Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  “And what is your name, daughter of Persephone?” Artemis asked. No longer was there threat, but she still spoke warily, and never once relinquished her weapon or pointed the tip in any direction but at her perceived foes. “Tell me, so that I may let my brethren know to let you pass unimpeded in future encounters.”

  The daughter of death spoke quietly, when at last she broke her silence. “You may let them know of my coming, and that my name is Lethe.” Artemis nodded at this, and began to withdraw from the glade, but not before the daughter of death left her with one final command, one that the goddess took without blanching, an insult that found its mark and yet still did not provoke the elder goddess to action. “Tell them of my coming, and warn them—warn them, huntress…that they should not dare to cross me, lest they find themselves in the poor graces of death.”

  18.

  Sienna

  The shotgun blast hit me right in the center of my chest, pellets tearing into my clothing and drawing from me a scream. “Aughhhhhhhh!” I shouted to the heavens, “Nooooooo! It hurrrrrts!” I howled out. “It hurrrts soooo bad! Arghhhhh!”

  Your acting is terrible, Harmon said with plain irritation.

  You deserve all the Razzies for that one, Eve agreed.

  I clutched at my chest where the buckshot had struck me, and then pulled them away like a magician making a flourish, my three audience members staring, momentarily frozen by my display of dramatics. “Just yanking your crank, guys.” Pellets tinkled to the cafe floor like rain outside. “I’ve built up my immunity to shotguns. Try again.”

  One of the three remaining guys, the one to my right, reached into his waistband and yanked out a revolver, an old one that looked like it had maybe seen better centuries.

  “Shit,” said I. “I thought you people didn’t have guns in this countr—”

  I ducked as he pulled the trigger and the revolver roared. My table went over as I tried to put it between me and him. It splintered, not exactly doing a yeoman’s work in absorbing the bullet. My calf caught it instead and I let out a cry that was way, way more sincere than my fake acting at the shotgun blast. Because it hurt.

  There’s nothing like getting shot in the leg to focus your attention. Mostly on the pain, sure, but also on the fact that the next bullet could kill you dead, even if you’re me. “The table, it does nothing,” I muttered under my breath, huddled behind it uselessly. It was concealment, but damned sure not cover, because it wasn’t going to protect me from anything but sunlight, which wasn’t a concern in Scotland anyway.

  Trying to turn lemons into lemonade, I said, “Wolfe,” and didn’t wait to hear if he’d pull out of his recent torpor in order to get to work pushing that bullet out of my leg. Instead, I kneed the table with the other one, hard, and sent it sliding across the floor toward my assailants.

  While it did that, I used my power of flight to go real low, zipping across the floor about a half inch off the ground and into the smaller, two-person table that had been right across from where I was sitting. When I got there, I reached under the nearest chair in the set and took hold, hurling it. The table I’d thrown had forced two of my foes to jump to avoid getting kneecapped, or maybe groincapped, which would have been hilarious. This included the shooter with the revolver, thankfully.

  “This girl likes it rough,” said the third, appearing above me. He raised a fist and brought it down, probably attempting to cave my head in with his punch, because it whistled toward the ground like a car dropped off a roof. (I’ve done it. It does whistle.)

  “Boy, do I,” I quipped in reply as I let his momentum carry him down. He smashed his fist into the tile, where it shattered, spraying me with fragments. Sadly, not of his fist, which remained intact and apparently unharmed, judging by the fact he didn’t grimace. While he was at the low point of his swing, though, I reached up and grabbed him by the cheeks and said, “A fine judge of character you are.” Then I slammed his face into the ground. “Distances, maybe not so much though.”

  I lifted his face enough to see that he had that glazed-over look in his eyes, blinking them furiously like he could just shrug off the concussion I’d just given him. With a hearty shove—and I do mean hearty—I sent him flying through the front window without ceremony. The sound of shattering glass did my heart good, and the sight of his ass tumbling out onto the Royal Mile didn’t exactly make me weep either. “Three down,” I muttered.

