Chapter 27

Chapter 27

T he day passed in a fuzzy, exhausted haze. Joy was called on for another assignation and took Willow along with her. Lilith disappeared shortly after, and Fey couldn't help but think she was finished helping them. Lilith could live without knowing why Alice had died.

But Fey couldn't.

So, she spent the day in the training gym, pushing her body to its limits. After her night with Alastair, her muscles had been pleasantly sore, but she didn't want to feel pleasantly sore today. She wanted to hurt. She wanted her body to match how she felt. She wanted to be distracted.

By the time the afternoon rolled into the evening, her muscles were a quivering mess. Finally, blissfully lost in the agony of pushing her body too hard, Fey went to the Med table on shaking legs and selected a bottle from their stock.

This wasn't the first time Fey had used training to escape her thoughts and emotions, and she'd learned the perfect combination of elixirs to dull the pain just enough that she could fight, if necessary.

She didn't want to take all the pain away, but a little something to relax her muscles so she could move again, a little something to dull the screaming in her limbs to a mild protest—that was the balance she was looking for.

Fey sighed, breaking the seal on the elixir bottle and preparing to pour it into the basin before her.

Then she stopped. Stopped, and looked at the contents of the bottle, really looked at it, for the first time in years.

She'd never bothered learning the art of making healing elixirs. Never gave much thought to how they worked, how they were made, despite being a Water Witch. That gift seemed so far outside of her own skills, so distant from what she was capable of.

Sana, head of the Water Coven, was the sort of Witch who concerned herself with healing elixirs. And Fey was no Sana.

It was easy to take them for granted. Easy to not think twice about the healing droughts delivered to their training room each week.

But tonight, her mind swimming with thoughts and fears, Fey stared at the bottle in her hand. The contents were a crystalline white, with opalescent magic swirling inside, circling within the bottle like a storm. Others on the shelves were blue, green, any color imaginable, all full of magic waiting to be released.

An elixir.

That's what it was—that's what they'd found in the warehouse. It hadn't been drugs, hadn't been a weapon.

It was an elixir. Crates upon crates of golden elixirs, gallons of the stuff. Enough to fuel an army.

Her mind reeled, and another piece of information slipped into the puzzle.

Phillip Danvers had been in the Med Witch department, hadn't he? And the Shifter Willow had met, he'd said Professor Danvers had taught Medicinal Chemistry… He would have been an expert on elixirs, would have known just as much about them and their properties as any Water Witch trained in elixir magic.

Phillip Danvers had met with Alice. Given her something, something that had shaken her.

It was all connected, somehow, wasn't it?

Fey felt dizzy.

She had to go back, back to the warehouse. Maybe there was some left, some that had survived the blast. It was a long shot, but if they had just a single bottle of the elixir they'd found, they could take it to Sana and have it identified.

She called Joy on her way back to her room, but the call rang through. She tried again, and again it rang and rang until finally clicking to voicemail.

"Joy, I need you to call me as soon as you get this," Fey said into the phone, pulling off her training clothes and grabbing her leathers. "It's all connected, the club, the warehouse it's?—"

She stopped, suddenly.

Something was happening here. Something big. And, until they had a bigger picture, until she knew what was going on, she didn't want anything recorded. Didn't want to reveal anything.

Her mouth dried.

"Just call me," she said, finally, and ended the call.

Fey slipped her phone into her pocket and pulled her mask over her face.

There was only one place she could go for answers, and she prayed to the Goddess she would find something still there.

The sun had almost set by the time Fey reached the ruins of the warehouse. She kept to the shadows, moving out of sight, until she reached the building. Or, rather, where the building had once stood.

Someone had cleaned up much of the mess they'd left, shuffling parts of the broken building into piles of rubble and debris. A few walls still stood, blackened and burnt from the explosion. The sound of the river running below was even louder now, with no building there to muffle the sounds.

The streets around the building were empty, and there were no more guards on patrol here, not anymore. Fey wandered through the piles of debris, shifting pieces of broken wood and glass with her boots, looking for…

Well, that was the problem, wasn't it? She wasn't sure what she was looking for .

But something gnawed at her, some intuition that there was something more here. Something they were missing.

There were no elixir bottles, no remnants of the ‘devil dust' they'd been sent to destroy. What remained of the building looked exactly as it should have—an abandoned, destroyed warehouse, stripped down to its skeleton.

Was there even a point to coming here? Fey moved further into the rubble, further into the remains that were still standing. There was nothing here. Nothing at all that?—

Something shifted in the debris, and Fey froze instinctually, crouching against a half standing wall and letting the shadows hide her.

Someone else was here.

More shuffling, just out of sight, somewhere deeper in the skeletal remains of the building. Then a voice.

"No, it's gone." A male voice. Gruff. "Picked clean."

Fey's breath caught in her throat, and carefully, oh so carefully, she shifted forward, moving silently across the rubble-strewn floor. It took practiced maneuvering to make her way toward the voice, keeping to the shadows for cover.

"If they were, they're long gone now."

Fey could only hear one voice, one body shifting through the rubble. Someone talking on the phone, then. She leaned closer, straining to hear the conversation. Strained hard enough that she didn't notice the small fragment of glass under her boot, shifting under her weight, until it cracked with an audible snap.

