Apex: A Hunter Novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  And that is the last thing that went right for us.

  Inside the walls, we were rushed on both sides by a mob of Manticores. The best we could manage was to huddle under Shields as they swarmed us. I ripped off my gas mask; it was taking up too much room in the scrum. We were so tightly packed together that I couldn’t see where to put up the little Shield walls to trip up the Manticores, and with so many stingers lashing down at us, Hammer and Steel didn’t dare drop their Shields even to give us a chance to fire into the mob. We were jammed up together, elbow to elbow, with the Hounds protected under the Shields with us. I tried to think of something I could do. The Manticores were so close I could smell their breath—metallic and hot. I couldn’t see anywhere to plant the skunk-spell that wouldn’t affect us too. I couldn’t see any place to land a light show that wouldn’t also blind us. I mentally ran through every bit of magic I had, and none of it was suited for close quarters like this.

  Then, as I started running through my magical arsenal again in case I’d missed something, we were forced to move, shuffling along together in our tight-packed mob, impelled by the physical pressure of the Manticores on our left side to move in the direction they wanted us to go.

  In other words, we were being herded. They had more than enough sheer mass on that side of us to overcome our resistance; it was move or be run over. This can’t be good, I thought, just as we moved into a more open area, a kind of plaza ringed by blank-faced concrete buildings. Some more shoving, and the Manticores withdrew, leaving us in the center with a ring of nasty around us…waiting.

  Well, I wasn’t going to wait. I planted a skunk-spell on the head of the one nearest me, then iced the ground at his feet for good measure. I wasn’t alone; with the pressure off, we spread out, and the others did what they did best, magically speaking, until Kent ordered the Shields down and we could use firepower.

  That lasted for about thirty seconds, then something white came screaming down out of the sky.

  Literally screaming.

  The sound this thing produced was like nothing I had ever heard before. I call it a “scream,” but there was really no adequate word for this piercing, agonizing sound. The effect it produced—I went to my knees with the pain, and I wasn’t the only one; three or four people next to me did the same. I clapped my hands over my ears, but it didn’t help. The thing swooped once around our circle and then came to hover just above me.

  It stopped screaming for a moment, and I panted with relief, looking up at it.

  It looked like a woman’s ghost—I mean, the way that female ghosts are generally shown in fantasy-vids. She was all filmy and white, dressed in long, floating, tattered robes with huge sleeves and a shredded veil, and you could see right through her. There were dark holes where her eyes should have been. And those dark holes were looking right at me.

  Then she opened her mouth and screamed.

  I collapsed, my mouth open in a scream of my own, hands wrapped around my head to no avail. My hands were wet…blood must have been pouring from my ears. My nose gushed blood. And the pain…

  Like my ears had railway spikes through them.

  Like my brain was on fire.

  Like my bones were shattering.

  I couldn’t hear anything but that scream, that horrible, horrible scream, but it wasn’t as if I was hearing it—more like it had become a part of me and I couldn’t escape it. I would never escape it. It was going to kill me. And there wasn’t anything I or anyone else could do about it.

  Then something closed around me, softly, like a giant hand enveloping me completely. I felt the nausea-inducing jolt of a bamph. The pain stopped.

  And that’s when I passed out.

  I came to in a medivac chopper—a chopper that was extremely crowded with all of my Hounds, even though my Alebrijes had taken their most compact forms. I was strapped to a stretcher. I panicked when I realized I couldn’t hear.

  And then the pain hit me again, pain as if every inch of me had been beaten to a pulp. I opened my mouth involuntarily. I might have screamed, I might have whimpered, I couldn’t tell, because I couldn’t hear what I was doing. Whatever I did, it was loud enough to get the attention of the medic, who turned around and gave me a hypospray in the side of my neck. The pain faded back to a dull ache. He had a whiteboard in his hand and he quickly scrawled something on it.

  Don’t move.

  I mouthed the word Okay.

  He erased what he had written and wrote something else. Banshee. Your eardrums are broken.

