Shadow Hunt

by Melissa F. Olson

  Everyone looked at me—Kirsten and Will, at least, seemed worried. But I was still enjoying my strange new sense of calm, so I just shrugged. “Happy to disappoint.”

  “Even if that’s true,” Will said, “there’s nothing to suggest the next part of their plan doesn’t take place back in France. They could be cutting their losses.”

  “It doesn’t have to be France.”

  Dashiell’s voice was uncharacteristically low, like he was thinking out loud. Since no one else was willing to question him, and I was already in trouble anyway, I said, “What do you mean? Isn’t that where they live?”

  “Some of them, yes.” He stood up, as if to pace again, but instead he wandered over to the patio door and stared at whatever was inside. Without turning to face us, he said, “There’s something you all should know. After the first time the Luparii came to my city, I thought it prudent to have my contacts in Europe gather more intelligence on them. As it turns out, our previous information had become . . . outdated.”

  Jesse and I looked at each other. Somehow I didn’t think Dashiell meant the Luparii had shriveled up and died in the last three years. “Are they still a big-ass family of werewolf hunters?” I asked, because sometimes my mouth just does things.

  Now Dashiell did turn and come back to the table, though he stood in front of his chair and leaned his fists on the edge. “Yes and no,” he answered. “The Gagnon descendants still run everything—and it sounds like this Sabine, at least, is one of them—but they have been accepting additional witches into their ranks. Witches with different or no specialties. The Luparii name has come to encompass the entire . . . organization.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kirsten nodding. “My aunt has heard similar rumors,” she reported. “They are very secretive, though, and Scandinavia isn’t considered part of the Luparii territory.”

  “Not yet,” Dashiell muttered. Ignoring Kirsten’s startled look, he finally sat down in his chair. “The Luparii have been growing in size over the last few decades, and they now have large cells operating in Portugal and Romania, as well as their main base of operations just outside Paris. They have become less a family and more of a . . . brotherhood.”

  “Hang on, what are we talking about here?” I said. “Is this like the Mafia kind of brotherhood, or some kind of witch fraternity?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of the Freemasons,” Jesse told me. “But evil.”

  “More evil?”

  The others ignored us. “My aunt said they were even employing vampires now,” Kirsten put in. “Why do they care so much about expansion?”

  Will, who had been texting—probably to warn his pack about the Luparii—looked up and added, “Especially since the wolves have been staying out of Europe.”

  I wondered for the first time how dialed in he was to other werewolf packs. Wolves are territorial by nature, and communication across large distances is difficult in the Old World, because we don’t exactly trust the Internet or phone lines, and we’re not allowed to bring any outside humans into the know. Did Will keep in touch with other alphas anyway? I’d never thought to ask.

  “What about the Luparii’s ideology?” asked Jesse. Out of all of us, he was probably the most accustomed to dealing with organized criminal wackos. “Has that changed, too?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dashiell admitted. “I know that they are still devoted to the eradication of werewolves. Still, as Kirsten said, I don’t understand why they’ve been making a point to expand.”

  We were probably all thinking it, but it was Will who said, in a carefully level voice, “You didn’t think it was necessary to tell us about any of this?”

  Dashiell didn’t seem offended, which surprised me a little. He spread his hands. “In truth, I thought we were done with the Luparii. Three years ago, when I negotiated with Aldric, their leader, I was unaware of the organization’s scope. By the time I found out that they had grown to a much larger force, we had already made the deal to keep Shadow in Los Angeles and allow Petra Corbett to take the fall for the nova wolf. And I haven’t heard a word from them since then.” He shrugged, looking at me. “What is that phrase you’ve been using? ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys’?”

  I pushed out a breath, nodding. I could tell by the way he hadn’t shot down Will for questioning him that Dashiell felt a little bad about not warning us. I couldn’t find it in me to blame him, though, even though he’d come down on me hard about going to Colorado. Dashiell had been alive for over a hundred years, and he could theoretically live forever. Of course he knew big-picture stuff he didn’t tell us about.