  The revolver blistered the air behind me and I caught another round, in the stomach this time. This was the price you paid for getting caught up with the unarmed, superpowered idiot while someone was trying to shoot you. Taking two slugs to the gut wasn’t exactly a highlight of my career or life, but honestly, it wasn’t even the worst thing that had happened to me this year.

  “Asshole!” I shouted, channeling my pain into anger and whipping this table at the shooter. He and the guy holding the shotgun were still in the fight, and I got a bad feeling that since I hadn’t heard the shotgun discharge lately but the guy was still holding it, that it was going to be used as a club to beat me to death. It’d probably be good for that, too, because it was useless for anything else presently.

  The searing sensation tearing its way through my belly reminded me of a time when Wolfe had stuck a finger in my guts and lifted me up. They say a stomach wound is one of the most painful ways to die, and I could vouch for it, paralyzing claws of agony worming their way through my central nervous system, making it damned impossible for me to concentrate on the important business of filleting these bastards and using their entrails to hang them as a warning to the next round of thugs to come after me in this godforsaken country that you really shouldn’t mess with Sienna Nealon, ever. Or at least not at breakfast.

  I was trying to marshal enough presence of mind to fling the last chair at them, but I was coming up short. Pain had quite literally shut down my body. I couldn’t even lift an arm to chuck the damned thing, and my eyes wandered, barely responding to my commands. I was shaking, my body—not quite convulsing, but at least locking down as my abdominal muscles flexed in an attempt to push out the murderously painful bullets currently afflicting them. My unconscious reaction was about to be the death of me.

  I couldn’t cast a light net. Couldn’t detonate for fear of killing people. Couldn’t go dragon, couldn’t summon the presence of mind to use Bjorn’s power…

  I was tapped out. No options left save one.

  “Time to die,” the man with the revolver said. I looked up, his face so blurry that all I could see was the gun barrel leering down at me, pointed right at my head.

  This, I couldn’t survive. And as I watched and shook, transfixed on the approaching doom, his finger began to tighten on the trigger.

  19.

  There are some moments in life where time just slows way the hell down. From my friends who actually went to school, I’m told the last ten minutes before the bell rings for summer is especially like this. The moment before a first kiss, when you’re nervous as hell, wondering if it’s even going to happen. Yeah, slow as molasses on a Minnesota January day.

  The moment before some Scottish goomba pulls the trigger on you? Yeah, it moves surprisingly slow. But fast at the same time, a hellish two-fer of contradictory clock movement. I actually had the thought about saying, “Wait!” in hopes it would buy me a second to come up with something that would buy me another second, but then I thought…to hell with it. I’m not gonna beg this schmuck to spare me for a tick tock.

  “Wait!” That shout wasn’t me.

  I looked up, the guy with the gun looked up, the guy with the shotgun behind him looked up. It was just one big festival of looking up, and we all saw the same thing, presumably. Unless I was delusional from the pain, which I didn’t rule out.

  There was a flash of red hair and MY HERO—Rose grabbed the guy with the revolver and swung him around. The gun belched loud, lipping a six-inch flame out of the barrel as she took one in the side and grunted hard. I couldn’t see the shot,
but I could see her face and it went a couple shades paler than it had been before as a hideous red wound opened up at her ribcage.

  Credit where it’s due, though, the girl soldiered right through it, knocking the revolver aside and then thwacking the tough in the neck. It looked like it hurt, but it was hardly the most effective of blows, merely knocking him back a step. The armchair quarterback in me wanted to ask her why the hell she’d done that, but I got my answer a second later when the man with the shotgun capped off another round—

  Right into the back of his friend’s head. Rose had shoved him right into the line of fire. Human shield 0, Scottish Rose 10. Or at least 5, with a deduction for the fact that she took a round and also got revolver man’s brains all over her ensemble. In the Sienna games, we do deduct points for that.

  “Go team,” I warbled, the pain in my belly subsiding at last. I rolled to my knees as Rose came back at the wild shotgunner, snatching the weapon out of his hands as I got to my feet. She kicked him in the throat and her form was spot on, clearly some training shining through. She whirled and delivered a lightning strike to his neck, capitalizing on the damage she’d already done.

