Nathan Marsh
“Hello,” I say into my phone.
“She’s back in town,” Emily says. I can tell by the tone of her voice that she means the hunter, not Ivy.
“Where?”
“She’s gone back up that trail over the house, same place you pointed out to me before.”
“Is she still there?”
“No. She was by while I was on the road. That’s all I got out of the imp.”
“Is the imp still present?” I ask.
“Yes, and it’s a difficult little bastard. It’ll only tell me that she was here, looked in on the house, and left.”
“I can be there in twenty minutes,” I say. Stationing an imp on the trail to watch it is an unconventional solution to watching a piece of property, given the capriciousness of imps, but with my influence upon the little demon, we might be making it work. The hunter is just too good for Emily to monitor physically, and magic is of extremely limited use as passive surveillance. We will decide, based on whether the imp cooperates with me or not, whether using one is a workable solution.
I am loathe to leave my overnight surveillance of Carl’s house, because he is still very touchy and volatile, but a chance to get some solid information about the hunter is too good to pass up. I just have to hope that Carl stays home for a while instead of going out looking for Ivy and Ben again. Now that we know for sure that the hunter is back in town and sniffing around, the only safe assumption is that she will come around to check on Carl some time, too. I know that he is closing in fast on Ivy and Ben, and I need to keep the hunter from following him out anywhere near them if he goes out looking again.
I briefly consider using my telekinesis to temporarily disable his car while I am gone, but his knowledge of vehicles is vastly superior to mine. Anything I can think of to keep him from using his car would be easy enough for him to diagnose.
Fretting over that, however, is getting me no information, so I have to take my chances. Besides, it is about three in the morning. It is likely that if he has not left his house yet, he will not do so until it is time to go to school. I cover the distance to Emily’s house quickly, and find her outside waiting for me.
“Let’s go,” she says, before I even set foot outside my car. The imp must be annoying her something fierce for her to be so curt with me.
We make our way carefully up the ridge behind the house, taking great pains to leave no prints of our own, and to break no twigs or branches. If the hunter is going to continue to watch the house, we want her to feel secure returning to the same place to do so.
I can feel the binding spell Emily cast, with my help, long before I can see the darkness that emanates from it. It is only when I have direct line of sight to the center of the spell’s focus that I can see the deeper blackness standing out against the darkness of the woods at night. Though the focus is small, it is intense, so much that the baleful red light of the imp’s eyes does not escape it, even though I know it is looking right at me. I know it wants to pretend it does not see me. I could order it out, or even draw it forth, but this particular kind of imp responds best to silent threats. I just stop on the trail, and look toward the focus, as if it is the least interesting thing I have seen all day.
Emily looks askance at me, but does not say anything. She knows by now to trust me when it comes to dealing with such creatures.
Finally, the little imp can take my nonchalance no longer, and it cautiously emerges from the focus.
I speak several syllables it would be impossible to render in any human alphabet, and that are best not described to people who do not know how to shield themselves from infernal energies. The imp responds with a lengthy spill of similar sounds that do not carry the same intense force as when they are spoken in my voice.
I ask it a few questions, and it hurriedly chatters its answers at me, as if suddenly becoming very aware of how quickly it wants to be anywhere but in front of me. I am reminding it that when we had set the focus, I had clearly stated that Emily spoke with the same authority as me regarding its task. The foolish imp decided to play around with the meaning of my words. I share with it a bit of knowledge, the names of a few other imps that have crossed me, and suggest that it do better in its next dealings with Emily.
With the imp’s full report given to me, and us having a renewed understanding of its relationship with Emily, I release it to retreat back into the focus until the next time a vampire comes up on one of the trails over the house.
“As with last time, the hunter came up here with infrared and optical equipment, and spent some time looking over the grounds. She is now also armed against both vampires and werewolves, and had some sort of attachment for her binoculars that seemed intended to specifically look for evidence of a werewolf’s presence. The vampire clans have had glass for a few years now that can pick up traces of a vampire’s passage. It appears they are now experimenting with the same for lycanthropes. If I am remembering Ben’s recent history correctly, he has been in hiding long enough that he may not know of the existence of either type of glass.”
“Carl is here all the time. If this stuff works, will the hunter be able to tell that?”
“I do not know,” I tell Emily. “The vampire glass is not very reliable, and gives very little information currently. A vampire has to spend a significant amount of time in a place to leave enough essence around. I do not know if the lycanthrope glass is any more reliable.”
