The Hunted: Hunter Circles Series Book One

by Jessica Gunn

  I laughed, a loud staccato sound. “My uncle wishes. You’re looking at the once first-string quarterback, baby.”

  Krystin rolled her eyes so hard, I thought for a moment they might actually fall out. “You’re kidding me, right? You have to be.” She tapped Rachel on the shoulder. “Is he serious? Quarterback?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Unfortunately. Can’t you tell by the ego?”

  The bartender returned with two more shots and I slid one to Krystin. “Top one they’d had in years. Carried the team to victory every time.”

  Rachel leaned over Krystin’s shoulder and gave me a wink. “Except that last national playoff game, huh?”

  I looked at her deadpan, but all she did in response was give me pouty lips. “You’d really go there?”

  She grinned. “Gotta take that ego down a notch or two. Everyone has a bad game now and then.”

  “Not at a clutch quarter,” I mumbled. Rage bubbled beneath the surface of my buzzed thoughts. Sure, there was a decent chance that my throw had sucked, but there was an equal possibility my wide receiver had tripped on air and fell into the catch. Hey, I’d never know. The only thing I remembered about that week was not ever sleeping.

  That last playoff game had taken place a day after Sandra had told me she was pregnant—and that I needed to give her an answer concerning whether or not I was going to stick around. Not that it’d mattered in the long run.

  Krystin nudged my shot toward me. “Oh, come on, you big baby. It was just a game.”

  “It’s never just a game,” I said and picked up the shot. We tossed them back at the same time.

  “Think that’s enough for both of you,” Nate said as he closed out our tabs. “We still have demon hunting to do.”

  I was pissed enough to go out on my own after Rachel had brought up that game, but I resisted the urge to tear off again after what Krystin had witnessed the other night. She was right. The team had to trust I’d be there as much as I had to trust that they’d do the same. Bad college memories or not.

  “Honestly,” Krystin said as she scanned the room again. “I’m thinking this is pretty pointless. Neither of the other two victims was killed near bars, and what kind of serial killer kills on back-to-back nights? Besides, this city is huge and we’re not the only teams out tonight.”

  “As much as I agree with you, our orders are to patrol all night,” I said. “Hence the alcohol now.”

  “Krystin’s right,” Nate said. “At the very least, let’s go to another bar and scour Boston for demons on the way. This place is a demon dead zone.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t spotted a single demon in here, although it was hard to pick them out with dim lighting. The biggest giveaway was their burgundy eyes, but those could be covered up by contact lenses. Mostly, you had to hope to catch them in the act of killing or attacking humans for their life energy. Not all demons were sadistic monsters that killed for laughs, though. Those kinds were just the easiest to find and exterminate.

  “All right.” I hopped off my barstool and shrugged my jacket back onto my shoulders. “Let’s move out. Next bar. And the next until they close. Then we’ll walk back to the house. Is that enough patrolling for everyone?”

  The team gave various nods of agreement and we set off.

  We hadn’t found a single demon. It was strange to go a night without at least one hit, but after the brutal attacks last night, it was like even the city demons were terrified of the new monster in town. It was unsatisfying after yesterday’s horrors, and my unused rage lit a fire inside of me.

  I went to unlock our front door for the others, but as my hand reached the knob, the door slipped open. Unlocked. I grasped for my knife immediately and gathered a small ball of lightning in my other hand.

  “Someone forget to lock the door on their way out?” I asked.

  “No, why?” Rachel said.

  I nodded to the open door and slipped inside. Everyone on the team drew their weapons and came into the living room beside me. Our furniture had been strewn around, the couch upturned next to the fallen coffee table. The room smelled like sulfur, like demon magik.

  Nate ran into the kitchen ahead of me and Krystin checked the stairs as I glanced around, doing a mental catalog of our belongings. Nothing seemed to be missing or out of place, only tossed about.

  “Clear,” Nate said.

  “Same in the stairwell,” Krystin called from the first landing.

  “Two and two,” I ordered. “Nate, let’s go to the basement. Rachel, take Krystin with you upstairs. Holler if anything’s amiss.”

