by Rhys Ford
“But you think nothing of killing dragons?” Kerrick called out to me as he slogged his way across the gravel.
I couldn’t risk going too far—just enough to stretch my legs and get some air without somebody else’s breath on it. Luckily for me, Kerrick was considerate enough to bring me company. Sure, I was glad he didn’t die, but mostly because he was Ryder’s cousin and his death would have sent the lordling into a spiraling case of guilt and depression.
“I only kill a dragon if it’s trying to kill me first,” I responded quietly and turned to face him. “You should head back. We’re going to be leaving soon.”
“We have forty-five minutes. I asked Cari if I would have time to speak to you.”
“And that’s what she told you? That you’ve got forty-five minutes?”
“No.” He shook his head. “She told me that you might not want to listen to me. She seems to believe you’re driven by stubbornness and pride. I told her I didn’t believe you had that much Sidhe in you.”
The joke took me by surprise, and I chuckled. “I was raised by the most pigheaded human there is. It’s kind of Dempsey’s legacy—along with knowing how to cook eggs and rice over an open fire. So talk. I’ll listen.”
The moons were out, mostly full and dripping with light. This far away from the city, and under such a clear sky, I could see even the rare speck moons, the tiny round celestial chunks the elfin brought with them. Above me, the stars were swirls of twinkling spots scattered through the deep blue backdrop. A few fluffy white clouds hung low enough to cast shadows on the gravel floor of the canyon.
Kerrick looked good in the moonlight. He was beautiful in a masculine way that most people would sigh over—a glorious peacock among sparrows. Humans were taken by the elfin, enamored by their beauty and grace despite the way some churches and politicians raked up fear among their followers. Kerrick would’ve been a good poster child for reconciliation, a pretty ambassador with smooth words who could sweep thousands of deaths under the proverbial rug.
For all I know, that’s exactly what he did for the Sidhe army.
By all accounts Ryder and Alexa were reasonably attractive, but not heartbreakingly gorgeous like Kerrick, but I preferred them. I liked people who looked real. Kerrick and I had both been thrown into the air and slammed into the ground, but he appeared as though he were out for a stroll in the gardens, his pristine Sidhe tunic and lightweight trousers paired with shoes made out of buttery leather.
No, I definitely preferred Ryder and Alexa.
“I wanted to say thank you for saving me.” His accent grew thicker and blurred his Singlish. “If there is anything I can do for you—”
“You can leave San Diego and the Southern Rise Court to Ryder,” I suggested dryly. “It’s the first thing I can think of off the top of my head. Well, the second, but somehow I don’t think you’re willing to take out the old lady for me. I can’t because I promised Ryder I wouldn’t.”
“And I promised my grandmother I would do my best to secure this court,” he said with a wide smile. “Still, I owe you my life, and while our respective promises are conflicting, I am honor bound to count you as someone I should protect.”
“Just listen when I tell you to do something,” I cautioned. “I’m not trying to be an asshole or to control you. I just want to make sure everybody who started off with me comes back home. I get you’re used to bossing people around, but it’s different out here. The cutest things can kill you. And sure, most of them came from Underhill, but they’re here now, and I’ve had years to deal with them.”
“It is funny you think this is the human world, because I believe it’s Underhill, and the humans’ world pushed into us. But that is neither here nor there. Our worlds are now one, and you are right, I have little experience with the wilderness we’re going through. As familiar as some of these creatures are, they’re different now, more aggressive and violent.” He tilted his face up and lifted his gaze to the skies. “I wonder if that’s what happened to our races as well. We’ve lost our way. We are no longer as courteous or polite. I want to change that. Go back to how we used to be.”
“See, that’s where your problem is, Kerrick.” I shifted my weight, ready to head toward the transport. “There’s no going back. You can’t unmake a reality. It’s just not possible. The only thing you can do is work hard to change it. To grow. To make things better.”
Whatever Kerrick was going to say—and he certainly looked like he was about to argue with me—was lost as a hail of bullets screamed down from the mesa above us. It was a short plateau, not more than ten feet, but it was enough of a height advantage that I couldn’t see who was shooting at us.
