Page 8 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

8

The hum of electronics in the surveillance room always scraped my nerves, but that wasn’t the reason I was gripping the edge of the desk hard enough to make my knuckles groan.

“Are we sure it was her?” I asked, barely able to contain the anger in my voice. For two days, we hadn’t had a single sighting of Megan Navali. No sign of new dark summonings. Nothing, until this.

On the big screen in front of us, a camera panned left to right before reversing course and sweeping back over a scene straight out of a horror film. Blood, gore, and barely identifiable body parts littered the shot. The only saving grace was that it was in black and white.

There must have been at least half a dozen bodies in that mess.

“Give it another minute,” Dennis said, swallowing hard.

Before I could snap a response, Megan Navali strolled into view. Her hair whipped wildly around her face, and her grin had me grinding my teeth. It reminded me of a killer clown, coiled up with wicked delight, and on her heels was a darkness that didn’t belong there.

“Does she have a death wish?” I asked, more to myself than anyone.

“What do you see?” Nguyen asked from behind me.

I didn’t bother turning around. My focus was fixed on the screen and the smear of black stretching out behind the reckless witch. “Penumbra.” Reaching out, I ran my index finger along the dark streak. It stretched behind her, running a different direction than the shadows cast by the sun.

The kind of power it would take to create darkness like that?—

Before I could finish the thought, she turned her head toward the camera, revealing glassy black eyes.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“Black eyes? What does that mean?” Dennis asked.

“That she’s messing with power she doesn’t understand.” I stared at the screen in disbelief, until she winked at the camera a second before the feed cut out. “How many dead?”

Dennis hit a few buttons on his laptop and the image rolled back to Megan just before her insidious little wink. “It’s hard to tell. This is all we’ve got right now. We’re still tracking down other feeds from the area, but there isn’t much to choose from that far out.”

“Where is this?” I tapped the screen.

“The reserve at the south end of the valley,” Nguyen said. “We can be there in thirty minutes.”

“When did it happen?” We were already too late to stop the destruction, but with any luck, we might be able to get eyes on her.

“The digital time stamp puts it at about one o’clock this morning.” Dennis sounded rough, and when I turned to look at him, his face was a telling shade of green .

I shoved away from the table, grabbed the small trash can from beside the door, and set it next to his chair. “Try not to puke on the tech, okay?”

It wasn’t meant as a joke, but he offered me a weak smile. “Would never dream of it.”

“What about drones? Is there anything in the area we can hijack?” With the attack hours in the past, I seriously doubted Megan would still be in the area, but I would feel a hell of a lot better if we could get the lay of the land before I sent a team out.

Dennis was back to staring at the screen and Megan’s eerie eyes. It was that, or he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the grayscale gore strewn across the ground behind her.

I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. When that didn’t help, I leaned forward and hit the escape key on his keyboard. The video blinked out, and he leaned back in his seat, letting out an uneven breath. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing. Now, get to work finding a drone with a camera. Nguyen, you’re with me.” I gave Dennis’s shoulder another squeeze, then headed through the door.

A misplaced shadow and black eyes meant she’d aligned herself with powerful dark magic, the kind that once a witch gave into it, there was no pulling her back. The question was, where did it come from? She might have made a deal with a crossroads demon, but they made themselves damned hard to find in our world. And if she had managed to track one down and offer up her soul in exchange for power, there would be no reason to attack innocent campers.

No, this was something else.

“Was that a possession?” Nguyen asked, following me out and down the hall.

“Maybe.” If it was, we might be able to untether her from whatever the hell she’d teamed up with before it burned through her soul and took her body as its permanent host, assuming it hadn’t already. But that was a big might. Especially since exorcising a demon could only be done by a more powerful demon. “Have we had any luck figuring out her motive?”

“We have a couple of theories,” he grumbled.

Which meant no.