  She nodded and took off with Krystin. I followed Nate back into the kitchen and down into the basement, my heart hammering in my chest. My pulse thundered behind my ears, louder than the storm that’d given me my lightning magik. They’d sent demons after us while we weren’t even home. Was it Shadow Crest? Had it been the same demons that’d taken Riley? Or was it the monster that’d mutilated those bodies last night?

  Just as we came to the bottom of the stairs and Nate cleared that room too, Rachel’s scream tore through the house, bloodcurdling. My body froze and it took all of my willpower to grab on to Nate’s arm and teleportante us up to the third floor instead of running up the stairs like my stupid body’s first instinct was. Magik was faster. Magik made us better.

  But magik didn’t prepare you for the world’s worst. Like the monster stalking Boston’s streets.

  “Ben, don’t!” Rachel screamed as we appeared.

  Because I’d started off the teleportante in a running motion, Nate and I skidded to a stop on the hallway rug upstairs. We barely caught ourselves before tripping over something—no, someone. A tall, pudgy man with light facial hair in dark slacks and a blue shirt.

  “What in the hell?” Nate asked as he pulled the sleeve of his shirt over his fist and brought it to his nose.

  My senses barely registered the coppery smell of blood over the shock and adrenaline. My body, numb—half because of the bloody mess at my feet and half thanks to Rachel’s scream awakening something protective and feral inside me—wouldn’t let me react. Except to slip to my knees and try to find a pulse on the body’s neck.

  His head lolled to the side as I felt for any sign of life, revealing deep burgundy eyes beneath eyelids that slipped open as his head moved. I shuffled back and gasped for air. I wasn’t sure I’d breathed since Nate and I had left the basement.

  “Dead,” I said. “Long dead.”

  “Duh. Look at the pool of blood,” Krystin said, a hand over her own mouth. “I think his tongue’s gone, too.”

  “Oh god.” Rachel’s face paled, then shifted to green, before she ran down the hall to the bathroom. Gagging and choking sounds followed.

  “This is unspeakable,” Nate uttered.

  I summoned what courage I could and turned the victim’s head back to the floor so we wouldn’t have to look. “Nate, get a sheet from the closet, then call Jaffrin. Now.”

  He nodded and hurried down the hall.

  “B-Ben,” Krystin stammered, her voice low and… scared? I wasn’t sure Krystin got scared. “His neck. Look.”

  “What?” I peered down at the poor demon again, forcing my eyes to focus on something more than blood or missing body parts. That’s when I saw it: a gold medallion hanging on a long leather chain. It swam in blood around the man’s neck and head.

  And it bore the Shadow Crest symbol.

  “Ben, that’s Shadow Crest,” Krystin said. “Th-That’s…”

  I looked up and our gazes met, hers filled with wild terror. Shock. The whites of her eyes were more pronounced than the blue of her irises. “I know.”

  “You know?” she asked. “Are you guys mixed up with them?” She turned to Nate as he hurried back down the hall, sheet in hand. “Did you guys anger Shadow Crest somehow?” Her eyes widened further, if at all possible. “Did we piss them off because of last night?”

  I shook my head. No, I’d gotten mixed up with them way before now
, two years ago, when they’d taken Riley.

  “We need to check the body,” Nate said to me as he handed me the sheet. “Just in case. You know.”

  Yeah, I did, but that didn’t mean I wanted to touch this guy. “I’m pretty sure this is message enough.”

  “Ben,” Nate said.

  “I know. Go check on Rachel.”

  He did, jogging to the bathroom.

  I knelt down again and checked the demon’s jacket and pants pockets. Only one contained anything—a small memory card. I held it up to Krystin. “This is weird.”

  “It’s for a camera,” Krystin said. “Why would a Shadow Crest demon have a camera with a memory card in it?”

  My stomach dropped as all breath whisked out from my lungs. Because it could be a ransom note. “It’s the rest of the message.”

