House of Slide: Hunter

by Juliann Whicker

  I looked up and saw a tall figure in a dark long coat outlined against the pale sky. It wasn’t Peregrine.

  “Enter at your own risk,” Grim said, walking briskly down the hall towards the newcomer. “I am the ruling consul here.”

  The man blinked at Grim, apparently not seeing this coming. I hadn’t either, come to think of it.

  “A consul in a world without Hollows? How peculiar. It takes a good deal of effort to achieve such order.”

  “I assure you, we have exerted generations of effort on the project. We are in possession of this place and these artifacts. Enter at your own risk.”

  Lorenzo made no move to walk inside and I could feel the men waiting outside, not yet visible, shifting in annoyed impatience.

  “A consul? What is your purpose?”

  “To serve the Hollow One,” Grim said smoothly.

  “I am his representative,” Lorenzo stated calmly.

  “Interesting, but I’d have to hear it from him. You understand,” Grim said.

  Lorenzo smiled, his perfectly symmetrical Wild features tilted strangely in the un-Wild expression of amusement.

  “I will let the Master know. He will not enjoy the message.”

  Grim shrugged his slim shoulders. “We are his consul. Surely he would not begrudge such a thing.”

  “I wonder if your Hollow blood is strong enough to control the stones,” Lorenzo said, seeming to sway on the threshold, considering entering.

  “I have not practiced extensively with my Hollow strengths,” Grim admitted, “But I have drawn a soul to life.”

  Lorenzo raised an eyebrow. “Then the stones should sing for you. I will leave you.”

  Grim bowed his head. “Thank-you, uncle.”

  “Uncle?” The Lost Soul, well, maybe he was found now, tensed up. “Is this body belonging to a relative of yours?”

  “My mother was the daughter of your sister. Helspeth.”

  Lorenzo smiled then, a short, brief flash of surprised joy. “You have some Romens around the eyes.”

  Grim nodded slightly. “It has been an awkward heritage to own. I had to fight in the end of the Hollow Wars.”

  Lorenzo winced then shrugged. “To hear that my own blood flows through your veins warms this cold soul of mine. I will inform the Hollow One of the consul.”

  He turned and left, leaving the door open behind him.

  I exhaled for the first time, after he left, slumping against Jackson. That had come very close to a slaughter, every word, gesture judged by Lorenzo. The fact that we were related, or would have been related if he wasn’t dead, had helped a good deal.

  “They would have slaughtered us,” I said.

  “Don’t be so optimistic,” Satan growled.

  “Everyone to your places,” my mother said, closing the door, having to walk past Grim where he still stood, as though locked in place. She put a hand on his shoulder, seeming to hold him up as well as to get him moving.

  “We won’t have to wait long,” Grim said as he turned, seeming strange, like a live wire or something.

  “What’s my place?” I asked as Jackson moved, apparently aware what that command meant.

  “You’ll stand in the middle of the room in the center of all the paintings,” my mother said quietly. “You have your knives?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  I stood and moved sluggishly towards the hall, the enormous room with the piano securely locked on one end and the floor covered in stones that reflected back at me, glittering until I was nearly blind. The paintings hung on the walls, a circle of madness, emotion, anger, despair, emotions that pounded at me even more than the rest of the house.

  I found the center of the room. The stones told me where to stand. They would also tell me what to do with the knife that I gripped in sweaty hands. The clothes I wore were nothing like the elaborate ball gowns. The room, the world didn’t fit the knife. I should be holding flowers. I wished I were holding flowers. I had a brief fantasy of being back at my father’s house, leaping off the rock and sliding into the water, cool blue waves covering me, drowning out everything.

  The front door opened. He was here. I could feel him, could feel every step he made reverberate on the stones into the place where I stood, like I was in the center of an echo chamber.

  “This doesn’t look like a consul to me,” he said in a voice that sounded nothing like Lewis. His tones were arrogant, lofty, careless. He had no fear of anyone taking away his power. He had complete confidence in his utter indestructibility. Good.

