldn’t it be better to replace both?”
“Possibly,” Red mused. “I don’t actually know what they will do to fix it. Cutting part out makes the most sense to me, mainly as Ollie will most likely want them to do whatever they can to keep as much of the old floor as possible, due to it being original.”
That made sense, he supposed. Noble wrinkled his nose as he eyed the rest of the room. The blood had been cleaned up, and the body was gone, but the rest of the broken shit had been left behind, which included quite a bit of glass fragments from the lamps Ollie kept on the tables.
It was one of the larger rooms, with one double-door opening, and a single door that broke up the shelves on the wall to the left. Bookcases lined all the walls, and while they didn’t go up to the ceiling, as they had carved wooden designs above each, they went up high enough to need a ladder to reach the top two shelves.
