Shadow Hunt

by Melissa F. Olson

  Jesse reached out and took my hand, drawing me close. The freeway noise was still loud, but at least we could use our normal speaking voices. “Listen. I want you to take Owen and go to Hair of the Dog. Keep him safe.”

  “Hell no,” I said. “I’m going with you to get Noah back.”

  He was already shaking his head. “Scar, they don’t have to wait for us to get all the way into the park. They could have a sniper rifle pointed at the entrance, and the moment we drive up, your head explodes.”

  “How are you going to get into the park without me breaking the humans-go-away spell, huh?” I challenged. “They may have thrown this together last-minute, but they’ve thought it through. You need me just to get to Noah.”

  He lowered his head so it was right by my ear. “You’re pregnant.”

  I flinched back, the wind whipping my hair around my face. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  He didn’t smile, so I pressed on. “And that doesn’t make me any less right. If I don’t go with you, Noah’s going to die.”

  Jesse smoothed down my hair, cupping my face with his warm hands. “If you go with me, you’re going to die.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “I can’t have that.”

  He looked so broken, so sad and terrified, that I began to get very, very angry. So I did what I usually did when I get angry.

  I lashed out like an asshole. This time, physically.

  My right hand snapped up and slapped Jesse lightly across the face. Just enough to wake him up. He looked appropriately stunned, but at least I had his attention. “Fuck that,” I snarled. “We are not letting this happen. So get your head out of your ass and help me make a plan.”

  “Okay, Jesus. Did you really have to hit me?”

  I steered him back toward the car. “Probably not.”

  While Jesse got us off the freeway, I used his iPad to pull up a satellite map of Bronson Canyon, where the caves were. Jesse pulled over in an empty parking lot and looked over my shoulder. “They’re going to go high,” he predicted, touching the screen to enlarge that section of the park. “It’s not the most complicated trap. Killian and Sabine will be at the mouth of the caves, waiting for us, but they’ll put a couple of shooters up in the hills. They can pick us off easily.”

  “How many, do you think?”

  “I know Owen saw seven people,” Jesse said, tilting his head at the kid, “but that seems low for a mission this big. They probably have a whole other shift, maybe two, that patrols and guards their base of operations. Let’s say twenty, minimum.”

  “But they won’t send everyone, not if they’re busy preparing for some big summoning,” I pointed out.

  “True.” Jesse glanced down at the iPad in my lap. “If it were me, I’d send three shooters to cover all the angles. Plus Killian and Sabine.”

  “Okay . . .” I stared at the map. I hadn’t been to the Bronson Caves since a day trip to LA back in middle school, but I’d been in plenty of other parts of the park. “Isn’t this basically loose dirt?” I asked, gesturing at the hills that formed the edge of the canyon.

  “Yeah. Hard to climb up. Harder to climb down.”

  “Hmm.” I checked the clock. It was still so fucking early: not quite seven in the morning. The Luparii had told Jesse to be at the park at 7:30, but we were already closer to the meeting spot than they’d anticipated. “I have an idea.”

  I dialed Will, who sounded just as distracted as before. “You know how you said some of your werewolves wanted revenge against the Luparii?”

  There was a brief pause, and then Will said warily, “Yes . . .”

  “Is now a good time?”

  Chapter 27

  We dropped Owen off at a Coffee Bean on Pico with forty bucks and Kirsten’s phone number written on a scrap of paper. “Wait three hours,” I told him. “If one of us doesn’t come back for you by then, call that number and tell the woman who answers that you’re a witch who needs sanctuary. She’ll help you.”

  Owen made a few token protests, but he was obviously relieved not to have to face down the Luparii again so soon. As he was climbing out, he paused for a moment and looked at me sorrowfully. “Are you sure about this?” He gave a little shudder. “Don’t you know what they can do?”

  I turned in my seat, enough so I could smile at him. It was not a nice smile. “They can’t do shit, Owen. Not with magic, not to me. And we’re going to get some help with the rest of it.”

  Griffith Park is enormous. I looked it up when I first moved to LA, and at forty-three hundred acres, it’s the second-largest park in California, about five times the size of Central Park in New York City.

