“I’m sure you do.”
Celia looks far too smug, and Ella wonders what other verbal ammunition she’s brought with her. The only weapon Ella has is her confidence, and that’s about to take a severe knock.
“I have a lot more to offer him than you ever could,” Celia baits her.
Completely unfazed by that, Ella folds her arms defiantly. “Like what? Your adorable personality? The fact that you’re an absolute starfish in bed? Or what?”
Celia blushes beneath her makeup, furious that Alex would have the nerve to publicly comment on her lack-luster bedroom skills. Returning fire on that, she pulls out an ace she knows Ella can’t possibly trump.
“He wants three kids. Did you know that?”
Ella’s heart stops beating momentarily, waiting for Celia to continue.
“Two boys and a girl.” She beams proudly. “Do you want to hear their names?”
Ella really doesn’t.
Through gritted teeth, “Stop it.”
“Just so that we’re absolutely clear: you’re a selfish little girl who thinks too much of herself, and I won’t let him throw everything away on you.”
“You don’t get to decide what he wants.”
“He doesn’t even know what he wants—that’s the problem. Right now, he thinks he wants you. He’s being driven by lust, and he’s not really thinking it through.”
“He seemed pretty sure of himself the other night.”
“Oh? When he was inside you? Yeah, it’s funny how men always seem to be so full of conviction when sexual climax is on the table.”
Ella glares at Celia with a mirror-rehearsed look of determination. “We’re going to be together, whether you like it or not.”
Celia sighs and checks her watch. To her, this little confrontation is just a minor inconvenience. She has other business to attend to this morning, and she doesn’t want to waste any more of her precious time in Ella’s company.
“I can see that you’re prepared to take a pretty foolhardy stance on this, so let me put it all another way for you: if you don’t back the fuck off, I’ll go to press with a front page story about your affair with Alex. You’ll be kicked out of the Academy, and publicly shamed for gross misconduct. The Hunter General may even be forced to resign. Public opinion will turn so hard and fast, he won’t have the opportunity to mitigate all the damage you’ve caused.”
Ella laughs that off. “I hate to burst your wicked little bubble, but since I’m still a Cadet, I can’t be legally reprimanded for sleeping with Alex. I’m a student, over the age of majority, and he’s a Hunter. Commander or not, we’re not breaking any rules.”
Ella thinks she has Celia beaten, but she’s wrong.
Celia looks haughtier than ever. In fact, she envisages that she’s about to put Ella back in her place, once and for all.
“That might’ve been true.” She pauses for effect. “Until yesterday.”
Uh-oh.
Ella’s stomach drops, but she keeps her panic well hidden. “What’re you talking about?”
“When Alex is released from hospital, he’ll have to start a back-to-work program. It’s absolutely mandatory, and there’s no way around it.”
Ella shrugs. “So what?”
“For all intents and purposes, he’ll work for the Academy, not the Hunter Division.” Celia looks smug. “He’ll be your teacher.”
Fuck.
Ella dies a little bit.
“I know you don’t exactly excel in the classroom,” Celia enjoys belittling her, “but surely even you can add those simple facts together, can’t you?”
She can.
Teacher plus student, multiplied by fucking, equals ultimate career suicide.
Ella doesn’t know what to say, and Celia can tell by her silence that this blunt truth has had the desired effect.
“I pity you, I really do.” Celia feigns sympathy. “You’re too young to know any better. Do you actually think he loves you?”
Ella battles tears. “He’s not going to take you back. No matter what you do.”
“We’ll see. Meanwhile, if you have any kind of love for him at all, you’ll stop before this all gets ugly.” She holds her hand out for the bag. “I think I’ll take that now.”
“Go to hell.”
“You really don’t know when to give up, do you?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“That’s inconsequential. It’s not me you have to fear, it’s the Sentinel District decency laws.” Growing impatient, Celia holds out her hand again. “Now hand over the bag. Don’t make me ask you a third time.”
CHAPTER THREE
Overkill
Alex wakes up to sunlight pouring in through the cheap hospital blinds. Drugged beyond all capacity to follow time, or the passing of days, he looks around the room for a sign of how many minutes or hours have elapsed since the last time he was lucid.
He spots a hold-all on the chair beside the bed and pulls it closer: it’s crammed full of the things Ella grabbed from his apartment for him. Not only that, but his Hunter Division PDA and personal cell phone are on the bedside table.
He cracks a smile, which is one of the few things he can still do without causing himself excruciating pain. Having the PDA in his possession will keep him apprised of all Hunter Division developments while he’s incapacitated. Having his personal cell phone will give him the ability to stay in touch with Ella.
The first thing he does is text her.
THANK YOU x
No response.
He waits.
Still nothing.
He double-checks the date and time on his phone: it’s Monday afternoon.
Shit.
He’s lost an entire day, and she’s probably working. Thinking nothing more of it, he sets the phone aside and rummages for his music player.
*************************
Crouched on the floor of an Old World ruin, Ella watches a paralyzed Chimera crawl toward her.
It’s a work in progress.
