Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Rose,” I said in surprise, looking from her to the cubicle entry in surprise. “How’d you—”

  “Lulled him,” she said, rubbing her face. “One of the others lashed out though, and it didn’t feel too grand when he connected. Like a mob, they are.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a fair amount of chagrin. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here before they figure out which cube we’ve ducked down into.” And I yanked her by the arm and shot out the door of the cubicle, suspended a few inches above the carpet.

  Yelps of surprise greeted us as we emerged and dodged down another row, then up and over the next, low to the ground. Cops were streaming through the bullpen now, and quiet ground was going to be harder and harder to come by the longer we drew this out. Of course, I could fight my way through them, but if this was mind control, these people could get hurt or killed (because as controlled as I was, it was a fight involving life or death, and even throwing a punch could be lethal, if it came from me), and I didn’t want that.

  I paused for a second, gathering my thoughts. Frankie barked sharp orders, his Scottish accent more prominent than ever before. “Block the doors! Don’t let them scarper!”

  “Ideas?” Rose asked as she sat there next to me in the quiet cube, our momentary cover just that—momentary. The sound of footfalls all around us made it impossible to tell where the nearest threat was, because they were everywhere and stampeding closer to us all the time.

  “A few,” I said, and stuck out my hand, beckoning for her to hand me the gun she’d purloined from her captor. “No offense, but I know you UK folks don’t much truck with those.”

  She handed it over instantly. “I suppose, what with you being an American and all…”

  “Yeah, I know what I’m doing,” I said, and slipped the pistol into my waistband. It was a little bitty popgun, maybe .380 at best, compact and properly European. I got the desire to do everything subtly and with maximum economy, whether it was the smaller houses that came standard over here or the rally cars they seemed to prefer over big SUVs. My understanding of that ethos, though, stopped at ammo, because .380 was a caliber for people just weren’t serious about getting killing done. Still, work with the tools you had…

  “So…what are ye doing?” Rose asked after I’d put the gun away. She was looking at me really questioningly, probably because she’d expected me to just put a bullet in Frankie’s head from across the bullpen and be done with this whole thing. And I wished I could have done that, but with a .380, I wasn’t going to throw away the limited shots I had across a crowded room.

  “Deciding that this is not the field of battle I’d prefer for this confrontation,” I said, and then generated a blast of fire that I sent shooting skyward. It ripped out of the ceiling, consuming everything in a ten-foot radius above us that could be burned and weakening the rest. That done, I scooped up Rose with a hand around the waist and shot into the air. Again, she kept from making any squeaking noises as we launched out of the roof of the station and streaked across the city sky, leaving the ambush behind us.

  “Mercy,” Rose said, and I couldn’t tell whether it was a comment on my handling of the situation or some sort of plea. “That was…”

  “Intense, yeah,” I said, looping north and hitting the deck again, flying low over the city.

  “So…are we leaving town now?” she asked. “Now that we know that everyone’s against us, including the police?”

  “No,” I said, feeling a solemn resolve settle over me. “No, we are not.”

  “Ummm, okay,” she said. “Then…where are we going?”

  “To the last place he’d expect,” I said, as our destination came in sight, a tower rising high over the north of the city. I grinned at Rose, admiring the wide-eyed look she gave me in return. “How long do you think it’ll be before he comes looking for us in his own headquarters?”

  42.

  As I changed my attitude to bring us up the side of the tower, the shift in direction, legs down, head up, from where we’d been a moment earlier necessitated Rose moving herself as well. She was pretty good at keeping up with the shifts of my body as we flew. I imagined she was getting used to it by now, something that couldn’t be said of most of my other flying companions, save for maybe my uncle, Friday, and his adaptation was less about moving with me and more about letting me carry him like a giant lump of weight.

  Still, when I changed direction to shoot up the side of the tower, Rose had to adjust herself accordingly, her hands snugged just south of my neck. She’d been pretty careful not to touch my skin thus far, but now, as she shifted, her exposed wrist touched directly against the side of my neck, something it took me a few seconds—and a hint of a burning feeling as my powers started to work—to notice.

  “Rose!” I said and shook her slightly to jar her wrists loose of where they were touching me. That faint sensation was enough to wake me up, not that I’d been in danger of sleeping as I flew into potentially very hostile territory.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” she said, and then, “Whew. I felt that.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, though I’d only caught it briefly. I shuddered through the length of my body. It had burned a little, under my skin, even from so brief a contact. Though it was unlikely I would have absorbed her completely without knowing it was happening, I counted myself lucky that I hadn’t zoned out, because the idea of Rose becoming another passenger in my head was…

  Well, actually, it was probably more appealing than dealing with the bunch I had in there already.

  So little appreciation, Harmon said. After all we do for you.

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate you, I said, it’s more that every once in a while, I think it might be nice to be left quietly alone with my own thoughts.

  I’ve felt the same my whole life, Harmon said. Unfortunately, that never happened, even to this day.

  One sympathizes, I said, truly sincere. He didn’t seem to take it in the spirit in which it was intended.

