Spirit of a Hunter

by Sylvie Kurtz

  The farmer leaned his weapon against a supporting beam and reached for the bale of hay in front of their hiding spot, grunting as he struggled to swing it down.

  The bug crawled around Sabriel’s scalp, inched along his nose, long legs popping in and out of his eyesight, revving his need to swat, spit, slap. Hell, of course it was a frigging spider.

  The farmer hefted the bale, exposing the tops of their heads to the fluorescent light bleeding up from below. It stretched shadows to the ceiling—the bales, his, hers.

  The spider’s sticky feet ambled over Sabriel’s lips. Pulse hammering madly, he screwed up his face. Still, stay still.

  With a rasp of breath, the farmer swung the bale from the loft to the barn floor below. Dust and bits of hay flew. The bale landed with a plop. The farmer reached for the shotgun.

  A muffled, thudlike choo came from Nora.

  The farmer squinted at the shadows, shotgun swinging into position.

  Sabriel shifted an arm, ready to deflect the shotgun’s barrel.

  The spider skittered across Sabriel’s cheek. His skin prickled, quivered, itched.

  The farmer leaned forward, poking the barrel of the shotgun ahead of him into the shadows.

  A ginger-colored cat sprang down from the top of the pyramid of bales to the farmer’s feet and rubbed against the farmer’s legs with a rusty engine purr.

  “You almost got yourself shot, cat,” old man Wagner said, brushing an arthritic hand across the ginger fur.

  The farmer took his time going down the ladder and adding hay to nets. The lights finally snapped off. The door rolled shut. Biting back a growl, Sabriel swatted at his head, desperately trying to dislodge the offensive spider.

  “What’s wrong?” Nora whispered, her voice tight and thready.

  “Nothing,” he said between clenched teeth. He could still feel the spider’s legs scampering all over his hair, but couldn’t see the damn thing.

  “Are they gone?”

  Figuring out Nora meant the Colonel’s men took him a second. “They won’t come back.”

  “Are you sure?” Her voice quavered.

  “They think old man Wagner gave us the shotgun welcome, too.”

  “What about the farmer?”

  Even with the spotlight the farmer had left burning in the yard, Sabriel couldn’t find the spider’s corpse. “He’ll be down till dawn unless those lights pop back on.”

  “So we’re safe?” she breathed on a long exhale.

  “For now. Get some sleep.”

  Sabriel swatted at his shoulders. Where the hell was the spider?

  “Are you okay?” she asked, curiosity now spicing her voice.

  “Fine,” he bit out.

  He finally plucked the spider with its ugly long legs from his collar and dangled it between two fingers.

  “What is it?” She rolled forward on her knees for a better look. “A spider? You’re afraid of a little spider?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “It’s not that little.”

  “Daddy longlegs are harmless.”

  His scowl deepened. “Better get some sleep while you can. We’re leaving at dawn.”

  Nora fell back on her rear and laughed, a low, soft sound replete with relief. “I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”

  With an exaggerated shudder, he disposed the spider’s carcass down the ladder. “Got bit by one of these suckers when I was a kid.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said gently, watching him with those big, brown eyes filled with compassion as he inspected his sleeping bag for uninvited guests. “But in an odd sort of way, that spiders creep you out makes me feel better.”

  “Glad I could be of help.” He shuffled into his sleeping bag and shut his eyes, only to have the sensation of a hundred spiders crawling all over him spring them open again.

  “It takes a big man to admit his fears.” She snugged deeper into her sleeping bag. “Not to let them get the better of him.” A certain wistfulness laced her voice.

  “Umph.”

  She rolled over toward him, looped one arm around his neck and pecked a kiss on his cheek. Soft, sweet and much too nice. “You’re still my hero.”

  Now he had something else to torture his mind, and he almost wished for the phantom spider’s return.

