Hunter's Oath (Changeling Blood Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Well, you’re the detective,” I pointed out as I circled the car. “Anything useful?”

  “She dumped the car rather than buy gas,” he repeated. “So, she has no cash. There were enough clothes and such at the stable that I doubt she’s running around naked, but she’s wearing riding gear—if it weren’t for Stampede, she’d stick out.”

  “And Stampede is over tomorrow,” I noted. “But she’ll find new clothes by then.”

  “Almost certainly.” Ibrahim shrugged. “The car has no GPS or maps, so if she was navigating, it was by phone—and all four of the phones the girls at the stable had are still there. We checked.”

  “So, no money, no phone, nothing.” I shook my head. “She almost certainly has a stash somewhere. Backup supplies, even if she wasn’t planning on getting blown up.”

  “I find most people don’t plan on exploding, but bug-out bags are useful. She would have been headed for one, you think?” the cop asked.

  “I would have been,” I told him. “The question is: how well could she navigate the city? We don’t know how long she’s been here.”

  “Long enough to get five thousand liters of chlorine into a place that’s supposed to have a hundredth of that,” Ibrahim noted. “It’s a shame that all got blown up; tracking it would have given us another avenue to find her.”

  “No luck at all with that?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “There’s only so much I can do for free, Kilkenny,” he noted. “That info’s worth money.”

  “Right.” I grabbed a loonie from my pocket and tossed it to him. “Enough?”

  He chuckled bitterly.

  “Some day, my friend, you are going to actually want something from me that will cost you for real,” he noted. He pocketed the coin, not even enough to buy a coffee these days.

  “We’ve got a forensic audit team ripping apart the books for the Stampede and that stable, trying to sort out when and how that chlorine got there, but that kind of tracking can take months,” he warned me. “The info’s cheap because it’s worthless. By the time the auditors find a trail, Chernenkov will have left us a trail of blood across half the damn city.”

  “I will not let that happen,” I replied. “Whatever it takes.”

  “Good.” He shook his head. “I’ve done all I can for now, Kilkenny. We’ll haul the car in, get it back to the girl’s family. Little enough solace that will be. I don’t know what to do from here.”

  I studied the ground around the parked car. Hard dirt, no tracks…but also no rain to wash away scent. Ibrahim and I were on about the same tier for senses: we could smell things no human could, but we couldn’t really track by scent.

  My girlfriend, on the other hand, knew people who could.

  “I think I do,” I told him. “Can you hold off on collecting the car for a bit? I need to call in some favors, and I’d rather we mess up the area as little as possible.”

  Ibrahim retreated out of sight and out of mind as I waited for my call to have results. I was impressed at the speed, to be honest, as a massive black pickup truck roared up in less time than it had taken me to respond to Ibrahim’s call.

  Barry Tenerim was the first out of the truck, a Clan Tenerim werewolf, a cousin of some kind to Mary. Two more werewolves followed, one of them turning back to help Mary down out of the extended-cab truck. A true work vehicle, it managed to make my Escalade look like a pampered poodle next to a grumpy Rottweiler.

  “Mary tells me you need someone tracked,” Barry told me. “I don’t need to tell you what Tenerim owes you. Our skills are at your command.”

  Unless I missed my guess, the three burly young men who’d arrived with my girlfriend had been the “brute squad” that Tarvers Tenerim had brought to the raid where he’d died. My intervention had stopped them picking a fight they couldn’t win…and then I had killed the man who’d killed their Alpha.

  I was reasonably sure Clan Tenerim wouldn’t go to war on my say-so. I wasn’t sure how far short of that the debt they regarded themselves as owing me stretched.

  “You know about the mess with the Pouka,” I told Barry. “She showed up again this morning. Killed four innocents and stole a car.”

  I pointed at the blue sedan.