  I flew in through the gaping hole in the side of the building, trying to ignore the giant swath of wreckage that extended out from this point across the city. I landed on the slab, which still had a massive hole down its center, scouting the room to see if Frankie had left behind any guards. There wasn’t anyone in this room, but there were a couple doors off the sides of the apartment’s living room, and I started toward one of them right away after I dropped Rose off my back.

  She kept quiet and shadowed me as I kicked in the door. A brief cry of alarm got cut off when the door I’d kicked collided with the crier. It knocked him flat, bounced him into a wall, and once I pulled it off of him I was confronted with quite the spectacle.

  Not only was there a man with a breathtaking head wound before me, but I was in a room that was…well…just…holy shit.

  “Sweet merciful Zeus,” Rose breathed behind me.

  I knew what she meant. There were corpses piled in this room, about ten of them, and none of them smelled like roses, but neither did they show signs of advanced decomposition. I looked at the one on top of the pile, then stooped to look at one beneath, and judged that they couldn’t be more than a day or so old. “Damnation,” I muttered, because that was not the last thing in the room.

  Prioritizing before I dealt with the other thing that had caught my attention, I headed for the man who’d caught the door with his forehead when I kicked it in. The injury was probably non-fatal—not that I cared at this stage of the game, but I needed something from him. I stuck a hand on his forehead, and waited as that sweet, tingling feeling started beneath my fingertips where my skin met his.

  A few seconds later, I was in his mind, skimming for a very specific piece of information. I found it, then breathed a sigh of relief. “He hasn’t seen Frankie since yesterday, after we left,” I said, feeling like this leant some credence to my scheme of hiding in plain sight. But it also suggested that this was not Frankie’s only base or place of residence or staging ground—whatever you want
ed to call it.

  Which was really, really scary when taken with the other thing that was here in the room.

  “That’s good…right?” Rose asked, studiously trying to avoid eye contact with the pile of corpses. She also looked a little green, like she was trying to keep that breakfast we’d yet to have down.

  “Probably,” I said, finally turning my attention to the thing that was lining the shelves on the walls at the far end of this narrow room. “It’s certainly better news than what we’re dealing with here.”

  “What…are we dealing with here?” Rose asked, following my gaze to the racks of shelving that were filled to brimming with a green chemical solution in vials ready-made for injection.

  “What we’re dealing with here,” I said, making my way over to those racks and running a hand over the vials until I pulled one off, at random, “is something that shouldn’t be here at all.” My eyes flitted down the labeling, and I closed them, cursing this discovery, cursing what it meant. I couldn’t read the language on the vial, so I let someone else do it for me.

  ‘Standard enhancement serum,’ Gavrikov said. It’s written in an obscure dialect used in only one place I’ve been…Revelen.

  “This is the stuff that takes an ordinary human…and turns them into a meta,” I said, fingers running over the vial’s smooth glass. “This is how Frankie’s so powerful.” I looked up at the pile of bodies, and it felt like a weight was settling on my shoulders. “He’s unlocking the latent powers in normal humans…and then stealing them, and with them…their souls.”

  43.

  Hours passed in the dreadfully dull silence. The sun crept high overhead behind the clouds, not showing me a hint of sky, the same shit I’d seen every day since coming to Scotland. I kept expecting the main door to the apartment to open at any minute, Frankie to stroll in like he owned the place—which he totally didn’t; the lease wasn’t even in his name, we discovered while prowling—and start throwing down again. I hadn’t decided much in my hours of stewing, but I knew that if we heard him coming we had to go out the nearest window, because unless I could sneak up behind him and put a bullet in his brain, this was not the right ground for a final encounter with him. This apartment building was still occupied, in spite of the gaping holes in the floor and ceiling and side of the building, and even if not, there were countless people in the city around that would get hurt if he kept throwing those damned ripper beams around.

  It was a curiously dark, unsatisfying feeling, the lurch of uncertainty about knowing what to do next. Usually, I could make a decision to orient things my way, and either head into a final rendezvous with the meta criminals I faced on my terms, or theirs, but usually not in the midst of a field of crowded civilians. The powers at Frankie’s disposal, though, were so massively destructive, and his ability to keep me at bay so significant, that I agonized about my choice of battlegrounds. I needed to fight him somewhere that a minimal amount of damage would be caused.

  To that end, I looked out the giant hole in the wall to get a sense of how far his beam had traveled after he’d attacked us here. I stared through the hole in the side of the tower and squinted out, trying to see the end of the crack the trailing ripper beam had left. It had certainly created a craterous divide in the buildings below, but it extended only a couple hundred yards before coming to an end, I realized. I had feared it went on for miles, but I could see it in the distance, the place where it seemed to narrow down to nothing and disappear, buried squarely in the middle of a brick apartment block.

  At least that gave me something to work with. I needed a space of distance that didn’t include housing nearby, somewhere abandoned that would include a wide gulf of space where the beams couldn’t do any harm to anybody…I thought of that massive park I overflew, the one that sat in the shadow of Edinburgh castle. That might be a good choice, if I could find a way to get Frankie to come to me.

  Oh, who was I kidding? I was priority number one for him right now.