  * * *

  SLEEP ELUDED HIM. Sabriel spent the night in the fog of the netherworld, somewhere between dreaming and awake, where the gray shadows of his mistakes liked to parade and mock. Once Nora’s breathing slowed and evened, he reached into his pack for the cedar flute he’d forgotten to take out the last time he’d hiked. In the shadow of the loft opening, watching the night stir beneath him, he fingered the flute, careful not to make a sound.

  “What are you playing?” Nora asked sleepily. Still swaddled in her sleeping bag, she’d turned toward him and rested her weight on one elbow. The light of the spot outside gave her face both strength and softness and the play of contradictions stirred fascination.

  He stashed the flute in his pack. “Nothing.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I wasn’t playing.”

  “I heard the music of your fingering.”

  Sorrow blossoming into song, as Grandmother Serena would say. She’d given him his first flute for his fifth birthday—and taught him the healing comfort of music…and that of story. All it took was the smell of a campfire to bring her maple-sugar skin and smiling apple face to mind. How many nights had he spent enchanted by the music of her voice, retelling him the adventures of Gluskabe—the Abenaki trickster-hero?

  “You should sleep while you can,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “Someone has to stand guard.”

  “You said we were safe.” Her sleeping bag swished as she sat up. “I can take a turn.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “From Ranger School?”

  That was a topic he had no intention of discussing. “Your body needs rest to repair itself.”

  “I can’t sleep.” She shoved her fingers through her hair and shook her head. “All I can think about is Scotty. If he’s okay. If he’s scared. If I’ll find him in time.” Her hands landed back on her lap and her face turned sheepish. “Can you do that thing you did before? That Reiki?”

  Why not? It would relax her. One of them should sleep. “Lie down.”

  He shuffled over to where she lay and offered a small prayer before he placed his hands over her eyes and the prickly warmth of Reiki energy flowed through his palms.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “All the time. About everything.”

  “No talking.”

  “Other than spiders, what are you afraid of?”

  “I had three older brothers. The youngest of them was five years older than me. They were big and brawny and I was scrawny. While we were kids, the goal of their lives was to terrorize me.”

  “You’re not scrawny. Not anymore.”

  “Doesn’t mean fear goes away.”

  “Even now? You have to be as big as they are.”

  “We’re good friends now. But there’s always something else.”

  “Like Ranger School.”

  “Why are you stuck on that subject?”

  “Because it changed you. It changed Tommy. And I don’t understand why.”

  He was glad his hands hid the curious draw of her eyes. “Ranger School was hell. Every day I was afraid of freezing or starving or dying.”

  “But you made it.”

  “Because when I stumbled, I got up anyway.” And sometimes it had felt as if every joule of energy was being sapped straight from his blood.

  She was silent for a long while, and he could sense the turmoil of her ruminations.

  “The scar on your palm,” she said, “it matches the one on Tommy’s palm.”

  He snapped his hands away and remembered….

  “Blood brothers,” Tommy said, drawing the edge of his blade across his palm. The wall of water, veiling their hideaway, bapti
zed their vow.

  “Blood brothers,” Sabriel answered, cutting his own palm, then reached for Tommy’s hand. They shook, bloody palm to bloody palm, and Sabriel made a solemn promise. “I’ll watch your back.”

  “And I’ll watch yours.” Tommy had laughed then. “You’ll have the tougher job.”

  The strangled emotions of that summer when they’d both run away from pain returned, twisting through him like a heated knife. He’d never shared those feelings. He’d kept them packed away in deep parts of himself where even he couldn’t find them. But there was Nora, looking at him with those wide, old-soul eyes. She understood hell.

  He returned his hands to their position and relaxed until the energy flowed once more. “Tommy and I made a pact that summer. I broke that promise.”

  She traced the scar with the tip of her index finger, triggering a shower of sparks up his arms and a blast of need that made him want more. More contact. More sensation. More…her. He balled his hands until he had his body back under control, then placed them alongside her ears and continued with the Reiki.

  “Tell me about Anna,” she said.

