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“I did not,” I said as I kept going into Willa’s apartment. I didn’t have time to stop and consider what this woman thought of me, or why she was using a name for me I’d only previously heard Mrak use. My only worry now was that maybe Willa had heard the name.
Maybe she was now scared of me, too.
I shut the front door to Willa’s apartment behind me for some modicum of privacy. It wouldn’t keep that woman out if she pursued me since I’d melted the knob. But I was glad to have no one else to witness the shock and horror of what I found inside the apartment.
Willa’s living room was disheveled. Furniture had been overturned, glasses knocked over. This was a far cry from the neat and orderly apartment I’d been in earlier this week.
“Willa?” I called as I slowly entered the space. The attached kitchen was empty, the door to her bedroom open. I carefully combed through the apartment room by room, only to find all of it empty and Willa gone.
Not gone. Taken. The signs of struggle, the blood near the door. She’d clearly been kidnapped or captured, but she’d put up a fight. The latter fact was the only thing that kept me from spiraling into a full panic.
Who would take Willa? Cassius was dead, and she hadn’t been in his manor when we’d attacked. None of the vampires associated with him would have known she was involved. Except… they had known. Willa had been watched by some of his men prior to my attack. And I’dstillleft her alone here when I’d gone after Leif, and for every minute after that which had led to the attack.
Willa was strong. But could she have taken on several vampires at once?
Tears stung my eyes as they fell. Guilt tore into me. I doubted any vampires from Cassius’s community had made it out of the manor alive—not between me, Mrak, and the Lunar League. But if Cassius had sent anyone in the time between me leaving to confront Leif and the attack on his manor, Willa could have been a target.
And now she was gone.
All in all, the time from leaving her apartment to Mrak ripping open a portal to Kithonia couldn’t have been more than an hour, maybe two. But we hadn’t returned. I’d been unconscious, and Mrak had been one-track-minded.
Had I come back here to Willa’s apartment instead of being taken to Kithonia, maybe I could have stopped Willa from being taken.
Butwhohad taken her, and why?
Outside of Lazarus’s feeder community and all of its remnants like Cassius, Willa couldn’t have had that many enemies. The more I thought about it, though, the more I became convinced vampires wouldn’t have left so much blood lying around wasted.
If Cassius or his men hadn’t taken Willa, who had?
I glanced around Willa’s apartment. There had to be something here I could use to track her down. Willa was a witch—and a powerful one at that. Whoever had taken her would’ve had to know how to counter her spells and magic. But it also meant there were tools here I could use to find her.
I bit my lip as I looked around. I wasn’t a witch, but there were things Icoulddo thanks to learning from Willa. Runes and sigils were one thing. Tracking was another—theoretically. I’d never actually done it before.
“There’s a first time for everything,” I mumbled as I caught sight of a chest tucked into one corner. I made my way to its simple wooden frame, decorated only by some gold-inlaid protection runes. What were the chances Willa had warded this chest against me in particular?
Hopefully none. I flipped open the top without harm and grinned. “Gotcha.”
Willa had a big stash of spell supplies stored in here. I pulled out a map of the city, as well as some herbs, crystals, and a knife. To track someone, you needed something you had in common. There was only one thing I could think of that was strong enough to work.
I set up the tracking spell and all of its pieces and then rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. A shiver rolled down my spine at the sight of the vampiric bite scars on my arms. I rarely spent more than a second glancing at them when I could avoid it. Today, I didn’t have a choice.
I held the knife to one of the bite scars I knew mirrored ones Willa had—both of us had been captive to the same vampires—and gave myself the smallest of cuts. Blood seeped from the tiny wound. I recited the tracking spell, summoning just enough of my magic to carry the words into manifestation. The tiny droplets of blood swirled together, hovering over the map thanks to magic, before trailing to one area and then another. Downtown. Over Cassius’s manor. Over even where the Lunar League’s headquarters was. But the blood never touched the map, didn’t once track where Willa was, before it collapsed without intention, the spell finished.
Willa was nowhere in the city. Or the nearby region.
Willa was gone.
