“So why make the deal with us in the first place?” Kirsten asked, worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth. “Why not just come here three years ago and put us in our place?”

“To buy time,” I suggested.

Jesse nodded. “I agree. The timing of this latest attack is bothering me. Scarlett has never left Shadow with a human for more than an hour or two, and her trip to Colorado was unplanned.” He glanced sideways at me, and I nodded, confirming it. I don’t care how good your evil empire is, no one could have known I was going to Boulder before I did. “I doubt the Luparii witches randomly showed up the night Scarlett left town—it’s too big of a coincidence. They’ve been watching her. There had to be a reason.”

A chill spread through me. They’d been watching me? Watching the cottage? “For how long? Since we captured Petra?” I asked.

Jesse shrugged, “There’s no way to know for sure, but I doubt it. Three years is a long time to surveil someone without them noticing.”

I nodded, trying to push away the sensation that my skin was crawling with bugs. “Okay, so they’ve been keeping an eye on me, waiting for a chance to take Shadow. But they could have attacked well before now. I had no idea they were in town; I wasn’t expecting it.”

“But if they put you out of commission first, Shadow wouldn’t have gone willingly, and it would have tipped off Dashiell and the others to their presence,” Jesse pointed out. “That’s why I think there’s a larger plan here.”

“Explain,” Dashiell demanded. Yeah, he was still mad.

“Killian said something about ‘them’ needing a couple of days,” Jesse said. “I think they originally planned something for a few days from now. Like I said, killing you and taking Shadow was just one part of that.” He glanced apologetically at me. “But then you left, and they panicked when they couldn’t find you. They also probably saw an opportunity to remove Shadow from the equation early.”

In a weird way, it actually made me feel a tiny bit better that the Luparii were planning something before I blew town. What had happened to Jesse was still my fault, but I didn’t deserve credit for the entire mess.

“Beltane is in a few days,” Kirsten offered.

Dashiell and Beatrice made little “hmm-ing” sounds, but Jesse shot me a confused look. “It’s the Wheel of the Year,” I explained. “Remember a few years ago, when Olivia and Mallory attacked Kirsten’s solstice party?” He nodded. “The winter solstice in December is the shortest night of the year. The summer solstice in June is the longest night of the year. If you picture the face of a clock, with winter solstice at twelve and summer solstice at six, that forms the Wheel of the Year.”

Kirsten was watching me with a tiny amused smile, probably wondering how much I’d been listening all the times she’d needed to explain this to me. “A regular clock has twelve points on it, but the Wheel of the Year has eight, which are the eight strongest times to use witch magic. Halfway between December and June is late March, which is called . . . um . . .” I looked at Kirsten for support.

“Ostara,” she supplied.

“Right. And halfway between Ostara and the summer solstice is Beltane. And that’s in two days.”

“Ostara and Beltane are the pagan names, from a western European tradition,” Kirsten added. “Very few traditions celebrated all eight holidays, until as recently as the 1950s, when British pagans finally put the Wheel of the Year together—”

“But they’re a convenient shortcut to describe the days when magic is objectively the strongest all over the world,” I broke in. I knew from past experience that Kirsten could go on for hours about how different cultures used different witch traditions, and we didn’t have that kind of time. “Bottom line: there’s symbolism, and there’s what works. For whatever reason, those eight days of the year work.”

“If they’re planning something big with witch magic, they might be aiming for that night,” Kirsten said.

“Or they might be using it as a misdirect, to attack the night before or after,” Dashiell pointed out.

“Well, whatever they might be planning, we need to find Shadow,” I said, making eye contact with each of them.

“Have you considered the possibility that they’ve already killed her?” Dashiell said, in a voice that was surprisingly gentle.

“How?” I asked. “Short of a nuke, I don’t know how you could kill a bargest quickly. If the Luparii have a simple way to do it, they would have killed her back at the cottage and saved the trouble of transporting her.”

“What about drowning?” Will offered. He said it suspiciously fast, and I wondered how much time he’d spent thinking about how to kill Shadow.

“How are you going to hold her under?” I countered. “She’s dense—heavy—but she can swim, and she can hold her breath a long time. Even if they still have her in that metal net, they’d need a way to hold the net underwater. Otherwise, there’s a good chance she could struggle out of it and kill them.” I took a deep breath and voiced my biggest fear. “Look, I’ve thought about this, back when Shadow first came to me. As far as I can tell, there are two ways to kill her. One would be to undo the bargest spell, but that requires a human sacrifice and a whole bunch of competent witches, not to mention some of the nightshades. It’s complicated. The other way—” My voice suddenly caught in my throat.

“Would be to starve her,” Jesse finished for me. His voice was grave.

I nodded. “She needs food and water like any other living creature. Her body requires fuel, and lots of it. It can heal itself, so she can probably last longer than ordinary dogs, but eventually she’s going to dehydrate or starve. All they have to do is put her in a cage somewhere and leave her.”

My voice was starting to tremble, so I forced myself to remember who I was talking to. Dashiell didn’t care about Shadow the way I did. I needed to use the things he did care about. I lifted my chin and looked at him directly. “There’s no reason for them to fly her back to Europe to starve her,” I told him. “Shadow is a powerful weapon. And I think she’s still here, at least in California.”

He nodded, understanding. “We may be able to recover her. And if they leave behind a group of witches to guard her, as I would do in their place, we can catch some of those who did this. All right. We go after Shadow.” He bared his teeth in what was really not a very nice smile. He was human in my presence, so it wasn’t vampire-scary. But it was still Dashiell-scary. “Where do we begin?”

Chapter 18

Where do you begin looking for a kidnapped dog monster?

My first thought was to try and trace the equipment necessary to contain a bargest, but that metal net Jesse had described wasn’t something you could get in LA—the werewolves would have found out by now and raised a stink—which meant they’d brought their own gear. And if they were planning to starve her to death, there was no point in trying to trace purchases of her specialized food.

That left trying to figure out where the Luparii might be staying, but we didn’t have any confirmation that they were still in LA County, and even if they were, thanks to Airbnb and the like, they could be anywhere. We didn’t even know how many people the Luparii might have brought with them to Los Angeles.

Dashiell said he would spend the remainder of the night looking at ways in and out of the city—given the heavy equipment, it seemed likely that the Luparii had arrived by private plane or ship, and Dashiell did a lot of business at the ports—and Kirsten agreed to put out feelers among her various contacts in the witch community, both here and in Europe. She’d also put all of her witches on alert for the Luparii magic.

Will would be busy trying to evacuate as many of his werewolves as he could from LA County, but he’d also have a couple of his best pack members sniff around, starting near the cottage and where Kirsten and Hayne had found Jesse’s unconscious body. They all knew Shadow’s scent. Even so, I didn’t have much hope for that panning out. Los Angeles was an insane amount of ground to cover.