Merlin's Children (The Children and the Blood) (27 page)

The second floor was in flames.

He jumped from the vehicle and took off.

Residents flooded out the door and others stood in the street, their eyes locked on the flames licking up the stucco walls. Sirens wailed in the distance and the wizards were nowhere to be seen. Skidding to a halt, he skimmed his gaze over the crowd.

The old woman and the couple were there. Dozens of other people too.

But not everyone.

He looked to the second floor.

A small hand pounded on the window of the endmost apartment.

He ran.

People stumbled from his path as he shoved through the doorway and rescued belongings went flying as he barreled between the crowd on the stairs. Protests followed him past the second story door, the noise dismissed as irrelevant the moment it reached his ears.

Smoke poured across the ceiling. Flames were devouring the walls.

Harris wrapped an arm across his mouth and nose, and ran for the end of the hall.

The heat was incredible. Everything on his body felt like it was cooking, and he could hardly breathe for the smoke. Amid the flames chewing through the cheap plasterboard, crazed scorch marks covered the walls, and charred drywall and insulation rained from holes blown in the ceiling.

He slowed, placing a hand to the door of the last apartment before grabbing the handle and hurrying inside.

Two wide-eyed faces stared up from beneath the layer of smoke, both of them crouched around a figure lying just inside the doorway.

He cursed, recognizing the young woman from a few minutes before. A gash covered her forehead, the ragged edges swelled tight, and blood laced her face till it was lost in her hair.

A shiver shook him despite the heat. She’d gone to get the groceries he’d left for her.

And then she’d gotten in the way.

Drawing a rough breath, he bent and scooped her up from the ground.

“Come on,” he ordered the kids. “Stay low and–”

“What the hell?” came a muffled voice.

He looked up to see two firemen in the doorway, their equipment covering them from head to toe. Without waiting for an answer, the nearest strode forward, taking the woman from Harris’ arms and jerking his head back toward the hall.

“This way,” the man barked from within his helmet, while his partner rounded up the children and led them from the room.

Harris didn’t argue.

Coughing hard, he rushed after them through the burning hallway. Apartment doors had been kicked open, and living rooms filled with smoke and abandoned belongings gaped back. The floor groaned beneath him, the sound almost drowned by the growl of the flames, and beyond the walls he could barely hear the sirens screaming.

Prone figures caught his eye and he slammed to a stop. His confused gaze went from the firemen to the apartment, and then his mind caught up with where he was standing.

The door had been blasted inward. He could see that from the chunks of wood flung all over the place. And the Blood had gone in fighting, given the fact the bodies hadn’t made it much beyond the living room. From the way the corpses lay, they looked like they’d tried to flee, and based upon the destruction in the hall and the residual blur of magic in the apartment, a few others had probably survived, though he couldn’t say if they’d ultimately managed to escape.

But that wasn’t the point.

He was shaking. He couldn’t stop shaking.

Five bodies. Burned. Blackened. Charred beyond recognition by the assault they’d taken.

And three of them were painfully small.

The floor cracked warningly beneath his feet, jarring him as it started to give way, and he gasped, taking in a lungful of smoke before he realized what he was doing. Choking, he stumbled from the apartment, his legs carrying him to the stairwell door. A firefighter grabbed him, muscling him down the stairs and out onto the street, and when an oxygen mask appeared in front of his face, it was all he could do to breathe.

Children.

They’d killed children.

Hands grabbed him as he tried to rise, holding him on the ambulance step.

The Blood had killed children.

“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

He blinked at the woman as she put a hand to his head and then flashed a light across his eyes.

Children.

“Sir, are you hurt?”

His gaze slid to the apartment building, watching the fire hoses rain torrents of water down on the blaze.

“Sir?”

He shook his head slowly and didn’t notice when she finally went away.

Emergency crews swirled around him while smoke billowed into the midday sky.

He pulled the mask from his face. Leaving it on the ambulance step, he walked back to the rental car. The door opened and let him into the driver’s seat, and then closed again.

