Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  So we waited. It didn’t take long, but it felt like a long time, let me tell you. It was a relief when bullets stopped hitting the concrete. It was a bigger relief when Bya said Done. The Saints will show you the way. “Saints.” That was Bya’s term for Mark’s Hounds. And if you want to know if he was being serious or sarcastic, I would bet on sarcasm.

  “All clear,” I said, and crawled out of hiding. Sure enough, one of Mark’s Hounds was flying toward us, and when he saw us getting up, he hovered until we caught up with him, then flew off, with glances backward over his shoulder to make sure we were keeping up.

  It was easy enough to see the first man, once we were led into the part of the ruined building where he had taken cover. He was the thing that looked like a bundle of multicolored rope with two sets of eyes. One set was his, and one set was my Hound’s.

  Shinje; I could tell from the colors. Shinje is mostly purple and red. Remember, I said my Hounds can look like anything? Well…this is something they learned how to do when I needed them to immobilize someone without hurting him. They change their form into something like a head and a couple legs and a bunch of tentacles, bamph in next to him, and then, before he can recover from having a horror like that just pop in next to him, they jump him and the next thing he knows, he’s bundled up like a spider’s prey.

  Mark’s eyes bulged while I leveled my pistol at the guy.

  “What do you want to do with him, Senior Hunter?” I asked, all formal. Now was not the time for me to play town sheriff.

  Mark thought about this. “Right now, talk to him. “All right, Shinje,” I said steadily. “Let him talk.”

  The tentacles peeled away from the rest of the guy’s head. I half expected cursing, but I guess he was so traumatized by what Shinje had done to him that he couldn’t seem to muster any words. Mark walked over and confiscated the rifle that was on the floor. Shinje moved tentacles and obligingly exposed a sidearm and a knife, and Mark took those too.

  “Why?” Mark said finally. “We’re Hunters, man! Why shoot at us?”

  The man finally regained some of his courage. “Yer Rayne’s lapdogs!” he spat. “Ye jump when he sez, an’ bite who he sez an’—”

  “Now, stop right there!” Mark said sternly, and Shinje gave the guy a squeeze, just enough to make him choke off whatever else he was about to say. “We’re Hunters, you moron, and do you think that if we were some sort of favored pets we’d be out here, in godforsaken Spillover, Hunting? No matter what you think when you see these stupid outfits, we are not Rayne’s to command. We are not anyone’s to command. We serve and protect all the people from the monsters of the Otherside, and we are not your enemies!”

  “Not unless you make enemies out of us by getting in between us and our job,” I added, keeping my pistol aimed right between his bushy eyebrows.

  Mark nodded. “Free up his legs so he can walk,” he ordered Shinje, who obliged. “Let’s go collect his friends.”

  Mark’s Hound led the way. As I had expected, the other two were together, sniper and spotter. It took a long climb to get up to them, but not a particularly hard one, since there were still metal catwalks and stairs all over this building, even though whatever huge machines had been bolted in here were long gone. Shinje had freed our captive’s legs so he could walk, and we found the spotter and sniper wrapped up by Bya and Dusana respectively, while Begtse, Chenresig, and three of the four of Mark’s Hounds stood guard. Our guy was sweating heavily by the time we got to the top; after all, he was carrying his own weight and the weight of my Hound. He seemed really happy to sit down and not inclined to talk.

  The other two glared at us, but I thought there might be some fear behind the glares. Mark and I confiscated their weapons, then walked a little way away.

  “I know what I would do,” I whispered hesitantly, “but I’ll follow your lead on this. I—don’t know what we can get away with….”

  Mark scowled. “Headquarters would probably prefer we just executed them,” he said reluctantly.

  “You don’t want to.” Neither did I. It would have been one thing to shoot them while they were shooting at us, it was quite another to kill them in cold blood.

  “It makes us worse than them.” I could see White Knight’s point. “Anyway, until Headquarters manages to fly more cameras out to us, we’re on our own, and whatever we say happened, happened.”

  I sucked on my lower lip for a little while. “Well…do you have any other ideas?”

