‘Expensive tastes,’ Evie remarked. ‘You think they’re all hanging out together in some mansion feeding off the rich and famous?’
‘Do the rich taste better, do you think?’ Vero asked.
‘Must be all that organic food,’ Ash said, giving her a sly smile.
‘More like all that blow,’ Vero fired back. ‘Probably gives them a hit, like passive smoking.’
‘We need shadow blades,’ Evie said almost under her breath. The saw blade she’d thrown at the Original in the Bradbury building had bounced clean off him, as ineffectual as a rubber band. But the shadow blade had sliced through his throat as easy as a knife through butter frosting. ‘Do you have any?’ she asked half-jokingly.
‘Yeah, we went to Walmart and bought their entire stock of other-realm weapons,’ sneered Vero, twisting around to give Evie an exasperated look.
‘Hang on,’ Evie said, grabbing hold of a memory that had surfaced somewhere in the back of her hazed-out mind. ‘Margaret – didn’t she have one?’
‘What?’ both Vero and Ash exclaimed.
Evie nodded. ‘In her cabinet. I’m sure of it. When we went to her office that time, Cyrus was playing with it and she told him to put it back. I didn’t think about it when we were there but, yeah, I’m pretty sure it was a shadow blade.’
Vero glanced at Ash across the front seat. He turned to her and shrugged. ‘We may as well take a look,’ he said, and when she frowned he reached a hand over and patted her on the knee. ‘I promise if we can’t find a shadow blade you can try the grenade launcher.’
Chapter 11
Evie fell silent in the back of the car, thinking through everything she’d just discovered. A small voice in a far recess of her brain – a voice that she was duly trying to ignore – was urging her to reorganise her priorities. With so many new Thirsters on the streets and a coven of Originals to find and destroy, she knew she should think about parking the Victor issue.
But what if she focused on this and he slipped through her fingers? What if it was then too late for revenge? She couldn’t just put it to one side. Not now.
She turned it over in her mind and then figured that there was no harm in trying to do two things at once. She was a female of the species, after all. And they were in LA. It wouldn’t hurt for them to detour and try to discover what they could about Victor’s whereabouts. It would only take an hour or so. She pulled the map out with the address on and thrust it under Ash’s nose.
He glared at her in the rear-view mirror then exchanged a brief glance with Vero. Finally, barely suppressing the sigh, he tapped the address into the GPS.
Carter Holdings, the address on the letter she’d found in the store, turned out to be a squat brick building with metal shutters clamped over the windows. It was situated in an area so deserted and derelict that Evie half expected the building to be cordoned off with yellow tape. The street stank of urine and dead animal.
Evie crunched across a sidewalk littered with old syringes and dog mess until she was standing in front of the door. She tried the handle. There was no give. It appeared to be double bolted.
‘Let’s try around the back,’ Ash suggested, heading for the corner.
Evie followed him, Vero bringing up the rear. They made their way down a stinking, garbage-strewn alley and found the back door also double locked. To the side of it, though, was a window, which looked just big enough for someone to squeeze through, if they contorted themselves enough.
‘Stand back,’ Ash said.
Evie ducked as he slung a brick straight through the glass.
Straight away an alarm started blaring. Evie glared at Ash.
‘Better get a move on,’ Ash said, grinning at her as he cleared the broken glass off the sill with his sleeve.
Evie paused for a fraction of a second, trying to listen for any police sirens, but the noise of the alarm was deafening. Damn it. They would only have this one shot. She placed her hands carefully on the sill and squeezed herself through the narrow frame.
She crunched down onto a carpet of broken glass and blinked through the gloom. It was a sparsely furnished office: a couple of desks were pressed against the wall on one side and opposite the door stood a filing cabinet. She crossed straight to it and yanked the top drawer. It was locked.
‘Have you got your knife?’ she yelled to Ash, who had wriggled through the window behind her.
