Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(37)

“Can you track more than one body at a time?” Lon asked.

Up until now, neither of us had brought this up. We couldn’t very well just tell Hajo that we were hunting the remains of the abducted children from the original Snatcher case. We might be too dumb to live, but we weren’t dumb enough to trust Drug Lord Hajo with that information.

“Naturally,” he said. “You wanna know how many bodies I sense on a daily basis? Thousands. Humans, animals—even insects, if they’re big enough. Death is everywhere, man. I can’t walk by a graveyard or I’ll pass out. And, yeah, there’s a boatload of dead things up in here, as if you can’t smell that yourself.”

I tried not to gag and inhaled with my mouth instead of my nose.

“You think I enjoy having this knack?” Hajo continued, his tone abrasive. “Would you? Why do you think I smoke sømna and just about anything else I can get my hands on? Anything to make me forget about it, or I go crazy.”

Lon grunted and aimed the flashlight at Hajo, who shielded his eyes.

“Come on,” I coaxed. If the children’s bodies were here, we were about to find out.

Single file, Hajo leading the way, we marched down the dank hallway. He stopped in front of a thick metal door. “Inside here.”

“Open the door,” Lon instructed.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Hajo admitted. “I just . . .”

I stuck my head around Lon’s arm and guided his hand to aim the flashlight on the door handle. A diffused wedge of pink glowed between the frame and the door. “It’s secured by a spell,” I said. Weird magick. Temporary spells fade, but stronger magick cracks. The pink glow here was riddled with fine lines, which meant that the spell must’ve been set a long time ago. Years and years . . . maybe even thirty years.

Lon bent low to inspect the glow, reaching, then suddenly withdrew his hand. “What are we looking at here? A serious ward? A warning?”

I examined the markings. They weren’t anything I’d seen, but on closer inspection, they followed a familiar pattern. “I think it’s just a deterrent. A trick to keep people out. Move away.”

We shifted positions. I tried to open the door myself, but my hand wouldn’t grasp the handle. What a clever spell; I wished I knew how to do it. In order for us to get inside, I’d have to short it out. I retrieved a short stick of red ochre chalk from my jacket and drew a sloppy circle around the handle, then marked it with three sigils. I would’ve preferred to use a better spell, one that required kindled Heka, but we were sans electricity, so I had to use simpler magick. I mumbled a dissolving spell and spat on the sigils. The red ochre markings crackled with a brief flash of light, then popped and died. The old pink haze disintegrated.

I stood and started again to open the door, but Lon’s arm hooked around my waist and pulled me backward. “Let him do it.”

Hajo balked. “You paid me to dowse, not lay a red carpet down for you.”

“Open it.” Lon wasn’t asking.

Hajo muttered to himself but complied as Bob scooted closer to cower behind me. I think he was sniffing my hair—probably still experiencing lingering effects from Hajo’s vassal suggestion—but I was too anxious about finding dead bodies to care.

The door creaked open and a foul, musty odor wafted out. We turned our heads away and moved back, waiting several moments for the stench to dissipate. This couldn’t be good.

The golden arc from Lon’s flashlight drifted over a square, windowless room. A bulky piece of broken conveyor machinery with several cranks and ceiling exhausts jutted out from the left, taking up a third of the area. Near the far wall, sketched onto the floor, I could just make out a row of mandalas: holy squared circles. Large ones. They are most commonly found in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual art, filled with delicate patterns and used for meditation and trance induction to focus energy. The outer circles of these were much simpler in design. But it was the size that caught my attention: three or four feet across. Inside the outer rings, a strangely patterned square was drawn, then another smaller circle inside the square. Four simple sigils rimmed the outer boundary. None of it was chalked. The designs were etched into the concrete. Serious stuff.

“I need to look at the symbols,” I said.

We moved as a unit and stepped inside the room.

“Stay here and guard the door,” Lon instructed Bob.

“In the dark?”

Lon dug a silver Zippo out of this pocket, snapped open the cover, and flicked it on. “Don’t lose this—it’s vintage. Speak up if you hear anything coming.”

“Oh, God,” Bob mumbled breathlessly, accepting the lighter with fearful reluctance. The blue-and-yellow flame bounced up and down in time with the Earthbound’s shaking hand.

“The spell on the door was old,” I assured Bob, putting a steady hand on his elbow. “No one’s been here for years.”

Lon picked up a rusted piece of piping off the floor, shook off cobwebs, and gave it to Bob. “Just in case.”

Bob whimpered.

We left him at his post and walked toward the mandalas. My stomach twisted as I counted them. Seven. Probably not a coincidence. And when I stepped closer and got a good look at the first one, I mentally changed that “probably” to a “definitely not.”