Banshee Hunt (15 page)

“My guess is that with the shock of the mortal injury to Fido the fascinator's hold over you has been broken for the moment. And even now while you're hating me you're also wondering why you came after me in the first place. Tell me, how did you get here? Do you even know me? I doubt you do. But now that you've failed like him, the detonator will be somewhere nearby, making sure you can’t talk.”

“Your only hope, such as it is, now lies with my partner hiding behind the door. She's a meta. Maybe she can prevent the detonator from turning you into a keg of dynamite ready to go bang. But really she can't do anything until you surrender.”

“Bastard!” The woman screamed at him, her face wrinkled up with fury. If she hadn't been angry before this time she really was. But she was also thinking. He could see it in her face. She didn't want to die and what he was telling her was making sense. Especially when her wolf was dying.

“Hunter,” he corrected her. “Now stand up, hands in the air. Step out from behind the car, slowly, and do a complete slow twirl. Show me you're unarmed.”

She should have done as he ordered. After all she had to know she had no choice. But she didn't. Instead she just started screaming at him again, lost in her hate and fear. She called him all sorts of names and accused him of a dozen different crimes. Ones that no one could really believe he'd committed. They just didn't make sense. And strangely she accused the Illuminati of many of those crimes as well. Crimes that anyone would know they would never commit.

He understood that she didn't like him. After all, he had just shot up her wolf. Shot up and – James momentarily took his eyes off her to check the wolf – killed her companion. That meant she was powerless. But it also meant she was grieving and looking to lash out at anyone she believed had hurt her. But there was a difference between hating him for what he had done and hating him for things that she surely knew he had never done. Or was that the fascinator at work?

If it was the fascinator's doing, he knew it would wear off in time. Even so he had no doubt she would continue to hate him simply for killing her creature. She might even hate him enough to want to seek revenge in time. He might have made yet another life long enemy.

For the moment though she was refusing to come out. And he had no idea whether she had any weapons. It was time to end this.

James holstered his Sig and pulled out his magic weapon. He didn't like the strange weapon he had been given by the Illuminati. He didn't trust it. How could you trust something that looked like a prop from a movie? But it did have some advantages. And one was that it fired a variety of spells instead of bullets. Unreliable and often useless spells, but sometimes they worked. James quickly started going through the rhyme in his head until he got to the line about command of beasts not being command of the gut, flicked the lever into position and waited for her to show herself.

“Are you coming out?”

“Go shove it up your arse!” She screamed it at him but in doing so she made a vital mistake. Like most people when she hurled abuse at someone she wanted to see who she was abusing. So she raised her head above the boot of his car. That was all the target he needed, and he squeezed the trigger.

An instant later she screamed and fell to the floor, retching. The battle was over.

James breathed a sigh of relief, glad that the spell had worked. The gun only worked about half the time, as its effectiveness depended on what sort of a witch or wizard he was shooting, the spells it was loaded with, and the arcane properties of firing enchantments. It wasn't like shooting a bullet. There was no recoil and no bullet heading off in a straight predictable line. Sometimes the spells missed their targets completely despite being perfectly aimed.

Still, this time it had worked, the rhyme had been right, and the woman was no longer a threat to him, something that became even more certain when he called out and Yasmin and the others who had all been hiding behind the door came rushing out and quickly placed her in restraints. They also placed a protection spell on her. He guessed it was something to prevent the detonator from working his magic on her.

After that she was led away, a tall, thin woman who just then looked somewhat broken. James knew she would be like that for a long time to come. It wasn't just the dry retching or even the fact of her capture. For a mistress like her, that bond with their animal companion was as tight as that of family. And she had just lost a loved one. Some would say – he wasn't sure he believed the salacious speculation about masters and their companions – a lover. There would be a period of adjustment. And the one thing he was absolutely sure of was that there would be nothing he could say or do to fix things. He would always be the man who had killed her companion.

