Josh pulled up in front of my apartment building, “Get some sleep. We’ll call you when we get together to organize things.”
As I got ready for bed, my phone rang. It was Shawna, and I wondered if having a vampire friend was a good thing. She was just getting off work and heading out to have fun when I was going to sleep.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Heard you had some excitement at Rosie’s.”
“Nothing major,” I said. “One of our local Hunters stopped in and tried to cut my head off. How about you? Anything new?”
I heard her laugh through the phone. “Damn, you have all the luck. The most exciting thing that happens to me at work is when someone actually leaves a tip.”
That reminded me of Frankie. “Do I hear a note of discouragement with your present lot in life?” I asked. “Interested in finding a more exciting job?”
“Why? Looking for help at Rosie’s?” she responded. “I’m not sure the clientele would be very welcoming of a bloodsucking waitress.”
“Naw, more exciting, better pay. Assistant DA Francis Jones is looking for investigators. All paranormals and supernaturals welcome to apply.”
Her laugh was much louder than before. “A vampire cop? That would be a first.”
“Give her a call. Probably better in the early evening.” I gave her Frankie’s phone number.
There was a pause, then, “You’re serious?”
“Tell her you’re my friend from Willard’s Green. Use Detective Sergeant Dan Bailey as a reference.”
A longer pause. “You are crazy, you know that?”
“The possibility has occurred to me.”
Chapter 21
Expecting to have a busy and dangerous day, I showered, braided my hair, and dressed in my Hunter’s clothes. Instead of a balaclava or a cowl with a veil, I tied a red scarf over my hair and put on a pink belt. I didn’t want to be mistaken for the enemy.
Lizzy had given me the belt as a joke. I once asked her if she really liked pink, a color I had always avoided.
“Do you like black?” she asked in response. “If you don’t, you can always pour a gallon of peroxide on your hair, bleach it out, and then color it any color you like. Hair dye rolls off my hair like water from a duck. So, I’m kind of stuck. I can either shoot myself or love pink. And suicide would deprive the world of my talent, my wit, and my joie de vivre.”
“Gotcha. Pink,” I said.
“You betcha. Pink.”
I figured I was guaranteed to be the only person wearing pink, so if I got hit by friendly fire, it would be on purpose.
But after I finished tucking away my weapons, it wasn’t Josh but Sam who came by to pick me up. He showed up at the door downstairs, and I buzzed him in.
“Coffee or tea?” I asked when he reached my apartment.
“Ah, a cuppa tea would be nice. Wanted to talk to you before we launch ourselves into a perilous situation.”
I fixed us each a cup of tea and brought the cups into the living room.
“Josh said that the gentleman last night recognized you, that you knew each other.”
I sat down and said, “Yes. Fritz Schottner, known as Bear. I’ve known him since I was fourteen. He was a ley line mage, like me, like Liam. He was one of my primary trainers when I first came to the Illuminati, teaching me how to control and contain my magic.”
“But you weren’t friends.” Sam stated that, not as a question.
“No. Schottner was an old-school Hunter, well over a hundred years old. And I’m just a girl, not suited to be one of his mates. He was an enforcer for Master Rudolf, who was second-in-command of the Hunters’ Guild. And Rudolf never liked me.”
I stood up and walked to the sliding glass door of the balcony and looked out over the creek and the park below. The next part was hard, something I’d never told anyone, and never really thought about until I left the Illuminati.
“Fritz was one of the men who took my virginity. I was sixteen, and they told me it was part of my training. He continued to train me in his own unique way until I reached eighteen and could tell him no.”
“One of the men?” I could hear an incredulous note in Sam’s voice.
“There were three of them. I don’t know which one was first. It was a long night, and I guess I’ve sort of blocked the memory.”
I turned around to face him, not knowing what I would find in his face. I saw anger rather than disgust, and I relaxed a bit.
“Well, I guess that answers the question of why you’re so choosy about men,” Sam said. “I didn’t know if it was because the Illuminati were prudes or something else.”
He caught me off guard, and I barked out a laugh. “No, they definitely weren’t prudes, and they didn’t have any taboos concerning a girl’s age. Or a boy’s, for that matter. We were expected to accommodate the masters. Trainees were basically servants, and we provided any service they asked. Now, Schottner wasn’t a master, but it would have been dangerous to piss him off. Easier to go along. Training accidents were all too common.”
