Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Then…it all just stopped.

  That was when the battlefield comm channel erupted in confused shouts. In all the babble, I could only make out one thing: “He’s gone!”

  I crouched over my Perscom, concentrating on the voices while my confused Hounds gathered around me and people yelled at each other—questions, recriminations, even some accusations. Finally, after about fifteen minutes of this, I figured out who it was who had disappeared.

  It was Ace.

  And I wanted to scream with anger and frustration, and I wanted to beat myself in the head until I was unconscious. Because I had known, I had just been told that something was going to happen with Ace, and I had blown it because I hadn’t passed the information on immediately.

  Oh ye gods, what had I done?

  OH GODS. THAT WAS all I could think, as the choppers came for us. Oh gods. Because what else could I think? I had the intel, the information was in my hands, and instead of getting on the comms to Kent, I’d wasted time looking for combat cams. I could have stopped Ace escaping, and I hadn’t. Forget how well I’d handled the Gog and Magog; this canceled out every bit of that.

  Because my first concern hadn’t been for my team, or for the Elite, or the Hunters, or anyone in the whole damn battle but myself. I’d been terrified Ace was coming after me, and that was all I had thought about. I’d let everyone down in that instant of selfishness.

  Don’t tell, snapped Bya in the next instant.

  Not even Uncle? I thought back at him.

  Bya shook his head. No one. Then as my legs gave way and I sort of folded up on the ground, he made his fur all soft and so did the rest, and they all clustered around me until I was encased in a nest of Hounds. I pulled off my gas mask and cried, partly because I was scared, partly because I was exhausted, partly because I was so sick at what I’d done, or rather, hadn’t done, but mostly because I just wanted all this to stop. I wanted people to stop trying to use me. I wanted people to stop trying to kill me. I didn’t want to have Folk showing up and delivering cryptic messages. I wanted things to be simple again, where all I needed to do was Hunt Othersiders and do my job well and everything else would take care of itself. I had thought everything would be all right, and now it was going all wrong again, and I was running out of ideas and energy.

  I am not a pretty crier. My nose got all clogged up, my face got all hot and raw, and my eyes swelled up. There were some rags in my backpack because it’s always a good idea to have clean rags no matter where you are, and they were all soggy and nasty by the time the chopper came to pick me up. I sent the Hounds home as it landed. There were two guys who were wounded, but not badly, and a medic in it already. The medic gave me a sharp look when he saw my face as I climbed in.

  “Are you hurt, Hunter?” he asked. I shook my head, still not able to talk coherently without bursting into tears.

  He gave me a sympathetic look and patted my shoulder. He was an older guy, old enough to have kids my age, actually. “It’s been a long, long day, kid, but it’s over. Go strap yourself down,” he said kindly, and handed me a wad of waste bandage to use in place of my rags. As soon as I was secured, he banged the side of the chopper, and we took off again, me still leaking tears.

  The chopper let them off first, then dropped me at HQ. I was the last Elite in, and as I trudged to the debrief office, I was not looking forward to fumbling my way through an interrogation.

  But to my surprise, I was just handed a form to sign that detailed most of what I’d done, with a page at the end where I could add what I wanted. So I added the Minotaurs and the rest of the cleanup, signed it, and hurried to my room so I could start the shower and have another good long cry under the hot water. Showers are great places to cry; the noise covers what you’re doing, and the water washes away all the mess.

  By this point, I was reduced to just one thought: I want to go home. I wanted everything to go back to normal, I wanted my friends, I wanted my Masters, I wanted people I could trust around me. Not just people I could depend on. People I could trust. People who knew me well enough to know when I might drop the ball and would make sure no one else did so my screwups would be covered. People who were so much smarter than me that they made Kent look like a bottom ranker. People who knew when I was out of my depth. People who I could have told about my moment of selfishness, who would have given me the lecture I deserved, then let me know they could still protect me—protect all of us. And somewhere I could be safe, as I could never be safe here, not as long as Ace was alive.

  My brain felt like mush, my gut and shoulders and neck were in knots, and I hurt, wanting these things so badly. And in that moment, not even having Josh as a boyfriend was incentive enough to make me want to stay, if someone had told me I could leave.

  But of course, no one would. I was trapped here. I could never go back. Things would never be “normal” or predictable again. I was so very tired, and there was no prospect of things ever getting better, no chance that anyone would ever let me go home again. And that, really, was why I was crying.

  I got out of the shower dripping and just wrapped myself up in a thick, soft robe without drying off, and flopped down on the bed. My eyes were sore. My cheeks felt better after the shower, but my nose was raw. I felt Bya tapping anxiously on the back of my mind and sat up long enough to bring him over.

  He curled up around me and just let me not think. For once, no one was pestering me (and right at that moment, I would have considered even a call from Josh to be “pestering”), and it slowly dawned on me why that was.

  Something far more important was occupying everyone here at HQ, and probably the Prefecture, and definitely at the army HQ. Ace was gone; this was the first time someone had vanished right off the battlefield in front of everybody, and it was a disaster. Above all else, they had to make sure no one talked about that outside of the Hunters and the army Mages and those in the conventional forces who had actually seen it happen. And then what would they do? I had no clue and probably neither did they, but they were scrambling.

