Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I…” Mark shook his head. “I was always told that what I had was all I was going to get.”

  “Ah. Someone back home told you that?” Archer asked. Mark nodded, while I kept my trap shut. Archer nodded. “Well, now you know. What you do with the knowledge is up to you. Just remember not to force anything. Magic answers to belief, not logic. For now, believe you can do this, and do more target practice. Like I said, you could be shooting around corners before too long, and that can come in damned handy.”

  Then Archer gave me a look and a raised eyebrow. “So who told you that it was possible to keep improving?”

  “No one had to tell me. It was logical; like you said, if you work muscles you get stronger,” I replied. “And stubbornness too, I guess.” I was thinking quickly, trying to remember everything I could about the only Hunter that was supposed to be back home, one of the Apex castoffs they sent to us. He’s still there, but when he arrived, the first thing he did was square off against one of the feral Folk. That was really stupid and got his brain melted for him, and right now he’s playing with his toes while one of the Masters makes up reports and sends them on to Apex for him. “My mentor’s not very good, and he’s also butt-lazy. He doesn’t know the people I grew up with, and I reckon he doesn’t really care all that much about them, but I do, so I worked as hard as anything to get good fast so I could protect them.” I drank a long swallow of water to give myself time to think some more. “If that makes sense?”

  “If it makes sense to you, then it makes sense.” Archer smiled a very little. “One of the first things you learn as an Elite is that if something works, you leave it be. Nice to work with both of you, by the way. John Shephard.” He offered his hand to me, and I shook it. Then he offered it to Mark, who did the same.

  “Mark Knight,” said White Knight. “And thanks for coming so quickly.”

  Archer just waved the thanks away. “That’s what we do, Mark. Speaking of which, we’ve lollygagged enough.” He turned his wrist and spoke into his Perscom. “Elite team AJ requesting pickup. Gazer nest neutralized.”

  “Roger, team AJ.”

  Archer stood up. “You want extraction, Knight? Remember, there’s a storm coming.”

  Mark looked at his Hounds clustered around him. They snorted. It sounded derisive. He laughed and shook his head. “We’re good for the rest of our shift, and that storm isn’t supposed to come in till after that. There wasn’t anything but Goblins until we found that nest.”

  “It’ll make good viewing on your channel,” Archer replied, producing something like a grin or as near as I had ever seen him come to one.

  Mark shrugged but didn’t reply. I was going to say something, but then I heard the sound of chopper blades in the far distance. The chopper that had dropped us must have been parked somewhere safe nearby, waiting for the pickup call. So instead, I just said, “See you back at HQ, Mark,” which made him nod and smile, finally.

  By that point, the chopper had arrived, and we climbed into it. Mark gave us a wave, then turned and went back on his patrol, his four Hounds spread out in the air ahead of him. As we rose and picked up speed, Archer suddenly frowned and leaned out the open door a little. Before I could ask what was wrong, he’d tapped the pilot on the shoulder and made the circle in the air with his finger that meant “circle around.”

  Then he turned back to me. “Down there!” he shouted, pointing, as the chopper tilted and began its arc. “It can’t be. But I could have sworn I saw…” His voice trailed off in a way that meant that what he’d thought he’d seen wasn’t just a monster.

  A chill flashed down my backbone, and I leaned forward as far as the harness I was in would let me, and peered down at the ground where he pointed.

  And…there was something down there! I got a glimpse, hardly more than a second, of flying lavender and mauve that could have been hair or fabric or both; then a flash of light from something highly reflective. Jewelry? And then…

  It was gone. There was nothing below us but weeds and bushes. I looked up to meet Archer’s baffled eyes.

  “Did you see that?” he shouted.

  I nodded slowly.

  The chopper straightened back up and got back on course, and the pilot called back to us. “Want me to circle around again, Hunter?”

  But Archer just gave me a warning look and replied, “No…I was just making sure we hadn’t left any live Gazers. I thought I saw one, but it was just some tangle of old junk.”

