Other gargoyles dotted outcroppings all over the castle. Some appeared to be sleeping, but most were in aggressive poses, like Fred. When we’d all lived in Caleb’s house, Fred was the only gargoyle I ever saw. She liked the taste of Caleb’s magic, and the fact that I left cream out on the porch for her. I hadn’t known at the time she was a she or that she was some sort of high priestess among her flock, so when she’d refused to tell me her name, I’d started calling her Fred. It amused her, so eventually the name stuck. When the castle had unfolded in the backyard, she’d moved her entire flock of gargoyles here. Maybe that was what she’d been waiting on the whole time.
“Hello, Fred,” I said, waving up at her.
“There is an ill wind this morrow.” The gargoyle’s words weren’t something I heard so much as felt in my mind. They were as hard and gravelly as her exterior, but not unkind.
“Someone broke into the old house. Can any of your gargoyles see the door to the house? Has anyone come through it?”
The gargoyle didn’t move, but after a moment, I heard her again in my mind. “Only the knight has passed that way, but we will remain vigilant.”
I nodded. The knight would be Falin, so we shouldn’t have any unexpected visitors. Yet.
“Any warnings or advice you’d like to share?” I asked the gargoyle. Occasionally she shared hints that her precog abilities showed her. She gave them to me as puzzles, typically, but right now I’d take almost anything.
The gargoyle remained silent. I waited a moment. Finally her words rumbled through my mind. “Look to yourself. What you seek is never far.”
Okay, I was wrong. I wouldn’t take almost anything, because that sounded like it belonged in a fortune cookie or on a motivational poster. I’d try to keep it in mind, but I had to wonder if it was actually a warning for my future or just general advice. I nodded to acknowledge I’d heard her, and then I glanced down at my phone. Falin had been gone at least ten minutes now. Had the police arrived yet? Had he encountered the person who broke in? Why hadn’t he called?
I glanced out the open portcullis in the wall of the castle to where the door out of the folded space waited. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness but the dim glow of flowers along the path. Though even if it had been day, I wouldn’t have been able to spot the door.
While the door that led to the folded space was part of Caleb’s house, which was in turn part of a larger neighborhood in the suburbs surrounding the Magic Quarter, on this side of the door, in the folded space, the door was just a frame and a door sprouting up from the ground in the center of an enormous field. Spotting it from a distance wasn’t easy.
I glanced at the phone display again, counting the seconds. It had been too long. Shoving the phone in my pocket, I started down the path. I wouldn’t walk through that door until Falin called me—well, as long as he called me soon—but I could be ready and waiting when he did.
I didn’t consider the fact that as the door was in the center of a field that was more or less flat and empty as far as the eye could see, there was absolutely nowhere to hide. Good for spotting intruders, bad if you were trying not to be seen by them. By the time the phone finally rang, I was sitting behind the door as it was the only cover in the field.
“The house is clear,” Falin said, and a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tumbled out of me. I sheathed my dagger as he continued, “Both the police and my agents are already here. You and the others can come back inside.”
“Understood,” I said, walking around to the other side of the door. I sent a text to the others, letting them know what he’d said, and then I walked into a crime scene that used to be my home.
Chapter 18
It could have been worse.
I kept telling myself that, but it didn’t help ease the violated feeling as I walked through my tiny one-room loft. The rest of the house had been left untouched, but the intruder had broken the wards and then kicked down my door. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped off my bed and were missing. The police were speculating that the thief used them to store and carry everything else they stole, but despite the fact that all of my dresser drawers were lying empty on the floor, and all the cabinets and drawers in the bathroom were open and empty, nothing else was missing. Mostly because there had been nothing in those places to take.
The TV hadn’t been touched, though it would have been a desperate thief who ventured to steal the old thing. The kitchen cabinets also appeared untouched, though Falin said the refrigerator had been open when he first walked in. Considering it had also been empty, nothing could have been stolen from the fridge. So as far as I could tell, the only thing missing was bedding.
And that worried me. As did the places the intruder had searched, because dresser drawers and the bathroom were where you’d normally find personal items. The kind of items one would use as a focus for a spell.
The sheets had been laundered and hadn’t been slept on in a month, so they wouldn’t make a particularly effective focus. All my clothes and toiletries had been moved to the castle, so there was nothing else personal in the loft. Ms. B and her brownie magic did the cleaning, so I knew that even if the intruder had time to check the drains in the shower, he wouldn’t have found a single hair. All and all, aside from the broken doorframe, there was very little damage. It could have been worse.
The police didn’t stay long. They dusted the door around the lock and a couple of the knobs on drawers the intruder might have touched, and then they left me with instructions to inventory everything stolen and turn the list in to the precinct later. That obviously wasn’t happening.
The FIB left even before the police did. Falin had startled one of the intruders on her way out, but she’d jumped into the back of a waiting car and sped away. He’d gotten the tag number, as well as the make and model, so his agents were off searching for the vehicle. Holly and Rianna had remained in the castle, but Caleb was outside assessing the damage to the wards. So only an hour after I’d awoken to sirens, I was moving numbly through my old apartment, putting the spare set of sheets on the bed and trying to figure out the best way to clean fingerprint dust off wood.
Falin didn’t press me to talk about it, or crowd me, but picked up the scattered drawers, fitting them back into the dresser silently. I avoided looking at the door, which wouldn’t stay shut so it hung open several inches, letting in a cold draft. But all too quickly the rest of the apartment was restored to the condition it had been in before the break-in, and all that was left was the broken door.
I stood in the middle of the room, staring at the splintered wood around the lock. One strip of the doorframe had broken off completely and lay dejected and mangled on the floor. I didn’t live here anymore, not really, but I had for several years, and it hurt to think of someone I didn’t know entering my space.
Falin stepped up beside me. “It’s too early to call someone to fix it. In a few hours we should be able to find someone. With luck they’ll be able to get to it today.”
But what did we do with it in the meantime? We couldn’t just leave the door hanging open. I might not sleep here, but I still spent time here occasionally.