I can’t . . . I almost can’t process it. A heap of bodies lie around the center of the floor, like jigsaw pieces. Jigsaw pieces to a puzzle of death. Pools of blood pockmark the carpet, gather at the edges, and soak it in an almost otherworldly red. Each body is riddled with bullets, lies twisted, folded, and arranged into an unnatural pose. It looks like a group execution, some mass suicide even, the bodies collapsed into a ring around a cardboard table posing as some cheap altar in the middle.
“Open the door,” Frain whispers.
A panic, a premature pang of loss and guilt is already creeping up my spine as the officer on my left twists the handle. I frantically search through the window as he attempts to pick the lock. I look for Joan’s face, for her perfect face—
But I don’t see her, thank God, she’s not here. Did she escape?
Did someone take her?
“Sir, it won’t budge.”
“So try again, Agent Brennan,” Frain orders.
Brennan mumbles a “Yes, sir” and tries the lock again. And again, as I scan the faces to see who’s been taken down—
They’re familiar faces, all of them—Colletto, and the men he was here with the other night. And the Shaw men, Kerrigan, O’Donnell, Sullivan, Dawson, Howie—
But no Joan. No troupe. The sorcerers, gone like magic dust in the wind.
And then I spot Gunn.
Gunn, the invincible.
Gunn, the man who stood between Joan and me, who kept her in a cage. Gunn, chest rising, falling, the life inside him slowly bleeding out.
“Sir,” Brennan whispers, at the same time as I put it together, “one of the men in there—he’s still alive.”
“You need to open that door,” Frain snaps.
“I’m trying, Agent Frain, but it’s—it’s like it’s cursed.”
As confusion and disappointment set in, a deep, dark, unsettling possibility starts pawing at my mind as well. It toys with me, just scratches at the surface—but I refuse to let it do any real damage. Not yet.
Frain surveys the door frame. “Kick it in.”
Brennan tries, then three agents attack the door, then five Unit men are running at it like an army, ready to take it down. It doesn’t budge.
“Alex, we need you,” Frain says impatiently.
So I try in vain to open it with magic, attempt trick after trick—
Frain stops us with a raise of his hand. He crouches in front of the entrance, studying it, the lock, the window, the blood dashed across the door like a warning. “Where the hell are the sorcerers?” he says to me.
I give him the only answer I have. “I’m not sure, sir.”
Frain looks to Agent Brennan again. “Call this in to the station,” he says softly. “Papers are going to have a field day with this.”
Then Frain grabs my arm, pulls me away from the rest of the Unit, down the corridor toward the main performance space. He sets his mouth into a hard line. “This main sorcerer of yours, Alex,” he says slowly. “You believe she was kidnapped, held against her will by Harrison Gunn.”
I look back to the door marked in blood, in dark magic. I feel like I’ve been cut right in half, divided like a double-sided trick. Part of me wants to tell Frain what I think might be true, what I’m terrified might be true. The other part refuses to believe she could have done this. I swallow. “All signs pointed to that, sir.”
“Did she strike you as headstrong? Volatile? Violent?”
Yes, maybe, I’m not sure. I don’t look him in the eye. “Not particularly.”
“Alex, Christ,” he whispers, “was she dangerous?” Far too dangerous, in more ways than one.
But Frain doesn’t wait for my response, just paces back toward the lounge, like the answer must be in the puzzle of bodies on the other side of the door.
“We need to find the sorcerers,” he commands to the force, “all of them. Now. Dial the names in to the station. Alex, I want a full list of names,” he calls back to me. “And get a backup team in here. I want that gangster taken out alive, along with the evidence.”
I stand there, nodding, mind reeling. Could Joan really have done this?
Did all of them do this, one highly orchestrated execution? A blood-drenched escape?
As the Unit men take notes, confer, study the bodies through the little glass window, another truth starts to itch, and in moments it’s crawling all over me—
I might have actually lost her, I might never see her again—
Joan might be gone for good.
As realization sets in, I blurt out, “Agent Frain, stay here, I’ve got a lead.” I start sprinting for the double doors. “I’ll circle up with you after!”
“Wait, stop, Alex, talk to me!”
But by the time I hear Frain’s hurried footsteps behind me, I’m halfway out the double doors.
I sprint up the stairs, into the lot, dash across M Street and into the back alley toward Frain’s car, with some vague plan to search the city for her. But as I pass the Unit’s black cars, something catches my eye, just the slightest bend of reality, and I stop.
I run toward the brick siding of the town home on the alley’s other side. The closer I get, the more the wall of the structure seems to distort, bend, almost looks like there’s a flat replica of the brick in front of the actual brick wall. I touch the replica, feel my way to where it drops off, grab the edge of the manipulation and step around it. Sitting behind it, watching her old world crumble to the ground, is Grace.