  I squeezed the memory card in my fist, then rose to my feet, hopping over the body to run into Rachel’s room. She had a collection of cameras from back when she’d studied journalism in college. I was ninety percent sure one of these would be a match.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel asked from the doorway, a tissue pressed against the corner of her mouth.

  I showed her the memory card. “They left this for us. Do you know which camera might take it?”

  Rachel grabbed the memory card from me and peered down at it. “Yes. I have this camera.” She walked over to her collection of cameras and plucked one off the shelf. And paused. “They used my camera. They must have. This is my memory card.”

  A creepy slinking feeling spiraled down my spine. They’d been in her room. “Put it in and play whatever’s on there.”

  She did, then handed the camera over to me with shaky fingers.

  The clip started with a video of a small child laughing and running around some forested area, then cut to a clip of him crying inside a cave. Brownstone covered every surface and torchlight bounced off it, creating shadows that danced along the walls. But there was enough light to catch the child’s features—blue eyes like mine, a face like his mother’s. Riley. My heart skipped a beat at seeing my son for the first time in years. It had to be him. What other child would Lady Azar show to me?

  My fingers squeezed the camera as I pulled it closer to my face, my pulse thundering in my ears.

  The scene then cut to a huge chamber where many demons stood with those golden Shadow Crest medallions around their necks. They chanted in a language I couldn’t understand, looking up at a woman on a dais in the center. She wore robes of red and gold, a small flame crown resting atop a head of dark hair piled high, and rosy cheeks around a stern pout of her lips.

  Lady Azar. The one who’d orchestrated Riley’s capture.

  The video then shifted to a dark room, where the only thing I could make out was a voice saying, “Hand her over to us, or you’ll never see him again.”

  Then the video cut out.

  A scream tore from my chest, lightning sparking between my fingers, until Rachel’s camera blew up in my hands in a shower of sparks and plastic and metal.

  Chapter 7

  KRYSTIN

  “Hand her over to us, or you’ll never see him again.”

  That was the only audio I heard from the video before Ben’s lightning creeped around his fingers and blew Rachel’s camera to smithereens. Pieces of it jumped into the air, the crack of electricity echoing around her bedroom.

  I ducked out of instinct, my adrenaline surging through every vein and artery. Demons didn’t usually break into Hunters’ homes, much less to leave dead bodies. At least, they didn’t do it enough that the Fire Circle had warned us about it in training.

  Rachel reached for her cousin. “Ben—”

  He tossed her hand away and backed up against a wall, using it to support his built body from falling over. His eyes widened, focusing on the shattered camera as his chest heaved. Whatever he’d seen on that video, whoever that “him” was, Ben had known him. Which meant this team had somehow pissed off Shadow Crest. They’d tangled with Lady Azar, in some form, and had survived.

  Why the hell would Jaffrin put me on this team, then? With the prophecy, with the way he and my mother have kept me guarded all this time, they assigned me to Ben?

  Rachel approached Ben again, low and cautious, as though trying to soothe a wounded animal. “Ben, listen to me.”

  “Get away from me!” he raged, surging to his full height. “We’re going. Now.”

  They have him; they have him. And I’ll never get him back.

  There were Ben’s thoughts again, breaking through my air-tight control. This guy was a loose cannon—in thoughts and in magik. Not a good combination. I built some mental walls as fast and as best as I could, then spun to Nate. He shrugged, eyes drawn like he knew Ben’s pain all too well. Clearly there was more to this puzzle. Maybe this ‘him’ was a brother or friend.

  Rachel put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “It’s almost sunrise. If we get caught—”

  “We won’t,” he growled. “I’m not leaving Riley with those monsters.”

  “No one wants to,” she said.

  “Two years,” he said. “They’ve had him for almost two whole years, doing god knows what to him, while we flounder with the ludicrous Hunter Circles.”

  I moved to intercept, to impart reason into his insane plan, but Nate grabbed my arm. “Not a good time.”

  “This is a perfect time, actually,” I said, raising my voice. “I know I don’t know you guys well enough to know what that video’s about, but let me at least say this: That’s Lady Azar on the video. Do you know who she is?”