The shifting on the other side of a pile of debris stopped.

Fuck .

A shadow passed over her, blocking the golden light from the setting sun, as a figure strode around the pile and loomed over her.

"You're not supposed to be here," the figure told her in a gruff voice. It was too dark to see him clearly, with the last remains of sunlight at his back.

But sometimes it's best to attack first and ask questions later.

Fey struck, shooting up from her crouch and knocking the male backward with a kick to the chest. She didn't move to kill, didn't draw the blades strapped to her thighs. After all, she had no idea who this person was, what they were doing here in this Goddess-forsaken warehouse. They could be another lifeline, another clue as to what the fuck was going on here.

The male was huge. Big enough that her kick had only sent him stumbling backwards a few steps. But Fey was already readying herself to go again, arms up to fight.

"That was a mistake," the man growled.

And he began to shift.

Watching a Shifter change between forms is something that never gets easier with time. It never loses the horror, the twisting sickening feeling that rises in your guts. It unleashes a fear, primal and ancient, of watching a monster being born.

The man on the warehouse floor roared as his face split in two, his jaw elongating and his skull cracking open. Fur flowed out from under his skin, black and smooth, and his thick arms twisted and bent as the muscles and bones broke and reformed.

It took just a few seconds for the shift to finish, and Fey watched, horrified, as a large cat emerged from within the skin of the man in front of her.

Fey had fought Shifters before. Fought and killed more Shifters than she could count on both hands. But she was alone tonight. Alone, with no backup, no sleep, and a seven-foot Panther rising to meet her.

The Panther snarled, revealing fangs sharp and big as fingers, and crouched to pounce. There was no time to run, no time to hide.

Fuck .

She rolled as the cat struck, barely getting out of the way in time. The Shifter didn't even pause before turning to launch at her again.

It hit her with enough force that Fey felt the air rush from her lungs. The two of them hit the ground, snapping burnt wood beneath them as they fought. Claws ripped into Fey's arm, and she screamed. It was a lucky hit for the Shifter—luckier, still, that it clipped her sigil for healing, tearing through the intricate pattern.

Fey immediately felt the sigil's loss, and every ache and pain in her body roared to life. The sigils kept them strong, powerful, and healthy. Without her healing sigil, every wound she took in this fight would be slow to re-knit, slow to heal.

She managed to get her forearm up between her and the Shifter's body, pushing against his neck to keep those gnashing fangs away from her face, but the claws tore into her, ripping into her shoulder as she fought.

The damage a large predator can do in just a few seconds is immense. By the time Fey had managed to pull her blade from its sheath and bury it in the Panther's side, her shoulders were covered in deep wounds.

The Shifter yowled when the blade sunk into its side, rolling away from her and scrambling for safety. She struck it again, slicing at its ribs, until finally it stumbled and collapsed.

Panting, Fey stood. She would live. Blood coated her arms, gushing from deep wounds on her shoulders and biceps, and it would take weeks for her to heal from this without her sigil. But she would live.

The Shifter would, too, Fey realized. The Panther whimpered at her feet, close to unconsciousness, but she hadn't hit anything vital. He would live, and she might finally get some answers?—

Someone hit her hard from the side, knocking her to the ground. Something smaller than the giant cat she'd just fought. Fey turned, scrambling to her feet, trying to locate her new enemy.

But something was wrong.

The world had been caught in a gentle dusk, the slowly setting sun basking everything in a gentle glow. But now? Something was in her eyes, clouding the light, something rough and gritty. Her body was awash with pain, all her nerves alight with agony. Fey scrambled to rub at her eyes, trying to move backward away from whatever was attacking her.

Too late. A foot found her rib cage, and Fey screamed as she curled over her body in pain. She barely had time to react before she was kicked again, the force of it flinging her several feet across the soot-coated ground.

Pain wracked her body, clouding her remaining senses. Everything was darkened and shadowed, hazy as though covered in dark mist. She couldn't see the danger around her, couldn't see where the next attack might come from.

But she could see something in the distance. Even through the shadows clouding her vision, she could see the golden glow of the sun dipping below the horizon.

Below the cliffside leading to the river below.

Fey pulled her power to her, releasing a blast of air in all directions around her. A roar of pain and crash let her know she'd hit her mark.

Scrambling to her feet, Fey pointed herself to the light on the horizon and ran. Her body was hot and heavy, and something was wrong, very, very wrong. Agony flooded her body as she moved, and the air was thick and far too heavy, impossibly thick in her lungs.

Smoke, she realized.

The world was hot around her, and Fey realized the world around her was burning. She was burning.

She was on fire.

Sounds behind her alerted her to danger a moment before she was attacked, giving her just enough time to dive to the side. The world spun, smoke clouding her gaze, but Fey screamed in rage and desperation and kept running.

This would not be how she died. Not like this, not blinded and running like a coward. She wouldn't die today, she wouldn't?—

The ground below her vanished as she reached the edge of the cliff face, and with a scream, Fey tumbled down into the emptiness, down, down, down to the river below.