Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  Below it, something big and spiderlike screeched and cowered away from the light.

  A Vampire.

  Oh, Vampires are not the pretty things from some of the old books and vids before the Diseray—they can look that way if they want, but it’s all illusion, part of their mind-powers. They’re about seven feet tall, bald, with long, skinny legs and long, skinny, dangly arms with claws on their hands, and they look like that picture The Scream. I sometimes wonder if the artist hadn’t got a glimpse into Otherside when he was painting that. Except Vamps have mouths full of needle teeth. They don’t make two neat little holes in their victim’s neck, they tear it open and drink that way.

  He was crouching over someone on the ground, and I already knew it was Karly, another Hound dead beside her. I yelled with fury, and before the Hounds could do anything, I gathered in more manna, and formed the spell for a levin bolt, and a second later it left my hand like a tiny meteor and smashed into him with a thwock and a splash of light.

  In fact, it hit him so hard, it knocked him up in the air and he came down about ten feet away from Karly. He hadn’t even landed when I had the next spell lined up, and I smashed it down on top of him, the way I’d smashed the Gazer. Only harder.

  Much harder.

  I could hear the sound of bones snapping—but that wasn’t going to keep a Vamp down for long. Only one thing would, and as I hit the monster a third time, I felt Bya shoving what I needed into my hand. My fingers closed around a piece of wood broken off so it had a pointed end, and then the Hounds and I closed in.

  They got to the Vamp before I did, each one grabbing a limb and pulling back, so he was spread-eagled among them, like puppies playing tug-of-war with a rag doll. I straddled the obscene creature, so angry I could scarcely see, and rammed the point of the wood down at his chest, aiming for a spot between ribs on the left side. He howled with rage and pain, but of course, I hadn’t pierced the heart, not yet, and that was the only thing that would kill him. I took my pistol and reversed it, using the grip like a hammer, and pounded on the flat end of the stake, driving it a little deeper with each hit, until I finally forced it through the ribs and into the chest cavity. Then, with a final blow, I pierced the heart.

  The thing screamed. The death-scream of a Vamp is one of the worst things you can ever hear. It pierces your head; it’s like having nails driven into your ears. I clapped both hands over my ears, but it didn’t do any good. He was trying to writhe, trying to get his hands on me and kill me, too, but my Hounds had their teeth clamped hard on his wrists and ankles, and their feet dug in, and all he could do was vibrate and scream until finally, finally, he gave a last convulsion, threw his head back, and died.

  The Hounds let go. I stumbled back to Karly’s body, already crying so hard I could barely see.

  The thing had completely torn her throat out. She must have bled out in seconds.

  I…lost it. I threw back my head and howled like a dog.

  There’s a big blank spot then, because the next thing I knew, there were two of the older Hunters, some of the ones I’d been trading stories and watching the Hunt vids with a couple of days ago, helping me up the ladder. Big dark-skinned guys, all muscle, like statues. Steel and Hammer were their nicknames. They were saying the things you say, but they weren’t in much better shape than me, just holding it together better. There was a chopper on the ground, and a couple of medics were putting a body bag in it. I started weeping again, and Steel just folded his arms around me and pulled me into his chest and let me rage and pound on him and cry until my throat was raw, I was coughing and wheezing, and my nose was so snotted up I couldn’t breathe.

  Then there was another big blank spot, and the next thing I knew, Knight had one arm around me while he was getting the door to my room open. He shoved me gently at the doorway, but I grabbed his hand, and begged him, “Don’t leave me,” so he came inside, and we sat down on the couch and I cried some more.

  Only this time it was with plenty of handkerchiefs, and Mark giving me fruit juice and not saying anything, just letting me cry. And blubbering all the stupid stuff like “It’s not fair!” as if the world actually cared about being fair, and finally, “Why Karly? She was smart! How could she—”

  And at that moment, Mark went very, very quiet. So still and quiet that I stopped blubbering. The kind of still and quiet that happens when someone knows something, something horrible, and isn’t sure how he’s going to say it, or even if he should.