  No, he thought. Then maybe. Maybe if Nora understood his failures, she wouldn’t expect so much from him. And he’d remind himself why she didn’t fit into his plans.

  “Anna was twenty-one when I noticed her.” He gave a short, sharp laugh. The skinny, gloating duckling he’d met years before had turned into a long-legged swan. “She was working on her biology thesis. How the human body adapts to survive under extreme conditions. How men could take the mental and physical abuse of Ranger School fascinated her.”

  Nora snorted. “With the Colonel as her father, it’s no surprise.”

  “The Colonel gave her access to the Ranger School recruits. Camden Laboratories had developed a drug that shut down the brain’s pain center and the soldiers’ need for sleep. The theory was that it would allow them to perform at higher levels long enough to complete their mission—no matter how long it took.”

  “The class you and Tommy were in. That was the first group to try the drug?”

  “Human guinea pigs.” His hands moved to the next position over the crown of her head. “We were told it was a vitamin supplement to help us get through Ranger School. At first, Anna thought what she was doing was helping people, but when she saw the results, she begged the Colonel to stop the testing.” Forgetting all about Reiki, Sabriel scrubbed a hand over his face to dislodge the flashes of memories snapping through his mind.

  He cleared his throat and scooped his hands under Nora’s nape. The relaxation of her head in his hands unwound the tightness in his chest. “But the Colonel insisted that the project was on course and tried to hide the negatives and amp the positives. She saw how the soldiers got hurt. One died—suicide. Most had hallucinations and were left with lingering PTSD. Tommy’s mind…fried.”

  “That wasn’t her fault. Or yours.”

  “I was a coward.” Tell the truth about what you see and do. Roger’s Rangers Standing Order Number 4.

  “You? No.”

  “I went against a direct order. I never took the drug. I kept quiet.” Not one of the team. An outsider. Never a real Ranger, despite the tab on his uniform shoulder. “But Tommy knew.”

  “The choice to take the drug or not was Tommy’s, not yours.”

  “He was sensitive to everything. Hell, he couldn’t even take aspirin without his stomach bleeding. And once he started on this experimental drug, the addiction was instantaneous. He needed more and more of it to get through the grueling days.”

  The memory was a stone in his heart and he rubbed at the weight. “He was afraid of the Colonel. He was a Camden. He couldn’t wash out. I’d seen how the Colonel treated him. The pressure. The expectations. I’d promised to help him through.” Sabriel shook his head. “But I couldn’t always pick up his slack or fix his mistakes. I let him down.”

  “He earned his tab. I saw it on his uniform.”

  Sabriel slid his hands to her shoulders. “One patrol short.”

  Day eleven of a twelve-day patrol. The wind whipped miserable cold into every pore. Rain made it impossible to see. They were pushed to the limits of endurance. But what snapped in Tommy wasn’t physical. It was mental. “On the last day, he cracked.”

  And spent the next two years in a mental hospital, getting his chemistry rebalanced.

  “What does the study have to do with Anna’s death?”

  Everything. “She thought Tommy’s breakdown was her fault. She knew how much Tommy needed to succeed, for the Colonel’s sake. Tommy begged for more—just to get through. And she gave him an extra dose. When he cracked, she quit her thesis, school, the lab—everything.” Anna had turned to Sabriel when the Colonel had given her an ultimatum and she’d refused to go back to the research. “We got married. But the Colonel wouldn’t leave her alone. He’d find a thousand little ways to let her know what a disappointment she was. She started taking more and more personal risks.”

  He swallowed around the knot in his throat. “She got into freediving to escape all the tension with her father.”

  “What’s freediving?”

  “Diving without an air tank.” In the water, she was magical—a mermaid. She had a concentration of energy that allowed her to break barriers others only dreamed of. She was at her calmest right before a dive, going deep inside herself to make the world, the worries, disappear. All that was left, she’d once told him, was pure mind.