Ash nodded, slipping it out of its sheath on his waist. Evie took it and slid it around the metal rim of the drawer, jimmying it against the lock. She felt a slight buckle of resistance and smacked down harder on the hilt with the heel of her hand until she felt the lock give.
She tossed the knife to Ash and pulled open the drawer. It was jammed with brown manila folders. Holding her breath, Evie rifled quickly through them, slowing when she got to L.
It was there. Victor’s name, stamped in black ink on the cover. With shaking fingers Evie dragged the folder free and stared at it.
Lassonde, Victor.
She was about to start rifling through it when Ash snatched it out of her hands.
‘Hey,’ Evie yelled, lunging for it, ‘give that back!’
‘Let’s just take it and get out of here,’ Ash said, tilting his head in the direction of the street. Evie opened her mouth to complain and then snapped it quickly shut. Over the noise of the alarm, she could hear a siren screaming.
She nodded and raced Ash to the window.
Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of a house in West Hollywood. Set back from the road, almost completely hidden behind a row of ornamental bushes, and with a trellis of pink roses trailing around the front door, it didn’t look like the kind of place Victor would call home, but then what did she really know about Victor, other than that he liked to wear silk ties and that he was a lying, murdering psychopath?
Ash parked a block down the street and killed the engine.
‘You two can wait here,’ Evie told Ash and Vero, throwing open her door.
‘We’re coming with you,’ Ash answered, climbing out of the car and blocking her path.
Evie glared at him and at Vero, who had come to stand beside him. She didn’t want them being dragged into this. They had no fight with Victor. But more than that, she had to admit, she wanted this revenge all to herself.
‘We’ve got your back, Evie. You’re not walking in there alone,’ Ash told her quietly.
Evie thought about arguing some more, but finally relented. Having backup probably wasn’t such a bad idea.
‘He’s all mine though,’ Evie muttered as she shouldered her way past them.
‘Understood,’ Ash answered, striding past her and around to the trunk. He popped it open and begun rifling through the contents of a duffel bag. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘You can’t go in there unarmed. Here, take this.’ He offered her a semi-automatic pistol, threw Vero a knife and pocketed some nunchuckers for himself.
Evie stared down at the gun, feeling its dull weight in the palm of her hand. Victor had once told her that guns weren’t worth fighting with – that bullets ran out and you couldn’t trust a gun to hit its target or not jam on you. He’d claimed that knives were better, that they became an extension of yourself. He had once told her that if your intention was true it would always strike home.
He’d killed Lucas with a knife.
Evie reached into the trunk and took hold of the longest blade that she could find. It was something she’d seen Ash fight with once. An Oriental antique sword with intricate engravings wrought down the length of the blade. It looked like it had been hewn with cruelty in mind and it slid into her hand as if it belonged there.
She caught the nervous glance Vero shot Ash as she turned back around to face them, holding the blade at her side.
‘Ready?’ she asked, the lightness of her voice belying her jangling nerves.
Ash nodded, closing the trunk. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said, taking a deep breath.
They walked
up the street, their footsteps ringing in unison, and for a moment Evie had a sense of the brotherhood that Cyrus, Ash and Vero had once shared. She felt as if her sides were protected, that she was being looked out for. She hadn’t felt that since Lucas had died.
She slowed almost to a standstill as she absorbed that truth, falling out of stride with the others. They slowed too, instinctively, and she quickly upped her pace, not wanting them to think she was having second thoughts about what she was about to do.
As they approached the house, she felt the atmosphere grow heavy around them. The house was completely, ominously, dark. As silent and still as a graveyard.
‘He’ll have sensed us,’ Vero whispered, as they made their way up the path.
Evie pushed the hood of her sweater down so she could hear better. ‘Good,’ she said, scanning the front of the house. ‘I want him to hear me coming. I want him to be ready. I want him to fight back.’
She caught the troubled sideways glance that Ash gave her but ignored it and stepped forward, heading along the path that ran down the side of the house. Breaking in through the back door would be less conspicuous, she figured. She couldn’t afford to be interrupted by the police.
