Damn werewolves. They always think they can run.
I'd gone home, grabbed the enchanted compass that connected to my tracking charms and the GPS on my phone. I spent the rest of the day driving all over Cleveland, meticulously visiting every place Thorne had been over the last twenty-four hours. He hadn't gone far, but he'd gone on a grand tour of Cleveland. Or at least it seemed that way.
I showed people his picture and walked every site hoping for a lead, but he'd left no trace. Except for my tracking charm, he was a ghost.
As night fell, the tracker led me to an empty warehouse on the bank of the Cuyahoga river where my GPS died without warning. I tapped the side of my phone and nothing. The compass had gone dark, too. The gadget was top-of-the-line bounty hunter gear that had cost me a small fortune. It wasn't supposed to stop like that, but no matter how I shook or tapped the thing, the screen remained dark.
I tossed the compass back into the organizer I kept on the hump between the driver and passenger side of the hearse. Might as well check out the warehouse. Maybe Thorne was still there. Maybe that's why the GPS had glitched.
I grabbed a flashlight, and double checked my weapons. Sometimes I took them off and forgot to put them back on again. The Glock was in a shoulder holster under my jean jacket, which was like wearing hell in the summer heat, but flashing a gun everywhere I went wasn't helpful. My knife was in a sheath tucked into my pants and the taser dangled from its carrying loop off my belt. The handcuffs went into my back pocket.
Sweating like a rising creek in the night's humidity, I edged into the warehouse. The chain locking the door was broken and the door itself hung at an odd angle off its hinges. Someone had broken in and I'd bet money it was Thorne, my thief on the lam.
The first thing I found was the tracking charm I'd slapped on Thorne, but he was no longer attached to it. The silver bracelet laid on the dirty warehouse floor, mocking me with a metallic glint.
I kicked at the tracking charm, and growled like an alpha on steroids. I wasn't a shifter, but I'd pissed off enough alphas to know what an 'I'm going to stuff your tail down your throat and pull it out your ass' growl sounded like.
Growls were like cuss words for shifters and I heard them a lot. It was a professional hazard. Bounty hunters pissed off everyone. My clientele—the shifters, witches and vampires of Cleveland—had given me a master class in FU. Oh, excuse me, I meant Duck U. I didn't need Freya blessing me with a bounty of shitty ducks.
But with that charm at my feet, I wanted to scream duck to the moon and back. Ducking werewolves.
If I didn’t find him soon, I would be out fifty grand. Fifty grand that I didn't have. The Triad fronted the money for the bonds, but I bore the loss. Because the Triad wasn't exactly about life being fair. They called it an incentive and I'd had no choice but hope I didn't get screwed.
So much for hope. On to active screwing.
“Crap on a dipshit wand.” My voice echoed in the dark void around me. Most of the warehouses in this area of Cleveland were empty. A slow economy meant few businesses wanted to hire out extra storage.
I went to kick the charm again, but stopped myself at the last second, and bent down to scoop it up instead. Silver was expensive these days. When I got home, I'd figure out some magic that would tell me how he broke the damn binding. Nothing like reverse engineering failure.
I sighed and shook my head. I would find Thorne. He had to know that. Every supe I bailed out had to give me hair and fingernail clippings in addition to submitting to a binding. In a few hours, I could magic his current location out of his DNA.
Of course, there was nothing I hated more than being cooped up in my kitchen cooking up magic. I was the witch who could spend hours making no magic at all—with all the right ingredients, no less. Hence the sinkhole known as my bounty hunter gig.
The raw truth? I didn’t have enough magic for anything else, but my blood line was too powerful to be snubbed either. My mother had served on the Witch Council most of her life. I was supposed to take her place—the office was inherited—but I couldn’t even if I tried. The magic didn’t run strong in me, no matter how pure my bloodline.
Much to my mother’s frustration.
So the Triad funded the bonds, I managed them, and everyone pretended I wasn't a total disappointment to all of Witchdom. Easy peasy, makes me pukey.
Once I caught up with Thorne, though, I wouldn't need magic. I curled my fingers into a fist. “Goddess help you, wolf.” He would pay for putting me through the hell of a conjuring.
A shadow moved in my peripheral vision and I whirled around. “Who’s there?”
The warehouse was still and dark. I blinked and tried again. Still nothing, but I caught another flitting movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned, trying to keep up with it.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled, sensing something my eyes couldn’t see. I shoved the charm in my pocket and pulled my gun from my shoulder holster. I kept it full of blessed and charmed silver bullets.
This witch didn't play.
“Put your gun away,” came a deep, male voice from the shadows. He had an accent from someplace I couldn’t identify and he sounded amused, which irritated me. If I had a nickel for every supe who underestimated me, I would be rich. Being lousy at magic was not the same as being weak.