  “She ran out of gas and dumped it here, but I’m guessing that she was heading for either a safehouse or a supply cache. She was on foot from here—and I need to know where she went. My nose isn’t good enough to track a shapeshifter through the city, but…”

  “But you know werewolves,” Barry said with a grin as Mary smiled past him at me. “Urban werewolves. There is nothing we can’t track across the city.”

  “That’s what I was hoping,” I told him. “You find the bitch, I’ll put her down.”

  Barry snorted.

  “If you think you’re getting into a fight and we’re just going to stand there and hold your coat, you’ve got another think coming,” he told me. “Shall we hunt?”

  Something in his phrasing ran right down my spine, and a part of my soul I rarely recognized as being present woke up with a vicious hunger.

  There was a reason, after all, that even as a changeling, I was still acknowledged as a Hunter.

  “I have some specific gear in the car for when we catch her,” I told him. “Let me grab it. Then, my wolven friends, you are quite correct.

  “We shall hunt.”

  12

  Mary took my SUV and one of Barry’s burly companions took his truck, moving the vehicles away from what would soon be a CPS crime site as the other two werewolves and I went after the scent.

  Barry started by squatting down next to the stolen car, breathing shallowly as he inhaled. I waited, hopefully patiently, as he picked up the scent. After a few moments, he turned back to me and grinned.

  “Got her scent,” he told me. “Shall we?”

  I gestured for him to lead the way, falling in behind him as he took off at a brisk walking pace.

  It was warm weather. Too warm, really, for the rain jacket I was wearing over my T-shirt. I didn’t trust the skies, though, with the rain we’d had lately—and it made a good cover for the revolver in the shoulder holster and the package of cold iron spikes.

  “Any idea where she was headed?” I asked Barry after a minute or so.

  “South,” he said. “Otherwise…” He shrugged. “Half the city is south of here, Jason. I can only follow the trail a few meters at a time.”

  The polite request not to be an idiot was silent, but I heard it anyway. My two werewolf companions knew what they were doing. I was there for when we reached the end of this hunt—and if I happened to pick up some tips and tricks on the hunting along the way, that was an extra benefit.

  The trail led us deep into the neighborhoods just north of downtown, separated from the skyscrapers by a river and a hill. After ten minutes, I realized we were starting to approach my own apartment and began to get a bit nervous.

  There was, as Barry had pointed out, no point in asking the werewolves if she’d been heading there. They were following a scent, not predicting where she was going.

  Finally, however, they stopped in front of one of the small older homes that filled the area. Unlike most of the houses around us, this one hadn’t been renovated at any point and looked rather rundown, showing every year of its probably sixty years or so of existence.

  What qualified as “old” in Calgary could still make me chuckle at times.

  “She went in here,” Barry told me, studying the home from the sidewalk, then shaking himself like a big dog. “Let’s keep moving; eyeing the place is way too obvious.”

  We looped the block, settling in to study the house from a distance.

  “Yeah, no continuation of the scent,” my werewolf friend noted. “She went in that house and didn’t leave on foot. Karl?”

  “Yeah, boss?” the second werewolf asked.

  “Check out the alley behind the house,” Barry instructed. “I’m guessing she’s either in
there or had a car stashed here, but she could have snuck out the back and we just missed the scent when we looped.”

  “Will do.”

  Karl disappeared back along the street while Barry and I continued to watch the front of the house.

  “No way to tell if she’s still there,” I said grimly.

  “Unless Karl finds her scent out back, no,” he confirmed. “I’ll bet biscuits to dollars there’s no vehicle parked out back, either. That might be because there never was a car—or because she left in it.”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t have the authority to bust into a human home on my own say-so, Jason,” Barry pointed out. “Won’t stop me if you, say, see the bitch through the windows, but breaking and entering is outside my purview.”

  I chuckled.

  “There’s an open question whether or not I have that authority with the mess with the new Court,” I admitted. “But my orders are clear, and that means I have sanction even if I don’t have authority.”

  The werewolf grinned evilly.