The back of the house was also sunk in darkness. Evie crept slowly towards the door. Her senses were blazing. ‘Can you feel anything?’ she asked the others.
‘No,’ Ash and Vero both answered simultaneously.
Evie scowled at the back door. Damn it. He wasn’t here. Had he ever been? She tried to zone out all the other noises – the hiss of cicadas and thrum of traffic in the distance – and focus on her senses.
Yes. It was the right house. He might not be here now, but Victor had been here once. She could feel the trace of him in the air, almost like a scent.
‘Let’s take a look inside,’ Ash said. ‘We may as well while we’re here.’
Evie didn’t need any further invitation. She smashed her elbow into the glass panel in the back door and then pushed her hand through and unlocked it from the inside.
They stepped over the broken glass and walked into a kitchen – clean, modern, a coffee cup on the draining board, but no other sign of life.
Evie strode to a door straight ahead of them and opened it. It led out into a narrow hallway. Her eyes fell immediately on a pair of leather loafers sitting neatly by the front door. There was a coat stand to the left. On it hung a suit jacket and a red silk cravat. Three swords were sticking out of an umbrella stand beside it.
‘Well, we’ve definitely found him,’ Evie remarked, feeling her heart rate almost double at the sight of the swords and cravat.
She turned her head, scanning the hallway for the best place to hide in order to get a clean strike the moment Victor walked in the door.
‘Er, guys?’
Evie spun around. Vero was calling to them from another room.
‘You might want to come and take a look at this,’ she shouted.
Evie’s stomach clenched. She followed Vero’s voice down the hallway and into a front room, the hairs on her arms bristling. Something wasn’t right about this house.
She found Vero standing in the centre of an empty room. She glanced around, unsure what she was supposed to be looking at. The room was bare – there was no furniture, not even a lampshade.
Then she saw it. What Evie had first dismissed as wallpaper was actually a collage made of newspaper clippings, maps, sheets of paper and large colour photographs. It covered the entire far wall of the room.
Evie took a faltering step forward, trying to take it all in, trying to understand and make sense of the hideous mosaic that was materialising in front of her. The pictures were crime scene images of bodies and body parts.
‘What’s he doing?’ she murmured in horror.
‘He’s hunting them, just like we are,’ Ash answered quietly.
Chapter 12
In the centre of the wall was a map of LA. It took Evie a while to figure it was a map at all because the whole thing was covered in red pins that obliterated most of the street names.
Beside her, Ash was busy snapping pictures on his phone, leaning in to take close-ups of the map, crouching down to make sure he got all angles. A piece of paper stuck at the top of the wall, near to the ceiling, had four words scrawled in large block letters on it.
BEVERLY HILLS
MULHOLLAND DRIVE
‘Do you think he’s trying to pinpoint their lair?’ Evie asked, pointing at the piece of paper.
‘Maybe,’ Ash answered, his fingers starting to run over the cluster of pins stuck into the map. ‘Look at how the pins are grouped.’
There were two larger clusters of red on the map around Beverly Hills, and another along Mulholland. Maybe that’s where Victor was right this moment. Tracking them. Maybe he was planning on killing them himself. Which was fine by her – she’d happily let him handle the situation alone. The only thing that concerned her was that he might not make it back alive so that she could then kill him.
‘Hey guys,’ Vero suddenly said. ‘Check this out!’
Evie spun around.
Vero was standing in the doorway brandishing a sword over her head. An enormous grin was splitting her face in two. Evie glanced upwards, her gaze settling on the silvery blue blade shimmering in Vero’s hands.
‘No way,’ Ash whispered.
‘It’s a shadow blade,’ Evie said, pointing out the obvious.
Vero let the blade fall, hefting it lightly in her palm and then running her finger along the flat.
‘It’s his. I mean, I found it out in the hallway by the coat stand. He must have taken it off a Shadow Warrior at some point.’