“You shot an invisible wolf in the dark?” Yasmin was unexpectedly back with him, nudging the wolf's lifeless body with her foot. “How? Sharp hearing? A sense of smell?”

“My brother was a fascinator. One of the most powerful. He could bend anyone's thoughts. Not mine though. And the ghost dog's magic is partly of bending thoughts as well as light.”

“And you bent his mind in turn. Broke it completely. He may not recover.” Just like that she passed judgement on him. She'd been wanting to for a day and a half. The whole office had, ever since they'd heard what he'd done. Warden Jones had been quite strident with her complaint, making sure that everyone in the department knew what he'd done. She'd called him a lot of names too, only some of them professional.

“After what he did to my family? To my own daughter? I should have actually burnt him alive!” James was in no mood to listen to her judgement, or rehash what he'd done. “You have no right to judge me! Not on that.”

“He was a defenceless prisoner.” Yasmin wasn't backing down.

And really he had to admire her for that. Once he had been the same. He had believed in law and rights and all of those things. Until he had run head long into the world of the magical and realised they were a luxury he couldn't afford. These people were just too dangerous. And Francis despite everything she seemed to want to believe in, was the worst.

“Francis destroyed my parents, leaving them broke and destitute. He completely ruined my wife, stealing her from me for fun and then using her as a weapon against me. And then he forced her to sell my eight year old daughter to a child sex ring. Until you've walked in those sorts of shoes you don't get to judge me.”

Should he have said that? James didn't know. He didn't even know what the others knew about his past. Will knew, but other than him James didn't know. But he suspected from the look of horror that crossed Yasmin's face when he said it, that she hadn't known. The look of shock and horror though wouldn't last. Soon it would be replaced by the one emotion he found more difficult to deal with – pity. He didn't want to see that on her face. He especially didn't want to hear the apology that he knew would be coming. So he marshalled his wits and started giving her orders.

“Now you need to go with the woman and take her statement. She may respond better to you as a woman. Especially when she knows you're a meta who can keep her safe. Tell her whatever you need to say to get some answers. And get some wards on her to protect her from the detonator.”

“And you?”

“I'm going home. The trouble's over for the night and it's only two days to Friday. I have an email to write.”

“An email? You should be in the interrogation.” Yasmin sounded surprised that he was even thinking of leaving. But really she was distracted, her thoughts on what he'd revealed about his past. He could see it in her eyes.

“Actually I need to be as far away from it as possible. That woman is never going to talk to me. Try to kill me maybe. Probably. Talk to me? No. Not in a million years. And if I'm even in her sight all she's going to be able to think about is how much she hates me. She's grieving. She's angry. Her instinct is to lash out. And there is absolutely nothing I can do to change that. The only leverage I could use against her would be to scare her some more. Or maybe even lay some guilt on her. But that would be cruel. I might even break her completely. I don't think you'd like that.”

She wouldn't. He saw Yasmin's amber eyes widen in horror at what he was suggesting. Maybe she'd spent too long around Warden Jones. Maybe she was just a better person than he was. Or maybe she was simply feeling overwhelmed and couldn't take anymore.

“So?”

“So go do your job. Sympathise with her. Tell her that I'm an arsehole. Tell her you want to put me up on charges for excessive force. Tell her whatever you have to, to get her to talk to you. But above all do not make excuses for me. The instant you do that you'll become her enemy too.”

“That's –.”

“That's interrogation.” James stopped her before she could argue anymore. “It's not about beating the suspects with rubber hoses. It's about using the right tactics to get the truth. The right person asking the right questions in the right way. Interrogation is an art.”

“But for tonight your goal isn't to get answers. You won't get any. Ask the questions. She has to know that you want the answers. But don't push. This is a woman lost in grief. She's trying to deal with that. And she's also been controlled by some sort of fascinator. For the moment though she'll be incapable of understanding that. For her we are the enemy. I am the face of that enemy.”

