Page 69 of Curse of the Wolf
“No bugs up here,” Duncan said as we stepped into a hallway similar to the one below, though small square windows marked each end instead of doors.
Bars had come down over those windows, bars that hadn’t been in place when I’d looked at them from outside.
I eyed my single grenade, hoping it would be as easy to leave when we were done as Duncan believed. After watching the cameras track us, I had little doubt that someone besides the guard bugs knew we were here and was probably on the way.
We looked through an open door into what reminded me of a break room in an office building. It had a fridge and cabinets but wasn’t a full kitchen.
“I was expecting a potion-making factory, like the other place,” I said, heading to the next room.
“Maybe that’s done in the basement.”
Which I wasn’t eager to explore if it was full of mechanical guard bugs. But the other rooms we checked upstairs weren’t any more promising, most holding desks or bedroom furniture. None of the drawers had anything in them, nor did I find my sword propped in the corner anywhere. Not that I’d expected that. I didn’t sense any magic on this floor.
We didn’t find any stairs leading up to the roof and debated our options when we returned to the elevator.
“Can you tell if any of the magic we can sense down there belongs to tools or artifacts?” I pointed at the floor. “Somethingimportant?”
I doubted the bugs could lift Duncan’s curse.
“It might,” he said. “There’s enough magic that it’s hard to identify individual signatures. My senses suggest there are a lot of those bugs down there.”
“Mine too, unfortunately.”
Duncan pressed one of the elevator buttons. When the doors opened, I braced myself, expecting the bug we’d seen earlier to walk out. But the elevator car was empty.
We stepped in, and Duncan held his finger over the two options. Level 1 or Basement. He looked at me.
We hadn’t checked all the rooms on the first floor, but my gut told me we wouldn’t find anything of interest on that level. We also might not have much time before the security squad arrived.
“Let’s find out what the guard bugs are guarding.” I held up the grenade to show him I was ready for trouble.
“Agreed, but don’t throw that unless you really need to, especially not in the basement.”
“Afraid the entire building would come down on us?”
“Thatisa possibility.” Duncan pressed the basement button.
As soon as the doors opened, dozens and dozens oftinksreached our ears, and numerous sets of glowing red eyes turned toward us. It had been dark upstairs, but down here, it was pitch-black, save for those eyes. The air smelled both floral and musty with a hint of decay. I remembered the odor of the mushroom farm and suspected the ingredients that had been mailed to this address were stored down here.
Duncan turned on his phone’s flashlight app and swung the beam over the red eyes. In the cavernous space, it shined on metal vats, wood and plastic crates, and white barrels that held chemicals or other liquids. A couple of those barrels had skull-and-crossbones stickers on the side. One claimed its contents were radioactive.
“Another reason not to throw a grenade down here,” I said.
The flashlight beam also reflected on the metallic carapaces of dozens and dozens of metal bugs, all rotated to face us. A couple of them puffed out soft breaths of vapor, the same as the one above. Well, notbreaths, I supposed. They wouldn’t have lungs and be breathing; at least, I couldn’t imagine that. But guessing what those little clouds might be made me uneasy. With so many other odors in the area, I couldn’t tell what the vapor smelled like or guess what it was.
Something toxic?
“I don’t see a light switch,” Duncan said.
“Maybe the lights are voice-activated, and you have to know a secret word to turn them on.”
“Could be.” Duncan pointed toward a door behind the bugs, one of a couple off the cavernous room. “Think they’ll let us go that way?”
“We’re powerful and mighty werewolves. How would they stop us?” Even as I asked the question, I eyed another puff of vapor in front of the eyes of a nearby bug. For a few seconds, Ithought I caught a sweet odor that didn’t fit in with the pervasive floral, mushroom, and chemical scents.
“Maybe we should have brought your SCUBA equipment, so we wouldn’t have had to breathe the air in here,” I said.
“I did notice they’re emitting… something.” Duncan sniffed. “Abrams’s scent is down here, even stronger than above.”
