I ran out the door and briefly scanned the corridor, thankfully not seeing the manager. Hopefully he’d made it into the lift and to safety rather than being taken out by a third shadow. I went right, found the stairs, and cautiously pressed the door open. No one jumped out at me. No shadows attacked.
I walked over to the railing and looked down. I couldn’t see either of the men and had no sense of their presence or their magic.
Then a footstep whispered through the air. The bastards had gone up, not down.
“Jack, they’re on the roof. You got anyone who can get in the air?”
“No one who can get there in time. What about Ginny?”
“Even if she has been released from hospital, she’ll likely be out of it with painkillers.”
I grabbed the railing and ran up, taking the stairs two at a time, though I already knew I was going to be too late to stop these bastards. If they’d headed up, then they were either some kind of bird shifters—unlikely given a shifter’s energy usually looked different to a human’s—or had prepared a quick escape earlier. There was no other reason for them to risk being trapped up there.
I reached the final flight and yanked the exit door open, but didn’t immediately run out. The roof area directly ahead was a forest of solar panels, while aircon towers sat to my right. The hazy figures were nowhere to be seen, but their magic was here, a dark trail of power that made my skin itch. I eased out of the stairwell and went left, keeping as close to the wall as practical. The density of the spell, whatever it was, was increasing, but I resisted the urge to hurry. I might be a witch, but I didn’t have the training to counter the sheer power being raised on this rooftop.
And yet, I had this weird feeling it wasn’ttheirmagic, even if it echoed with the same darkness that had cloaked their bodies.
I reached the corner of the building, paused briefly, then darted around. More solar panels filled the space between me and the building’s parapet. I couldn’t immediately see the two men, but as I took a step forward, the air to my right shimmered.
They were standing atop the parapet; one stepped out and disappeared downward. The other turned, the shadows around him shifting long enough to show the salute he gave me, then he too dropped from sight. I swore and ran through the sea of solar panels to the edge of the building. There was no sign of them. Not in the air, not on the ground.
I hit the earwig again. “Jack, the two men just leapt off the building and disappeared.”
“Winged shifters?”
“Don’t think so. A spell was cast before they leapt, and it was a monster.”
“Some sort of transport vortex, then?”
“Possibly, though I never finished spell studies and can’t say for sure.” I turned and walked back to the stairwell. “I’ll go check the apartment and see what they were up to. You might want to call off the cavalry, given our suspects eluded us.”
“You sure? Said suspects might have left a nasty spell surprise or two.”
“Someone was definitely spelling, but I doubt it was meant to trap anyone but the two women.”
And having said that, I’d probably find myself snared in a handful of them.
“Rescinding requests for police help now,” Jack said.
I trundled down the stairs but paused once again at the apartment’s doorway, looking for any telltale signs of spells. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything, but the first stranger had certainly been up to something nasty in the bedroom, so that was the best place to start.
I tugged out another set of gloves and put them on, then got out my phone and hit the Record button; auditing was all well and good, but sometimes it was better to also have a physical record of your actions at a crime scene. And thiswasa crime scene, even if none of the women were here. I walked over to the bedroom door, which had slammed closed after the stranger had barreled through it, and warily pushed it open.
Francesca lay naked on the bed, half curled into a fetal position.
She wasn’t asleep.
She was dead.
Murdered.
ChapterThree
It wasn’t the absence of life light that told me that. It was the blood. It drained from the ruins of her chest, stained the white sheets, and dripped lazily into an ever-widening pool of crimson at the base of the bed.... There was so damn much that I couldn’t believe it had all come from her.
I swallowed heavily against the rise of bile and forced my feet forward. I’d seen death before, in very many different guises, but I’d never seen one like this—one where the body had been so brutally butchered while the victim’s expression remained locked in serenity rather than terror.
Had she been magicked? Drugged? It surely had to be one or the other, because why else would her expression be so serene when some bastard had punched a hole into her chest and ripped her heart out?