“Looks like we got a hunt.” The man’s voice boomed through the winding gulch. “Got us a couple of cat bastards down here!”
Laughter echoed through the canyon, and someone whooped—a deep rolling voice giddy with glee. We were too far from the transport to make a clean run for it, and I heard someone reloading, the distinctive click of a clip being slid home, and it chilled my blood quicker than the cold water of the pond had done hours before.
“Go! I’ll cover you,” I ordered, shoving Kerrick back. I drew my Glocks, flicked off the safety switches, and returned fire.
Nineteen
THE ONLY way I was going to stop the firefight was to get to the top of the mesa. Bullets scored through the rock by my feet and into the wall near my head. I wasn’t going to wait around to see if Kerrick reached the transport. He was on his own.
Other Stalkers have often called me mercenary. Maybe it’s something Dempsey left in my manners, or maybe I’m as cold-blooded as some think, but my first loyalty will always be to the people I love. I needed to get Ryder and Cari safe, even if it meant abandoning the run. Ryder would argue and say he wasn’t as important as securing the safety and well-being of an elfin seeking asylum, but he was wrong. If he fell, then Kerrick would step in, and the Southern Rise Court would suffer for it.
I didn’t need to be a hibiki like Cari to see that the death of ideas and tolerance hovered nearby. Kerrick would fight to bring San Diego’s court down to its knees and mold it into something straight out of his grandmother’s playbook. The kids we were trying to retrieve were a sacrifice I was going to have to be willing to make, because there were a hell of a lot more elfin back in Balboa who didn’t deserve Kerrick as their high lord.
Providing I could survive getting shot at.
Iesu, my leg hurt like a son of a bitch, but I was a sitting duck if I stayed in one place. The passageway led up toward the mesa flats and would eventually get to the top. Ten feet wasn’t that tall, and I’d already been on one climbing trip so far on this run, but it looked like I was going to be on another. The transport fired up, and Ryder shouted something at me. I couldn’t hear him, not with the rush of anger pouring through me.
I wasn’t going to survive everything life threw at me only to get picked off by a pack of rich assholes with more money than morals. That wasn’t how I was going out. I didn’t know how I was going to die, but Dempsey had it right. Sitting on a friend’s porch, drinking whiskey, and watching blue chickens peck for seed would be my choice.
There was a dip in the wall above me where the mesa dropped a bit. The gunshots continued, but they were aimed toward the rumbling transport. I could only hope Kerrick’s flashy clothes drew their attention so they wouldn’t know I was coming, but I wasn’t going to bet on it. I couldn’t climb with my Glocks, so a knife in my teeth would have to suffice. It looked stupid and flashy—a throwback to those pirate movies Dempsey liked to watch—but it gave me a weapon I didn’t have to draw once I got to the top.
I was going to need every advantage, and even though I was literally taking a knife to a gunfight, a well-thrown dagger would give me enough time to draw my Glocks.
The rock face was a hell of a lot easier to scale than the sleek walls of the cavern. I sent a cascade of dirt sliding down the cliff as I dug in, but most of the holds
I grabbed were good. There wasn’t any clear way up to the mesa, probably wasn’t one for a long stretch, so when the transport rumbled up the pass toward me, I didn’t stop climbing.
I took a quick glance to see who was driving and spotted Cari at the wheel. Ryder sat next to her, a sawed-off shotgun clenched in his hands. I pressed myself up against the cliff wall and waited for the transport to pass, hoping whoever was on the mesa wouldn’t be able to see me tucked into the shadows in the rock. Cari must have spotted me against the cliff, or maybe she heard me cursing her in the back of my head, because the transport’s running lights clicked off for a few yards when it rolled by.
“They’re heading ’round.” A panicked shout sounded above me, and I shoved myself as tightly as I could into the shallow depression I’d found. “They’ve got guns. Thought you said it was going to be easy.”
“Easy, my ass,” I muttered around my knife as I watched the transport disappear around a bend. “Just wait.”
