Page 19 of Cast in Shadow
“What about drones? Is there anything in the area we can hijack?” With the attack hours in the past, I seriously doubted Megan would still be in the area, but I would feel a hell of a lot better if we could get the lay of the land before I sent a team out.
Dennis was back to staring at the screen and Megan’s eerie eyes. It was that, or he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the grayscale gore strewn across the ground behind her.
I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. When that didn’t help, I leaned forward and hit the escape key on his keyboard. The video blinked out, and he leaned back in his seat, letting out an uneven breath. “Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Now, get to work finding a drone with a camera. Nguyen, you’re with me.” I gave Dennis’s shoulder another squeeze, then headed through the door.
A misplaced shadow and black eyes meant she’d aligned herself with powerful dark magic, the kind that once a witch gave into it, there was no pulling her back. The question was, where did it come from? She might have made a deal with a crossroads demon, but they made themselves damned hard to find in our world. And if she had managed to track one down and offer up her soul in exchange for power, there would be no reason to attack innocent campers.
No, this was something else.
“Was that a possession?” Nguyen asked, following me out and down the hall.
“Maybe.” If it was, wemightbe able to untether her from whatever the hell she’d teamed up with before it burned through her soul and took her body as its permanent host,assuming it hadn’t already. But that was a big might. Especially since exorcising a demon could only be done by a more powerful demon. “Have we had any luck figuring out her motive?”
“We have a couple of theories,” he grumbled.
Which meant no.
If she was power hungry, I could see summoning a lesser demon, but sure as hell not letting one possess her. Most of the demons in our realm with the ability to possess didn’t wield enough power to do it without invitation. Unless she’d summoned the wrong one thinking she would be strong enough to control it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen a witch make that mistake.
The alternative was that she’d stolen so much magic that it was dragging her into the darkness.
“Let’s keep working on the why,” I said. “In the meantime, we need to see if we can figure out exactly how much her power has grown.”
Nguyen grunted something unintelligible behind me, but I didn’t turn around. By the time we got to the Jeep, he’d grabbed two more agents to join us and had us all outfitted in black tactical gear.
“I’m driving.” I held out my hand for the keys.
His eyes narrowed for a beat, then he tossed them to me. I probably could have been a little nicer about it, but I was in a mood and still a little miffed about our disagreement over the shifter girl. Or maybe I was frustrated because it had been two days since she’d gone on the run, and we hadn’t found any sign of her. Or it might have had something to do with the fact that I’d spent the last two days on edge, waiting for Emerson to reappear, and my nerves were raw.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the night he’d gotten into my head, but he was still there, nudging at my mentalbarriers. He wasn’t done with me, and one way or another, he would find me again. I could feel the inevitability of that fact in my bones.
With everyone piled in, I rolled us quietly out of the parking structure. When we were a few blocks away, I put the pedal to the floor. “Dennis, you there?”
There was a crackle over my earbud before his voice came through. “Here. We’ve got control of two drones, and we’re scanning the area now.”
“Good. Let me know if you find anything.”
“Roger Dodger.”
Nguyen shook his head. He was kind of a stick in the mud when it came to protocol and processes. Dennis wasn’t. Granted, he wasn’t exactly a wild card like Shay, but he didn’t always follow the rules, including over the radio.
“You know he does it to get under your skin, right?” I asked, not glancing over to see Nguyen’s expression. My eyes were on the road and everything else around the Jeep as I weaved us through traffic.
“How hard is it to follow basic communication procedures?” he grumbled.
“It’s not. I’m pretty sure that’s the point.”
He leaned his head back against the headrest until we hit a pothole the size of a tire, sending the Jeep veering over the white line and onto the rumble strips on the shoulder. He scrambled for the grab handle beside his head and shot me a menacing glare. “You are never driving again.”
I got us back on the road in under two seconds. Still, when I dared a glance over, his jaw was screwed so tight it was pulling the muscles of his neck up with it.
“Dennis, any luck?” I asked.
“Nothing yet. I flew them over the site of the attack and spiraled out from there. It looks like she’s in the wind.”
“Keep looking.” If she was out there waiting to ambush more unsuspecting victims, I wanted eyes on her.