Sam shook his head and sipped his tea. I sat back down and sipped mine.
“You mentioned a Master Rudolf. Is he still alive?”
“So I’ve been told. I don’t know if he’s here in Westport. When Gabriel Laurent killed Rodrick Barclay, he told me Rudolf was in Washington, D.C. Then David Cunningham said that Rudolf killed his sister in Washington not too long ago, but that was before all these Hunters started showing up in Westport. If we take out the men he sent here…” I shrugged. “There’s too much we don’t know. What I can tell you is that Rudolf is far more dangerous than the rest of them put together.”
“How so?”
“Rudolf, like most of the other members of the Illuminati Council, is a blood mage. He’s more than three hundred years old and doesn’t look half that age. They extended their lives through rituals involving human sacrifice. I have no idea what it would be like to face a mage that powerful in battle.” I realized what I’d just said and figured I should clarify. “Sam, I didn’t know about the blood magic and the sacrifices. Finding out about that was part of what prompted me to leave.”
We finished our tea, and I took the cups to the kitchen and washed them. “So, what are we doing?”
Sam, Josh, Jolene and I, along with a dozen witches and mages, joined Dan Bailey and the cops of the Paranormal Crimes Unit for a planning session. I recognized about half of the people from Rosie’s, but they all seemed to know each other.
The PCU had determined that Fritz Schottner had a room at the Western Star Hotel on the edge of downtown and put the hotel under surveillance.
“As far as we can tell,” Bailey told us, “no one else who might fit the descriptions of the Hunters we know about is staying at the hotel. Some of the hotel personnel recognized Schottner’s photo, but Cindy talked to several of the maids, and they said his bed wasn’t always slept in.”
That made sense to me. I’d been trained to avoid patterns of behavior during an active operation that could be used to find me or predict my movements. As I’d told Lizzy, the Illuminati were paranoid.
In addition to the hotel, they were also watching Harland Hall, Feldman’s residence, and an old country club property a couple of miles from Michaela’s sword and golf club. But the PCU was stretched, and the cops were pleased to have mages volunteering to help with their surveillance.
We brainstormed ideas for more than three hours. Even Josh, who had a tendency to be a hothead, wasn’t in favor of ending up dead. Once we agreed that we had two things on our side—magic and numbers—a plan started to come together.
I was impressed with the way Bailey took charge, and how he organized things. He showed everyone a map and the floorplan of the hotel and gave each team a keycard to the hotel’s entrances and Schottner’s room.
The final plan was something I hadn’t considered when people first started talking about taking the Hunters down. I figured we were going to storm in, fireballs a blazing, and fight them toe to toe. We knew that might still be what would happen, but a smarter, less violent approach appealed to me.
According to the plan, Sam, Josh, Jolene, and I drew the watch on the hotel later that evening along with a couple of PCU detectives I didn’t know.
We arrived at the hotel as the sun was setting over the horizon in the west. It was cold and clear with a bone-chilling breeze coming in off the ocean. We went in to talk to the day shift and to relieve them.
“We just saw a man who resembled one of the photos we were given,” one of the dayshift cops said. “He went in and took the elevator to the tenth floor. We’ve already called Sergeant Bailey.” He showed us some surveillance pictures, and I recognized Gavin Edmundson right away.
The hotel sat next to a small park, with other tall buildings on the other three sides. The front entrance faced a busy street with a number of office buildings. I had been in it before, when I rescued Jolene from Gabriel Laurent after David kidnapped her, so it was easy for me to visualize the inside of Schottner’s suite when Bailey showed us the layout at the meeting.
We circled around the hotel, and when we got to the corner of the building below Schottner’s suite, Sam lifted off and drifted upward along the hotel’s outside wall. I didn’t know he could fly. Once again, I found myself envious of other mages having an affinity. I wondered if Frankie could fly, too.
Josh chuckled. “He looks like a mini blimp.”
Jolene and I lost it, laughing so hard that it brought tears to my eyes. Sam was a large man, in all directions, and the description was so apt.
“Isn’t that a sight?” Dan Bailey said. “I wonder if we’ll get any UFO reports?” I turned to see him approaching with a couple of other cops and a couple of civilian witches, one of whom Sam had told me was a healer.
After ten minutes, Sam settled back to earth and reported to Bailey and the rest of us.