Shadowed (Fated) (7 page)

‘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.

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.