by E. A. Copen
I sighed and opened my wallet. “How much did he pay you? I’ll double it.”
“It’s not really about the money. Dex and his people, they’re local heroes. Dex is basically a legend here in town. A staple. If I let you stay, and they find out about it, they’re going to charge me extra next time I need help.”
I frowned and added another bill to the pile. Maybe Dex had a point. This whole lone hunter gig was getting kind of expensive. “How about now? That should more than cover any extra fees they charge.”
The girl eyed the pile of cash, took it, counted it, and pocketed all but one bill before retrieving a guest key. “Lucky room thirteen. Up the stairs, around the corner. Second door on the left. Enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks, I guess.” I took the key and moved further into the musty smelling hotel.
Worn, felt-like carpet lined the stairs. They creaked loudly as I climbed up to the second story. Old photographs hung on the walls, images from a different time and place preserved in a dingy motel. There were smiling people in front of skyscrapers, people in costumes at a convention down by the old shopping mall, a couple kissing on a glass skywalk that overlooked Peachtree Street. Some edges were worn and brown from the passage of time, but the photos were displayed proudly on scratched walls. Brass numbers hung on most of the doors, though room thirteen seemed to be the exception. The numbers were missing, but someone had been kind enough to write the room number in sharpie.
I sighed and slid the key into the lock.
The room beyond wasn’t much. I had stayed in nicer, and in worse. It was a ten by fifteen space, modified from whatever the room had originally been to be just large enough to fit a bed, dresser, mirror, and a small folding desk. A few rusty wire hangers hung on a wooden dowel rod that served as a closet. To my right was the bathroom. A shower curtain around it provided the only privacy, but at least there was running water. I pulled back the paper-thin comforter, pleased to see no bugs flee the light. Running water and a bug-free mattress? Maybe the place was worth the price of admission after all.
The springs squeaked noisily as I plopped onto the end of the bed. My reflection stared back at me in the streaky mirror hanging on the wall. I looked like a drowned rat. A drowned rat with bloodstains on my shoulder. I turned my head to see if I could assess the damage, but that required taking my shirt off first. I peeled the wet shirt off, wincing when it stuck to an old wound across my stomach.
An old wound… Funny way to describe a bunch of crystals growing out of the cut across my midsection. I draped the shirt across the back of a metal chair and rose, examining the crystals. They glistened, a deep indigo. Each one was no bigger than a marble, pressed into a line as thick as a pencil just above my navel. In another era, it would’ve passed as some form of body jewelry or body modification, but they weren’t. The crystals had been growing out of my skin for almost five years, slowly spreading. One day, even the antigen potions wouldn’t be enough to stop the spread. I could already feel that the effects weren’t lasting as long. When that happened, the crystals would grow unchecked. They’d invade my blood and vital organs, solidifying them to rock hard crystals. If I were lucky, I’d die before they grew in my brain. I’d seen what that could do to a person, and it wasn’t pretty.
The infection was a death sentence, but a slow-moving one as long as the potions worked. Illegal potions weren’t the worst of my worries, though. People didn’t understand the infection, and they feared what they didn’t understand. There were misconceptions that the infected could spread it to others by touch. Some believed you could catch it like a cold just by being in the same room as an infected person.
But it didn’t work like that. Even if someone were to touch the crystals growing in me with their bare hands, it would never jump from me to them, not unless they had an open wound on their finger or something. They needed blood to take root and grow.
Not that anyone would listen. If anyone found out about the infection, every city would close its gates to me forever. Average people who didn’t know any better wouldn’t see the difference between me and the mad crystal-eating heretics who lived in the outlands. To them, I’d be just another dangerous monster to be put down before I killed someone else.
But there was nothing I could do about the crystal growth. At least, nothing now.
I turned around to get a better view of the gash on my shoulder. An angry red line streaked from the shoulder blade toward my spine. Better clean it up.
