Shadow Hunter

by B R Kingsolver

  The bus pulled up to my stop. Trevor stood to let me out.

  “Should I walk you in?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think he can run as fast as the bus. I’ll be okay.”

  We stared at each other, and then I said, “I-I don’t think going out on Tuesday is a very good idea.”

  I spun about and rushed to get off the bus. Halfway across the parking lot, I turned and watched the bus pull away. I could still feel his lips on mine, and my head was spinning more from the kiss than it was from the Hunter’s attack.

  Chapter 21

  A pounding interrupted my sleep. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was, but when it stopped, I drifted back to sleep. Then it started again. Groggily sitting up, I figured out it was someone knocking on my door. No one had ever knocked on my door.

  Throwing on a t-shirt, I stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed my only knife, then made my way to the front door and looked through the peephole. Lizzy and Jolene stood in the hall, and Lizzy was beating on the door with her fist.

  It took me a moment to collect myself enough to open the door and dissolve the ward.

  “What’s going on? Is the building on fire?”

  They barged past me.

  “Trevor told us you fought the Hunter last night,” Jolene said. “Do you have any coffee?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lizzy’s voice came from the kitchen. “She has tea, though.” I heard the tap turn on and the sound of my teakettle being filled.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock,” Jolene said. “Actually, eight-ten.” She looked around the apartment, taking in the complete lack of furniture. “What do you sit on?”

  “The bed.”

  Lizzy came back from the kitchen. “Oh, wow. You don’t have any furniture?”

  I shook my head. “The apartment was unfurnished. I’m saving to buy some.”

  “Hell, we can do something about that,” Jolene said.

  Lizzy nodded, then went back into the kitchen, and I heard the refrigerator open. “No cream?” she called.

  “No.”

  “Do you always greet visitors like that?” Jolene asked, pointing to the knife in my hand.

  “I never have visitors, except for the Hunter, and even he doesn’t show up at the crack of dawn.”

  They both laughed.

  “We think we know how to find the Hunter,” Jolene said. “Lizzy thinks that she can identify where he’s living, and if she’s right, then I can probably find it.”

  I went into the kitchen as the teakettle started to whistle and put the knife away. Lizzy poured hot water into three mugs, and said, “Grab one. Let’s go where we can sit down.”

  She picked up two of the mugs and headed back toward the living room. By the time I got there, my visitors were already in my bedroom. They picked different corners of the bed and sat down. I brought a box with a plastic grocery bag that I used as a trash bin and set it near so they could toss their tea bags, then I crawled on the bed, pulling the covers over my legs.

  “Did you ask Sam about a trap spell?” Jolene asked.

  “I haven’t seen Sam. I won’t see him until I go into work today.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. “We need something from the Hunter. Did you happen to get a scrap of clothing, or even better, some blood or hair from him last night?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Hell, no. We’re lucky he didn’t collect our blood.”

  They exchanged glances.

  “Trevor told us that you knocked him down. Perhaps he dropped something or scraped himself on the ground. Can we go there and check it out?” Lizzy asked.

  “It was at a bus stop. Who knows how many people have tromped through there since then.”

  “Between three o’clock and now? That’s a nightlife district,” Jolene said. “It’s worth a shot. Come on, get dressed.”

  I took a quick shower and braided my hair, threw on some jeans, a t-shirt, my boots, and we were out the door. I still hadn’t had breakfast or anything at all to eat since my meal at work the previous evening.

  Lizzy drove us to the bus stop, and we got out of the car. I explained how the fight progressed and showed them where the Hunter had fallen and then the route he used to escape.

  My expectation that they would find anything was zero. I couldn’t tell them that the Hunter’s clothing consisted of skin-tight ballistic cloth, with gloves and a balaclava that covered him from crown to soles with only his eyes exposed. Besides, he was shielded. There wouldn’t be any skin or cloth, not even a loose thread.

  Lizzy studied the ground where the Hunter had fallen, very slowly scanning every inch of the area. After about five minutes, she pulled a small pair of tweezers and a small plastic bag out of her purse and used the tweezers to pick something up. She dropped it in the bag and held it up.

  “You don’t wear contacts, do you?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “This has residual magic,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice. I leaned closer to look at what she had, and saw it was a contact lens. It must have jarred loose when I kicked him. Not being attached to him anymore, it would have fallen free of his shield.

  After another half an hour searching the area, then following the path of the Hunter’s retreat, she announced, “Yup. It’s his. I can see the same magic residuals on these twigs.” She pointed to the leafless branches of the trees hanging down low enough that someone might have brushed them in passing.

  We piled back into her car and drove to Rosie’s where I gratefully grabbed a menu as we sat at the bar. I ordered a full Irish breakfast, and then told Sam about Trevor and my adventure earlier that morning and Lizzy’s find.

  “What we’re wondering,” I concluded, “is if you know anyone who can cast a trap spell. I can cast a ward that would hold him, but I would have to have him stationary first.”

  Sam gave us a thoughtful look, then studied the contact lens in the little baggie.

  “I can cast a trap spell,” he finally said. “And I can teach you how to do it.”

