Chapter 81 Find Them!
The last gunshot had faded twenty minutes ago and the rogue town was quiet, it had gone very still.
The surviving rogues and former prisoners moved through the aftermath in the now glaring harshness of the sun, some of them dealing with the wounded, some of them standing in the open ground between the buildings and looking at what remained of the feast that had been interrupted mid-celebration.
Overturned cups, scattered food, and bodies that had been police officers two hours ago, arranged across the ground.
Every last one of them.
The rogue king, Elijah, stood in the centre of the open ground with his hands clasped behind his back and surveyed it. His jaw was set and his eyes moved across the scene with a chill in them.
The enchantment on the town had held for three years. Three years of operations out of this location, three years of movements and missions and activities that had given law enforcement every reason to be interested and no way of acting on that interest, because the magical concealment of this place had been built by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had done it thoroughly. You did not find this town unless you were told where it was, and even being told where it was only got you so far, except you were invited in or, your blood was used in the concealment’s creation.
Maddox shared blood with Elijah which was why he was able to get through.
The enchantment had not failed. It had been bypassed. There was a difference, and the difference mattered, and Elijah had been turning it over since the first siren reached them.
His people were gathering now, the full group assembling in the open ground without being summoned, because the situation made the gathering obvious. The former prisoners had pulled together on their side with the instinct of a group that defaulted to formation when the environment became uncertain, and the rogues had done the same, and for the moment both groups were present and accounted for and looking toward the rogue king with the collective expectation of people who needed the next instruction.
One of the rogues, a lanky, slim-built man whose instincts tended toward accusation when things went wrong, looked across at the ex-prisoners group and said, "We need to talk about how we were found."
Elijah said nothing yet.
"Three years," the man continued, addressing the people around him as much as anyone else. "Three years this place has been secure. New people arrive and two days later we've got police crawling in from every direction." He let the implication sit without completing it, which was its own kind of completion.
Several heads turned toward the ex-prisoner’s group.
Khan was watching from the far end of the assembled crowd with a stillness, his eyes were narrowed with calculation. The men on either side of him had shifted their posture, registering the direction of Ferris's attention.
Elijah turned his head and looked at the slim man.
The look was enough.
The slim man stopped talking.
"The next person who speaks before I ask them to," Elijah said, his voice very quiet, "will wish they hadn't." He let the silence run for a moment after that, making sure it had settled fully before he continued. "We were not betrayed by anyone in this camp. The enchantment was not broken from the inside. Someone with knowledge of magical concealment bypassed the barrier from the outside, which is a different problem and a more significant one, and I will not have us wasting time pointing at each other while the actual answer is sitting somewhere we haven't looked yet."
He looked at the assembled group.
"We are leaving this location. All of it. Everything that can be carried, we carry. Everything that can't be carried, we burn. We move within the hour." He paused. "Questions after we move. Not before."
The group began to shift, people splitting off toward the buildings with practised efficiency. Elijah watched it begin and then turned to Ferris, who was standing closest to him and who functioned as the nearest thing he had to a personal aide.
"Where is Maddox," he said.
Ferris's expression did a small, controlled thing. "We haven't located him yet."
Elijah looked at him.
"We've asked," Ferris said carefully. "No one has seen him since before the police arrived."
Elijah turned to scan the crowd again with fresh eyes, running the count. The ex-prisoners were present as a group, Khan visible at the far end, the freed prisoners clustered together. The rogues were mostly accounted for. And Maddox was not where Maddox should be, which was beside his uncle in the immediate aftermath of an attack on their position.
Before he could say anything further, a man pushed forward from the edge of the crowd.
He came forward with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for the moment and had decided it had arrived. His face was carrying something that was more than the general tension of the morning, something specific and directional, and Elijah recognized the quality of it and felt, before a word was spoken, a shift in his attention that was separate from everything else demanding it.
Behind the man, another man came forward. Older, one of the longer-standing members of the camp. He had been in the rogue king's operation for six years, and he was not a man who sought attention or brought drama to situations that didn't require it.
The older man was not composed. His face was set between fury and grief, and he was looking at Elijah with the eyes of someone who had arrived at a specific request.
"Tell me," Elijah said.
The older man reached the front of the assembled group and stopped. He looked at Elijah directly and said, "Maddox killed Bran."
The words landed in the open ground and the people closest to them went still.
Elijah did not move. "Say that again."
"Bran’s dead," the older man said. His voice was controlled though you could tell he was holding something enormous inside them and had decided that falling apart was not what the moment required. "Me younger boy saw it,” he said gesturing to the younger man who came with him. “Neck got snapped clean. Maddox did it." He paused and his jaw worked once before he said the next part. "Bran was me fucking son!"
