The Element of Death (The Final Formula Series, Book 1.5) (3 page)

“Unreal.” Donovan stepped up to the opening, his eyes sliding upward to take in James’s new form. He’d never witnessed this aspect of James’s ability. Maybe it would change his mind about his cool magic. Wordlessly, Donovan thrust an arm through the opening to hand James the bag.

Thank you.

“See you in a bit.” Donovan stepped back.

James released the portal and it winked closed. The bag fell from his hand, his claws slicing through the handle. He sighed, the sound more like a low growl in this form. He hoped he could get it out the other side without destroying his change of clothes.

The duffle bag tumbled across the cobbles and James landed beside it. A wind had kicked up, sending cool fingers combing through his fur. He returned to human form, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees.

The front steps were empty. “Rowan?” Perhaps he’d gone inside to get out of the wind.

James opened the duffle bag and pulled on the sweatpants and long-sleeve shirt inside.

Tucking the bag under one arm, he hurried up the stairs. He stepped across the threshold and froze. The weight of the place bore down on him, making the air almost too thick to breathe. The energy here was staggering. He was dead, with little to fear from such things, yet the fine hairs on his body rose as if charged.

He stood in a large, two-story foyer. Old checkerboard tile cover the floor, most of the pieces cracked or missing entirely. A counter ran along the rear wall, and high windows above the door let in the fading afternoon light. But what dominated the space was a large white statue of a woman. She wore an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform, the long skirt reminiscent of something from the early 1900s. Not something he’d expect to see in a crematorium. Maybe a hospital.

“Rowan?” James didn’t see him in the room. He spun in a slow circle, searching the dim corners. With the storm rolling in, the light was fading fast. James couldn’t imagine Rowan deciding to take a tour of the building. Perhaps he’d wandered off into the trees for a bathroom break. James searched for the familiar glow of his soul and found…nothing. He’d have to be dozens of yards away to escape James’s notice. Had he gotten lost?

“Rowan!” James’s voice echoed in the empty room.

A glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye and James whirled to face the open doorway and the man who stood in the shadows beyond the threshold.

“Where did you—” James fell silent, his sensitive nose picking up the odor of charred meat and ashes. It wasn’t Rowan.

A man stepped into the room, the source of the odor, his dark complexion almost the same shade as the decades-old suit he wore.

The man moved closer and James realized that the guy’s skin wasn’t brown, it was charcoal. Literally. The man’s head swiveled toward James, black pits where the eyes should be.

Get out.
The man’s lips didn’t move, but James had no doubt the raspy whisper was his. The man’s appearance began to change, the flesh of his face falling away to reveal charred bone.

James stood his ground. “You first.” He let the hound rise, coloring his tone and his eyes. It wasn’t an empty threat. The ghost’s soul was in the mortal plane and as accessible to James as any other.

The ghost tipped his face toward the ceiling, then faded away.

Something snapped above him, and James looked up. The chandelier two stories overhead broke free. James dove through the door into the open hallway an instant before the heavy chandelier crashed down where he’d been. The wrought iron arms shattered the tile floor, lifting a cloud of dust.

Wrought iron. Had the ghost known that James was weak to iron?

James pushed himself to his feet. He pulled in a breath—and froze. In the narrow confines of the hallway, he picked up a new scent. A familiar scent: Rowan’s blood.

Chapter

3

J
ames found the first droplet
a dozen feet down the hall. Squatting, he touched a finger to the spot. The blood was fresh. What was Rowan doing here? James lifted his head, searching his surroundings for souls. If Rowan was still in the building, he should be able to see him.

Dim flickers from the souls of the building’s other occupants winked in and out of existence. Had they hidden from him before, trying to entice him into the building? He’d encountered a few ghosts over the course of his life. Most avoided him, while others had been unaware of their surroundings. James wondered if they even knew they were dead.

He sighed and let his vision return to normal. Unable to locate Rowan by sight, he was left with one option: he’d have to hunt him.

Like his brothers, James was a Hunter. It was their genetic heritage, passed down not only through their genes, but also in their blood. Though nowhere near his strength, his brothers were still magical. Traces of hellhound blood flowed in their veins, enhancing their senses and their intuition to second-guess their prey. James didn’t want to think of Rowan as prey, but as long as he stayed in human form, that shouldn’t be a problem.

He closed his eyes and touched the blood to his tongue. Heat seared across his senses and he pulled back in surprise. It was just magic, but damn, he’d never felt anything like it. Moving past the magic, he focused on the taste of Rowan’s soul. Molten metal flowed across his senses, hardening into an unbending will, but beneath it, James picked up the disorienting tang of confusion. That didn’t mesh with the man he knew. Had their trip through the hellhound’s dimension messed him up that much?

James was reminded of a conversation he’d once had with Addie. She’d admitted that blood alchemists would torture people to imbue their blood with certain characteristics. Scare them, and bottle the essence of fear. Hurt them, and their blood held pain. Starve them, and capture the want of hunger. At the time, he’d been too shocked that she knew such things, but now, he looked past that and saw the truth in her words.

He raked a hand through his hair. What had he done to Rowan?

James rose to his feet, the taste of Rowan’s soul heavy on his tongue. The thrill of the hunt filled him, tingling across his skin and urging him to change. He resisted the temptation, determined to let the cool head of logic prevail.

He continued down the hall. The dust wasn’t heavy, but he still noticed the scuff from a shoe, the scent of disturbed plaster where Rowan had brushed a wall. And of course, the blood. He found the next drop near a closed door a few yards further down the hall. He touched his fingers to the peeling paint and the door swung open, the hinges protesting with a screech. He stepped inside and stopped.

Spray-painted messages adorned the walls. Words meant to frighten.

She walks.

You are not alone.

Ashes to ashes.