  “Welcome,” Grim said, his voice less pounding than the Hollow One’s had been. “I am…”

  “If you are my consul, you will obey my orders, even if given through a third party.”

  “Actually,” Grim said, sounding apologetic. “A consul is only responsible directly to the Hollow One. What is your will?”

  “I have come for the paintings,” the Hollow One said with a trace of sarcastic amusement in his voice. “Although now that I’m here, I’ll probably harvest your bodies for the use of Lost Souls.”

  I stopped breathing, but Grim didn’t seem particularly worried.

  “If that is your will,” he said easily.

  “My men will take the paintings.”

  “Of course.”

  I watched as the door soon opened and a man, the big one from my soul flying stepped into the room. He blinked then fell to the floor, lifeless. I could see when I closed my eyes, his soul, trapped, pushed out of the room while the body fell in.

  Another man, another lifeless body, another soul left spinning in the hall, growing fainter, released from the form until it disappeared.

  Silence descended on the House as everyone held their breath. Even the house seemed to wait.

  A shadow filled the doorway. He stood there, taking in the room, the fallen bodies, me.

  “Dove. I hardly recognized you without your feathers. I’ll take you with me as well as these less unique works of art.”

  His smile made my heart race and my skin go clammy.

  “I’m not a piece of art,” I said, my voice less certain than I wanted it to be. “I’m of the consul.”

  “The consul’s purpose is to serve me,” he said, stepping forward, smiling a smile that did not belong on Lewis’s mouth. “This brings back memories of when we danced. You should never have left,” he whispered dangerously as he took two more steps towards me.

  I barely managed to stay where I was instead of flinching back. “I’m a falcon, not a dove. You can’t dress me up and change what I am.”

  He cocked his head and smiled as he moved towards me, staring with an intensity that curdled my stomach. He moved too much like Lewis. He looked too much like him, but he was so wrong, so gone. If I went with him, if he won this day, I would lose the fight against insanity. I would lose myself.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said as he neared me, circling me while I stood, paralyzed. “Only a few hours really, but when I lose something that belongs to me, I can’t rest until it’s mine again.”

  Something inside me snapped. “The only thing about me that belongs to you is my knife, and it belongs in your heart.”

  He leaned closer. “You can’t hurt me any more than I can hurt you. That’s what makes this all so interesting.” He reached forward to stroke my cheek.

  I closed my eyes while his hand stayed against my face. “Grim,” I whispered as panic ran through me and I began to hyperventilate. I opened my eyes and saw Peregrine’s face, blank, empty, devoid of emotion, shock, anything and realized that this was it, our chance.

  “Now!” I felt more than heard and moved instinctively to pull my knives out of the holsters against my ribs beneath my mother’s leather jacket.

  I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Aiden leaning me. I opened my eyes and lunged, shoving my knife into his chest up to the hilt at the same time I felt the other knife slide through my ribs. I twisted, heard bones crunch and the muscles pop.

&nbs
p; Breathless, I stared into his eyes, empty of emotion, of anything, frozen the way all the souls inside of him were paralyzed. I sank, swimming through the souls, spinning through the greens and blues, the purples and pale yellows of Lost Souls. Their anger seemed farther away. There were so many souls.

  I searched, looking for the one, the soul that would be fragmented. Time passed. My heart frozen between beats like his was as I searched through the broken, twisted, hungry souls, searching for that one flicker of Lewis that I’d seen in his eyes. There were millions of souls to sift through, racing time, racing the beating heart, before it healed. I could feel Peregrine fight the paralysis, fight the stones, the house. The house trembled, shaken with conflicting wills.

  The paintings pulled, beating at me, at Lewis’s body, beating into him in patterns of emotion and intent, speaking a language of hopelessness and fear that I didn’t understand. It was almost done. My time was up and I had searched every soul, every color, every space inside the Hollow one, but there was no fragment of Lewis.