  Let the news come to you naturally. Be as surprised as anyone else. Bya was sharp. And correct. And he was right about another thing, that I shouldn’t report that “my” Folk Mage had warned me (although, Cassandra-like, the Folk Mage hadn’t exactly been clear about what he was warning me against).

  If I’d reported that contact, though, all I’d get out of it would be more trouble. They’d just had one former Hunter, now Mage, defect (I was already pretty sure Ace had defected, and I figured it wouldn’t take long for everyone else to come to the same conclusion). They knew from the recordings made that day when the Hounds and I saved the train that “my” Folk Mage had made me an offer. They’d be right to assume that, if he’d shown up again, it wasn’t just to give me some vaguely worded warning, but to repeat the offer; and in their shoes, I’d be looking at me with a lot of suspicion.

  I was just glad that there hadn’t been a cam around to record his second appearance in my life.

  You should eat, Bya chided.

  Ugh. I still felt sick to my stomach. Too much running on terror and adrenaline, and too much crying. But there were some liquid meals in my cool-box, and I mustered enough energy to get two and drink them.

  I was too tired to sleep, somehow, so I dimmed the lights, then put on some music and just lay there with Bya serving as a source of warmth and comfort and as a pillow. It was rest, kind of.

  Every so often I thought about getting up and going to the lounge, but I just couldn’t bring myself to move. I had that feeling of heavy exhaustion that comes after you’re over the worst of a bad illness but aren’t in any shape to get up and do anything.

  At least with everyone else running around trying to deal with what Ace had done, probably no one was thinking about me. Except Bya.

  Why do you do this? I finally asked Bya. Hunt with us humans, I mean?

  He took a long time to answer, and I wasn’t sure he would, actually. Me? he asked. Or all Hounds?


  All Hounds, I clarified.

  He was quiet for a few more minutes. Partly the same reason why wolves came to hunt with humans and became dogs. Together we are better hunters than either of us alone. And since our prey hunts you humans, it is easier to join you and wait to ambush the prey than it is to chase it down.

  That made perfect sense, of course. But I started to feel disappointment—

  But Bya wasn’t finished. But mostly it is because we like you. We are more like dogs than wolves, now. We come to you because we like you, we enjoy Hunting with you, and we enjoy your company. All of us like our Hunters at least a little. Some of us like our Hunters a very great deal. And he gave me a nudge and a lick. I would have to like you very, very much to clean your runny nose with my tongue, no?

  I was astonished enough to be jarred right out of my depression. That was one of those things I had always hoped I was right about, but I never thought I’d hear Bya just say it. I put both arms around his neck and hugged. “I love you too,” I whispered into his ear.

  Good. That is as it should be, he replied, and I sensed his amusement. Now rest. Learn the wisdom of the Hound. Always rest, eat, and play when you can, because the universe conspires to keep you from doing any of these things nearly as often as you would like.

  Did anyone else have this kind of closeness with their Hounds? Surely someone did….Archer was always curled up in a Hound-ball when he was resting. So was Kent. And I wondered, just before sleep finally hit me between the eyes, if this was something Hunters and Hounds could somehow use against the Othersiders.

  We were shorthanded as I came to find out when I signed in. Three of the other Elite had been injured, not critically, but we might be scrambling for a few days.

  Between that and Ace’s defection—and it was all over Hunter HQ that he had defected—no one was paying any attention to me, which was exactly the way I liked it. No messages waiting for me when I woke up, no one calling as soon as my status went green. As I walked into the mess for breakfast, I had planned to be early to continue being left alone…but so, it seemed, had everyone else. The mess was packed.

  I listened to the gossip over breakfast as I ate off in a far corner. It was pretty lively. There was even some about me…some people were wondering what I’d been doing after the Minotaur attack—though in light of Ace’s disappearance, people were just shrugging it off with a “Well, looks like Joy’s finally had a moment of hitting the wall.” Which was humiliating, since some people were snickering when they said it, and it was pretty obvious there were still Hunters here that thought I was getting above myself and needed a little takedown. On the other hand, it wasn’t all that humiliating, and there were a whole lot worse speculations they could have made.

  Even Ace’s former friends were making no effort to defend him now. It was one thing when he’d gone after me and another when he’d basically given a big fat “up yours” to every Hunter ever by going over to the Othersiders. Ace’s former girlfriend, Cielle, was pretty bitter about it. “‘Trust me, baby,’ he kept saying,” she said to a little group of sympathizers. “‘I know what I’m doing, baby, you don’t need to know anything.’ And sure, I bet he knew what he was doing! He was selling out to Them the whole time! I bet he even had a deal going with Them so he always had what looked like fantastic Hunts and he’d stay number one! Lousy cheat! I wonder how many of us he planned to hand over to Them?” There was a lot more in that vein. She’d gotten the notion in her head that Ace had been grooming her to present to the Othersiders. She might have been right.

