“You did?” Owen asked, looking between me and the others. “When?”
“Three years ago,” I answered. “They sent a scout on a mission to check out the nova wolf, and we bitch-slapped her and stole the bargest. No offense,” I added to Shadow, who gave me a not amused look.
“Yes, we embarrassed them. And if they want to keep collecting power, they have to get a foothold in the United States,” Will put in. “Taking us down is the perfect way to do it. If we run and hide, we’re giving them what they need.”
“But what do they want with all that territory, all that power?”
Kirsten pointed at me. “Great question.”
“One we should be asking Dashiell,” Will reminded us.
“I don’t disagree,” Kirsten said. “But I can’t shake the feeling that waking up Dashiell and taking him out during the day might be exactly what they want.”
She was right. Unless there was imminent death on the line, I wasn’t going to pull Dashiell out of the safety of his mansion. I checked my watch and groaned. How was it only noon? “We’ve got seven hours until sunset. What do you guys want to do?”
Will looked at Kirsten, and they exchanged some kind of complicated leadership look that I was glad I didn’t have to interpret.
“We evacuate the weakest among us,” Will said finally, “and prepare the strong to fight.”
Chapter 36
That sounded suitably dramatic and all, but contacting all the city’s witches and werewolves wasn’t really something I could help with.
What we needed to know was where the Luparii were now, although I’d settle for where they intended to start the Wild Hunt. Owen would keep doing his best with the book research.
I had a different idea for how to spend my afternoon.
Jesse wasn’t going to like it much, but I had Shadow for backup. And the bargest seemed to be spoiling for a fight.
Will agreed to contact Astrid and make sure I could keep using her truck, promising to provide her with a spare vehicle if she needed it. While Shadow and I walked out to the parking lot, I called Jesse’s cell phone, but there was no answer. He was probably talking to the doctor, or maybe Noah was out of surgery and had been moved to intensive care. I left him a voice mail, not sure if that was making it easier or harder for either of us.
When people from other places talk about Los Angeles, they’re really referring to the greater LA area, a massive territory that includes incorporated towns like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Pasadena. It’s all LA to someone from Michigan, but residents might actually take offense if you accuse them of living in LA when their actual home is within the Beverly Hills limits, and vice versa.
I know. It’s weird. Then again, most people in LA can’t tell you the difference between Minnesota and Wisconsin, so whatever.
But although Los Angeles is often a blanket term for places outside the city, San Pedro technically is within the LA city limits, though it’s crowded by other cities on two sides, and the ocean on a third. It’s large and independent enough to be its own town (in fact, it used to be), but now it has something that LA wants: the Port of Los Angeles, which brings like a million jobs into California. So San Pedro stays in the city limits, even if it requires some creative border-drawing to make it so.
And at the southern tip of the southernmost part of the city lies a big chunk that fell into the water. I’d looked up Sunken City before leaving Kirsten and Will, and Jesse had been right: it was a condemned oceanfront area that had once contained a fancy new development—or however fancy developments got in the 1920s. At about forty thousand square feet, it wasn’t even that big, but it was dangerous as hell: a bunch of people had died exploring the area, sometimes as many as five in one year. And yet its location was still easily available on Google Maps and Yelp, with handy tips for parking and sneaking past the fence.
Oh, Los Angeles. I love you.
Even with light Saturday afternoon traffic, it took me over an hour to get down to San Pedro, shoot south on Pacific Avenue to the shoreline, and park on the corner of Pacific and Shepherd. I turned the truck off and leaned forward to peer over the dash. You couldn’t actually see Sunken City from the street; it was pretty well hidden behind a stretch of perfectly normal-looking houses. The only clue from this distance was the tall, wrought-iron fence that ran along the back of those properties to keep people away from the wreckage.
I closed my eyes to concentrate and pushed my radius outward. Almost immediately, I felt some kind of major-league witch magic go pop. I wasn’t sensitive enough to know what kind of spell I was breaking, but it felt a lot like the one at Griffith Park, which in turn had seemed similar to Kirsten’s standard humans-go-away spell. Like the other one, though, this had a sort of sickly cast to it. I was guessing it was some kind of Luparii signature. Gross.
I sat there for another five minutes, concentrating hard on my radius. If I felt the slightest hint of witch magic—or any magic, really—I was going to peel out of there and get help.
But there was nothing. No active witches, no other spells.
I looked at Shadow. “You sure you’re okay with going back there?” I asked her. She actually licked her chops, obviously hoping we would get a chance to revenge-maim someone. What a cliché. “Okay, then.”
We got out of the truck. Shadow was on high alert, ears and nose twitching as she surveyed the area. “How do we get in?” I asked her. She immediately began trotting down Shepherd Street, along the row of houses. I started following her, then stopped. Shadow paused, too, and turned to me inquiringly. “What happened to the people living in these houses?” I asked, gesturing at the row of buildings that faced back onto Sunken City. “They were all inside the humans-go-away spell.”
Shadow tilted her head at me, which meant she either didn’t know or the answer was too complex for her to communicate with body language. But she made no attempt to stop me as I started up the walkway of the nearest house. I rang the doorbell, but nothing happened. I put my hand on the knob, and it turned.
A dozen different scenes from horror movies flashed through my head, and I pictured myself opening the door on a neck-high pile of dead bodies.
I cracked the door open a few inches. “Hello?” I called. The house smelled a little musty and closed up, but there was no hint of eau de decaying bodies, a scent I was unfortunately very familiar with. I stepped into the house, knife in hand, and Shadow barreled past my leg so she could check it for threats. I waited in the living room for her, but I didn’t expect her to find anything. It felt empty.
When Shadow returned, wagging her tail, I wandered into the kitchen and found empty takeout trays stacked on the counters—not cheap fast food, but heavy foil or cardboard containers that bore the logos of some of LA’s nicest restaurants. I followed a hallway to the bedrooms and found that the beds were still made, but topped with sleeping bags. Each room had at least one duffel bag. I went through one of them, but it contained only clothes and a handful of toiletries: shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste.
I held up a handful of clothes to Shadow. “Were the Luparii witches staying here?”
She didn’t bother to sniff, just licked the air in front of her face.
Hmm. They must have left in a hurry after Shadow and Owen had escaped. “What would Jesse do?” I asked myself.
The answer was obvious: he’d be thorough. So I painstakingly went through every single duffel bag, hoping they’d left behind something about where they planned to start the Wild Hunt, or how to stop the spell itself. But I found nothing other than clothes and toiletries: no personal items, no maps or diaries, no discarded burner phones. There was nothing else of interest, so I checked the neighboring house. It contained more or less the same situation.
One by one, Shadow and I searched all seven houses on that stretch of Shepherd Street, counting sleeping bags. Every time I opened a new door, I was afraid that this one would reveal a pile of bodies, but it never happened. There were twenty-one sleeping bags, but no signs of the houses’ actual owners. “What did they do with them?” I asked Shadow. She just wagged her tail slowly, the bargest equivalent of a shrug.
“Okay, how do we get past the fence?”