Without another word, she went inside the cabin, leaving the door open for us to follow.
“Who has taken them?” Joe asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how they could have identified them as Tess’s aunts. It’s not like anyone even knows she’s a Wanderer.”
“Did they follow you to their house?”
“No chance. I’ve been watching for a tail ever since we were ambushed twice in the last week. I even cast a glamour after the last one that would have hidden us from any magical divination. I just don’t understand how they’re doing it.”
Joe nodded his head thoughtfully. I recognized the trait.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking that if you were shielded from magical tracking, then maybe someone used something mundane to track you. Have your possessions been out of your control for any length of time?”
“Not recently, not since New Braunfels,” I said.
“But you said they’ve been tracking you since then.”
“Yeah, but a harpy had been following us. Beast took care of it. The next attack didn’t occur for days, and I don’t know how they found us that time either.”
“Perhaps you should check your possessions for a bug?” Joe suggested.
“A bug? Spy stuff? How…” I trailed off. Did they make bugs that would track us across the miles we’d traveled?
“All right, I think I have a spell that will identify things that don’t belong to me. I’ll try it right now,” I said and went inside.
Joe followed, and I heard the door close behind me. The door to the bedroom Tess and I shared was open, and I could see her pulling on her leathers.
“In a hurry?” I called.
“You aren’t?” Tess snapped. “These are my aunts, damn it.”
“They gave us until sunrise. We have time to prepare.”
“Yeah, yeah, plenty of time. Look, we’ll go to their house and find Aunt Ashley’s hairbrush. Her hair was long enough to leave plenty of hair behind. You can cast that tracking spell, and we’ll hunt them down and rescue them,” Tess snapped up the zipper on her jacket and reached for her boots.
“Good plan, Tess. I’ve got something to do first. It won’t take but a few minutes. Bring me our saddlebags.”
She frowned at me, but gathered up our saddlebags in one hand and her boots in her other and joined me in front of Joe’s fireplace.
“What’s so important that you have to do it before we get my Aunts back?”
“Joe offered a suggestion that these people are tracking us through some kind of mundane bug planted on our stuff.”
Tess glanced at Joe and then back at me. She nodded. “Makes sense, you do have blinders on when it comes to modern technology.”
I frowned at her, but she was right. If mundanes were going to keep attacking us, then I was going to have to get up to speed.
Taking my larger grimoire from my saddlebags, I summoned the appropriate spell, and when the pages stopped flipping past, it lay open before me. I read the spell once, noted the pattern and the runes to use and started to speak.
“Hey! Aren’t we doing it together?” Tess interrupted.
“Yes, sorry, my bad. Give me your hand.”
We clasped hands and meshed. I released her hand and held out the grimoire. She took it and at my nod, began to read the spell. Simultaneously, I traced the pattern in the air above our saddlebags. There was a snap of power being released as the spell completed. Our bags glowed for a few seconds and then the glow faded until only one spot on one of my bags still glowed.
“Ah,” Joe commented.
“Looks like you were right, Joe.” I opened the saddlebag, and the glow intensified. A small metal object the size of a quarter was glowing in the bottom of my bag. Without the spell, I wouldn’t have found it without dumping the entire contents of my bags onto the floor.
I pinched it between thumb and index finger and lifted it out.
“So that’s how they’ve been following us,” Tess said.
“I guess so. Now what should I do with it?”
“Can you follow its signal back to whoever put it there?” Tess asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t see how. Besides, I imagine that the Shade who possessed Laura did it. Not many people have had access to my bags.”
“So it was working with this group of mercenaries?”
“One way or another. It could have been working with Rowle, and he could have hired them after she failed to stop us. The tracker may have just been insurance for Rowle. He could have guessed that I wouldn’t suspect him of using a mundane tracker.”
“So then why haven’t they attacked us here?” Tess asked.
“I imagine the signal is blocked by the wards on Joe’s cabin. It’s pretty potent.”
“So, then when we stopped at Emily’s, it showed us inside their ward?”
I shrugged. “They did have that helicopter after us shortly after we arrived. I guess they were tracking us all afternoon and when we stopped, they investigated who lived there.”
“So I put my Aunts in danger,” Tess snarled.
“It’s not your fault. I should have thought of checking for a mundane tracker.” I canceled the spell and dropped the mesh with Tess. “Give me a minute to put my leathers on, and we’ll go. I’ve had about all I’m going to tolerate from these mundanes.”
I tossed the tracker into the fireplace and went to dress.
Chapter 22
Therese
Rafe dressed quietly while I inwardly fumed with myself over getting my Aunts kidnapped. I should have thought of a tracker being in our stuff. We hadn’t used them in the ’Stan, but it had been part of our in-country briefing. Apparently, the bad guys liked to use them.
I checked my crossbow and quarrels while Rafe dressed. I had a baker’s dozen of the deadly little shafts with their strange metal broadheads. Seeing as how the mundanes who’d taken my Aunts hadn’t had much in the way of magic, I’d probably have more use for
