Chapter 4
The buzz of Shadow’s phone woke her for the second time the next day, sometime after noon, and she blinked away the sleep still fogging her thoughts and vision.
She glanced at the screen long enough to determine who had messaged her.
Erik. Of course.
At least she was in her own, much shabbier, motel room. She had tiptoed out of Jeremiah’s hotel room sometime in the wee hours of the morning, gathering her clothes and slipping into them, but carrying her boots in one hand until she reached the elevator. She had still been zipping them up as she hopped out into the lobby, and the single bellhop on duty had raised one eyebrow at her.
Fuck him, anyway, she had thought. It was none of his business what she was doing there.
That was what came of staying at fancy hotels with people who did things like carry luggage.
She had stalked through the streets back to her car, still in the parking lot at the bar. By the time she punched the key to open the door, her hair was damp with gathering dew.
Sleeping with that slight dampness to her hair, on top of the sweat-soaked sex before, had left her with a hairdo that resembled dreadlocks more than her usual white-blond mane. With a grimace, she separated it into three more-or-less even chunks and plaited it into a long braid down her back. Tying it off with a band, she quickly scrolled through the messages to the latest one.
Rumor: pack meeting tonight. Call me.
So much for luxuriating in the sense of relaxation she had gained last night.
Hell, she could already feel it dissipating as she instinctively began tensing up in preparation for a battle.
With a whole pack, though? As far as she knew, Shadow was the only active Scyld in Savannah. Taking on a pack by herself wasn’t wise.
No, unless Erik had made arrangements with another hunter to head this direction, her best bet would be to watch and wait, take out a few of the monsters at a time until she had thinned them down a little.
It would mean staying in Georgia longer than she had intended to.
But it’s not like I have anywhere else special to be.
Idly, she wondered how long Jeremiah’s team was going to be in town. Maybe she could go watch them play.
Even better, maybe she could let him play with her again.
She shivered a little in remembered reaction. Damn, that had been amazing.
Deal with the werewolves first, Shadow.
At least, she assumed they were werewolves, based on the kill the night before.
But that wasn’t necessarily the case. It was at least marginally possible that she had taken down a lone wolf the night before and that the pack meeting involved some other kind of shapeshifter.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a pack of werebunnies.
No. On second thought, they would probably end up being a pack of rabid werebunnies.
And no one wants a rabid wererabbit.
Setting a pot of coffee on to brew, she took a deep breath and prepared to speak to the elder Scyld, the man who had trained her, been her mentor—the man who had taught her everything she knew about hunting monsters.
The man who was about to quiz her about her activities the night before.
The activities should couldn’t quit thinking about.
Shadow needed to get her mind on her job and off of the memory of Jeremiah’s hands holding her thighs, pressing her down against his mouth.
It’s none of Erik’s business, she reminded herself. He could just keep wondering.
She threw herself back onto the mattress and tapped on her mentor’s name in her phonebook.
* * *
When Jeremiah woke that morning, Shadow was gone. Somehow, he had known she would be, that their tryst the night before would not survive into the morning light.
He felt oddly disappointed, anyway.
But his list of things to do in order to prepare for that night’s meeting with the wolves would keep him too busy to worry about the beautiful, blond human with the wolf-bright eyes and a hyena-shifter’s sense of play in the bedroom.
Right now, though, he needed to focus on making sure the wolves didn’t betray his clan. Keeya might be certain they would behave. Jeremiah was not.
His first step was to make sure that the square in the historic district where they would be holding their meeting was secure—or at least as secure as an open space in the middle of a residential and commercial area of a major city could be.
He knew Keeya would want to walk to the meeting site—she was already complaining of being cooped up inside too much on this trip—so Jeremiah chose to walk the short route between the hotel and the square.
The wolves thought they were being funny by suggesting the meeting happen in Savannah—as if choosing a city named after the birthplace of the hyena-shifters was particularly clever. Keeya had simply agreed calmly and without additional comment. That the city was far from the disputed territory was ultimately good, as was the fact that Savannah had very little in the way of its own shifter population at the moment.
Georgia, in fact, was virtually open territory, politically, the last two major groups to have held land there having all but wiped one another out—alligators and raccoons, if Jeremiah remembered correctly, the alligators having been the natural predators, but the raccoons having been more cunning.
