“He’s taken hostages?” Concern laced his voice as Trent reached to open the door for me.
Worried, I went inside, the sudden calm and coolness of the air conditioner making me shiver. The very emptiness was shocking. There was trash on the scuffed floor, and the orange chairs were empty. The front desk was unmanned, and the metal and magic detector abandoned. Nearly out of sight, three uniformed FIB officers and one plainclothes were helping get a stretcher and an ambulance crew into the elevator.
“Hey!” I called, striding forward and ignoring the beep of the detector as my boots clicked unusually loud on the tile. “Hold the lift!”
But it was too late. The elevator doors closed, leaving only a single uniformed officer and the plainclothes still there as informal gatekeepers. “Top floor, right?” I said, breathlessly as Trent and I halted before them and I pushed the call button, making the plainclothes frown. “Edden is up there already?”
“Ah, who are you, ma’am?”
“Ma’am?” Jenks snickered from my shoulder. “He called you ma’am.”
I tried to turn my grimace into a charming smile with mixed results. “Rachel Morgan and, ah, Trent Kalamack. I called Edden this morning. He was supposed to clear us.”
“Oh yeah!” the uniformed man exclaimed, eyes wide as they shifted from Trent to Jenks and then me. “I heard you came in Wednesday.” Heads down, they both looked at the list on the clipboard. “Neither of you is on the list. Mr. Kalamack, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you up there.”
I sighed at how fast Trent became the governing force here, but he had once been on the city council and was a major benefactor to the FIB’s and I.S.’s pet charities as well as half a dozen others. They knew me only because I caused trouble.
“You should have told them you were Margret Tessel,” Jenks said in a soft singsong.
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Trent was saying, his political voice in top form.
Behind us, the elevator whined to a stop and dinged. I didn’t have time for this. “Is that the latest report?” I said as it opened, and their heads snapped up when I took the papers right out of the man’s hand. Smiling, I backed into the elevator. His head ducked to hide a smile, Trent quietly got in beside me. Jenks hovered at the opening, and I frantically pushed the door-close button, my smile never wavering.
“Ma’am. Mr. Kalamack. Please get out of the elevator,” the plainclothes said, his hand twitching as if to reach for his cuffs, and Jenks’s wings hummed, stopping the man dead in his tracks when he made a motion to reach in and pull us out.
“Do me a favor,” I said, holding the door-close button down and smiling. “Tell Edden I’m on the way up? My calls don’t seem to be making it through lately.”
Finally the doors started to move. The cops reached to hold them open, jerking back when Jenks buzzed them. The pixy darted back in at the last moment, and I exhaled, falling back against the elevator wall with a loud sigh. Trent was smiling as Jenks hung in the middle of the elevator in satisfaction, a pool of dusty sunshine growing under him.
“You can do bold,” Trent said in admiration, and I pulled myself straight, my worry for him flowing back. Why was I working so hard to get him up there? Bancroft had flipped his lid.
“You haven’t seen anything,” Jenks said as he landed on the railing, feet pedaling to stay on when they slipped and his wings caught him before he moved a hairsbreadth. “I’ve seen this woman push her way into—”
“Jenks!”
Grinning, Jenks shifted to Trent’s shoulder. “Ask me later.”
But Trent wasn’t even listening, intent on the report that I’d taken. “This doesn’t sound like Bancroft,” he said, brow furrowed. “Hostages?” He flipped a page, eyes widening. “Oh no.”
I leaned to look and Jenks whistled. It was hard to tell with the fuzzy, enlarged photo, but it looked as if a third of the walls of the entire top floor had been blown out to make a sheltered cave at the top of the sky. “Tink’s little pink rosebuds,” Jenks breathed, hardly louder than his wings. “How much magic did you bring, Rache?”
“Enough?” I said, not sure as I tugged my shoulder bag up. I didn’t have anything that would let me fly, and we were more than thirty stories up. “Is he making any demands?”
Trent flipped through the pages as the elevator dinged. “Not . . . yet.”
His words trailed off as the silver doors parted and the unmistakable scent of fresh air and broken concrete poured into the elevator and down the shaft. Almost immediately the doors began to close, and I put a hand out, stopping them. All three of us looked out into the alien-seeming, broken building as the wind pushed my hair back. The walls between us and the horizon were gone, and though there was still a ceiling, the Cincy skyline spread before us in magnificence unimpeded. Fluorescent lights, some on, some not, hung from the ceiling in a once-regular pattern. Desks and office equipment were shoved into haphazard piles. In one corner by the edge, a huge pile of stuff stretched to the ceiling. It had to be at least forty feet in diameter and was made of desks, pieces of wallboard, and twisted rebar. It looked like a nest.
Bancroft did this? “Maybe we should keep the hard hats on,” I whispered. Between us and the clutter was a much more modest barrier of desks, and behind it with their backs to us crouched two officers and Edden. Almost at our feet and clearly waiting to be taken down were two ominous, coat-covered bodies. The ambulance crew and stretcher were nowhere I could see, but the second elevator was going down.
They’re removing bodies, I thought, inching in front of Trent.
“I don’t know if I’ve got enough magic for this,” Trent said, and Edden turned, still in a crouch. When I gave him a little wave, he frowned and gestured brusquely for us to join him.
“You think?” Jenks darted out, immediately lost in the wind and glare bouncing into the open floor from the nearby building.
“Get over here!” Edden all but hissed, and we jolted into motion, hunched as we half ran. Rebar and wallboard littered the carpet squares, and cool air still flowed from the air ducts. Bancroft’s voice was coming from the weird “nest,” shouting about the sun and having to go deeper.
“Oh, thank God,” Trent breathed when we got closer. “There’s Landon. He looks okay.”
I pulled my gaze away from the covered bodies. Okay was a matter of interpretation. The young man was sitting on the floor, jaw clenched and eyes darting. Doctor Tessel? I wondered, eyes going back to the bodies by the elevator. Not good.