The shower was lukewarm, even with the knob turned to hot. I put my shoulder under the shower head, watching the water go from clear to pink to red, and back again as it trickled down the drain.
Dex had seemed nice. Easy to look at, too. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the shower wall, conjuring up an image of him in my mind. Him and his dumb, lopsided smile. I let myself wonder what it would be like not to be infected, to have this secret that isolated me.
Would I have taken him up on his offer? Probably not. Casual sex just wasn’t me, even before. I’d practically been a child at eighteen when I got the magicite scar, and the man I had loved, the one I thought I would spend the rest of my life with… He was gone. Swallowed by the rift. I’d never even gotten to tell him the truth about how I felt.
Now, nobody would touch me. Even if they thought they might want to, I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t let anyone see the jagged line of indigo teeth growing in my stomach. I was a deformed monster, and that meant I had to be alone.
Once I’d cleaned my shoulder with soap, I dabbed some rubbing alcohol onto the wound and bandaged it as best I could. It didn’t need stitches, but it’d probably leave one hell of a scar.
My wounds seen to, I sat down cross-legged on the creaky bed and spread the newspaper’s classified section out in front of me. The jobs section was pretty extensive, but most of them were for general laborers. Atlanta had two major guilds, and any important work would’ve gone straight to them without ever seeing a day in the paper. The few jobs posted that required a hunter’s expertise didn’t pay particularly well, but I’d take what I could get. A few jobs, and I might make enough to get myself another potion.
Let’s see here. I tapped the flat end of a marker on my chin. There was a bakery with an unspecified infestation. No thanks. I’d grown up doing odd jobs like that as part of my training. It was likely a giant spider, or maybe some dire rats had gotten into the larder. If they were really unlucky, they had a sugarplum fairy problem. Those things were a pain to get rid of.
Further down the page, a farmer was looking to hire a few were-folk as farm hands. It was a good deal, especially since he was offering pay and lodgings, but I wasn’t a were-anything, so I had to pass.
I scanned the first page and turned it over. Hello, what’s this? My finger stopped on a wanted ad I had nearly passed over.
WANTED:
Ten to twenty expert hunters. Must travel. Must provide own equipment. Not guild sanctioned. Pay discussed. Meet at Red’s Tavern in the Old Fourth Ward if interested.
It sounded perfect. Well, everything except the ten to twenty hunters part. I rarely worked with other people for obvious reasons. Still, a non-guild sanctioned hunt? What sort of prey could they be after? Guilds usually only took jobs hunting creatures that were local nuisances. They didn’t travel, and they didn’t hunt for sport, though sometimes individual guild members would. Sport hunts were for trophies, fame, or cartloads of cash, usually hunting the biggest, most dangerous creatures. I’d heard of hunts that’d captured and killed chimeras, mad witches, or even dragons. While I didn’t care about the trophies, a job like that would pay well enough I might not have to work for months at a time. I could relax a little and still have enough potions to keep myself alive.
Even better, the meeting was supposed to take place tomorrow afternoon. I couldn’t have timed my arrival better if I tried.
I circled the job twice and placed the newspaper beside the bed before turning off the light and se
ttling in.
The next morning, I checked out of the crappy motel just before noon, giving me just enough time to get to Red’s.
Red’s Tavern was one of those buildings that had begun its life as something else and been transformed by time and necessity. The bottom half of the building was brick mixed with concrete, and the top dark treated wood. Christmas lights hung from a wooden awning and over a hand-painted sign that swung in the light breeze. It sat on the side of a small hill, and had been built to embrace the hillside rather than to fight against it, with a street-level entrance and a set of stairs leading to a basement door. A smaller sign announced the meeting room was below, so I took the stairs.
I opened the basement door. Several burly men moved out of the way, but there wasn’t far they could go. The whole room was full of people standing under a low ceiling. Each man had a sword, daggers, or wore arrows on his back. The room stank of body odor, ale, and damp oak. Dark walls drank in the light coming from the front of the room where a man paced, speaking to the crowd of hunters. From the back, I couldn’t see him, especially since I was shorter than almost everyone in the room, even when I stood on my tiptoes.