There was no guarantee Cari could even get up to the mesa or if she was driving straight into an ambush, but I was going to have to trust Sparky’s machinery skills to get them through. The centipede took the hit from the henge monster pretty well. It could probably handle bullets.
“I’ve got a shoulder launcher in the truck,” a gruffer voice belted out, more than a bit of impatience ramping up his tone. “That’ll take care of them.”
Okay, the centipede probably couldn’t take that—not without being cracked open. It didn’t sound like they were moving away from the edge, but I couldn’t wait any longer. My shoulders and arms were on fire, strained from holding me up, and my still-not-quite-healed break shot sharp pains up through my joints. Swearing softly, I reached for the next rock hold I saw on the cliff, pulled myself up as quickly as I could, and stopped only when I heard their voices draw closer.
“There’s a woman with them—a human,” the first man shouted, panic riding his words. “That wasn’t the plan. There’s not supposed to be any people with these animals.”
“Look, she knew who she was falling in with.” A different man spoke, and a thick, clipped accent shortened his words as he spat them out. “She’s no better than they are. Probably going to be spitting out cat-bastard babies for them in a few years, if she hasn’t already. That what you want? To be overrun by those things?”
“They can’t mate with humans,” the tight-voiced second man argued. “It’s like breeding a cat and a dog. Ain’t going to happen. But that doesn’t mean she’s not one of them. Be like those kids down underneath the city with their pointy ears and stupid faces. We’re losing what it means to be human. I say she’s as much of a problem as they are. ’Sides, not like anyone’s going to find her out here.”
Three. I could handle three. Maybe even four if there was someone else up there. Problem was, the clouds were rolling in off the far hills, and in their heavy, swollen depths, they brought a hint of rain and darkness with them as they swallowed up the moons, spread their heft over the canyons, and hugged the land. No matter what everyone spun out about the elfin seeing better in the dark, I didn’t ever find it to be that much of an advantage. Dark was dark, and I wasn’t happy about the sheath of black that stretched over the night sky to the east.
I snagged the lip of the plateau with my fingers, wedged my toes into a solid chunk of rock, and crunched myself up into a ball. My ribs began to complain, reminding me I was bruised to hell and gone across my torso, and when I stretched my legs, a ball of pain tore across my injured calf.
And the metal blade against my tongue didn’t taste that good.
My abdomen complained a bit when I slowly lifted myself up to peer over the edge. The clouds were moving in fast, dimming the sky, but I could still make out three large shapes moving about in the scrub bushes about twenty yards from where I hung on. A small rover sat by what looked like a curved bend a little farther back. It looked too narrow for the transport to make it up the incline, but I couldn’t tell for sure. The rover sported bubble tires, nearly round balls of hard rubber meant to roll a vehicle around any terrain. They made it nearly impossible to upend, so getting to the top of the mesa probably hadn’t been much of a challenge for the squat metal beast. And if I had any doubts that those guys were rich, they were put to rest when I spotted those tires—each one cost a good year’s wages for a competent Stalker. Four was an unimaginable fortune.
The avarice demon I had inside of me begged me to steal the rover, but that kind of thing always led to no good, so despite my intense and sudden desire for a four-seat rover with balls at its axle points, I forced myself to focus on the men.
“Get in the car!” The gruff-voiced man I’d heard scolding the other two earlier was huge and loomed over the other men. What little light there was glistened across his bald head, and a flash of silver traveled over his smooth pate as he moved. “That thing won’t make it up the hill. We’ll be able to meet them at the gully and corner them.”
“This isn’t what we signed up for.” A smaller slender man broke out of the group and backed away from the rover. “We’re supposed to—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish. Surprise was all I had going for me, and the moment the tall bald guy rounded on his client, I went up over the edge of the mesa, slid my knife back into its sheath, and drew a Glock right before the shouting began.
As stupid as it was, I had a hard, fast rule about holding my fire unless I was being shot at. Being a Stalker meant living on the edge of lawlessness with less-than-honorable people who would sooner gut a man for his boots than give him a sip of water. I’d heard stories about Dempsey’s ruthlessness over the years, but he never ever shot first—or at least not while I was around.
