Shadow Hunt

by Melissa F. Olson

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was shining. Not shiny—shining. I don’t know if it was actually glowing or if it was designed to catch light weird or what, but when Grandpa saw it, he staggered and kind of fell back in his chair. Like he’d been shot or something. It seemed like he recognized it.”

  Owen’s voice shook a little. We were getting to the worst part of the story. Shadow, to my surprise, laboriously turned herself around on the seat so she could rest her head on Owen’s shoulder. He patted her absently, his eyes fixed on his car window as though it were a television screen and he was watching the whole scene again. “I was standing by the entrance to the living room, and the lady lifted the sword and sort of rested it on my shoulder. It only, like, touched my skin, no pressure at all, but I started bleeding.” He raised one hand to a shallow cut on his neck. I hadn’t noticed it earlier under all the grime.

  “And Grandpa just . . . gave up. He told Thierry where to find the scroll: in an old trunk in the crawlspace. Thierry went up there, but the woman stayed where she was, with the sword on me. I wanted to punch her, to duck away or something, but Grandpa told me not to try anything. He sounded so scared, but I could tell he was scared for me. Because of the sword.

  “But I knew Thierry was gonna come back down and was gonna kill us both, so I . . .”

  He trailed off, looking ashamed. I saw Jesse open his mouth to ask, but I overrode him. “You tried magic,” I said softly. The kid nodded.

  He was a witch, but he hadn’t used magic in a long time, and it weakened him. Owen had probably once been medium-powered, but magic is like a muscle: you have to keep using it to keep having much of it.

  “I was so stupid,” Owen burst out. “I thought . . . I tried to twist up her shoes, to make her stumble or fall down, so I could duck out from under the sword, you see? But it barely ruffled her. She laughed at first, but when Thierry came back downstairs, she told him I might be useful.”

  His voice sped up, like he was just trying to get the next part over with. “Thierry gave the woman the scroll and his gun, and she handed him the sword, really carefully. Then he told my grandpa to kneel down.”

  I’d had to turn all the way around again—sitting sideways was making me carsick—but now I snuck a look back at him. Tears were rolling down his face. “Grandpa knew they were going to kill him. I started to yell, but the woman hit me, and I shut up. I was crying. Grandpa asked them not to do it in front of me, but I said it was okay, I wanted to be with him, you know, so someone who loved him was there . . .”

  The boy was openly weeping again now. Heartsick, I reached into the center console for tissues . . . and remembered that we weren’t in my van. Beatrice’s car didn’t even have fast-food napkins.

  Shadow solved the problem by licking the tears off Owen’s face. He grimaced and then let out a little laugh. “We know what happened after that,” Jesse said, trying to spare him.

  But Owen shook his head. “No. You don’t. Because when Thierry raised the sword and brought it down, he used no pressure. Basically just gravity. I don’t know a ton about weapons, but I’m pretty sure the sharpest blade in the world can’t do that.”

  Aw, shit. The sword was motherfucking magical. Like we didn’t have enough problems.

  “You’re right, that was good for us to know,” Jesse said gently. I knew him well enough to notice that as our conversation with Owen had gone on, Jesse’s tone had changed from the one he uses with suspects to the one he uses with witnesses and victims. He believed Owen. So did I. “How did you get away from them?”

  “Shadow saved me,” Owen said, sniffling, shooting a fond look at my bargest. “Thierry and the woman tied my hands and put a blindfold on me. They drove for a while, maybe half an hour? When we got out, they wouldn’t let me take the blindfold off. They marched me around this weird terrain, sort of up and down tiny hills. I stumbled a lot, and fell a couple of times, too.” He lifted his hands to show me the cuts and bruises. “They finally had to take the blindfold off, and I saw we were on these weird sort of cliffs.”

  “Weird how?” I asked.

  “They weren’t really cliffs, exactly, more like enormous pieces of concrete that had been scattered around like Legos? And there was all this graffiti on them.”

  “I know where that is,” Jesse said quietly.