If she was power hungry, I could see summoning a lesser demon, but sure as hell not letting one possess her. Most of the demons in our realm with the ability to possess didn’t wield enough power to do it without invitation. Unless she’d summoned the wrong one thinking she would be strong enough to control it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen a witch make that mistake.

The alternative was that she’d stolen so much magic that it was dragging her into the darkness.

“Let’s keep working on the why,” I said. “In the meantime, we need to see if we can figure out exactly how much her power has grown.”

Nguyen grunted something unintelligible behind me, but I didn’t turn around. By the time we got to the Jeep, he’d grabbed two more agents to join us and had us all outfitted in black tactical gear.

“I’m driving.” I held out my hand for the keys.

His eyes narrowed for a beat, then he tossed them to me. I probably could have been a little nicer about it, but I was in a mood and still a little miffed about our disagreement over the shifter girl. Or maybe I was frustrated because it had been two days since she’d gone on the run, and we hadn’t found any sign of her. Or it might have had something to do with the fact that I’d spent the last two days on edge, waiting for Emerson to reappear, and my nerves were raw.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the night he’d gotten into my head, but he was still there, nudging at my mental barriers. He wasn’t done with me, and one way or another, he would find me again. I could feel the inevitability of that fact in my bones.

With everyone piled in, I rolled us quietly out of the parking structure. When we were a few blocks away, I put the pedal to the floor. “Dennis, you there?”

There was a crackle over my earbud before his voice came through. “Here. We’ve got control of two drones, and we’re scanning the area now.”

“Good. Let me know if you find anything.”

“Roger Dodger.”

Nguyen shook his head. He was kind of a stick in the mud when it came to protocol and processes. Dennis wasn’t. Granted, he wasn’t exactly a wild card like Shay, but he didn’t always follow the rules, including over the radio.

“You know he does it to get under your skin, right?” I asked, not glancing over to see Nguyen’s expression. My eyes were on the road and everything else around the Jeep as I weaved us through traffic.

“How hard is it to follow basic communication procedures?” he grumbled.

“It’s not. I’m pretty sure that’s the point.”

He leaned his head back against the headrest until we hit a pothole the size of a tire, sending the Jeep veering over the white line and onto the rumble strips on the shoulder. He scrambled for the grab handle beside his head and shot me a menacing glare. “You are never driving again.”

I got us back on the road in under two seconds. Still, when I dared a glance over, his jaw was screwed so tight it was pulling the muscles of his neck up with it.

“Dennis, any luck?” I asked.

“Nothing yet. I flew them over the site of the attack and spiraled out from there. It looks like she’s in the wind. ”

“Keep looking.” If she was out there waiting to ambush more unsuspecting victims, I wanted eyes on her.

“Will do, but I’ll be down to one drone in a minute or two. The battery is almost toast on the other one. This is why I keep saying we need a couple of our own.”

Sure, except having our own drones wouldn’t have done us much good, seeing as he would have had to fly them all the way out to the south preserve to even start the search.

We made the rest of the breakneck drive in relative silence. As we rolled into the parking area, Nguyen pulled his gun out and checked the barrel. “Lock and load.” The other two agents followed suit.

“The attack happened in the camping area up on the right,” I said. “Stay sharp. If you see Navali, call in your location but don’t engage if you can help it.”

“What?” Nguyen cocked his head. “What the hell do you mean ‘don’t engage’?”

“Exactly what I said. That might have looked like Navali on the video, but we don’t know if she’s the one in the driver’s seat. Until we’re sure what we’re dealing with, this is a recon mission, nothing more.”

“You can’t be serious. You saw what she did to those people.”

Yeah, we all did. The slaughter of innocents was never something I took lightly, but those lives were already lost. I refused to add my people to that tragic list just because someone got a little hot under the collar. “You all have your orders. Eyes only. Keep your distance. But if she does get too close, make damn sure you shoot to kill. Got it?”

I waited for his grunt to the affirmative before checking the rearview. The other two agents gave me a sharp nod, and we all climbed out of the Jeep.