Not that there weren’t other dangers besides shapeshifters. Rumor had it that The Huntsman had been sweeping through the Deep South lately—the monstrous human predator who stalked shapeshifters across the world, using some sort of magical tracking skills to turn predator shifter-animals into prey.
Never mind the fact that most shapeshifters avoided hurting humans at any cost. It was against Council law to kill a human—not out of any kind of morality, particularly, though Jeremiah saw no reason to harm beings that were, essentially, the shifters’ biological cousins, if not siblings—but because the last thing shapeshifters wanted was to confirm humans’ worst fears of their existence.
Humans outnumbered shapeshifters thousands, if not tens of thousands, to one. Only a rare psychopathic shifter ever believed that shapeshifters could survive being found out by humanity. The Council did what it could to eliminate them.
Anyway, stories of The Huntsman were legion, and all depicted him as a giant of a man who carried an axe that could split a shifter down the middle with one fell stroke, much as he had dispatched the werewolf who had made the mistake of attacking Red Riding Hood and her witch of a grandmother. Despite being fairly certain that most of the stories were myth, Jeremiah felt equally certain that there was some kernel of truth to the legends—a person or group who attempted to track shifters.
If he was right, and there was a chance The Huntsman, or even a less-infamous huntsman, was nearby, Jeremiah needed to make sure he would find no way to pursue the hyenas.
The historic square was nicely secure, he decided. Despite being surrounded on two sides by vegetation, there was little chance a human could hide there. At least, no human the size The Huntsman would have to be to do the damage he was said to do. A child, or maybe a very small woman, might be able to find a hiding spot. But not a huntsman.
* * *
Pulling on a dark hoodie over her jeans and black t-shirt, Shadow slid her dagger into its scabbard down the back of her pants, slipped out of the nondescript car she drove, and moved into the night. If she’d had her choice, she would have ridden her Harley, but she had learned the hard way in Montana that a lone woman on a bike drew more attention than she was willing to have cast her direction.
Not to mention the fact that she couldn’t easily take her axe with her unless she had her car—and more importantly, its trunk.
So the motorcycle had been garaged in Missouri, and now she drove a Chevrolet something-or-other sedan—for now—at least until she switched it out for something else, equally unremarkable.
She raised the hood of the jacket over her bright hair, camouflaging it in the night. In her jeans pocket, she carried a compact filled with a black face-paint. If she got close enough, she’d smear some on to cover her pale skin. All her hunting clothes had been washed with baking soda and bagged before she packed them, and she had used scent-killing soap before dressing.
She was as close to imperceptible to the monsters’ heightened sense of smell as she could make herself. A handful of crushed leaves rubbed along her body would help cover what was left.
Erik still favored the old ways—he kept a chunk of charcoal with him at all times. Shadow preferred her non-comedogenic mineral-powder eyeshadow, thanks.
But until she was actually ready to fade into the surrounding trees, she would actually draw less attention to herself if she avoided the wargames-style face-paint.
For a stroll through Savannah’s historic district, a girl in jeans and a hoodie was as unusual as she wanted to appear.
Of course, Shadow had been trained by Erik, so she wasn’t entirely unprepared, either. She had a few other tricks and even some stronger spells in her pockets—some flare-powder to use as a distraction if she needed it, a strength supplement, even a confusion spell. But spells too often went awry, and she didn’t want to do anything to draw attention to herself in a city.
She was still having difficulty believing that the werewolves were having a pack meeting in the middle of one of Savannah’s famous squares. It’s not like the spaces were even that big. And they certainly weren’t the kind of wildlife refuge area she tended to think of as being the sort of places werewolves met. But the one Erik had directed her to was surrounded on two sides by bushes and flowers, and the square itself boasted a densely planted garden with bricked walkways meandering through trees to an ornate fountain flowing in the center.
As she moved down the sidewalk across the street from the square, she blinked at the figure of a dog that darted out from the underbrush and into a patch of darkness nearby.
Wait.
A dog?
Definitely not a wolf. Too small. And Shadow had never seen a half-shifted werewolf in that form, either.
But … it wasn’t the right shape for a dog, exactly, either.
What the hell was that?