His gaze fell to his jacket and the space where it hid his gun.

He couldn’t shoot them. He knew how that scenario ran. And arresting them was as much a joke now as it’d been with Ashley.

They’d murdered kids.

His eyes closed and his brow furrowed as his head began to pound.

The kids he’d led them to. The kids they must have seen when they’d come into the room and whom they could have avoided hitting if they’d really wanted. They hadn’t needed to kill them. The adults weren’t even anywhere close; not based on where the bodies lay. The Blood could have taken the children with them or, at a minimum, left them after everything else was done.

But there was nothing like the slaughter of kids to undercut your enemy’s will to fight. Sometimes, anyway.

He shook his head, the thoughts beating against the pain in his temples.

And he’d made it happen. He’d set it up. He’d used the woman being rushed to the hospital right now as a cover, as if he hadn’t known that leaving her to step into that hallway would never be safe, and he’d given up the location of a bunch of children without ever considering they might be the ones behind that door.

But he hadn’t cared. He’d just assumed…

He’d always just assumed…

That wizards could ever be the good guys. That people didn’t lie. That ninety-nine percent of their world wasn’t solely focused on their own advantage, regardless of how many innocents they had to crush beneath them along the way.

And he was so, so much smarter than that. At least, he should have been.

A rasping breath escaped him as he opened his eyes, his gaze landing on the apartment building and its wreath of hoses and spinning emergency lights.

He’d wanted to keep people safe. To protect those whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And instead, he’d ended up helping a group every bit as vicious as Ashley’s had ever been.

He wondered how many others the Blood had killed, while always telling him the Merlin were the only ones to blame.

Dragging in another breath, he looked away, his gaze tracking across the oblivious crowd watching the blaze. He didn’t know how to make it right. He was only here because no one believed him anyway. Just saying Ashley went up in flames had gotten him driven off the police force, and if he ever tried to tell anyone about the things he’d seen since, a straitjacket and a rainbow of pills would only be the beginning.

He couldn’t touch them. They operated with impunity based upon the simple fact they couldn’t be seen. And he couldn’t change that. He couldn’t make the world look past their magic, or stare at supposedly blank video for however long it took for the static to give way. Recording a confession was useless, as was filming one of their fights, and with how far off the grid they’d made themselves, he’d be hard-pressed to find anything linking them to their continent-wide swath of crimes.

His head throbbed as his gaze ran over the crisp interior of the sedan without seeing the upholstery and plastic at all.

He had nothing. Absolutely nothing. He had…

Harris paused, the tiny blur in front of him resolving into the rental company sticker at which he hadn’t realized he’d been staring.

Incredulity nearly made him laugh.

He was an idiot. The answer was right there.

Based on everything he’d seen, he had to assume the Blood used shell companies. Fake names and identification were probably considered basic necessities. In all their dealings, they’d undoubtedly been meticulous to avoid any trace that would connect to them directly, and their underworld contacts would likely put a mob boss to shame.

But everyone left a trail. Following the dead had led him to Ashley, for all that it hadn’t gone according to plan in the end. And trailing Cole’s friend had gotten him closer to finding the boy than anyone else in eight years. It hadn’t been perfect, and it hadn’t brought him success overall, but that wasn’t the point.

It had worked. And there was one small, terribly important difference this time.

He was on the inside. He wasn’t reading case reports or looking at evidence months after the crime. He was in their building, going on their raids, doing their dirty work and being ignored throughout every other part of the day.

Air escaped him as he looked back at the crowd still watching the flames.

A paper trail of private flights and car rentals between their murders could be enough to start the police looking for them. Eventually, it might even put their faces on the internet and TV. And while that wouldn’t bring back the kids they’d killed or the others who’d gotten in their way, it would make life difficult to an extreme. Every time they set foot outside the door, they’d be at risk, because even if regular folks didn’t necessarily see them, other wizards would recognize them immediately.