“… I’ll be candid. This is a dangerous trek,” said the voice in the room's front.
That voice… I pushed through the crowd, sliding through small spaces toward the front. I know it, but it can’t be. I leaned around people, tried to jump up for a better view, but I just couldn’t see, and people packed in too tightly at the front.
Of all the times to be the shortest person in the room.
I spied a pile of barrels on the other side of the room that’d be easy to climb up and made a beeline for them. As I pushed between two men in matching blue shirts, a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. I spun, ready to defend myself, only to find it was Dex that had grabbed me.
He flashed a big smile. “Well, if it isn’t the freelancer. Fancy meeting you here, Ember.”
I pulled my arm away. “What are you doing here? I thought you had your own guild? The sign said this wasn’t a guild sanctioned hunt.”
“I’ve got my reasons. Didn’t figure you for a team player.”
“I’ve got my reasons.” I repeated and turned my back to slide through the last few people before he could press me further. The pile of barrels was a short distance away. I grabbed the first one and pulled myself up.
“… I cannot overstate the danger those who join will face. We are going into territory that has been reclaimed by wild magic and hungry rifts. Ravenous beasts stalk the forests and mountains. Cultists capture the unwary and bandits prey upon the weak. Dozens of open rifts stand between us and our destination. Hundreds have died making the attempt at capturing this legendary beast. But should we succeed—and we will succeed—the spoils of this hunt will make all who take part rich beyond your wildest dreams,” continued the familiar voice. “Our prey is none other than the elder dragon of Black Mountain.”
I nearly fell from my perch. And not because he’d finally revealed the details of the hunt.
The man at the front of the room. I recognized his sharp, angular features, his dark, curly hair, his sparkling quartz-gray eyes. I knew him. I also knew it couldn’t be who I thought it was because five years ago, I had watched a rift swallow him alive.
Chapter Three
Five years ago…
“EMBER!” Ash’s voice was distant, like he was underwater.
I knew he couldn’t be more than five feet behind me, caught in the wild winds of the widening rift. My hair whipped around my head. Rocks and other debris tore at my exposed skin, and still I couldn’t move. The rift reflected in my eyes, glowing on the edges like the sun.
From a distance, the center had always seemed little more than a black hole, ready to swallow anyone who got too close. But with the rift right in front of me, I thought I could see something more, something big and wonderful waiting on the other side. It felt as if I stood on the edge of a cliff overlooking a valley of understanding and truth. Everything I had ever wanted to know waited on the other side of that rift. All I had to do was walk through it.
With the rift shining in my eyes, I reached for what lay beyond.
And the beyond reached back.
“Ember, no!” Ash’s powerful arms wrapped around me. In one decisive move, he pivoted, yanking my feet from the ground, and threw me away from the rift.
I hit the ground face first. Fire bit into my stomach as the jagged edge of a magicite crystal sliced open the skin. The pain brought me back to reality, the weight of what I had been about to do pressing in from all sides. I pushed myself up, holding onto the bloody line the magicite had carved in me, and turned around. “Ash!”
The light of the rift swelled, making him look like nothing more than a shadow. He looked up at the rift as it closed in, then over his shoulder at me. His lips moved, mouthing something I couldn’t catch.
“Run, you idiot,” I screamed, knowing it was already too late.
Ash turned back to the rift, threw his arms wide, and let it swallow him whole.
****
Ash was dead. He had to be. There was no denying what I had seen, and no one came back from whatever was on the other side of the rifts. Everyone knew that. Monsters came through, but even they didn’t go back.
Yet there he stood, in the dimly lit basement of an Atlanta tavern, a crimson cape over one shoulder, revealing a new sword at his side, and new people at his back. The small crowd of men and women surrounding Ash all wore the same colors as him and had a pin shaped like a dragon on their sleeve.