  “Wait until I get done giving them a piece of my mind.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after a lecture from Mark about how we were Hunters, damn it, and our job was to protect all Cits, even if some of the Cits were idiots, and even if some Cits had decided they didn’t want to be Cits anymore, Mark and I moved away from them to talk.

  It might have been a much longer lecture, but Knight was big and intimidating, and my Hounds were going out of their way to be weird and intimidating, and our captives stayed quiet, and it looked as if Mark was having an effect on them.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Well, I had an idea,” he said. “We wait until the new cams catch up with us, then we kill them.”

  “What?” I spluttered, then felt like an idiot. “Right, of course. For the cameras. Gotcha. Think they’ll go along with that?”

  “Only one way to find out.” He marched over to them. “Now, morons. You’ve got two choices. One, I call a chopper for you. Two, we fake a firefight and you die, and it had better be an amazing performance. Which will it be?”

  They looked at each other. “I reckon…we die….” the sniper said slowly.

  I looked at my Hounds. Okay, Bya, let ’em go.

  Once they were out of the tangles of tentacles, we could see that their outfits consisted of layers of mismatched tatters, and they looked pretty dirty and thin, although their weapons were in good order and the sniper rifle was really excellent. So if they were “rebels,” it didn’t look as if their rebellion was prospering.

  “Now what?” the sniper asked.

  “Now we wait back where we were until the new camera comes in. I’m sure you can spot it,” Mark replied with heavy sarcasm. “Then we shoot at each other, and you die. Dramatically.”

  “And remember,” I said darkly, “if you back out on this deal, my Hounds will get you again.”

  They looked, shuddered, then looked at each other. “We’ll need some blood,” said the scruffier of the lot. “A lot of blood.”

  Five dead rabbits later, Mark and I were back in place when the camera came zipping in. And the exchange of gunfire began. We were all damn good shots, so it wasn’t hard to hit close enough to make it look real, but actually hit cover instead.

  It was really impressive. So was the bloodcurdling scream that rang from the top of the building.

  Mark wanted dramatic…well, we got dramatic. There was a lot of shouting and cursing, and I learned a whole new set of colorful words I would never be allowed to use in public. And I actually had to suppress a giggle when as a “last act of defiance,” the sniper took out the new camera as he “died.”

  I decided I needed to find a way to let Uncle know how this had really turned out. I was pretty sure he’d approve.

  Not that any of this would have appeared on our feeds. It was already clear that, like existence of the Folk, those in charge did not want the Cits to know anyone was rebelling against Premier Rayne’s rule, no matter how shabby they looked.

  Mark and I sat down for a breather while my Hounds made sure the rebels actually moved out like we said they should. “I’m glad that worked out the way it did,” I said finally.

  “Me too.” He blew out his breath in a long sigh. “I’m a Hunter, I’m supposed to protect people, not make them into targets.”

  Which was pretty much how I felt, so I nodded, and we just sat there quietly until my Hounds came back. They run very fast, Bya said smugly. I don’t think they wanted to be wrapped up again.

  Yet another
set of cameras caught up with us when we were a good half mile from the ambush point, just in time to record us surrounding and eliminating a herd of Goblins. We gave the cameras a good show, then moved on.

  Which is when we practically tripped over trouble, and only the alertness of our Hounds saved us.

  I know neither of us were expecting two concentrations of Othersiders so close together. After all, this part of Spillover was within sight of the Barrier, and if there had been anyone patrolling the hydro side, the activity should have been spotted. A lay up of Goblins was one thing—you couldn’t tell where they’d wander off to next, and it wouldn’t be remotely out of the question for them to go unnoticed in the couple of days they had been nesting here.

  But what we almost ran into was something entirely different. It was a long-term nesting site, and a huge nesting site…of Gazers.

  The nest was inside one of the old industrial buildings, a smaller one than most of the others, maybe half an acre in size, two stories tall, and made solidly of brick. It didn’t have a roof, but that wouldn’t bother Gazers. It looked, in fact, as if something had come along and ripped off the top part, leaving a brick shell open to the sky. And it was a good thing that Mark’s Hounds were flyers, because they were the ones that spotted the danger before we humans got too close, streaking back with Bya in close attendance on the ground to provide translation so we didn’t have to play a game of charades with them to find out what was wrong.

