Free Never More by Dana Marie Bell Page B

case.”
    “Will do.” Raven hung up and pocketed his phone. He then grudgingly put the earpiece in, wincing a little at the thought of redcap earwax. “Man, the things you have to do for work around here.”
    “Tell me about it.” Liam sounded like he was right next to Raven.
    Raven easily leapt over the chain-link fence and stepped through the broken front door. “I’m in.”
    “Searching for electronic signatures.”
    Raven picked his way across what was once a living room. The upper floor had completely caved in, carpeting the floor below with debris. Raven had to float in a few places that were impossible to walk on. Sifting through this would take days…if he were human.
    Raven called his friends, his beasts, his pretty little birds into the room. His ravens flowed through the broken front door, filling the living room with their joyous cries. Raven smiled and held out his arms, allowing some of them to land on him. He greeted each and every one, touching them, showing he was pleased with them. “We need to find anything Sayyid left behind, my pets. Search for anything with his scent or his signature.”
    The ravens scattered, the only sound in the house the silken slither of their wings.
    Raven glanced around the living room again, conducting his own search with the help of two of his ravens. While he used his powers to lift things out of the way, the ravens dug with beak and claw. After an hour, Raven began to tire. “Nothing. I haven’t found a damn thing yet.”
    “He had to leave something behind to anchor the illusion. Did you look in the basement? Is the staircase intact, and if so, is there one of those little hidey-holes under it, like in Harry Potter?”
    Raven sighed. “Work, work, work.” But he followed Liam’s advice and headed for the staircase.
    Sure enough, there was a cubby under the stairs, complete with a djinn sigil. “I hate you so much right now.”
    Liam laughed. “I love being right.”
    “Call Robin and let him know what happened. I need to get rid of the sigil before someone accidentally sets it off again.” And if that happened, whoever touched it would become the focus of the trap, dying horribly as the house collapsed in on them.
    There was something odd about the sigil, something that had him staring at it, trying to figure out what it was that sent his hackles into an uproar.
    “Will do. I’ll see you in a couple of days at the Dunne farm.”
    “Can you live without your toys until the wedding is over?”
    Liam chuckled. “What makes you think I’ll be without them?”
    He cut off the call before Raven could ask him what he meant. The gremlin probably had access to portable electronics nerds only dreamed of.
    So instead of trying to break his brain figuring out the geekiest geek in the universe, Raven worked to abolish the sigil his half brother had left behind. One misstep would cause the trap to spring.
    Raven hated djinn illusion traps. He was not a fan of anything with an oops, you’re dead theme. At least when it was aimed at him.
    It took some time to work out what order they needed to be erased in, but Raven eventually got it. It helped that he’d seen this particular set of symbols before, but Sayyid liked to change things up by altering the symbol order. But once you figured out the key symbol, the rest wasn’t nearly as difficult.
    It was the raven symbol that had him freaking out just a little bit. Either this trap had been meant for him, or for his birds. It was the only thing he could think of that made sense, the only mark that was out of place in a relatively normal djinn death trap.
    Raven pressed the symbols in order, confident he’d gotten it right. When he pressed the last one, the sigil flared a bright green, the color of Robin’s eyes, and disappeared.
    The house creaked ominously. If he was wrong, and the sigil had been all that had been holding the crumbling house up…
    He called a warning to his ravens, telling them to get out. He