Shadow Hunter

by B R Kingsolver

  “I’ll take you to lunch tomorrow? La Maison at noon?” I said with a hopeful note in my voice.

  Flynn laughed. “Oh, Ms. McLane. You’ll be magnificent in a hundred years.”

  “Yes, I will be, and you’ll still be striking out. Consider my future good will for that hundred years as a great bargain.”

  He regarded me over the rim of his glass, then said, “I’ll take that. Someone in City Hall asked Rodrick to do it.”

  “Name?”

  “Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t have that. It seems this person has promised to back him for Master of the City.”

  “Is that person a vampire?”

  Flynn shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Then how would he be able to help Barclay?” I couldn’t imagine how a non-vampire could possibly do that.

  “I told you Rodrick isn’t quite right.”

  As far as I was able to determine, four children of Lord Carleton had the age to contend for supremacy, with Flynn and Barclay the strongest contenders. Eventually, one of them would kill the other and ascend the throne. Outsiders normally had very little influence over that struggle.

  “Mr. Flynn? Watch your back. I believe that someone in City Hall is directing the Hunter that’s in town.”

  He raised an eyebrow, finished his whiskey, and as he got to his feet, said, “Ms. McLane, that nugget of information was worth a lot more than lunch. Until next time.” He smiled, collected his bodyguards, and walked out of the bar.

  Sam dropped in later that evening, and I told him about Mietzner and my conversation with Flynn.

  “I agree with Lizzy and Jolene,” Sam said. “Meeting with Mietzner is too dangerous. I don’t care if you do have backup. You said yourself that he’s a powerful mage. Too much can go wrong, especially if his backup is the Hunter.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. The Hunter would definitely cancel me out, and I wouldn’t be armed. I had the spells in the Book to forge a sword, but I would have to find a skilled metalsmith, possibly through Lizzy’s Fae connections, and it would take time. Assuming I could find a Fae smith willing to work with iron. It would be expensive, too. I would probably have to give the smith the spells to pay for it.

  I answered the phone around midnight, and Jolene said, “Can you come by my place around noon tomorrow? Lizzy and I are going to try and find your Hunter. Lizzy said she can pick you up at your place around eleven-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  And with that to look forward to, sleep didn’t come easily when I got home. My mind just wouldn’t stop.

  Chapter 25

  “Trevor did some research for us,” Jolene said when Lizzy and I showed up at her house the following day. “Mietzner owns a couple of rental properties. I thought we could cruise by them and see if we can learn anything.”

  “If we could get anything personal of the Hunter’s to focus on, it would make finding him a lot easier,” Lizzy said. “Jolene says she can fashion a tracker we might plant on him.”

  It seemed to me that if we found where he was staying, we wouldn’t need a finder spell, but I didn’t say anything. If Trevor had given me the information, I would have checked it out. At least with Jolene’s and Lizzy’s help, I would have transportation.

  We took Jolene’s car because it was less remarkable. Lizzy’s pink Cooper with flower decals was rather noticeable.

  The first place we checked was a six-story apartment building downtown. We drove around it, then I asked Jolene to let me out. Lizzy came with me. There weren’t any balconies, and when we walked into the lobby, we discovered there weren’t any apartments on the ground floor—just the lobby, a small liquor store with fancy wines, a gym, and a laundry room. There were two sets of stairs and two central elevators.

  Shaking my head, I said, “Nope. He wouldn’t be here,” and walked back out.

  “Why do you say that?” Lizzy asked as we stood on the curb waiting for Jolene to come around and pick us up.”

  “No escape routes. Hard to secure. Not private enough.”

  She nodded, then shrugged.

  Jolene next drove us out to an area near my place. Rather than apartments, the neighborhood was comprised of one-story duplexes with small front yards and walled backyards. According to property tax records, Mietzner owned two buildings—four apartments—right next to each other.

  Jolene parked a block away and said, “Hand me that clipboard on the back seat.” Lizzy handed it to her, and Jolene got out of the car. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she opened the door, tossed the clipboard into the backseat, and got back in the car.

  “Nope. No paranormal assassins in residence.”

  “What did you do?” I had been bursting with curiosity the whole time she had been gone.

  “There’s a senior center two blocks from here. I rang the bell and said I was doing a survey for the community center. Asked them what services they used, and what programs they would like to see offered. Talked to people in all four addresses, and the youngest one was a woman in her seventies.”

  We next drove across the river and into a forested area at the base of the foothills. Custom homes on large lots, shielded for the most part from their neighbors and the road by trees. Mietzner’s house was on one edge of the neighborhood with trees all around it, and a forested hill rising behind it.

  “Trevor said this is where Mietzner lived for a long time, but he built a new house a few years ago. He’s been renting this one because the housing market was down.”

  “This one’s going to be a little trickier to scout,” I said. “If I was staying here, I’d set wards, but I’d also set some booby traps. Not the kind that would hurt anyone, but that would tell me if someone was sneaking around.”

  “Yeah,” Jolene said. “You either have to sneak through the woods or walk right up the driveway in plain sight of the house. Hard to be discreet. Hand me the clipboard.”