‘Well, it’s ours now,’ Evie said, brushing past Vero and heading back into the hallway, wanting to check what other weapons they might have overlooked. That’s when she heard the key turning in the lock.
Evie leapt backwards, swinging her sword up to chest height.
In the same second, Vero and Ash moved into flanking positions, Vero brandishing the shadow blade, Ash the nunchuckers.
The door fell open. Evie drew in a breath, the sword trembling in her hand. This was her moment.
Victor pushed open the door and stepped inside. There wasn’t even a ripple of surprise on his face at seeing them there. He just gave them a curt nod.
‘Good evening,’ he said, shrugging off his jacket.
The three of them were too stunned to say anything in reply.
Victor pulled the blue silk scarf from around his neck and shook it out. Evie’s focus fell to the thin pink scar running at a diagonal across his throat and for a brief moment she pictured Lucas kneeling on Victor’s chest, his blade pressed to his neck, about to slash through his windpipe. He would have killed him that night if Evie hadn’t intervened. She wished to hell she hadn’t.
She felt an elbow suddenly nudge her in the ribs and realised that Ash and Vero were waiting on her cue. Startled, she lifted her gaze from Victor’s neck and forced herself to meet his eyes.
He smiled at her. ‘I knew you’d find me eventually,’ he said. ‘I just wondered how long it would take. Longer than I expected as it turned out.’
In the thousand different scenarios Evie had played out in her head when she imagined this scene, she had always been the one doing the talking while Victor cowered speechless in a corner. In her fantasies she’d lifted her sword without any hesitation and swung it at him over and over.
They were veering quickly off script.
‘You must be Ash,’ Victor said, his attention switching from Evie. He held out a hand for Ash to shake.
Evie could feel the situation slipping rapidly out of her grasp. ‘Shut up!’ she yelled.
Victor turned to her with an amused smile. ‘I’m assuming this little break-in and sword-waving routine is your attempt at killing me?’
Blood roared loud as thunder in Evie’s ears and the edges of her vision blurred.
‘So are you going to get on with it?’ he asked in a bo
red voice.
Evie clenched her hands around the hilt of the sword and took a step forward. She wasn’t going to let him say another word.
‘This is for Lucas,’ she hissed. ‘And for my parents.’ She’d rehearsed these lines so many times, wanting their names to be the last thing Victor ever heard.
She brought the sword up over her head. This was it. This was the moment she’d been dreaming of for months. It all came down to this. Yet she couldn’t seem to gather the strength to swing.
‘Oh, Evie,’ Victor sighed impatiently. ‘You’re not going to kill me,’ he said. ‘Firstly, you don’t have it in you. And secondly, you need me.’
Evie’s sword arm wavered. ‘Why would we need you?’ she asked, incredulous.
‘I should think that would be obvious,’ Victor answered with a smile, gesturing to the room behind them – the one with the horror wallpaper adorning it. ‘We’re all trying to achieve the same goal. If you’re planning on killing all the Originals out there before they destroy this realm, then you need my help.’
‘We don’t need your help.’
It was Vero who’d spoken, snatching the words right out of Evie’s mouth.
Victor smiled thinly at Vero. ‘What if I told you I know where they live?’
‘I’d say, Congratulations, now tell us before I let Evie slice you into cocktail wiener-sized pieces,’ Ash replied coolly, swinging the nunchuckers in his hand.
Evie noted the beads of sweat popping on Victor’s temple. ‘Think about it,’ Victor blurted, a gratifying tremor entering his voice. ‘There are only three of you. These are Originals – unlike anything you’ve ever dealt with before.’
‘Actually, I think you’ll find we dealt just fine,’ Ash answered, winking at Evie.
Victor’s eyes flashed wide in surprise. He hadn’t known that Evie had killed one at the Bradbury and she felt a burst of triumph as he did a quick double take, reassessing her in the light of this new information.
Victor cleared his throat. ‘But against a dozen?’ he asked. ‘And all the other unhumans they’re gathering around them? I think you’ll find you do need me.’