  I kept my mouth shut. If Archer didn’t want to report this, then neither did I. And after all, what had we actually seen? Nothing but a brief glimpse of…something. Maybe it was just our tired minds playing tricks on us. After all, we’d just been fighting Gazers, and they mess with your head. Then again, so do the Folk.

  But…that flash of lavender…the color I associated with that Folk Mage who seemed particularly interested in me…I won’t lie, just thinking about the possibility made my gut knot up and my whole body go cold with terror. I didn’t know why he was interested in me, but when you catch the eye of any of the Folk, much less a Folk Mage, that is generally not a story that ends well.

  I nodded soberly at the senior Elite, and he shrugged, grimaced, and made a little twirling motion with his finger next to his ear, the near-universal sign for “brains scrambled.” I nodded again. We both sighed and settled back for the trip.

  I closed my eyes and wondered if I ought to go back on rotation again. I was snapping back from the exertion of the Gazer Hunt pretty quickly, but then, all I had done was throw dazzles and hold down the net. Archer was pretty drained, but the longer I sat here resting, the more I felt ready to go. By the time we landed, I just wanted something to eat, then to go out again.

  But as we left the chopper, Archer grabbed my elbow, and we walked far enough away from the thing so we could talk without shouting. “Come inside; I want to talk with you a minute,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  The Elite had a little kitchen of its own, since we were often too late or too early for the regular meals. There was a freezer full of prepared stuff and a flash-heater, and a cold cupboard with a glass front full of stuff that didn’t need to be cooked. Archer got himself three plates’ worth of frozen, while I made some tomato sandwiches. We sat down at a little table that could seat about six if you crowded up, and ate.

  One of the other Elite, a younger (and really nice-looking) guy call-signed Retro wandered in and grabbed three or four pieces of fruit. He was in his Hunting outfit, as were we—green and gray and silver leather, sleeveless, and…quite tight. He turned and saw us there and grinned. At me. I blinked a little.

  “Hey, Joy,” he said, starting an actual juggling routine with the fruit. I blinked again. He had disconcertingly blue eyes, a lantern jaw, and shaggy blond hair—and for some reason, the direct look in his eyes made me flustered.

  “Hey yourself,” I replied.

  “So, when are you and I gonna go out on a date?” he asked as if it was the most logical thing in the world to say.

  “I—uh—” I spluttered a little. “I’m kind of seeing someone—”

  “Creepy Psimon, right? It exclusive?” He waggled his eyebrows at me, still juggling.

  “Uh—” I said cleverly. Of course, I should have known that people would know about my so-called social life, since until I went Elite it was all over my Hunter channel.

  “Not exclusive, then. Think it over! I’m a fun guy!” He grinned even harder.

  “You’re a mushroom?” Archer deadpanned.

  “Yeah, they keep me in the dark and feed me on bullcrap,” he quipped right back. Archer rolled his eyes. Retro finished his juggling with a flourish, catching the last apple in his mouth, and strolled out.

  I really didn’t know what to say after that. Fortunately, Archer didn’t miss a beat. “It’s three guys to one gal here in the Hunters,” he pointed out. “He was going to ask eventually. Knowing Retro…I’m surprised it took him this long.”

 
; “Uh—okay,” I said. “What did you want to talk to me about?” Not a date, I prayed. I admired Archer a lot, and it was obvious I could learn a lot from him, but he was kind of old for someone like me….

  “You,” Archer said, pointing a potato stick at me, “are not like the other recruits, Joyeaux Charmand. Why is that?”

  I bit into the sandwich, buying myself some time to respond.

  “Probably where I come from. It started as a commune before the Diseray.” Totally true. The Monastery was a sort of commune. I shrugged. “So I guess by your standards I have…a different attitude.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. So.” He finished his potato sticks and started in on some sort of stew. “Tell me, Hunter Joyeaux, what do you want to learn?”