  I saw a flicker, a movement in the souls devoid of color. It took up a sliver of space between two souls that would otherwise have swirled around each other in the normal way, but that something between them, the absence of color still retained a slight reflective quality, and a sound, a low, deep, throbbing hum that was barely distinguishable in the midst of the roiling souls, but it was a sound I knew. I caught hold of that soul, drawing it with all my energy up, up, up, to the surface, helped by the paintings, the force that drew us out, higher and higher until with a blink, I was in my own body. I stared into eyes that looked back without a flicker of remembrance, and then nothing.

  Chapter 25

  “Dari, wake up!”

  I took the first jagged breath and felt my heart beat. The face in front of mine swam until my eyes focused on Aiden. He looked older.

  “Aiden?”

  He grinned at me while his blue eyes glowed. “Nicely done,” he said, pulling me upright by my elbow.

  My head ached furiously, pounding in time to the throbbing of the stones beneath me while my heart beat around the hole in my chest that grew smaller with every breath. I tried not to look at the body beside me, the still, silent, dead seeming body.

  “What exactly, did I do? He doesn’t have enough soul left to hold onto the body.”

  “He will when I’m done with him.”

  Aiden turned away from me and ripped off the Hollow One’s shirt, revealing perfect skin of his pale chest. His movements were precise as he drew lines over his skin, lines that left a trail of blood that dripped onto the stones.

  I sat panting with my arms wrapped around my knees trying not to smell the blood. When I closed my eyes, I could see the lines drawn on his body, bright, colorful lines that seemed to shift brilliantly, brightly, every color, lines that trailed through the air to attach to one of the paintings. Each series of Bloodwork tied to one painting until there was only one left. The final painting, the final series, but Aiden didn’t stop. He drew a line down his chest that brought the agony in my own heart to life, a new bond that burned in spite of the Bloodworker never coming near my skin.

  The pain wasn’t what had me not breathing, it was the feel of his soul, flaring to life, coalescing inside of him like a supernova, bright, burning, consuming anything that got too close. I was too close. I was going to burn out.

  The sudden silence, the sudden absence of his soul had me blinking my eyes, staring around the room. Yes, Aiden was really there, doing a few last lines of bloodwork on his own chest, filled out and no longer belonging to the scrawny and unbalanced Hybrid I’d almost grown fond of.

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm and dragging me to my feet. “Let’s get out of here before the drones arrive.”

  “Drones?”

  “Lost Souls. We’ve done our damage. They won’t appreciate us interfering. Until he comes to himself, even after then depending, we stay out of their way.”

  “After? How long will it take…”

  “Lewis isn’t ever going to be who he was. You know that, right?”

  I blinked and nodded. My job here was done; I wanted nothing more to do with the Hollow One. I’d done it. It was finished.

  “If they’re coming here, then Slider’s shop will be unprotected,” I said jerkily.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Seriously, after this you don’t want to take a break?” He grinned and I saw the familiar madness in his eyes.

  “I can’t leave my… sister Hybrid. Right now is exactly the time for a rescue.”

  He nodded. Together we left the room then sprinted down the hall. My mother waited at the front door. She let us pass before she closed the door firmly behind her, locking it before she leaped down the steps after us.

  “Come with me,” Aiden said, grabbing my arm to tug me towards a well-worn motorcycle with sidecar.

  “You have a sidecar?”

  “Sure,” he said, leaping on the seat and bringing the engine to life.

  “Right,” I said, climbing in. “Of course you have a sidecar. Did you steal this from a Hotblood? Don’t you keep any parts of the Code?”

  “Life’s too short for that, or long in my case,” he answered with his mad smile.

  “Dari,” my mother said, but then her words were cut off as the Lost Souls descended. The blinding darkness that took away all visibility didn’t stop Aiden from pushing the motorcycle faster than would be sane on a clear day without the wind that rose around us, rocking the sidecar I clutched with both hands.