  “So why make the deal with us in the first place?” Kirsten asked, worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth. “Why not just come here three years ago and put us in our place?”

  “To buy time,” I suggested.

  Jesse nodded. “I agree. The timing of this latest attack is bothering me. Scarlett has never left Shadow with a human for more than an hour or two, and her trip to Colorado was unplanned.” He glanced sideways at me, and I nodded, confirming it. I don’t care how good your evil empire is, no one could have known I was going to Boulder before I did. “I doubt the Luparii witches randomly showed up the night Scarlett left town—it’s too big of a coincidence. They’ve been watching her. There had to be a reason.”

  A chill spread through me. They’d been watching me? Watching the cottage? “For how long? Since we captured Petra?” I asked.

  Jesse shrugged, “There’s no way to know for sure, but I doubt it. Three years is a long time to surveil someone without them noticing.”

  I nodded, trying to push away the sensation that my skin was crawling with bugs. “Okay, so they’ve been keeping an eye on me, waiting for a chance to take Shadow. But they could have attacked well before now. I had no idea they were in town; I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “But if they put you out of commission first, Shadow wouldn’t have gone willingly, and it would have tipped off Dashiell and the others to their presence,” Jesse pointed out. “That’s why I think there’s a larger plan here.”

  “Explain,” Dashiell demanded. Yeah, he was still mad.

  “Killian said something about ‘them’ needing a couple of days,” Jesse said. “I think they originally planned something for a few days from now. Like I said, killing you and taking Shadow was just one part of that.” He glanced apologetically at me. “But then you left, and they panicked when they couldn’t find you. They also probably saw an opportunity to remove Shadow from the equation early.”

  In a weird way, it actually made me feel a tiny bit better that the Luparii were planning something before I blew town. What had happened to Jesse was still my fault, but I didn’t deserve credit for the entire mess.

  “Beltane is in a few days,” Kirsten offered.

  Dashiell and Beatrice made little “hmm-ing” sounds, but Jesse shot me a confused look. “It’s the Wheel of the Year,” I explained. “Remember a few years ago, when Olivia and Mallory attacked Kirsten’s solstice party?” He nodded. “The winter solstice in December is the shortest night of the year. The summer solstice in June is the longest night of the year. If you picture the face of a clock, with winter solstice at twelve and summer solstice at six, that forms the Wheel of the Year.”

  Kirsten was watching me with a tiny amused smile, probably wondering how much I’d been listening all the times she’d needed to explain this to me. “A regular clock has twelve points on it, but the Wheel of the Year has eight, which are the eight strongest times to use witch magic. Halfway between December and June is late March, which is called . . . um . . .” I looked at Kirsten for support.

  “Ostara,” she supplied.

  “Right. And halfway between Ostara and the summer solstice is Beltane. And that’s in two days.”

  “Ostara and Beltane are the pagan names, from a western European tradition,” Kirsten added. “Very few traditions celebrated all eight holidays, until as recently as the 1950s, when
British pagans finally put the Wheel of the Year together—”

  “But they’re a convenient shortcut to describe the days when magic is objectively the strongest all over the world,” I broke in. I knew from past experience that Kirsten could go on for hours about how different cultures used different witch traditions, and we didn’t have that kind of time. “Bottom line: there’s symbolism, and there’s what works. For whatever reason, those eight days of the year work.”

  “If they’re planning something big with witch magic, they might be aiming for that night,” Kirsten said.

  “Or they might be using it as a misdirect, to attack the night before or after,” Dashiell pointed out.

  “Well, whatever they might be planning, we need to find Shadow,” I said, making eye contact with each of them.

  “Have you considered the possibility that they’ve already killed her?” Dashiell said, in a voice that was surprisingly gentle.