  What did I want to learn? Aside from everything? I reined myself in and thought about the question. “I don’t know enough to say what I don’t know,” I replied after a moment. “But whatever anyone is willing to teach me.”

  He nodded again. “I’ll pass that on. And I’ll suggest some books. The most important thing I ever learned was what I told White Knight out there. That magic responds better to how you feel about it than how you reason.”

  That was, more or less, what the Masters had taught me, but I tried to make my expression look as if this had been new to me. But Archer wasn’t quite through.

  “The other thing is this, because I’m guessing you are not used to thinking like we do,” Archer continued, setting the last of his emptied plates aside. “Everything in this world is layers and masks. Nothing is ever exactly what it seems to be.”

  He gave me an unreadable look, and I had the feeling that he meant more than just the Othersiders. I had the feeling he also meant here, in Apex City, and I’d already gotten a taste of that.

  “Everybody wears a mask,” I said finally.

  He pointed a finger at me this time. “That,” he said with a smile, “is the truest thing you have ever said.”

  “Well,” I told him, feeling more like myself with a meal in me, “the second-truest thing will be that I should probably put myself back in rotation—”

  “No need,” he countered, interrupting me. Then he pointed behind me, where I knew there was a screen on the wall that usually showed the general-news channel. I turned and looked, and it was a weather-radar image with Apex at the center of it. There was a storm front moving in, fast, and it wasn’t red and orange like ours usually are. This one was mostly purple, with trailing red. “Storm front,” he said casually, confirming what I already knew. “It’s one of the big ones. You haven’t been here long enough to see one. Nothing moves in one of those, not even a Gog or a Drakken. It wasn’t supposed to hit us, but…” He shrugged, as if to say, “You can’t count on prediction.”

  And as soon as he said that, both our Perscoms gave a peculiar warbling call, like nothing I had heard since I got here, followed by what sounded like a prerecorded announcement. “All Hunters. Storm front moving in. All Hunters. Return to base.” I double-tapped mine to acknowledge, and shut the message off, a second before Archer did the same.

  “Our big storms are mostly blizzards,” I said as Archer looked at something on his Perscom. “They go on for days.” And I flashed back for a moment to one of those storms. The Monastery is mostly built into the mountain, so all the Masters do is put the thick wooden storm shutters over the windows, rely on the wind to keep our electrics charged, and move all the practices that we can inside to the big dojos. Down in the villages, though, they spend the early part of the fall making straw-sheltered tunnels between buildings, and by the time a big blizzard hits, it’s just another couple of feet of snow on top of what’s already there. Once every couple of years, we get an epic thunderstorm, but not more often than that.

  “Well, we’re locked down for twelve hours, at least, maybe a couple days,” Archer replied, and cocked an eyebrow at me. “You know all those storm-sewer tunnels you’ve patrolled? They’re that big for a reason.” He stretched as I tried and failed to imagine those tunnels filled with thundering water. “Good thing we got as much Hunting in as we did today. Our Hounds will be fine until the storm is over. But the grumbling in the lounge over the fact that the channels will be on repeat is going to be louder than the thunder.” He quirked a corner of his mouth in a sardonic half smile, and I snorted.

  “What about if something horrible pops up outside the storm zone?” I asked anxiously, as he stood up to go.

  “Hope that doesn’t happen,” was all he’d say. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. “Look at the map,” he pointed out. “Look at the size of the storm zone. It’d take us hours to get to anything that far, even without the storm. There are Hunters in cities outside the storm zone. And there are Hunters with the army.”

  But they aren’t Elite! I wanted to protest, but…Hunters and the army and plain old Mages were handling Othersiders before there ever were Elite, or Apex wouldn’t even be here. So I nodded, and he went on his way. And I noticed for the first time he had a slight limp when he walked. Well, maybe he only limped when he was tired. I wondered what had caused it.

  Curious now, I went out to the entrance to HQ that faced the coming storm, and as soon as I got outside…it took my breath away. I’d seen one of the big blizzards approaching back home as I helped put up the shutters. That had been impressive enough. This storm, though—this storm whacked you in the face with how utterly insignificant you were when the planet decided to cut loose around you.