“Your job is to show her that some of her ideas about the Illuminati are wrong. That we aren't all monsters. And that some of us do care. So you need to be sympathetic – though you can't agree with what she says. Tell her that what's happened was a tragedy, but don't allow her to say it was our crime. Be strong on that. Because ultimately she is going to have to face the fact that she came here with her ghost wolf to commit murder. That that was the decision that got her creature killed.”

“That'll crush her.” Yasmin's eyes flashed in warning.

“But it's the truth and we don't hide from the truth. And what will save her is when she understands that she was controlled. Your job is to get her to that point so that she gives up the name.” He understood what the woman needed only too well. Because it was the same thing that his ex-wife needed to help her crawl out of her personal darkness. It was also the one thing he could never give her. Sheryl was not one of the gifted. She could not be told that there was magic in the world. And so she would have to live for the rest of her life thinking she had chosen to sell their daughter to the child sex slavers without ever being able to understand why. That was what was destroying her. And it was beyond cruel. This woman would be luckier.

“You find the fascinator and the detonator and I'll hunt them down.”

With that James left Yasmin and headed for his car, uncaring that she was still standing there in shock, no doubt thinking that he truly was an arsehole. She didn't understand. Few did. He was in the end exactly what he had to be. An investigator. He did his job and he did it well. And if they thought he was too cold, so be it.

Chapter Nine

James sat in his car, watching the front of the church as he waited for his prey to arrive. He knew it wouldn't be long. The service started at half ten and it was already twenty past. He had only another ten minutes to go. And despite being hunted, his prey would come. James knew that because he was starting to understand the crime. Better than the criminals themselves. And everything revolved around this church.

Natasha – the woman who had attacked him in the garage – had taken a surprising amount of time to crack. Not because she was trying to be obstructive or because she was protecting others. Mostly it was because she was still in deep shock following the death of her animal companion. Fenris had come to her when she'd turned thirteen and they had been together ever since. Fifteen years. Whether in fact the wolf was her lover as the gossips would have it or not, that sort of bond could not be broken easily. Fenris was family. Lover or brother, it didn't matter which.

Gaining her cooperation had been tricky. And really it had only started after they'd held a funeral for her companion. That had been Yasmin's idea, and he had to admit it had been a good one.

Of course there was one other confounding factor. The influence of the fascinator was still with her. Not everyone was as certain of that as he was. Will had his doubts. Daniels poured scorn on the whole idea saying that there could be no unknown fascinator in the country. They had all been identified. The danger they posed was too great to let one slip through the Illuminati's net. But James was sure of it, and unexpectedly Yasmin was in his corner. She said she could feel the residue of the magic. Besides, every time he heard Daniels saying that there couldn't be an unknown fascinator around he remembered his brother. Francis had been an unknown fascinator right up until the end.

And there were ways that fascinators could remain hidden. Francis had been unknown because their parents had been distrustful of the Illuminati. They had not registered their gifts with them. So if neither parent was registered, than no one thought to check the children. That was the true guilt his parents lived with. In this case though the means by which their fascinator had remained unknown was simpler. He wasn't from North America. Daniels might scoff at that, but James was sure.

As far as James was concerned this could only be the work of a fascinator. Grief and shock might have robbed the wolf mistress of her ability to hear the fascinator's commands any more. But whoever the fascinator was had been speaking to her for a long time. Months or perhaps even years. Possibly he had been speaking to her ever since she had come to the country a couple of years before. Dripping his poison steadily into her soul. Her mind had been well and truly bent long before she had been given the command to kill him. And so they had to get past the deeply entrenched layers of lies that had comprised her world.

Natashi had been led to believe that the Illuminati were evil. That they had repressed her people for centuries. Who her people actually were James wasn't sure. He suspected Natasha didn't know either. But she did “know” that the Illuminati were trying to take over the world. Dominating everyone who had a gift. And the hunters were their most dangerous soldiers. It was the stuff of a conspiracy theorist's nightmares – and James’ would be killer believed it absolutely.

