Chapter 152 The Search Begins
POV: Isla Reid | Eastern Shelter, The Rookeries
The room still smelled like her.
That was the thing Isla couldn't get past, standing in the doorway of the third floor room with the reinforced lock hanging open and the small bed pushed against the wall and Lily's drawings still tacked above the headboard. Crayoned wolves and stick figures and one drawing that was clearly meant to be Isla, identifiable by the red hair Lily had insisted on giving her even though Isla's hair was brown.
The room smelled like the child who slept in it and the child was gone and the lock had been opened from the outside by someone who knew exactly where to look and exactly how to do it quietly enough that the two wolves on overnight watch hadn't heard anything.
Sarah.
The name sat in Isla's chest like a coal. She had welcomed that woman into the shelter. She had trusted her beside the wounded, trusted her with supply counts and schedules and the internal geography of every building they operated out of. She had argued with Valentina about it, told Callum his instincts were grief talking when he went quiet after Silas's warning.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum and breathed through it.
Callum was in the main room below organizing the search, his voice carrying up through the floorboards in the flat even tone he used when he was holding something down that wanted to come up. She could hear other voices, the crew assembling, the specific quality of movement that meant people picking up weapons and purpose at the same time.
She went downstairs.
The main room held fourteen people, which was most of the core crew plus three others who had heard and come without being called. Callum was at the table with a hand-drawn map of the East End spread out and weighted at the corners. Valentina stood beside him, phone to her ear, speaking quietly in Italian to whoever was on the other end of it. Tom was in the corner with his eyes closed and his hands flat on the wall, which was what he looked like when he was running fae tracking magic through the building's structure.
Isla went to the table.
"They had forty minutes before my message reached you," she said. "They were prepared. They knew the layout, the schedule, the shift pattern. They went straight to the room." She looked at Callum. "Sarah gave them everything."
"I know." He said it without heat. The heat was underneath it, controlled. "Tom's trying to get a directional trace from the magic used to open the lock. Valentina's working her Parliament contacts." He looked at the map. "We're covering the six most likely ground routes out of the Rookeries. Every wolf who isn't on route coverage is watching the entry points."
"She's five years old," Isla said.
"I know." He met her eyes. The look in his said he understood what she was carrying and he was carrying the same thing and neither of them had time to put it down yet.
She took a breath and straightened and became the version of herself that was useful rather than the version that was standing in a doorway smelling a child's empty room.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Medical kit ready to go. When we find her, she'll need you first."
She was already moving toward the supply cabinet when Silas came through the front door.
He came fast, which was not how Silas moved normally. Silas moved like a man who had learned that hurrying toward things was rarely an improvement over arriving prepared. Seeing him move quickly was its own kind of alarm.
He stopped at the table and looked at Callum and then at Isla and then at the map.
"I know where they took her," he said. He was breathing harder than usual. "I have a contact at St. Thomas Hospital. He's been reporting unusual activity in the sub-basement levels for two months, access restricted, supplies going in that don't match any registered medical operation." He set both hands on the table. "It's a Hermetic Order facility. Underground, extensive, warded six ways from Sunday." He paused, and the pause had weight to it. "She's in the Facilities."
Nobody in the room spoke for a moment.
Isla had heard that word used once before, in the context of the Hermetic Order's hybrid program. She had not known it was a real place with a real location. She had thought it was the kind of word that covered something deliberately vague.
She looked at Callum.
His jaw was set. The controlled thing underneath his voice had found a new container.
"How do we get in?" he said.