A guild? No, this wasn’t a guild sanctioned hunt. Who were they then?
I suddenly felt eyes on me and lifted my head to scan the rafters above. Two pairs of blood-red eyes peered back. The eyes belonged to the emaciated, hairless, humanoid bodies of vampires. The silver circlet with a single glowing stone meant there was a necromancer somewhere in the crowd controlling them.
Or someone on stage. I studied the people’s faces again, searching for someone concentrating just a little harder than the rest. An unshackled vampire was little more than a feeding machine. It would’ve torn through that room in seconds, killing everyone. Under the control of a trained necromancer, however, vampires were docile with no will of their own.
A dark-haired woman with lipstick that matched her red cape turned her head slightly and met my eyes. She wore a matching silver circlet.
Gotcha. I stared back. She would’ve been able to see through her vampires’ eyes too, giving her a prime view of everyone in the crowd. Guess they were Ash’s private security.
I glanced away from her and back to Ash. Looks like you’ve come up in the world since getting eaten by a rift. Who are you now? Where have you been all this time?
There was a sudden pang in my chest. How long had he been back? Had he even looked for me? All this time, he’d let me believe he was dead. And to find him in the company of these strangers… Something about it all left a sour taste in my mouth. More than that, it hurt. It felt as if he’d rejected me, although I didn’t know that was the case. For all I knew, Ash thought I was dead. That day five years ago seemed like it had happened in another life. For him, maybe it felt even longer.
Ash stepped to the side, picking up a paper scroll that he held for all to see. “Anyone interested can step forward now and sign up.”
“What’s the catch?” someone from the crowd yelled. A chorus of agreeing grunts and nods followed.
Ash lowered the paper. “The threat of death isn’t enough?”
The small crowd at Ash’s back snickered.
Ash maintained his grave expression and paced to the center of the stage. “I asked for twenty good, armed men for a reason. I fully expect that less than half who embark on this expedition will survive it. Make no mistake. We are going into hostile territory to hunt a beast that has already claimed dozens of lives. Looking around the room, just getting to the dragon’s lair will be too much for some of you. Guild life has made yo
u soft. Weak. You Atlantians are used to escorting mail trains and clearing gnomes from the park. Safe work with guaranteed pay. I’m offering you greatness, but that comes at a price. Anyone who puts his signature on this page had better be right with his God.”
A disgruntled murmur swept through the crowd. Several of the hunters looked at each other, shook their heads, and shuffled toward the door. They were probably the smart ones.
I scanned the room to see who had stayed and spotted Dex’s white cowboy hat, his feet planted firmly where I’d left him, arms crossed. He watched the stage with a distrustful frown, calculating and weighing losses and gains in his head.
“You haven’t told us where we’re going,” said another man. He was an average height guy, with silver hair and a goatee. No, not silver. He was too young to have gone gray naturally, and the guy was built like a tank. His hair was snow white.
Ash’s eyes focused on the man. “Ike, is it?”
The man shrugged. “You can call me Commander Tolliver.”
“A good, powerful name. Generations of monster hunting in your blood. Yet you still need your hand held.” Ash sat on the table, gripping the edge with both hands. “You’re not the only guild leader who’s crept in here. Do you know what would happen if I were to tell everyone exactly where we were going and how much it paid? You and Dexter Cavalieres would run back to your respective guild headquarters, raise a group of your own hunters, and head out to give me competition. I don’t like competition.” He lifted the page again, raising his voice. “Anyone who puts his name on this page today will get that information, and a small retainer just in case you need to purchase some gear. Questions?”
The room was silent.
I looked around. There were over twenty people still in the room, but some of them looked like they wanted to bolt as soon as people started moving.
Ash placed the paper on the desk with a pen and stepped aside, waiting.
Dex glanced around, lowered his arms, and pushed his way through the crowd. Silently, he picked up the pen and affixed his name to the page.