  Most of Griffith, however, is wild and untamed: steep cliffs, deep ravines, and brush that can’t be navigated without a machete and a sacrifice to the god of cacti. There are a few roads and plenty of trails, but overall it’s less of a traditional urban park and more of a wild space punctuated by small attractions. As long as you stick to the trails, though, you can make your way to a bunch of playgrounds and picnic areas, the Griffith Park Observatory, a theater, a couple of teeny museums, and the Batcave.

  No, really. Bronson Canyon, in the southwest area of the park, is a former quarry that’s often used as a filming location. The middle of the canyon has a rock formation with a couple of small caves, one of which served as the entrance to Adam West’s Batcave in the 1960s show.

  I’d made a frenzy of phone calls, and we now had three things going for us: first, Killian and Sabine had inadvertently given us a little more time than they should have. The time limit they’d given us would have been tight had we been at or around Marina del Rey, but we’d been well on our way to Hair of the Dog, which would cut our commute by half. Second, there was no way for them to know how far I could push out my radius, or how much time I had spent practicing.

  Most importantly, they didn’t know we had Shadow.

  I had taken pains to make sure of this, with the help of one of Kirsten’s witches, a reporter for a small Beach Cities newspaper. I’d texted her a few blurry photos of Shadow, and she’d immediately put up a web article about an enormous dog spotted loose on Redondo Beach. If the Luparii were monitoring news outlets—as any decent bad guys would—they would think Shadow was on the wrong side of town right now.

  We deliberately delayed our arrival until 7:40 to give the werewolves enough time to get into place. Showing up late was a risk, but by LA standards, ten minutes late was practically early.

  There wasn’t really a gate or anything at this entrance to Griffith: we just had to go east on busy Franklin Avenue and turn left on Canyon Drive, which is a straight chute of residential neighborhoods that abruptly turns into parkland. Once inside the park, you just have to take a really sharp right on foot and double back deeper in for about a quarter of a mile to the cave entrance. Jesse and I had gone over it on the map. He thought the Luparii would have a spotter at the turn onto Canyon, so we’d chosen a bus stop on Franklin, a block before the turn, as our meeting spot.

  There was a werewolf waiting for us: Astrid, a hard, rangy woman who always looked like she’d have no problem tearing off the head of a chicken and popping it in her mouth. Will had said he’d try to get a female werewolf, but I was a little surprised he’d chosen her: Astrid had never really warmed up to me. I wasn’t sure she was actually capable of warming up to anyone, and we were asking her to put her life at risk.

  But as she leaned in the window, giving me a slow, toothy grin, I realized that she wasn’t here for me, and certainly not for Jesse’s brother. “Howdy,” she said with a smirk. She was wearing jeans and black motorcycle boots with a plain green tee shirt, her hair knotted in a bun that went through a battered-looking USC cap. She pulled open the door and stood aside so I could climb out. I opened the back door and helped Shadow do the same.

  Astrid passed me a plastic grocery bag and took my seat in the Lexus. “Should be everything you need. Walkie-talkie is at the bottom.”

  Cell service could be spotty in the
park. “Thanks,” I said. I handed her my sunglasses. Then, checking first to make sure no one was watching, I crouched down and emptied the plastic bag on the sidewalk: a blonde wig, a baseball cap, and cheap plastic sunglasses. My hair was already tied in a long braid that I’d run down the back of my shirt. I wasn’t great with wigs, but I made the baseball hat tight enough to hold it on. When I was sure it was secure, I looked through Astrid’s open door at Jesse. “Give us a two-minute head start.”

  He nodded, and opened his mouth to say . . . something. I knew it was going to be mushy and meaningful and might make me cry, so I said quickly, “Tell me later,” and slammed the door. Jesse was probably annoyed with me, but that was better than dealing with sappy stuff.

  Right?

  I crouched down and looked at Shadow. “I love you,” I told her. She wagged her club tail at me and licked the air in front of my face. The feeling was mutual.

