Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,63
a decade, and we were off.
We were looking for a big colonial style place: white walls, gable windows, and columns on either side of the double front door. A wide lawn with a tree that shaded the driveway. And, most importantly—because there were probably a thousand houses in the suburbs that fit the rest of the description—Snap had also caught a glimpse of a bronze statue of a rearing horse poised next to the front steps. We just had to hope it was still there after however many years it’d been since Meriden had last worked in the office building.
I opened up my map app. “Keep going north on this street until I tell you otherwise,” I ordered Ruse. “We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Navigate away, Miss Blaze!”
Receiving only a couple of honks—Ruse wasn’t so smooth at the whole changing lanes thing—we made it around the edges of downtown and up into the wealthier district where I’d set more than one collector’s home on fire. I got the incubus weaving up and down the streets while the rest of us scanned the houses beyond our windows.
After a couple of hours, my vision was starting to blur from staring so long. Snap made a soft hissing sound against his teeth. “I’m not seeing the same one—not the way I tasted it from the mug. I don’t know for sure it was in this city.”
“He might live farther out of town,” I admitted with a grimace. It would take days to scour the entire greater metropolitan area—if even that got us what we wanted. Maybe I’d have to put our fates in the hands of a black-market hacker cabal after all.
“We’re here now—might as well give it our best shot,” Ruse said with good cheer. I guessed he enjoyed driving.
We continued on until my stomach started to grumble that it needed something more substantial than the bag of barbeque chips and mug of coffee I’d already downed as a sort of lunch. At a particularly loud gurgle, Thorn turned in his seat with a questioning look. With the final notes of The Joshua Tree fading from the speakers, I admitted defeat. We definitely still hadn’t found what we were looking for.
“Let’s head back and grab some dinner, and I’ll try to figure out how to reach out to my internet associates in a way that won’t get us killed.”
“I approve of that plan,” Ruse said. Even he was starting to sound a bit weary.
We cruised down one last residential street, heading south. Just as the houses started shrinking and the lawns were getting scruffier, Snap jerked toward his window.
“Stop! There, on that street we just passed. Turn around!”
We got five honks for Ruse’s next maneuver, pulling a U-ey and then a left on the heels of his companion’s urgent plea. Snap gestured to a house three from the corner: white walls gone a bit dingy, paint flaking from the columns on either side of the door, a rather bedraggled oak tree by the driveway. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off a tarnished statue of a rearing horse next to the front steps.
Ruse let out a low whistle. “Nice job.”
He had enough sense of stealth to drive a little farther before parking outside a house on the other side of the street. I squinted at the building Snap had indicated, noting a key feature he hadn’t picked up on from his vision.
“Meriden doesn’t live in the whole place. It’s divided into apartments. There are three different mailboxes beside the door.”
Ruse motioned toward the driveway that ran alongside the house to a garage farther back. “And another around the side there.” Another door stood atop a couple of concrete steps with its own mailbox, maybe a separate entrance to the basement or a back apartment.
“It seems we can be reasonably confident that the object of our interest resides somewhere in that place,” Thorn said. He glanced at me. “We should investigate while you stay here, m’lady. We don’t know how closely Meriden’s home might be monitored. You can keep watch in case he leaves while we’re conducting our search.”
“I don’t even know what he looks like,” I protested. Like hell did I want to hang back in the car like a kid waiting for her parents to run an errand. Sure, the shadowkind could slink around unseen and I couldn’t, but this guy had been working with—or on?—shadowkind for years. He might be able to detect them anyway. They shouldn’t have to take all