Huntress

by Christine Warren, Marjorie Liu, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclaine

  One side of his head was a mess. His cheek and jaw had smashed so far inward, she wondered how he lived—let alone stayed conscious. Blood covered his entire face, and his hair had matted into tangled clumps. But he was sitting up, staring at her, and holding one of her whirly-gigs and blowing on it, blades spinning gently. All those men stared at her, until she felt like the focus of one giant eye—the men, a single entity, not individuals; a force, hungry and strange.

  She stood before them, trying to act bold and brave, and glanced at Irdu. His eyes were as black as the inside of a cave located ten miles under; unfathomably, inescapably dark, without light or even the smallest inner glow. Dead eyes. Cold.

  “Welcome to our home,” he said quietly. “One of many, for we are rootless, and old as the wind.”

  “Where are the people you took?” Maggie asked. “The women from Olo, the folk from Dubois? Have you hurt them?”

  Irdu’s expression did not change, but the other men looked at one another, and faint, knowing smiles touched their mouths. Chess pieces clicked, and several books were put facedown. She could not see what those men were reading, but the spines were thick and creased, and their fingers were gentle upon the covers.

  An odd sight. Maggie could still see them in her dreams, their heads thrown back, darkness spilling from their mouths—and somehow she managed not to flinch in revulsion when Irdu dragged his fingers up her arm, and brushed the underside of her breast with his palm. His face grew colder, and harder, until it was barely human.

  He was not human, Maggie thought. None of them were.

  “I will show you where those people are,” he whispered, and snapped his fingers. One of his men rose gracefully from his chair and strode behind the counter to a closed door. Keys jangled. He entered, and Maggie heard a faint tired voice.

  A young woman stumbled out. She was not from Olo. She was dressed in a dirty wrinkled skirt and an unbuttoned blouse that exposed her breasts. Her hair was tangled, her face gaunt and smeared with gray dust marks. Maggie searched her face for fear, but there was none—just a languid quality to her expression that was not terrified or hungry, but full of weary pleasure. The woman seemed unbothered by her partial nudity. When she saw Irdu, a spark entered her eyes—a dull spark—and she gave him a tired, mindless smile.

  “Pet,” he said to her, “bend over the table.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, still smiling, and Maggie watched in horror as she bent over one of the few tables not laden with candles, her hands stretching out to grip the rim. Irdu undid his trousers and pulled free his penis, which was large and already erect.

  Nausea rose up in Maggie’s throat. She took a step—unsure what to do, only that she had to do something—but strong fingers gripped her arm. It was the man who wore the black feather cape. He smelled like blood, and gave her a brief, merciless shake that rattled her teeth. His head seemed a little less caved-in, as though his bones were knitting together. Those feathers reminded her too much of her crow—her crow, whom she suddenly missed desperately—and Maggie tried to knee him in the groin.

  He spun her around with a quiet snarl and forced her to watch Irdu, who pulled up the woman’s skirts and placed his palms on her naked rear. He did not look down at her exposed body. Just at Maggie.

  “Watch and learn,” he said, and drove himself forward.

  The woman cried out, but not in pain. Pleasure filled her face, mindless satisfaction, and the sounds of her gratification only grew louder, and more piercing, as the robber thrust harder and faster, never once taking his gaze off Maggie.

  Maggie watched him, too, and for the first time in her life, she felt hate—burning through her like fire.

  She saw something else, too, as the woman’s shrieks grew louder and more urgent—as she writhed against the robber and grabbed her breasts with one squeezing hand. Maggie saw a pulse of light surround the woman. Golden, precious light. And as the woman stiffened against Irdu, her voice breaking with pleasure, he threw back his head, opened his mouth, and breathed in the light surrounding the woman. He sucked it down like smoke.

  The young woman collapsed forward, gasping for air. Irdu also gasped, but for a different reason: He was still breathing in flickers of the woman’s light.

