Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “He was a young man, like Adam,” Elspeth sniffled, Rose’s emotional hold over her clearly about to falter, tears streaming down her white cheeks. “But…but…” She sniffled, trying to compose herself and failing. “They said it was a heart attack.”

  22.

  As Rose and I walked away from the shop I heard a chorus of wails begin behind us, drawing a deep cringe from me and a puckish smile of amusement from her. “You shouldn’t take delight in the misery of others, you know,” I said, like I had any room to talk.

  “Oh!” I’d caught her red-handed and she blushed hard. “I’m not delighting—I wasn’t smiling about that! It was just, you—when ye were dealing with them…I caught that wee hint of—”

  “I don’t like feelings,” I said, cutting right to what she was going to say before she said it. “Which is probably why I’m not the hugest fan of empaths, just FYI.”

  “You’ve known some of us, then?” she asked, falling into line beside me, still cradling her side, as we walked past a shop whose signage promised that they sold the finest whiskeys in Scotland.

  “I’ve known a few empaths, yes.” I glanced at the whiskey shop, at the display in the front window, which gave way to a jewelry shop next door. Lots of silver, which interested me only marginally more than the whiskey.

  “If you’ll forgive me for saying so,” she said tentatively, “most people, when I’m around them…I get a sense of their feelings whether I want to or not. But with ye…”

  “You don’t get anything, right? I’m like a black hole in the sidewalk?” I kept my eyes forward. Graham’s shop was supposedly just up the hill, though Rose was lagging a little and I slowed so as not to leave her behind. I scanned the street, looking for watchful eyes or hostility, but not too many people were out in this misting rain that had begun again.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Which—I’m sorry, I’ve never encountered that before.”

  “I have a telepath in my head,” I said. “Telepaths and empaths are—I dunno, polar opposites or something. They block each other pretty effectively. Empaths can’t twist a telepath’s emotions and telepaths can’t read an empath’s mind.”

  “Oh.” She lapsed into a very brief silence, which normally I would have found comforting. For some reason, with Rose, her questions didn’t bother me as much as they did with a normal person. “Do all metahuman powers have an opposite balanced one like that?”

  I blinked, giving it some thought. “Uhmm…that’s a good question. I don’t know, exactly.”

  “Well…does yours?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “The opposite of a succubus or incubus is probably a Persephone. I can kill and absorb a soul with my touch while a Persephone can heal and give life with theirs. But they can also control plants from root and seed, which has no analog in my abilities, unfortunately. But I guess they’re a sort of equal and opposite for my kind.”

  “That’s really fascinating,” Rose said, and I could tell by the way she leaned in that she wasn’t fooling around. She was eating this all up, which was kind of…cool. Because most of the time when I was on a case with an unfortunate hanger-on, they weren’t typically all that jazzed about it as a teachable moment. They were either trying to survive or else so used to my presence that they were jaded by me.

  There’s an old saying that you’re never a prophet in your own land. For the first time ever, maybe, with Rose, I finally understood what that meant. Because here, in Scotland, I’d finally found someone who wanted to learn what I had to teach. Not that I’d made much of an effort to find pupils, but still…

  “Can you think of other powers that have that sort of relationship?” She was really getting into this.

  “Hmm,” I said, racking my brain. “You could almost say that a Hercules and an Atlas have a relationship to one another…a Hercules can swell or shrink their muscles, with some sort of converse relationship to brain power the stronger they get. Whereas an Atlas can actually grow or shrink their body, becoming smaller or larger, but their strength largely remains fixed, along with their brainpower…”

  I got kinda lost in this new line of thought and almost missed it when Rose said, “I think that’s where Graham worked.” She was pointing at a shop that sold—guess what? Whiskey.

  “Right you are,” I said, dragging myself out of my nice little intellectual exercise. It was a pleasant change of pace from beating asses, giving some deeper thought to metahuman abilities in a way I’d never had cause to discuss them before.

