Taken

Chapter 12

Night fell, cold and windy.

The first problem was the address. It was a strip mall. Or, more precisely, it was one of those little mail shops in a strip mall, the kind of place where you could pay a monthly fee and rent a box. It looked like a street address, and it was the sort of step a woman who needed privacy would take.

Which was interesting. And a dead end.

But he had another card up his sleeve.

I’ve got night school, too. I’m studying to be a social worker. Which meant all he had to do was find out about night classes. A city this size wouldn’t have too many night-school programs, and all he had to do was start with the biggest and work down. Any place she was five nights a week would give him a trail.

He watched the mail stop from a pool of darker shadow across the street for a little while, though, wondering why she had this address on her driver’s license. He hunched inside the denim jacket that had been Kyle’s, always a little too big on his younger brother. It still smelled like him, though, a thorn of guilt spiking through Zach’s chest every few inhales.

He suffered it. They hadn’t had a chance to sing Kyle to the moon yet. He had to hope his brother would understand, that the majir had explained everything—and that Kyle had forgiven him.

He could hope, couldn’t he?

Zach shook himself. Come on. Concentrate on the problem at hand. A maiden name, a mail drop, no friends to speak of, and flinching whenever a husband was mentioned. It added up to a picture, and not a pretty one.

Still, could be wrong. Assumptions, you know. Fastest way to make a situation worse than it has to be.

Yeah, right. He could be wrong like the moon was made of cheese and crackers.

His Family was safe as possible, in a motel at the edge of town with the van just in case. Waiting for him to bring the shaman back. This was the first time he’d been alone in years, and he didn’t like it. There were crowds of prey around, and he had to think this was hostile upir-laden territory. Not to mention he had to keep his temper under control until he found her, but he had to do it without others of his kind around to keep him occupied and remind him he was human.

Most of all, though, he had too much time to brood when he was alone. Too much time to remember, and to think about mistakes.

It had been a cold, gray day of driving as fast as he dared, and the sound of city traffic had sharp edges, burrowing into his tired head. He could go for a couple more days without sleep, but he wanted to bring their shaman back before dawn. God only knew what would happen without him around to defend his Family.

Were the upir after them or after her? He just didn’t know enough.

But why would upir be after her? It was just a random attack by a rabid sucker, right? So why would seven more of them, all too young to know what to do with their new reflexes, go after a group of Carcajou, even a small group with a shaman so new she didn’t know what the hell to do with herself?

It’s a puzzle, and a nasty one. Work on it later. Find her now.

The biggest campus with a night-school social worker program was a community college on the bus lines. The parking lots were huge, but there was no trace of her there or in any of the buildings. The second-largest was vaguely in the same part of town as the mail stop, another hour or two on the bus as the time ticked away, hopping off to find the campus was a good four-block walk away. She wouldn’t be in any condition to go to class, but he’d be able to find a trail and her real address, and—

His head came up and he tested the wind. There it was. Ice, moonlight, brunette spice, and a sharp fresh note of weariness and pain. Strong, very strong.

The smell was a trail as wide as a highway to his sensitive nose, like a deer path in the woods. She’d walked this way less than three hours ago. He could almost taste each individual footprint, and he could track the scent backward, too, working along a flaring, fading drift of more pain and heaviness, and a pungent undertone of fear that prodded and teased at his already-fraying temper.

But the most important thing was the familiarity, and the musk spinning through the scent. She had been with his Family long enough to be theirs. The relief tasted like wine and fresh blood against his palate, a heady mix.

Well, he thought, that’s half the battle won. Now let’s go see if we can find the war.