  “What?” I demanded, sharply, now more scared than grieving, all my alarm instincts going into overdrive. Because that kind of silence and that hint at horrible generally means you need to be scared.

  “You were supposed to be in that territory, Joy,” he said slowly.

  I knew exactly what he was not saying.

  And I went cold all over.

  The Vamp had help getting in there. It had to have; there was no way it could have gotten there otherwise. Vamps couldn’t cross the Barriers; they had to go over with help or under by finding a hole. And it wasn’t supposed to be Karly it killed.

  It was supposed to be me.

  MARK LEFT ME, FINALLY. I was too tired to cry anymore—and now that I was alone I was feeling scared and cold and exhausted. I didn’t want to sleep, but I didn’t get any choice; sleep ambushed me, and when I woke up again, the lights in my room were still on and there was a message light blinking on both my vid-screen and my Perscom.

  Answering was reflex now, and I did it without thinking. I answered the one on the Perscom first. It was an automated message, saying that Medical had given me a day off Hunting because of my “loss.” Great, one day to hide in my room—and did they have that many Hunters that they could afford to give me a day off? And I wanted to Hunt! It wasn’t enough that I’d killed the thing that got her, I wanted to kill the thing that had sent it!

  I had this surge of pure, white-hot anger that wiped everything out and pushed how scared I was into the background. Karly deserved more than that! She was a Hunter, and maybe she’d been a little cynical and maybe she hadn’t been a ranker, but she was tough and competent and she never just sat back and coasted, she Hunted. And she was my friend, and like the big sister I’d never had. I wasn’t going to hide in my room, dammit. I was going to find out who it was that had murdered Karly.

  One of the first things my Masters ever taught us was how to solve problems. Not every problem needs to be attacked head-on, they’d tell me. And then they showed us, over and over until we got it.

  Blind rondori—that was one of the ways they showed us. It was a martial-arts exercise where we were blindfolded and attacked from all sides. Single attacks when we were beginners, multiple when we got better. Start from what you know. The answer will unfold.

  The lights had been shut off. The Vamp could never have gotten into FF-12 alone. FF-12 was too far from the Barrier for a Vamp to walk between sundown and sunup. And it would have had to have gotten in the same way the one Ace killed had—by a hole under the Barrier—and if it got in through a hole, so would swarms of other things. Yet there hadn’t been anything but that Vamp. Someone had helped it get to FF-12 and then down into the sewers, and then shut off the lights for it so it could lie in wait.

  So I closed my eyes, took a lot of deep, shuddering breaths, held back sobs, and waited for something I knew to float toward me out of the dark. When I let it happen, something did, something important. Which was that whoever had brought in that fang-face that killed Karly hadn’t known we’d swapped territories.

  Why not? Well, the simplest answer? He hadn’t watched the feeds. He’d depended on what our schedules said. If he had watched the feeds, he hadn’t paid that much attention—and FF-12 and F-22 looked a lot alike if you were just glancing through the feeds and not paying attention to the commentary or who was in the zone. Especially if you didn’t know the outlying districts well.

  He probably wouldn’t have had a lot of time to work in either. Unless he had a job that gave him a l
ot of freedom of movement, he’d have to do his shift, then find the time to set up his ambush.

  Who could possibly persuade or coerce—or even encounter!—a Vamp?

  A handful of people. No ordinary Cit, for sure. An army Magus, a Psimon, or a Hunter. Anyone else would be the fang’s next entrée.

  Yeah, I think fast. Especially when something or someone is trying to kill me. But I was concentrating so hard on all of this that I didn’t notice the itch in the back of my head until it suddenly turned into a burn—and a matching burn on the Mandala scars on the backs of my hands.

  What? The Hounds had only demanded to come through without being summoned a handful of times, and all of them had been urgent. This was something I didn’t bother to think about. I clapped my hands over my eyes and opened the Way the quick-and-dirty way, just calling to the Hounds and letting the Mandalas on the backs of my hands serve as the Glyphs for the Portal.

