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I touched her arm and said, “I’m going in.”
“I’m not sure that’s wise—”
“We don’t have time to wait,” I repeated, and walked away. Her frustration followed me, but she remained put. There were advantages to not having to follow protocol.
And it wasn’t like I needed directions to find my brother. Even in a room filled with a riot of different and delicious aromas, I could smell both him and his aftershave. The latter was especially strong, and a strange and probably expensive aroma that was a mix of cigar smoke, old leather, and lavender. He’d had it when he’d made his grand appearance in the café, though at the time, my olfactory senses had taken a back seat to the sheer shock of finding him standing there.
I hurried through the various tables and strode toward the stairs at the rear of the building. Some sort of warding shield guarded the top step, but it wasn’t a particularly intricate one, and it took me all of five seconds to disconnect it.
A waiter appeared from a side room and planted himself in front of me. I clenched my fists against the instinctive urge to push him aside and stopped several feet away.
He offered me a cool smile. “May I help you, miss?”
“We’re with the high council.” I motioned toward Saska, who was currently talking to a woman I presumed was the manager. “We need to speak to Julius Marlowe as a matter of urgency.”
“I’m afraid that’s imposs—”
The rest of his sentence was lost to a gigantic whoomph. He immediately spun and made a dismissive motion with his right hand—no doubt to deactivate the warding spell I’d already dismantled—then hurried down the stairs. As I ran after him, the shouting began, from both behind and below.
Thick dust billowed up the stairs, catching in my throat and making me cough even as visibility dropped to almost zero. The waiter stopped so abruptly that I cannoned into him, sending him tumbling down into the fog.
I swore and cast a light spell. It bobbed a few feet in front of me, highlighting the bits of plaster and wood fibers floating in the air. It suggested that a wall or a ceiling might have come down, but the fog itself was too thick to be natural. There was magic behind it, magic that didn’t feel dark but wasn’t entirely light, either.
I found the waiter sprawled at the bottom of the steps, his face etched with pain as he cradled his left wrist.
“You able to move?”
He grimaced and accepted the hand I offered him. Though he was bigger than me, I had no trouble hauling him upright. What I could see of his face in the dusty gloom said he was in a lot of pain, but he didn’t swear, and that was more than I probably would have done in his shoes.
“Our guests—”
“I’ll check on them. You need to get upstairs and get that wrist seen to. My colleague will have called in help.”
He gripped the handrail with his good hand and began to climb. I ran on. While the lights were on, they weren’t having much impact. People appeared out of doors to the left and the right, somewhat resembling bewildered brown ghosts. I ordered them to evacuate and pointed them in the right direction but didn’t stop.
The bobbing light revealed a final door down the far end of the hall. Magic swirled around its frame, the color light, clean, and vaguely familiar. Juli’s magic, I suspected. It had the same sort of energy pulse as my father’s.
I was ten feet away from the door when a woman screamed, and the thick scent of fresh blood flooded the air.
I stopped abruptly, my gaze sweeping the door and the spell that blocked my entry. It was intricate and all-encompassing, and I simply didn’t have the time to dismantle it.
The woman screamed again, the sound accompanied by an odd thumping, and a deep, deep rumble that had the hairs along the back of my neck rising.
It was a sound I knew. A sound I’d heard more than once back in the reservation. A warning to back off or suffer the consequences.
I was running out of time.
Or rather, that woman inside was.
I gathered the inner wild magic around my right hand and flung it, as hard as I could, at the wall to the right of the door.
Unlike the door, it wasn’t protected by magic.
The tumbling mass of threads and power punched straight through the wood paneling and the wall frame, spraying wood and dust back into the room while giving me direct access and a direct view.
The rumble I’d heard had indeed come from a werewolf, and he was a big motherfucker.
Bigger than Aiden, even.
