Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  If the bigger man was upset about his ex-wife’s arrival, though, he kept it to himself, leaving the room to answer the door without a word.

  Will wheeled on Scarlett. “You need to do it,” he said firmly. “You have to wake him up.”

  Scarlett shook her head. “You know I can’t do that. He’s forbidden it.”

  Jesse had never heard Scarlett use the word “forbidden” before, but it sure sounded like something Dashiell would say. “Hold on,” Jesse jumped in, stepping between the two of them. “Scarlett has worked for you guys for years. This has to have come up before, right? That you might get in a jam and need to bend the rules?”

  “You were with me on the two worst situations I’ve ever seen,” Scarlett said, with a little more control in her voice. “And I don’t think we even discussed it.”

  “Things were never this time-sensitive,” Will objected. He bared his teeth, adding, “I’m your employer too, you know. Anything Dashiell can do to you, I can do just as easily.”

  “Hey!” Jesse began, stepping forward, but just then Kirsten walked through the doorway with Hayne at her heels. The semi-official leader of the city’s witch population was a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a tiered wool skirt, tall boots, and a white sweater with sleeves long enough to cover the second knuckles on each hand. The sweater made Kirsten look feminine and angelic, but Jesse knew better than to underestimate her. He’d seen some of the things she could do with magic.

  Kirsten took one glance around the room and made a beeline for Will. “What on earth is going on?” she demanded.

  His eyes latched on to her with sudden desperation. “They’re here, Kirsten,” he said, anguished. “The Luparii came to town.”

  Jesse glanced at Scarlett, who appeared to be as confused as he was. Kirsten looked suddenly unsteady on her feet, her alabaster skin paling further. Hayne stepped up beside her with concern on his face, placing a hand gently on her arm. She seized it and hung on, tilting her head way up to see Hayne’s face.

  “Bring them up, Teddy,” she said quietly. “Bring them up here and Scarlett can wake them. I swear on my craft that you won’t be blamed.”

  There was a moment of silence in the living room, punctuated only by the sound of Will pacing back and forth in front of the patio door. Finally Hayne nodded. He turned on his heel and left the room.

  They left a long, terrible silence in their wake, and then Scarlett let out a choking sound. “Scar?” Jesse asked, concerned. She made the sound again, and Jesse realized she was laughing. “What?”

  She chortled. “His first name is Teddy?”

  Chapter 27

  It took me a little while to stop laughing, but only because of the law of inertia—once I started, it just seemed easier to keep going. Teddy. What a stupid name for such an enormous man.

  Eventually I calmed down and remembered that Jesse and I still had no idea what was going on. The Luparii . . . that name jangled in my brain, and I closed my eyes, trying to remember. Olivia had been telling me stories about the European Old World. I opened my eyes and looked at Kirsten. “They’re the boogeymen for werewolves, right?” I asked Kirsten. My voice came out thin and sober.

  “Something like that.” Kirsten looked suddenly tired. “I’ll tell you all about it, but it’ll be easiest if we wait for them,” she said firmly. I shrugged and went to sit down in one of Dashiell’s nice padded chairs.

  Minutes ticked by. Part of me was ready to take a handful of Advil and go to sleep right there, but at the same time my stomach was thrashing around like a shark on a boat deck. Hayne may have been the one actually moving him, but I knew Dashiell was going to blame me for resurrecting him during the day. Besides, completely apart from the fact that I wasn’t supposed to wake him without permission, Dashiell hates being near me. I don’t blame him, really. If you spend a couple of centuries becoming the most powerful creature in a hundred square miles, the last thing you want to do is be near someone who can immediately relegate you to the bottom of the food chain, which is what humans are. He gets in my radius every once in a while just to prove he isn’t afraid, but he always looks twitchy when I’ve foisted humanity on him. And now I was going to do it without his permission or foreknowledge? It just seemed like the pickle on the crap sandwich of my week.