  “How?” I asked. “Short of a nuke, I don’t know how you could kill a bargest quickly. If the Luparii have a simple way to do it, they would have killed her back at the cottage and saved the trouble of transporting her.”

  “What about drowning?” Will offered. He said it suspiciously fast, and I wondered how much time he’d spent thinking about how to kill Shadow.

  “How are you going to hold her under?” I countered. “She’s dense—heavy—but she can swim, and she can hold her breath a long time. Even if they still have her in that metal net, they’d need a way to hold the net underwater. Otherwise, there’s a good chance she could struggle out of it and kill them.” I took a deep breath and voiced my biggest fear. “Look, I’ve thought about this, back when Shadow first came to me. As far as I can tell, there are two ways to kill her. One would be to undo the bargest spell, but that requires a human sacrifice and a whole bunch of competent witches, not to mention some of the nightshades. It’s complicated. The other way—” My voice suddenly caught in my throat.

  “Would be to starve her,” Jesse finished for me. His voice was grave.

  I nodded. “She needs food and water like any other living creature. Her body requires fuel, and lots of it. It can heal itself, so she can probably last longer than ordinary dogs, but eventually she’s going to dehydrate or starve. All they have to do is put her in a cage somewhere and leave her.”

  My voice was starting to tremble, so I forced myself to remember who I was talking to. Dashiell didn’t care about Shadow the way I did. I needed to use the things he did care about. I lifted my chin and looked at him directly. “There’s no reason for them to fly her back to Europe to starve her,” I told him. “Shadow is a powerful weapon. And I think she’s still here, at least in California.”

  He nodded, understanding. “We may be able to recover her. And if they leave behind a group of witches to guard her, as I would do in their place, we can catch some of those who did this. All right. We go after Shadow.” He bared his teeth in what was really not a very nice smile. He was human in my presence, so it wasn’t vampire-scary. But it was still Dashiell-scary. “Where do we begin?”

  Chapter 18

  Where do you begin looking for a kidnapped dog monster?

  My first thought was to try and trace the equipment necessary to contain a bargest, but that metal net Jesse had described wasn’t something you could get in LA—the werewolves would have found out by now and raised a stink—which meant they’d brought their own gear. And if they were planning to starve her to death, there was no point in trying to trace purchases of her specialized food.

  That left trying to figure out where the Luparii might be staying, but we didn’t have any confirmation that they were still in LA County, and even if they were, thanks to Airbnb and the like, they could be anywhere. We didn’t even know how many people the Luparii might have brought with them to Los Angeles.

  Dashiell said he would spend the remainder of the night looking at ways in and out of the city—given the heavy equipment, it seemed likely that the Luparii had arrived by private plane or ship, and Dashiell did a lot of business at the ports—and Kirsten agreed to put out feelers among her various contacts in the witch community, both here and in Europe. She’d also put all of her witches on alert for the Luparii magic.

  Will would be busy trying to evacuate as many of his werewolves as he could from LA County, but he’d also have a couple of his best pack members sniff around, starting near the cottage and where Kirsten and Hayne had found Jesse’s unconscious body. They all knew Shadow’s scent. Even so, I didn’t have much hope for that panning out. Los Angeles was an insane amount of ground to cover.

  Which left Jesse and me. I was ready to start driving around the city with my head out of the window screaming Shadow’s name, but Jesse suggested that we interview a friend of his who worked at the prison, in case the Luparii had left any evidence behind. Short of a hotel room key or a signed confession, I had no idea how that was going to help, but neither of us had any other ideas, and sitting at the cottage worrying about Shadow wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  And so, everyone went about wasting the day.

  Jesse and I went down to Corona and met his friend Dan Cohen over early-morning coffee, but he couldn’t help much. He did tell us one thing that was being kept from the press: one of the other guards had walked Petra into the minimum-security part of the prison and basically waved her goodbye, all of which appeared on the surveillance footage. That same guard, Cohen said, now claimed he had no memory of why he’d done it.