  “So, anyone who wants to argue can take up with the scary lady who may as well be a goddess?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” I confirmed, pulling out my phone to check the time. “It’s Saturday. The area is probably as empty as it’s going to be before work starts on Monday, so I figure we call in Mary and Evan to have the vehicles on hand.

  “And then we go kick down a door.”

  It said everything about the attitude of the shifters I worked with that both Mary and Evan exited the vehicles openly armed. My girlfriend had been wearing a rain jacket, but she’d left that in the Escalade, making the shoulder holster for her ugly little Czech machine pistol very visible.

  Evan, on the other hand, was carrying a black police-issue shotgun with a long box magazine that made it resemble an automatic rifle. It might have been overkill…except that I could tell Mary’s gun was loaded with cold iron and Evan’s wasn’t.

  “Are we good, or does anyone need to grab any more artillery?” I asked dryly.

  “We don’t have any cold iron ammo in the truck,” Barry admitted. “Claws are probably our best bet from here.”

  I shook my head—but I also tossed my raincoat in the SUV and grabbed the spare speed loaders for my revolver. My Gifts of Fire and Force were probably more useful against Chernenkov, but the cold iron-tipped rounds in the .38 Special would be useful against anything else.

  The street was quiet enough. As quiet as it was likely to get in the midafternoon on Saturday, anyway. I could see cars down the road and a few pedestrians, but no one close enough to see what we were doing.

  “Okay. With me,” I told them all.

  I strode across the street, trying to at least look like I was moving with purpose and not plotting anything furtive or covert, and walked up to the door of the house Chernenkov had entered. The door was locked, and I studied it for a moment.

  Talus or Inga probably could have picked it with their minds, but they’d had access to their Gift of Force for decades or more. I’d only realized I had it a week ago. I could probably break the door down or shatter the lock with Force, but…well, I had been practicing with my fire, too.

  With a gesture and a flick of concealed green flame, I cut the bolts and pushed the door open. We were now officially breaking and entering, as far as mortal law was concerned.

  Not that mortal law was high on my mind as I stepped into the old home, drawing the iron-loaded revolver. The main entry was empty, and I moved aside, letting the shifters follow me in and sweep the floor.

  “There’s no one here,” Barry reported grimly. “But take a look at this.”

  I followed his gesture and saw the small business license half-concealed near the main door. It listed a numbered company, a maximum number of occupants, and a section of the Innkeepers Act.

  “Vacation rental,” the werewolf continued. “If they had this much paperwork in place, probably before the internet made it easy, too.”

  “But she probably booked it over the net, somehow,” I noted. “Follow the scent, Barry. I doubt this isn’t a dead end, but let’s see what we can find.”

  I took a picture of the business license and emailed it to Shelly Fairchild, Talus’s mortal girlfriend and lawyer. If anyone could get anything useful out of that, it would be her. That side of things was better left to, well, humans.

  “The place is covered in her scent,” Barry said after a few minutes. “Mostly old, though. She was staying here before the whole mess at the Stampede. Freshest scent…from today. She came in the front door and went straight upstairs.”

  I gestured for him to lead the way and followed him onto the second floor. There were two bedrooms upstairs, one of which was undisturbed and one of which looked like a hurricane had come through. Barry stopped in the door, inhaling sharply and then shaking his head.

  “Take a look,” he told me.

  The bedsheets were…well used. From everything, I would guess that the mussed-up sheets and the discarded lingerie were from before I’d met and burnt Chernenkov. She hadn’t spent her last night alone, that was for sure.

  From the lack of blood, her partner had even survived the experience.

  “One other scent, missed it downstairs,” Barry said carefully. “Stronger here, for obvious reasons. Male. Fae.”

  “Damn.” That shouldn’t have been unexpected—the woman had managed to sneak about five thousand liters of a poisonous gas into my city. She hadn’t done that on her own. That the partner was fae wasn’t really a surprise, either.