  “What—” Mark said, alarmed at the way the Hounds were acting, boiling around us like frightened ferrets.

  “A Gazer nest…” I said flatly, and he blanched. I wasn’t feeling any too good myself.

  One Gazer was bad enough. There were at least twenty, maybe more, and about a hundred gross little eyeballs that were the nestlings. This was way, way too big for us to handle, and once Bya had finished giving me the full description of what Mark’s Hound had seen, Mark opened up the com link back to headquarters, while the two of us and all the Hounds made a run for the nearest building that was tall enough to look down into the one the Gazers had taken for their own.

  I was being point man with weapons hot and ready while Mark handled the call, so I didn’t catch a lot of it on my own comm. This building wasn’t in as good shape as the one the sniper had used. But eventually we got to a spot where there was half a busted-out window, and a bit of sturdy catwalk to lie flat on. We dug out our binocs and had a look, Mark still talking to HQ. Now that I wasn’t watching sixty directions at once, it sounded as if they were talking about calling in an artillery barrage, which was sensible. We both had laser pointers and we could easily paint the spot so the Gazers got no warning. Only one small problem.

  We both spotted it at the same time, as some of the baby eyeballs lofted up about a story and sank back down again.

  “Cancel that,” Mark said. “They’re fledging.” If the babies were flight-capable, we were too close to paint the target and survive what the artillery would have to lob at the nest to get them all in one go. And if you didn’t get them all…you had a scattered nest of really angry Gazers, who tend to come back with friends. Friends like Gogs and Magogs.

  Someone broke in on our freq. “We all just finished our patrols and got nothin’,” said a voice I recognized. Ace. “There’s twenty of us sitting around HQ, including Dazzle—she can net and flash, Noob can net and flash; that’ll be good enough to hold while the rest of us give the Cits a good show. And Armorer Kent’s here, that’s an Elite. We oughta be able to take out two nests with all of that.” Noob. That was me.

  HQ didn’t need any convincing, though. “Put out your beacon, White Knight,” the controller ordered. “Hunter Ace is right. This is going to be sensational.”

  DO I EVEN HAVE TO say how bad an idea I thought this was? From Mark’s face, he felt the same. But he didn’t dare say anything; we were on camera, and the decision had already been made for us.

  They went into the building, sneaking in from the rear, one and two at a time, and we came down off the high perch to meet them because there was no way that bit of catwalk would hold more than four.

  But of course, we had the cameras to watch for us now. And we had the armorer, who, thank heavens, was the one really in charge and not Ace.

  It was the armorer who ordered HQ to put the cameras up around the edge of the Gazer building. They argued with him when he said that, because they wanted as many cameras on the Hunters as possible. Evidently this was a whole new thing—a Hunting party of ranking Hunters this big—and people on the live feeds were getting excited about it.

  Thanks to the cameras, we had eyes on the Gazer symbionts too, Jackals. They were nasty things, just as nasty as the Gazers, in a different sort of fashion. They looked a bit like real doggy hounds: white, with floppy hound ears as red as blood, and red eyes that looked as if they were weeping blood all the time. Small, no bigger than a rabbit hound, but fast and vicious, with a mouth full of needle teeth that could turn you into shreds in a moment.

  There were lots of Jackals, at least twice as many as there were Gazer nestlings. Right now they were asleep in a big pile; they must have all eaten recently and well, because Gazers only get sleepy after a big feast. I didn’t want to think what that meant, but of course the conclusion was inescapable. The Goblins had been sleepy too, and Gazers and Goblins didn’t have any problem working together. So they had probably found a concentration of people out here, and…well, only Hunters could hope to survive against Gazers, Jackals, and Goblins combined.

  They’d probably destroyed almost a village-worth of men, women, and children. It did make me angry, though, to know that those men who had been shooting at us must also have a sort of headquarters or encampment somewhere out here, and to know that they had tried to pick us off instead of sniping Gazers.

