Updated Apr 13, 2026 • ~14 min read
Chapter 4: The First Clue
Sage
Sage is standing in an abandoned warehouse in Cambridge at eleven o’clock at night, watching Oliver Reyes poke at a puddle of what might be residual ectoplasm with a stick he found on the ground, and she’s reconsidering every life choice that led her to this moment.
“Don’t touch that,” she says for the third time, and Oliver looks up with that stupid grin he seems to wear regardless of how dangerous their situation is.
“I’m not touching it, I’m poking it. There’s a difference.”
“The difference is negligible when it comes to magical contamination,” Sage retorts, moving closer to examine the warehouse’s interior with her witch-sight active—the world overlaid with threads of magic, visible only to those with the training and power to see them.
This is where Emma Wilson vanished two weeks ago. The second victim, a solitary practitioner who specialized in protection magic and apparently came to this warehouse regularly to gather materials from the urban decay—rust for binding spells, broken glass for reflection magic, the kind of scavenging that practical witches do when they can’t afford specialty shops.
The warehouse is exactly what Sage expected: crumbling brick walls covered in graffiti, broken windows letting in sickly streetlight, the smell of mold and old rain and something else, something that makes her magic recoil like it’s touching something diseased.
Oliver’s sensitivity must be picking it up too, because he’s abandoned his stick-poking and is standing very still, head tilted like he’s listening to something Sage can’t hear.
“The air feels wrong here,” he says quietly. “Like there’s a pressure change, but not physical. Magical?”
“Yes,” Sage confirms, impressed despite herself because most humans with trace sensitivity can’t detect ambient magic this accurately. “There’s residue everywhere. Whatever happened here left a significant magical footprint.”
She pulls out her scrying compass—an antique piece that belonged to her grandmother, calibrated to detect magical disturbances—and watches as the needle spins wildly before pointing to the far corner of the warehouse, where shadows seem to pool thicker than they should.
“There,” Sage says, already moving in that direction, her boots crunching on broken glass and debris.
Oliver follows, pulling out his phone to use as a flashlight, and Sage doesn’t tell him that she can see perfectly well in the dark because witches learned centuries ago that being helpless at night is a good way to get killed.
The corner where the compass pointed is wrong in ways that make Sage’s skin crawl—the shadows are too deep, the air too cold, and when she focuses her witch-sight, she can see it: a massive magical working, complex and vicious, designed to drain power from a living source.
“Absorption magic,” Sage breathes, tracing the pattern with her eyes because touching it would be catastrophically stupid. “Someone’s stealing their power.”
“Who would do that?” Oliver asks, leaning closer to examine the shadows, and Sage grabs his arm to pull him back before he walks directly into the remnants of the spell.
“Lots of entities,” she says grimly, not releasing his arm because he seems to have a death wish when it comes to investigating dangerous magic. “None of them good. Power absorption is dark magic—not necessarily evil, but definitely dark. It requires willing sacrifice or forced extraction, and I’m betting the missing witches didn’t volunteer.”
Oliver’s face has gone pale in the phone’s backlight. “This is what took your coven?”
“Similar pattern,” Sage confirms, finally releasing his arm when she’s certain he’s not going to do anything stupid. “But this working is more refined. Five years ago, the magic was rawer, less controlled. This entity is either getting stronger or more skilled.”
“That’s deeply concerning.”
“Yes, Reyes, murder is generally concerning,” Sage says dryly, kneeling to examine the spell’s anchor points—places where the magic is tied to physical reality, usually through blood or bone or other organic materials that Sage doesn’t want to think about too hard.
She can see the structure now, the way the absorption spell is designed: lure the victim to the location, trigger the trap, drain their power over the course of several minutes while they’re conscious and aware, and then—this is the part that makes Sage’s stomach turn—erase them completely, magical signature and physical form both, leaving only void behind.
“It’s methodical,” she murmurs, more to herself than Oliver. “This isn’t random killing. It’s harvesting. The entity needs witch power for something, and it’s collecting specific types.”
“What types?” Oliver asks, and Sage appreciates that he’s taking notes even while standing in a murder scene, that his hands are steady even though she can see fear in his eyes.
“Emma Wilson specialized in protection magic. Melissa Hunt was a generalist but strong in warding. If the pattern holds—” Sage pulls out her phone, scrolling through the file Oliver sent her earlier, checking the third victim’s specialization. “Rebecca Torres. Elemental magic, specifically water and ice.”