  I looked at Jesse, who nodded to say he got it too. The guard had probably been pressed by a vampire, which confirmed what Kirsten had heard about the Luparii: they were expanding their ranks.

  Jesse asked Cohen if Petra had left anything behind in her cell, and he frowned. “I work in a different area, but I’ve filled in a couple of shifts on that ward,” he said. “That chick was an ice queen. No personal effects, no books, nothing. She was careful . . . and scary. Every other woman in there left her alone, which is saying something.”

  “Did she have computer privileges?” Jesse asked. “Visitors?”

  Cohen shrugged. “They’re looking into that now, but there certainly wasn’t anything that stood out as unusual. In a way, she was a model prisoner: left everyone alone, didn’t cause trouble. But she creeped everyone out. She didn’t even have a cellmate, because they kept trying to commit suicide.”

  Jesse and I exchanged a look. The Luparii magic tended to twist things toward evil. Why not minds?

  Cohen misinterpreted our expressions and said emphatically, “Yeah, see what I mean? Creepy.”

  So the prison was a dead end. At noon, we checked in with Kirsten and Will, who were both busy dealing with informants and/or panicky werewolves, and didn’t have any new information on Shadow. I was racking my brain for ideas about finding Shadow, but I kept coming up empty. Finally, we went back to the cottage—I kept my radius expanded so I’d have plenty of advance warning if the Luparii decided to try another run at me—and started making calls. Jesse phoned his old contacts at various police stations to ask them to call if there were any sightings of a very unusual dog, or noise complaints about a bark loud enough to shake the ground. I called shelters. It seemed like a very long shot, but Shadow was as smart as some people, with magic-enhanced strength and healing. I had to believe there was a chance she could get away from the Luparii on her own.

  At 7:45, shortly after sunset, Jesse and I were sitting in my living room, trying to figure out our next move. I had just gotten off the phone with Dashiell.

  “Any new info?” Jesse asked.

  I shook my head. “More of a confirmation. The vampires in Europe have noticed that the Luparii are expanding. They’ve kept an eye on it, but the Luparii have made it clear that their continued goal is eradicating werewolves.”

  “So the European vampires don’t really care,” Jesse concluded.

  “Exactly.”

  He opened his mouth, but his cell phone rang before he could s
ay anything. He checked the screen and then paused, frowning like he couldn’t decide whether to answer.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “A former friend,” he said briefly, and answered the phone. “This is Jesse Cruz.”

  Then he listened for a long time, interjecting only the occasional “Mmm-hmm,” or “Yeah, probably.” At one point he looked at me and made a little writing motion, and I got him the pen from the coffee table. He scribbled something on the palm of his hand.

  Finally, Jesse hung up and turned to me, looking grim. “There was a murder in Long Beach that could be supernatural,” he reported.

  I needed a second to take that in. His friend was in the know, and worked with the LAPD. While helping Hayne with his security measures, I knew the (very short) list of humans who were allowed to know about the Old World despite not being attached to it. And one of them was a criminologist in Jesse’s old division. “Is this Gloria Sherman?”

  “Yes.” Jesse looked tense. “Years ago, Dashiell told her to call me if she got a case that looked supernatural. But I haven’t actually heard from her since the Luparii murders.”

  “Huh.” That didn’t surprise me, given how quiet things had been in LA. Well, maybe not “quiet” so much as “we keep our shit contained.”

  Then a terrible, terrible thought struck me. “Is it . . . are there jaws missing?”

  Back when the Luparii were hunting wolves for the king of France, they would save the wolves’ jaws as proof of death. On the Luparii’s last visit to LA, they’d killed two of Will’s werewolves and taken their jaws.

  Shadow. Shadow had killed them.

  Were the Luparii making her kill again?

  Before I could follow that thought down the inevitable rabbit hole, Jesse said, “No, no. He definitely wasn’t mauled.”

  “Then how did he die?”

  He made a face. “By beheading.”