First, she’d broken its front and back legs. Not satisfied with that, she then broke its spine and pulled out every one of its talons. After that, she pinned it to the floor, cut off its jaw, and smashed its upper incisors.
Emotionlessly, she lets it try to get close to her. It pulls itself forward with its broken and bleeding front legs, its back legs dragging limply behind it.
She feels nothing.
It gets close enough to paw at one of her steel-toed boots, and licks the edge of the rubber sole as it tries to press its damaged teeth down on top of it.
It can’t even make a dent.
As its tongue flops against the floor, no jaw to contain it, Ella spears it with her hunting knife. Lacking the strength to yank itself away from the knife, the creature begins to pull back slowly, its tongue tearing little by little.
Crack!
All of a sudden, a steel bar is thrust down into the Chimera’s skull, shattering it, and pulverizing its brain. The creature is dead in an instant.
Ella looks up.
The man on the other end of the steel bar is a Hunter called James Harkin. Temporarily relegated to the third line after getting into a physical fight with his unit Commander, this second line Hunter is nine years older than Ella and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
“Boy trouble?” He looks down at her.
“What makes you say that?” She gets to her feet.
“In my experience, women are only cruel when they’re brokenhearted.”
“Spoken like a man who’s suffered the wrath of a woman scorned.”
“More than once.” He points down at the dead animal. “Friendly reminder: we’re here to kill them, not play with them.”
“Can’t we do both?”
Harkin doesn’t bother to answer that. The question’s too juvenile, and it doesn’t merit a response. Besides, they have real work to do.
There’s a growl and a scuffle in the street outside the window, and both Ella and
Harkin rush to look out. Two adult male Chimera are fighting over territory, circling each other like a couple of boxers waiting to throw the first punch. Their respective packs are behind them, offering snarls, swaggers and rumbles of encouragement.
Harkin pulls a grenade from his utility belt and prepares to pull the pin, but Ella stops him.
“Wait.” She snatches it away from him. “We can do better than that.”
She alters the digital timer so that it’ll detonate thirty seconds after the pin is pulled—that’s twenty-five seconds longer than usual.
“That’s too long.” Harkin shakes his head. “They’ll hear the grenade land and they’ll run. All you’ll do is blow a hole in the road.”
“We’ll see.”
Ella keeps the timer set at thirty seconds and walks over to the Chimera she mutilated. She severs its head and stuffs the grenade through the hole made by Harkin’s steel bar. Once it’s securely wedged inside the animal’s shattered skull, she pulls the pin and hurls the whole thing out of the window into the middle of the street.
Thunk!
The head splats against the ground and rolls in between the two warring males. As Ella had hoped, the smell of fresh meat distracts them from their fight. Not only that, it draws both packs of Chimera closer.
Thirty seconds is just enough time.
The Chimera gather around the skull, completely unaware of the danger.
First one … then two … three … four … five.
BOOM!
The grenade explodes and obliterates all of them. Chunks of Chimera flesh and brain matter and shards of bone are flung into the air, covering Ella and Harkin.
Ella is grinning.
Harkin is quietly impressed. “You really are the Hunter General’s daughter.”
“Imagination is a good thing to have in combat.”
“In the right measure.” He looks back at the headless corpse on the floor. “But this was still overkill.”
“Criticism taken on board.” Ella shoulders her PP-2000 and heads for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I saw one of them get away.” She tips her head in the direction of the meat strewn street. “An adolescent.”
“I’m not supposed to let you go alone.”
“It’s a shame you lost sight of me, then.” She winks.
Harkin lets her go.
He knows he couldn’t stop her anyway.
She tracks the Chimera to the end of the street and follows it through a tiny gap between two crumbling buildings. She keeps a safe distance, making sure to stay downwind of it. She could put a bullet in its head now, but she doesn’t want to be impatient. If she’s lucky, it might lead her to a nest, and she’d never pass up an opportunity for mass carnage.
On the other side, she emerges out into a cul-de-sac.
Damnit.
She stumbles out into the street as fast as she can, but she can’t see the creature anywhere. To make things worse, brain juice from the explosion is caught up in her eyelashes and it’s beginning to impair her vision.
Setting her PP-2000 down on the ground, she crouches beside a puddle and washes some of the blood and guts off her face. When she looks back up, she catches sight of the adolescent Chimera disappearing inside an old residential building.
“Gotcha!”
She bolts after it.
Breaching the threshold of the house, all seems quiet. There are no signs of a nest, and no welcoming vocalizations to greet the adolescent.
Creak.
Upstairs.
Ella reaches for her weapon …
Shit.
Her PP-2000 is outside, lying next to a puddle.
Never mind.
This creature is an adolescent and should be easily subdued. She draws her HK USP and treads carefully up the rickety staircase and into a bedroom.
No Chimera.
This room—which once belonged to a child—is filled with toys and debris. The mattress on the bed has been torn to shreds, and petrified chunks of foam are scattered all over the floor. The rotting carpet has been sliced to pieces by Chimera talons, and the closet’s been raided.