  “Look, I know that the werewolf smell drives you nuts, and I’m not going to be right there next to you to help,” I said, looking into her eyes. They shone with unnatural intelligence and something else. I would have to call it happiness. Shadow loved violence against an enemy the way regular dogs loved walks. “I need you to remember that these werewolves are our friends. We want to hurt the bad witches, not the werewolves. Okay?”

  She tossed her head like a horse, the bargest equivalent of rolling her eyes at me. “You know I had to say it,” I told her. She licked the air in front of her face and wagged her tail again. We were good.

  I put on the sunglasses, and Shadow and I began jogging toward Canyon. She left me behind almost immediately, sticking close to the shadows where she wouldn’t be as noticeable.

  We were in luck: as I’d hoped, there were a couple of joggers already out on Canyon. I slowed to a walk, watching them carefully. When they reached the last intersection before the park, every one of them stopped, turned around, and headed back the way they’d come. That was the humans-go-away spell.

  I was still half a block away, but I ducked into a cluster of trees and lifted the walkie-talkie. “Okay, it starts at the corner of Canyon and Carolus. Let me know when you’re in position.”

  We had to time this really carefully, because if Jesse wasn’t in my radius, the spell would work on him and he’d stop the car, blowing the whole ruse with Astrid. At the same time, if I broke the spell too early and the Luparii were watching, they’d know I wasn’t in the car.

  I continued up Canyon at a brisk walk, keeping an eye out for the Lexus. A couple of family-type SUVs went by, and then I saw it. From a distance, there was no reason to think the woman next to Jesse wearing my sunglasses wasn’t me. I was almost to the intersection, so I stopped, leaned against a tree, and closed my eyes, concentrating on the edges of my radius. When I was sure I was sort of holding the whole thing in my head at once, I thought as hard as I could: expand.

  My eyes opened, and the Lexus sailed past the intersection, into Griffith Park. I sighed with relief, still holding my expanded radius. And I started to run.

  Chapter 28

  Jesse’s stomach was tying itself in knots. He wanted desperately to hurry, to rush in there and get his brother out, but he forced himself to drive slowly into the park. When they passed the intersection and the spell didn’t stop him, he sighed with relief.

  “We’re in her aura,” Astrid said, shifting a little in her seat. It was less like she was uncomfortable and more like she’d just gotten comfortable. Jesse knew that werewolf magic was difficult: it sort of itched at their psyches. In theory, being near Scarlett was relaxing for them—but it never seemed to fully mellow Astrid. “How far can she make it go?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Jesse admitted.

  “Seriously?” Astrid was aghast. “How can she not know?”

  “It’s hard to test, because it expands when she gets worked up about something, and most of the situations where she’s really needed to enlarge it are stressful,” he explained. “But she’s strong. She can do this.”

  Astrid settled back in her seat, adjusting Scarlett’s black Ray-Bans on her nose. “I hope you’re right. We might not get another chance at these fuckers.”

  Jesse was almost positive they were going to get another chance at the Luparii, if they survived this encounter, but he saw no reason to say that to Astrid.

  “This is the lot,” he said, pulling over a little ways past the entrance.

  “How far are the caves?” Astrid asked.

  “Not that far. Just keep your head down. They’ll want to confirm it’s us, so they’ll wait until we’re close. Remember to go slow,” he couldn’t help adding. Astrid just grunted.

  They got out and walked up to the trailhead. It was unmarked, but Jesse had taken his parents’ dog, Max, for a walk to the caves only a couple of months earlier, and he knew where they were going. They passed the small white gate meant to keep vehicles out, and the trail immediately widened, winding into the hills toward the canyon. It was at an incline, so anyone who wanted to take an alternate route to the caves would have to face a steep hill with very dense brush. Just looking at it made Jesse wince. He wondered for the first time if he and Astrid had the easier job.

  They walked very slowly along the dirt road. Jesse scanned the hills that rose up all around them, trying to spot the glint of a gun or scope. There were just too many possible hiding spots. He’d put on his bulletproof vest, and Astrid was wearing one too, but there were weapons and ammunition that could pierce it. The whole thing made his skin itchy.

  “Where is she?” Astrid muttered through her teeth. “I could walk faster than this on my hands.”

  “Does Scarlett strike you as a really outdoorsy person?” Jesse said, in as low a voice as he could.