Though maybe, just maybe, if enough people started paying attention, they’d break through that damn invisibility.

A small chuckle slipped out and he drew a breath, reining the sound back in. Finding evidence wouldn’t be enough. He’d need more than just what the Blood had on hand if he was going to piece their little empire together in a way the rest of the world would see.

Glancing down, he picked up his phone and then hesitated.

There wasn’t an alternative. He didn’t have the resources to do this alone.

His thumb hit the speed dial.

“Hello?”

He drew a breath. “Hey, Scott.”

“John?”

“Yeah.”

The man paused, and Harris could almost picture the expressions that would have been running across his face, if not for the scars. “It’s been a while,” Malden said carefully.

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“You alright?”

It was his turn to pause. “I need to ask you something.”

“You should come back in, John.”

Rubbing his eyes, Harris didn’t answer. Silence hung between them, and then a squeaking sound carried across the line, followed by the clunk of a closing door.

“You still in the wheelchair?” he asked uncomfortably.

“Another few weeks.” A moment passed. “I take it you were getting Rhianne’s emails, then.”

“Yeah.”

The hiss of the phone connection became deafening.

“Listen, if you’d rather I not–” Harris started.

“What’s the question?”

He hesitated. “Do you still have access to the department databases?”

“You can’t–”

“It’s about the girl.”

Malden went quiet. “She’s the FBI’s problem, John,” he said with tight control. “Let them handle it.”

Harris’ gaze skimmed the crowd as he tried to figure out what to say.

“You find her?” Malden asked, an edge to the words.

He hesitated. “Close.”

A moment passed.

“You going to bring her in?”

He grimaced. “If I can.”

Malden let a breath out slowly. “Alright. What do you need?”

Harris’ eyes closed in relief. “You got a pen?”

He could hear rustling on the other end of the phone. “Yeah,” Malden said.

“Okay, take these down. Victor Jamison. Mason Brogan. Simeon Cavanaugh. Isabella Marceau. Mark Keller. I want everything you can find.”

“These people connected to the girl?”

“Very.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Scott.”

Malden scoffed. “I’ll treasure your gratitude when we’re in jail.”

In spite of himself, he chuckled before he hung up the phone. Sliding the cell into his pocket, he glanced back at the crowd.

News crews surrounded the building now, filming the destruction and interviewing firemen who would only have mundane and mistaken answers to give for the blaze.

But maybe that could change.

He started the car. Checking the traffic briefly, he pulled the vehicle from the curb and headed back for the airport.

Brogan would want to know why he was covered in soot, and the wizards would be furious he was so late, but he wasn’t concerned. Like everything else, he’d just come up with a cover story.

Harris smiled. After six months of tracking wizards through a world where no one else believed they existed, he’d gotten really good at those anyway.

“I
thought
it was this way…” Lily said worriedly as she stared out at the spruce trees crowding the roadside. “Past that big boulder that looked like a house.”

In the seat behind her, Cole made a hedging noise. “I don’t remember any boulder, and I’m pretty sure their place was a lot farther west than this. Over near Bellingham, maybe.”

Her grip on the steering wheel tightening, Ashe glanced to Spider in the rearview mirror. The girl rolled her eyes. In the two days since they’d left Banston, the boy hadn’t quit trying to slow them down. If it wasn’t comments that they were going the wrong way, it was possible attempts to sabotage the car. More than once when they paused for gas, she or Spider had spotted him lingering near the vehicle, eyeing it as though trying to figure out how to break it without either killing them all or leaving too much of a trace. Between the two of them, they’d swiftly taken to never letting him out of their sight, although that hadn’t brought an end to the incessant commentary.

Twisting in her seat, Lily looked back at him. “Really?”

Cole made a rueful noise. “I think so.”

Ashe gritted her teeth, biting back two days’ worth of frustration. With how he’d been steadily undermining the girl’s confidence, there was a good chance they were on the wrong road anyway.