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Revenge? The Shepherd didn’t strike me as a hotheaded, “revenge at all costs” type. He was more of a calculating, “friz-ice in his veins” kind of enemy.
I replayed the chronology of the events in my head, trying to find some form of connection. First, Red got jumped by reeves and had his neck scratched. Next, he and Julie went to look for her mother at the Sisters’ gathering place. From there, I took Julie home. Red followed us and gave Julie a monisto. The reeves attacked Julie. Then I left Julie in the vault and the reeves attacked me.
That last bit made no sense. An attack on me and Julie in my apartment I could understand. Then, the odds were clearly in the Shepherd’s favor. But attacking me the second time, when I had a werewolf and a vampire with me? And out in the open? It’s almost as if he had been desperate.
And how did they find me? They didn’t track me by scent. Atlanta’s streets are too polluted to provide a good scent trail. They didn’t track me by sight, either. They would’ve had to be close to do so, and Derek would’ve smelled them.
The only way they could have tracked me was by magic.
Red had said that reeve hair grabbed like a lasso. The hair was only active during a magic wave. Then the reeves attacked my apartment, also during the magic wave. And finally, they struck at me just when the magic wave had ended. It was as if an invisible magic scent somehow stained Red, then Julie, then me, and the reeves followed it like hounds.
Red, Julie, me. Was there a pattern here? What could’ve connected us all? Perhaps Red became polluted with some weird residual magic. Julie touched Red, and I touched Julie, transferring the traces onto myself. But residual magic usually didn’t survive technology, and the magic had been shifting like crazy.
Maybe I was thinking about it wrong. Maybe the reeves were tracking something specific. Something that exuded a definite power signature. Something that only acted up during the magic waves, a beacon like Whomper. Something that passed from Red to Julie and from Julie to me. But what?
The monisto. Red gave it to Julie, and Julie gave it to me.
I pulled the necklace out and tried to examine it, glancing at the road once in a while. A simple cord, knotted together from dirty shoelaces. There were probably two dozen coins on it. Let’s see, a Kennedy half-dollar, a quarter, a twenty-peso coin, a Georgia peach quarter—wow, rare, a token from the mall carousel with a little horse on it, a Chinese coin with a square hole in the middle—where did he get this one? A miniature, dollar-sized CD marked Axe Grinder III, a video game maybe? A rough disk with a loop in the center to pass the cord through. A Republica NC Pilipinas coin, Philippines? A little triangular charm with a loop on top, inscribed with an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol. A round coin, too worn to determine if anything was on it originally. A square bronze charm with a rune on it. A Jefferson nickel…
One of those was special. Which one? It would have to be one of the older-looking ones. Of course, with my luck, the Shepherd could be a crazy numismatist just dying for a Kennedy fifty-cent piece.
Maybe I could set a trap with a handful of change. Here, Shepherd, here boy, look, I have a Susan B.
Anthony dollar, you know you want it.
I put the monisto away. I could stare at it all night trying to pinpoint the reeve magnet, or I could just ask Julie, the human m-scanner extraordinaire, which one felt weird to her. If I was right.