Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I wish to go, yes,” Wolfe said, knocked off his reticence as easily as a bird struck from the roof of a house by a bowman.

  “Excellent,” Odin said, rising to his feet. “Then we shall leave on the morrow. I will see that a message finds its way to your mistress at the conclusion of her evening…activities.” Another scream pierced the quiet of the meadhall, and at the far end of the room, Odin’s idiot son laughed and banged his hammer against an anvil, clanging it loudly enough to make Wolfe grimace.

  “No,” Wolfe said, causing Odin to raise his eyebrow once more, only slightly, the surprise obvious this time. “Just the two of us should go.” He cast his eyes toward the hallway where Lethe did her business with the helpless, enfeebled sacrifices, men culled from other armies and given to her as…sacrifices.

  Odin nodded once, subtly. “Very well. We shall leave the Valkyrie to her business of choosing the dead. Are you ready?”

  Wolfe rose, pulling the skin tight to himself. “I am.”

  The All-Father smiled. “Very well then, Wolfe. Let us go forth and seek our own satisfaction, in the manner of the conquering.” He led the way out of the hall. Another scream sounded as they left, echoing in Wolfe’s ear, a low burn in his belly stoking his inner fire to draw some screams of his own, as if in answer to the ones he could hear—but never enjoy—from Lethe’s victims.

  35.

  Sienna

  I awoke to light streaming in through the window, unaware that I’d even fallen asleep on the couch. Rose was next to me, her own head tipped sideways where she looked to be resting, eyes open and fixed on me. When she caught me looking she smiled. “Good morning to ye.”

  “Ouch,” I said, feeling a little stiff from my sleeping position. I waited to see if Wolfe would clear it up on his own, but he didn’t, so I finally said, Wolfe, and a few seconds later the aching sensation in my neck disappeared just like a gunshot wound. Which reminded me: “How’s your side?”

  Rose lifted her shirt. “Good as new,” she said, poking the newly minted flesh where she’d been shot, only a little red spot still lingering to indicate where she’d taken the round.

  I stretched and rose, shaking my head as I stumbled to my feet. Cobwebs in the brain seemed to dot my thoughts, an unusual amount even for my usual state of fatigue. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen asleep, much less that I’d had the sleep I did, a mostly dreamless affair save for one nightmare that I vaguely recalled—feeling like Frankie was touching me, strangling me, trying to suffocate me.

  I took a breath. Well, he definitely hadn’t done that, and as much as I might have wished otherwise, I’d never had a shortage of nightmares after getting my ass kicked. Hell, sometimes I even had nightmares after I’d kicked someone else’s ass. The brain did like to unpack trauma in whatever way it could.

  “Damn,” I muttered, thinking of something. Rose looked at me with undisguised querying, and I said, “Gotta hit the toilet.” I excused myself from the room and closed the door to the bathroom quietly, as though I might wake Frankie, wherever he was, by slamming it.

  That wasn’t actually what I was cursing about. I’d meant to reach out to Jamal Coleman the next time I slept, to try and get him digging into what was going on in Edinburgh. He was a savvy character, the kind of guy that could unearth more with a computer than anyone else I’d ever met save one. But I couldn’t contact him by conventional means, because he was definitely under FBI surveillance and suspicion, being employed by my brother, a known associate of Sienna Nealon who worked with other known associates of mine. Giving the FBI reason to investigate them would be like throwing fresh meat in the midst of my friends when a hungry lion was prowling nearby.

  But I’d wanted to set Jamal to work on some of the burning questions—who was Frankie? How many people had gone missing around Edinburgh—and maybe Scotland in general—that had ended up donating their powers to his cause? How long had this been going on? Where the hell could I find this guy?

  Oh, and by the way—any thoughts on how to kill him?

  Jamal would probably come up dry on that last one, wearing an embarrassed look. Maybe not, though. He had taken revenge for the death of his last girlfriend, and it hadn’t been a super pretty kind of revenge either, poison at long range, pistols at dawn, or something clean and vaguely civilized. He’d looked those men in the face as he’d killed them, cold and angry. That was the kind of death Frankie had coming for indiscriminately ripping apart Edinburgh without concern for who got hurt or killed in the process of his douchebaggery.

