“Edmundson is in the room on this corner,” Sam said, pointing to the right side of the building. “He’s searching the place and packing things up. My guess is that someone tipped him off that Schottner isn’t coming back.”
We entered the hotel through a side door and started up the stairs. After we passed, the PCU cops blocked off the stairwells and elevators. By the time we hit the fifth-floor landing, my leg was aching, and I wished Schottner had skipped a room with a view.
When we arrived on the tenth floor and caught our breaths, Sam reported over a police radio that Edmundson was still in the room. The people in charge discussed things and made the decision to open the room and surprise him.
Nine years of living with the Illuminati had taught me not only caution but paranoia. As confident as I was in dealing with a vampire, or even other mages, I had a healthy respect for how much damage a Hunter could do in a very short amount of time. Without Josh, I wasn’t sure I could have taken Schottner, and I’d failed to best Edmundson in our previous encounter.
My shield powered to the max, I nodded to Bailey. He slipped the keycard into its slot, the lock clicked, and I pushed the door open with my foot.
The room was empty within my line of sight. The shades were drawn back, and through the windows, I could see the sun setting into the ocean in a spectacular light show.
A mini tornado hit me and blew me backwards through the closed door of the room behind me. Stunned, I lay there on a crushed table amid the door’s splinters and shards. If not for my shield, my bones would have been just as broken.
There was a lot of noise in the hall, and I heard a crashing sound. When I tried to sit up, my head spun, and the contents of my stomach threatened to come up, so I lay back down. I knew from experience that a shield would protect my body from outward harm, but not from my brain bouncing around inside my skull. It had been a while since I had a concussion, but the symptoms were all too familiar.
I heard movement in the room I was in, and when I raised my head, I saw the healer crawling toward me, his image blurry and shifting. I slowly let my head fall back and let my shield go.
He peeled back one of my eyelids, then the other. “Are you conscious?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Head.”
“Do you hurt anywhere else?”
“No.”
“Do you feel nauseous?”
“Yes.”
He placed his hands on either side of my head, and I felt cool seep into my head. Like the feeling when I walked into an air-conditioned room from outside on a hot day. I hadn’t really noticed that I had a headache. A massive headache. But I did notice it go away.
After a few minutes, he took his hands away, then put one hand under my head and lifted it.
“Drink this.” A small vial touched my lips. I opened my mouth, and he poured the contents over my tongue. It tasted sort of minty.
I started to feel better and opened my eyes. Josh stood staring down at me, and he seemed impossibly big and tall. Like looking up at a skyscraper.
“You okay?” he asked. “Geez, Erin, I thought for a moment you’d gone all the way out the window. Lucky thing that door was closed.”
Oh, yeah. I felt lucky. I sat up and twisted around to look at the room. Josh was right. The windows were about twenty feet behind me, and if I had hit the glass the way I hit the door… I decided not to think about that.
“Edmundson?” I asked.
“Got away. He flew down the stairwell, and I didn’t have a chance in hell of catching him. Killed a witch on the eighth-floor landing. Killed another guy and wounded a couple of people when he came out of the building, then took off like a big bird.”
“I guess we know what his affinity is,” I said.
Josh made a rude sound.
When we got back to the ground floor, Sam came over and hugged me to him with an arm as big around as my leg.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. A bit shaky there for a bit, but the healer fixed me up.”
I looked around and saw a line running across the park where grass and bushes looked as though they were flattened. “What’s that?”
“Edmundson’s path out of here.”
My puzzlement must have been obvious, because Sam went on to explain.
“Aeromancers don’t actually fly,” he said. “We compress air until it’s solid enough to hold us. For me to float ten stories into the sky, it takes a massive amount of energy to compress that much air. Luckily, there are so many ley lines here that energy is never in short supply. But to float and move laterally—to fly—also requires air pushing on you. So, Edmundson compressed air to support himself and conjured a small, fast tornado to push him along. I doubt he could keep it up for long, but that’s how he got away.”
I tried to process that. “Can you do that over water?”
Sam laughed. “Nay. Nothing to push against. The water just moves away from the pressure.”
Although I still felt a little fuzzy, my headache was gone, and I didn’t have any double vision. Physically I felt fine. In fact, my leg felt better than it had before Edmundson made his escape. Josh drove me home and dropped me off, and I took a long, hot bath with a glass of wine.