  With a guttural sound, Mr. Shotgun staggered back, clutching at his throat. It didn’t look quite right, mostly because it had a serious crease right where his Adam’s apple should have been, a perfect gutter that you could catch water runoff with. It reminded me of one time when I’d seen crime scene photos of a guy who’d decided to hang himself from a bridge, enduring an eighteen-foot fall before the rope had caught him. It had probably been a quick death, what with the snapping of his neck, but it hadn’t left a very pretty corpse. Definitely a high collar suit or a closed casket required for that one.

  Mr. Shotgun fell over backward, still trying to figure out how to breathe through a windpipe that had been closed like a Minnesota road during summertime. He never quite figured it out, bucking wildly for a few seconds as he struggled, increasingly desperately, for breath that just wasn’t coming.

  “I could probably do a tracheotomy and help him,” I said, “but to hell with that guy.” I clutched at my stomach as a couple bullets popped out and fell from my shirt to the floor. They were still stained with red.

  “Are you all right?” Rose rushed to my side, like I hadn’t just popped the bullets out, but kept herself from hanging on my arm or something similarly deleterious to her health.

  “How’d you find me?” I asked, just managing to get upright. Thanks, Wolfe, I said. He didn’t answer.

  “I leapt the rooftops after you,” Rose said, wisely keeping out of my personal space. “Lost you on the Mile, but…hard not to notice gunshots in Edinburgh, and people flying out windows onto the street.”

  “I bring chaos with me,” I said. “Like I pack it in my very suitcase.” I stretched gingerly and looked at the red mark on her side. “What about you?”

  She looked down, and her eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh my. That’s…”

  “Definitely more than a flesh wound,” I said, and she nodded along, sickly. “How strong is your meta healing?”

  Rose went so pale it looked to me like her hair was on fire. “Uhmm…I don’t know. I’ve never tested it before.”

  Sirens blared down the way. “Well,” I said, “we should probably get you…uhh, sorted out, or whatever you people say up here.” I glanced at the guy thrashing on the floor. “I just need to do one thing first…”

  I knelt down and put my hand on his head, holding him to the ground. Rose clutched her side, still pale, but also curious, her head cocked to the side, watching me. “What are you doing?”

  “Draining his memory of the events leading up to this little soiree,” I said, pushing through his mind quickly. I didn’t want to be in there as he died, after all, and I damned sure didn’t want to absorb him wholly. It took a few seconds to get to the memory I wanted, and I was a little out of practice ripping memories out of peoples’ heads, but since people were dying and these goons had just come to kill me, I wasn’t thrilled to walk out without a lead.

  And a few seconds later, I got one.

  I tumbled through his mind to a few hours earlier, and a vision of where he’d been just before this. I sensed it was the beginning of the story, or as near to it as I could find. Harmon wasn’t wrong; this guy’s head was weird, his memories cast in a kind of strange light, like his brain was diced or something.

  He was shaking hands with a man and feeling funny about it—staggering a little afterward, like he would have now if he’d been awake when I went to take my hands off him. He shook his head when it was done, looked back up at the man who’d touched him, and I got a clear look at the guy’s face.

  “I want ye to kill Sienna Nealon,” the man said. His skin was smooth, he had a five o’clock shadow, and his head was cleanly shaven. His eyes were a little sunken back in his head, but not too badly. He had a lean and hungry look, and when he smiled, it looked predatory.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said, dropping the thug’s hand as I re-entered the real world of the cafe, with the tables strewn across the floor from my battle and glass shattered in the front. Rose was still standing there, pale and clutching her side. I beckoned her toward the door and she came, hobbling smoothly along in my wake, stain on her shirt almost as red as her hair.

  When we got out onto the Royal Mile, I looked left and right. The cops were coming, but they weren’t quiet in sight yet, which worked for me. “Come here,” I said, and when Rose wandered close enough, I snaked an arm around her waist. She made a yelp of alarm at the suddenness of the movement, and then we were aloft, as I pulled her into the sky, seeking a suitable place to doctor her wound and also to think, to ponder, to study a little closer the face of the enemy that I’d just pulled from that tough’s mind.

  20.