  Lizzy snorted. “You think people in this neighborhood use senior centers?”

  “No, I want to write down the license number on the car in the driveway.”

  “Let’s go grab some lunch and bring it back,” I said. “We can go to that fast-food joint we passed. Maybe we can see someone coming out of the house.”

  I watched for the car while we ordered burgers and fries but didn’t see anyone drive by. We got our food and parked down the street where we could see the car but none of the windows in the house. Jolene called Trevor and asked him to check on the car’s license number, and then we waited.

  After an hour, Trevor called back. Jolene talked to him, taking notes, then asked, “Did you get the name on the credit card?” She wrote some more, then said, “Thanks,” and hung up.

  Turning to us, she said, “It’s a rental car, and it was rented two months ago. The credit card he used is in the name of Hans Christian.”

  I snorted, and Lizzy asked about silver skates.

  “Yeah,” Jolene said, “but Trevor hacked the credit card company, and he’s got all the places the card was used over the past two months. Restaurants, laundry, gas stations. We can map out a pattern.”

  We watched for another two hours, and everyone was starting to get fidgety, when a man came out of the house and got in the car. Jolene handed me her binoculars.

  “That’s the guy from the police sketch,” I said, and handed the binoculars to Lizzy.

  We watched Christian drive away, and Lizzy jumped out of the car.

  “Hey, where are you going?” I called.

  “Spell material,” she said, trotting away.

  “Watch out for booby traps.”

  Lizzy laughed.

  She came back about ten minutes later and jumped into the car.

  “You were right,” she said. “The house is warded, and there are both magical and physical tripwires set around the place. I think you could get blown up if you weren’t careful.”

  “Physical tripwires?”
I asked. “How did you spot those?”

  “He tried to hide them with magic, and I can see the magic,” she said with a grin.

  “Hell. If I ever break into a wizard’s castle, you’re the first person I’m hiring.”

  “Did you get anything?” Jolene asked.

  Lizzy held up a black glove—a Hunter’s glove. I gasped.

  “He evidently dropped it and accidently kicked it under a bush, I guess,” Lizzy said.

  “That’s perfect,” Jolene said. “Don’t turn it inside out until I can get it home.”

  It was one of my nights off, so we all went to Jolene’s.

  Jolene ordered a pizza, which I thought was pretty neat and made a note to remember I could do that if I ever got a phone.

  Lizzy gave Jolene the glove, and she took it out to her lab in the garage. She put on rubber gloves, then turned the glove inside out on a black cloth. Using the back of a knife, she gently scraped the glove, then moved the cloth to a counter near the stove.

  “Did I get anything, Lizzy?” Jolene asked.

  “Yeah. There’s residual magic on the cloth. I think you also got some skin cells.”

  “Fantastic.”

  I watched all of that but was puzzled. “I don’t understand. We already found him. Why do we need a finding spell?”

  Jolene stopped what she was doing and turned to me. “I’m not doing a finding spell. I’m going to create a couple of trackers. One for his car, and one for him. I don’t know how we’re going to get the one on him, but if we can, we can follow him anywhere.”

  Lizzy chuckled. “Put it on the glove, then I’ll put the glove back somewhere he’ll find it.” She cocked her head at me, as if asking whether that would work.

  “Yeah, that will do it,” I said. “That glove is ballistic cloth and leather, with hardened leather over the knuckles and wrists. He’s not going to get one like it at the local store.”

  Jolene gave me a strange look, but Lizzy just looked smug, and I realized I shouldn’t have known about the glove, since I’d never handled it.

  I watched as Jolene put various liquids in a pot along with a few sprigs of vegetation and heated it. She then took a dot of cloth the size of my thumbnail and dipped it in the mixture. Holding it with a pair of tweezers, she laid it on a button sort of thing she took out of a cabinet, and then put the whole thing on a pedestal at the center of her pentagram.

  Next, she put the black cloth in the pot and simmered it for a few minutes. She pulled the cloth out of the pot and laid it on the counter. Passing her hand over the cloth, she mumbled a few words. The cloth looked different, and I leaned closer.

  “Touch it,” Jolene said. I did and discovered the cloth was dry.

  She cut another dot out of the cloth and put it next to the button on the pedestal. Then she pulled two small mirrors out of another cabinet, and with a pair of tweezers, placed each cloth dot on a mirror, then put them on the pedestal.

  Her doorbell rang.

  “Pizza’s here!” Lizzy called out.

  “Yeah, I can finish the spell after we eat. I’m starving,” Jolene said.

  We sat around her kitchen table and ate the pizza, which had different stuff on it than what Trevor had ordered. Jolene laid out her plan. We would plant one of the trackers she was preparing on the Hunter’s car. The other she would embed in his glove, then we’d plant the glove back in his driveway and hope he found it. The little mirrors were the receivers.

  We trooped back into the garage, where Jolene lit the candles, sprinkled salt around the outline of the circle, and then stepped inside it. She chanted an incantation in a language I didn’t know, and then there was a small flash of light from the top of the pedestal. She put one of the trackers in a little plastic bag, then pressed the other against the back of the glove near the wrist and said a Word. Then she scuffed the salt to break the circle and blew out the candles.