That was why she'd come after him. It was also James assumed why her giant friend had come after him. In their world he was the enemy. The sharp point of the sword tearing them apart. He was a hunter and they were the hunted.

In actual fact he hadn't hunted either of them. They weren't on his radar. They weren't on anyone's. He didn't actually know any of the members of the church. He'd never even heard of the Church of the Second Chance before. And all of the terrible stories she'd told the others about what he'd done to them were just that – stories. As were the tales of the dead and missing. But they were real to her. So when she'd attacked him she hadn't been trying to kill him out of vengeance or hatred or anything like that. She'd been protecting her people. The other members of the congregation.

It had taken days to get to that point. Days in which she gave up very little. In fact she'd spent a lot of that time simply sitting, staring blankly at the walls, and sometimes crying silently. But during that time she did get to hear the other side of the story. More importantly she watched what they showed her. And that included the videos of her friend blowing up. Dimetrie. They had a name for the giant now. And though Natasha still hated James with a passion, she had finally accepted that he hadn't killed her friend. That another of her friends had. Sza. Sza – she had no last name for him – was the only detonator she knew. And he also attended the church. In fact he was devout.

James watched as Sza – a short Mongolian man just as she'd described – walked up the street towards the church.

James was there to arrest him.

But not immediately James decided as he watched the man walk up the street cautiously, checking both sides as he travelled, looking for any sign he was being followed. James was curious. First about the detonator. To look at him you wouldn’t think he was dangerous. Short and of stocky build, he had black hair tied back in a ponytail and sported a long thin beard. His skin was what would be described as swarthy, but James would have said it was the skin of someone who had spent his entire life out in the sun. He did look odd, but not the sort of man who could simply blow another up with a thought. Not even the sort who would. There was nothing in his face that said murderer. Nothing that said he was cold. Frightened, but not cold. But then most murderers didn't.

James also wanted to know what this was about. And somehow he suspected it had nothing to do with anything the wolf mistress had been told. That was just the cover story.

Natasha didn't know that. Dimetrie probably hadn't known it. And Sza he suspected wouldn't know it either. They were all just new arrivals in the country who had been drawn to a church service for the gifted. No doubt they had been told it would be a way of meeting others like themselves in this new land. In reality James suspected, the church had been a way for the ringleader of this little circus to start recruiting. And James felt sure the fascinator’s agenda was not one the others knew about. Nor that it was a godly one.

The Church of the Second Chance might claim to be a Christian mission set up to minister to the needs of the gifted, but everything about it said to James that it had a very different purpose.

From the outside it looked like a typical church with the arched heavy wooden doors and the cross atop the steeple. The people attending it probably thought it was one. Certainly they had dressed up in their Sunday finest to attend. But every instinct within James was telling him that it was something else. A rival organisation to the Illuminati perhaps. One being set up right under their noses. Alternatively it might be the start of a new crime syndicate being formed. One that used the gifted for its own ends. It could even be a political movement. Whatever it was though, it was trouble. And as he watched Sza walk up the concrete steps and in through the huge double doors, James only became more certain of that.

James felt sure that many of these people’s gifts would not be registered with the Illuminati.  Some of them might also be illegal immigrants. They were undocumented. Not so far as the government was concerned – or actually maybe some of them were, he didn't know and the Illuminati didn't care – but they were gifted people who had arrived in the country and told no one. Probably because a fascinator had convinced them not to.

That was a mistake. While the Illuminati might not care about the legality of their entry into the country, they did care about these people’s gifts not being registered with them. And they were very insistent that all of the gifted be registered. It was one of their rules. But the trio involved in the attacks on him weren’t and hence they had been unable to find any record relating to the giant, Sza or to Natasha. And here he had a church, perhaps with a hundred or more gifted souls, many of whom were probably also unknown to the Illuminati. That was a problem.

