Chapter 25
We crammed into the Lexus. I told Jesse he should drive because I didn’t like the car, but I think he knew I was nauseous again. Jesse and I had enough room up front, but Owen was smooshed in the back seat with Shadow, who immediately began fogging up the window as she hulked in the seat next to him. Jesse covertly hit the child safety locks so Owen couldn’t bail out.
I had about a thousand questions for the kid, but first I had to call Will and let him know where we were going. He was awake, despite the early hour, and Dashiell had called him to say the meeting was off, so he knew about Shadow and Owen. Without saying it outright, I intimated that we were going to hole up at the bar for a few hours. The Luparii probably knew about Hair of the Dog, but hopefully they wouldn’t expect us there before it was open. Plus, it was on a busy commercial stretch of Pico, which would be much harder to attack in broad daylight on a Sunday morning.
“Fine, that’s fine,” Will said distractedly. “I’m not sure we’re even going to open today.”
He sounded even worse than I’d expected. “Is everything okay?” I said cautiously.
To his credit, Will didn’t respond with “Of course it isn’t fucking okay, you moron.”
“I’m still trying to get as many of my pack out of the city as I can,” he explained, “but it’s complicated because of territory. On top of that, half the wolves I talk to hear the word Luparii, and they want to stay and get their revenge for Drew and Terrence.”
Oh. Trying to put a positive spin on it, I said, “Um, there’s always the other half?”
Will sighed. “Many of them think running is the coward’s way out, and I’m a bad leader for suggesting it.”
So much for that positive spin. “I’m sorry, Will,” I said, meaning it. Jesse gave me an inquisitive look, but I gave him a little headshake. “Hopefully we’ll have some answers soon.”
As soon as I hung up the phone, Jesse said, “How’s he doing?”
“Not great.” I glanced over my shoulder at Owen, who was making himself as small as possible. Jesse got the message: I didn’t want to fill him in while the kid was listening.
Owen picked up on the attention and straightened up just a little. “Um. Okay. Where should I start?”
I was about to say something dumb like “at the beginning,” but Jesse jumped in with “Start with yesterday morning, when they killed your grandfather.”
Yeah, that was probably a better spot.
“Okay, well, I wasn’t even supposed to be at Grandpa’s yesterday, but I promised him I’d stop by in the morning and help pack boxes. He’s . . . he was supposed to be moving from the house to an assisted-living place in a few weeks. Anyway, around ten there was a knock on the door. Grandpa had fallen asleep in his chair, so I went to answer it.”
He paused, and I turned sideways in the car seat so I could look at him. “Through the little window I saw a woman, maybe your age, and an older man. He was probably sixty or so. And I . . . I opened the door.” His voice broke, and guilt washed over his face. “I just thought they were lost, you know? I mean, this is Long Beach, in the middle of a nice suburban area in broad daylight. Hell, the woman had a yoga mat on a strap.”
“I would have probably done the same thing,” Jesse assured him.
I doubted that, but it was a nice thing to say. “Go on.”
“The man pulled out a gun and made me back up, into the living room. Grandpa was just standing up to follow me to the door, but he saw the man, and his whole face turned white. I mean, Grandpa is—was—a pale guy anyway, but for a minute I honestly thought he was having a heart attack. But he knew the other guy. He called him Thierry.” He pronounced it tee-e-REE. “And Thierry knew Grandpa’s real name, Otto. He ordered Grandpa to give him the scroll.”
Okay, that was a lot of information. I said, “What do you mean, his real name?” at the exact same moment Jesse said, “What scroll?”
Owen chose Jesse’s question first. “It’s a spell,” he explained. “Grandpa stole it from the other Luparii a long time ago. That’s why he left them. Changed his name and hid in Los Angeles.”
Jesse and I looked at each other. Karl Schmidt had been a Luparii deserter?
Jesse told Owen to go on.
“Okay, well, Grandpa tried to play dumb at first, and the blonde lady opened up her yoga mat—it was actually a false compartment, kind of smart—and pulled out this”—Owen’s voice dropped into an awed hush—“sword.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It was shining. Not shiny—shining. I don’t know if it was actually glowing or if it was designed to catch light weird or what, but when Grandpa saw it, he staggered and kind of fell back in his chair. Like he’d been shot or something. It seemed like he recognized it.”
Owen’s voice shook a little. We were getting to the worst part of the story. Shadow, to my surprise, laboriously turned herself around on the seat so she could rest her head on Owen’s shoulder. He patted her absently, his eyes fixed on his car window as though it were a television screen and he was watching the whole scene again. “I was standing by the entrance to the living room, and the lady lifted the sword and sort of rested it on my shoulder. It only, like, touched my skin, no pressure at all, but I started bleeding.” He raised one hand to a shallow cut on his neck. I hadn’t noticed it earlier under all the grime.
“And Grandpa just . . . gave up. He told Thierry where to find the scroll: in an old trunk in the crawlspace. Thierry went up there, but the woman stayed where she was, with the sword on me. I wanted to punch her, to duck away or something, but Grandpa told me not to try anything. He sounded so scared, but I could tell he was scared for me. Because of the sword.
“But I knew Thierry was gonna come back down and was gonna kill us both, so I . . .”
He trailed off, looking ashamed. I saw Jesse open his mouth to ask, but I overrode him. “You tried magic,” I said softly. The kid nodded.
He was a witch, but he hadn’t used magic in a long time, and it weakened him. Owen had probably once been medium-powered, but magic is like a muscle: you have to keep using it to keep having much of it.
“I was so stupid,” Owen burst out. “I thought . . . I tried to twist up her shoes, to make her stumble or fall down, so I could duck out from under the sword, you see? But it barely ruffled her. She laughed at first, but when Thierry came back downstairs, she told him I might be useful.”
His voice sped up, like he was just trying to get the next part over with. “Thierry gave the woman the scroll and his gun, and she handed him the sword, really carefully. Then he told my grandpa to kneel down.”
I’d had to turn all the way around again—sitting sideways was making me carsick—but now I snuck a look back at him. Tears were rolling down his face. “Grandpa knew they were going to kill him. I started to yell, but the woman hit me, and I shut up. I was crying. Grandpa asked them not to do it in front of me, but I said it was okay, I wanted to be with him, you know, so someone who loved him was there . . .”
The boy was openly weeping again now. Heartsick, I reached into the center console for tissues . . . and remembered that we weren’t in my van. Beatrice’s car didn’t even have fast-food napkins.
Shadow solved the problem by licking the tears off Owen’s face. He grimaced and then let out a little laugh. “We know what happened after that,” Jesse said, trying to spare him.
But Owen shook his head. “No. You don’t. Because when Thierry raised the sword and brought it down, he used no pressure. Basically just gravity. I don’t know a ton about weapons, but I’m pretty sure the sharpest blade in the world can’t do that.”
Aw, shit. The sword was motherfucking magical. Like we didn’t have enough problems.
“You’re right, that was good for us to know,” Jesse said gently. I knew him well enough to notice that as our conversation with Owen had gone on, Jesse’s tone had changed from the one he uses with suspects to the one he uses with witnesses and victims. He believed Owen. So did I. “How did you get away from them?”