  Owen continued, “They had set it up like a little campsite with all this gear and supplies, but they also seemed to have taken over some of the houses that backed up to it, so they’d go in and out. Anyway, there was this one flat piece of concrete that was balanced on a tall, skinny piece, like a three-dimensional letter T. On top of it was a heavy metal cage, and Shadow was inside. There were spikes on the inside of the cage, about every six inches, so Shadow couldn’t throw herself against the bars. And even if she did somehow escape the cage, they’d set up more spikes on the ground, like the kind that pop people’s tires in movies. It was pretty brutal.”

  I couldn’t help shuddering. I reached back and rested a hand on Shadow’s pebbly skin. She turned her head to lick my wrist. It’s okay. I’m fine.

  “What happened then?” Jesse asked.

  “They didn’t know what to do with me because they weren’t planning on taking a prisoner, see, so Thierry argued about it with the others for a while—”

  “How many others?” Jesse interrupted. “How many people were there total?”

  “I counted seven, but that might not have been all of them,” Owen answered, then continued. “Anyway, they eventually decided to put me in the cage with Shadow. They didn’t want to feed her, and some of them were afraid she’d eat me, but Thierry said it would be a couple of days before Shadow’s will broke that far, and they would have left with me by then. They got this stepladder, and made me climb up into the cage. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought she was going to eat me.”

  I really couldn’t blame the kid for that one. I had to be careful about taking Shadow for walks in public because people tended to cross the street to avoid us. Often they also crossed themselves. “But you escaped,” I prompted.

  The boy nodded. “We were there all day. I was so hot. I was really scared of Shadow, especially because she kept moving around.” He smiled. “But after a while, I figured out that she was trying to position herself to keep me in the shade so I wouldn’t get sunburned.”

  Okay, my heart kind of swelled at that one. Shadow had exposed skin, but it never burned because of her healing abilities. So she’d tried to protect an innocent.

  Or maybe she’d just wisely decided the enemy of her enemy was a friend. I was never quite sure where Shadow stood, morally, when it came to people other than Jesse and me.

  “There was this beige girl who would come out sometimes and sit on a rock nearby, watching the whole area. She would wave her arms around, and the pieces of concrete would lift into the air and move. She was really powerful.”

  I looked at Jesse. “Beige girl?”

  He nodded. “Sabine. Even her hair is beige. Somehow.”

  “Is that her name?” Owen’s brow wrinkled. “Okay, well, she was scary as shit. I think she came out there just so I would see what she could do, so I would be scared of her. It totally worked. Anyway, maybe an hour before sunset, Thierry came out of one of the houses with this guy who was even older, like seventy. They had a huge argument with the beige girl—Sabine, I guess—and this other guy with lots of guns.”

  “That would be Killian,” Jesse said sourly.

  “Whoa. Appropriate. Anyway, the old guy was furious with the two younger ones. I couldn’t hear most of the conversation, but then the old guy started yelling and screaming about how they needed to kill Scarlett Bernard. And that’s you.” Owen nodded at me. “When Shadow heard your name, she kind of went apeshit. That’s when I realized she could understand what everyone was saying. She tried throwing herself against the bars, but it obviously hurt her—she coughed up blood.”

  Ouch. I reached back to rest a hand on the fur
ry side of Shadow’s head. Her skin was basically impenetrable, but if something hit her hard enough, it was possible for her to get internal injuries. That explained some of the blood that had been matted into Shadow’s fur. I had kind of assumed she’d eaten someone while they were escaping.

  “I tried to calm her down, because I could tell the younger two were leaving, and it was getting dark. It was almost like they’d forgotten about Shadow and me, because they were sure we couldn’t get out, and they didn’t really care if Shadow ate me.” He shrugged. “But see, I had plenty of room to put my hands on the inside of the cage bars, because the spikes were too far apart. They were sized to prevent a dog . . . thing from ramming into them, not a human.

  “Eventually, we figured out that I could brace my feet on the bars, between the spikes, and Shadow could push on my back. We managed to slide the cage so it was hanging off the side of the concrete platform, and I was able to, like, dangle over the side and jump past the spikes on the ground. That’s how I hurt my shoulder, when I landed on it. I moved the spikes on the ground out of the way, Shadow got loose, and we ran like hell.”