  I finished in the bathroom and came out, another lost opportunity occurring to me. Even if I hadn’t gotten Jamal, I could have contacted Wexford, given him a status update for how things had gone bad up here. I might still have to do that; US intelligence probably knew he and the UK government were nominally shielding me from trouble over here. It was anyone’s guess as to how they’d react to that—

  Poorly, Harmon said. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies don’t enjoy being thwarted, not even gently and quietly by our allies.

  Okay, well, it was the ex-president’s guess as to how they’d react to that, and his guess was not well. But will they actively intervene over here, on foreign soil?

  Harmon mulled that over for a moment. Probably not, unless the UK government asks for their help. To do so openly, or even covertly, and being caught at it? Major diplomatic incident, and not the sort of thing my successor, Richard Gondry—you’ve never met a dimmer, more cowardly herd animal—will want to risk.

  Good to know, I muttered as I came out of the bathroom.

  That said…watch your back, as the proles say, Harmon said. They may not want to use our operatives on British soil, but they have other resources that aren’t nearly as easy to trace back. Catspaws, if you will.

  Mercenaries, I said.

  Or worse. You’ll need to be careful.

  “Great,” I said as I came around the corner back into the living room, and stopped talking because Rose was already looking at me funny. Like I needed more problems right now.

  “What’s great?” Rose asked.

  “The reaction to everything that’s happened, I’m sure.” I strolled over to the coffee table in front of the couch and picked up the TV remote, clicking it on. “Why don’t you see what your friend has for breakfast while I take a minute to digest the goings-on as reported by the ever-reliable crusaders in the news media?”

  Rose nodded as the TV came on and took a minute to adjust to the signal it was getting. BBC News popped up a few seconds later, one of those impeccably British news readers inflappably speaking to the audience about goings-on around here.

  I’d avoided British news for the most part since I’d been here. It didn’t bear thinking about, most of the time, worrying what others were saying about me. I’d found it to be a trap of sorts, the kind I could easily wander into but not so easily get out of. Public opinion was a tricky thing for a control freak, because it was utterly out of my control.

  “…fracas in Edinburgh,” the news caster was saying. He was a middle-aged guy, looked like he probably wore glasses off camera, but he had the sort of gravitas that I tended to find easier in Englishmen than anywhere else. Wexford had it in spades. “Reports are now consistently firm—59 dead, 123 injured. Sienna Nealon has been sighted fleeing the scene, as well as overflying Edinburgh yesterday—”

  “Welcome to the obvious conclusion,” I said, and flipped the channel. To my surprise, one of the American news channels popped on, and I wondered if this was some sort of international satellite package or what, because I hadn’t seen this in any of the hotels I’d stayed at since arriving.

  “…some reactions online,” the host of the show was saying, “I think we can safely say that Sienna Nealon has been, to use the current phrase, ‘destroyed’ on the internet last night.” The guy wore a smirk. “It’s become obvious that whatever good we thought she was doing was all misrepresentation, that this whole time she wasn’t the hero we belie
ved in; she was a criminal busy covering up her own crimes. And the fact that they were such loathsome crimes—there should be an investigation into why the previous administration covered up for her, and why they—not just tolerated but actively supported her for years, keeping her in a governmental role to oversee metahuman criminal affairs—”

  I clicked the TV off and dropped the control, not gently. It clacked hard on the coffee table.

  “What?” Rose asked, still banging about in the kitchen. “What is it?”

  “It would appear I’ve been ‘destroyed’ on the internet again overnight,” I said, feeling the acidic taste of disgust. “So what else is new.” I said it really jaded, but the truth was, even after all this time of people finding ways to assume the absolute worst of me, regardless of what I was doing or trying to do…it still hurt to be so thoroughly misunderstood.

