Page 18 of Wicked Deeds

I extended my magic, searching for traces of demonkind, but got nothing. I twisted back to Callum. “You should go next.”

“You won’t learn if you always go last.”

Maybe not, but in this situation, I was willing to hang back. Whatever we found in the house, I’d be more use backing Lizzie and him up than trying to lead the charge.

Lizzie moved deeper into the house and Callum glided after her, moving in the silent way he always did in our training sessions. A s’ealg oiche on the hunt. Focused and deadly.

I should attempt to channel that energy. I was a hunter, too.

I followed Callum, closing the back door once I was inside. The hallway was dark without the moonlight, and I blinked, trying to get my eyes to adjust. I could barely make out Callum’s hand stretched toward what I assumed was a light switch.

“No. I don’t want to draw attention,” Lizzie said. She summoned a globe of dim light in her left hand. “This will do.”

“Ah,” Callum said, “Yes, that is sensible.” He followed Lizzie’s example and also summoned a small light, setting it to hover by his shoulder. I couldn’t do the hovering part yet, but I could summon a light to my hand, like Lizzie.

My sight adjusted to the small amount of light, showing me a central hall painted some light color that was hard to make out by the witchlight. There were two doors on each side, painted a deeper shade of whatever the color was, then the hall ended at a more open area at the front of the house.

The air was musty, like the house had been closed up for a long time. Someone might have been taking care of the garden, but no one was coming in to clean judging by the layer of dust gathered on everything and the cobwebs stretched over some of the doors.

I shivered at the sight of them. Since the bruadhsiu, spiders creeped me out. And the webs reminded me of the sticky sensation of Cerridwen’s lure. The one that had drawn an afrit in. I reached for my magic. I didn’t get the same sensation here,but that didn’t mean anything. There are many different types of afrit.

I took a few more breaths of the stale air, but all I got was dust and the fading heat of the day. None of the acid-rot smell of demonkind.

I blew out a breath, some of the tension in my shoulders easing.

Lizzie pointed down the corridor, gesturing at the doors. “Which one?”

One of them might hide a staircase, though that was more likely to be near the front. More likely the doors led to the kitchen and laundry room. Maybe a powder room and home office. The bedrooms were usually upstairs.

“Can you hear anything?” I asked Callum. His hearing was way more sensitive than ours would be. It might be smarter to check upstairs first, make sure the place was truly empty. But if it was, it didn’t make much difference what order we checked the rooms.

“No,” he admitted.

“So we take one room at a time?” I asked. “Stay together.”

He nodded. “That seems wise.”

Lizzie opened the nearest door, the first room to the left, revealing a laundry room. Washer, dryer, laundry sink with a floor-to-ceiling cabinet next to them lined one wall. A counter with cabinets above and below filled the other. They might have been white, but mostly looked grimy gray under the dust.

The appliances were covered in dust, too.

Lizzie opened the tall cabinet. Her brows drew down as she stared at the contents.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She waved a hand at the cabinet. “Whoever lived here left a bunch of stuff.”

I peered past her shoulder. She was right. The cabinet was full. Iron and ironing board, a robot vacuum on a docking station and shelves full of the random junk that accumulates in cabinets. Garbage bags, detergent, cleaning supplies.

“Well, some people are messy when they leave,” I said. “Or it could be a furnished rental?”

“Who leaves a rental empty long enough for all this dust to accumulate in this city?” Pivoting she started opening the cabinets on the other wall. They also held cleaning supplies. “I think they left in a hurry.”

“If they did, it wasn’t recently,” I said. “Let’s keep looking.”

Lizzie grimaced but nodded. With three of us, it didn’t take long to go through the cabinets. No sign of afrit or magical artifacts of any kind.

We moved on to the next room. An office but, unlike the laundry, it didn’t look well-used. There was a large desk in the far corner with the kind of starter kit office chair you buy from big box office supply stores tucked up against it. Most of the wall opposite the desk was taken up with built-in storage cabinets that, unlike the laundry, were empty. And lacking any of the scuff marks or left behind bits and pieces to suggest they’d ever been in use. I mean, if whoever lived here had vacated in a rush, surely there’d be crap in this room, too?

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