Hunted By The Others (25 page)

He shook his head, lip lifting briefly in a touch of disgust as he glanced around. “Depends on how long we stay. The Moonwalkers might take it wrong if I stick around here too long, especially since tonight’s the first night of the full moon.”

I recalled how the cabbie that had driven me back to my car from Royce’s building the other day had dissed the Sunstrikers. Seemed there was no love lost between the two packs. After a moment of thought, I said, “I’d rather not stir up another pack or bring them into this. What about the zoo?”

“The Central Park Zoo? Since it isn’t technically part of the Moonwalkers’ territory, I suppose that could work,” Chaz said. Then he grinned in a way I didn’t like; it was far too predatory. “Though the animals won’t care for me much.”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “We’ll just have to leave with enough time for me to get ready. The park closes before sunset anyway.”

We waited for a while for Sara to come back. I found a sunny spot to lie down on, folding my hands behind my head and closing my eyes. It would be nice to relax and not think about my possible impending demise for a few hours, but there was way too much on my mind for any hope of that.

Arnold parked his skinny butt on a big rock next to me, keeping an eye out for anybody or anything suspicious. Chaz leaned up against a tree and watched people pass by on the path; joggers, mothers pushing strollers, people walking dogs.

I thought about everything I had seen and learned and done in the last few days. Somewhere in this mess there had to be a solution, or at least a hint to what might lead me to figuring out who had the focus. There seemed to be something there, an idea hovering just out of my reach, the glimmer of a thought that seemed to become less and less substantial the harder I tried to grasp it.

My phone started buzzing, startling me into a yelp. Arnold and Chaz both looked alarmed, then gradually relaxed, smirking at each other at my reaction. Muttering in irritation, I dug into my jeans and pulled it out, picking up the call from Sara.

“Hey, where are you?”

Low, masculine laughter answered me. I stiffened, looking down at the phone in shock for a second before putting it back to my ear. “Who is this?” I demanded, wondering what in God’s name had gone wrong this time.

“
La Petite Boisson
. Tonight. Leave the mage at home, or your little friend is dead,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said. I could hear muffled sounds in the background, what I sorely hoped were not muted screams, which abruptly ended when the guy hung up on me. I lowered the phone from my ear and stupidly stared at it, trying to get my wits around what just happened.

Arnold reached down and put a hand on my shoulder. “What happened? Is everything all right?”

“Fuck!”
I exclaimed, loud enough to startle both men and cause a mother with her two toddlers on the path below us to shoot me a dirty look and hurry the kids along. “Somebody has her. The fucker kidnapped Sara!”

Arnold swore and Chaz leaped to his feet.

“We never should have sent her alone…” Arnold said.

“Yeah, well, it’s too late for that now,” Chaz replied, irritation clear in his voice. “You didn’t trust me alone with Shia and you didn’t trust me enough to show me your daytime hiding spot. So now we pay the price for separating.”

“Don’t start that shit, you two,” I said, rolling up to my feet and starting off at a run back in the direction of Janine’s apartment. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck!
I hope they haven’t hurt Janine, too…”

This changed everything. Oh God, Sara might end up hurt or even killed if I didn’t play my cards right. It was one thing for me to get tied up in this craziness—it was quite another for this psycho to drag my friends into it, too.

Even though I wasn’t wearing the belt, I seemed to have retained some strength from it, and as I bolted along, I suddenly realized Arnold wasn’t keeping up. I slowed my pace for the mage’s sake, though it was difficult not to burst into a full-out run. He was having a tough time of it, blowing and huffing like a bellows and lagging a bit behind. Chaz, on the other hand, was barely breaking a sweat by the time we’d run from the park to Janine’s building.

Everything looked okay when we got there. The security guard at his station recognized Arnold and me, giving us a nod. That gave me some hope for Sara’s sister, at least. We hustled past him to Janine’s door, which fortunately wasn’t locked.