  Astrid choked on a snort. “You think she’s stuck on a cactus?”

  Just then the walkie-talkie stuffed in Jesse’s sock made a tiny blip. He bent down as if to tie his shoe, pressing the button with the side of his palm. “Go ahead.”

  “You were right,” came Scarlett’s breathless voice. “One on the ground, probably Sabine, and three in the hills. I felt the twisted slumber break, so she’ll know ‘I’m’ close.”

  Witches were the only species in the Old World that Scarlett could feel without them knowing—unless they were using their power in that moment. “We’ll hurry. Cue the others.”

  Jesse straightened up, slipping the walkie-talkie into his left pants pocket, and they began walking again. He was careful to keep the same leisurely pace, in case they were being watched through a scope.

  Astrid’s body sort of jerked for a moment, then she continued walking. “Back to werewolf?” Jesse murmured.

  “Yes.”

  Jesse carefully took hold of Astrid’s arm, ignoring her quiet growl of annoyance, and the two of them hurried ahead. Scarlett would be contacting her werewolf friend Marko, who was currently in human form. He was waiting up the path on the other side of the caves. And he wasn’t alone.

  The wide path doglegged to the right, and suddenly the Batcave entrance was only forty feet away. The path continued to the left in an almost-circle around it, so the cave formation was right in the center. Killian stood at the mouth of the cave, wearing dark sunglasses and a sneer. Sabine was crouched behind him and to the side, but Jesse couldn’t see what she was focused on.

  “Hey, Cruz,” Killian called. “Did you have a nice nap?”

  Jesse felt a rush of anger. “Where’s my brother?” he yelled, stepping forward. He didn’t let go of Astrid’s arm.

  Smirking, Killian took one step sideways, revealing Noah lying on the ground. Noah’s feet hadn’t been in the photo, but even from a distance, Jesse could see that one of his ankles was twisted to the side at a grotesque angle. Sabine crouched near his head with a look of irritation on her face. Scarlett had popped the spell. She said something to Killian, and his sneering lips turned down. “My wife says her access to magic is already back,” Killian called.

  “Now?” Ast
rid muttered.

  “Now.”

  With Jesse’s body angled in front of her, Astrid reached into Jesse’s pants pocket, fumbled for the walkie-talkie, and pushed the button twice. Come on, Scarlett, Jesse thought. She was going to have to come close enough to see them so she could expand her radius exactly the right amount. If she overshot it, they were screwed.

  “Your wife?” Jesse yelled to Killian. “That’s funny, I figured you guys for brother and sister. Then again, maybe we’re both right.”

  Something flickered across Killian’s face, and Jesse realized he’d actually been close. Considering their moral flexibility, the Luparii probably wouldn’t be opposed to a little light inbreeding to keep up the strength of their magic. “What are you, cousins?” he called. “Second cousins?”

  Killian stepped forward from the cave’s entrance and took his sunglasses off, his face clouded over with anger.

  It was obviously some kind of signal, because less than a second later, Astrid was shot in the head.

  Chapter 29

  I was panting by the time I came in sight of the turn to the cave. Panting and filthy, with scratches all over my arms and God knew what foliage in my hair. My boots were ruined, and there was a deep scratch across my cheek that I was trying to pretend didn’t hurt and wouldn’t scar. I’d had to break through a lot of brush to figure out how many Luparii witches were waiting on the edge of the canyon without being seen by said witches. I do not recommend going off-road in Griffith Park.

  I almost cried with relief when I got to walk on the path again. Then I got the two-beep signal on the walkie-talkie, and ran to the side of the canyon wall so I could peek around the dogleg at the cave entrance. Jesse and Astrid had their backs to me, but I could see a prone figure a little past them. Well, okay, I saw legs. Good enough for me.

  I was already tired, hurt, and—oh yeah—pregnant, so I had to close my eyes and concentrate as I expanded my radius to engulf a werewolf, then a witch—and I stopped, holding it right there. This was more intricate and fussy than I was used to—generally I stuck to “expand” or “contract,” but I managed. Barely. I even opened my eyes so I could check on Jesse and Astrid again.