  “We can pick this up later again, if ye want,” Rose said, and she sounded hopeful about it. Then she looked both ways and started to cross the Royal Mile, heading for the whiskey shop.

  “I do want to pick it up again later,” I said, taking a step off the curb to follow her to Graham’s place of employment, and, with any luck, some answers.

  23.

  We didn’t find any answers in the whiskey shop, unfortunately, just shelves and shelves of obscenely high-priced Scotch whiskey and a shopgirl who shrugged her shoulders at any inquiry about Graham, the type of person he was, what he might have been up to, etc.

  She’s new, Harmon informed me, not exactly knocking my socks off with surprise. And kind of dumb. Also not a huge surprise.

  “Well, that was a bit of a dead end,” Rose said, frowning as we stepped out of the whiskey shop and into the street, where the rain had, for the moment, stopped. Dark clouds still malingered overhead, and I eyed them with annoyance, wondering how much moisture my wig could absorb before it became completely unserviceable as a disguise. These were the moments when Scott Byerly was sorely missed. Well, now and sometimes late at night, when—

  Never mind. You don’t need to know about that.

  Gross.

  Anyway, as I stopped on the curb, trying to decide what to do next, Rose stuck up her arm on the unwounded side of her body, which still prompted her to cringe. Before I could ask what she was up to, a cab slowed and popped to a stop next to us. “Sorry,” she said, genuinely apologizing, “but it occurred to me that we’re going to the Ailbeart’s next, yeah?” She waited for me to nod. “Well, if you want, you can fly ahead and I’ll take the cab and meet you there, but—”

  “You being flown right now is going to hurt like hell,” I said, getting it at last. “Quick thinking on the cab.”

  She let a pained look flash through, and I could tell her side must have been really bothering her. As would tend to happen when you had a several-centimeter hole torn through flesh, internal organs and bone. “Just trying to be efficient. Like I said, I can meet ye there if you want to get a jump on—”

  “No, I’ll ride with you,” I said, leaning down to open the door for her so she didn’t have to. The cab was what I referred to as a shoebox car, the sort of thing almost all Europeans seemed to prefer, provided they had a car at all. It was some sort of small hatchback, and I fit into it comfortably enough next to Rose, who scooted in like I was chasing after her with a pitchfork and a torch. “Chill, Rose,” I said as she settled into place. “There’s no rush. I’m not going to bail on you if you take a few extra seconds to get into the car.”

  She laughed uncomfortably. “Just don’t want to slow ye down.”

  I sat back as the cabbie started the car and Rose gave him the address, wondering about that last exchange with her. It was a little weird that she’d be worried about slowing me down while I was worried about her wellbeing. Weird for me to be worrying about a near total stranger, and not leaving her behind, but I consoled myself by knowing that I was looking out for her against whatever assassins might come her way now that she’d cast her lot with me.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked as she cradled her arm close to her side. I spoke meta-low, so quietly that only another metahuman, with our enhanced sense of hearing, could have heard me.

  “A little better, I think,” she said, replying in kind. The cabbie wasn’t even looking around, just watching the road
without a clue we were talking, hopefully. “Still hurts, but nothing I can’t deal with.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Can I ask ye about this victim?” She looked at me very tentatively until I nodded. “Do you have any idea why he was killed?”

  “Not the foggiest—yet. I was leaning toward random act until we found out his roommate had been killed too. Now I’m thinking—well, I don’t actually know that I have a thought for it, unless Graham is secretly the killer and he’s faked his own death.” I made a mental note to stop by the Edinburgh PD shortly and get the file on Graham’s death. Assuming they’d realized it was a homicide and done any legwork on it. Heart attack ruling made that…unlikely. I would have called them, but…hell, I still didn’t know how to dial British numbers in my American phone. I probably should have had my bankers in Liechtenstein find someone to buy me a British one, but I’d been loathe to contact them lately, now that the American heat was so high on me. I was always worrying that a drone was overhead at any time, ready to pump a Hellfire missile right up my tookus.