Funny how so many supes thought differently.
I tracked the voice and aimed toward it. “Says the guy playing hide-and-seek. Show yourself.”
“And be an easy target? I do not think so.”
I snorted. “I’m a witch. These bullets will find you even in the dark.” In my line of work, it paid to cover all the bases, even if I had to outsource some of the spell casting. If I pulled the trigger, there would be no hiding. Supes were fast, but not quick enough to avoid witch magic.
There was a moment of silence while he considered that. Then he stepped forward into the dim light. It was past sunset and the only illumination came from the streetlights outside. Their glare shone through the windows, forming staggered pools of light that ran the length of one wall. The effect was one of weak spotlights gleaming at regular intervals.
I’d counted on the dark to hide me from Thorne. Werewolves smell better than they see, and I’d wanted to press the advantage. Now I wished I’d brought my flashlight so I could shine it in this guy’s eyes and keep him disoriented.
The stranger stepped into one of the spots with more light than the others, and I finally saw him. He was tall with dark hair and a square, angular face. I couldn’t tell eye color from where I stood, but I marked him as vampire by the pallor of his skin. He looked gray, which meant he hadn’t fed. Well-nourished vamps ran white, almost glowing like the full moon.
He wore a pair of black dress pants and a fitted white dress shirt that skimmed a truly impressive musculature. In comparison, I felt gauche in my jeans and t-shirt, but I'd dressed for rolling in the mud with a furball. I doubted we were in the same line of work.
As the undead went, he was handsome enough. They usually were. If there had ever been ugly vamps, they were extinct now. Or perhaps hidden away. Humans were still uneasy around supes and the better we blended in, the less stink people made about things. So we all did our best to look human and keep our scariness in check.
There was even the Triad, an inter-supernatural Council that oversee such concerns. Although I’d heard the witch representative hexed the werewolf, and the vampires had threatened to cut off relations.
Politics stayed the same no matter how much magic you had.
The vamp walked toward me, and I waved my gun at him. “That’s close enough.”
He went still the way only a vampire can. I couldn’t kill him with bullets, but I could still cause enough damage that any sensible vampire wanted to avoid being shot. It took a lot of blood to heal from a charmed bullet.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” I waved my gun to remind him this was serious.
He raised his hands in a placating gesture and flashed a smile that tried to look charming as opposed to hungry. Gray on vamps is the equivalent of low blood sugar in diabetics. “I am Vitor and I am looking for Sheridon Thorne. Who are you?”
Vitor? Of course he was foreign. Weren’t they always? If you asked me, there was a shortage of real American vampires. Where was the ‘made in America’ push for the undead?
“Sylvie.” I left out the whole bounty hunter song and dance. Supes didn’t like law enforcement, and I was too close to the cops for them to trust me as a general rule. I frowned. “How did you know he would be here?”
“Sheridon called me.”
I remained skeptical. “For what?”
“I owe him money and he wanted payment.”
“And now he’s gone.” I spoke more to myself than anyone else. I held out my hand. “Let me see your phone.”
Vitor’s eyes narrowed.
I rolled my eyes. “Thorne called you, right? Let’s see if he’s still answering his phone.”
He gave a curt nod and pulled a fancy smart phone out of his pocket, but instead of passing it over to me, he made the call.
Vampires didn’t like to give up control. They said vampires were the cats of supes; prickly, independent, one second they want your affection, the next they’ve drawn blood. There were memes about it online that always made me laugh. Although I sometimes wondered how cats felt about the comparison.
Putting the phone on speaker, he held it up, and we listened to the ringing on the other end. No one picked up and the call rolled over to voice mail. To my surprise, the recorded message wasn’t in Thorne’s low, throaty growl, but that of a woman with chipper, cheerful, probably-taking-uppers kind of voice.
"Thank you for calling Alpha's Grill. We can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can."
Great. Thorne hadn’t used his personal phone. Probably afraid of being tracked.
Vitor hung up before the beep and we both looked at each other.
An unpleasant thought occurred to me. What if Thorne hadn’t found a way out of the charm? What if...what if he’d died?
The spell dispersed upon death. I always told my clients that was the only way to be free of the binding charm.
My stomach sank like my gut had become quicksand. I lost all oxygen for a moment from the shock of the thought. Maybe that was why my tracker had gone dark.
Well, duck me with a wand full of splinters.
Death may release Thorne, but I was still stuck. Without a body, he'd technically still miss his court date, and the state would fine me the fifty grand. Dead or alive, I had to find him...and soon.
Gah. I hated dead bodies.
The metal door at the warehouse entrance scraped open. I jumped, but Vitor didn't even blink. It's hard to sneak up on vamps. That's why I hunted them during the day, when they were supposed to be asleep.
“Police,” announced a loud voice. “Put your hands up.”