Janine was sitting on a couch with the remote in her hand, glancing up from channel surfing when the three of us stumbled in. She sat up abruptly, confusion and fright contorting her pale china doll features. “Shiarra? What’s going on? Who’s this?” She gestured at Chaz.

I paused to steady my breathing, and watched poor Arnold brace his hands on his knees and lower his head. That Janine was okay, at least, was a blessing, and he seemed almost as relieved as I did. “Something’s happened. Did Sara come back here?”

She shook her head, her panic rising. “What happened? Where is she?”

I closed my eyes, cursing the stupidity that led to us splitting up. From everything that happened the last couple of days, I thought
I
was the target. Stupid as it was, I never would’ve credited a bad guy with trying to use Sara to get to me. Not like this.

Janine really wasn’t going to like this. Steeling myself to the inevitable breakdown, I swallowed my grief and anger to explain, “Sara’s been kidnapped. I’ll—I don’t know exactly who did it, but I’ll find out. Tonight. I’ll get her back.” Before she can get torn apart like Veronica and Allison. Please, God.

Janine jumped about three feet in the air. “Oh, God! We have to do something! Call the police, the…somebody—you have to do something!” Her hysteria made Chaz and Arnold shift uncomfortably, looking anywhere but at her.

I moved closer and placed a hand on her shoulder, urging her to sit back down. “Don’t worry, we’ll save her.” I prayed I wasn’t just mouthing platitudes. God, how I hoped. “Don’t drag the police into this. Whoever took her might kill her out of hand if I don’t do what they asked me to. We’ll figure out a way to get her out of there.”

“Oh, no,” she moaned, wringing her hands and gradually, tensely lowering back down to the couch. She shot a fearful look at the men, tears glimmering in her eyes making me vow not to let mine fall. One of us had to be strong here, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Janine. I could dissolve into a puddle of misery later, after I saved Sara. For now, I focused on the anger, clinging to it, using it to keep from driving myself into despair over increasingly overwhelming odds. Those responsible would pay dearly for causing so much pain and misery.

“How could this have happened?” Janine said, wiping at her tears.

I shared a helpless look with Arnold before shaking my head and running my hands through my curls, getting some of the sweat-plastered strings off my forehead and out of my eyes. I wanted to shake my fist at the sky, shout and scream against the holder of that thrice-damned focus, throw and destroy things and beat them into submission. I wanted to hunt them down like the cowardly curs they were, let
them
know what it felt like to be hounded and hunted and harassed. When I got my hands on them, I would make sure they felt every last indignity, bruise, cut, and abrasion they put Sara and me through.

If they didn’t keep their word, if they did the unthinkable and killed her, I don’t know what I would do. Whatever it was wouldn’t be pretty.

But it would all have to wait until after sunset.

“I’ll let Arnold and Chaz fill you in. I need to get ready to fight this thing.”

With that, I turned and stomped off to the guest bedroom. I’d be damned if whoever was doing this caught me unprepared again. The next minion I met was going to get a bullet between the eyes, contract or no contract.

Chapter 37

Chaz let out a low whistle when I strode back into the living room in the armor, belt, and holster. The guns weren’t going to be out of easy reach until the holder of the focus was dead, no matter how many times I forgot and jabbed myself in the ribs by folding my arms. The sweet scent of cloves and cinnamon also clung to me, as I’d applied some more of the Amber Kiss perfume, just in case. I put the trench coat on, slung the duffel over my shoulder, and headed for the door.

“Let’s go, guys.”

Chaz and Arnold stood and started to follow me, but I paused at the door and looked back over my shoulder. “Janine, I’m sorry, but I’d recommend you go lay low somewhere else for a couple of days.”

She looked up when I spoke, her eyes red from her tears. What surprised me was the anger there, glinting in the icy blue depths so like Sara’s. I’d never seen her anything but a neurotic, nervous wreck before, so the sudden intense animosity was unexpected.

“You find her. You get her out of this mess. If you don’t, I’ll—I’ll do something. Something bad. You won’t like it.”