“What else?” she asks me.
“The imp says she was frustrated again to find nobody home, but had not gone any closer to the house. Once she came up here, the imp remained with her until she was off the property. So thus far, we have no proof that she has come any closer than this spot.”
“So is it safe to assume she knows nothing about the circles?” Emily asks, pointing to the woods beyond the house on the other side of the property.
“I would cautiously say so, but not positively. We know for sure she has been here, but we have no idea if she has been over there. Neither you nor I have seen any sign, but remember, she is very good at evading physical detection.”
“At least I’ve been able to keep any rumors from floating around town.”
“You and Ivy have been stellar on that count. Even Carl does not know.”
“Carl’s training was extremely focused,” Emily reminds me.
He had been raised from birth to kill vampires, and nothing else. It would not surprise me there were not so much as an allusion to witches in his training, as well as no mention of creatures like myself.
“I should get back to Carl’s place,” I tell Emily. “I have not noticed any evidence of the hunter near there, but I do suspect she will be there soon enough. The imp told me he did detect better weapons for fighting lycanthropes in her possession, so she is prepared for an encounter, whether she initiates it or finds herself in it.”
“He’s pretty conflicted on his feelings about Ivy lately. Fortunately, he’s not mad at her, upset at the situation more. But he needs to be receptive to her when he finally does see her again. Her feelings for him have been changing lately, and she’s going to surprise him very soon. If you can make sure to keep nudging him away from being mad at her if you see him drifting that way, it would be good.”
“Are you coming perilously close to sharing the prophecy about Ivy with me?” I ask her, stepping away, turning my back on her even as I start to walk down the hill back toward the house.
“I am giving you only one small part, that does not say anything about your future that will bring the inevitable to pass with the least amount of damage.”
“Please, do not,” I tell her. “Fate must run its own course, without my hand guiding anything. I want no knowledge about what you know. None!” That last bit comes out both sharper than I intend it, and not as strong as I would like it to be. Even if I am angry with Emily for laying that information upon me, for the risk to my well-being it creates, I do not wish to end our conversation on me snapping at her.
“Your forgiveness, please,” I say. “Just remember that I have made it clear that if I am bound up in Ivy’s fate, let the winds blow me as they will. The outcome for Ivy will still be as you’ve foreseen, and I will come to and cause less harm on the way.”
“This prophecy…” Emily starts.
“Please,” I say. “Respect my wishes on this count. If Carl or Ivy needs guidance, getting me involved will not actually help. All of history backs me up.”
Emily touches my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “The future always seems much more uncertain when it’s one of your own.”
“So do the wise thing, old wise woman. Let fate fall as it will from this starting point until the end. Changing the starting point does not change the end. It never has and never will. You yourself have given that counsel. Heed it now.”
Emily laughs, bitterly. “My words never sound so wise in my own ears as I think they do coming out of your mouth.”
“Tricky thing about wisdom, that is,” I say. “I will be in touch tomorrow.”
“I will make sure Carl comes over after school tomorrow, so you can take an evening off from watching him. I’m sure you have other things to do.”
The next day, I struggle to pay attention to anything at school, with the hunter on my mind, and with Carl still being so close to losing control all of the time. I get caught up afterwards helping Kate study, and doing my best to keep her from going to Emily’s house to give her a piece of her mind about hiding where Ivy is. Almost all of the time, the loyalty that Ivy’s friends have for her is a powerful asset. Right now, it seems half of the town is on edge and wanting to go out and overturn every rock within a hundred miles looking for her. At least this is creating a background of chaos around Ivy that will impede the hunter’s work at finding her by trying to glean information from the locals.
A little bit after seven, Emily calls me to say Carl has left her house, and is quite angry. He had promised he would go directly home, but she is concerned that his agitation will drive him to break that promise. She says she can tell where he is at any time that he is in human form, but if the wolf comes out, she is powerless to keep track of him.
I am certain that Ben and Ivy are way too far away for Carl to pursue without driving, so I try to assure her things are well, but she still asks that I keep an eye on him for the night. I do my best to politely finish up with Kate and head over to Carl’s house.