  Hayne brought Beatrice and then Dashiell to the hallway outside the living room, and then called for Will to help. The werewolf went out and collected Beatrice’s limp form, and the two of them carried the vampires into the room, a sober procession that was only somewhat tempered by how ridiculous Dashiell looked in a fireman’s carry on Hayne’s shoulders.

  When Hayne took the last step into my radius, Dashiell exploded with sudden life, taking in an enormous breath and struggling to disentangle himself from Hayne. Beatrice, right behind him, got her feet under her without much trouble, but Dashiell looked undignified and silly for a second, flailing around to get himself oriented without his usual vampire grace. And thanks to the world’s most reliably terrible luck, when he finally got his feet under him, the vampire was about six inches away from me with murder in his eye.

  Before anyone could speak, Dashiell raised his palm to slap me—but Will had anticipated this and darted forward, grabbing his hand. “Stop,” he roared at the vampire, and Dashiell froze in surprise. I had never heard Will—or anyone, really—talk to Dashiell like that. “It’s not her fault; I made her,” Will said in a quieter tone. You know things are bad when the unhinged werewolf is the most reasonable person in the room.

  Then Will added, very simply, “The Luparii are in town.”

  The word hit Dashiell like a blow. He seemed to suddenly forget all about me as he turned around as fast as a human can, managing to arrive at Beatrice’s side just in time to catch his wife as she fainted dead away. No pun intended. Jesse looked at me with his mouth open.

  So. That happened.

  It took a few minutes, but Hayne got everyone seated and more or less calm. I stayed in my armchair, mostly because it was so overstuffed that I wasn’t sure I could get up by myself. Dashiell and Beatrice were on the adjoining sofa, which was still in my radius. Bea looked pale and shaky, and I suspected that she was only sitting upright because she was leaning on her husband. Will took the hard-backed chair on the other side of the sofa from me, and a wary Jesse had simply sunk down on the floor to my right. I knew he didn’t want to be too far from me in case everything went to hell again, but I didn’t exactly mind. Hayne brought in a chair for Kirsten, who set it between Will and Jesse so we formed a loose oval around the coffee table. Hayne stood guard at the door.

  Between the Luparii and Beatrice fainting, Dashiell seemed to have forgotten he was furious with me—although every once in a while he shot me a suspicious look that I didn’t at all like.

  When it seemed like we were more or less settled, I jumped in. “Olivia talked about the Luparii once,” I ventured. “I don’t remember her exact phrasing, but I had the impression that they were magical imaginary villains, something older werewolves used to scare new wolves into silence. Like the Loch Ness Monster or something.”

  Will frowned at me from across the coffee table. “Oh, they’re very real, unfortunately. And technically they’re witches. A family of witches.”

  I looked at Kirsten, whose frown matched Will’s. That explained why the witch queen of LA was here. “What do you mean, ‘technically’?” Jesse asked.

  “The Luparii are witches the way Hitler was German,” Kirsten said stiffly. She held a hand up to Will to indicate that she’d take over, and he nodded. “They are a family, a very old French family. There are stories about them going back as far as the Middle Ages.”

  I blinked in surprise. Unlike vampires or werewolves, witches pass their magic on hereditarily, not through infection. I knew that there were old witch families, but I’d only heard of, like, Mayflower-old, not medieval. “Back then, they were called the Gagnons,” Kirsten continued. She did the full French pronunciation of
the name in a careless, natural way that I envied. “As you know, different witches are skilled differently.”

  “Like how Runa finds things,” Jesse said quietly, and Kirsten nodded.

  “Different families sometimes pass down the same . . . specialties.” She bit her lip. “Our history suggests that the Gagnons had a gift for . . . twisting things. Changing the purpose of things, usually to something dark and cruel.”

  “Example?” I asked. I was feeling very attentive. If it meant I got to sit down and no one was trying to smack me, Kirsten could lecture all day, as far I was concerned.