  “Witch magic?” I asked. I was sure Sam was a mage, not a witch.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s mage magic, a variation of the ward I have on the door. The way we would do it is, you set up one of those hybrid wards of yours but not trigger it. The trap spell is the trigger, but we need something of his—blood, hair, even a few skin cells—to make it personal to him. I’m not sure there would be enough of his personal DNA or whatever on that lens to do it. Of course, you can set a trap spell that will catch anyone who walks into it, along with mice, pigeons, and roaches, but I doubt that’s what you want.”

  I ate my breakfast, then Jolene and Lizzy took me back to my place. They planned to use the contact lens to try and find the Hunter and told me they would let me know if they had any success.

  After washing my hair, I put on my work clothes and went back to Rosie’s. Even if I never got the necessary ingredients to trap the Hunter, I wasn’t going to let a chance to learn Sam’s trap spell go to waste.

  The middle of the afternoon was Rosie’s slowest time, so we left Liam tending the bar, and Sam took me to the riverside park between the bar and my apartment. There were stretches where there weren’t any buildings near the creek, and we found a place where we would be safe from witnesses.

  Sam set up a ward using four trees as the anchors, then took a strand of my hair, spelled it, and laid it between two of the trees. He drew on the nearby ley line, twisted the magic into a pattern similar to a Celtic knot, and overlaid that on the strand of hair.

  “Okay, walk between the trees, passing over the hair,” he directed.

  I stepped through the area where he indicated, and light flashed between the trees. I walked around, feeling with my hands, and found I was completely sealed into the space.

  After he dissolved the ward, he gave me a whisker from his sideburns, and I tried it. It took me four tries to get the pattern woven correctly, but when I did, and
he stepped into the space between the wards, I was rewarded with a flash of light as the ward closed.

  I cast the spell twice more successfully, then we drove back to the bar.

  “What happens if you cast that without the hair?” I asked as we drove.

  “You’ll catch anyone who happens by.”

  “So, I could hypothetically cast it on my balcony and catch him if he tries to get in that way again.”

  Sam chuckled. “That would work if he came when you weren’t home. Do you want to be trapped in your apartment with him? Keep in mind, that would leave your front door unguarded, unless you set a trigger on that door as well.” He thought for a moment, then said, “It seems he’s keeping track of your movements. Do you know if he’s tried to get in when you aren’t home?”

  “No. I don’t have any way of knowing that.”

  He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and sketched a rune in the air. It glowed briefly, then faded. “Did you catch that?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Weave that into the spell when you cast your ward, and it will let you know if someone has tried it.”

  Blair came in after the dinner rush was over and ordered a beer. When I brought it to him, he handed me a folded piece of paper. Opening it, I found a pencil sketch of a man’s face.

  “Ever seen him?”

  I shook my head.

  “The guy you and Frankie took down said that is the man who hired him and his buddies. Dark hair with a hint of salt-and-pepper on the sides, and blue eyes. Said he was in his late forties or early fifties.”

  I studied the drawing but couldn’t remember ever seeing him. “You know, don’t you, that a mage could be two or three times that age? We don’t age at the same rate normal people do,” I said. Master Benedict was well over two hundred and looked to be around sixty. Of course, if I was looking at a picture of the Hunter, he probably was under a hundred. Even mages’ reflexes began to slow as they aged.

  “You can keep that,” Blair said. “Do you like ballet?”

  The change of subject took me by surprise. “Yes, I do. I think every little girl has dreams of becoming a ballerina.” I had taken ballet classes when I was young, before the Illuminati. After I went to live with them, my classes had changed to the martial arts.

  “Sleeping Beauty is going to be performed at the opera house Saturday night,” Blair said. “I wondered if you’d like to go.”

  The smile I gave him probably reflected the hint of sadness I felt. “I would love to, but I have to work.” I had seen a video of Sleeping Beauty but never a live performance. The City of the Illuminati didn’t have television, but the older Masters were fans of ballet and opera, chamber music and symphonies. I had been to a couple of live performances while on missions. The rich and influential liked to hang out at such cultural events. See and be seen.

  “Won’t Sam let you switch shifts with someone for one night?”

  I shrugged. But as I tended to my other customers, I thought about it.

  When I took Blair another beer, I said, “I wouldn’t have taken you for a ballet person, Lieutenant.”

  He smiled. “My mother was a dancer before she married my father. I also have season tickets to the opera.”

  “Really? Rubbing elbows with all the upper crust?”

  With a chuckle, he said, “Yes. As a matter of fact, the mayor’s chief of staff has the seats right next to mine this season. All the politicians go to hang out with their rich donors.”

  “Like Frankie’s boss and captains of industry?”

  “Yep, those are the ones.”

  There was more than one way to skin a cat. “Let me talk to Sam. Maybe I can work something out.”

  Blair beamed, and I felt a little guilty.

  I gave Sam a call, and he said he would move the schedule around. One of the other bartenders had asked for some extra shifts, and he said she would gladly fill in for me. When I hung up, I went back to Blair.

