Shadow Hunt

“Shadow saved me,” Owen said, sniffling, shooting a fond look at my bargest. “Thierry and the woman tied my hands and put a blindfold on me. They drove for a while, maybe half an hour? When we got out, they wouldn’t let me take the blindfold off. They marched me around this weird terrain, sort of up and down tiny hills. I stumbled a lot, and fell a couple of times, too.” He lifted his hands to show me the cuts and bruises. “They finally had to take the blindfold off, and I saw we were on these weird sort of cliffs.”

“Weird how?” I asked.

“They weren’t really cliffs, exactly, more like enormous pieces of concrete that had been scattered around like Legos? And there was all this graffiti on them.”

“I know where that is,” Jesse said quietly.

Owen continued, “They had set it up like a little campsite with all this gear and supplies, but they also seemed to have taken over some of the houses that backed up to it, so they’d go in and out. Anyway, there was this one flat piece of concrete that was balanced on a tall, skinny piece, like a three-dimensional letter T. On top of it was a heavy metal cage, and Shadow was inside. There were spikes on the inside of the cage, about every six inches, so Shadow couldn’t throw herself against the bars. And even if she did somehow escape the cage, they’d set up more spikes on the ground, like the kind that pop people’s tires in movies. It was pretty brutal.”

I couldn’t help shuddering. I reached back and rested a hand on Shadow’s pebbly skin. She turned her head to lick my wrist. It’s okay. I’m fine.

“What happened then?” Jesse asked.

“They didn’t know what to do with me because they weren’t planning on taking a prisoner, see, so Thierry argued about it with the others for a while—”

“How many others?” Jesse interrupted. “How many people were there total?”

“I counted seven, but that might not have been all of them,” Owen answered, then continued. “Anyway, they eventually decided to put me in the cage with Shadow. They didn’t want to feed her, and some of them were afraid she’d eat me, but Thierry said it would be a couple of days before Shadow’s will broke that far, and they would have left with me by then. They got this stepladder, and made me climb up into the cage. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought she was going to eat me.”

I really couldn’t blame the kid for that one. I had to be careful about taking Shadow for walks in public because people tended to cross the street to avoid us. Often they also crossed themselves. “But you escaped,” I prompted.

The boy nodded. “We were there all day. I was so hot. I was really scared of Shadow, especially because she kept moving around.” He smiled. “But after a while, I figured out that she was trying to position herself to keep me in the shade so I wouldn’t get sunburned.”

Okay, my heart kind of swelled at that one. Shadow had exposed skin, but it never burned because of her healing abilities. So she’d tried to protect an innocent.

Or maybe she’d just wisely decided the enemy of her enemy was a friend. I was never quite sure where Shadow stood, morally, when it came to people other than Jesse and me.

“There was this beige girl who would come out sometimes and sit on a rock nearby, watching the whole area. She would wave her arms around, and the pieces of concrete would lift into the air and move. She was really powerful.”

I looked at Jesse. “Beige girl?”

He nodded. “Sabine. Even her hair is beige. Somehow.”

“Is that her name?” Owen’s brow wrinkled. “Okay, well, she was scary as shit. I think she came out there just so I would see what she could do, so I would be scared of her. It totally worked. Anyway, maybe an hour before sunset, Thierry came out of one of the houses with this guy who was even older, like seventy. They had a huge argument with the beige girl—Sabine, I guess—and this other guy with lots of guns.”

“That would be Killian,” Jesse said sourly.

“Whoa. Appropriate. Anyway, the old guy was furious with the two younger ones. I couldn’t hear most of the conversation, but then the old guy started yelling and screaming about how they needed to kill Scarlett Bernard. And that’s you.” Owen nodded at me. “When Shadow heard your name, she kind of went apeshit. That’s when I realized she could understand what everyone was saying. She tried throwing herself against the bars, but it obviously hurt her—she coughed up blood.”

Ouch. I reached back to rest a hand on the furry side of Shadow’s head. Her skin was basically impenetrable, but if something hit her hard enough, it was possible for her to get internal injuries. That explained some of the blood that had been matted into Shadow’s fur. I had kind of assumed she’d eaten someone while they were escaping.

“I tried to calm her down, because I could tell the younger two were leaving, and it was getting dark. It was almost like they’d forgotten about Shadow and me, because they were sure we couldn’t get out, and they didn’t really care if Shadow ate me.” He shrugged. “But see, I had plenty of room to put my hands on the inside of the cage bars, because the spikes were too far apart. They were sized to prevent a dog . . . thing from ramming into them, not a human.

“Eventually, we figured out that I could brace my feet on the bars, between the spikes, and Shadow could push on my back. We managed to slide the cage so it was hanging off the side of the concrete platform, and I was able to, like, dangle over the side and jump past the spikes on the ground. That’s how I hurt my shoulder, when I landed on it. I moved the spikes on the ground out of the way, Shadow got loose, and we ran like hell.”

Jesus. I wanted so badly to hug Shadow in that moment, but there was just no room in the back seat for me to do it. She saw my frustration and pushed her head and shoulders in between the front seats to lick my face. I laughed, hugging her head.

“And you walked all night?” Jesse asked Owen.

He nodded. “I tried to hitchhike, but no one would pick me up with Shadow, and I wasn’t going to leave her. I didn’t know where to go, but she was absolutely set on us walking along the ocean, so that’s what we did, until we got to Marina del Rey.”

Smart. The beaches were deserted at night, except for the occasional beach patrol, so no one would be bothered by a dog monster roaming free. And Owen wouldn’t need to worry about his personal safety with Shadow there to protect him. “Good job, Shadow,” I told her.

“Okay, time for the big question, Owen,” Jesse said, taking the on-ramp for the 405. It had been a long time since I’d been on the west side of LA this early in the day. Everything looked so shiny and clean. “What’s on the scroll?”

Owen shook his head. “I don’t know. It was in German, or something sort of like German? All Grandpa would ever tell me was that it’s old, bad magic, and it can’t be destroyed. He said he even tried to burn it once, but it wouldn’t catch fire. It can’t be copied or even memorized, either, which is a big deal. To use it you have to have the scroll.”

“But you must have asked him what the spell was for,” I persisted.

“Grandpa just said it was a summoning spell. He insisted I was better off not knowing.”

“And you left it at that?” I said in disbelief. “No follow-up questions at all?”

“You had to have seen him,” Owen said. “He never meant to tell me about the Luparii at all, but . . . I found out.”

“How?” Jesse asked.

Owen shrank into himself a little. “Look, my whole life, I thought Grandpa was just, like, a grandpa, you know? I mean, he was a retired crane operator! But he used to make these amazing leashes out of braided rope. They were super complicated and beautiful, so much stronger than any other rope I’d seen, and he worked on them all the time, the way other men might whittle or do crossword puzzles. But he’d just put them in a box or give them to his own kids, when they were grown, to use with their dogs . . .”

The kid winced, and I recognized the look of a shameful memory. “What did you do?” I asked.

“When I was sixteen, I worked at this shitty pet-supply store, and I stole a bunch of the leashes and put them out for sale. They were just sitting there in a box, and . . .” He shook his head. “They sold really quickly, so I took out some more. Eventually, I’d made a pretty good dent in the box, and I took the cash—minus a finder’s fee, because I was an asshole—and I gave it to Grandpa in this envelope. I thought . . . I guess I thought he’d be excited. But he flipped.”