Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,60
hunters who’d shipped him off to that cage I’d rescued him from.
I strolled around the block and down the driveway beside the used furniture store next door. Cutting across the parking lot took me straight to a rather imposing steel door at the back of Meriden’s apparently former workplace. Thank galloping gremlins that something about the process of melding iron into steel seemed to diffuse its repulsive effect on most shadowkind.
I glanced around to make sure no one was hanging out nearby to see me, pulled on my gloves, and tried the handle. It didn’t budge.
Huh. I’d expected the trio to make it there before me. An uneasy quiver ran down through my gut. I looked around again, bracing myself to run—and the handle jerked over with a metallic crunching sound from the other side.
Before I could bolt, the door swung open to reveal Thorn’s own imposing visage. The handle from the other side of the door, broken and twisted, dangled from his brawny hand.
“The place has some fancy-pants locks we couldn’t manage to open without a certain amount of destruction,” Ruse said with a baleful look toward the taller guy. “I tried to suggest to this lunk that we make sure you thought it was wise to literally break our way in before going ahead.”
Thorn was already motioning me in with an urgent sweep of his arm. “We’d have drawn much more attention standing around outside discussing the matter—or leaving her out there wondering what had befallen us. She’s in now.”
Snap peered around the storage room I’d joined them in. “It doesn’t look as if anyone’s come by here in a long time.”
The shelving units that filled the space were mostly empty, the few bedraggled cardboard boxes that remained holding nothing that revealed more than what type of printer paper the business had used. The date on a shipping label informed me that particular package had been delivered five years ago.
Had this place been empty that long? My hopes sank even further.
The storage room opened up to a hallway lined with interior windows. The rooms on the other side appeared to be labs with gleaming metal tables and fridges next to open spaces that held nothing more than scuffs on the floor suggesting there’d once been other equipment there. Only muted light filtered through the tiny, high outer windows set with frosted glass. A bitter chemical odor hung in the air.
Thorn got us into one of those rooms with a similar trick with the lock—if you could call brute strength a “trick.” Inside, Snap crouched down by the scuff marks. The first flick of his tongue provoked a wince that echoed through his entire slim body.
“Silver and iron,” he said, his voice gone tight. “There were cages here.”
The kinds of cages that would only be used to hold shadowkind. The sword-star bunch had removed the obvious evidence, but they hadn’t counted on a being with Snap’s skills checking out the place.
“Can you pick up anything else about them—what sort of shadowkind they were keeping?” Ruse asked.
Snap took another tentative taste and shook his head with a shudder. He moved on, sampling the air over and around the table and then the fridge. His beautiful face tensed with a frown it was painful to see.
“I can’t taste much about the people who used this room,” he said quietly. “But they were doing something with—something to—shadowkind creatures. Something that hurt.”
Thorn’s hands clenched at his sides. My own fingers had curled into my palms. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t have guessed that whoever had taken their boss—and probably come for my Auntie Luna as well—had nefarious purposes, but if they’d operated out of this building, there was no doubting their intentions now.
We checked each of the lab rooms in turn, even though my stomach knotted at the growing strain that showed in Snap’s demeanor. The impressions of whatever awful experiments he was having to glean became worth it when he straightened up from a cabinet in the last room with a brilliant grin.
“I saw it! Someone who opened this recently—however recently they were last working here—had that star symbol with the swords on the folder he was holding.”
“We’re definitely in the right place, then.” I glanced at the pale walls around us with another shiver of uneasiness. “Meriden must be our guy.” But so far we hadn’t seen anything here that could lead us closer to him.
“The front of the building had more… debris,” Thorn said. “Something there might give us