Ella recalls her Academy lessons in behavioral sciences.
When pregnant Chimera feel that they’re close to giving birth, they’ll destroy anything soft that they can get their talons on and use it to line a whelping den. Perhaps this is where the adolescent was born, and that’s why he came back here after the rest of his family was slaughtered. Either that, or he just followed the stench of his own kind.
Not that Ella really cares.
She steps further into the room and veers away from a large mountain of stuffed animals in the corner. It reeks like death and stale bodily fluids, and Ella gives it a wide berth. Walking past it, she doesn’t see the leathery, gray face peeking out over the top of the pile in between a large white rabbit and a cat in a hat.
By the time the pile begins to topple, it’s too late.
The beast leaps out from behind it and tackles Ella sideways.
She loses her grip on her handgun and hits the floor shoulder first. The gun bounces away beneath the bed and Ella rolls over, trying to throw the Chimera into a chest of drawers behind her.
She manages to wrestle it away from her face and drive her elbow into its solar plexus. She winds it, and pushes it off her. Kneeling on its chest, she reaches for the nearest available object: a paperweight.
Using that, she beats its skull until it dies a slow, bloody death. It puts its front paws up to try and fend off the attack, but self-defense is futile. Ella obliterates one eyeball, and then the other. She breaks its piggish nose, its maxilla, and cracks several teeth. Blood starts to trickle from its ears, nose, mouth, and eyes.
Eventually, there’s a sharp cracking sound and its frontal lobe caves in. The rest of its skull is soon to follow, and it begins to break apart along the suture lines which, due to the creature’s age, aren’t fully fused.
It’s dead.
Sliding off its chest, Ella lies down on the floor beside it and prepares to retrieve her gun from beneath the bed, but that’s not the only thing hiding under there.
A tiny skeleton.
Undisturbed since the end of the Old World, it’s draped in scraps of rotting clothing and is perfectly intact.
The remains of a young boy.
Ella freezes.
She’s never seen a skeleton so well preserved.
Forcing herself to be objective, she locates her gun next to his elbow and reaches out for it, stretching as far as she can. She gets her fingers around the tip of the barrel and tries to flick it closer.
It works, but it also dislodges the bones.
The little boy’s skeleton shifts and collapses. Though she tries to prevent it, his little head drops forward and rolls toward her. Backing away from it, Ella grabs her gun and pulls it forward. As she does so, the bones of his left arm get caught against the trigger and are dragged outward at an angle. The movement displaces the bones of his left hand, revealing something clutched within.
Ella would recognize those bright red underpants anywhere.
It’s a Superman action figure.
*************************
Not sure what kind of minefield she might be walking into, Ella takes a deep breath, tucks the reclaimed Superman action figure into her pocket, and strides into the foyer of Western Point Hospital.
Unbeknownst to her, as she passes by the security station, she sets off a silent alarm. The Security Officers on duty look down at their PDAs, then back up at Ella.
Yup, it’s her.
With visual identity confirmed, one of the Officers approaches her by the elevators and plants a heavy hand on her shoulder.
“Miss, I’m sorry, but I need you to leave.”
She shrugs off his hand. “You must think I’m someone else.”
“Ella Cross?” he confirms.
Confused, she squints up at him.
“You need to leave
,” he repeats.
Ella would object, but he doesn’t give her the chance and he’s much stronger than she is. He drags her away from the elevators and deposits her outside on the sidewalk with no explanation at all. He tries to leave her there, but she demands answers.
“What’s going on?” She grabs him by the arm. “You can’t just kick me out of the hospital like this without telling me what I did wrong.”
“I don’t know what you did wrong, Miss. All I know is that a patient in the hospital has a restraining order against you, and it’s my job to uphold the law.”
“Are you kidding? Who? And what the fuck?”
The Officer pulls out his PDA and shows it to her.
ORDER AGAINST: Cross, Ella (Intern)
COMPLAINANT: King, Alexander James (Cmdr.)
She’s not to be allowed within one hundred feet of him.
“This is a mistake.” Ella shoves the PDA back at the Officer. “Who ordered this?”
“He did.”
“Bullshit. When?”
“The order was put through yesterday.”
Ella is dumbstruck.
Sensing that he’s of no more use to her, the Officer returns to his post. Meanwhile, Ella pulls out her phone and texts Alex.
WHAT’S GOING ON?
Nothing.
She tries again.
ALEX, WHAT THE HELL???
Still nothing.
Hurt, Ella refuses to accept defeat.
She walks the perimeter of the building until she finds a fire escape stairway. Counting floors, she skips up the stairs toward the floor she knows Alex is on. Instead of using the door—which would surely set off an alarm—she leans over the fire escape railing and latches precariously onto the ledge of an open window.
Dangling by her arms, she pulls herself up and through the window. Trying to be as quiet as possible, she jumps down onto her feet and tries to orient herself. Pinpointing the direction that looks most familiar, she glances up at the charts on the doors as she passes by them, waiting for his name to jump out at her.
And it does.
Victory is in her sights.
She reaches for the door handle …
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