Shifting Stars by Gary Stringer (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

Catriona rewarded Jacob’s support in the bedroom that night, and a few days later, the day before Renjaf’s next delivery was due, Catriona and Jacob set their plan in motion.

A ‘Trickster’ did indeed appear in Compton and start causing mischief. Jacob delivered as usual, despite having to track down a few items that went ‘missing’ from his cart. (Actually, hidden by Catriona in pre-arranged places.) Jacob was commended for his efforts and reminded that he need not make his deliveries the next day if the Trickster were still around. Jacob said he was determined to go anyway – after all, it was only a Trickster out there, wasn’t it?

That first day, the Trickster was tolerated as people simply hoped it would get bored and go away, but by the second day, they’d decided enough was enough and did what people always did in these situations: call in a demon hunter.

Demon hunters loathe Trickster cases. With all the second-hand rumours and false sightings flying around, getting to the truth is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Usually, some novice demon hunter is sent in to sort it out, both because none of the more experienced ones can be bothered and because they had to do it when they were novices. In fact, by Catriona’s time, it had become a rite of passage for some young demon hunters. Especially ones who felt they had something to prove.

Chapter 7

The second day of the Trickster attack on Compton was the day the rains came, although Cat and Jacob both knew it was neither a real Trickster nor a real attack. It was, however, real rain, in case you were wondering. Weather notwithstanding, Jacob set out on his deliveries as usual, ‘intending’ to do his full rounds, including going all the way out to Renjaf’s tower. Along the way, however, true to Catriona’s ‘prediction,’ he managed to lose his horse. Naturally, everybody would blame the Trickster demon, as they always did in these cases, and in a way, they were right. Just not in the usual way. The horse was, in fact, not really a horse at all, but Catriona herself.

Where was his real horse, you may ask, gentle reader?

Well, that morning, my mother had got up early, taking her ‘sort-of-Jacob’ form and ‘stealing’ Bonnie. If anybody happened to see them that morning, in the dark, from a distance, it would not arouse any suspicion. She had considered stealing the horse as the Trickster, but the last thing she wanted was to attract the attention of the demon hunter she had heard was in town.

The previous evening, when going over the plan, she had asked Jacob to draw up a list of all the locations in and around Compton that he would look for Bonnie if she ever wandered off. Places where a horse could be safely left for a few hours.

Now, having been ‘stranded,’ he could still make deliveries within the boundaries of the town itself, though it would obviously take longer, while at the same time ‘looking’ for his horse. But Renjaf’s delivery was out of the question, so he simply took his packages back to the depot and ensured that a message was sent. During the day, as he did his rounds, Jacob planned to ‘look’ for Bonnie in all the places he usually would, making sure that he ‘found’ the correct one as late as possible.

Meanwhile, Catriona made sure that the Trickster was seen all over Compton that morning, never staying in one place for too long. It wasn’t easy, staying two steps ahead of the demon hunter all that time. She had nearly been caught on one occasion, already, but had managed to give her the slip by running around a corner, shapeshifting into her red-banded falcon form and flying away.

Around midday, Cat decided she had pushed her luck enough for one day and, seeing an inn up ahead, she decided to stop for a drink and a bite to eat. Cat rolled her eyes at the tacky name ‘FaerWay Tavern’ – obviously making a ‘clever pun’ out of her Faery heritage. The sign – a nonsensical tiny winged Faery hovering above a road – was even worse, and as a rule, she would refuse to go inside on principle. But going anywhere else would waste time she didn’t have, and she really was famished, so she stuck to her plan.

When she stepped outside again, she began walking, searching for a suitably secluded spot to shift to her falcon form once more, so she could quickly fly to Renjaf’s tower to watch for him leaving. She had to walk quite a distance away from the town centre, as the early afternoon was a busy time in Compton. It didn’t matter that the Trickster wouldn’t be around the rest of the afternoon; no doubt the rumour mill would be enough to keep the demon hunter busy.

Unfortunately, Catriona was so busy checking all around to make sure no-one would see her, that she failed to look where she was putting her feet and stepped right into a demon trap. A small bubble of magic surrounded her, keeping her inside.

“No, no, no!” she cursed herself. “I don’t have time for this!”

She tried to use her druid magic but cut off from nature as she was, it wouldn’t respond. Nothing they had taught her at wizard college would help her in this situation, either. Attempts to retrieve her staff from her pocket dimension also failed to yield results, not that she could have used it, anyway. Even if she could unlock its power, when her Angel spoke of a ‘dire emergency of worldwide cataclysmic proportions,’ it was unlikely that ‘getting out of a demon trap that you blundered into and is only there because you’re running around, pretending to be a Trickster,’ is quite what they had in mind.

Fortunately, the demon hunter came by before long to check on her trap. She cut quite the imposing figure, dressed all in