  Jesus. I wanted so badly to hug Shadow in that moment, but there was just no room in the back seat for me to do it. She saw my frustration and pushed her head and shoulders in between the front seats to lick my face. I laughed, hugging her head.

  “And you walked all night?” Jesse asked Owen.

  He nodded. “I tried to hitchhike, but no one would pick me up with Shadow, and I wasn’t going to leave her. I didn’t know where to go, but she was absolutely set on us walking along the ocean, so that’s what we did, until we got to Marina del Rey.”

  Smart. The beaches were deserted at night, except for the occasional beach patrol, so no one would be bothered by a dog monster roaming free. And Owen wouldn’t need to worry about his personal safety with Shadow there to protect him. “Good job, Shadow,” I told her.

  “Okay, time for the big question, Owen,” Jesse said, taking the on-ramp for the 405. It had been a long time since I’d been on the west side of LA this early in the day. Everything looked so shiny and clean. “What’s on the scroll?”

  Owen shook his head. “I don’t know. It was in German, or something sort of like German? All Grandpa would ever tell me was that it’s old, bad magic, and it can’t be destroyed. He said he even tried to burn it once, but it wouldn’t catch fire. It can’t be copied or even memorized, either, which is a big deal. To use it you have to have the scroll.”

  “But you must have asked him what the spell was for,” I persisted.

  “Grandpa just said it was a summoning spell. He insisted I was better off not knowing.”

  “And you left it at that?” I said in disbelief. “No follow-up questions at all?”

  “You had to have seen him,” Owen said. “He never meant to tell me about the Luparii at all, but . . . I found out.”

  “How?” Jesse asked.

  Owen shrank into himself a little. “Look, my whole life, I thought Grandpa was just, like, a grandpa, you know? I mean, he was a retired crane operator! But he used to make these amazing leashes out of braided rope. They were super complicated and beautiful, so much stronger than any other rope I’d seen, and he worked on them all the time, the way other men might whittle or do crossword puzzles. But he’d just put them in a box or give them to his own kids, when they were grown, to use with their dogs . . .”

  The kid winced, and I recognized the look of a shameful memory. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “When I was sixteen, I worked at this shitty pet-supply store, and I stole a bunch of the leashes and put them out for sale. They were just sitting there in a box, and . . .” He shook his head. “They sold really quickly, so I took out some more. Eventually, I’d made a pretty good dent in the box, and I took the cash—minus a finder’s fee, because I was an asshole—and I gave it to Grandpa in this envelope. I thought . . . I guess I thought he’d be excited. But he flipped.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were Luparii leashes,” he said quietly.

  Then I got it. “For controlling bargests,” I said.

  Owen nodded. “I guess his family had been making them for hundreds of years. They might as well have been trademarked. Grandpa demanded that I take them off the shelves, like, that night. He wanted me to look up which customers had purchased them and try to get them back, but I was too embarrassed. We got into a huge fight about it, and that finally pushed him to tell me the story. That he was born into a cultish family of witches who thought their life’s purpose was to clear the earth of shapeshifter magic. The leashes were for the dogs they trained to hunt werewolves. It sounded so nuts.” He shook his head. “Then Grandpa had me bring this trunk down from the attic, and it was full of photos and spellbooks and things. There were a couple of pictures of the werewolves, and they were”—he shuddered—“they were terrifying. So when Grandpa said knowing anything else could get me killed, I believed him.”

  That wasn’t the end of the story—at some point, Owen must have tried messing around with magic, activating his witchblood as a teen—but just then, a tiny chirping melody came out of Jesse’s jacket pocket, and I recognized part of the theme song from Super Mario Bros. Jesse made a face. “Sorry, that’s Noah, texting.”

  Before Owen could continue his story, the phone chirped again. And then again. Annoyed, Jesse mumbled a curse in Spanish. We were a quarter mile from our exit, so he said to me, “Can you text him that I’ll call him back later?”

