It wasn’t difficult to find the location of the blaze in Spiretown; the smoke could be seen for miles. Collin had suspected it was the Sanctuary that had gone up in flames and his arrival confirmed it. He'd guessed that it was mages causing all of the trouble. He recognized a woman from Logan's brothel being restrained by Templars while the regular city police fought back another group. Wahl jogged over as he saw Collin getting out of his car. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and looked like he’d been in a fight.
“What the hell?” Collin asked as they met halfway.
“Protesters—plainblood civilians out here trying to throw gasoline on the flames—literally.”
Collin sighed, “Anybody hurt?”
Wahl held up his bandaged hands, “A few got too close to the fire and I had to pull one of them out. We’ve got at least three plainbloods in the hospital—the mages heal their own.”
“What’s going on with them?” Collin nodded towards the small group of women—and men—being detained by his officers.
“Logan’s people, apparently…employees. They were worried about him. They don’t believe he wasn’t inside when the place was hit.”
Even a block away, the heat from the fire could be felt on the breeze.
“You—I know you—you set him up, didn’t you?!” The prostitute Collin had picked up as his ticket into the Sanctuary narrowed her eyes at him, and the others fixed him in their gazes.
Collin held up his hands, “Logan Grey is safe. Was anyone in the building when it went up?”
The small group mumbled amongst themselves for a few seconds, then someone spoke up—the kid Collin had seen with the D.A. that night. “We want proof that he’s okay before we talk to anyone about anything.”
Sgt. Neman raised a canister of dampening gas towards the group but Collin stopped him.
“Look, I’d really like to let you see for yourselves, but he’s been taken into custodial protection now at his own request.”
“Whose protection? Yours?” The woman snarled.
Collin sighed, "I can't disclose that information; you'll just have to take my word for it." She opened her mouth to protest but the D.A.'s boy-toy stopped her, touching her arm gently as he kept his eyes fixed on Collin.
"He's telling the truth—Logan's alright."
The woman breathed a sigh of relief.
"No one was in there." The boy-toy answered Collin's earlier question. "Logan paid us all and locked the place down the night after you came in."
Which meant that Logan hadn't gone to bed like a good little mage after all. Collin would have asked the man if Logan had any enemies but that was fairly obvious. Even if he hadn’t come to Collin for protection, at a minimum he would have earned the ire of practically every citizen of Port Ari just by being a mage.
"Is there a reason they are being detained?" Collin asked Neman, feeling suddenly exhausted.
Sgt. Neman jerked his head towards the group of angry plainblood protestors, "Just keeping them apart."
"Let the mages go." He turned his attention to the small group of Logan's employees, "You all return home and I won't have to file a report."
Muttering softly to themselves, the mages wandered off without arguing further.
Wahl said nothing, though the difference in Collin's attitude was noticeable.
Normally Collin would have been looking for any excuse to haul in a group of mages, but he felt weary. The mage at home was causing him problems, and he'd already had more than enough to deal with. Neman looked at Wahl as they shared concerns for their C.O., but shrugged and directed the other officers to let Logan's cheering squad go.
"You think one of them might have had something to do with it?" Collin asked, looking at the plainblood group, though he already knew the answer. They were opportunists, nothing more; just people looking for a reason to start a fight.
He didn’t wait for a response as he began to scope the perimeter for clues he knew he wouldn’t find. While the buildings in Spiretown were old, fires here were never started by faulty electrical wiring, and never needed an accelerant. Few mages were Fire-Adepts, but just one was all it took. However, Collin didn’t believe the Sanctuary was destroyed by a fire-wielding spell-caster accidentally getting off a good burst. Nor did he believe that Logan had necessarily been the target, though everything pointed to that as the most obvious motive. Collin grimaced as his fillings began to ache and a buzzing started in his ears. There was something rotten in Spiretown, and it wasn't just the mages.
"Chief, everything okay?" Wahl moved up beside Collin.
"Things are getting...complicated..." Collin closed his eyes as he realized it was the first time he'd admitted to the obvious, even though it had nothing to do with Philip's question. He frowned down at his cane and made his way back to his vehicle, "Let me know if you get any leads."
Collin paused by Neman on his way and signed off on the official reports, then got into his car and headed for home. He was just thinking about how Logan's intuition had been wrong, until he entered Port Ari. The moment he cleared the Templar route tunnel, something dropped down onto the hood of his car, making him swerve and lose control.
He thought he'd seen a man's face hissing at him through the windshield and the body went rolling off when he slammed on his brakes. No...not any man's face. Sergeant John Gislain. Collin's heart thundered in his ears as he put the vehicle in park and unfastened his seatbelt. Something big had definitely hit his hood; from the huge dent, that much was clear. Turning off the car, he fished his gun out of the center console and flipped off the safety.
The only sound was the ticking of his radiator in the big V-8 engine as he listened for movement. Collin quietly opened his driver's-side door, and purposefully pressed his cane into the ground first. Something grabbed hold of the cane from beneath the car; the force of it bent the aluminum shaft and snatched the cane from his hand. Collin rolled free of his vehicle and began shooting directly underneath his car. For a moment, he saw what he was certain was Gislain's face, or what was left of it, on a body that looked more like an insect's as it squealed and skittered away. Collin felt queasy. Unless someone was seriously fucking with him, he was losing his mind. The thing moved quickly and he was unable to track it through the shadows, though he could see a shiny trail it left behind, indicating that he'd gotten at least one good hit.
The sound from his shots attracted the attention of a few police and soon Wahl was yelling as he and some of the plainclothes officers ran to him from the Spiretown side of the tunnel.
"Collin! What the hell is going on?"
Collin didn't answer, the thing had attracted his attention again, skittering and darting towards the vine-covered wall of the tunnel. He stood up and began shooting.
"Jesus Christ!" Wahl yelled trying to wave back several police-officers who'd readied their rifles in case something had snapped in Collin's brain. It wouldn’t have been the first time a Templar had gone crazy; aside from the stress of the job, the Felsyrum they took rendered some serious cumulative effects on the brain. From the looks of things, the Templar commander was shooting at shadows.
"Collin!"
Collin had again lost track of the creature; it had burrowed into the leaves, a trail of black ichor the only evidence that anything had been there at all. Collin dropped his arm, holstering his weapon. "Something dropped onto the hood of my car."
Wahl indicated to the regular officers to stand down as he followed Collin to his vehicle. His cane lie bent in half, partially underneath.
"What the hell..." Wahl stared at the huge dent in the hood of the car, then took the cane from Collin as he held it up. Initially he had doubted Collin's story; the man was under a lot of stress lately, but he couldn't refute the evidence, "What...what could have done that?"
Collin shook his head, "I don’t want to speculate. Be careful around the tunnel and sewer-entrances. Whatever it was, I doubt it was the only one."