“Did they work out what caused the fire?” Madoc asked sardonically.
She snorted but shrugged it off. “Protocol. I told the detectives on the case they couldn’t go in until we’d finished securing the building. There’s some risk of collapse still. I doubt health and safety is much of a worry for you, though.”
Madoc used some air to chuckle along with her, even though she was wrong. The thought of being buried under burned timbers, the charred smell worked into his clothes and his lungs filled with splinters and smoke, picked at his brain to release stale, aged adrenaline.
He remembered what the apples smelled like when they burned. The weight on his back. How long he screamed for.
No. Not useful.Madoc pushed the memories down, dragged the scented taint of smoke back from his brain like a recalcitrant dog, and headed into the kitchen.
Smoke eddied up from stubborn spots of char on the ground, embers still dull red despite the drip-drip of water that ran down the walls and soaked into the floor. Linoleum curled up in black, withered scabs on the floor that cracked under Madoc’s boots.
Desecration smelled like burned apples and piss. Madoc was barefoot, his soles gouged by charred splinters as he staggered through the remains of the first home he’d ever had. Where his first love—
Madoc shoved the old memories away with a flash of frustrated anger, wedged them back into the overflowing cupboards of his mind. One benefit of a long life should surely be the ability to forget, or at least take the edge off, old injury.
He thought of Took instead—the sharp brain hidden under that golden scruff, the taste of his skin, the tickle of an unexpected laugh against his throat, the secrets and unexplained silences. The jag of lust and frustration was enough to drag him back into the here and now as he headed into the other room.
The echoes of the Arons’ murder were gone, wiped out by this fresh violence. The plaster walls were cracked and the wooden floor burned down to concrete in a wide, black ring where the Molotov cocktail had landed. He scuffed the edge of his boot over the blackened rim and the wood crumbled into cinders under the weight. He wondered if the owner—an aunt, he thought, in Detroit—would be glad to see it go. Or would it sting to see the loss of the last thing her family had left behind?
Madoc shrugged off that thought—it was perilously close to brooding about his past—and started a cursory search of the space. Cracked walls, ruined floors, a house that—historical significance aside—would likely have to be taken down to the foundations and built up again. There were some signs of a termite infestation in the cavities of the cracked open walls, but that didn’t seem like such a worry anymore.
It certainly didn’t seem like a reason for Hunters to want to burn it to the ground, especially not when their overkill approach would have taken out a whole street of the breathing, mortal citizens they claimed to protect.
Madoc paused on the way to the stairs. He claimed that he wanted to find the children, so maybe he should start in the place where he knew one had been?
He backtracked into the kitchen and crouched down in front of the counter. The doors were blistered and melted into place. Madoc dug his nails into the warped seam of the door and pulled. It cracked and groaned as he forced it open.
The revealed cupboard was smoke-stained and still a pathetically small space to imagine an eight-year-old wedged into as she tried to hide. Fire had buckled the sides and cracked the back of it, and there were burn marks on the Formica where the counter above had burned. The base of the unit had fallen through completely, and something metal glittered in the torn linoleum underneath.
Madoc reached in and brushed the ashes and debris out of the way. He peeled back the stiff, brittle flooring in cracked shards until he could see a long, metal lid sunk into the floor. It was, he supposed, big enough for a child to hide in. Or to think they could.
VINE hadn’t missed this—it hadn’t been their case—but someone on the local police had. He wondered bleakly, after the fire truck last night, if it had been deliberate.
“You okay?” Kendall yelled from outside.
“Fine,” Madoc gritted out. A cursory examination of the box didn’t reveal any obvious way to get into it. He supposed that he should wait for CSU to cordon off and deconstruct the area, record each step as they removed the box. However long that took.
Or….
Madoc stood up and wrenched the countertop off the wall. He tossed it aside—the heavy length of pressed board cracked as it hit the wall—and went to work on the cupboards. Screws screeched as he wrenched them out of the concrete floor and revealed the four-foot-long metal box that had to have been installed as a feature of the kitchen.
“Hey!” Kendall snapped as she pushed through the door, hard hat on and gloves tugged over her hands. “You want this place to come down on your head? Keep doing that.”
“I intend to,” Madoc said. He kicked a metal pipe out of his way and straddled the box. “Get out.”
“This is my—”
“Get out,” he repeated coldly as he bent down and dug his fingers into the concrete. “Or stay. It’s up to you.”
It cracked under the pressure he put on it, splinters of it dug into his fingertips and under his nails, and gave way in divots. After a moment Kendall took the path of least resistance and retreated. Her voice rose angrily outside as she radioed in for backup. Madoc ignored it. There was only half a house left as it was. If it came down, it wouldn’t kill him. Maybe it would even be for the best. There had been enough horrors associated with this address, and Madoc suspected he was about to add another. Better to rip it down and salt it clean.
He clenched his jaw and wrenched at the box. The concrete groaned audibly under the strain and then cracked in deep, jagged fissures that fractured out under the ruined linoleum. One hit the wall and spiderwebbed up through the plaster and the few tiles left on the wall popped loose. Heat spread across Madoc’s shoulders as he dragged the box one reluctant inch after another out of its grave. It finally came free with a brittle crack as the bolts sunk into the floor snapped off at the roots.
There wasn’t much weight to it once it was free of the concrete. Madoc could have tucked it under his arm to carry it out. Instead he cradled it carefully to his chest as he carried it outside to lay it down on the ground.
“Fuck. Me,” Kendall muttered succinctly. She walked forward to peer at the box. “What the hell is that? Some sort of safe?”
Madoc ran his fingers along the edge of the box. There was an electronic combination lock on the top, or there had been. Even if the fire hadn’t gotten to it and the plastic screen and black rubber buttons weren’t a clotted mess, he didn’t have the patience to play Took with passcodes. Luckily he didn’t need to.
