I nodded and swung my eyes to the right, peering into the deep shadows and looking for anything that might be amiss. Yellowed light showered the cement from poles lining the path. Up ahead was a squat building, lit with security lights.
“Behind here.” Oscar squinted up at one of the light poles. “I always forget to bring the big flashlight.” He extracted a small flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on. The weak white beam made a spotlight on the ground in front of him. “It’ll work. They keep this place pretty clean. There’s nothing to trip on. Just stay close so you can see.”
He clearly didn’t know that both of us could see in the dark. We didn’t enlighten him. Instead, we silently followed him around a stack of containers. Not much further along, we entered a passageway between two towering rows of containers. The light from the open space cut off, leaving us in the murky blackness that criminals and unscrupulous characters favored.
That wasn’t what was making my heart beat faster, though. I couldn’t get over the enormity of the man-made walls to either side of us. A shipping container was big enough to walk in. Hell, one of them would be roomy enough for a makeshift office. These were stacked four or five high, towering above us. Had they been buildings, I wouldn’t have worried. But something about them being movable, like building blocks in the hands of a giant, had me speeding up to get out of there.
“Giants don’t exist, right?” I asked Darius quietly. “I mean, there are huge rock people in the Realm, of course—you made sure that I met one—but they aren’t big enough to actually be giants. Also, are there earthquakes in Seattle?”
“What is causing these ramblings?” Darius asked, his hand now splayed more firmly across my back. He was worried I was about to crack up. Little did he know this was normal for me.
“If these things fell, we’d be crushed.” I pointed at the scarred and scuffed shipping containers. “Doesn’t that worry you?”
“We would be out of harm’s way before the first stack buckled.” He rubbed my back. “I am much faster than a wobbling mess of cargo containers, even when carrying a flailing creature such as yourself.”
“I’m a creature now, am I?”
“I confess, being that you are so much more than human, I am at a loss for what exactly to call you.”
“Here.” Oscar rounded a corner and disappeared into the darkness.
I slowed, listening to the distant hum of the freeway and water lapping. Turning, I looked down the row before sizing up the container closest to me.
“A makeshift office,” I said, digging through my earlier thoughts. Without a word, Darius followed me to the end of the aisle, where we met Oscar. He’d turned back to wave his beam of light in our direction.
“Stay close. It’s—”
“Shhh.” I held up my hand. “Give me a second.”
Now that we were at the end of the row, a sliver of light cut across the ground from a distant light pole. I eyed the front end of a container that served as a door. Four lines of metal ran from top to bottom, crowded toward the split of doors in the middle. At chest height, four latches—one on each strip of metal—secured it to the container. A padlock secured each latch.
“Open those please, Darius.” I motioned at the locks.
“Oh no, we shouldn’t break the locks,” the detective said. “Those have been—”
Ignoring Oscar, Darius waved his hand. They all popped open.
“What the hell?” Oscar leaned forward with wide eyes.
I moved forward to open the doors, but Darius stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Please, let me.” He pulled the latches away. Metal squealed as he moved the strips down or up, depending on whether they were securing the top or bottom. A moment later he swung open the doors, revealing a mishmash of…household stuff. A black garbage bag sat on a recliner. Beyond that, a desk with plastic storage bins piled up. In the back, I saw the fronds of a plant that was hopefully (for its sake) fake. The container clearly belonged to someone moving overseas.
“That is someone’s private stuff,” the detective said. Clearly he was only used to breaking and entering after a crime was committed.
“Look at all the space in there.” I stepped up to the edge and spread out my hands. “What is that, eight feet wide?” I raised my hand above me. “Eight or nine feet tall?”
“Closer to nine.” Darius peered through the gloom. “Is it big enough for a circle to call a demon?”
I stuck out a hip, debating. “I can’t be sure—Callie and Dizzy would be better equipped to field that question—but I think a high level four would just fit. You wouldn’t have any room to work around it. But there’s definitely enough room to skin a man. Again, it would be tight, but doable if they needed a place.” I backed up and glanced at Oscar. “You said security wasn’t great around here?”
He looked off toward the building we’d passed before turning into the stacked containers. “As far as the patrols go, they are decent for their salary range, which is on the lower side. When we questioned them, I got the idea they don’t typically see a lot of action. And that’s largely due to these crates being inspected and given a seal of approval before they’re brought in here and shipped. That’s what I gathered, anyway. The security system used to vet the actual crates is much better.” He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be easy to use this place as an after-hours torture chamber if that’s what you’re thinking, though the possibility did occur to us. There just isn’t the evidence to support it. During the day people are coming and going out of here. Someone would’ve noticed blood. Screams.”
I scoffed. “I’ve gotten a dead body from one side of New Orleans to the other in the trunk of a Lyft driver’s car. Without the driver knowing. Mostly. If these mages have their own car, and we should assume they do, getting someone in one of these things—and skinning them in there—would be easy. There wouldn’t be blood seeping out of the container. The spell would have collected it all. Within the container, sure, you’d see blood spatter, but not as much as you’re probably envisioning.”
His flashlight came up and beamed me in the face. “You transported a dead body in a cab?”
“I would remove that light from her face if I were you,” Darius warned softly.
The vampire was right. I did not like being blasted with light. It made me more aggressive than I already was, and that was saying something.
Thankfully, the cone of light swung away. “What did you say your job title was?” Oscar asked.
“I get things done, Oscar,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“You’d have to bring an empty container into the port,” Darius said. “Or empty one already here. It sounds like neither is a possibility without being detected.”
“There’s that,” I said, chewing on my lip.