Page 70 of Scarred Resolve

“Wait, before we start, let me go get Jacky’s clothes. There’s no reason to keep her like that.” Davor rushed out of the cabin and was back in less than a minute while Niko and I waited patiently in the main room that had been knocked around a bit, and not only by me. Whatever scramble the witches had been in, they had made a mess of the place themselves.

“Thanks.”

I moved to a corner away from the stairs and the main doors and Changed, quickly dressing the moment I was human. My injuries hadn’t been too significant, and aside from a few light scars from being grazed with silver, I was fine.

“We need to figure out who just screamed and where those gunshots came from,” Niko said, and Davor pointed. Niko and I followed that finger to see a door I had missed entirely when I had been down here, trying to get the door to the outside open for my brothers. Niko had missed it while he’d waited on me and Davor, so I didn’t feel too bad.

“A basement?” I asked no one in particular, stretching my arms and legs as I spoke as quickly as I could. It had been several long hours since I had been bipedal.

“Let’s find out,” Niko said, marching to the door and pulling it open.

My guess had been right. It could have been a closet, but a basement made sense. I moved closer, squeezed between my brothers, knowing they could smell the thick magic and fresh death I could. Some of the death, however, was a little older. Not much older, but enough that it was an obvious difference.

“There’s so much to smell that I’m not getting everything,” Davor said softly.

Niko nodded in response as I opened my mouth.

“Me, neither,” I said, beginning to walk down. They followed, and at the bottom, I held a hand over my mouth.

There were seven bodies in different positions. Two stood out, certainly killed by the gunshots we had heard when we thought the fighting was over. The other five had no obvious cause of death. I was frozen as Niko and Davor stepped around me, able to recover from the shock faster.

“They’re sitting on mats with circles drawn on them,” Davor pointed out softly. “They were doing some dark magic.”

“They were doing magic. I don’t think there’s such a thing as light and dark. Just magic and how someone decides to use it,” Niko replied, shaking his head. “I have no idea what they were doing.”

I finally stepped closer and knew in my heart what my brothers were trying to put together.

“They were the witches controlling the werewolves and werecat,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and rubbing my upper arms as I tried to warm myself up. It wasn’t cold, but I had to do something about the chills I had. “The ones that have been dead longest… the one that screamed once the werecat was truly dead… They died when the moon cursed they controlled died.”

“I’m grateful to have you on this mission. I would have thought I was going mad if I thought of that with as much evidence as we have to prove it. Which is very little,” Davor said, but while the words were an oddly condescending choice, his tone wasn’t. When he looked at me, I saw that he believed every word I was saying.

“I don’t like it,” Niko muttered. “Not the idea, but the…” He waved a hand at the dead around us. “The fact that we’restanding in the proof of it. It was one thing for the werewolves to be caught out by some witches, but us werecats… This is bad.”

“It’s been bad,” I said, going to one knee to inspect one of the witches who seemed to have died for no reason at all. Someone had cleaned him. After that, I moved to the next as my brothers talked over my head, but I didn’t listen. It was the third witch that told me something new.

Gently, I tilted her head and saw blood in her ears. So recently dead, the movement caused blood to run from her nose. I clenched my jaw and fought with my stomach as I tried to open one of her eyes and saw that the whites of them were entirely red, all the blood vessels burst. With that, I checked one of the cleaned ones. The eyes couldn’t be cleaned.

“Jacky?” Davor and Niko were finally done talking, and Davor was asking for me.

I was checking all of them now. They all had those eyes, and I tilted the head of one and saw some missed blood in the ears.

“They cleaned the ones who died earlier, probably out of respect, but it’s like the werewolves and werecat dying had… They all suddenly started bleeding in their brains and died quickly. There was no saving them.”

“And once all the controllers died, the last two…”

I looked at what Niko trailed off about. The last two had eaten the muzzles of their sidearms and ended things before we knew they existed. There would be no witches answering our questions here.

“One of them must have been holding the spells on the doors, trying to protect the witches down here,” Davor said, going for the practical rather than lingering on how those two witches had died. I didn’t blame him.

“Let’s go find your case, if it wasn’t stolen on that plane, and contact our family,” I said, straightening up and patting his shoulder.

We left the bodies where they had fallen, all of them. We scoured the house up and down, and while we found tons of documents to go through, there was no sign of the case.

“Fuck. If they stole it, they could be using it now or contacting one of my peers to break into my servers…” Davor groaned.

“Let me check one more thing,” I said, heading out the door that faced the clearing. As I walked, Davor continued to spiral while Niko tried to settle him. I wasn’t fretting, though. I remembered the bitch with the briefcase.

Sure enough, I kicked her off the case, and it was Davor’s. I had been in a flurry of emotions and hadn’t recognized it as his. Picking it up, relief settled in my chest.

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