Several other phrases and warnings decorated the space, no doubt the work of some kids sneaking into the crematorium on a dare. A chalked circle had been drawn in the center of the room, faintly visible beneath the dust. Lumps broke up the chalked line at regular intervals, and James realized it was the congealed wax where candles had once burned. A séance perhaps, or maybe something darker.

Someone had been here in the not too distant past. One window had been covered with black fabric. An aluminum stepladder stood beside the other window, black fabric draped over the top beneath an industrial-sized staple gun. The kind that shot two-inch staples. Those things were expensive. James would suspect that the owner had intended to return, but everything was coated in a layer of dust. No, this stuff had been abandoned.

A shoe scuffed the floorboards behind him, and James whirled to face the sound. No one had entered the room. The only tracks in the dust-coated floor were his own. Yet he knew he wasn’t alone.

“Show yourself.” A growl crept in beneath the words. He quieted his breathing and listened. The wind moaned outside the building, but inside, only silence reached his ears.

He rubbed the back of his neck. The wrongness of this place tugged at him, urging him to leave. If the place affected him this way, no wonder the person who’d worked in this room had fled, abandoning his equipment.

“James!” The voice was faint, far away, and undeniably Rowan’s.

“Rowan, where are you?” James ran from the room, then skidded to a halt when he reached the hall. He’d been right; he wasn’t alone.

She stood before him, her long white nurse’s uniform glowing in pristine brilliance, though there was no ambient light. The white uniform bore an eerie resemblance to the one worn by the statue in the foyer. She watched him a moment, then gestured at the hallway behind her.

James followed her gesture and tensed as the door at the end of the hall swung open. He turned his gaze back to the nurse, a question on his lips, but she was gone. Was she helping him, or playing a game to amuse herself?

Tamping down his sense of foreboding, he hurried forward.

The door opened onto a stairwell. One set of stairs led up to the second story while the other led down to a basement he hadn’t noticed previously. The scent of damp and mold rose from the darkness…as did the iron tang of Rowan’s blood. He called the hound and his surrounding took on a green glow, not unlike the view through a night-vision camera. He discovered a blood droplet on the top stair. How had Rowan found his way in the darkness? And the bigger question, why?

The stairs descended more than a story, but not quite two. At the bottom, they opened onto a wide corridor, the ceiling high and the walls at least ten feet apart. Tile had once lined the walls, but most had fallen over the intervening decades and lay broken on the rough cement floor. The corridor curved to his left some distance ahead. He was able to make it out by the flickering, orange reflection. A fire?

“Rowan?” James’s voice reverberated in the corridor, but only the echo of his own voice answered him.

James glanced over his shoulder. The corridor ended a dozen feet behind him in an avalanche of dirt. Unease pressed against the edges of his control. He looked up, examining the ceiling for cracks, aware of the tons of brick and stone above him. This place reminded him of the basement beneath the Alchemica. He remembered well when it had collapsed, nearly burying him and Addie inside.

He shook his head in an effort to dispel the image. He didn’t want to think about that now. He didn’t want to think about her.

Firming his resolve, he started toward the flickering reflection of flames on the distant wall. Why would Rowan be down here starting fires? He must be a lot more messed up than James realized. He remembered the crazy, uncoordinated attack when they first returned to the mortal plane. That hadn’t been like Rowan at all.

He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm his mounting anxiety. With a conscious effort, he returned to the hunt, focusing on the scents around him. Damp cement, mold, and earth were the dominant smells, but not the only ones. Underlying those were ash, blood, and an odor the hound recognized immediately: death. He rolled his shoulders to shake off the unease. He couldn’t determine if it was the sheer number of dead that had passed through this place or something more recent. It suddenly occurred to him that there was another reason he’d fail to see a soul: it was no longer on the mortal plane. The muscles of his throat tightened, making it hard to swallow. He picked up his pace, hurrying toward the light.

The corridor curved in an odd downward arc as if it circled something in the ground. Perhaps the foundation for the smokestack? The flickering light grew brighter, and the corridor spit him out into a large room. The curving wall continued on his right, the light coming from that direction. To his left, he found a bank of mortuary drawers with a rusted gurney parked beside it. But the counter straight ahead snagged his attention. An assortment of early twentieth-century lab equipment took up most of the space. He could imagine Addie rushing forward to inspect the find, unmindful of any potential threats in her surroundings—much as she had the night they’d explored the ruins of the Alchemica.

James rubbed a hand over his face, forcing his mind from those familiar channels. He had to stop doing that.

He walked to the counter, trying to puzzle out the purpose of the equipment. The pieces were old, early to mid-twentieth century, but he still recognized most of them: flasks, sample jars, an iron ring stand, and a rack of test tubes. The items were dust covered, and the metal pieces a bit rusted, making it clear that nothing had been touched in decades. But why was it here? Why—

Then he saw the alembic. Maybe it wasn’t an unusual piece of equipment for this time period, but today, that particular item was most likely to be found in an alchemist’s lab. Was the person who’d put together this collection of equipment an alchemist?

James continued down the counter and stopped before a desiccator that sat at the far end of the bench. The old-fashioned glass jar was used to hold samples in a low-humidity environment. James leaned closer and eyed the dozen or more vials lined up within. Yellowing labels were affixed to each. He squinted at the fading letters. Were those names? Other than the labels, each vial appeared to contain the same thing: ash.

The light had grown brighter, and heat now warmed his back. He glanced over his shoulder and found the cremator set in the base of the curving wall. He’d been right about the smokestack foundation, but that observation was a fleeting one. For a long moment, he stood and stared at the flickering flames. Why would Rowan light the cremator?

“Rowan?” No answer.

James raked a hand through his hair. This made no sense. He’d followed the trail, and it led to the basement. Had he missed another room?