Page 22 of A Brighter Yellow
“Warlock magic,” she said. “Follow me.”
Anna worked her way up from the green belt toward Charlie’s house, with Ochre at her heels. He was very quiet for someone so big and not a wolf. The house was a two-story bungalow with an attic turned bedroom space and a converted basement that was now a make-shift lab. Anna kept to the fence line and the shadows and didn’t move swiftly until they were within a few yards of the house. The basement was accessed from the outside by a slanted storm cellar door. From where she stood in the shadow of a sugar maple, Anna could see that it had been smashed open.
“That’s not good,” whispered Ochre.
Anna forgot he wasn’t a wolf and rumbled her agreement. She crept forward and then darted down the stairs into the basement. Ochre followed, an arrow already nocked in his bow. The lab equipment had been smashed, and everything was in puddles and shards.
Anna rubbed her hand across her nose, dismayed by the overwhelming stink.
“Can you… uh… smell anything?” Ochre whispered, looking around at the mess.
Anna shook her head. “Charlie was working on warlock samples. I can’t tell if the smell is from the samples or from something else. Let’s go upstairs.”
“Do you want me to go first?” asked Ochre as she headed for the door to the stairs.
“Why?” asked Anna, puzzled.
“Um… I don’t know. I just feel like I should go first?”
“But bows are shit in close quarters, and I can heal fast from anything smaller than an elephant gun.”
“Well, when you put it like that, please lead the way,” said Ochre.
“You’re cute when you’re chivalrous,” she said.
“I’m going to pretend not to be insulted by that,” he replied, and she grinned.
They crept up the stairs. When they reached the first floor, Anna sniffed cautiously and realized that the stink of magic was confined to the basement. The smell of men lingered over everything, but she couldn’t pinpoint anything specifically magical that didn’t belong to Charlie. The rest of the house had been ransacked, and someone had written slut on the kitchen wall in ketchup. Anna stared at the dripping red word and began to feel some serious misgivings.
“Anything?” asked Ochre as she nosed around the living room
“I think they came in through the storm cellar door and then up here. There were two of them. One went outside. While the other one…” She gestured toward the kitchen.
She looked around the living room at the remains of the knick-knacks from the fireplace. The man had thrown them on the floor, smashing the cute angels with afros figurines from Charlie’s childhood and throwing the family photos into the fireplace. He’d also torn up two protective wards, but they had both been bound into small African palm baskets. It was hard to say if that had been a targeted attack on the magical items or just anything that Charlie loved. Unhappily, Anna picked up one of the angels and put it back on the mantle. Her wings had broken off, but they were still intact, and Anna retrieved them. She put them next to the figurine, thinking that maybe it could be fixed when Charlie came home. Then she looked at the rest of the room. The lone angel seemed like such a futile gesture compared to the rest of the disastrous scene.
“Did they leave with Charlie?” asked Ochre, doing his own survey. He had a sour expression on his face.
“I don’t know…” She hesitantly followed the scent trail and path of the debris into the hall. Then she continued upstairs to Charlie’s bedroom. Charlie’s underwear drawer had been upended, and there was a substance left on the sheets.
“I don’t think this is the warlocks,” she said, reluctantly stating the obvious. The stink in the room was disgustingly male, very human, and it made Anna want to puke a little in the back of her mouth.
“Well, whoever it was has a serious problem with Charlie,” said Ochre. He put his arrow back in the quiver. “This isn’t quite what I was expecting when we left this morning.”
Anna froze. What had he meant by that? It wasn’t what she had expected either. She had thought it was going to be a warlock problem. Obviously, it wasn’t, but that didn’t mean that Charlie was in any less in trouble. Anna felt a surge of rage. Ochre had sounded…disgusted, exactly like she’d expect his kind to act. Fucking Supernaturals never gave a damn about humans. Just because their lives were shorter didn’t make them any less valuable.
On the other hand, Ochre had stated several times that he was interrupting his life and work to be here with her. He had wanted to help with a mission that affected all Supernaturals, not help deal with a stalker. At the end of the day, Charlie was her human and not his problem. Anna’s rage was replaced by a sweep of embarrassment. She hadn’t known what Charlie’s situation was, but now it must look like she’d pulled Ochre into something that she could handle herself and wasted his time. She felt like an idiot.
Anna headed for the stairs. Charlie wasn’t OK. She wasn’t answering her phone. Her place had been trashed. It was obvious that something bad had happened. But it was the kind of bad Anna could handle herself, and she would.
“You should probably go,” said Anna.
“Wait, what?” Ochre asked, following her.
“Well, this is clearly a human problem. I’ll deal with it. I’ll go to Charlie’s work and make sure she’s OK. You’re probably wasting your time.”
“Anna, wait up,” said Ochre. He was struggling to negotiate the narrow stairs with his bow, but Anna didn’t wait. She felt stupid and angry. No one woke up one day and randomly decided to trash a girl’s house and masturbate on her sheets. This was something that someone worked up to. Charlie had been on edge the last few months, but Anna had put it down to them getting closer to the warlocks and their goals. Now she felt stupid for missing that her friend had a stalker, angry that she had let Charlie down and embarrassed that she had hauled Ochre into a clearly non-magical, creeper issue.
Anna swallowed hard, hoping that Charlie hadn’t been home for any of this. Anna hadn’t smelled any blood in the house, but Charlie had better be OK, or there was definitely going to be some blood somewhere—right after Anna put her fist into someone’s skull.