It was also strange. Why would these people not have reported to the local Illuminati hall when they'd arrived in the country? Even if they didn't want to report to immigration, it would still have been the smart thing to do. Anyone with the gift would surely know that. The Illuminati were regulators in the magical world, but they weren't monsters. And why make trouble for themselves if they didn't have to? Then again, why hadn't his parents? He still didn't understand that.

“All right people, stay tight and watch. Listen over the link. Detain anyone who leaves – quietly. And wait for my order.”

The German would be proud of him James thought. Here he was, not just calling for back up but coming to the church with a small army of people. That had to be seen as a positive. Though he might be less pleased with the rest of his plan. Certainly the others had been critical when they'd found out barely an hour before. Will had called him a fool. Yasmin had told him he was suicidal. Daniels had asked him what sort of funeral he wanted. West and Peters had shaken their heads in disbelief. But it was his plan and it had been approved. The orders had come down from the elders for everyone. The plan was a go.

In the end they had to know who their enemy was.

The German might also have something to say about his paranoia. James still suspected that there was a mole somewhere in their organisation. And so he'd taken steps to make sure that no word of the plan could be leaked to the enemy. His own office had only been informed of the operation an hour before, and everyone had been watched ever since, just to make sure no one tried to make contact with anyone from the outside. They didn't like that, which was another reason they were upset with him. Regardless, he doubted any warning could have gone out.

So now not only was his entire team on hand, all of them wearing jackets that proudly proclaimed them as members of Immigrations and Customs – ICE agents – they also had another dozen men with them all in the same jackets. ICE was a useful cover – especially here as all they needed to tell anyone was that they were looking for illegal immigrants. And in fact they were. It was just that those they were looking for were actually unregistered with the Illuminati. 

At half past ten exactly James got out of the car, tightened his duffel coat around him since there was a cool wind blowing, and wandered over the road to the church. He had a service to attend. A sermon to hear. And probably a priest to apprehend. Because who else, he thought, as he walked up the steps, would have greater control of people than the priest? It was a natural position for a fascinator to assume.

This was the part of the plan that everyone thought was madness. That he went in alone into what could be the heart of enemy territory wearing nothing but a wire. But James knew it had to be done. Someone had to hear what was happening. And he backed himself to be clever and quick enough to get away if he had to. Besides, he was also armed. If everything went wrong he would still be alright. He hoped. But his hands were still a little clammy in his pockets.

Inside, the church looked like any other. There were dark wooden floors and white painted walls. The roof beams were exposed to reveal the gabled roof. It was a long and narrow building, with the centre aisle barely wide enough for two people to walk down side by side, and rows of hard wooden pews on both sides. Up at the front James could see a traditional altar table covered with a white cloth embroidered with a gold cross. There was a small stone fountain to the right for baptisms. To the left stood the priest’s lectern. At the far end of the church behind the altar table was a stained glass window with a scene from the crucifixion.

It could have been any typical country church, despite being near the docks. Perhaps even a Catholic church, though he wasn't familiar enough with them to be sure. But it wasn't. Because walking in through the double doors James felt an immediate chill. There was something very wrong here. But was that the church or the people?

Still, he played his part. When nobody noticed him or even said anything much to him he accepted a hymn book from the usher, nodded his thanks and took a seat in one of the rear pews. No one seemed any the wiser that a hunter was among them. No one even seemed suspicious.

Certainly no one said anything. But then why would they? No one would recognise him. He had taken a leaf from the Illuminati's book and come in disguise. Not a magical disguise – in a place filled with gifted that would have been spotted in an instant. Instead he’d used a simple one. He wore a light coloured duffel coat that ran to his knees and had the collar turned up as if he was cold. He had heavy glasses on – though the lenses in them were completely flat since he had perfect vision. And to complete things he was wearing a long blond wig, totally unlike his normal dark close cropped hair. He hated the wig, but together with the glasses and the raised collar it reframed his face, making him look completely different. If anyone knew what the hunter for New York looked like, they still wouldn't recognise him. Not unless they looked closely. And why would they? He was just another church goer.