  She swiveled her hand idly in the air, her eyes searching the air above my head for an example. “Like . . . farmers who competed with the Gagnons would suddenly discover all of their crops were poisonous. I don’t mean that the crops were poisoned, I mean they became toxic. Or a young woman who rejected one of the Gagnon men would have miscarriage after miscarriage, and the babies would be born . . . disfigured.” Kirsten shuddered. “Anyway, the Gagnons caused a lot of deaths. Eventually even Charlemagne noticed. Do you . . .” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I rolled my eyes back.

  “Yes, I know who Charlemagne is. My father taught history.”

  Kirsten nodded and continued. “Well, in the ninth century Charlemagne figured there was no point in arresting the Gagnons. There was never any proof, and anyway every kind of law enforcement that went after them simply disappeared. So instead, he gave them a job.”

  “Come again?” I asked, confused.

  Kirsten sighed. “It was a tactic. If your two-year-old is about to throw a tantrum, you ask him to help you water the flowers or bake some cookies.”

  “I’m guessing the Gagnons aren’t known for their amazing snickerdoodles,” Jesse guessed. I flashed him a grin.

  “No,” Kirsten answered, her expression soured. “Charlemagne gave them the office of the Luparii, the official wolf hunters for the crown.”

  Will’s lips curled back with rage. “He paid them a reward for each dead wolf.”

  “The jaws,” I said softly, putting it together. “They used the jaws to prove the kill.”

  “Yes,” Kirsten confirmed. “It was easier to drag around a bag of jaws”—she wrinkled her nose distastefully—“than the complete carcasses.”

  “Did it work?” Jesse asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Will said darkly, “it worked. The Luparii grew rich slaughtering wolves for the crown. They excelled at it.” He stood up and began to pace the length of the room restlessly again. The pacing took him in and out of my radius with each loop, which was harmlessly distracting, like when a fly keeps dive-bombing your head. I wasn’t about to ask him to stop, though.

  “And this is regular wolves?” I asked hesitantly. “I mean, not werewolves?”

  “Right.” Kirsten nodded. She glanced furtively at Will. “They used their magic occasionally, but . . . mmm . . . well, they mostly used ‘regular’ methods to hunt wolves: poisoned meat, packs of hunting dogs, that kind of thing. It was a point of pride for them that they could do it without magic. In all fairness,” she added, with an apologetic glance at Will, “wolves were a genuine threat to human settlements at the time, and the Gagnons felt that they were performing a public service. A lucrative one.”

  Will turned to face us, and I saw the bones in his jaw flex with anger. “Wolves were hated then,” he snapped. “They were the rabid baby-eating monsters of fairy tales.”

  “Many of which were based on werewolves,” Dashiell pointed out conversationally, an unfathomable expression on his face. Apparently the vampire was still feeling hostile.

  Will snarled back, a human sound in his currently human throat, but Dashiell didn’t rise to the bait. I almost opened my mouth to intervene, but decided I’d rather they were mad at each other than at me.

  “Anyway,” Kirsten said hurriedly, “this went on for centuries. The last name changed from Gagnon to something else, and changed again, but the family line continued killing wolves. In the eighteenth century, though, the crown could no longer afford to finance the office of the Luparii.”

  “So they had to find something else to kill,” Will growled.

  “They started hunting werewolves?” I guessed, and Will nodded grimly. “Just for fun, or what?”

  “By then they were true believers,” Kirsten said softly. “They thought it was their family’s calling, the same way some families turn out many generations of teachers or policemen. They began to travel. And werewolves began to die.”

  “People must have noticed,” Jesse protested. “I mean, the werewolves were people most of the time. People were disappearing.”

  “Oh, they noticed,” Dashiell spoke up. He and Beatrice had been suspiciously quiet through all of this. “The French monarchy realized that people were disappearing around the Luparii again, so they reinstated the office ten years later, hoping to get them back on track. The position exists to this day, I believe, although now it’s called the Wolfcatcher Royal.”

  “But it was too late—the Luparii didn’t want to go back to hunting regular wolves,” Kirsten added. “I don’t condone or agree with what they do, but to them, werewolves are a plague. And generation after generation of Gagnons have spent their lifetimes training to destroy that plague.”

