CAGED (#3, of Crows and Thorns)

Chapter 63

The rooftop's heavy doors swung wide as I shoved them open, and we made our way inside the Golden Panam building, quickly navigating down the staircase and corridors until we came to a bank of elevators. Half the team came with me, the rest took another service elevator. As we glided downward, while the others murmured quietly between themselves, some readjusting their weapons or dropping equipment bags down by their feet, I leaned up against the elevator's burnished metal wall and went back to my search. Pulling up the newspaper the day after my mother was stolen, I did the same thing, scanning through the articles for something I wasn't even sure what I was looking for. But the Monarch Tower stayed in my mind.

The newspaper was filled with the usual kind of business and world news, as well as local events happening within Ascendria itself. Some fun articles and feel-good ones too, but mostly deaths and murders and disappearances, and the war the law enforcement waged on our magic-infused drugs that infested its streets.

I almost missed it.

Almost.

My shoulders stiffened and my heart erupted into a staccato beat.

I quickly scrolled back, squinting at the screen, carefully reading the article that detailed an extreme electrical fault at the Monarch Tower that had occurred the day before, the same day my mother had been stolen off a quiet country road. The entire building had mysteriously lost power and the fault had been blamed on a lightning strike from a thunderstorm that had swept through Ascendria.

I rubbed my chin, frowning. It was fucking odd that lightning had taken out the Monarch Tower since every building had lightning rods to protect its structure. I knew Mom had been wearing elegant clothing along with her beloved jewelry set as if she was going to meet someone important from one of the Houses. And what better place to meet them than the Monarch Tower?

My mind speared back to my brother a few nights back when we sat across from one another in the library. I'd asked him if he'd felt her that day...and what had he said?

"You ever fall in your dreams? Like that rushing feeling of physically falling and you jolt suddenly awake? The way I woke up was similar to that. But it wasn't falling, it was this swift electric shock that went through me, like lightning I suppose, stuttering my heart. It was a faint echo of what it's like when Mom's tortured with fire, or ice shreds her skin, or her bones are stretched and quaking."

I inhaled sharply.

A bone-deep surety strummed my blood. My mother had been at the Monarch Tower that day and she'd encountered an other. A lightning-striker or a storm-weaver.

Holy hellsgate!

The elevator shuddered to a stop, snapping me abruptly out of my revelation.

I tucked my phone away, doming the pocket, just as the elevator's doors slid open. Shaking the astonishment and unease from my shoulders, I pushed into motion. The mystery of my mother sank into the dark recesses of my mind to be retrieved later and pulled apart further. Right now I needed a clear head and to make a move on my plan for my other problem.