  “People who talk about someone being ‘destroyed’ on the internet?” Rose shook her head. “They seem like the kind of coddled little weasels that would fold like a bitch with one good punch.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at Rose’s devastating assessment. “You’re not wrong.”

  “You’ve still got fans out there,” Rose said sincerely. “People who believe in you, who don’t automatically leap to the worst possible conclusion when things go awry.”

  I glanced back at the dark TV. “There can’t be many of them left after these last few months.”

  “Ahh, they’re out there,” she said. She glanced around the kitchen. “Sooo…there’s not much in here, unfortunately. I found a little English breakfast tea…and that’s about it. Apparently my friend hasn’t hit the shop in a while. Needs a little M&S run.”

  “So we have to go out if we want to eat,” I said, coming to that very reluctant conclusion.

  “So it would seem,” Rose said, making away from the counter. “I mean, we could resort to cannibalism, if you’d prefer, and I think you have a very strong chance of besting me in any such contest—”

  I snorted. “I can’t eat a ginger.” She cocked her head in surprise as I delivered the punchline. “I feel like I’d be able to taste your lack of soul in the meat.”

  Her eyes widened, and she stood there for a second, mouth slightly agape, and then she started to laugh. “Ahahaha! That’s—that’s genuinely funny! Hahahah!”

  “And I didn’t even think it was one of my best,” I said, and a few seconds later we settled back into a glum silence. “Out we go, I guess.” I looked at the door with grim reluctance, like something was going to come crashing in at any second. Because that was the kind of state we were in.

  36.

  When we reached the street, it was clear Edinburgh was in a funk. It was were quiet, the sounds of cars in the distance but only occasionally nearby. It was like a grim blanket had settled over the city, pushing down on it, suppressing the life out of it.

  Now a fog had crept in, albeit a thin one, and where I might have expected a normal, steady flow of human traffic down a street like this on a regular morning, here I was seeing people out in ones and twos, heads down, their utter silence a strange tableau to behold.

  Rose and I looked left and right, and ultimately she nodded to the left, so I followed her. She seemed to know where she was going, and as we walked I heard her stomach rumble. She touched it self-consciously and said, “Sorry.” As though she had to apologize for being hungry because I’d had her hunker down last night.

  A guy walked past in a soccer shirt, head down, shuffling his feet. The cool morning air was causing my skin to prickle, and I said, after he’d passed, “I don’t get soccer. I mean, I don’t get many sports, actually, but especially not soccer.”

  “It’s football,” Rose said, a trace of crankiness oozing its way out.

  “Soccer.”

  “Football.”

  “You saying it over and over doesn’t make it something different.”

  “The rest of the world calls it football,” she said, “and you Americans call it soccer. Why the hell do you think you get to name it?”

  “When you’re back to back World War champs,” I said lightly, “you get to name things.” I didn’t give enough of a shit to provide anything other than the snarkiest of answers, bereft of any sincerity. “It’s a fringe benefit of having enough nuclear firepower to destroy the planet ten times over.”

  Rose’s shoulders shook slightly with mirth, then she got serious. “Might makes right, is that it?”

  I got a little quieter in my answer, because now we’d left snark behind and crossed over into a serious point. “Sadly, it always has, and I don’t see that fundamental truth of human nature changing anytime soon.”

  A couple of guys walked past, looking at Rose and me, taking a keen interest in us. They didn’t stop as they passed, but I saw one pull out a phone as he went by, and he had it up to his ear a moment later.

  “Shit,” I said, and tried to decide whether it would be a good idea to zap it out of his hand with a light net. I went back and forth a few times, but he turned into an alley behind me before I could land on a decision. If he’d been definitely guilty…no problem, right? But who knew whether he was just calling his mother or dropping a dime on me to Frankie?

  “That guy was suspicious, right?” Rose asked, leaning in to whisper to me.

  “He was.” I twitched as I walked, looking around like my head was on a swivel. I really missed my blonde wig right now, because as lame as it looked, it really did change my appearance enough that when coupled with an accent, people didn’t suspect I was Sienna Nealon.