  “Sure.” I dug the phone out of his jacket pocket and checked the screen.

  Then I stopped breathing.

  “Jesse,” I said very softly. “I need you to pull the car over.”

  “What?” He gave me a sharp look. “We’re on the freeway.”

  “Please, Jesse. Just pull over.”

  He started cursing again, but he cut across two lanes and slowed to a stop, nearly blocking off the exit lane to get on the 10. A car swerved in front of him to get on the on-ramp and blared its horn, but Jesse ignored it and slammed his thumb into the parking button. “What is it?” he demanded.

  I didn’t want to do it to him, but I handed over the phone, fighting the urge to vomit.

  All three texts were the same picture: Jesse’s brother lying on an inconspicuous patch of bare dirt. He’d been beaten. His shirt had been removed, probably to show off the deep blue bruises that covered his chest. His eyes were closed, but the skin around one eye was so puffed out that you couldn’t even see it.

  But that wasn’t the worse part. With shaking fingers, Jesse zoomed in on the photo, seeing what I’d already noticed. Noah’s hair was drenched, and his entire body shone with sweat.

  “No,” Jesse whispered.

  From the back seat, Owen’s alarmed voice said, “What? What is it?”

  I didn’t bother turning around. “It’s the twisted slumber.”

  Chapter 26

  I think Jesse was about to call his brother’s phone, but his cell rang first. Jesse answered it, listened for a few seconds, and snarled, “I’m not doing shit until I know he’s alive.” Then his face clouded over with worry, and when I leaned closer, I could hear moaning. I’d only met Jesse’s brother a few times, but even I recognized Noah’s voice. It was so much like Jesse’s.

  A man’s voice came back on the line. Jesse listened for a moment longer, started to talk, and realized that whoever it was had hung up on him. He threw the phone forcefully onto the dash, where it bounced up and thunked against the windshield.

  “Jesse—” I began.

  But he got out of the car.

  That in itself shocked me, because we were on a Los Angeles freeway, which is basically certain death. It wasn’t that crowded this early on a Saturday, but that actually made it scarier, because the cars were zooming past the driver’s door at eighty miles per hour, so fast they looked like part of a video game.

  But Jesse miraculously made it around the front of the car, and stormed ove
r to the guardrail, placing both hands on the barrier.

  “What’s going on?” Owen said from the back seat. He sounded totally unnerved. I was right there with him.

  “Stay here,” I told him, unbuckling. “Shadow, you too.”

  She made a sound of protest, but I slipped out of the car quickly and walked over to Jesse. Slowly, I rested one hand on his shoulder.

  I could feel his back muscles bunch up as he leaned backward without letting go, rattling the railing as hard as he could.

  “I’m so fucking stupid,” he practically screamed. “I knew they were going through my brain, that they knew everything about my life, but it never occurred to me that—” His voice broke off, and he bowed his head, still clutching the railing.

  “What do they want?” I yelled over the noise from the freeway.

  Jesse finally let go and turned around, leaning his lower back against the railing. His eyes were red. “They want you,” he said simply. “They want me to trade your life for Noah’s.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “They said that?”

  Jesse wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “Of course not. Killian told me you wouldn’t be harmed, that they’re just going to lock you up for a couple of days while they conclude their business. But they’ve already tried to kill you three different times. I’m an idiot, but I’m not that dumb.”

  “When do they want to do the trade?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Scarlett—”

  I held up a hand to say Bear with me. “When?”

  “In an hour, at the caves in Griffith Park. They don’t want us to have enough time to call anyone. He said they set a humans-go-away perimeter spell by the Canyon Drive entrance. They’ll know when you break it, so we can’t sneak into the park and go around them. If they see anyone other than you and me, he’ll kill my brother.”

  “They’re desperate,” I said loudly, thinking it through. “Broad daylight on a Sunday morning? That’s bold even for them. They probably came up with the kidnapping scheme five minutes after they realized Shadow had escaped. They don’t know she’s already with us, and they’re hoping to get me out of the way before she finds me and goes into bodyguard mode.”