now back on the road. ‘No. They don’t care about blending in. They don’t need to blend in. Only animals that can get eaten need to learn how to camouflage themselves. These guys are at the top of the food chain. They don’t need to hide. They have nothing to fear from humans.’
He paused, as though to let Evie fully comprehend what he was saying. ‘We’re their only threat,’ he continued, ‘and when you colonise another realm you do that by first ridding yourself of any threats to your own dominance in that realm’s eco-system. That would be us. It’s Darwinism. The strongest species wins.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Evie asked, leaning forward between the two front seats. ‘They’re going to kill all the Hunters in this realm? That’s their big plan? So they can what? Hang out here at the all-you-can-eat-buffet for the rest of eternity?’
‘Yes,’ Ash nodded.
Fear wrapped itself around her insides, but Evie forced herself to ignore it. ‘So,’ she said, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt, ‘I guess we had better find them first. Any ideas where they’re hanging out?’
‘No.’
‘But they feed right? Any patterns to the feeding?’
‘Up in the hills, along Mulholland and in Beverly Hills. That’s where most of the killings have taken place.’
‘Expensive tastes,’ Evie remarked. ‘You think they’re all hanging out together in some mansion feeding off the rich and famous?’
‘Do the rich taste better, do you think?’ Vero asked.
‘Must be all that organic food,’ Ash said, giving her a sly smile.
‘More like all that blow,’ Vero fired back. ‘Probably gives them a hit, like passive smoking.’
‘We need shadow blades,’ Evie said almost under her breath. The saw blade she’d thrown at the Original in the Bradbury building had bounced clean off him, as ineffectual as a rubber band. But the shadow blade had sliced through his throat as easy as a knife through butter frosting. ‘Do you have any?’ she asked half-jokingly.
‘Yeah, we went to Walmart and bought their entire stock of other-realm weapons,’ sneered Vero, twisting around to give Evie an exasperated look.
‘Hang on,’ Evie said, grabbing hold of a memory that had surfaced somewhere in the back of her hazed-out mind. ‘Margaret – didn’t she have one?’
‘What?’ both Vero and Ash exclaimed.
Evie nodded. ‘In her cabinet. I’m sure of it. When we went to her office that time, Cyrus was playing with it and she told him to put it back. I didn’t think about it when we were there but, yeah, I’m pretty sure it was a shadow blade.’
Vero glanced at Ash across the front seat. He turned to her and shrugged. ‘We may as well take a look,’ he said, and when she frowned he reached a hand over and patted her on the knee. ‘I promise if we can’t find a shadow blade you can try the grenade launcher.’
Chapter 11
Evie fell silent in the back of the car, thinking through everything she’d just discovered. A small voice in a far recess of her brain – a voice that she was duly trying to ignore – was urging her to reorganise her priorities. With so many new Thirsters on the streets and a coven of Originals to find and destroy, she knew she should think about parking the Victor issue.
But what if she focused on this and he slipped through her fingers? What if it was then too late for revenge? She couldn’t just put it to one side. Not now.
She turned it over in her mind and then figured that there was no harm in trying to do two things at once. She was a female of the species, after all. And they were in LA. It wouldn’t hurt for them to detour and try to discover what they could about Victor’s whereabouts. It would only take an hour or so. She pulled the map out with the address on and thrust it under Ash’s nose.
He glared at her in the rear-view mirror then exchanged a brief glance with Vero. Finally, barely suppressing the sigh, he tapped the address into the GPS.
Carter Holdings, the address on the letter she’d found in the store, turned out to be a squat brick building with metal shutters clamped over the windows. It was situated in an area so deserted and derelict that Evie half expected the building to be cordoned off with yellow tape. The street stank of urine and dead animal.
Evie crunched across a sidewalk littered with old syringes and dog mess until she