  “We’ll take the glove back out to his house, and then take you home,” Jolene said. “We can start trying to track him tomorrow, but I’m bushed.”

  She gave me a few pages of paper. “These are Hans’s credit card charges that Trevor sent me. Go over them and figure out a good place to find him tomorrow so we can plant the tracker on his car.”

  We drove back out to the Hunter’s house. His car wasn’t in the driveway, so Lizzy took the glove up to the house.

  “I put it right at the base of the front steps,” she said when she returned. You wouldn’t see it at night because it will be in shadow, and you don’t notice it when you come down the steps from the porch.”

  Jolene drove to my place, where Lizzy had left her car, and we said good night.

  Chapter 26

  I went through the credit card charges Trevor provided and marked them on my city map. Then I put together a matrix that showed where he used the card versus the day and time he used it. When I sat back and looked at it, I realized that the Hunter had a favorite place for brunch. He had eaten at the same place and paid his check between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning almost every day for the past five weeks, with only three breaks in the pattern.

  Catching him when he wasn’t armed—or at least not armed with his sword—had its attraction, but a magical battle in public that ended in one or more people’s deaths wasn’t something anyone in the shadow world wanted. Frankie would have a huge task in trying to explain away people throwing fireballs in the middle of the city at noon. I tagged the breakfast place as a good place to plant the tracker on his car.

  For dinner, he had five places with more than one charge. Most senior Hunters, including me, had unlimited expense accounts. No one cared whether we ate hamburgers or lobster. The Illuminati were so wealthy that even the Masters in charge of their finances didn’t know how much money they had. I’d seen their reports on Master Benedict’s desk.

  Hans Christian was fond of steak and seafood and barbeque. He had been to La Maison twice. Considering what I saw of their menu, I would have haunted the place if I had the money. But steaks bigger than my head had never been my thing.

  Lizzy came by in the morning. When I got in her car, she said, “I’m going to drop you at Jolene’s, and then I have to go to class. I’ll hook up with you guys this afternoon.”

  “I can take the train downtown,” I said.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Just drop me at the train station.”

  Waiting on the platform, I noticed a guy checking me out. Maybe thirty, good-looking, in a millennial-punk sort of way. He wasn’t being obnoxious or leering, so I didn’t think too much about it.

  He changed trains when I did and got off at the same station. Several other people did as well. I thought I might have seen one of the women around my apartment complex. My hours were so weird that I hadn’t met many of my neighbors.

  I stopped in at a convenience store down the street from the station and bought a drink. When I came out, I caught a glimpse of the same guy, standing partially turned away from me and partially behind the corner of a building across the street.

  I had been trained to consider coincidences as dangerous. So, rather than go straight to Jolene’s, I started off in the other direction. I took the first corner and sped up, then took off at a sprint after rounding the next corner. There was a large bush in the yard of the second house, and I dived behind it.

  My follower came around the corner and stopped. He looked around, turning his head in all directions, obviously baffled because he couldn’t see me.

  “What are you doing?” a woman’s voice came from behind me. I looked up and saw a woman, probably in her sixties, with gray hair, glaring at me through her window screen.

  “Shhhh. That man is stalking me,” I whispered. “I think he’s a rapist.”

  With a look of alarm, she slammed the window closed. I turned back, peeking through the bush, and saw my follower take off at a run down the street. As soon as he took the next corner, I went back around to the convenience store and used
a pay phone to call Jolene.

  “Hi. Do you know the little convenience store next to the train station near your house?”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps you could come and get me up there? I seem to have picked up a tail. I don’t want to take him to your place.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it. See you in about five minutes.”

  I waited inside the store, and when Jolene pulled in, I ran out and jumped in her car.

  “The Brown Derby restaurant,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “With any luck, that’s where our Hunter is having breakfast.”

  The restaurant turned out to be on the north bank of the river, about two miles from the house where Hans Christian was staying. We pulled into the parking lot, and Jolene parked around the back.

  She held out her palm holding a small plastic bag with the tracker she had prepared. “One side is sticky,” she said. “Very sticky. If you touch it, we’ll be tracking you.” She turned the bag over. “This is the side you can touch. Stick it underneath one of the bumpers.”

  “He knows what I look like. Why don’t you do it?”

  Jolene pursed her mouth and seemed to be trying to think of something to refute my argument.

  “You’re probably right. But if I get caught, you have to bail me out.”

  “Not a problem.”

  We both got out of the car, and while she went looking for Christian’s car, I snuck along the wall of the restaurant, trying to stay away from the windows. That required crawling under the windows on my hands and knees sometimes.

  About the time I reached the front of the building, I saw Jolene walking back toward me.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” she said as she walked past.

  “Did you do it?”

  “Yeah, it’s all planted. Let’s go see what we can see in the mirror.”

  I took a deep breath, looked around, then followed her, keeping my face turned away from the restaurant windows. I tried to slump a little, hoping to disguise the way I moved. I felt ridiculous.