The Sweetest Burn (Broken Destiny #2)(74)

That sounded like Demetrius, but I was struck by something else. "You realize that you happened to stay at two out of the three places where the staff has been," I pointed out.

He opened his mouth to speak, then paused. "If the staff's at the old Graenan estate, that's true," he finally said.

I grunted. "Proving once again that fate has a twisted sense of humor."

The staff might have been right under Demetrius's nose when he set that fire, and he hadn't known it. Thank God that demons didn't have the ability to sense hallowed objects, or Demetrius could've sent the realm walls crashing down decades ago.

Beyond the window, buildings and urban areas were starting to be replaced by trees and a much more rural-looking setting.

"Let's hope the staff is still there," I said, giving Adrian a tired, if impish, smile. "If you send Demetrius a selfie of you holding it next to that house's ruins, he might combust with rage and save us the trouble of killing him."

* * *

THE FORMER CHATEAU was on over ten acres of land in an area where the other estates also had a lot of elbow room. Obviously, this area still catered to the wealthy. We had to park outside the estate's closed gates, and if we'd been in a regular car instead of a limo, I felt sure that someone would've called the police to report an attempted robbery. 

Of course, our fancy ride wasn't the only thing that helped. The late hour did, too. At just after three in the morning, any normal resident would be in bed. If I didn't have a life-or-death task in front of me, that's where I'd be. Jet lag had nothing on realm lag. I'd been bouncing back and forth between so many time zones without sleep; if I started speaking in tongues out of sheer exhaustion, I wouldn't be surprised.

That's why I didn't object when, safely out of sight from our limo driver, Adrian had Brutus land and then we climbed on his back. I might not like traveling via Gargoyle Airlines, but I didn't think I had a ten-acre trek in me at the moment.

Brutus had barely taken off when my hallowed sensors started to perk up. They grew stronger over the time it took him to fly us to the ruins, and when he set us down next to the charred remains of an abandoned chateau, they were vibrating.

"Feel anything?" Adrian asked.

"Yep," I responded. "For starters, now I'm awake, and the readings I'm getting feel stronger than the ones in France."

"Are they stronger than the ones that were at the campus chapel?" he asked at once.

I sent my senses out as I followed that inner sensor to the far side of the rubble that marked the main house. "No," I said at last. Then I pointed to an overgrown section of weeds that looked out of place even for abandoned ruins. "From what I'm feeling, that's where the chapel used to be."

Adrian looked back and forth between the weeds and the crumbled wall next to it. From his expression, he was restructuring how the house used to look when it was whole, and part of me wished I could've seen what was in his mind's eye.

"I remember it now," he finally said. "It's unbelievable that it wasn't destroyed by the fire, too."

The chapel had been located right next to the main house, which hadn't survived the blaze, yet somehow, it had. "Something must have saved it," I said quietly.

That "something" had to be divine intervention, although I didn't say it out loud. I might have conflicted feelings about the Great Being, but I had no doubt that He wouldn't let a fire destroy one of His famed, destiny-fulfilling weapons.

I bent down and touched the section of ground where the pulses were the strongest. The supernatural version of red alert that seemed to follow the staff was there, and it was stronger than in France, but...it still felt like echoes compared to touching the wall in the crypt beneath the campus chapel.

"Unless its casing has been spelled to mute its effect, the staff isn't here," I said with a heavy sense of disappointment. "I think it used to be, though. I can feel traces of it."

And if I went by my time-lessons-the-effect theory, then the staff had followed the migration of the chapel, first being in France, then here, and then at Marquette University. Why had someone bothered to ship it along with the disassembled chapel to all of those places? They must have known how valuable the staff was to go to such trouble. Most important, if it wasn't in any of the previous three "holy homes" it had resided in before, where was it now?

"Maybe there's another tablet or clue underneath this slab," I said, choosing to be optimistic that we hadn't come all the way here for nothing. "Or maybe the staff is here and there's a reason why I don't feel it. I say we dig and make sure that the staff's supernatural vibes aren't being muted with symbols like they were back in the Marquette chapel."