  Needless to say, although there were cameras here as always, not a one was broadcasting. So the Hunters could say exactly what they liked, and they were not holding back. If someone didn’t have a nasty Ace Sturgis story of his own, there was always the opening to commiserate with someone who did.

  Sure, some of this was sour grapes, but all of it was fueled by the deep sense of betrayal shared by everyone in the room. When it had just been Ace trying to murder me, that was terrible, of course, but people told themselves it was just Ace going ape over his brother’s death. But this was an outright betrayal of every single one of us. It hit everyone on a personal level. They were angry, outraged, and personally offended.

  There was a certain satisfaction in hearing Ace getting smeared by everyone. I’ll admit it. Sometimes I am not a nice person, and that not-nice person was feeling vindicated right down to her toes. The bad-mouthing also made me feel a little less depressed.

  But what really got rid of the depression was that when I was about halfway through my breakfast, a bunch of grapes appeared in front of my eyes. “I thought about an apple, but that’s a Christer thing,” said Retro from behind me. “I always preferred the Romans. Care for a grape?”

  “Sure,” I said, taking one off the bunch and popping it in my mouth. He came around with his tray and plopped himself down across from me.

  “So. Our Bad Lad has flown the coop.” He made a birdlike shape with his hands and flapped it off. “Am I the only one not surprised?”

  “I guess…I guess the prefect probably isn’t,” I said after a moment of thought. “He was the one that wanted Ace somewhere they’d have to pump sunshine to him. But other than him and you…I guess so.”

  He picked up a piece of bacon, eyed it critically, and ate it. “I’ll admit, it was more dramatic than I pictured. I figured he’d make an illusion doppelganger of himself during a fight and just walk away. Probably go sell his services as a Mage to a warlord somewhere, or one of those bandit paramilitary groups. Or, hell, he wasn’t in a position to be picky, to the anti–Premier Rayne bunch of wannabe rebels out there in Spillover.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Mind you, any of those would have been a significant comedown in the world.”

  “You know who I wouldn’t want to be right now?” I said slowly. “The army Mages he must have been palling up to. He royally shafted them, and now they’re probably being raked over the coals for not keeping a tighter leash on him.”

  “True, oh wolves,” he replied, which actually made me smile briefly because it meant he’d read The Jungle Books too. “Have some grapes,” he added, offering me the rest of the bunch. I was polite and only took about half.

  “Why aren’t you angry about this?” I asked—because of everyone in the room, Retro seemed to be the only one that wasn’t treating Ace’s defection like some personal betrayal.

  “Waste of my time,” he said, and chuckled. “Look, it really is. I got angry at him when he tried to murder one of us. After that, so far as I was concerned, he was not getting one second more of my attention, unless and until I was in a position to do something about him. When I’m not Hunting, I want to be having a good time, and being eaten up with anger is not having a good time.” He cocked his head at me. “So, want to have a good time?”

  I was saved from having to answer when his Perscom went off. He looked at it, shook his fist at the ceiling, and dashed off.

  When I was done, I reported to the armory, which was also packed. Kent came out of his office, looked around, and announced that he had decided to hold an impromptu briefing for us, which was probably smart, since that would short-circuit a lot of speculation. Right now, people were still in the shock phase and venting about Ace. But Hunters are smart; they have to be or they don’t survive. I gave it less than forty-eight hours before people started taking the little bits that they knew and blowing them up into full-blown stories.

  “This is what we know so far,” he said when we’d all settled around the room.

  “All the cam footage has been gathered up, and if there was any doubt before, there’s none now. You might as well know the truth, since you’re likely to be the ones to butt heads with him. Ace Sturgis definitely defected to the Othersiders. We’ve got cam footage of him going through one of their Portals of his own free will.”

  There was some murmuring, but no one sounded surprised. Angry but not surprised.

  “The good news was that there
were no Cit casualties,” he continued. “The bad news is that the analysts have a theory that the entire attack was staged in order to cut Ace loose.”

  Well, that’s going to tilt over the hive, I thought. It might have taken people a while to come up with that theory on their own…but on the other hand, maybe it was best to just get it in the open now. Would people speculate less if they thought the authorities were already trying to figure out what that meant and what we could expect?

  “They lost an awful lot of minions just to get one human Mage,” Archer observed, his voice skeptical. “The Folk Mages are better than ours are. What could they possibly want with Sturgis that they couldn’t get easier with one of their own?”

  Inside information, I thought immediately. Details on defenses. Even if Ace doesn’t know how the defenses are constructed, or even how they work, he knows where they are and where the controls are. And he knows the Hunters, knows their powers. A lot of them, if not all of them.

  “When have you ever seen the Folk concerned about their foot soldiers?” countered Flashfire, one of the Elites whose pyromancy left me in awe. “I’ve seen them fling a couple hundred onto the barricades only to wander away when they got tired of the fight and leave the grunts to fend for themselves. We all have. I can easily see them sending in their cannon fodder just to distract us while they hooked Sturgis.”

  “If all the troops were supposed to be was a distraction, that would account for the lack of tactics. They didn’t seem to give them any direction at all,” Hammer observed. “They just opened Portals and turned the troops loose.”