Chapter 22
The light coming in through the window of my bedroom woke me up. I rose and opened the blinds, appreciating the view of the mountains to the north. Knowing I would probably have a busy day ahead, I went to the kitchen, put the teapot on the stove and hoped to have some breakfast in quiet and peace.
Sure enough, Jolene and Josh showed up before my tea was cool enough to drink.
“Frankie asked me to find that Hunter,” Jolene said. “We’re supposed to meet Sergeant Bailey downtown.”
“Can I get dressed first?” I had jeans and a t-shirt on but didn’t consider that adequate for a potential battle.
“Yeah. Hurry up.”
“How about breakfast?”
“We’ll stop and grab something on the way.”
I shook my head as I headed for my bedroom. Josh stayed out in the living room, but Jolene followed me.
“If you’re planning to feed me that fast-food crap Lizzy eats for breakfast sometimes, the deal’s off,” I said as I started changing clothes. “I didn’t get any dinner last night and went through a healing. Food. Real food. And Dan Bailey can kiss my ass if he bitches that we’re late.”
Jolene stared at me for a moment, then said, “Well, okay, Miss Grumpy. What do you consider real food?”
We went to Rosie’s, and I ordered a full-Irish breakfast. Josh ordered the same thing, while Jolene had some fruit and yogurt. Of course, there really wasn’t much of her to feed. I doubted she weighed a hundred pounds.
I wolfed the food down as fast as Josh did, and then said, “Okay, let’s go catch some bad guys.”
On our way downtown, I asked, “How’s Trevor doing?”
“Pretty good,” Josh said. “I talked to him last night and told him about all the fun he’s missing. He’s up in Seattle this week getting measured and stuff. The doctors evidently are still having problems trying to understand how he healed so fast and so clean.”
“How’s he handling it?”
“As well as can be expected,” Jolene said. “He’s been playing around with voice software, hoping he can replace typing with it. He’ll be back in town this weekend.”
“Bring him by the bar if you can pry him away from Heather,” I said.
She laughed. “We’ll try.”
“She’s like a barnacle,” Josh grumbled.
In spite of Josh and Jolene’s impatience, we actually arrived fifteen minutes early for our meeting with Sergeant Bailey and Frankie. Frankie had commandeered a large conference room in the courthouse building. In addition to the three of us, there were the other two mages who worked for the PCU, Sam, and twelve more mages, some of whom I had never seen before.
All of those mages were many decades older than I was. Sam told me they were all strong, experienced magic users who had combat training and experience. I knew from the Illuminati that many paranormals had fought on both sides in World War II, although their roles had always been hidden. A couple of the guys looked old enough to have fought in the first world war, as was Sam.
“We’ve traced the Hunter, Gavin Edmundson, to Harland Hall, a building on the university campus,” Frankie said after the introductions. “There are at least two mages associated with past Illuminati plots who have offices and laboratories in that building—Thomas Feldman and James Winter—and a Hunter was seen entering the building on more than one occasion. We’ve had it under surveillance for some time, and all the phones and computers have been tapped.”
That last was a surprise to me, and I glanced at Josh. He smiled and winked. Evidently Trevor had been doing some work for Frankie while he was recuperating.
“Feldman invited some other mages to a meeting there this afternoon. We’ll surround the place and intercept anyone trying to go in or come out. For anyone already inside, we’ll essentially lay siege to the place and try and get them to surrender. The building was built in the 1920s out of stone and has steel doors, so it wouldn’t be easy to crack it.”
“And if they won’t surrender?” I asked.
“Then we do whatever’s necessary to remove them as a threat,” Frankie said. “This has been going on long enough, and the loss of life caused by those people’s activities can’t be ignored. If we have to, we’ll form a circle and pull the place down on their heads.”
The grim expressions on everyone’s faces showed how seriously they took the matter. I didn’t volunteer that I had training from the Illuminati in breaching castle walls. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.
I raised my hand. “There may be other Hunters. At least one, anyway. We haven’t caught the guy from Willard’s Green.” The one who tried to get into my apartment and who I had seen enter Harland Hall.
The meeting of the Hunters and Columbia Club members at Harland Hall was scheduled for five o’clock, after most of the staff who worked in the building should have left. We arrived at three-thirty, and Bailey positioned the members of our impromptu team so that we had all the doors covered.