  “A demon,” Ben snapped. “Obviously.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the hallway, where the demonic body still lay. One of us should really throw a cedo match on it before someone else saw that mess.

  “She’s high up in Darkness,” Rachel added. “The Fire Circle never told us much aside from Lady Azar being a ranking demon of Darkness. An Old One.”

  Of course they hadn’t told them much more than that. Jaffrin didn’t know what “being helpful” meant. I’d never been a fan of him. Ever. But that he wouldn’t even warn this team about what this Riley, whoever he was, had gotten into…

  “Not just high up,” I told them. “Lady Azar is Aloysius’s daughter. As in, the creator of all of Darkness’s demons. The creator of the magik that makes them that way. She’s not just an Old One. Lady Azar is one of the originals.”

  They stared back at me blankly. Stars above, please tell me they knew even a little bit about Darkness’s founding member.

  “We know. And I don’t care. We’ll go extra carefully,” Ben said. “I’m okay with whatever we have to do, but I’m going regardless. I’m done with this waiting game. The Fire Circle hasn’t found Riley yet and they might never. At least now we know where he is.”

  “Do you?” I asked. Who the hell was this Riley guy? “Because last I checked, not even the Ether Head Circle knows exactly where Shadow Crest’s lair is. None of the normal locator magiks work, and anyone who’s been sent to find their hideout has never returned, as a human or as a demon.”

  “Even I’ve tried, Ben,” Nate said. “And my teacher before me. He’d been given that assignment by the Circles to find them many times.”

  I didn’t have it in me to tell Nate that although he was so powerful I now felt his magik on me, he was severely undertrained. Like Ben’s lightning the night before, Nate’s magik rolled off of him in uncontrolled waves. Still, with his abilities, he wouldn’t be able to penetrate any magik shield as powerful as the one protecting Shadow Crest’s lair. Even if his teacher had been assigned to attempt it, Lady Azar wasn’t a normal demon. Her magik was more than ours. The world was very different when she first walked it, and the world’s magik wasn’t any different.

  “If you know about them,” I said, “then you know how stupid it’d be to just waltz in there. Shadow Crest is comprised of the strongest demons allied with Aloysius. And his daughter? She’s singlehandedly brought down empir
es.”

  “I wouldn’t be demanding anything,” Ben said, a defiant, arrogant drip in his tone. “They invited me.”

  “‘Bring her,’” I echoed. “What does that even mean, other than this is a trap?”

  Ben seethed. Rachel dropped her hands as if his skin temperature had skyrocketed to the boiling point. “See, that’s the thing I don’t understand. This demand is new. And you’re the only new ‘her’ I can think of.”

  My eyes narrowed even as blind panic slid from the tip of my spine to my toes, dragging dread throughout every node in my body. Me joining a team had been a terrible idea from the start. “That’s ridiculous.” But was it? If Lady Azar knew who I was… that I’d been assigned to the same team that’d pissed her off before…

  Who else knew? And what did that mean for every attempt at hiding my destiny that Jaffrin and my mother had made?

  Ben’s jaw slid from side to side so hard, I swore the sound of his teeth grinding together reached my ears. “I don’t think so. You show up here and not forty-eighty hours later, a demonic body appears in our house?”

  “It’s called a coincidence,” I said. “Just because you don’t trust me—”

  “Why the hell should I?” he asked. “No one told us we were getting a fourth team member. No one warned us you were coming. You ran into the fight without giving us any indication you were a Hunter. Never mind it being on the same night two mutilated bodies turn up in demon attacks. And now, now”—he pointed to the piled remains of Rachel’s camera—“now they’re asking for you. Why? Are you tied to Shadow Crest? Is that why Jaffrin only assigned you to a team ten years before retirement?”

  “No,” I spat. “The Empire is full of filthy creatures I want nothing to do with. I’m only here because my mother and Jaffrin control this part of my life. I was doing just fucking fine on my own.”

  “Is that why you used to hang out at the Guild so much?” Nate asked out of nowhere. “As a safety net?”