  Until no more. The light disappeared. The woman looked no different, showed no lessening of her pleasure, but Maggie knew, in her gut, that she was staring at a dead person. Something vital had been stolen from the woman. She would die, and soon.

  Irdu stood back. His glistening penis was still erect, and he stroked it as he stared at Maggie. She fought not to tremble, to show nothing of her terrible rage and fear, but her voice still shook when she asked, “What are you?”

  “We are those who came before,” said Irdu, moving close to Maggie as he continued to stroke himself; roughly, with increasing intensity. “We, who were worshipped once, and sacrificed to with flesh and honor.” He stood directly in front of Maggie, holding her gaze as his hand pumped up and down. She could barely hold it in to not be sick.

  “It was easier before,” he said almost idly. “There were so many humans who could fall unnoticed. But now we must hunt in plain sight, and it is difficult to sustain us. We have so many hungers.”

  And then his hand stopped moving and he said, “Touch me.”

  “No,” Maggie whispered.

  The robber reached out to finger the shark teeth hanging from her neck. “I thought you would come because we had forged a connection. Because I awoke what was sleeping inside you. And now I know you came because of her.” His hand squeezed hard around his penis. “Touch me, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  The idea of touching him made Maggie want to scream. And if she did as he asked, she was afraid of what he would want next. He could have anything. He could force her to do anything, outnumbered as she was.

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” he echoed.

  “And if you make me—” began Maggie, but he held up his hand.

  At first she thought he was merely telling her to be quiet. He tilted his head, his gaze sharpening as he stared past her. She heard footfall, something dragging, and terrible dread curled through her heart. Irdu’s mouth broke into an awful smile, and he bared his teeth—as sharp, white, and long as those hanging from her neck.

  Which Maggie suddenly sensed had not come from a shark.

  The fingers holding her arm loosened. She turned, slowly, and saw men walking toward them from across an expansive lobby filled with tables laden down with books, and shelves, and large windows that she had not previously noticed. Someone had propped skulls on the edge of a long wooden counter, grinning human bones staring endlessly at the books.

  Seven men were striding across the floor, their long hair flowing like water around their cold sharp faces. Their eyes glittered with flecks of gold. The eighth man in their midst, whom Maggie did not see until they were almost on top of her, was being dragged. He was naked and lean, his skin covered in shallow crisscrossed cuts as though a net had bitten into him. His dark hair fell over his eyes. One of the men dragging him by the arm also held a cloak of feathers, much like the one being worn by the bloody heap who had been holding her.

  Maggie stared, heart hammering in her throat, a scream building. She swallowed it down and remained utterly still and silent as the men tossed their captive at her feet. She looked at the familiar line of a strong hard jaw, and felt something snap inside her, just a little. She touched the teeth hanging around her neck and they burned cold against her palm. Her own teeth ached.

  “A skinwalker,” whispered Irdu, walking up behind her. “Distant cousins. Sly creatures, but easy to catch if you know how. We see them rarely.”

  “He was just outside,” said one of the men softly. “Watching for her.”

  “Curious friend you have.” Irdu reached out, and took the black feather cape from the man who had been dragging her human crow. The feathers gleamed and seemed to Maggie to pulse with light and power. “Ekir.
Put them both away.”

  The injured man—Ekir—grabbed Maggie’s arm, and then reached down and twined his fingers through the crow’s hair. He yanked hard, pulling backward, and she watched the crow man’s eyes flutter open, dim with pain. She had never seen his human eyes, not up close, but they were wild and dark as night, and thunderous.

  He saw Maggie first, and the faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth. It broke her heart. A small, pained sound escaped from her, and it was like a slap across his face. Awareness, memory, flooded his eyes. He looked up and sideways at Ekir, and his expression hardened quick as death, staring like death: implacable and grim.

  He lunged upward toward Ekir, as did Maggie, digging her fingers into the crushed bone of his cold sharp face. Ekir arched his spine, breath rattling in his throat, but he did not release her, and his boot smashed into the crow’s head.

