“No point crawling through a window when we can just as easily use the door,” Gabriel said.
He slipped his pack off his shoulder, took out the small pry bar, and went to work. It didn’t take long to get inside.
He switched on his flashlight and splashed the beam around the interior of the charred space. It was filled with the remains of workbenches, cutting and polishing machinery, and cabinets that had once held raw amber. Everything but the mag-steel tools had been burned beyond repair.
“This was one very hot fire,” Lucy said, flashing her light around the space.
Gabriel prowled slowly through the room. “Whoever set it wanted to destroy evidence.”
Otis abruptly vaulted down from Gabriel’s shoulder. He landed on a workbench and hopped down to the floor. Ash billowed around him. He opened all four eyes and bustled about, churning up more ash as he explored the room.
Lucy groaned. “He’s going to need a bath when we get home.” She looked down at her clothes. “We will, too.”
When we get home. She spoke casually, but Gabriel reran the words in his head as he searched the burned-out room. The phrase hummed through him like a line from a song he couldn’t quite remember. For him, home still meant his parents’ house. He hadn’t lived there since he had joined the Guild, but none of the apartments he had rented during his climb to the top had ever felt like home.
His current situation—spending his nights at Lucy’s apartment—was as temporary as things could get, but for some reason he found it natural to use the word home.
Lucy cautiously checked what was left of a cabinet. “What are we looking for?”
“Every tuner I ever knew kept the best specimens stashed in a vault in the Underworld. I’m betting Pitney had a hole-in-the-wall. The problem will be trying to find it. Everything is covered in ash and grit.”
Lucy took a step. The floor squeaked and groaned beneath her boot. She jumped back quickly.
“Stay where you are,” Gabriel said. “There’s a reason the fire marshal put up that condemned sign out front.”
He dug the pry bar out of his pack again and used it to probe the ashes.
He found what he was looking for beneath the wreckage of what had once been a small bathroom.
“Here we go,” he said.
He applied the pry bar to the trapdoor in the floor. Otis rushed over to see what was going on. Gabriel got the trap open and aimed his flashlight down into the darkness. A flight of cracked concrete steps led to the basement. Tendrils of a familiar energy wafted upward.
Otis chortled excitedly.
“Did you find Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall?” Lucy called from the alley door.
“Looks like it. There’s definitely a lot of Underworld heat. Come on over, but follow my footprints.”
“On my way.”
Lucy picked a path through the ash and soot. When she reached his side, he got a pleasant little shiver of awareness and knew she had heightened her senses.
“Definitely tunnel heat,” she said. “But even if Pitney had a secret vault down below, how can we find it? We’d need the coordinates.”
“Finding things is what I do, remember? If Pitney frequently came and went from a chamber in the tunnels, there will be a trail.”
“How will you be able to recognize it?”
Gabriel took one of the pendants out of his jacket. “If Pitney was the tuner who worked this amber, his vibe will be infused into it.”
Lucy smiled. “Excellent.”
“Let’s go.”
He went down the steps, senses at high rez. Otis scampered ahead of him. Lucy followed.
Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall was easy to locate. He had secured it with an impressive mag-steel door and a serious-looking lock. Green quartz energy seeped around the edges.
“I don’t think your pry bar will work on that door,” Lucy said.
“It’s a frequency lock. I’ve got a jammer that could open it, but we’re not going to have to go to any trouble.”
“Why not?”
Gabriel grabbed the steel handle and hauled the door open. “Because whoever went through this door last either did not know how to reset the lock or wasn’t worried about locking up. I think we can assume that person was the killer. He was looking for Pitney’s vault. The question is, did he find it?”
The heavy vault-style door swung open. Acid-green energy spilled through a ragged, two-foot-wide crack in the quartz wall. A shivery thrill rezzed his senses. He had spent a lot of his life in the Underworld, but he still got the rush.