  Dazzle and I huddled up as soon as the armorer got off the comm. We had our Perscom screens tuned to cameras on the opposite sides of the Gazer nest, so we could see the whole thing and begin planning our assault.

  “Do you anchor your net?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “Don’t know how,” she confessed, and looked at me hopefully.

  “Okay…let’s try this,” I suggested, and made a rough circle of broken brick and cement between us. “You float yours over, I’ll slam mine down at cross-grain to yours and see if I can’t anchor both.” We wouldn’t have to worry about the Gazers seeing the nets until it was too late; even with Mage-sight, they’d be looking up into the sun and be too blinded to catch the magic.

  With a ring of interested Hounds watching—she had four that looked like wolves with rose-ash smoke for fur—we gave it a shot. The first two times were failures: the first time, her net disintegrated under mine; the second, I failed to “cup” the edges of mine, and hers slipped out from underneath, then collapsed. But the third time, we got it right, and after another three trials to refine our technique, we figured we were ready. We grinned at each other and fist-bumped, then rejoined the rest of the group.

  Mark’s four Hounds were going to be incredibly important, since only he and one other Hunter had flyers.

  “Your job is going to be to knock any Gazers that escape and take to the air right down to the ground again,” the armorer said. When Mark, the other Hunter, and their Hounds all looked puzzled, I raised my hand.

  The armorer pointed his thumb at me. “Go, Joy.”

  “I’ve seen raptors do that, up in the mountains,” I said, which was true, but I’d seen one of the Masters’ Hounds do it too. I went on to explain, miming it all with my hands. “The flyer gets height and circles—it’s called ‘waiting on.’” My right hand formed a winglike thing that was supposed to represent the Hound while my left made a fist that was the Gazer. “And when his prey takes to the air, he folds his wings and fists his claws—or paws in the case of your Hounds, Mark—and dives.” I plunged my right hand down on my left. “He hits it—bam!—right on the head, but since he’s fisted his claws, he doesn’t bi
nd to it, and he bounces right back up while he knocks the prey to the ground.”

  Mark, the other guy, and the armorer all nodded—Mark and the other Hunter in understanding, the armorer in approval. He went back to laying out the plan.

  Something I noticed was how Paules and Ace stood together, and had this kind of unspoken communication going, almost as if they were twins rather than older and younger brothers. I’d never seen them in a Hunting situation together, and it was the first time I’d ever seen Ace show anything like fraternal feelings, though it had been clear a long time ago that Paules really wanted to impress his older brother.

  One of the things that the armorer was absolutely insisting on was that we each have partners keeping an eye on each other; we were going to use some light-flash spells and flash-bangs to try to blind the Gazers, but there were a lot of them and a lot of their Jackals and way too many fledglings, and even the little ones could get a hypnotic lock on you. So we were going to have to be vigilant about that, and make sure that anyone who got Gazed got snapped right out of it.

  “Which is why I want the two of you watched over by White Knight and at least two of your Hounds, each,” the armorer said. Bya bowed over his paws and whined agreement; I could tell he’d been worried about that. He wanted to fight the Gazers, but he didn’t want to leave me vulnerable—well, now he could relax; he had orders.

  I called over Dusana, Begtse, Chenresig, Kalachakra, and Shinje, and pointed at the armorer. “Pack with his Hounds,” I said. “Bya and Hevajra will stay with me.”

  Dusana snorted, which is his way of saying yes, so it was settled.

  Dazzle, Mark, the armorer, and our Hounds all moved out first; this could not possibly have been a situation more to the Gazer advantage. There were only two doors into the whole building, and the only other way up to the second floor, where there were knocked-out windows, was a metal fire escape. The party split up into two, except for me, Dazzle, Mark, and the armorer, and slipped up to the blank brick wall and the holes where the doors had been. The four of us and our Hounds carefully inched up the fire escape, hoping it wouldn’t pull free of the brick, or creak, or break underneath us. I only breathed a little easier when we were all on the platform on our bellies, the armorer had a grenade gun out, and Dazzle and I began painting Glyphs in the air over the Gazer nest with little twitches of our fingers.