Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

Time Call —or Juan loves Penny . There were a few gang tags, too.
    At the far end from us was a raised platform. Like the rest of the room, it was stripped as well, the podium and organ or piano long gone. But someone had cobbled together a table out of cinder blocks. I didn’t have to go closer to know what that table had been used for.
    â€œBlood and death,” I said. I closed my eyes. It helped me catch the fainter scents and kept me from crying. “Ben,” I said. “Warren. Daniel. And Littleton.”
    We’d found the sorcerer’s lair.
    â€œBut not Stefan.” Andre stood behind me, and his voice echoed in the rafters of the room.
    I couldn’t read anything from his voice, but I was not comfortable with him at my back. I remembered Naomi telling me that all of the vampires lost control sometimes—and the room smelled of blood and death.
    I walked past him back out to the foyer. “Not Stefan,” I agreed. “At least not in there.”
    There was a hallway on the other side of the foyer with doors opening off either side. I opened the doors and found three rooms and a closet with a hot water heater and a large fuse box.
    â€œHe won’t be up here,” Andre said. “There are too many windows.” He hadn’t followed me, just waited in the foyer until I finished my search.
    His eyes weren’t glowing, which I took to be a good sign.
    â€œThere’s a basement,” I told him. “I saw the windows outside.”
    We found the stairs to the basement tucked neatly behind the stairway to the choir loft. He didn’t seem to mind me being behind him, even with my stake, so I followed him down.
    Our footsteps, quiet as they were, sounded hollow in the stairwell. The air was dry and dusty. Andre opened the door at the bottom and the scents in the air changed abruptly.
    Now I smelled Stefan, Adam, and Samuel as well as Littleton—but the strongest scent of all of them was the demon. As it had at the hotel, after only a few breaths, the reek of demon drowned out everything else. The door at the bottom of the stairway had kept the scents contained.
    We walked even more quietly now, though, as Andre had said, if Littleton was here, he’d have heard us come in.
    The basement was darker than upstairs, and someone without preternatural sight might have had trouble seeing at all. We were in an entryway, similar to the foyer upstairs.
    There were a pair of bathrooms next to the stairway; and the MEN sign fell off when I pushed open the first door. Streetlights filtered through glass block windows allowing me to see that the room was empty except for a broken urinal leaning crookedly against one wall.
    I let the door close. Andre had checked the other restroom and was already walking past a cloakroom and into a short hallway, the duplicate of the one upstairs complete with doors.
    I left him to it and started on the other side of the stairs. The first room I walked into was a generous-sized kitchen, though there were only empty spaces where a refrigerator and stove had been. The cabinets were hanging open and bare. Along the inside wall there was a folding half-door covering the top of the counter. With it open, the church members could have served food from the kitchen to the room on the other side without walking back out to the foyer.
    Something scuttled behind me and I spun around, but it was only a mouse. We stared at each other for a moment before it went on its way. My heart was beating like a drum in my ears—stupid mouse.
    I came out to find Andre standing in front of the double doors next to the kitchen. The door was chained shut and locked with a shiny new padlock.
    He put his hand on the door and something beyond the door growled softly—a werewolf.
    â€œHe won’t have left them free,” Andre said, though he made no effort to break the chain. “That door would never hold a werewolf who wanted out.”
    â€œAndre?” Stefan called out. “Is that you? Who’s with you?”
    â€œStefan?” Andre whispered, frozen in place.
    â€œOpen the door.” I pushed on his shoulder urgently. Stefan was alive. If I could have ripped the doors off the hinges myself, I would have. Stefan and at least one of the wolves were still alive.
    Andre took hold of the chain gingerly and pulled until one of the links broke.
    I reached past him and jerked on the chain, letting it fall to the floor as I