“Different specializations,” Oliver notes. “So the entity isn’t targeting one specific type of magic, it’s collecting variety?”
“Or it needs different types for something,” Sage says, standing and brushing dust off her knees. “Like ingredients in a recipe. You don’t just need flour, you need flour and eggs and sugar and—”
“I get the metaphor,” Oliver interrupts, and there’s something in his voice that makes Sage look at him more carefully.
He’s gone very still, staring at the absorption spell’s remnants, and his expression has shifted from interested-investigator to genuinely-afraid.
“What?” Sage demands, because she knows that look, has seen it on witches’ faces when they realize the danger is worse than they thought.
“My abuela used to tell stories,” Oliver says slowly. “About entities that collected magic. She called them Collectors—capital C, like it was a title. Said they were witches or practitioners who found a way to extend their lives by stealing others’ power, but the process turned them into something not quite human anymore.”
Sage feels cold settle into her bones, colder than the warehouse air, colder than the void residue. “The Collector,” she whispers, and the name feels right in a terrible way, like naming something gives it power. “That’s what killed my coven. The Collector.”
“If the stories are true,” Oliver continues, and he’s pulled out his notebook, flipping through pages with shaking hands, “then Collectors are ancient—hundreds of years old, sustained by stolen magic. They’re nearly impossible to kill because they’ve accumulated so much power that conventional magic just… bounces off.”
“That tracks with what I remember,” Sage says bitterly. “My coven threw everything at it—combat magic, binding spells, even forbidden curses—and nothing worked. It was like fighting smoke.”
Oliver meets her eyes, and Sage sees her own fear reflected back at her. “How do we stop something that can’t be stopped?”
“We figure out what it wants,” Sage says, because giving up isn’t an option even if every instinct she has is screaming at her to run. “And we destroy that instead.”
She turns back to the absorption spell, studying it with new understanding, looking for weaknesses, and that’s when Oliver makes his first genuinely stupid mistake of the evening.
He steps forward to get a better look at the spell’s structure, crosses directly over one of the anchor points Sage hadn’t yet identified, and triggers the protective ward that the Collector apparently left behind to discourage investigation.
The ward activates with a sound like shattering glass, and suddenly the warehouse is full of light—sickly green, poisonous-looking—and Oliver is frozen in place, caught in a binding that’s wrapping around him like invisible chains.
“Don’t move!” Sage shouts, already reaching for her athame, the ceremonial knife she uses for cutting magical bonds.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Oliver grits out, and Sage can see the strain in his face as he fights against the binding, which is only making it tighter because struggling against ward magic is like struggling in quicksand.
Sage moves fast, assessing the ward’s structure in the split-second before it fully activates—it’s a punishment trap, designed to incapacitate intruders and alert the caster, which means they have maybe minutes before the Collector knows someone is investigating.
“I thought you were human!” Sage snarls, cutting through the first layer of the binding with her athame, the blade glowing with her own power as it severs the magical threads.
“Mostly human,” Oliver gasps, and the binding is fighting her, trying to reconstruct faster than she can cut. “My grandmother was a bruja. I have sensitivity, not power.”
“You didn’t mention that!” Sage cuts through another layer, but the ward is three-dimensional, wrapping around Oliver from multiple angles, and she’s going to need his help to fully dismantle it before it either crushes him or alerts the Collector.
“You didn’t ask!” Oliver shoots back, and despite the danger—despite the fact that he could die in the next thirty seconds—he sounds more annoyed than terrified.
Sage would find that admirable if she weren’t so busy trying to save his life.
“The binding is using your own magic against you,” she says, working faster, her athame moving in patterns her grandmother taught her. “Your sensitivity is feeding it. You need to shut down your magical perception completely—stop sensing, stop reaching out, make yourself as magically inert as possible.”
“How do I—”
“Meditation technique, grounding exercise, I don’t care, just do it!” Sage cuts through the third layer, and the binding shudders but doesn’t break. “Think of something completely non-magical. Your favorite food, a TV show, anything that anchors you to the mundane world.”
She can feel Oliver trying, can sense the moment his magical sensitivity stutters and dims, and the binding loosens just enough for Sage to get her athame into the core structure.
“When I cut this next thread, you’re going to fall,” she warns. “Catch yourself if you can.”
“Comforting,” Oliver mutters, but he braces himself, and Sage brings her athame down in a strike that channels every ounce of power she has into the blade.
The ward shatters.