  Pouka weren’t known for regarding humans as anything other than a source of protein.

  “That suitcase”—Barry pointed—“had guns and cash. Quite distinct smells, those two,” he noted.

  “So, she got here, grabbed clothes, guns and money, then left, I’m guessing?”

  Barry sighed.

  “Yeah, scent went from the stairs to the backdoor, to the parking spot. Since we didn’t have her scent leaving, she had a car.”

  “Couldn’t have gone for a motorbike, could she?” I half-jokingly bitched. Chernenkov wouldn’t have been expecting me to bring urban werewolves to bear on tracking her, but scent was a tool available to fae, too. A motorbike rider could be tracked by scent.

  I shook my head, looking around the room with its three wide-open suitcases and lack of answers.

  “I guess I go through everything,” I told Barry. “Don’t think I need you for that. You’ve been more helpful than I hoped, to be honest.”

  This wasn’t much, but it was a starting point.

  “We owe you, Kilkenny,” he told me. “And even if we didn’t, you take good care of Mary.” He chuckled. “And if I said that where she could hear me, she’d hurt me.”

  “I have very good ears,” a familiar voice shouted up from the ground floor. “You’re lucky you’re being helpful!”

  “You have your own business, I’m sure,” I said. “Not least, apparently, hiding from my girlfriend. I think I’ve got it from here.”

  He punched my shoulder gently.

  “All right. You have my number—don’t hesitate to call if you need muscle, guns or money.”

  I laughed.

  “Barry, I have my boss for at least two of those,” I told him. “But I appreciate it. Thanks.”

  Mary and I turned the vacation rental upside down for the next few hours, hoping to find some kind of sign of or information on our prey.

  Finally, as the road outside began to fill up with people returning from their weekend excursions—tomorrow was the last day of Stampede, after all—we sat down in the kitchen and compared notes.

  “Well, I now know her bra and underwear size and that she likes black and lacy at multiple layers,” I concluded. “I’m guessing she took a couple of sets of clean clothes, and I think there was at least one more suitcase that’s missing, but that’s it.”

  I shook my head.

  “If there was any useful paperwork or ID or anyt
hing here, she took it with her,” I said. “Did you find anything?”

  Mary snorted.

  “I can probably identify both her and her lover by scent, which may come in handy later,” she told me. “Right now?” My lover shrugged. “About the same as you. I can tell you she likes Starbucks and had packed the freezer with meat. No receipts in the garbage to find a credit card or anything.”

  We could probably get a DNA sample from upstairs, but that wasn’t going to help us. It wasn’t like Oberis had a database of the DNA of the fae in the city. Mary’s memory of the scent was probably more useful than anything we’d get from that.

  “If it’s a rental, the neighbors are probably used to seeing strangers come and go, but we should probably clear out regardless,” I said with a sigh. “We’re not getting anything useful here. Shelly may have more for us by Monday, once she can get into the legal records.”

  “I was hoping for more,” Mary admitted, and I nodded my agreement. “This…woman needs to die.”

  “We’ll find her, love,” I promised. “She will pay for those girls.”

  I didn’t even know how many people Chernenkov had killed. It was at least theoretically possible that she’d spent her life up to this point eating cadavers and such as most “reformed” feeders did. Somehow, however, I didn’t think that was the case.

  “There was another fae here, Jason,” Mary reminded me. “I’m guessing that’s trouble?”

  I nodded, considering.

  “If they’re Seelie, Oberis will hand them to me on a silver platter once we find them,” I said grimly. “If they’re Unseelie…” I shivered. “We may need more than your nose to identify them before Lord Andrell will turn them over.”

  “And if he refuses to turn them over?” she demanded. “Are you going to let what they did stand?”

  “Mary…love…we don’t know that her lover was involved,” I pointed out. “I’m pretty sure Andrell will at least let us interrogate them if we can finger an Unseelie lover of hers.”