Elijah looked at him for a long moment. He looked at the face of a man he had known for six years and whose composure right now was costing him more than most things cost most people, and he felt something move through his own chest that was not simple and was not clean.
Bran had been difficult. That was simply true. He had been one of the camp's more volatile presences, had caused friction that needed managing, and had operated with a roughness that created problems. None of that made him worth less than any other person in this camp, and none of it was information that the older man needed to hear right now.
"I'm sorry for your loss," Elijah said, and he meant it, which was not always the case when he said those words.
The older man nodded once, tight and controlled. "I want justice for me boy" he said. "I'm owed that."
"You are," Elijah said. He was still looking at the man but his mind was moving through it rapidly. Maddox had killed one of his men. That was the claim, from a witness who had no particular reason to fabricate it. Maddox, who had left the camp after the police arrived rather than staying to help manage the situation, which was itself a thing that required explanation.
There was something missing from this picture. He could feel the gap in it.
"There's more," the younger man said, and his voice had a smugness to it that did not go unnoticed by Elijah. "He weren’t alone when he left."
Elijah turned to him.
"He ran with someone," the younger man said. "A girl. Not one o’ ours." He paused, and the pause was deliberate. "Bran had called ‘er a witch afore he was taken. He could smell it on ‘er."
The open ground went very quiet.
Elijah stood in the quiet and looked at the younger man and thought about the enchantment that had kept this camp invisible for three years and had been bypassed in a single night.
A witch. There had been a witch in this camp during the raid. A witch that Maddox had apparently known well enough to protect at the cost of one of the camp's own men, and had then fled with when the situation became untenable.
A commotion at the edge of the group broke the silence. Two of the rogues were dragging someone forward, a man who was not walking so much as being transported, his feet barely finding the ground between them. He was in a police uniform, or what remained of one, and his face had been rearranged in ways that made identification difficult. He was alive. That was about the most that could be said for his current condition.
The man holding his left arm said, "Found him trying to get out through the east side. Thought he'd gone but he was hiding in one of the storage buildings."
The surviving officer was deposited in the centre of the assembled group. He went to his knees and stayed there.
Elijah walked toward him slowly and crouched down to meet him at eye level, the man cowering to avoid his gaze.
"How did you find this location," Elijah said.
The officer's eyes were swollen and his breathing was uneven and he looked at Elijah with the expression of a man calculating the distance between what he wanted to say and what was likely to happen to him regardless of what he chose.
"A woman," he said finally. His voice was rough. "A woman called in the location. Said she had a tip."
Elijah didn't move.
"She called the lead detective personally," the officer continued. He was talking now, past the decision not to, operating on the instinct that giving information was better than withholding it in his current position. "She knew exactly where you were. She said the person we were looking for would be here."
Elijah straightened up slowly.
A woman.
The girl Maddox had saved.
A witch.
She must’ve brought down the barrier for the police.
And Maddox had been found in this camp with a witch, had killed a man to protect her, and had run with her when it became impossible to stay.
Elijah stood in the midst of it all, thinking. The witch Maddox had protected had been the instrument of the barrier going down. Whether she'd known she was being used for that purpose or had acted intentionally was a question he couldn't answer yet, but the question of whether she was connected to what had happened here was no longer a question at all.
He turned to face the assembled group.
"We move as planned," he said. "Pack what can be carried. Burn the rest." He looked at Ferris. "Send four teams in four directions. I want Maddox found and brought back. Alive." He let that word sit with enough weight that no one in the immediate vicinity could mistake it for a soft preference. "He is my nephew. He is not to be harmed until I confront him."
He turned back to survey the camp once more and added, almost as an afterthought, "The witch? Dead or alive."
At the far back of the assembled group, standing where the crowd was thinnest and Elijah's direct eyeline didn't reach, Khan had been listening to all of it.
He stood with his arms at his sides and his face composed in quiet decision. Beside him, close enough that she could hear him without anyone else doing the same, was Silena, she was fast and sharper than most people clocked immediately.
Khan looked at her for a moment without speaking. She turned to look back at him, then he moved his chin slightly to the left, a gesture that was minimal enough to mean nothing to anyone watching casually.
She gave a small nod.
Khan's eyes moved to three other ex-prisoners positioned at different points around the edge of the group. He made contact with each of them in turn, and each of them registered it. Each of them gave the equivalent of a nod.
Khan looked forward again and said nothing.
The crowd began to disperse as the relocation preparations started in earnest. In the movement and noise of it, four Islanders separated quietly from the group and moved in four different directions, east and west, and north and south, disappearing into the tree line at the camp's perimeter with the natural unhurried quality of people who were simply moving rather than searching.
They were searching.
And they were going to find Maddox before anyone else did.