Were we dealing with four men? Or concealment magic? Though, if it were the latter, why wouldn’t the two women have sensed its presence and shown at least some concern? Unless this was all part of whatever game Monica was playing.
Of course, if that were true, then either something had gone seriously wrong or neither of these two women had been aware of the extent of it. Otherwise, why would they so blithely head upstairs to their deaths?
As the four waited for the lift, the two men half turned, looked directly at the camera, and smiled in a way that suggested that they knew the cameras were there and didn’t care—and that, in turn, suggested an identity check would not lead us to them.
I pointed at the two men on the screen. “Did those two come back down at all?”
The manager shrugged and fast-forwarded the tape. Five minutes later, the two men reappeared, striding out of the lift toward the exit without acknowledging the guard. But as the door opened, the tape glitched, and their outlines appeared to waver slightly.
“Freeze the tape,” I said instantly.
He did so. I leaned forward, eyes narrowing as I studied the image on the screen. It wasn’t the tape that had glitched—it was them. As the night air swept in, their bodies visually distorted. It reminded me of a computer glitch, where for one brief second, static ran through whatever image or item was on the screen.
I knew it was possible for some witches to cast their “being” forward as a distraction to make it look like they were going somewhere they were not, but such projections were generally incapable of interacting with the world. They certainly wouldn’t be able to operate a lift. Of course, the camera wasn’t pointed at the lift, so it was possible one or both men hadn’t been inside of it.
I asked the manager to print a pic of the two men, then thanked him and walked out. As I made my way back to my car, I contacted Jack yet again.
“I thought you’d quit for the night,” he said, amused.
“I have, but I just wondered—I know we’ve been monitoring Monica’s calls, but were we also monitoring the others?”
“I haven’t been, but I can certainly contact my counterparts in Canberra and ask them. Why?”
“Because I suspect we may find contact between them and the two men they were with tonight. I need you to put in an urgent request for those files, if they exist, covering the last month or so.”
“That could be a whole lot of data.”
“Undoubtedly,” I said with a grin, “but Ginny’s got nothing to do today.”
He laughed. “I shall send them to the cloud as soon as I have them. Anything else?”
“Actually, yes. Have we got anyone who specializes in runes up here? I might also need a spell tracer.”
“The RWA has the latter, but I’m not sure we’ve anyone on tap who does runes. I can enquire, if you like.”
The Regional Witch Association was a government body charged with dealing with any witch-related situation in the more remote areas of Australia, but they generally had offices in all major cities as well as most major regional centers. It was only when there was a high-profile witch involved that they called the High Council Investigators in.
“It’s urgent, of course.”
He laughed. “Of course. We’ll message once we get anything.”
I hung up again and jumped into my car. Like most sub-offices, Brisbane owned a number of apartments for interstate investigators and officials to use, some of them fancier than others. The one we’d been allocated was one of the latter, but it was in a quiet area close to a park, with a small mall nearby that had a good range of decent eateries. There were no parking spots outside the apartment block, and there was no way known I was going to park underground—it was small, dark, and infested with roaches as big as my fist—so I circled around and parked in the next street. After catching the lift up to our second-floor apartment, I keyed in the security code and pushed the door open.
“Ginny? You here?”
There was no response, but I checked her bedroom and found her sprawled on top of her bed. I grabbed a blanket, threw it over the top of her, then headed into my en suite. After finding the safe, I boosted the magic around the shard to keep it active, then secured it, stripped off, and took a hot shower. It didn’t do a whole lot to erase the tiredness, the achy muscles, or the thick sludge of siphoned energy that sat like a weight on my soul. I should have dispersed it, but it was too late to do so now. Itwouldeventually dissipate, but its stain would remain; the more life energy I “ate”—be it light or dark—without funneling it straight back out into something else, the thicker that stain would become, until it blanketed my entire being. What happened after that, I wasn’t entirely sure, because Owen had never really said anything more than it would be a bad,badmove to let it reach that state.
The sudden need to ring him hit, and I glanced at the time. It was close to four-thirty, so he was likely to be awake if not up as yet, given how early he usually went into the office.
I grabbed my phone, climbed into bed, and made the call.
It rang for several seconds before he said, “Darling girl, is there a problem?”
His voice was filled with a warm mix of sleepiness and concern, and I briefly wished I was lying beside him, tucked into his arms, listening to the steady beat of his heart. But while I did love the man, I wasn’tinlove with him, and never had been. I wasn’t alone in that, though. Ours had been an arranged marriage, one born out of necessity rather than desire, and while it had developed into something more than mere friendship, an expiry point had been written into the contract. We’d gone well beyond that date, but in the end had decided to divorce so that we could both find our forever partners. I doubted mine existed, but he certainly deserved to find someone to grow old with.
“I think there might be.”
“Work or personal?”