  I knew that word, but only from Irish folklore. Banshees were supposed to be ghosts or spirits that warned the living that they were about to die. Looked like this one had decided to take the “death” part into her own hands.

  He wrote again. Night shift is scrambled. Army mages onsite. We’re winning.

  I glared at him. If he was lying…

  Truth, he wrote. You were target. Archer nailed Banshee when you bamphed.

  I was the target? That meant the Banshee had been given orders and a description. There were only two Othersiders that would recognize me well enough to do that. One was that fancy gold one, Laur-something. And the other one of them…was Torcion. Of the two, Torcion knew best what I looked like.

  Before I could absorb the implications of that, I passed out again.

  They didn’t let me come to again until after everyone was back. I wasn’t the only casualty, but thank the gods both great and small, there were no fatalities. I was joined in the medbay by Raynd, Mei, and Flashfire. Raynd, I learned from Jessie, had two broken arms. Mei was thoroughly concussed; they were treating her to prevent brain swelling. And Flashfire had a gash an inch deep all down his left arm and another across his back from Manticore talons.

  I, of course, had busted eardrums, my brain had been rattled in my skull enough to give me the same results as a concussion, and every bone in my body had microfractures. I was pretty well contused over every square inch of skin too. That was what being the focus of a Banshee’s scream did to you. Hammer and Steel were probably trying to figure out how to change their Shields to stop sound.

  At least, I hoped they were.

  I was all by myself in a little room with no windows and just enough space for the bed, medical equipment on all sides (most of which was, thankfully, not hooked up to me), and one chair for a visitor. I had an IV drip in the back of my hand, and something hooked up to my head.

  I was in so much pain that despite being pumped full of All The Drugs, I wasn’t in the least groggy. So to shut me up and prevent having to write out everything that had happened on a whiteboard by hand, Jessie arranged for a monitor over my bed and a control I could use without moving my hand much or my arm at all.

  The first thing I did was queue up the vid-feeds of the fight from our cams. I fast-forwarded to when the Banshee turned up, just to make sure I really was the one she wanted, but there was no doubt. I was the complete focus of her attention, right up to the point where Shinje and Dusana bravely jumped in next to me, Shinje wrapped me and Dusana up in tentacles, and Dusana bamphed all three of us out of the city.

  It was pretty surreal seeing all of this from outside. But there was no doubt that Shinje and Dusana saved my life. If they hadn’t gone right into the cone of the Banshee’s scream and gotten me out, my brain would have been liquefied.

  There was only one other thing I wanted to see, but it wasn’t on any of the cams: Which Folk Lord had been orchestrating this? I started going through all the cam footage in slow-mo, concentrating so hard my head began to hurt even through the drugs. But me being me, and stubborn as a hog on ice, I was going to push through the pain and find that damned Folk Lord even if my ears began to bleed again.

  At this point Jessie came back, pushed the monitor out of the way, took the control out of my hand, and administered an injection, and that was all I knew for a while.

  When I woke up the second time, I could actually hear, sort of. I can’t really describe it properly; sound
was not just dim but distorted. The little room I was in was shadow shrouded, so I guessed it was night, but which night? I moved my right arm and peered at it. The bruises had turned an unpleasant shade of mottled green, so it had to have been a couple days since I last woke up.

  My stomach growled.

  And I ached.

  At least my head didn’t feel as if it was going to split wide open anymore.

  My stomach growled again, and as if that had been a summons, Jessie appeared in the door with a tray. “Don’t move,” she said in a voice that sounded a million miles away but was probably very loud.

  “Yes’m,” I replied. She adjusted the bed into a sitting position, arranged the tray on the bedrails so it didn’t touch me anywhere, and clamped it down. “Do I need to feed you?” she asked very matter-of-factly, as if she would, without a doubt, feed me if I asked her to. I shook my head gingerly, but there was something that was very much on my mind.

