enough that I could have put up a hand and touched them.
We made a careful search of the room. In places, Teag, Caliel, and Sorren had to duck to avoid hitting the low-hanging wires and the pipes that ran just inches over my head. I shivered each time something brushed my hair.
I was afraid we might find Harry’s body in a corner, overlooked by Kell’s ghost hunters. I was hoping that we’d find him holed up, stoned or drunk but alive, but I feared something much worse had befallen him. Unfortunately, Harry was nowhere to be found.
“I feel power, called and dispelled,” Caliel said. He moved up to the front with Sorren. Teag fell back to guard the rear, and I played my heavy-duty flashlight around the room. Sorren would sense any humans nearby, and some types of supernatural creatures, but I didn’t know if that included Nephilim, and I did not want to find out the hard way. Any angel fallen far enough to end up here had a rough descent.
“Someone’s done dark magic, close by,” Sorren agreed.
A strange odor lingered in the air, something I associated with an old, unpleasant memory. Then I knew what I smelled: burned meat and hair. That wasn’t a good omen.
“Look there.” Sorren pointed to a place where the dust had been swept clear. A large area, probably six feet by six feet, had been cleaned off down to the concrete, and charcoal and salt circle of power had been drawn on the stained old floor. The circle had been smudged open in one place, so whatever it was made to contain had either been freed or dispelled. I was pretty sure that anything called up in that circle was something I did not want to meet.
A black chicken feather wafted down through the air. What’s a chicken doing down here?
“Oh, oh, oh.” Caliel was standing over a blackened lump, and as we drew closer, I wrinkled my nose at the smell of rotting meat.
“What is that?” Teag asked, as our flashlights showed bits of yellow bone amid the blackened, charred surface. I saw a smaller lump nearby.
“Someone’s offered a burnt sacrifice,” Caliel said, “and whatever they used the circle to conjure, they called a Loa to help them.” He pointed to a smudged marking on the concrete. It was a veve, the elaborate drawings that were the signature of the Voudon Loa, powerful immortal beings that sometimes meddled in the affairs of humans.
“I don’t recognize that veve,” I said.
“Best you don’t,” Caliel replied. “No good reason to call that Loa. Marinette Bois Sech is cruel and powerful, and if she’s involved, we’ve got big trouble, you can be sure of that.”
“Then the things over there –” Teag asked, pointing at the blackened lumps.
“They’re the price Marinette charges for her help. A black pig and a black rooster. Burned alive.” Caliel was already drawing the veves for Papa Legba and Damballah Wedo, protective and very powerful Loas. Sorren examined the large circle while Caliel sprinkled salt and chanted, dispelling any remaining dark energy from whoever had called down Marinette’s spirit. “There’s a reason she’s feared. She does terrible things and she’s the patron of monsters. Some say she’s the protector of werewolves,” Caliel replied.
Werewolves have a patron Loa? I resolved to discuss that further with Sorren, once were well gone from this creepy place.
“What about that circle?” Teag asked. He stood with his back toward us, watching the rest of the floor to avoid being ambushed. “Did someone bring a Watcher through?”
Sorren straightened from where he knelt next to the circle. “That’s exactly what I think happened. We need to be gone from here. The sooner the better.”
“There’s another floor,” Teag said. “Kell’s people were freaked out enough after Harry disappeared and they found the circle that they didn’t try to go farther. But I found the blueprints online. There’s another subfloor, probably used mostly for storage, underneath this one.”
“All right,” Sorren said. “Let’s have a look. But we’ll make it quick.”
The upper floors had smelled of mold and dust, decay and disuse. The smell that rose from the lower floor made me think of fetid swamps in the dead of summer. Not a scent I expected to encounter indoors.
“Stop.” Sorren’s voice made us freeze in out tracks. “There’s a lot of stagnant water down here,” he said. “No idea how deep or what’s in it. But there’s something out there, and I don’t think we want to meet it. Back up slowly.