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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.