  The sky over me was cloudless, but what faced me was blue-black, and there was already a powerful enough wind blowing that I’d had to force the door open. A little bit ago it had been warm, but this wind had ice in its breath and shoved the smell of rain down the throat and into the lungs. And the storm approached on hundreds of bright legs of lightning. The thunder was so continuous, it sounded like a thousand drummers beating the biggest drums in the universe.

  This was no place for a mere human being. I dashed right back inside.

  HQ didn’t have a lot of windows, for the obvious safety reasons, but I knew there was one spot I would sort of be able to see the sky, and that was the indoor garden with the little koi pond. So that was where I headed, stopping just long enough to get a portion of fish food, because the fish would neither know nor care that all hell was breaking loose outside their little world, and as Mark would say, it would be wrong to shake their faith.

  I sat down on a bench next to the pond, absently tossed the food in, and stared upward through the glass ceiling. It was almost as black as full night up there—except for the lightning. It never stopped. The rain hadn’t started yet, so I was getting a clear view of the clouds above us, and besides the bolts that were cutting across the sky in an unstoppable barrage, there was lightning illuminating the insides of the clouds as well.

  Even through glass that I now knew was a full foot thick, the thunder vibrated everything. I was wrong about the fish. They fled to hide under overhanging rocks or the lily pads. It was just me and the storm, and the foot of glass didn’t seem like nearly enough.

  Then the rain hit. And I mean hit. I actually jumped and nearly fell off my bench. My head knew that hundreds, if not thousands of these storms had struck HQ before this one. My gut, however, was dead certain there was no way that layer of glass between me and the storm was going to hold. My gut, used to the storms of the mountains, was sure the next thing that was coming were hailstones the size of my head. I left, and in a hurry.

  But this was no time to go to my room. With something like that raging outside, thunder a constant growl and the very fabric of the building trembling under it, I wanted other people around and I wanted them now. I headed straight for the lounge.

  It looked like I wasn’t the only one that felt that way, since the lounge was packed. Archer was there, and Armorer Kent, and Hammer and Steel. I saw Dazzle in the middle of one of the big sofas, squashed in between four other Hunters. One of them was another of the Elite, a woman with the call-sign of Sca
rlet; that might even have been her real name. Scarlet was a totally stunning woman, with long red hair, the face and body of an antique goddess, and the poise of a dancer. And on top of all that, she was one of the nicest people I’d met in the Elite. Right now she was being nice to one of the new Hunters, who was clearly shaken up by the storm. The lounge was actually so packed that mostly all I saw were bodies and the backs of heads. I was disappointed not to see Mark, and then concerned; I queried by Perscom and was relieved to see that his status was listed as “in quarters.” Well, he didn’t much like the lounge get-togethers at the best of times, and as crowded as it was now, he’d probably just put something on his vid that was loud enough to drown out the thunder.

  I spotted Retro, and for a minute, I was afraid he was going to work his way over to me and…I don’t know…press things, I guess. But all he did was raise his eyebrows and grin when he caught me looking at him, wave casually, then go back to the conversation he was in.

  You’d think that people that Hunt monsters every single day (or night) wouldn’t be afraid of a storm. But no matter how much we tried to tell ourselves that we were surely safe behind our thick, clever walls, our guts knew better. The terrible storms of the Diseray were still with us, punishing us for what our ancestors had done.

  The big vid-screen wasn’t showing Hunt footage for a change. Someone had set it to a loop of a nice, crackling fireplace. It actually made me feel homesick, and I started getting the inevitable horrid feelings of wanting home so bad I could taste it.

  But before I could leave, Trev spotted me and waved at me enthusiastically, pointing to an empty chair across from him. Regi and Sara looked to see who he was waving at, and started waving their arms around like idiots. I couldn’t help it, that put a big old smile on my face, and I wiggled my way through the crowd toward them.