  The sight made her wild. She fought harder, but strong arms wrenched Maggie backward, cold lips pressing against her ear. Words whispered, but she could not hear them past the roar and thunder of her pounding heart. Her vision blurred. All she could see suddenly were her dreams: men with their heads thrown back and darkness spilling from their mouths. Shark teeth burned against her skin. Her blood burned in her veins.

  You could stop this, she imagined Trace saying. Listen.

  But Maggie did not. She could not. And only when she and the crow were thrown inside a small room packed with corpses did she finally remember how to breathe.

  EIGHT

  Everyone was dead, or near death. Less than a week gone from their homes, Maggie thought, and their lives had been drained dry. The woman who had just been taken on the table lay in a heap by the door, barely breathing. Maggie tried to wake her, but nothing worked. She was asleep, her pulse so slow, Maggie could hardly feel it. Her face looked peaceful, though. Just as peaceful and still as the faces of the other seven women crammed inside the room. The two men from Dubois were dead, too. Blankets covered the floor, and the remains of food and some clothing. The air smelled dirty, but not rotten. Almost as if the bodies had been preserved.

  Maggie did not linger over the women from Olo. She knew them. She knew their names, and tried to remember some of the Amish prayers she had heard growing up. Most of them were spoken in German, but one or two had been translated. She could recall only a smattering of words, but she did her best to say something kind over their still bodies. Her heart ached the entire time; with fury and grief. Life was too precious now to waste like this. Life had always been too precious.

  “Maggie,” whispered her crow, struggling to rise from where he had been thrown down on the floor.

  She crossed to him quickly, and crouched. “Don’t move,” she said, her hands hovering over his shoulders, afraid to touch him. “Something might be broken.”

  “Only my head,” he muttered, and peered sideways at her. “You?”

  “Alive,” Maggie said, but her voice croaked on the word. She sat down even closer, and finally let herself touch him. Her fingers threaded gently through his dark fine hair, searching for an injury—or just an excuse to be near him. Her heart felt so lonely she thought it might break. Brittle and tired, and full of grief.

  His hand caught hers, and he pressed his mouth to her palm. Maggie closed her eyes, shuddering. “You have a name?”

  “Mister Crow,” he murmured. “My favorite, I think.”

  “Mister Crow,” she replied softly. “What else?”

  He hesitated. “Samuel.”

  She sighed, and allowed herself to be drawn down, all the way to the floor. She curled on her side, facing her crow—looking only at him, trying to pretend they were not so near death, or faced with their own deaths. He was naked, but she did not care. It was a clean nudity, compared to what she had just seen. Downright wholesome, even.

  “I was foolish,” he said. “I came back too late. I saw you being taken, and I followed. I should have known they would feel me close.”

  “They,” she said.

  “Demons,” he said softly. “Incubi, or vampires. A bit of both, I suppose. Depending on what they are hungry for. Energy or blood.”

  Maggie was quiet for a long moment, turning those words over in her head. She was familiar with both, having read them in her books—sometime, long ago. Vampires, full of teeth and cunning, with an allure that seemed to make people tumble over themselves like fools; enthralled, in lust, ready to give their lives for nothing but a kiss. There were so many stories like that, so many in such varied forms, Maggie had come to half-believe that those creatures existed. How could they not, when so many had dreamed of them? How, indeed?

  Incubi was a word less known, but she knew it had to do with sex, and power.

  Either way, death. Either way, truth.

  “I don’t know how this is possible,” she said. “The Big Death, the forests around the cities. You. Those men. What does it all mean?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “Must there be a meaning? The world is a different place now. This happens. Civilizations rise and fall, and are erased in time. The essence of everything that was, twenty years ago, will be forgotten the moment the last survivor dies. Those born now, even you, know nothing of the living past. You’ll make your own—a new world on the top of the old.”

  “Alongside magic? Consumed by it?”

  Samuel closed his eyes. “Not all of us prey on humans.”

