Raised in Fire (Fire and Ice Trilogy 2)

“Healing ointments aren’t just for magical people, and very few mages can successfully do what Callie does in that arena. She can sell her stuff as beauty products, and they work ten times better than whatever the grocery market stocks. You know, because of magic. It’s that business that earns us the most. Then, of course, we are reliable, hardworking, and willing to bend to strange demands, like color-coded casings. That attracts eccentric customers, like vampires who like everything just so.”

“One of those vampires is standing right here, you know. Listening.” I grinned at Dizzy before shifting my gaze to Darius, who wore a blank face.

“All of this comes as no shock to him, I’m sure,” Dizzy said, unperturbed. He emptied another drawer on the floor before shaking his head. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything of importance in the office. This guy isn’t all that organized. He probably has the important things randomly stuffed on some shelf.”

“Like you would?” I shoved a desk drawer shut, agreeing with Dizzy. I’d found zero.

“Exactly, yes. So let’s move on to the living room or, better yet, find his work room.” Dizzy left the mess and moved to the door.

“You know,” I said, following, “the mage’s house we busted into the other night didn’t have a work room. He had a place where he kept his spells, but I don’t know where he actually made them. That should’ve occurred to me.”

“Why would it?” Dizzy led us into the living room, then glanced around. After a moment, he shook his head and started upstairs. “You don’t cast spells, so you wouldn’t think to look for the place where it’s done.”

It was a weak argument, but I let it go.

Fifteen minutes of searching the three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and we’d still found nothing.

“Was there a shed out back?” Dizzy moved to the window of the master bedroom, which overlooked the back half of the property. “I don’t remember anything besides Reagan battling a demon midair.”

“No, no shed.” Darius stood in the doorway. “We are wasting time.”

“We don’t have any strong leads,” I said, frustrated. “They are surely trying to build up power as we speak. If we head to that railway, and we’re wrong, that’s it. He’s gone.”

Dizzy gave me an apologetic shake of the head. “It doesn’t look like we have anything else, Reagan. Not a key, or a leasing agreement, or a pen, or…anything. Certainly no GPS.”

“Computer.” I blinked. “We didn’t come across a computer.”

“We’ve got her,” Callie yelled from what sounded like the bottom of the stairs. “She wants to know where to head. She’s in a small town north of here, so it’ll take her forty-five minutes to get into the city. At least.”

Urgency ate away at me. That demon would be in a blind panic to get out of the Brink. It had what it came for and knew it was in grave peril. It would be bending the mages over backward to get everything ready.

“What to do,” I said, chewing my lip.

Silence fell on the room, all eyes on me, until Callie finally yelled out, “Well?”

“Let’s go to that rail yard.” I broke for the door. “If it’s a ghost town, then we’ll circle back to the terminal, or maybe go hang that bartender up by the feet to see what else he knows. We’re running out of time.”

Chapter Thirty

“This is close to the place they dumped that other body,” Callie said as she peered out the passenger window. We slowly rolled into the mostly deserted employee parking structure at the southern corner of the huge rail yard. “It’s just across the freeway.”

“Yes, it is.” I looked at the map on my phone. “Two of the mages work within ten minutes of each other. What do you want to bet they both work night shifts?”

I tried to peer out through the opening slats of the parking structure to get a better sense of what we were getting into. Fat chance. A building stood between us and the rail lines, and if it hadn’t, there would have been an abundance of crates and cargo to block our view. This was a large rail yard that likely dealt with hundreds of shipments a day. I was no expert, but I bet someone could easily get lost in the shadows if they knew where to hide. Especially if they were the security.

“I have a good feeling about this,” I said into the quiet car.

“I feel sick.” Dizzy cleared his throat.

As Darius parked a few floors up, a long, forlorn horn sounded in the night.

“I didn’t know trains ran this late,” I said softly, letting the somber feeling of the empty parking structure press on me. I climbed from the car.

“Freight carriers certainly do,” Callie said, getting out the other side. She looked at her phone. “Penny is on the first floor.”

“How’d you get her to come?” Dizzy asked. His gaze swept the area and his hand firmly gripped the strap of the satchel that draped across his chest. His eyes settled on the exit sign on the far wall.

“I have a way with people.” Callie clearly didn’t see the irony of that statement. “She had to sneak out of the house to duck that atrocious mother of hers, but the…incident a couple of months ago left her wanting to learn. She trusts me.”

“She won’t after this,” I said, taking out my gun.

“I doubt this is going to be worse than a circle of women turning themselves into zombies, like at that mage battle.” Callie sniffed. “She’ll be fine. She’s a natural.”

I walked to the front of the car as the others started off toward the stairs. Above the wall in front of the car, which stopped at my chest, I could see a train passing below us, moving out of the vast, empty space lined with railroad tracks. To my left, on the other side of the long, low building, the tracks continued in the other direction. Leaning out, I could just make out the rail yard, lined with containers and crates similar to the ones we’d seen on the shipping port on the other side of the freeway.

“It won’t tell us much, but it’ll give us an idea,” Darius said, waiting patiently. He never seemed to feel the urgency the rest of us did. Though seeing into his head had somewhat changed my perception of that. He was a lot better at hiding his feelings than the rest of us were.

“It’s a huge space.” I backed away from the wall and headed toward the stairs, which Callie and Dizzy were already making their way down. “With the buildings, and the rail cars, and the containers… If they’re here, how are we going to find them?”

“They will be using large quantities of magic, not to mention the demon’s power. Feeling magic is your specialty, is it not?” Darius’s hand settled on my lower back. “Don’t let what happened earlier make you second-guess yourself. Learn from it, and move on.”

“Thanks, coach.” I took a deep breath, starting down the stairs. “But it’s not that easy this time. I don’t know how to defeat this thing.”

“We have three of the four most powerful mages I’ve ever met. One might not be trained, but she is a natural, as Callie said. If you immobilize the demon, they can work with us to kill it. The trick will be wiping out the mage circle before the demon escapes.”

“Yes, that will be the trick, all right.”

Penny was sitting in her car, staring down at her phone, when Callie knocked on her window. The girl, about my age, jumped and flung up her hands to cover her head.

“Step one, work on those reactions,” I mumbled as I waited with Darius off to the side.

“As I said, untrained. Give her time,” Darius murmured as Penny exited her car.

“Wait, when did you meet her? You were gone by the time we got her out of the closet at that mage battle.”

“I occasionally have business in this part of the world. Like I do in many parts of the world.”

I frowned. Cryptic. Or was this part of some greater design? Vlad had told Darius he’d give him the professional courtesy of steering clear of the area because Darius had something cooking…

I pushed the thought away. It wasn’t important right now.