  “Where are my Hounds?” I asked, because I hadn’t sent them back. Only their own Hunter or a Master can send Hounds back to where they came from, and there were no Masters here.

  “In your rooms,” Jessie said. “They’ve been going out to Hunt with other packs. They get a chopper all their own.”

  That was all right, then. They were getting fed and they had a place to go. I picked up the spoon and slowly ate whatever it was that was in the bowl. It had the consistency of cornmeal mush and tasted vaguely savory—it was probably a concentrate of some sort. There was a thick, cold drink that tasted of honey, probably the same. Whatever they were, they made my stomach shut up. Jessie came back, gave me the vid-control, and pushed the monitor over my bed again before exiting with the bowl, glass, and tray.

  Once again I looked at all the vid-feeds from that raid, doing my best to analyze everything. It wasn’t long before I got to the Banshee part again, and this time I stayed on the cam that showed what happened after the Hounds pulled me out. Basically, after the Hounds rescued me right from under her nose, the Banshee was startled and shocked, and acted confused. Archer took advantage of her moment of surprise and nailed her.

  Then, before the Manticores could rally, the rest of the Elite unloaded everything they had on them. My Hounds remained with the team, and since all the buildings surrounding the plaza were concrete, my fire-breathers unloaded on the Manticores without restraint. “Oh, good boys,” I breathed. There it was—the damn things were very vulnerable to being set on fire. It was the one thing we hadn’t tried before, because every other time we’d encountered them, we had been in the middle of extremely flammable structures.

  After that, the army Mages turned up in force and the town got cleared in fairly short order, my Hounds joined me at the medivac chopper, and that was the end of that.

  I didn’t do a search to find out how many kids had been kidnapped. I decided I didn’t want to know. It would only make me feel worse than I did already.

  Because, frankly, I felt horrible, and I don’t mean physically.

  In a way, it didn’t matter if the Folk Lord that had been running this raid was Torcion or the other one. Either way, I should have said something. If it had been Torcion, I should have told someone about him weeks ago. If it was the other one, I should have guessed from the way he’d looked at me the last time that he had something planned, and told someone. But worst of all, I had solid intel on Gold from Torcion, and I’d withheld it. I knew Gold, specifically, was kidnapping people. I knew he was able to recognize me, and I could sure deduce from the way he’d glared at me that I was on his shit list.

  I scanned through every bit of vid-feed and didn’t see even a hint of Folk Lord anywhere. Was it possible the Folk had something like a cam? Well…anything was possible. Folklore talked about “scrying”—a way to see what was going on at a distance as if you had a cam on it—and things like crystal balls. If it was Torcion, he certainly wouldn’t want to be caught double-crossing me. And if it was Goldie, well, I’d seen him twice, and I bet he wasn’t going to take the chance I’d somehow put a bullet in him the third time.

  I was still worrying about it when Jessie came in, took things away from me, and put an end to my unhappy thoughts with another shot.

  “We’re in trouble,” Kent said from the chair at my bedside. He and I had been reviewing the vid again, looking for the Folk Lord in vain. I’d finally suggested that the Folk Lord could have been working remotely; he’d shrugged and said there was nothing to rule that out, which just gave us one more layer in our crap sandwich.

  I could hear again, but those microfractures took special treatment, it seemed. I could break my bones—more than one of them at once—if I put stress on them, so I was still sidelined.

  “How bad is it?” I asked. “The team, I mean. How many are we down now?”

  “You’re out. Denali is out. Mei should be out, but I can’t keep her off her feet, so she might as well go active. In fact, in the old days, about a quarter of the Elite would have been benched for minor injuries, but…” He sighed and spread his hands. “The only good news is that Denali is awake again, but he is definitely not in good shape. If we’re lucky, he’ll be fit to go in a week. If not…the docs can’t give me a number. This is all new ground for them.”

  “And we keep losing kids to raids,” I said flatly.

  He nodded. “So we’re in trouble.”

  I hesitated, then made a reluctant suggestion. “Can we annex the army Mages? I know they’re hard to work with….”

