Empty Box

I get up and put my hand back on the gun in my pocket. Whoever did this could still be around. I roll the kid over and the thing in his arms clatters to the side. The cigarette falls out of my mouth as I recognize a metal box with engravings I’d only seen once and would never forget. An empty, used to contain a very specific Book, metal box. The kid’s blood is on it. And suddenly the whole picture comes into focus. Ferris screaming on the radio. Malvolio not asking about the Book’s location. The death. The Book that’s driving this whole operation is currently on the loose. A check over the body and it’s pretty obvious that the hole in his chest is what did the kid in. It’s too big to be a single bullet, unless holy weapons have some kind of extra kick I don’t know about. Could the kid even survive normal gun shots? A werewolf could’ve punched through him like that, a vampire too. Dingo being sent out early on some errand. Anything, could’ve drawn the kid over here. Maybe speared him with a pipe even. He’d had enough time to text me, maybe even before he got hit. Maybe ten minutes had gone by between that and my arrival. Questions were piling up like blank paper and the only answer I had was that it all had something to do with the empty box lying next to the kid. What to do? Go to Mills and the Paladins? Ask Ferris to sniff around? I only knew one thing for certain at that point. Whatever it took, whatever kind of bullet I needed, I was going to plant it straight in the heart of whoever had done this. The son of a bitch was going to pay.