While Jesse got us off the freeway, I used his iPad to pull up a satellite map of Bronson Canyon, where the caves were. Jesse pulled over in an empty parking lot and looked over my shoulder. “They’re going to go high,” he predicted, touching the screen to enlarge that section of the park. “It’s not the most complicated trap. Killian and Sabine will be at the mouth of the caves, waiting for us, but they’ll put a couple of shooters up in the hills. They can pick us off easily.”
“How many, do you think?”
“I know Owen saw seven people,” Jesse said, tilting his head at the kid, “but that seems low for a mission this big. They probably have a whole other shift, maybe two, that patrols and guards their base of operations. Let’s say twenty, minimum.”
“But they won’t send everyone, not if they’re busy preparing for some big summoning,” I pointed out.
“True.” Jesse glanced down at the iPad in my lap. “If it were me, I’d send three shooters to cover all the angles. Plus Killian and Sabine.”
“Okay . . .” I stared at the map. I hadn’t been to the Bronson Caves since a day trip to LA back in middle school, but I’d been in plenty of other parts of the park. “Isn’t this basically loose dirt?” I asked, gesturing at the hills that formed the edge of the canyon.
“Yeah. Hard to climb up. Harder to climb down.”
“Hmm.” I checked the clock. It was still so fucking early: not quite seven in the morning. The Luparii had told Jesse to be at the park at 7:30, but we were already closer to the meeting spot than they’d anticipated. “I have an idea.”
I dialed Will, who sounded just as distracted as before. “You know how you said some of your werewolves wanted revenge against the Luparii?”
There was a brief pause, and then Will said warily, “Yes . . .”
“Is now a good time?”
Chapter 27
We dropped Owen off at a Coffee Bean on Pico with forty bucks and Kirsten’s phone number written on a scrap of paper. “Wait three hours,” I told him. “If one of us doesn’t come back for you by then, call that number and tell the woman who answers that you’re a witch who needs sanctuary. She’ll help you.”
Owen made a few token protests, but he was obviously relieved not to have to face down the Luparii again so soon. As he was climbing out, he paused for a moment and looked at me sorrowfully. “Are you sure about this?” He gave a little shudder. “Don’t you know what they can do?”
I turned in my seat, enough so I could smile at him. It was not a nice smile. “They can’t do shit, Owen. Not with magic, not to me. And we’re going to get some help with the rest of it.”
Griffith Park is enormous. I looked it up when I first moved to LA, and at forty-three hundred acres, it’s the second-largest park in California, about five times the size of Central Park in New York City.
Most of Griffith, however, is wild and untamed: steep cliffs, deep ravines, and brush that can’t be navigated without a machete and a sacrifice to the god of cacti. There are a few roads and plenty of trails, but overall it’s less of a traditional urban park and more of a wild space punctuated by small attractions. As long as you stick to the trails, though, you can make your way to a bunch of playgrounds and picnic areas, the Griffith Park Observatory, a theater, a couple of teeny museums, and the Batcave.
No, really. Bronson Canyon, in the southwest area of the park, is a former quarry that’s often used as a filming location. The middle of the canyon has a rock formation with a couple of small caves, one of which served as the entrance to Adam West’s Batcave in the 1960s show.
I’d made a frenzy of phone calls, and we now had three things going for us: first, Killian and Sabine had inadvertently given us a little more time than they should have. The time limit they’d given us would have been tight had we been at or around Marina del Rey, but we’d been well on our way to Hair of the Dog, which would cut our commute by half. Second, there was no way for them to know how far I could push out my radius, or how much time I had spent practicing.
Most importantly, they didn’t know we had Shadow.
I had taken pains to make sure of this, with the help of one of Kirsten’s witches, a reporter for a small Beach Cities newspaper. I’d texted her a few blurry photos of Shadow, and she’d immediately put up a web article about an enormous dog spotted loose on Redondo Beach. If the Luparii were monitoring news outlets—as any decent bad guys would—they would think Shadow was on the wrong side of town right now.
We deliberately delayed our arrival until 7:40 to give the werewolves enough time to get into place. Showing up late was a risk, but by LA standards, ten minutes late was practically early.
There wasn’t really a gate or anything at this entrance to Griffith: we just had to go east on busy Franklin Avenue and turn left on Canyon Drive, which is a straight chute of residential neighborhoods that abruptly turns into parkland. Once inside the park, you just have to take a really sharp right on foot and double back deeper in for about a quarter of a mile to the cave entrance. Jesse and I had gone over it on the map. He thought the Luparii would have a spotter at the turn onto Canyon, so we’d chosen a bus stop on Franklin, a block before the turn, as our meeting spot.
There was a werewolf waiting for us: Astrid, a hard, rangy woman who always looked like she’d have no problem tearing off the head of a chicken and popping it in her mouth. Will had said he’d try to get a female werewolf, but I was a little surprised he’d chosen her: Astrid had never really warmed up to me. I wasn’t sure she was actually capable of warming up to anyone, and we were asking her to put her life at risk.
But as she leaned in the window, giving me a slow, toothy grin, I realized that she wasn’t here for me, and certainly not for Jesse’s brother. “Howdy,” she said with a smirk. She was wearing jeans and black motorcycle boots with a plain green tee shirt, her hair knotted in a bun that went through a battered-looking USC cap. She pulled open the door and stood aside so I could climb out. I opened the back door and helped Shadow do the same.
Astrid passed me a plastic grocery bag and took my seat in the Lexus. “Should be everything you need. Walkie-talkie is at the bottom.”
Cell service could be spotty in the park. “Thanks,” I said. I handed her my sunglasses. Then, checking first to make sure no one was watching, I crouched down and emptied the plastic bag on the sidewalk: a blonde wig, a baseball cap, and cheap plastic sunglasses. My hair was already tied in a long braid that I’d run down the back of my shirt. I wasn’t great with wigs, but I made the baseball hat tight enough to hold it on. When I was sure it was secure, I looked through Astrid’s open door at Jesse. “Give us a two-minute head start.”
He nodded, and opened his mouth to say . . . something. I knew it was going to be mushy and meaningful and might make me cry, so I said quickly, “Tell me later,” and slammed the door. Jesse was probably annoyed with me, but that was better than dealing with sappy stuff.
Right?
I crouched down and looked at Shadow. “I love you,” I told her. She wagged her club tail at me and licked the air in front of my face. The feeling was mutual.
“Look, I know that the werewolf smell drives you nuts, and I’m not going to be right there next to you to help,” I said, looking into her eyes. They shone with unnatural intelligence and something else. I would have to call it happiness. Shadow loved violence against an enemy the way regular dogs loved walks. “I need you to remember that these werewolves are our friends. We want to hurt the bad witches, not the werewolves. Okay?”
She tossed her head like a horse, the bargest equivalent of rolling her eyes at me. “You know I had to say it,” I told her. She licked the air in front of her face and wagged her tail again. We were good.
I put on the sunglasses, and Shadow and I began jogging toward Canyon. She left me behind almost immediately, sticking close to the shadows where she wouldn’t be as noticeable.
We were in luck: as I’d hoped, there were a couple of joggers already out on Canyon. I slowed to a walk, watching them carefully. When they reached the last intersection before the park, every one of them stopped, turned around, and headed back the way they’d come. That was the humans-go-away spell.