  “Sam says I can have Saturday off. So, what’s the plan?”

  “I’ll pick you up at your place about five. We’ll go to dinner, and then to the ballet.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. But my mind was already swirling with things I would have to do.

  For the second morning in a row, someone knocked on my door. I was already awake, however, although just barely. I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea and went to the door to see who it was. I saw Jolene’s face through the peephole and opened the door.

  I didn’t expect the shocked expression on her face, and then I realized I was nude except for my panties.

  “Put on some clothes,” she said with some urgency. “We have a bunch of guys with us.” I noticed that she had a chair sitting on the floor next to her.

  I hurried to my bedroom and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans. When I came out, I discovered Josh and another guy who I didn’t know maneuvering a sofa through my door. Behind them, Trevor and a fourth guy carried an overstuffed chair. And behind them came Lizzy, carrying another chair, a match for the one Jolene had already put in my kitchen.

  The men all trooped out and down the stairs. I walked to the end of the hall and looked through the window overlooking the parking lot. A pickup truck was parked in my space, the back of it filled with furniture.

  By the time the truck was empty, I had a sofa and a chair in the living room that didn’t match, a coffee table and a side table that didn’t match, along with two lamps that didn’t match. The dinette set in the kitchen did match, but the night stand and the bureau in my bedroom didn’t. I stared at all of it with my mouth hanging open.

  “And here’s a housewarming present,” Lizzy said with a huge smile, handing me a ceramic teapot with an infuser. “Now you can properly entertain guests.”

  “What—where—?”

  “We called around and asked people if they had any old furniture they would like us to haul away for free,” Jolene said. “Welcome to Westport.”

  I looked at the men, who all looked very pleased with themselves, and felt very awkward.

  Lizzy whispered in my ear, “Give each of them a hug and a kiss on the cheek.”

  So I did. It felt kind of weird, but it seemed to please them. In spite of the Hunter and all the other problems I had encountered in Westport, I realized I had friends, for the first time since I was thirteen years old, and it felt pretty damned good.

  After brushing my hair and my teeth, I took them all to Rosie’s and bought them breakfast with some of the money I was saving for furniture.

  Chapter 22

  After breakfast, I took the bus to a clothing store and spent the money I had planned to buy a dinette set with on a nice cocktail dress, a pair of pantyhose, a lacy demi bra, a pair of high heels, some make up, a new purse, some curlers, and a couple of pieces of costume jewelry. The bill came to more than I could afford, but I decided I could eat a little less until my next paycheck.

  While I wasn’t supermodel material, I knew how to present what I had in the best possible way. A good portion of my training had been aimed at placing me in high society settings where I might meet and engage with wealthy and influential men. High society girls weren’t all movie-star beautiful—even with expensive surgery—and a lot of what I had learned was attitude, poise, and witty banter. I could fit into upscale social circles and flirt with the best of them when I wanted to. Of course, the Illuminati supplied me with all the necessary money for that, and money wasn’t something I could magically conjure. Unfortunately.

  There were some things a female Hunter could do that a man couldn’t, and the Illuminati never let such petty concerns as ethics and morality interfere with reaching their goals. When it came to staying alive, I wasn’t going to let such things get in my way, either.

  Daniel Nava, the District Attorney and Frankie’s boss, had been a successful prosecutor, gone into private practice and made a bundle, then run for office. Nava was a widower, and his two daughters were at university. Nothing I could find in my or
Trevor’s research indicated he had a lover or a steady girlfriend, but I did find several pictures on the internet of him with beautiful young women at society events. Never the same woman more than twice.

  Charles Mietzner, the mayor’s chief of staff, was also single. I couldn’t find any evidence he had ever been married, and that added to my suspicions that he might be an Illuminati. His career was as a political operative, and it certainly appeared that he was positioning the mayor for a run for governor in the next election. As with Nava, he rarely appeared at public functions alone and had been linked romantically to several wealthy women, models, and movie starlets over the years, always younger than he was.

  When Saturday rolled around, I washed and curled my hair, applied makeup, and dressed. Blair buzzed my apartment promptly at five. I went downstairs, wondering for the first time how Jolene and Lizzy got to the third floor without me letting them in the building.

  I opened the door to find Blair dressed in a tailored black suit. He looked very dashing, and I wondered if the suit was bought specifically to attend such events as the opera and ballet.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant.”

  “Whoa!”

  I gave him a coy smile. “Is that a good whoa, or a bad whoa?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “And you’re a liar, but a very sweet one. Shall we go?”

  He was driving a different car than I’d seen before, a sporty Japanese sedan that appeared to be two or three years old. Not as racy as Frankie’s poor destroyed car, nor the kind of flashy German car that men trying to impress women tended to buy.

  We drove to a parking garage downtown and walked two blocks to a restaurant called La Maison. The maître d seated us quickly, and a waiter greeted Monsieur Blair by name. I glanced at the menu, and the prices.

  “Do you come here often?” I asked.

  He gave me a disarming grin. “Whenever I attend a performance. It puts me in the mood to mingle with people who spend more on shoes than I make in a month.”