  Jesse met my eyes, and I thought we both thought of the same thing: a conversation we’d had with Jared Hess, back in the fall. He had been crazy, and he had loathed everything about the Old World . . . but he’d also hinted that he wasn’t the only one. Don’t you think there are a few humans who know what’s going on, who want to put the animals down? “How many werewolves did they kill?” I asked.

  “All of them,” Will said flatly. “To this day, there are no werewolves in mainland Europe or the United Kingdom. The Luparii killed most of them, and the few who survived ran for their lives.”

  There was a moment of silence. I was awed by the scale of what Will was saying: all of the werewolves in mainland Europe and the United Kingdom? All those different countries, different cultures . . . I couldn’t imagine a clan of witches claiming that big a territory.

  “Excuse me,” Jesse said finally, mindful of Will’s anger. “But aren’t you all supposed to be really hard to kill? And aren’t werewolves smart enough to evade those guys?”

  “We’re not always as smart in our other form,” Will answered. “But yes, we could avoid the Luparii at first. Then they adapted to us.”

  “They began to incorporate their magic,” I guessed. Will and Kirsten both nodded. “How?” I was genuinely curious, apart from our current troubles. Magic doesn’t work very well against itself, which means witches can’t put spells on other Old World creatures. So how would you use magic to kill werewolves?

  “That’s the thing,” Kirsten said softly. “I don’t really know.”

  Jesse met my eyes, and without discussing it we both turned our heads to look at Beatrice and Dashiell. The cardinal vampire’s arm tightened protectively around his wife, but she sat up straighter, her shoulders back. “Do you know something about them, Bea?” I said softly.

  “They . . . my . . .” Beatrice cleared her throat and looked helplessly at Dashiell. I’d never seen her look so unsure of herself.

  Dashiell pressed his lips to her head, then looked back up and said with stormy eyes, “The Luparii killed her younger brother.”

  Chapter 28

  Dashiell looked like he was ready to slaughter the first one of us to ask a question, but luckily Beatrice patted her husband’s arm gently and said, “I will tell them.” Her voice was small and fearful, but strong.

  “You don’t have to,” I rushed to say, ignoring the look that Jesse shot me. We needed whatever information we could get. I knew it, but I just didn’t want to make Beatrice relive whatever was causing that expression on her face.

  “It’s all right,” Beatrice said, letting out a long breath. “It was a long time ago.”

  Back in Spain, she explained, she’d had a little brother
she was close to. Esteban had been twelve years younger than her, and their mother had died giving birth to him. Beatrice had more or less raised the boy, and he’d followed his big sister around with worshipful eyes. In 1911, Dashiell had passed through Barcelona and spotted the twenty-five-year-old beauty. He was enchanted, and began to court Beatrice—always at night, of course. They fell in love.

  For years, Dashiell pressed her mind to keep her from asking too many question about his strange habits, but eventually he loved her so much, he didn’t want to lie anymore.

  “So I told her what I was,” Dashiell broke in. He was human in my presence, and I wondered if he would still have that look of guilt and grief if he weren’t. “As soon as I did, the local cardinal vampire made sure I turned her.”

  Beatrice took his hand. “It’s what I wanted too, love.” She looked back at me with tears pooled in her eyes. “We planned to leave town, as is the custom when one is turned. You leave everything behind. Esteban was sixteen, though, and he didn’t want me to go. He followed Dashiell one night, to talk to him, and he . . . realized what we were.” Her voice broke. I winced. The poor kid had probably seen his big sister drinking someone’s blood. And by finding out about the Old World, he’d have to join or be killed.

  Dashiell picked up the story so Beatrice wouldn’t have to. “Because of the boy’s age, we decided he should join the werewolf pack, rather than the vampires. Even back then, sixteen was too young to . . .” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. Becoming a werewolf would keep him alive, and let him and Beatrice have many long years together . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment. “We contacted a local alpha. The change was successful—”

  “And the Luparii came to Barcelona three months later,” Beatrice finished. She took a deep breath. “They killed the whole pack, including Esteban. They took their jaws.”