Hannibal stared in silence at the empty room. The single lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, the bare concrete walls and wooden floor.
Where Abigail should have sat there was now nothing more than a smudge of dried blood.
The room was barely three feet long and wide, more a closet than anything. A storage cupboard. There was nowhere she could have hidden, unless she'd suddenly developed the ability to walk through walls or turn invisible.
Hannibal looked back the way he had come, the narrow, dimly lit hallway choked with dust he left to collect with purpose.
The only disturbances he could see were where his own feet had met the ground, and Abigail's stumbled footprints from the day before. No human could have reached the door he now stood inside without leaving a sign of their passing.
Which didn't rule out the possibility of a flying daemon.
But the door had been locked, just as he had left it, and he could smell nothing out of the ordinary in the confined space, no scents other than his own, and Abigail's.
"Do you sense anything, Stergata?" He called over his shoulder, not bothering to keep his voice low.
Silence met him, as he had expected, but neither did his daemon move at all from where she perched at the far end of the hall, confirming that she could sense nothing out of the ordinary.
Aside, of course, from the fact that the young woman they had held injured and drugged inside a small, locked room had managed to escape without opening the door or leaving a single sign to show how she had managed it.
His mouth thinning into a line, he turned on his heel, and strode back up the dusty corridor, his stance growing more tense with every step he took, something feral beginning to squirm its way past his normally cool exterior.
Challenge or not, Hannibal was starting to get annoyed.