Shadow led me between the houses to a place where two welded chunks of fence were supposed to meet. A whole twelve-foot section of fence had been detached and tipped forward onto the ground, and there were dusty lines on the metal where truck tires had passed over it. This was how the Luparii had gotten supplies in and out of Sunken City.
Shadow led me over the downed fence, past some tall grass, and I could see scratches in the dirt that had probably been pallets and tents holding supplies. They’d taken the time to pack this stuff up, leaving clothes and other replaceable items behind. We wove along a little path in the grass that had obviously been made by feet rather than a machine. It looked old, and I realized this wasn’t a Luparii addition: this was the path that hikers used to get to Sunken City.
Then we went past the tall grass, and suddenly there it was.
It looked as though a giant had picked up several concrete buildings, crumpled them in his hands, and flung them onto the jagged side of a cliff. And then some pretty spectacular artists had done the decorating. It was kind of breathtaking. I understood why hikers and sightseers continued to sneak in here, despite the potential for injury or trespassing tickets. I had never been to Stonehenge, but something about the formation of the concrete chunks reminded me of it: a humungous visual marvel that had been simultaneously created by humans and by nature. I wanted to take photos, to climb up and down the structures and admire the graffiti.
But that wasn’t why we were there. Shadow was already moving, leading me down the inclined path toward a formation that looked like a giant letter T—just like Owen had described. There was nothing on the top, but I could see scratch marks where the metal bars of the cage had dragged. “This is where they kept you?” I asked. She wagged her tail. “Do you see anything they might have left behind?”
She lowered her nose to the ground and wandered away, looking for clues.
I wandered a little myself, but the only thing I noticed was straw scattered around, likely by the breeze coming in off the ocean. It didn’t look like the tall grass, or anything native to the coast. It seemed like the kind of thing you’d feed to horses. “Shadow?” I called. The bargest trotted back to me. “Were there horses here?” I asked.
She took off, which surprised me, but she just led me to a different spot on the cliff’s edge. I peeked over—and the reek of horse poop hit my nostrils. “Ugh!”
But I made myself look back over. “That is one big pile of shit,” I said aloud. Shadow didn’t laugh. Every bargest’s a critic.
It looked like a lot of poop to me, but I didn’t know enough about horses to determine how many would have been required to create such a mess. Probably however many they were planning to use tonight for the Wild Hunt. This was not good.
Shadow’s nostrils flared, and she wandered off again, leaping to the top of some of the stone structures. The whole area was wildly uneven: peaks and valleys created by concrete, mounds of dirt, fallen trees, and decades of wind. I picked my way down to the bottom of the U-shaped valley, checking the crevices for scraps of paper. There was some trash, but it looked like the kind of things teenagers might leave: cigarette butts, the occasional soda cup or beer bottle. I sighed. There was nothing here. It was pretty and interesting, but this had been a huge waste of time.
I turned to climb back up, but my thoughts shifted to Jesse. It was kind of surprising that he hadn’t called back by now. We’d already been there for over an hour looking through the houses, and it had taken us an hour to get here in the first place. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and checked the screen. I only had one bar, and even as I looked at the screen, it faded away, returned, faded out again. Shit.
Suddenly, my screen lit up with a bright red circle. I squinted, adjusting the angle of the phone, and realized the glow extended from a small dot. And it was moving. What the hell? Could phones get viruses? But then the little red dot slid to the bottom of the screen, went down my wrist, skimmed over my arm, and stopped on my chest.
Chapter 37
My insides froze. “Shadow,” I called, wondering if I could duck behind the nearest concrete chunk before whoever it was got the shot off.
The bargest had been standing on a massive horizontal chunk of concrete about twenty yards away, but she turned to hop down—and a voice boomed through the air, courtesy of some kind of megaphone.
“Stay on that ledge, bargest,” said a male voice with a French accent. “Or we will shoot her.”
I heard Shadow snarl, her nails scratching on rock as she shuffled anxiously, but she didn’t come closer.
I was still thinking about moving away—I had the bulletproof vest, after all—when two more dots joined the first. One of the three slid up my chest. I couldn’t follow its progress past my collarbone, but I figured it would end up somewhere around my forehead.
The tall grass at the top of the incline seemed to ruffle, and a man appeared on the dirt path, making his way down toward us. He looked to be about sixty, but I’d lived in LA long enough to know well preserved when I saw it. He was probably upward of seventy. There was a sound amplifier in his hand, but no weapon. He didn’t need one.
“Miss Bernard,” he called as he approached me. “I thought it was time we spoke in person.”
I expanded my radius to get him inside it sooner, and felt the immense tug of a powerful witch. A Luparii witch.
He stopped about a dozen feet away and stood to the side, staying well out of the line of fire. “So good to finally meet you,” he said, as though we were at a fucking college mixer. “My name is Aldric.”
The name rang a bell. “You’re the head of the Luparii,” I said, a little awestruck. He had come himself, in person? “Don’t you have minions for this kind of thing?”
He gave me a pained smile. “Come now, Miss Bernard,” he said cheerfully. “You don’t think I’d miss the opportunity to lead the Wild Hunt?”
“Plus, squashing your insolent enemies doesn’t carry the same weight if you have a lackey do it.”
The smile faded from his face. “Really, you should be honored,” he said. “It shows great respect to the soon-to-be former leaders of Los Angeles that I came for them in person.”
I snorted. “Yes, that’s just what we’ve been feeling these last few days. Respected. How did you know I was here?”
“You tripped the spell I had placed around the houses. When I stopped feeling my magic, I knew you must have arrived.”
Stupid, stupid. Served me right for not learning enough about witch magic. Karl Schmidt’s house, Noah’s kidnapping, and now this? I was getting really fucking sick of these guys setting traps in my own damn city. And even sicker of falling into them. I had underestimated these people, which was stupid. They’d spent three years preparing for this, and at least part of that time watching me. Of course they’d had contingency plans in place.
“So why am I not dead?” I said bluntly.
“Because in this moment, I do not desire your death.”
Oh, goody. We were going to play word games. “So what do you want?”
He smiled mirthlessly. “They did tell me you were direct. I want to go for a car ride, young lady. But first I’ll have you remove your knife belt and vest and toss them aside.”
“I don’t think so.”
He must have been wearing some kind of communication device, because he just said, “Roland,” and a chunk of dirt kicked up six inches in front of me.
“The next shot will go through your left upper arm,” Aldric said in the same maddeningly calm tone. “After that, your right upper arm. Then each hand. At that point I may lose my temper and simply let you bleed out, but who knows? You’ll certainly be incapacitated enough for us to do anything we want.”
Gritting my teeth, I pulled my tee shirt over my head and unbuckled the strap of my knife belt. I could hear Shadow whining and scratching behind me, so I called, “Stay, Shadow.”
I tugged at the Velcro straps of the vest, ripping them apart harder than I really needed to. Aldric watched me pull the vest over my head, but he didn’t smirk at my skintight tank top. “You may put your blouse back on,” he said, as though he were being hugely generous.