Marked For Death: A Dark Urban Fantasy Novel Becca Blake (fiction novels to read .txt) 📖

us away. There were no cars parked anywhere nearby, though that didn’t necessarily mean it would be empty; I hadn’t pulled my car up to the building, either.

“Looks clear,” I said. “But I’ll hold the invisibility until we’re inside, just in case.”

We ducked under the police caution tape that blocked off the door. The husks of old vehicles, long since stripped of any usable parts, crowded the bottom floor. The warehouse must have once been an auto repair shop or a used car dealership that no one cleared out after the business shuttered.

Jacob and I moved through the bottom floor, weaving between the cars as we searched for any sign we weren’t alone. The back doors to a van that may have once been white were wide open, and another strip of police tape covered the entrance. Other than the lingering stench of weed that seeped into the van’s cushioned seats, they left no evidence behind.

I wrinkled my nose and backed out of the van. There didn’t seem to be any traces of a fight. It was looking more and more like this was a freak accident that the kids had lied about. Or maybe they were high enough that they really believed someone with electric hands killed their friend.

Either way, this recon mission was a bust.

Satisfied that we were alone, I dropped the invisibility spell. My head hummed with a dull ache as the emotions I’d been holding in returned.

“Hey, what’s this?” Jacob asked.

I followed the sound of his voice to find him crouching beside what remained of a pickup truck.

The metal was warped and twisted at the bottom, and a black scorch mark twisted its way from the fender to the ground below, ending near Jacob’s feet.

“That could be what we’re looking for,” I said, running my finger over the blackened dirt. There was no way to be certain the marks were magical, but they looked recent.

“How did the police miss these?” Jacob asked. “I mean, they look fresh.”

“I doubt they were taking the claims of electricity hands seriously in their search. They seemed to be focused on the kids’ drug hideout over there.” I pointed at the van. “We’ll need more than this to be sure there’s something that concerns us, though. We should keep looking.”

A piece of paper stuck to the windshield of a nearby car caught my attention. I snatched it and looked it over, frowning. The receipt from the gas station had yesterday’s date printed across the top.

“The kid died a few days ago, didn’t he?” Jacob asked, looking over my shoulder. “This place has been a crime scene.”

“Right,” I said. “There shouldn’t have been anyone here yesterday.”

“Do you think they’ll come back?”

I bit my bottom lip. “I’m not sure. We should stick around for the night to see if anything happens. If not, we’ll head out tomorrow morning to question those kids about what they saw.”

“We could just go home in the morning and say we questioned them,” Jacob said. “A few burn marks and a receipt won’t be enough to convince HQ something magical happened here, and I doubt the civilian kids have much to say beyond what was in that blog post.”

“Maybe, but Orion will know if we half-assed the job. We’re not doing that. Come on—let’s go find somewhere to crash.”

The rooms on the upper level had once been offices, but only piles of garbage and moth-bitten furniture were left in them. I pulled out a blanket from my pack and laid it out on the floor instead of covering the ratty couch in the corner. I could only imagine what sorts of activities had taken place on that couch, and the opened Trojan wrappers strewn around the room were enough to tell me I didn’t want to know.

The floor would do just fine.

“It’s getting dark. Do you want to take the first watch?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I tossed Jacob one of the bags of chips from my backpack. “Hungry?”

At first he looked irritated, as though he might refuse, but his expression softened. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Come get me in a few hours,” I said as I lay back on my blanket. It surprised me to find that the hard floor wasn’t all that uncomfortable. Or maybe I was too tired to care.

Just as I began dozing off, a loud banging sound came from the lower level, and a high-pitched scream cut through the air.

Chapter Five

“Casey, wait!”

The female voice from the lower level startled me to my feet. I crept toward the doorway, trying to find an angle to see what was happening downstairs.

Across the balcony where he’d been standing watch, Jacob dropped low and crawled toward me. He kept his head down and moved slowly, trying not to make too much noise.

When he made it to me, I touched his arm to cloak us both in another invisibility spell, then peeked over the balcony’s railing.

The front door, which had barely been hanging onto its frame earlier, had been torn from its hinges. That explained the loud banging, at least. A car’s headlights streamed in through the entrance, casting a spotlight over the lower level of the building.

“At least we didn’t park out front,” Jacob whispered beside me. “Good call.”

Not that I had any time to appreciate it, but that was the closest he’d come to giving me a compliment since we met.

I followed the bright light across the floor, to see the silhouettes of two women, one chasing the other. The pursuer was short and slender, with what looked to be fair skin and blond hair. The woman she followed—Casey, I assumed—was taller, with jet black hair and a fuller figure. Casey walked away from the other woman at a brisk pace, holding something bundled tight against her chest.

“Leave me alone, Alexis!” Casey came to an abrupt stop at the center of the warehouse and spun on her heels to face the other woman. A blast of power laced with electric energy burst free from her outstretched palm, and the force of