And I sure as hell wasn’t going to break that creed, even if these three had already laid down a blanket of fire on me earlier.
“Drop your guns,” I ordered, keeping my voice as steady as I could. “You don’t have to die tonight.”
The anguish of my torn muscles and bruises thickened my voice, pulling out the growl in my words, but I knew I still sounded human. And in the dark—as they say—all cats are gray. Betting they couldn’t tell I was elfin, I wanted to make them stop and think about what they were doing.
The tall bald guy blew that straight out of the water. Bringing up a sawed-off shotgun he’d held down against his leg, he bellowed, “Shit, it’s Gracen.”
In the movies, fights were always one-on-one, or the biggest guy would hold the others back with a shout of He’s mine! before engaging the hero in an epic fifteen-minute battle of trick shots and impossible acrobatics. That’s not how any of it worked. Instead what happens is a bunch of guys I never saw come barreling out of Pele-knew-where, and everyone starts shooting at me.
And that is exactly what happened.
I don’t know where the other two guys came from, but they were ready to kill me based solely on the tall bald guy’s say-so. I don’t know who they were expecting to hunt down near the rendezvous point, but they’d come loaded with more weapons than I would have brought along for a nightmare hunt. The guys by the rover were struggling with high-powered rifles—the kind of weapon used more to show off than to do the job. Bald Guy was a worry. His stance was solid, his grip casual on the stock of the shotgun, and I knew he would give me trouble.
His first shot opened up the game, and if I hadn’t seen him dip his shoulder, he might’ve blown me clean through. Being out of range helped. So did jumping out of the way. And as the ground ate the blast he’d unloaded at me, I came up firing.
Unfortunately, so did the two guys who came out of the bushes.
The only thing that saved me from becoming a sieve was the transport surging its way up onto the mesa and slamming into the rover.
It was always great to see backup arrive, especially when I was outnumbered. The two guys holding the rifles hit the dirt and flung their weapons out of reach. The bald guy was much more savvy. He rolled to the side and out of the way of the rover. The men
by the bushes didn’t even stop to blink as they turned their guns onto the centipede and began unloading their clips into its front end.
I did not fare as well. As I brought my Glocks up to return fire, one of the rover’s tires broke loose and barreled toward me. Dodging a four-foot-wide solid ball of rubber was difficult on the uneven ground of the mesa. I feinted to the right when the damn thing hit a rock. It changed its trajectory, and instead of rushing past me, it caught me straight in the ribs.
The tire picked me up, or rather, it ground me down. I ate dirt and then a bit of blood and spit out both as I fought to catch my breath and scramble to my feet. A round of gunshots exploded, some headed my way, but they went wide, probably thrown off by the tire as it rolled by me. The bouncing ball of rubber went over the lip of the mesa and crashed into the gulches below. I heard another pair of engines firing up, smaller than a car or rover, and as I began to sprint toward a boulder to give myself some cover, a pair of dirt bikes broke from the bushes, carrying the men I’d seen emerging earlier.
If the bald guy was concerned about their desertion, he didn’t show it. He backed himself up against the turned-over rover, threw down the shotgun, and reached for the handgun holstered to his thigh. He let off a shot, aiming for my head, and it whistled through the dried leaves of a tall sage near my ear.
“Drop your damned weapons,” I shouted again. “There’s no way you’re going to get out of this!”
The lights on the roof of the transport flared on, and I got a very good look at the man trying to kill me. I knew his face. I’d seen it before, but my impression was fleeting, and my attention was drawn by the revving engines of the dirt bikes as their riders pulled the two hunters behind them. They roared away, slightly off balance from the added weight and the uneven ground.
“Cari, cover me,” I shouted at the centipede, not knowing if anyone inside could hear me. The driver’s door swung open, offering Cari shelter as she crouched down behind it and leveled a shotgun at the retreating motorbikes. I knew she wouldn’t pull the trigger, not unless I told her to or someone on the bikes opened fire.