  “That, and I’m putting out a plea for more Hunters from the other territories.” He passed his hand over his face. “We’ve got to get more help from somewhere, and I’m running out of places to ask.”

  I’d seen Uncle, or rather, he had come to see me, and I had covertly asked him to talk to the Masters and ask them for help.

  So far, obviously, there had been no response. Not yes, not no, just…nothing. We hadn’t gotten mail from there for weeks. Were they under siege as well?

  “I’ve tired you out,” Kent said, giving me a hard look.

  “Not tired,” I corrected. “Scared. Depressed. Out of ideas. Scared, mostly.” I didn’t add “guilty,” but I was that too.

  I’d had time to think, and now…now I was wondering if everything I’d done to protect the Mountain had been wrong. Sure, all the people around the Monastery need the Hunters we have and the protection the Hunters and the Masters can give them—but now, Apex clearly needed all the help it could get. And yes, I was taking care of the people at home, but I was just as responsible for the people here. Should I have asked the Masters to send more Hunters before now? Should I have told Kent about the Monastery? If I had…if I had, we might not be in this position.

  “I don’t blame you, kid,” Kent sighed. “I’ll let you get some rest.” And before I could say anything, he left.

  When I was alone, all I could think about was if keeping my word had made things ever so much worse for everyone here.

  THE CALLOUT ALARM WOKE me out of a drugged sleep, and I was on my feet and staggering around my little room, dazedly trying to figure out where my gear was, when an orderly came in and picked me up bodily to put me back in bed. “Stay,” he ordered, as if I were a dog. I woke up enough to remember where I was, and fumbled for the vid-control. But the screen didn’t show anything but archived footage, no matter how many buttons I punched, and I finally figured out it wasn’t hooked up to the main vid-feeds.

  I swore, and considered disobeying the orderly and getting out to where there was a live feed—because that particular alarm wouldn’t have sounded in the medbay unless this was a full callout, one requiring every mobile member of the Elite and sidekicks, plus possible medical backup. I needed to know what was happening!

  But they most likely had at least a cam in here, and even though I wasn’t hooked up to IVs and machines anymore, they probably had passive stuff monitoring my heart and blood pressure and who knows what else. If I got out of bed again for any reason other than to use t
he bathroom I shared with the room next door, someone would be in here again, and this time they might strap me down.

  I swore again. Dammit, I wouldn’t even be able to keep an eye on my Hounds!

  And then it hit me. There was a way I could keep track of things.

  Bya! I called.

  We are in our flying room, he said immediately. We cannot return to you now.

  Flying room—that would be what Bya called the chopper. The Hounds hadn’t been in one very often before I was laid up. I don’t want you to return to me, I assured him. They won’t let me see the Hunt. Can I see through your eyes?

  Easily! he replied, and as I closed my eyes, it was suddenly like someone was playing a movie in my head. A movie with odd perspective, and even odder lighting, but vivid and immediate.

  We’d done this more than once back home, when Bya and the rest were ranging out as much as half a mile from me and they wanted me to see something. But this was the first time I’d seen the inside of a chopper from a Hound’s point of view.

  All the Alebrijes had grown tentacles, not just Shinje, and they had knotted themselves into the seat harnesses or tie-down points on the floor. Hold, Strike, Gwalchmai, and Myrrdhin were each wrapped up by one of their pack-mates and tethered that way. There was no one else in this chopper, but then, with eleven Hounds, seven of them sporting masses of tentacles, there wouldn’t have been much room for anyone.

  Bya was near the door, and his night vision was outstanding; when he looked out, I spotted two more choppers racing alongside this one with all their lights off, in stealth mode. The ground speeding by under us wasn’t anything I recognized, so I had no idea where we were going. Neither did Bya, I supposed. He wasn’t sharing his thoughts with me, just his senses. The chopper motor, the pitching and vibration of the deck under him, the smell of cut hay and machine oil, night damp and hot metal.