  “Hmm,” Rose said, going back to her own thoughts.

  “This doesn’t seem like a very big town,” I said, looking out at some of the old stone buildings of Edinburgh as they passed. We were turning to go down a hill, crossing a huge bridge with pedestrian traffic swarming on either side. I could see the glass roof of something out my window. It looked vaguely like either a train station or else a hell of a conservatory. “Did you know either of these guys?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’m not from Edinburgh originally.”

  “Oh? Where’d you come from?”

  “Small town on the west coast. Of Scotland, I mean—”

  “I didn’t expect it was Seattle you were talking about.”

  “I only got here a few years ago.” She smiled weakly. “Right about the time you came to fame, actually.”

  “What brought you to Edinburgh?”

  “Not a lot of people left in my town,” she said, taking her own chance to look out the window.

  The cabbie turned the car onto a main drag, one I’d overflown earlier in the day. I watched with interest, and noted a street sign: Princes Street.

  “This is new Edinburgh,” Rose said, apparently noticing my attentiveness to the scenery. “The old town is up on the hill, spreading out from the castle. They used to have city gates and everything, plans for a defense because it’d get, ye know, under siege from medieval invaders. Once that threat was out, people started building out here, and the wealth moved off the hill and into this nice, new area.”

  “Only a stone’s throw away,” I said, looking back over the bridge we’d crossed. On the opposite side from the train station, there was a park that stretched off into the distance, couched at the base of the hill between the old town and the new. “Almost literally.” I peered out the back window. “That park is huge. It’s like Edinburgh’s version of Central Park in New York.”

  “It wasn’t always so nice,” she said with a slight smile.

  “Oh?”

  “The reason it’s not built on? It used to be Nor Loch until they drained it,” she said, still smiling. “The city’s at the top of the hill, lake at the bottom…all those people, no indoor plumbing…that refuse needed somewhere to go when they tossed it out their front doors and down the hill…”

  “I bet that was a smelly place to swim.”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda glad it’s gardens and park now,” she said. “Not sure a swampy sewage reservoir would make this city as nice a place to live.”

  I snorted. “Well, it’s gotta go somewhere.” Ahead, in the distance, I could see the hilltop monuments I’d spied when I’d landed in Edinburgh for the first time, and I could tell that the Old Calton Burial Grounds, where I’d looked at Adam Perry’s body, was not terribly far.

  The cabbie turned left off the main road, and suddenly we found ourselves making a few turns, enough that I lost my sense of direction. Pretty soon he stopped the car and said something fairly low himself, but not so bad I couldn’t understand him. “£8.24.” It was the first thing he’d said since we got in the cab, and I thought I was in love. I didn’t know how many cabbies had tried to make conversations with me over the years since I’d started riding in cabs, but it was a lot.

  I paid the man with a wrinkled £10 note and got out after Rose, who had a little more spring in her step. She probably was healing fast, though I’d need to check on it after we finished this interview and potentially got back to more serious business. I didn’t bother waving at the cabbie as he pulled away, because his code of silence and stoicism probably would have prevented him from waving back in any case.

  Ailbeart’s was all done up in a blue storefront, funky with glittering letters. It looked like it might have been a pub at one point but taken a bad left turn to cater to schoolkids. I shook my head and followed Rose’s lead to the front door, which, to my surprise, given that it was mid-afternoon, swung wide when she pushed.

  “In the non-evening hours it’s just a pub,” she said as we found ourselves in a dark space, my eyes swiftly adjusting to the cave-like atmosphere. I could see the dance floor that gleamed to my left as I headed to the bar, which was to the right. The whole place had been sandwiched into the first floor of another of Edinburgh’s ubiquitous European-style apartment buildings, the kind I tended to see all over the damned place over here. The only thing that varied was the facade, and only slightly.

  There was only one guy behind the bar at this hour, and not a patron in the place. Seemed like a good argument for it being a high school establishment, with the caveat that in the UK, a high school establishment included liquor.