  Aiden yelled but his words were lost, pulled away by the rushing wind.

  It didn’t seem real, riding through darkness in a sidecar, a horde of Lost Souls behind us exhibiting Wild abilities like this lack of light. Maybe I was still in shock from the stones, from stabbing myself and the Hollow One in the heart, and not dying. People shouldn’t be able to live through that. It wasn’t fair.

  The longer we went the clearer it got until finally, Aiden swerved around a car. I closed my eyes and realized how he was driving, using the lines of soul sight to direct him. Soul sight was not infallible, however, particularly when you considered things like inanimate cars that didn’t have much life in them to see with your eyes shut.

  “Aiden, slow down,” I said, but he only glanced down at me with a grin.

  I shrugged as he turned right, bouncing over the curb, making my teeth rattled as he careened across the sidewalk and between a bus stop and a newsstand, onto the grass of a park whose trees I could barely make out in the dark fog that held onto us.

  We bumped and lurched across the grass, narrowly dodging trees and people who were beginning to get up and gather their blankets in the face of the sudden storm that would surely dump at any moment.

  “Lean into the trees,” Aiden yelled.

  I stared at him then shook off the confusion, closing my eyes to see exactly what he meant. He was pulling the trees, the energy out, and letting it pull him in at the same time. It left me uncertain where Aiden was. Oh. I followed suit, getting sick and disoriented from trying to be in several trees at the same time while my stomach lurched over uneven ground while Aiden never slowed down at all.

  He took several sudden turns until we finally went flying off some steps and back towards a street.

  A bus swerved to avoid us, but we kept going, into the other lane where a bright yellow cab fishtailed, braking to avoid us.

  “Aiden, slow down,” I yelled, but it was too late.

  We bounced up the other curb and then Aiden was on one side of a telephone pole and I was on the other. I jumped, flying for a few yards before I came down, rolling awkwardly until I stumbled to my feet. I looked up and saw that Aiden had taken out a taco stand. He ran towards me, dripping red sauce and burning, his eyes nearly combusting as he neared me.

  I turned and ran, dodging people in the busy downtown, making my way towards the metro station. We raced down the steps, hopefully losing any pursuers.

  “We’ll take t
his train,” he said, jumping over the turnstile, like that was okay.

  “You can’t do that,” I said, held up on the other side without a ticket.

  He turned and grabbed me, dragging me over the turnstile before the woman manning the platform could do anything about us.

  “Your mother owns this city. I’m sure she won’t begrudge fifty cents.”

  I ran faster, pushing past people who glared at us, disrupting their commute.

  “You’re making me feel like a criminal,” I said.

  “What’s so bad about that?” he asked with a grin as we slid through the doors of the last car right before it left the station. His eyes lingered at me as he grabbed the bar above my head.

  “What?” I asked, uncomfortable with the way he stared at me with his burning eyes.

  “Nice job.”

  “Nice job?”

  He shrugged and turned to glance at some other passengers on the car.

  “That’s what I get? Well, you too. Nice job. You’re really good at cutting people open.”

  “We’ll get off two blocks from Slider’s place,” Aiden said.

  “Right. You don’t actually have to come with me. It might be better if you took off in a different direction, you know, led off any Lost Souls that might still be following us.”

  A few people on the train seemed to be staring at me, at the scar on my face in particular. I’d almost forgotten to be self-conscious about it since I’d been hanging out with people who didn’t notice that kind of thing. When Wilds saw me, I was a disgusting Hybrid way more than a disgusting scarred person.

  “What happened to your face?” a dark-haired kid asked, pointing up at me while his mother tried to hush him and not stare directly at me at the same time.

  “Plane wreck,” I said with a smile both for him and his mother. “I guess I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  I shrugged and could still feel the pain of the puckered scar tissue on my chest.