Silas gestured, and a flash of green ran around the opening. “No magic.” He reached forward, pulled on the edge, and swung the door wide, ducking as it knocked out the remnants of its plaster disguise.
On the other side of the door, Pip danced around, tail a blur although Darien thought he might be limping. “There you are! It’s here. Over there. Where the rats go.”
Silas stepped carefully through the doorway and Darien hurried after him, kneeling to hug Pip. “You did great, buddy. Are you okay? Did you hurt your foot?”
“Just bumped it.” Pip gestured up a side wall with his nose. “I had to jump down from up there.” At the top of the wall, about seven feet up, a dark opening marked the sub-floor space.
“That’s high!”
“For a dog, of course,” Grim said. “Nothing for a cat. Still, well done.”
Pip trotted over to a corner of the small room at the base of another brick wall, this one very roughly built with crumbling mortar. He snuffed against a spot where part of a brick had fallen out. “Here. A rat went in here, and it smells interesting.” He pushed half his snout into the space and backed out with a sneeze. “I don’t fit.”
Kii said, “Might be just as well. There’s a lot of power on the other side of that wall.”
“Power?” Silas sketched a rune, which floated to the wall and vanished unchanged. “Can you tell if there’s a demon?”
Kii cocked her head. “I’m better at sensing the level of power than which kind, but… I don’t feel my skin prickling like I usually do around demon magic.”
Silas knelt beside Pip at the gap in the wall and sketched a pair of small demon-find runes across the space, then looked up at Jasper. “I’m not picking up balefire. But what kind of magic could be running like that, unattended, probably for years?”
Darien was a little hurt that Silas focused on Jasper as he spoke, but then Jasper was much more likely to have an answer. Still, Darien said, just to show he was paying attention, “Could someone have been sneaking in to power the spell?”
“Very unlikely,” Silas said. “I have wards around the house. Unless someone tunneled up through the ground, they shouldn’t be able to get in here undetected. And they definitely couldn’t push power through my wards from outside.”
“Could there be a tunnel up into the other room?”
“Now there’s an idea,” Grim said. “We know the rats are coming and going somewhere.”
Jasper looked eager. “We need to get into that other room and see what’s going on.” He picked at the crumbling mortar between two bricks, then pulled out his pocketknife and dug with the blade. Little bits crumbled out as he worked, but getting even one brick free looked like a long job.
“We should come back with proper tools,” Silas said. “And… I think we need to be well rested and powered up. I don’t know what’s in there, but if it is demonic, I’m running a bit low and Darien’s almost fried.”
“I’m not!”
Silas touched the back of Darien’s hand. “Really?”
“Ouch!” He shook his fingers out, but couldn’t deny both his skin and his power felt crisped like he’d spent too many hours at the beach.
Jasper said, “You know what might get us in there? My drill.”
Silas raised an eyebrow. “I have tools. They’re in the kitchen in a cabinet, somewhere.”
Darien grinned as Jasper’s meaning clicked. “Not that kind of drill, Si. One built with power. When Jasper and I were kidnapped, we were in the middle of playing with a drill-bit created from runes and power. We’d drilled a hole in the wall of the barn. A big hole.”
“I’d need your help though.” Jasper looked him up and down. “How burned out are you?”
Darien raised his shields— that still works— and tried to shape the shield energy into a little wedge he could jam into the gap in the wall and then expand… a few chunks of mortar fell out of the gap, but trying to force his shield against the bricks made a throbbing ache start in the middle of his forehead. He pulled back his shield and let it fade. “Nothing another meal and a real sleep won’t fix.” He hoped that was the truth.
“If you leave a light,” Kii offered, “I can stay and keep watch. If any rats pass through, I won’t mind another snack.”
Silas set his flashlight on the floor, the low angle of the light making his cheeks look hollow and emphasizing the line of his jaw. Darien thought he looked dangerous. Mmm, my dangerous man— Darien pinched himself on the leg and tried to keep his fuzzy brain fixed on appropriate things.
Silas demonstrated the switch. “Can you turn it on and off, Kii? The batteries won’t last all night.”
The hawk bent over the device, working with beak and talons, and successfully extinguished and relit it. “I’ll rely on hearing until I need light. I have excellent hearing.”
“Are you sure?” Pip asked. “I could stay too if you like. I could Fetch a rat if it tries to get away.”
Kii tossed her head. “You had your turn at adventure. And I don’t want to share the rats.” When Pip looked a bit crestfallen, she flicked a wing at him. “You need rest, youngster, to be sharp for your sorcerer tomorrow.”
Darien said, “Thanks, Kii. Will you come get us, if something else happens?”
“You may be quite sure, young sorcerer, that if anything other than a rat emerges from that room, I will be winging my way to you at hawk-speed.”
“Very well.” Silas turned away from the wall with what looked like reluctance. “We’ll go eat, Darien can sleep, I might track down a ghost or two. There’s that cemetery job I’ve been putting off. We’ll refuel, grab some real tools, just in case, and meet back here. Can you watch for six or seven hours, Kii?”
“I once spent seven hours trying to fish a demon-possessed book out of a hole in the ground,” Kii said. “I think I can manage.”
Chapter 4
Silas returned to the house buzzing with energy, after a run out to the old cemetery on a local farm. Three fewer ghosts were wandering around, and he’d gained enough power in return to feel slightly tipsy. Hopefully Darien had managed to sleep away the hours and was feeling better too.
Silas had very carefully not thought about the magic in the cellar, or how he’d lived in that house for a year and never known about it, or how Coldwell had failed to tell him about it, even at the end when he’d crammed all kinds of vital knowledge into Silas’s mind. Norlington outlived him by nine years. Maybe it was something Norlington did after Coldwell was dead. Silas sure hoped so, because if not… He pushed down a feeling of betrayal. He had no time right now to wallow in emotional reactions.
He found Darien in the kitchen with Jasper, cooking what was probably meant to be scrambled eggs. Darien gave him a sweet smile, on a face that looked less sunburned than it had. “Hey, I made breakfast for dinner. There’s toast in the toaster.”
“Works for me.” Silas took a seat beside Jasper and ate a slice of toast, watching bemused as Darien wolfed his way through half a dozen eggs, more toast, and two apples.