  The familiar surge of pain in my hands hit me twice; so, only two of the Hounds had come over. When I uncovered my eyes, I saw Bya, who I expected…but also Dusana, who almost filled the room.

  When Bya was in a hurry, he never bothered to talk to me. Instead, he showed me things, like vids in my head. And what I saw were the other pair of Karly’s Hounds, the two we hadn’t seen dead. They were badly wounded, down in that sewer tunnel.…If someone didn’t get to them soon, they were going to die.

  Dusana knelt, and it was clear that soon was not going to mean wait for a pod.

  Not that I had any intention of calling a pod. Who’d look for me if I left my Perscom here, especially if I was supposed to be crying my eyes out in my room?

  I pulled my Perscom off and threw it on the bed, climbed onto Dusana’s back, and held on, feeling grateful I hadn’t eaten.

  Three bamphs got us to the sewer entrance, and I slid off to throw up. Seriously? Given the choice of bamphing and walking? I’ll walk….

  Not an option this time, though.

  Once my stomach stopped trying to exit through my mouth, I wiped my face and staggered for the sewer system. I went down the ladder and it all hit me again. The lump in my throat grew and I clenched my fists. The anger was overwhelming. Because there was someone out there who had murdered Karly by proxy, and that someone was probably a Hunter. Yeah, a Psimon or a Magician could do it—but the most logical was a Hunter. I think that was the moment I decided that whoever it was, he was going to pay. Murder was horrid if it was a Psimon or Magus, but if it was a fellow Hunter? There are no words filthy enough for the piece of dung who would do that.

  The sewer tunnel was a patchwork of light and dark. Looked as if when there wasn’t a Hunter down here, about two-thirds of the overhead lights were turned off, which only made sense. That might have been how Karly had gotten ambushed. Karly had probably gotten down here, tried to turn on the lights, and when they wouldn’t light up, figured that there had been a glitch in the system and just decided to go on ahead anyway. I probably would have done the same thing.

  Bya ran ahead, turning his head to make sure I was following. Dusana trotted at my side, and I understood he was guarding me, taking Bya’s usual spot. We went about half a mile before we finally found the Hounds.

  They were horribly torn up. Hounds…well they aren’t exactly built like “real” animals. They don’t seem to have any internal organs, for one thing. In this case that probably prevented them from dying instantly instead of by inches. So they were lying there, the wolves made of shadow, shadows in tatters, in pools of what passes for blood for them, with huge, terrible gashes where the fang had raked them with its talons.

  This required some very special magic.

  I layered both of them with Glyphs, three deep, stopping the blood flow, but fixing them needed more than that. I knelt between them, put a hand on each of them, and gathered my own manna. Then, with my eyes closed and my head bowed, I let my manna flow into them.

  I wasn’t sure it would work, actually. Every Hunter can heal her own Hounds by virtue of the connection between them. I knew some Hunters could heal other peoples’ Hounds, but until that moment, I didn’t know if I was one of them.

  But I was. I felt the manna flowing out of me, into the two Hounds, and sighed with relief. I didn’t need to look to know that those awful slashes were closing, that their flesh was knitting, their skin zipping shut. It all took place in moments, and I opened my eyes to see them whole.

  Now they looked as they had when I had first seen them: beefy, thick-boned, heavily muscled shadow-wolves, whose golden-eyed heads would have been about level with my hip. But they were very weak, and there was no way I could give them enough manna to get back to strength without endangering myself and my Hounds. They couldn’t cross back to their Otherside in this weakened state; they’d be prey for stuff over there if they did. So my—or rather our—work wasn’t done.

  I could feel Bya’s assent as I cast the Glyphs and brought over the rest of the pack.

  “Is there anything in the tunnels here we can Hunt?” I asked him, and showed him what I had in mind; the rest of the pack driving something toward where I would lie in ambush, so Karly’s Hounds could feed on the kill.

