“I’ll have Astrid put all the descriptions into the system and widen the search for them, then,” Wade said, swiping through his phone. “The one thing we know for sure is that they scared Marjorie into leaving, though I doubt that was their intention. I think she didn’t want to put her parents in any danger, figuring she was better off running away.”
“That’s why you want the cleanup team to wipe the Hamms’ memories,” I mumbled, putting two and two together.
“Yeah. If anything goes wrong with Marjorie, at least they won’t suffer over her loss. I know you might think it’s inhumane or whatever, but—”
“No. I agree. Given the circumstances, it’s for the best,” I said to Wade. “But hold on, I get deleting the parents’ memories, but what about everybody else that Marjorie knew since the adoption?”
Raffe chuckled. “The cleanup crew is very good at what they do, don’t worry.”
I was officially curious.
Santana sucked in a breath and grabbed her side, hissing from pain. It burned through me, too, but it wasn’t as bad as it was for her.
“What’s wrong?” Wade asked.
“Ah…” Santana struggled to stand up straight for a moment. Once she regained her composure, she gave us an alarmed look. “The Cranstons. Something set off their charms. Something happened.”
An icy wave hit me hard as I realized the horrible truth. Our worst-case scenarios were starting to come true.
Twenty
Harley
Wade drove like the devil, darting down the streets and taking sharp turns, slipping between lanes and cars, as we rushed to the Cranstons’ place. As soon as the Jeep screeched to a halt outside, I knew the worst had happened.
The front door was open, and I wasn’t getting any emotions from inside the house.
The silence was almost unbearable.
Little Micah…
We jumped out of the car and raced inside. My heart stopped for a moment, dread clutching my throat. The hallway side table was knocked over. Papers and shoes were scattered across the floor. Jackets and hats, too. The wall mirror was down, broken into hundreds of shards.
“Weren’t there supposed to be alarm charms and traps in place in here?” I whispered.
“Yes. I don’t think they worked as intended,” Wade replied.
His rings lit up bright orange, ready to hit in case of an attack. He moved forward, carefully stepping over the items on the floor. This was definitely a crime scene, and we needed to touch it as little as possible, for the purpose of a proper investigation.
Wade cursed under his breath when he saw the living room. Santana, Raffe, and I reached him. We all froze.
Horror cut my breath off. I saw Susan and Larry lying on the floor, in the middle of the living room. They were both dead, staring at the ceiling with eyes wide open—lifeless and glassy. Their throats had been slit. Blood had pooled around their heads. Their skin was paler than usual, but rigor mortis had yet to properly set in, judging by the color of their lips.
“Oh, God,” I gasped.
Wade went in and checked the bodies. He whispered a spell as he moved his hand over Susan and Larry. His rings lit up white as he took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment.
“They’ve been dead for ten, fifteen minutes, tops,” he said. “They bled out.”
“Micah!” I shouted, praying to Chaos itself to hear him or see him alive. “Micah! Can you hear me? It’s Harley! MICAH!”
Santana squeezed my shoulder. “He’s not here, querida,” she murmured, wearing a pained look on her face. “Neither is the Orisha I left with him.”
I broke into a cold sweat as I looked around the room. There had been a violent fight here. The coffee table was knocked over. Most of the books from the shelves were on the floor. Coffee had been spilled on the carpet, the cups smashed into pieces. The framed photographs were down, the glass broken and smoke swirling from beneath.
“What… What the hell?” I croaked, pointing at one of the images.
The photograph showed Susan and Larry, holding a little boy between them—Micah, only his face had been burned out. The others were the same. Everywhere I looked, Micah’s face had been taken out with fire.
Santana came by my side. “That’s not good,” she said. “That’s a very ugly and dark spell.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Obliviscaris in Perpetuum,” Wade breathed as he joined us. “It’s a forbidden curse. It rips a person out of everything. Photos, clothes, memories… anything that Micah has touched or left a trace on.” He pointed at various black spots in the room. “Every strand of hair or fragment of skin he’s left behind… it’s all burned out of existence.”
“Why… Why would they do that?” I replied, trying to wrap my head around the purpose of such a heinous act.
“They don’t want us to use a tracer spell to find him,” Raffe concluded. “The Ryders took him. I know it in my bones.”