  I stopped just down the High Street, way down the hill from the castle and not far from a building that looked like the seventies had birthed it after an ill-considered night with Frank Lloyd Wright. Which was really gross when you considered he’d died in 1959.

  “That’s Scottish Parliament,” Rose said, catching me giving the building a grim eye as we came in for a landing. Past it I saw a funky-looking castle building, or something similar, and before I could ask, she said, “And that’s Holyrood House, the Queen’s residence in Edinburgh.”

  “She has a lot of houses, doesn’t she?” I asked.

  “She’s the queen,” Rose said with a shrug and a far-off look that suggested to me that shock from the gunshot wound was setting in.

  “Come on, let’s get you doctored,” I said, and led her over to the center of the building we were standing on.

  I led her far from the edges of the roof, where people could see us, and then stopped. She was about as easily led as a baby lamb with a rope around its neck, and when I gestured for her to, she gingerly sat down, cringing all the while but being a good sport and not whining about it.

  “Looks like a through and through,” I said once I’d had a chance to give it a once-over.

  “A what?” she asked, politely baffled, like she was just asking something inconsequential. If it’d been me, I would have been a little more, “Arghhhh, what are you talking about, arghhhhhh, stop bullshitting and say what you mean in plain effing Englishhhhh!” But not Rose. She looked like she was holding her breath, probably a strategy to minimize the pain. I wasn’t going to tell her not to, because for all I knew it helped that she wasn’t putting pressure on her diaphragm, which would maybe translate to her ribs, one of which was likely busted by that bullet.

  “It just means there’s a secondary wound, an exit where the bullet came out,” I said, lifting her shirt and peering at the entry wound and then the exit wound. Yep, it had come out, and it looked pretty much like a straight shot through. I could even see Edinburgh faintly through the other side of the gunshot wound when I stared in. “Ouch.”

  “Is that good, then?” She was so damned polite, that lamb on a rope analogy was sounding mo
re accurate all the time.

  “It’s good in that I’m not going to have to dig around in your chest cavity to retrieve the bullet,” I said, still staring through, trying to see if her healing had done much with this thus far. It didn’t seem to, though the hole wasn’t bleeding profusely, just a small trickle. That was a good sign. “Depending on how strong of a meta you are, you can heal faster or slower, more completely or, erhmm…”

  “Less completely?” she offered weakly.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Someone with less of a natural healing ability will still heal from something like this, but they’d need more aid. For example, my healing ability can push the bullets right out of me in most cases, the tissue growth is so sudden and so powerful. Not all metas can do that as they heal. Some would heal with the bullet still inside them.”

  “Really?” she asked, sounding faint in the sense that she wasn’t talking very loud or forcefully, and also in the sense that when I looked up, she seemed like she might keel over from lightheadedness.

  “Yeah,” I said, figuring it was better to continue my lecture and give her something to focus on other than being shot. “Although I do occasionally have to watch out. For example, one time I got lung shot and the bullet didn’t come out. Which was a problem, because when I healed, the bullet got pushed into the lung instead of out of my body.”

  “Oh my,” Rose said, wobbling where she sat. “What happened?”

  “Oh, it hurt a lot, rattling around in there until I had someone pull it out.”

  “Someone?” She evinced a certain measure of worry in this, and I couldn’t decide whether it was for my wellbeing or her own, and ultimately decided it didn’t matter.

  “Yeah, I had a curious friend practice surgery on me,” I said. “Figured I didn’t need an actual doctor, and I didn’t want to go under general anesthesia, so I just had them cut an incision, break a rib, and pull it out.” Needless to say, that had hurt a lot, and Augustus, so enthused about maybe pursuing an MD with his paid-for college, quickly changed his tune after about twenty minutes of following my curse-screamed requests that he get on with finishing the incision and breaking the rib. It was not our happiest day of the friendship, but I felt a lot better when I heard the bullet thud on the ground outside where we’d decided to do the surgery. I Wolfe’d back to health a few seconds later and knew by the look on Augustus’s face when I rose that he wouldn’t so much as look at a hospital again without feeling like he’d need to shit a brick.