“Janine.” I hesitated in the face of her anger. “You know I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. She’s my best friend. I swear, I’ll do everything in my power to save her, to get her back.”

She continued to glare at me from her seat. The two men were awkwardly shuffling their feet and trying to back away as inconspicuously as possible. “Do it. I swear to God, Shiarra, if she gets hurt because of this mess you dragged her into, I
will
do everything I can to make your life miserable.” I might have taken offense if the angry look hadn’t suddenly crumbled into helpless despair. She lowered her head into her hands, hiding her tears.

“Janine, I promise, I’ll do everything I can to get her back.”

She didn’t turn in my direction when I spoke, not that I could blame her. All she did was nod in response.

I felt bad, but with everything else going on, I didn’t have any time to sit and hold her hand. There was too much work to do. I had come up with the semblance of a plan while getting dressed and scrubbing the worst of the sweat off my face. My hair needed a wash, but I didn’t have time, finger combing it instead and using water to slick the curls back out of my face as much as possible.

As the three of us stepped out into the noonday sun, I waited until there were no pedestrians nearby and then said, “Arnold, you were talking about familiars last night. Mage familiars.”

“Yeah. What about them?”

“Does every mage have one?”

“No.”

Crap. That was disappointing. But he wasn’t finished.

“Newer magi fresh out of the Academy generally don’t. Neither do some of the less well off or not very powerful ones. Generally any practicing mage has one, though, particularly if you’re part of a coven and expected to be casting on a regular basis. Why?”

I grinned. Maybe something was finally going right after all. “Does that mean Veronica had a familiar?”

After a moment, recognition dawned and he started grinning right back at me. Chaz was looking at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were. “Yes. Yes, she did. A cat.”

Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “Excellent. Do you think there’s any way we can get into her apartment to find it? Without alerting the cops?”

He looked thoughtfully at me, then frowned as his gaze slid to Chaz. “No.” An awkward, hesitant expression crossed his face, which reminded me of what he was like when I first met him. All he would need to complete the look were the coke-bottle lenses. “I guess we can go back to my place and I can summon it. I’d need equipment anyway to be able to speak with it and see what it knows.”

Chaz’s brows rose. “Summon it? You can do that?”

“Yeah. Familiars are planar beings. Technically, it’s considered rude to call someone else’s familiar uninvited, but since Veronica is dead, I don’t have to worry about the consequences quite so much.”

“And you can talk to it, right? Find out what it knows, the way you do with…uhh…” I asked, fumbling for the name of the mouse he’d shown me. “Bob?”

“Sort of. Enough that I can maybe figure out who was there when she died. If we’re lucky, maybe the holder of the focus was there and the familiar saw it.”

Chaz’s brows finally unfurrowed as understanding dawned. “You think somehow the person who had the focus was using Others to kill a mage?”

Guess he didn’t read the Sunday paper.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a long story,” Arnold said. “Let’s get going, I’ll explain in the car.”

We hurried to Arnold’s car, parked in a guest spot at Janine’s building. I let Chaz sit shotgun since the tiny sports car would have forced him to tuck his knees under his chin just to fit in the back.

Arnold efficiently wove through traffic heading downtown. Finally he turned onto a side street in the Village and pulled into a gated garage below a small, new-but-made-to-look-old, red brick apartment building. The majority of the cars parked down there were trendy sports models like his. No minivans or broken-down junkers here. He pulled into a numbered parking space and Chaz, ever the gentleman, helped me clamber out of the back and shouldered my duffel.

Arnold led us to his apartment, which was open and spacious, with large windows offering a great view of the street and a park down the block. The floors were a clean, shiny hardwood, and rather than the expected geekdom or magic paraphernalia, he had some nice electronics and plush, comfortable-looking furniture. There was a stereo, a large flatscreen TV, and a bank of four computers lined up against one wall, along with more movies than you could watch in a year shelved in floor-to-ceiling bookcases.