Oliver drops like a puppet with cut strings, catching himself on his hands and knees, gasping, and Sage is already grabbing his arm and hauling him upright because they need to move now, need to get out before the ward’s destruction draws attention.
“Can you run?” she demands, and Oliver nods, still breathing hard but functional.
“Yeah. Yes. Running is good.”
They run.
Sage pulls Oliver through the warehouse, avoiding the spell residue and the anchor points she’s now hyper-aware of, and they burst out into the cold Cambridge night, putting distance between themselves and the murder scene as fast as Oliver’s human endurance allows.
Two blocks away, in the dubious cover of a closed coffee shop’s awning, Sage finally stops and rounds on Oliver with fury that’s at least sixty percent displaced fear.
“That was monumentally stupid,” she hisses, and Oliver has the grace to look ashamed.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t sense the ward until I was already in it.”
“Your sensitivity isn’t strong enough to detect active wards before triggering them,” Sage says, and she knows she sounds harsh but she can’t help it, because the image of Oliver caught in that binding is going to haunt her and she’s known him for less than a day. “Which means you need to let me go first in every situation, or you’re going to get killed and I’m going to have to explain to your partner why I returned you in pieces.”
Oliver straightens, meeting her eyes, and despite having just nearly died, he looks determined rather than cowed. “I made a mistake. I’ll be more careful. But I’m not going to hide behind you like I’m useless.”
“I didn’t say you were useless,” Sage snaps. “I said you need to not die.”
“Why do you care?” Oliver asks, and it’s not confrontational, just genuinely curious. “You barely know me.”
Sage doesn’t have an answer for that—doesn’t want to examine why the thought of this cheerful curse-breaker getting killed makes her chest tight with something that feels dangerously like caring—so she deflects with irritation instead.
“Because I don’t need the guilt of another death on my conscience,” she says coldly. “My coven was enough.”
It’s a low blow, using her own trauma as a shield, and she sees Oliver flinch before his expression shutters.
“Right,” he says quietly. “Professional partnership. Got it.”
Sage wants to take it back, wants to explain that she’s terrified of losing someone else and that pushing him away is easier than admitting she’s already starting to rely on his presence, but the words stick in her throat, tangled up with five years of grief and isolation.
“We should go,” she says instead. “The ward’s destruction will have alerted the Collector. We need to be somewhere warded before it comes looking.”
Oliver nods, and they walk back to Sage’s car in silence that feels heavier than it should.
The drive back to Salem is quiet, the classical music playing low, and Sage keeps glancing at Oliver out of the corner of her eye, watching him stare out the window with an expression she can’t read.
She broke something between them in that moment outside the warehouse, she can feel it, and part of her is grateful because distance is safer, but another part—a part she thought she’d successfully killed five years ago—mourns the loss of the easy camaraderie they were starting to build.
By the time she pulls up outside Thornwood Occult, it’s past midnight, and Oliver looks exhausted in a way that’s more than just physical.
“Get some rest,” Sage says, and she means it to sound dismissive but it comes out almost gentle. “We’ll regroup tomorrow.”
Oliver looks at her for a long moment, and Sage has the uncomfortable feeling that he’s seeing past her walls again, seeing the fear and the guilt and the desperate desire to push him away before she has to care about what happens to him.
“Sage,” he says quietly. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me, whether you like it or not.”
He gets out of the car before she can respond, and Sage watches him walk to his own vehicle—apparently he drove separately and met her here earlier—and she tells herself that the feeling in her chest is annoyance, not relief.
She parks in the alley behind the shop, disables the wards, and climbs the stairs to her apartment on autopilot, her mind still in that warehouse, still seeing Oliver trapped in binding magic, still feeling the fear that flooded her when she thought she might not be able to free him in time.
Sage hates it. Hates that she’s already invested enough to be afraid for him. Hates that Oliver Reyes has somehow gotten past defenses she’s spent five years perfecting. Hates that when he said he wasn’t going anywhere, part of her was glad.
She collapses onto her couch without bothering to change out of her dust-covered clothes, and stares at the ceiling, and tries very hard not to think about the fact that she’s already in too deep to walk away.
Outside her window, the moon is waning, and somewhere in the darkness, a Collector is hunting witches, and Sage Thornwood is going to have to decide if protecting her heart is worth letting people die.
She already knows the answer. She’s known it since she agreed to work with Oliver.
But acknowledging it out loud would make it real, and Sage isn’t ready for real yet.
So instead she closes her eyes, and tries to sleep, and fails spectacularly at both.
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