I stop a good deal down the road from his house, park, and find a very discrete place to rid myself of my mortal weight. I take to the air and allow light to pass through me as effortless as I pass through the wind. I want to get a good look around as much of Carl’s property as I can, and with dusk approaching, it is not too much of a drain on me to both fly and remain hidden from physical sight. As soon as I get into the air, I see the hunter’s motorcycle, concealed not too far from where I had hidden my car. The hunter is not on it, but the engine is still very warm, as if she had just shut it off within the past few minutes. I do not see her on the road to Carl’s place, so I must have just missed her getting there. I immediately turn my attention to his house. I detect body heat inside, but it is definitely not Carl – I have watched him this way enough to know the shape of his warmth as well as I know the shape of his face. His car is not in the garage, either, but Emily has not called to tell me he had gone anywhere. I can only assume now that whatever means she was using to track him, he has eluded it.
I turn my attention back out from the house again, seeking the hunter. I finally find her, in the woods well behind Carl’s house. She is barely warmer than her surroundings – how judiciously she must feed that she has been so cold every time I have seen her – but I can see the heat of a phone in her hand. Looking back to Carl’s house, at the body heat of whomever is inside, I see they also have a phone in operation. Seems our little hunter has worked around the prohibition against entering a home uninvited by sending somebody in for her. A search up and down the block shows a warm car, three houses down, in the opposite direction of the hunter’s motorcycle. I assume that she is working with a known associate of hers. It takes skill to break into a house and search for things on behalf of someone else; it is not something that a mortal can be compelled to do competently.
I let myself slowly alight on the roof, so I can feel around a little more to see if I can determine what the mortal inside is doing. I have been inside the house enough to know its layout very well. Right now, the spy is in Carl’s bedroom, going through his dresser. Since he is present in the home, I can tell where he has been, and he is on a very methodical search of the place, lingering anywhere Carl keeps things that appear important. This person seems to be very professional at their task. Finding out more about him seems to be a wise idea.
I am very unhappy to have her helper inside of Carl’s house, though. Carl is a young lycanthrope, trained from birth for a war that ended before he got thrown into it. He has never faced down a vampire in a fight. I do not know if the hunter will be able to ascertain that from her proxy search of his home, what information different clues may give her. But if she is as skilled as I think she is, it is possible that she could find a way to eliminate him without vampiric involvement being known. The only werewolves that really know much of Carl are the foster parents that abandoned him. Everybody else was just a cohort at one short training camp or another. When the werewolves had to adapt to traveling in smaller and less centralized and controlled packs, they started to raise their pups without much true and deep attachment to each other. Teach them that pack was who you were with today, not who you were with yesterday. It was a security measure then – if a lycanthrope truly knows nothing important about any other lycanthrope, they cannot give any meaningful information away. Now it is a liability, as young men and women like Carl live often in isolation from their kind, bearing their secrets alone, having nobody that understands intimately what it is like to have a hungry wolf inside of them.
If this hunter, a Negre, realizes she can kill Carl without risking the Truce at all, I fear his days are severely numbered. And here is where I curse Emily five ways from the dark moon. My own sense of the future tells me this hunter needs to remain alive for some time. Emily tells me Carl must be reunited with Ivy, on ‘receptive’ terms. How do I meet the demands of both futures? A day ago, I would have made the decision to leave the hunter alive, and leave it to Carl’s fate whether the hunter takes his pelt. Now, I know that I have to keep both of them alive. I am obligated to protect both of them, which means starting to actively manipulate their movements to keep them apart from each other.
I decide to take a chance, a calculated risk which only barely gives me a number I like. What if I can get her and her associate away from the house before she gets a critical amount of information on Carl?
If the hunter’s motorcycle has trackers on it so her movements can be reconstructed by the Negre later if they need, she certainly has something simple on her phone that would tell her if it is moving without her on it. I land on her bike, use my telekinesis to turn the ignition without the key, and switch back to my mortal shape.
An hour later, the machine is just about out of fuel, and I am seventy miles, straight line, away from Carl’s house, but there are nearly a hundred fresh miles on the odometer, with all of the switchbacks and curves I take coming down from the ridge into the river valley. I make a partial transformation, pulling out my wings, so I can fly free after I gun the engine at a switchback, and the motorcycle launches itself off the road and down a ravine.
I do not know for sure if the hunter did indeed have some means of knowing that I had ridden off with her transportation, or if she had even left Carl’s house as I did so, but at this moment, she is most certainly inconvenienced. That is enough for me. I keep to the air and start to fly back toward where my car is parked, on Carl’s road.