“They don’t want us to—” I paused, then took a deep breath, trying to keep myself calm. My palms were itching. My blood was boiling. “What do we do?”
“I’ll check outside,” Raffe said.
He left us there, with the lifeless bodies of Susan and Larry Cranston, who had adopted little Micah, hoping to give him the best family possible. The cruelty of what the Ryders had done was beyond monstrous.
“My Orisha is gone,” Santana repeated, frowning. “That’s not normal. I can’t feel her anymore. I didn’t feel anything earlier, either. Whatever magic the twins are using, it overrode all my charms…” The color drained from her face. “I think they killed my Orisha!”
Wade was stunned. I was even more confused.
“Santana, that’s some incredibly dark and evil magic the Ryders are conjuring,” Wade said. “That’s worth a life sentence in Purgatory.”
“They killed my Orisha!” Santana replied, tearing up. “She would’ve fought them. She never would’ve allowed them to take the kid! They killed her!”
I felt her pain, and it was more than I could take, on top of my own.
“Santana, check the boy’s room, please,” Wade said, trying to keep her focused. “Take photos, imprints, anything you can. I’ll handle this room and call a cleanup crew.”
She nodded slowly and went upstairs. I had to get out of the room, so I went around the ground floor to check the rest of the place out. I hadn’t spotted them at first, but there were charcoal smudges all over the place, even in the hallway.
The kitchen was a mess. The fight had spread throughout the house, from what I could tell. There were broken dishes and pots everywhere, food splattered over the floor—mac and cheese, pieces of bread, mashed potatoes… They were preparing Sunday lunch when the attack happened.
It was vicious. It took me a while to reconstruct the entire scene, but I managed to get all the clues together. Outside, Raffe was looking around, checking every corner of the backyard. We briefly looked at each other, and I could feel the confusing mix of grief, sadness, and excitement coming from him.
I went back into the living room, measuring my breaths as I carefully walked along the edges of the carpet. “The door wasn’t broken, and there was no sign of magical tampering on it,” I said.
“They likely knew them,” Wade replied.
“Assuming the Ryders are Shapeshifters, they must’ve somehow adopted the personas of people that the Cranstons were familiar with, maybe even Social Services. They came in, then all hell broke loose. The parents tried to fight them off. From what I saw in the kitchen, my guess is that Micah made it all the way there.”
“Susan and Larry went down fast,” Wade said. “There are barely any defensive wounds. I’m guessing by this time they’d already disabled all the charms and traps.”
“Which means they were left with apprehending Micah—”
“Who didn’t go down easy. I guess he employed all his abilities against them,” Wade continued my line of reasoning.
“Which, again, explains the mess in the kitchen.”
Santana came down, tears streaming down her cheeks. It took her a while to say something.
“The bedroom is black. Everything was burned to a crisp,” she managed, her voice shaky. “But it was controlled, part of the spell.”
“They wanted us to find all of this. Otherwise, they would’ve just burned the whole place down for good measure,” Raffe added, coming back in. “They wanted us to find the bodies, the burned spots, everything.”
“But why?” I asked hoarsely. “To mess with us?”
Every single thing we’d discovered about the Ryders pointed them out as extreme psychopaths, the most vicious magicals I’d encountered so far, for sure. They made Finch look like a Boy Scout. He didn’t get his hands dirty—he let the gargoyles do the dirty work for him. The Ryders got up close and personal.
I resisted the urge to puke, though I could feel my coffee and half a bagel struggling to come back up. A few deeper breaths in, and I got it under control, but I couldn’t shake the chills that had settled in my bones.
“To make us aware of what they can do. To make us feel helpless,” Wade replied. “They want us to understand that they can stop us from tracing the people they take. They want us to see the damage they can do.”
“They want us to be afraid of them,” Santana murmured.
“Well, screw that!” I snapped. I didn’t let Finch get to me. I had no intention of letting these bastards break my morale, either. This entire scene made me rage with the fire of exacting revenge, but not fear. No, the Ryders made me furious, not scared. “We’re going to find them, and we’re going to put them in Purgatory. And I hope, I really hope they put up a fight, because then I can just light them up and watch them burn!” I shouted.
The air felt heavy as Wade, Santana, and Raffe stared at me, speechless and befuddled. I thought about what I’d just said, realizing it may have come across as extreme. My cheeks burned.