  “She went for record after record.” Always needed to go a little deeper into the quiet, into the peace. He’d hoped that this peace in the deep of the sea would save her, even if the depth of his love for her couldn’t. “All to prove that she wasn’t a failure.”

  “Like Tommy.” Nora’s voice was thick with tears.

  Sabriel could still see the image of Anna captured by the ESPN crew taping her record attempt on that day. The black and neon-green wet suit fitting her body like skin. Her long blond hair, a cascade of curls around her long, slim face. And that faraway look in her eyes, as if she was seeing something no one else could see.

  He’d tried to tell her to forget the Colonel, to concentrate on the life they were making together, their plans for a family of their own. But something about the Camden doctrine just wouldn’t let her go.

  “Sometimes she had to exhaust herself swimming laps before she could sleep.” But she couldn’t give up. And a cloud hung over their happiness, a gnawing fear that she couldn’t ever escape the expectations, the feeling of failure.

  “When someone broke her record, she had to go right back out and go deeper.” Sabriel moved his hands above Nora’s throat, drew the symbol of power in his mind’s eye and continued. “Anna was fifteen miles off the Florida coast. I was hundreds of miles away, trying to explain to a board of my peers why I’d disobeyed a direct order from a commanding officer.”

  “Wait for me, Anna. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “There’s a storm coming in,” she said, and he could hear that tight despair in her voice. “I need to get the dive in before the rain hits. The sponsors—”

  “Can damn well wait. I’m your safety diver.”

  “I’ve got a whole crew to take care of me.”

  “She broke her record,” Sabriel said, shaking off the soap-bubble image of Anna as she walked off the boat and into the deep blue water. “But when it was time to come back up, her lift bag didn’t inflate and she lost consciousness.”

  Time, he could still feel its maddening speed, its torturing slowness. The frenzy that had come over him at the news of her accident. His mad race to reach her.

  Too far. Too late.

  “By the time I got to the hospital,” he said, “she was dead.”

  And the Colonel, seeking to hurt him, had slapped a copy of the video taken at the scene by the television crew into his hands and told him Anna’s death was his fault, that he would have to pay.

  Sabriel had watched the tape helplessly time and again, wa
tched as the divers had surfaced, watched as bloody foam poured from Anna’s mouth, watched her limp body being whisked away by ambulance.

  He’d demanded answers. He’d inspected every frame of video, every piece of her equipment.

  That’s when he’d understood the truth. That she’d wanted to die. That she’d waited for the one time he couldn’t save her to escape.

  Everything after that was a blur. The funeral, his dishonorable discharge from the Army, the Colonel’s negligence lawsuit. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t work. A hole formed inside him and nothing could sew it back together.

  He’d given up on saving the world. Less toll on the heart to attack the situation from the other side—first with the U.S. Marshals, then with Seekers. Find the scum and put them where they wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  The one thing he knew for sure was that he couldn’t lie down and die. He couldn’t let the Colonel win.

  Not then, not now.

  * * *

  IN THE DARK of this loft, in the warm nest of sleeping bag and hay, with the relaxing waves of Sabriel’s magic hands still humming through her body, talking seemed natural.

  “Anna’s death wasn’t your fault.” Tenderness squeezed Nora’s heart at the pain he’d had to endure. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, but sensed he wouldn’t appreciate such a gesture, so she sat up and tucked her arms around her legs over the sleeping bag. “If anyone’s responsible, it’s the Colonel.”

  “Dying was the only way she could escape him. I wish—” Sabriel went back to the loft opening and studied the landscape. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does.” The sadness etching his face against the stark light of the farmyard made her want to comfort him as he’d comforted her with his hands. She hugged her knees tighter. “Loving someone, losing them, it’s always hard, no matter what.”

  Sabriel’s frankness about Anna was disarming, demanding an equal measure of truth. She couldn’t ease his sorrow, but she could share her failures, the ones she’d never dared speak for fear they would taint her.