  He raised his head and sniffed the air; so did the rest. Given that Karly Hunted this territory every day, and presumably found kills every day, I figured the odds were good….

  They peeled off down the tunnel, a good sign that Bya thought he had detected something. He didn’t say anything, though, and I didn’t jiggle his elbow. He had felt determined, in a way I hadn’t sensed from him before. Oh, he was focused when we Hunted, but ever since I was thirteenish, there’d been a sense from all the Hounds that no matter what got thrown at us, we could handle it. This time was different. Things had happened that we hadn’t trained for, terrible things had happened to our friends, and our world was now unpredictable with enemies we couldn’t recognize, and they didn’t like it one bit.

  Well, I liked it even less. I was just glad they were driven to help Karly’s Hounds.

  As I waited with them, the poor things so weak all they could do was raise their heads a little, guilt crept over me. Because in a way, this was my fault. Maybe I should have talked to Karly and swapped territories with her until things got properly sorted out. We would have been able to handle a Vamp. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have given us some trouble—he would have. Vamps are crazy fast and as strong as six or seven humans put together. But he wasn’t as fast or strong as that Wyvern, and we’d handled that solo. Plus, my Hounds would have bamphed down into the sewer ahead of me, and sniffed him out. Karly had to wait for her Hounds to jump down to join her—that was probably when she’d gotten ambushed.

  I mean, maybe the person who had smuggled the Vamp down here had known that. He’d have known I would just get a good scare. Except it wasn’t me who came down that ladder….

  The more I thought about it, the worse I felt, sick and grieving at the same time. All I could think of now was that it should have been me, and if it had been, Karly would still be alive. I squeezed my eyes shut and choked on a sob.

  That was when I felt something heavy and warm shove under my hand, and I looked down and saw that one of Karly’s Hounds had inched over to me and pushed his head underneath my palm.

  I hadn’t quite processed that when I heard my lot bellow out their Hunting cries in the far distance. The sounds echoed down through the tunnels, and were enough like the cries of a dog pack that it was clear why these Othersiders had been named Hounds in the first place. At the same time, I got a brief flash from Bya.

  They’d found some Knockers. Only a few—probably some strays that hadn’t followed along with the horde that had attacked us, and so had escaped for a time. But my crew had nosed them out, and now they were herding the little horrors toward us.

  Perfect.

  I got to my feet and moved a little distance off, making use of the shadows between where the lights fell to cloak my presence. I didn’t have any weapons, but I was far from unar
med.

  Back home, you had to save your ammo and had weapons that weren’t always reliable. Back home, what I depended on was magic.

  I won’t say I didn’t need a gun, but I will say I never counted on having one. Which was a good thing right now.

  I readied the spell for the snare. Karly’s Hounds couldn’t move much, so the timing on this would have to be just right. Close enough for the Hounds to consume the manna, far enough away that the Knockers couldn’t reach them to hurt them.

  I heard the clatter of their rock-hard feet on the concrete; my fingers tingled with the power I had coiled up and waiting. Then I spotted movement in the distance, a sort of flicker as the running Knockers moved in and out of pools of light from the overhead lamps. Behind them was another sort of flicker—the flicker of flame as my Hounds spat their fires to keep the Knockers running.

  I brought my hands up close to my chest; I could feel the scars on the backs of them warming, and the tingle in my fingers ramped up until it felt as if my hands were vibrating. The Knockers were running as fast as their horrid bandy little legs would carry them—there were six or eight of them, so not nearly enough to challenge my Hounds. And they were in a panic, paying no attention to anything except the Hounds at their heels. I could have been standing right in the middle of the light and they probably wouldn’t have seen me.

  They reached the spot I had marked in my mind, and I keyed the spell and dropped the net on them. With so few, it was a nice, tight one; the interstitial spaces were far too small to let anything but an arm or a leg through.

  Then, as I held the net down on them, I began to have doubts. This wasn’t Hunting—this was going to be just plain cruel. The Knockers were completely outnumbered, and netted like this there was no way they could harm us. And what I proposed to do to them…