“Stay off the main trail,” I said, keeping my voice low.

The witch’s magic blanketed the area, clinging to the ground like mist, but it was fading fast. And it was changing. When I’d seen her in the clearing two days earlier, the magic swirling around her had wisps of darkness, but the natural green of her power was still dominant. Now, it was noticeably darker, and those black threads were multiplying.

We crept through the woods toward the campground in silence. If I hadn’t been able to feel Nguyen’s magic a few yards to my left, I never would have known he was there. Bears had a reputation for being smash and crash predators, but they could move with terrifying stealth when the situation demanded it.

Before we’d even reached the site of the massacre, the sick, metallic tang of blood flooded my nostrils. I’d been expecting it after the footage we’d seen, but I still caught myself gripping my pistol tighter.

It wasn’t until I was standing next to a blood-soaked tent that I realized the full extent of the damage she’d inflicted. The bodies on the video were all there, just as gruesome as expected, but the camera had failed to capture the ones hidden inside tents and spread out beyond the rustically manicured grounds.

Pain contorted the faces of the dead, forever frozen in different states of agony. Some had been gutted. A few had gaping holes in their chests. And at least one was missing his head entirely.

The couple who’d tried to run had gotten the worst of it. At least, I was assuming that was what they were trying to do, since their mangled body parts were scattered near one of the trailheads that led deeper into the woods. With that level of violence, it couldn’t have taken long for death to claim them. Certainly no more than a minute. But it would have been sixty seconds of misery that I didn’t even want to begin to imagine.

Megan was changing the game. It wasn’t just about stealing magic anymore. She was testing her abilities, stretching her dark magical legs, so to speak .

I parted my lips and drew shallow breaths to help combat the growing stench of blood and intestines. “Dennis?”

“Awaiting orders,” he said.

“Is the cleanup crew on the way?”

“Yes. Dispatched right after you left.”

“Good. Let them know it’s worse than we thought. I count eleven bodies,” I said.

“Twelve,” one of the other agents added, lifting a sleeping bag and showing me the blood-smeared body of a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

“For fuck’s sake,” I hissed. “Make that twelve. And warn them one of the casualties is a child.” If Megan had been acting as their thirteenth, they would have had enough members to form a proper coven.

Silence spanned over the radio for a beat. “Dennis, you copy?”

“Copy,” he said, sounding a little out of breath.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know how you guys can stand being out there.” The muffled sound of retching followed, but all I could do was shake my head.

Did the scene make me a little queasy? Yes. Did it leave me questioning human nature? Again, yes. The attack was brutal and bloody, but it wasn’t the worst I’d seen by a long shot.

Dennis’s problem was that he wasn’t the kind of agent one would expect to find working for a paranormal shadow organization that had no qualms about putting down the worst of the worst. For starters, he was human. Barely a lick of magic in his blood. He didn’t have any real-life tactical experience when he started, but the guy was a certifiable genius with tech and hacking. He also had a surprisingly broad knowledge of the supernatural world. He knew all the kooky made-up crap, as well as the reality of shifters and demons, and he could tell the difference between fact and fiction when he saw it.

That was a rarity in our world.

But he didn’t have the stomach for field work. Some people didn’t, just like some of us weren’t cut out for spending our days cooped up inside behind a keyboard as the incessant buzz of electronics slowly drove us mad. It took all types to keep an organization like Lexa running.

“Shut down the feed, Dennis, but keep it recording in the background. Have one of the techs scan back through later to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” The bodies weren’t going anywhere. The answers, though? Those were slipping through our fingers by the second. The image of her winking at the camera played in my head, and I looked at Nguyen and the others. “She’s gone, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t left traps. Fan out. Stay alert. Maybe we can figure out where she’s headed next.”

I’d taken all of two steps toward the trail littered with body parts when Dennis’s voice came through my earpiece again. “Pull up, boss. We have a new problem.”