safely away from each other, we searched the dingy living room for someone who wasn’t us, but it was empty of everything except sagging furniture and a rug that was so threadbare I thought it was part of the floor, until it moved under my boots.
There were two doors at the back of the room. Nicky pushed through the one to the right, putting the door flush against the wall so nothing could hide behind it. A small kitchen looked white and tired in the light from the single window. It was cleaner than the living room, neat and tidy, all the dishes put away. I went to the last door, and before I even touched it, I felt the thrum and pull of that longing: Justine, Justine, Justine, Justine.
I motioned, letting them know it was behind door number two. Nicky held up a finger and then pointed it at the door. He could either hear or smell one person in the room. I motioned and mouthed the words one inside.
Zerbrowski nodded that he’d understood.
We were all already standing to one side of the door just in case our bad guy had a gun to go with his creepy magic. It was just standard not to stand in front of a door when you didn’t know what was on the other side. Until it was time to kick it in, and then you sort of had to stand in the danger zone of the door, which was why SWAT and other special teams had heavy shields and body armor. Of course, they were only human, and Nicky wasn’t. There was a time in my life where I might have argued about which of us got to kick the door in, but it was just good physical math to let him do it. Zerbrowski and I came at his side, sliding around the door to either wall like there was enough of us to cut the pie. Nicky did follow along the wall behind me like I’d learned in SWAT and he’d learned somewhere less formal. That left Zerbrowski on his side of the room alone, but the room wasn’t that big, so we could still cover each other and the room.
Only when we were in place and could keep each other as safe as possible did I let myself really look at the room. I mean, I’d seen that there was a small bed in one corner against a heavily draped window. There were two more windows in the far wall, but they’d been covered with plywood and then painted black so that the entire far wall was black. Between the boarded-up windows were the top and lower half of a skull nailed in place, or maybe screwed in place; it was hard to tell from here. The skull and jawbone seemed to be trapped in a nightmarish scream. Part of a left arm and then the pelvic bone were all pinned in place like some evil butterfly on display. The sound of Justine in my head was so loud I wasn’t sure I would hear anything else in the room.
There were symbols painted around the bones that I didn’t recognize, but then I didn’t do this kind of necromancy, the kind that used the dead to power your magic instead of using your magic to empower the dead. It was almost the polar opposite of what I did. The symbols went all the way to the floor on either side of a small altar that was directly below the bones.
“Where is he?” Zerbrowski asked.
It took me a second to understand he meant the person that Nicky had sensed in the room. The bones were so loud, the magic so overwhelming, that I’d forgotten that there might be a living danger in the room. It was too careless for words; I knew better than to let my power deafen me to other safety concerns. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought, until I realized that I was saying it to the same beat as Justine, Justine, Justine.
I closed up my power like folding it back into a tight fist that I wouldn’t let go of again. When I did that, I could hear other things, feel other things besides horror at the fact that Thomas Warrington was somehow still attached to his bones, still aware