  Maggie curled up tight around herself. She had hid under her covers from monsters, as a child. Monsters in her dreams. Monsters she could see while awake, inside her head. She remembered now. She had made herself forget that, too. Whatever else might be inside her head, she understood why forgetting was better. Life was hard enough without searching shadows for the unreal. There had been enough death.

  Home, she thought, aching. She could have been home, in her own bed, among the safe and familiar. Ignorant. Blissfully so. Content to live and die in Olo as nothing but a fixer, a salvager, a toy-maker. A dreamer, watching the changing seasons through the great doors of her barn.

  For one brief second Maggie wanted that again so badly, she wished she had never seen those shark teeth hanging around Ekir’s neck. Never laid eyes on the necklace at all. She wouldn’t have known Trace was in trouble.

  She would not be in trouble.

  Coward, Maggie told herself, ashamed.

  Strong fingers wiped her cheeks, which were wet with tears. Samuel whispered, “I should have told you everything.”

  Maggie rubbed her nose. “Why didn’t you?”

  “It was ugly,” he said simply. “And I wanted to spare you that. Even if it was reckless of me.”

  “You were scared to show me your face.”

  He hesitated. “You are not looking at me now.”

  It was true, she realized. While lying so close, she had stared at his chest, his throat, past his ear—but not at his face, or his eyes. She did not know why. And yet, when she began to raise her gaze to his, fear gripped her.

  “Let me meet you halfway,” he whispered, and scooted lower, his muscles flexing in the shadows, until there—in front of her—was his face. Lean and rawboned, with dark, wild eyes searching hers. Maggie stared back, drinking him in, her heart beating unsteadily.

  “You’re a bird,” she breathed.

  “And a man,” he replied with sadness. “Your friend, too.”

  Maggie closed her eyes, but only for a moment. She missed his face, and had to look at him again simply to keep from feeling sick. But that was impossible. Bodies everywhere, and pretending that was not the case could last only so long.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she mumbled, and pushed herself up on her elbow, struggling to stand. Lying down felt suddenly too much like giving up.

  Maggie scrabbled to her feet, swaying. Samuel stood far more gracefully, his hands outstretched to steady her. Her fingertips grazed his, ever so lightly, and she felt the pulse of his life shimmering for one hot instant: lovely golden wings beating inside his heart. Sh
e could taste them.

  “Those feathers that … thing … wears,” she began to say, and then stopped.

  “Those feathers belonged to her,” he said. “Her skin. Steal our skin, and you steal our ability to become … something else. You steal our power. The demon did that to her. And then … used her up. Used her like these people have been used. I … found her. Afterwards. I think, maybe, I lost my mind when that happened. I no longer wanted to be a man. Ever again.”

  Samuel’s elegant dusky hands twined light as air around hers. Maggie wanted him to tell her why he had chosen to become a man, for her—and if that was the reason he had hidden from her for so long, in shadows and dreams—but he answered none of those things. Not with his voice. He continued to hold her hands, and then he leaned in, very carefully, to kiss her cheek. It was not chaste, or distant. Simple, maybe, but that brief touch of his lips filled her with more longing, and heat, than a million of Irdu’s forced intimacies.

  “I wish I could have known you earlier,” she confessed, almost afraid of saying that much.

  He hesitated. “There is something I did not tell you.”

  The quiet urgency in his voice made her straighten, staring. But before he could explain, she heard scuffing sounds outside, and the door was pushed open. Men came inside, a blur of sharp lines and dark hair, and hands were rough, cold as ice, as they took hold of them both.

  She did not fight them, and neither did Samuel. Instead he gave her a terrible, knowing look that made her heart ache. Whatever was going to happen next, he had already gone through it once before, on the periphery. He had lost someone he loved to these men. And now he was going to lose himself in turn—all for helping Maggie. It made her sick. Furious.

  Irdu waited outside the room. Maggie felt all the men watching her, as if she was as much a curiosity to them as they were to her—not normal, an oddity.