“Stop.”

I braked in front of one of the cannery buildings.

“Inside there,” Hajo said, flinging off his seat belt.

I switched off the ignition and exited the SUV under a smattering of cold rain while Lon dug around in a seat pocket for a flashlight. He flicked it on and followed Hajo to a large loading door at the end of the building. Waist-high weeds, dead and brittle, blocked the door. Lon and Hajo worked together silently to stamp them down until they revealed a vertical door handle chained with a blackened padlock.

“You know how to pick locks?” Hajo asked Lon.

Lon shone the flashlight on the padlock, studied it for several seconds, then beckoned for me to take the light from him. “Hold it right there,” he instructed. He fished out his father’s old pocketknife and dug rusted bolts from the metal plate holding one side of the chain. Within seconds, the entire plate fell away with the chain still attached.

“Don’t get your fingerprints on anything. Just in case,” he said. He retracted his hand inside the edge of his jacket sleeve before sliding the large door a few feet to the side, and one by one we slipped into darkness, shaking the rain off as we entered the crumbling warehouse.

A shallow ramp led into a cavernous empty room. Everything was concrete—the floor, walls, rows of columns, even the ceiling. Only a narrow, rectangular band of windows broke the monotony. Stormy twilight passed through busted glass and illuminated an impressive display of faded graffiti that tagged the walls. Near the entrance, wooden crates were stacked high, a make-do ladder leading up to one of the broken windows, presumably used by graffiti artists to get in and out of the building. A pile of rusted spray-paint cans lay nearby.

We walked in, wet shoes squelching as we avoided rubble and some foul-smelling standing water that ran through the center of the room. At the end, we continued through a passage into a second area filled with tables and long metal tanks. Abandoned machinery was choked with weeds that snaked in through the broken windows. The graffiti tags tapered off here.

“So strong . . .” Hajo mumbled. “Keep going.”

Something stirred in the darkness to the side. I started and Lon herded me in closer to his hip. “Just rats,” he assured me, “or bats. Or maybe seagulls.” Any of them would explain the strong, acidic smell of animal droppings that stung my eyes.

“People get sick from breathing in pigeon shit,” I complained, eyeing the darkness with trepidation. “Like, hospital sick.”

Lon grunted. “Isn’t your buddy Bob here a healer?”

“I’m not good with disease,” Bob argued in a loud whisper behind me. “Just minor injuries. My father’s knack was stronger. He was a well-known GP in Morella before he died.”

He was right about that. Earthbounds with healing abilities were fairly common, and those with substantial skills usually made a career of medicine. Their high rate of success gave them a sizable advantage over human doctors and also gave them access to the highest-paying jobs. In fact, Bob lived off his father’s inheritance. I often wondered if Bob felt overshadowed by his father’s success—he talked about the man a lot, especially after a few drinks.

“It’s just on the other side of that hallway,” Hajo said.

We all looked where he was pointing. “That hallway” was long, narrow, and echoed with the sound of water dripping from broken pipes running along the ceiling. Every fiber of my being screamed a warning not to step into it. If Jupe were there, he would tell me that people too dumb to live did this kind of thing all the time in horror movies.

“Can you track more than one body at a time?” Lon asked.

Up until now, neither of us had brought this up. We couldn’t very well just tell Hajo that we were hunting the remains of the abducted children from the original Snatcher case. We might be too dumb to live, but we weren’t dumb enough to trust Drug Lord Hajo with that information.

“Naturally,” he said. “You wanna know how many bodies I sense on a daily basis? Thousands. Humans, animals—even insects, if they’re big enough. Death is everywhere, man. I can’t walk by a graveyard or I’ll pass out. And, yeah, there’s a boatload of dead things up in here, as if you can’t smell that yourself.”

I tried not to gag and inhaled with my mouth instead of my nose.

“You think I enjoy having this knack?” Hajo continued, his tone abrasive. “Would you? Why do you think I smoke sømna and just about anything else I can get my hands on? Anything to make me forget about it, or I go crazy.”

Lon grunted and aimed the flashlight at Hajo, who shielded his eyes.

“Come on,” I coaxed. If the children’s bodies were here, we were about to find out.

Single file, Hajo leading the way, we marched down the dank hallway. He stopped in front of a thick metal door. “Inside here.”

“Open the door,” Lon instructed.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Hajo admitted. “I just . . .”

I stuck my head around Lon’s arm and guided his hand to aim the flashlight on the door handle. A diffused wedge of pink glowed between the frame and the door. “It’s secured by a spell,” I said. Weird magick. Temporary spells fade, but stronger magick cracks. The pink glow here was riddled with fine lines, which meant that the spell must’ve been set a long time ago. Years and years . . . maybe even thirty years.