  “You’re frowning,” she said, informing me of something I did not realize but should have guessed, since it’s me and I assume I frown a lot.

  “Was just pondering your drinking age and remembering how irresponsible I was at eighteen.”

  “You didn’t drink at age eighteen?”

  “Oh, I did,” I said, remembering the time I’d gone on a mission with Kat and Scott that had resulted in drunkenness and some truly terrible decisions, like nearly sleeping with an Omega incubus. “And regretted it.”

  She got a wry smile. “Couldn’t hold your liquor?”

  “Couldn’t think very well after imbibing it, actually.”

  I steered us toward the bartender, who, like the shopkeeper in the last place, was doing a bit of leering as we approached. He focused his attention mostly on Rose, and I asked, meta-low, “Is Edinburgh suffering from a higher than normal proportion of leches? Or are these last two just poor ambassadors for their sex?”

  “I haven’t been anywhere else but my village,” she said, “so I guess I’m not sure if there are a lot more leches elsewhere than here, but these two aren’t what I’d call normal, wearing their gawking on their sleeve like this.”

  “Good.”

  “’ello, dollfaces,” the bartender said in an actual British English accent, one that didn’t really seem totally out of place in Edinburgh but was distinctly not Scottish. It actually sounded almost Cockney, but like it had faded over time. “Can I get you a drink? Ladies’ night is tonight, two-for-ones, and I’m more than happy to start you off a little early.”

  I debated whether having a drink would make him chattier or not, and ultimately decided my usual, bullheaded approach was the way to go with a guy like this. Why change things up for the sake of an ass? “My name is Sarah Nelson and I’m with Scotland Yard.”

  He froze, but only for a second, then picked up a glass and a rag and started polishing it. “Whatchoo want?” he asked, not exactly the height of civility.

  “I’m here about Adam Perry.”

  He paused for a second. “Oh. That sod. Should have known; you two are a little older than our usual crowd. What’d Adam do now?” He evinced just a hint of relief that we were here about someone else.

  I decided not to be merciful in dropping the hammer. “Got murdered.”<
br />
  That hit him like a brick in the face, but he evinced only momentary surprise before tossing out, “What’s that got to do wif me?”

  “Well, I assumed you murdered him, of course.” I smiled sweetly, and watched the panic form in his eyes as he tried to come up with an explanation.

  “Look, I don’t know what you think is going on here, but I was here, at the bar, until late.” He spoke with the air of a man desperately, desperately trying to get me to believe him, a man who hadn’t quite tumbled to the fact I was toying with him. “I have witnesses. Dozens of them. I’ll make a list—”

  “Do that,” I said, and watched him dive for a paper and pen like he was a brave soldier jumping on a grenade to save his fellows. Though, in this case, he was about to throw me a dozen names to save his own ass, so…

  “Perry wasn’t even here that long last night,” the bartender said, writing feverishly. “You want these guys’ mobile numbers, too?” He didn’t even wait for me to answer, pulling out his phone. “Of course you do. You just give them a call, they’ll tell you, I was here until late. Super late. Like break of dawn.”

  I shared a look of pure amusement with Rose, who seemed to be getting a kick out of this as well. “It might take me a little while to call them all. You okay with us staying here while we do?”

  He stopped writing in the middle of a name. “Staying…here?” He looked like I’d tossed him in front of a train, and I wondered if I’d caught him in the middle of a lie or if he’d just been caught by surprise that we’d want to bask in his presence for any longer than we had to.

  “Of course,” I said, keeping my malicious glee buttoned up inside. Rose was trying to hold in laughter, shoulders shaking in silent mirth, mixed with the grimaces of the pain that was probably rolling through her from the stress on her lungs and rib cage. She wasn’t whimpering, so give the girl credit. “Like you said, we’re a bit older than your usual clientele, which means we weren’t born yesterday. I know the minute I walk out that door you’re going to be making frantic phone calls to your pals, making sure they confirm your alibi, and I want to talk to them before you get a chance to screw up their young and impressionable heads.”