  Now…? Especially given that I’d already been sighted in Edinburgh? That guy was probably just calling the cops. And who could blame him for it?

  Another guy was standing across the street on a phone, watching our progress like he was a motion-activated security camera. I caught a glimpse of another guy sending furtive glances at us from one of those glass bus stands that was bracketed by ads.

  “This is going to turn bad, quickly,” I said, leaning toward Rose. I was thinking I should snatch her up and fly before things got hot here. “Too many people looking at us here.” I mean, on a New York street, you could expect most people to just be doing their own thing, but here? Everybody seemed to be in full, ‘If you see something, say something,’ mode, and damned sure looking to see some shit. “We need to skedaddle.”

  “Okay,” Rose said, and she got closer. “How do ye want to—”

  We were only about fifty feet from a T intersection at the end of a block, and I was planning the best escape. Flying out right in the middle of the street seemed like a bad idea, but worse would be just standing around waiting for cops to show up or…

  Damn.

  That familiar bald head came bobbing around the corner, looking at us as he turned it and strode, unchallenged, into the street. Rose and I stopped where we were, in her case because she was struck dumb, in mine because he was close enough that if I grabbed Rose and zoomed right, he could probably throw up one of those ripper blasts with the wall of red that rose above it like a force field that’d cut me off before I made it twenty feet.

  “Sweet merciful Zeus,” Rose said under her breath.

  “By all accounts,” I said, “he was not that merciful.”

  You can say that again, Wolfe said.

  “Hello, Sienna,” Frankie said, and he cocked his head, grinning. “Have a good night?”

  37.

  “I did,” I said, figuring I’d crack wise with him while I was trying to decide on my course of action. “I’m surprised you didn’t come visit me in my dreams, since you seemed to think I was your density, George McFly without the charm. Or the hair.”

  He ran a hand over the slick top of his head and still grinned. “I was rather busy doing other things, lass.” Being called ‘lass’ by a handsome Scotsman was on my list of melty-excitey turn-ons. Being called ‘lass’ by Frankie kinda killed the dream, though. “That’s a good look for you,” he said, apparently noticing I was sti
ll clad in the ripped-up clothes he’d destroyed when last we’d met. “Like roadkill.”

  I stepped off the curb. “Well, I am on the road. And we both know you’re going to try and kill me. But a lot of people have tried, including yourself, and hey, I’m still here. In your case, I think we can chalk it up to performance anxiety. I’d say it’s natural, but really, most guys who try and kill me don’t have the kind of power you do and then choke at it, so…I think it’s just you.”

  Intentionally pissing him off was perhaps not the wisest use of my time, but every second I did it delayed the battle, and—I hoped—piled a little more excess emotion on the fire for him. If I made him mad enough, maybe he’d get sloppy. Flimsy as it was, that was kinda my only hope at the moment.

  “All right, well, let’s not muck about,” Frankie said, and then he fired off two blasts of those ripper beams. They went churning down the street, one of them aimed to go straight through Rose, who squealed as I yanked her out of the way. She’d already been in motion, but not quite fast enough for my taste. The blast ripped through the asphalt and concrete as it shot past, showering me with concrete shards as it tore apart the ground on either side of me and left trenches a foot deep in their wake.

  “Ride my back,” I said to Rose as I flung her over my shoulder and let her sort out how she wanted to carry out my command. I started to zip off straight up, but Frankie anticipated this and sent out two more blasts, one that walled things off to my right for a second, which was the direction I had been intending to flee, and another that cut things off to my left—well, behind me now that I’d turned. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he’d leapt off the curb and closed the distance between us to thirty feet or so.

  Penned in on both sides by his blasts for the moment, I tried to decide my best course of action. If I tried to run right, he had me blocked until that wall faded behind his ripper blast. Same thing to the left. His hands were glowing, and he was clearly gearing up to send another one at me and Rose, who’d adjusted her grip so as not to touch my skin, but she still had me clutched around the shoulders and was hanging on for dear life.