  “Ye’ve got a look on your face,” Rose said, breaking our long mutual silence. The shadows were getting long down below, and I came back into the room with the serum because I didn’t want to chance some minion of Frankie’s sighting me from a rooftop or something.

  “I usually do,” I said lightly. “Most of the time it’s a general anger. Occasionally, I’m just hungry. Right now, it’s contemplation of murder. Dark, dark murder. Or murder in the dark, I guess.” When that didn’t get her to stop looking at me intently, I said, “I’m trying to figure out how to structure this next fight, Rose. Because this…I can’t let it go on. Frankie’s got to die next time we meet.”

  Rose pursed her lips. “I feel like there’s a subtext beneath those words, like a part of the sentence you left off…’Or I do.’”

  “That’s always a hazard in my line of work,” I said, curiously resigned about it. Then again, I usually was.

  “Death doesn’t bother you?” She was staring at me with a faint trace of horror.

  I thought carefully before answering. “It’s not that it doesn’t bother me. I don’t…want to die. But I can’t let Frankie keep doing what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t get it,” Rose said. “We talked before about retreating. But this time…you won’t retreat. You could go find help—”

  “I could get people involved in this who have less chance of survival than I do.”

  “—or arming up and coming at him with…I dunno, stronger weapons…a rifle—”

  “Look at the bodies in there, Rose. Frankie is killing thousands of people in order to grow his power, harvesting them like designer meta genes. And other than assaulting a police station, I don’t know a definite place around here that would yield me a rifle.”

  “There are people you could call, surely? I mean…ye didn’t come here by just picking this country out of a hat, I assume.”

  The idea of Wexford occurred to me again. He hadn’t given me a phone number, probably because he wanted to maintain some level of plausible deniability. Also, he probably hadn’t foreseen bizarre circumstances where somehow our serial killer would turn the Scotland police against me. Hell, who had foreseen that?

  “Those police officers,” Rose said, “they went after you like dogs on command. How did he even do that?”

  “If I had to guess,” I said, feeling pretty worn down by speculation, each time I had to stop and answer a question like a pin poked into the balloon of my enthusiasm, letting a little more out with each prick, “I’d say he absorbed a male and female siren.” When she frowned, I said, “Sirens can control the opposite sex merely by speaking to them.” Or so I’d heard. I’d never actually faced one, but my old friend Breandan, the late Irish lad who’d fought by my side during the war, had told me about his deceased girlfriend, who could wrap men around her little finger with nothing but the sound of her voice.

  She took that in stoically, and finally said, “There has to be another way than rushing into a fight with him right now.”

  “Of course there are other ways,” I said. “There are always other ways. I could fly to Mongolia tonight and hang out in Ulan Bator for the rest of my days, secure in the knowledge that Frankie probably wouldn’t find me. I could go seek out a third world country that’s in shambles, and declare myself a goddess to them, killing their dictator and taking over, making them worship me as the travel-sized dose of awesome that I’ve always known I am at heart. I could fly across the Atlantic and hit up a National Guard armory, possibly kill a dozen or more guys in the process, and come back loaded for bear. I could knock over a police station in Birmingham, maybe, and have the same effect—come back with rifles and pull a Hot Fuzz on this town, a shootout in the streets that leaves Frankie and a dozen more dead, I don’t know—”

  I put my head in my hand. “For some reason, none of those options appeal to me too much. Most of the time when I go into a fight with someone, I know a lot more about why they’re fighting.”

  She sounded puzzled. “But he�
��s an incubus and you’re a succubus and he wants—”

  “That’s what he says he wants.” I took a breath of the dusk air that had filtered into the room, and looked out through the cracked door. The sun was setting out there, the sky on fire as the clouds looked like they were lighting up at day’s end. “But he’s coming after me hard now, and maybe it’s because he’s feeling scorned…or maybe it’s because what he said wanted all along isn’t the thing he actually wanted.” I shook my head. “There’s so much about this that doesn’t feel right.”

  “Like you’re walking into a trap?” she asked, and sounded…terrified.

  “Frankie is ungodly overpowered,” I said, taking my hand away from my face. “Anytime I fight him I’m walking into a trap. He can dissolve my attacks with a wave of his hand, throw ones back at me that are not only cataclysmically destructive but also can’t be waved aside. Any fight I get into with him has an element of danger for me and everyone around that a lot of my previous battles haven’t carried. I mean—”

  An electronic squeal in the distance shut me up. Someone was accessing the emergency warning system for Edinburgh, and it sounded like a PA at a sporting event, but with less clarity.

  “Sienna Nealon.” Frankie’s low voice carried across the city, and I stepped out of the room we had been sheltering in, not because I needed to in order to hear him, but because my feet carried me by instinct. “It’s time to come out, Sienna. Ye cannae keep doing this any longer.”

  “Shit,” I said, hanging my head.

  “What?” Rose asked, voice rising. “What?”

  I had a feeling I knew what was coming before it came.

  “I’m going to give you one hour,” Frankie said. “One hour to come out and face me…and after that…well…if you think the citizens of Edinburgh were dying fast before…” His voice held a tinge of madness, sadistic glee running through every word, and I knew he meant it. “…I’ll start killing them by the hundreds…until you do come out…”