Checking the air currents flowing around her, she moved around until she was downwind of the square before ducking into the foliage that surrounded two sides of the square. Couldn’t have the monsters sniffing her out as she spied on them.
Her own sense of smell was nowhere near as refined as a shapeshifter’s, but she still caught a whiff of something similar to the scent she had gotten from the werewolf the night before. Something wild and exotic. Something other.
Something laced with a trace of an almost-familiar fragrance that hadn’t been there the night before.
But whatever this new scent was, she had definitely smelled it before. Recently.
It had a pleasant association with it.
Shadow bit back a sound of annoyance.
For all her heritage and training, as well as the supernatural strength and skills that came with taking on the role of Scyld, she was no shapeshifter. She could tease out some elements of a scent, use it perhaps to track one of the beasts, to tell it apart from its pure-animal cousins or find it in the pitch-black darkness of a cemetery at night. She could not, however, take apart a smell for all its constituent aromas.
Not for the first time, she wondered exactly how refined the monsters’ sense of smell was, and if it varied from species to species. She had wondered that about their eyesight before. A lot of animals had better eyesight than humans—but many had worse. Lowering her face to keep any moonlight from shining on it, she opened the compact and swiped her fingers through the shadow, then dragged them across her face. She’d had enough practice at it that she knew that, at least to human vision, even Scyld-magic-enhanced eyes, her face would most likely blend in with any moon-dappled leaves. A thousand years’ worth of Scyld experience backed up that assumption, though Shadow would have liked to test it with various kinds of shifters.
Shadow wasn’t sure exactly how many species of monsters there were out there. She had taken down maybe a dozen different kinds in her time.
All her kills had been creatures that shifted into animals that were, in the wild, predators.
Also not for the first time, she wondered if less predatory animals had shifter counterparts.
And if so, would she be required to put down, say, a swan-shifter? Or a field-mouse shifter?
Not that there was any question of that tonight. Whatever other kind of creature was hanging out with the wolves tonight was big enough, and dog-like enough, to be a killing creature.
Shadow could barely make out several figures, human and animal, milling around the fountain in the center of the square, and although she couldn’t distinguish any specific words, she definitely heard voices.
The monsters would have set guards. That she hadn’t seen or sensed any yet meant absolutely nothing.
No matter, though. Far too many of them were milling about—she would never be able to take them all down.
She needed to get close enough to listen in, figure out what was going on. Then maybe she could track them back to their lair. Erik was on his way to Savannah, already on the road. Working together, perhaps the two of them could figure out a way to take out a whole pack of the things.
Maybe two packs, given the two different animals she was seeing.
I need to see more of them.
Slowly, she shifted her weight forward, working her way through the underbrush centimeter by centimeter so as to avoid making any noise that might attract the wolves’ attention. A single gap in the leaves caught her attention. If she could slide her eyes up to it without causing any of the foliage around her to rustle, she could watch the meeting—and maybe even hear what was going on, too.
Don’t get too impatient, Shadow.
She could hear Erik’s voice. Be your name. Unseen. Dark. Unnoticed.
So she settled in to wait for her chance, moving only one muscle at a time, moving in tiny increments until her face pressed up against the opening in leaves, her eyes gazing through the gap. The plants she stood among had scratchy, waxy leaves that scraped against her face. Only years of training kept her perfectly still.
Well, training and the fact that she had finally gotten a clear look at the other kind of animal in the square with the werewolves.
A hyena?
Seriously?
I thought hyenas hung out on the savanna, not in Savannah, Georgia.
Shadow bit back a grin at her internal wit, unwilling to let her teeth flash in a smile, potentially giving away her hiding spot.
Several hyenas stood facing her in a semicircle around the fountain, facing off across from a similar number of wolves. Behind them stood several men and women, monsters in their human shapes, Shadow assumed, since she had never heard of these monsters keeping any human servants. And at the center of the circle created by the creatures stood a man and a woman, engaged in intense conversation.
Whatever was going on here was something serious, and she could almost—almost—hear make out what the two people at the center of the circle near the fountain were saying to one another.
But not quite.
Carefully, she slowed her breathing, letting most of her senses fall away, focusing on sight and hearing, waiting for the scene at the fountain to come into sharp focus.