Page 57 of At the Mercy of Midnight
Amelia stepped in beside him, scanning the wreckage.
“This doesn’t look like a robbery,” she said quietly, “it looks ransacked. Like they were looking for something.”
Silas knelt near a collapsed bookshelf, brushing away shards of what had been a Wayglass. “I wonder if they found what they wanted.”
He crossed to Fabian’s chair, the one he had sat in during their visit. It was tilted, one of its legs broken. Silas crouched beside it.
His fingers grazed a strange mark scorched into the floor.
It wasn’t blood.
It was a glyph. Jagged, burned into the stone as though made hastily. A crude line ran across it, reversing it. His palms tingled as he looked at it, like something writhed beneath his skin, before disappearing again.
His brows furrowed. “A warding glyph, but it’s slashed. Broken.”
“Do you think he cast it?”
He swallowed, glancing to where she hovered above him, anxiously tugging at her fingers. “I think he tried.”
Amelia looked around uneasily. “Do you think he’s…gone?”
Silas glanced at the rushed glyph, possibly a last-ditch effort for protection. He stood. “I think so. Perhaps, then…they did find what they were after.”
They searched the room quickly and quietly. Cabinets, drawers, beneath the tables. Amelia uncovered one of Fabian’s hand-drawn maps of the Rift, half-burned and stabbed through with a knife.
There was no sign of Fabian.
No body, no note. Nothing.
It was as they were leaving that they found anything of interest.
A single scrap of paper, jammed under the corner of the toppled desk near the tilted door, as though it had fluttered there in the chaos.
Silas retrieved it, turning it over to reveal a symbol. Twin blades crossed over one another, a half circle encasing them both, cradling them together. His breath caught. “Winslow.”
She took the paper, eyes scanning the symbol before she looked up and whispered, “do you recognise this?”
“No,” he said, staring at it, “but it looks an awful lot like—”
“Our blades,” she finished.
Silas folded the paper, slipping it into his coat pocket. “It seems someone other than us are aware of their existence.”
They looked once more at the wreckage of Fabian’s store. His heart turned over, wondering what happened to the odd mage. His eyes strayed to the protective glyph on the floor. Next to it was a scorch mark on the weathered floorboards that ended in a burn-mark in the shape of a hand.
Nothing about the situation was clear, except perhaps one thing.
Fabian hadn’t run.
He’d fought.
And lost.
That afternoon, Amelia leaned against the bookshelves, arms crossed, watching Silas pace before his blackboard, brow furrowed in thought. His fingers twitched occasionally at his sides, like his hands were reaching for something invisible.
He had a renewed surge of determination in the wake of finding Fabian’s shop ravaged. Especially after alerting the authorities, and having it called a ‘low priority threat’.
It all zinged through him, rising and falling like the tides, making him antsy and frustrated.
