Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  My Hounds skidded to a halt as the Knockers began to screech. Bya sauntered over to me and looked up at me.

  They have blood on them, he said. We can smell it.

  Now, Bya wouldn’t have bothered to tell me this if it was animal blood he smelled. All my reservations vanished.

  One or more of the Hounds would seize an arm or a leg from the pile. I would withdraw the net from that particular Knocker, and they would drag it, screaming and screeching, to Karly’s Hounds. They’d wait until one of the two got its jaws locked on some part of the creature. Then they’d kill it, and let the wounded Hound absorb all the manna for itself. After the first four Knockers were dead, Karly’s Hounds had revived enough to join the pack at the net, and do the killing themselves. When all of the Knockers were bloody meat on the concrete, Karly’s Hounds were looking much more like their normal selves. Certainly doing well enough to cross over to the Otherside without worrying if something there would attack them.

  I felt a little guilt easing. At least I’d managed to save them.

  They padded ponderously over to me, and I opened the Way for them. But they didn’t step through it. Instead, they sat down, looked at each other, then looked at Bya.

  Bya gazed back, then swung his head to look at me. They want to join our pack, he said.

  I felt stunned. I’d never heard of this happening before. Everything I knew about Hounds said that when their Hunter died, if they were still alive, they went back Otherside. I answered with the first thing that came into my head.

  Do you want them in your pack? I asked him, or rather, thought at him.

  They are not our kind, but they will do, he replied with a bit of a swagger. Well, small wonder, he was pack leader, the alpha, and the bigger your pack, the more prestige among Hounds you had. I looked at the two Hounds—so unlike my gaudy lot—which were about to become mine.

  “You are welcome in our pack,” I said gravely.

  Both of them bowed their heads, first to me, then to Bya. One of them got up, walked to me, and opened his mouth. I knew without prompting what he wanted and put my hand in it. He closed his mouth gently around it, and I could feel a small part of the backs of my hands within the Mandala burning. He let go, and I pulled my hand back and looked at it. Sure enough, where I’d felt the burning spot, there was a fresh scar. Same on the other hand.

  The second came over and did the same, with the same result; another new patch of scar pattern in the Mandalas.

  Bya padded up to me and looked up into my face gravely. Their names are Hold and Strike, he said. Not terribly imaginative, I suppose, but Karly was pretty much what you see is what you get.

  Was…

  I felt my throat closing up, and my eyes burning, and I just knelt down between Hold and Strike and put my arms around their shoulders and sobbed. I felt them shaking beneath my arms, and little whines came from their throats that sounded just like crying. So we all three cried together for the friend we had lost, and the rest of the pack closed around us protectively. I finally stopped only when my eyes hurt too much to keep on, rubbed them dry with the tail of my shirt, and stood up. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. I just cast the Glyphs and opened the Way, and all the Hounds except Dusana passed through to the Otherside. Dusana looked at me expectantly, and I groaned a little. If I was going to keep bamphing with him, I was going to have to find a solution to barfing my toenails up when the ride was over. But I didn’t have any other way to get back to headquarters, and it was a long, long walk that I would have to explain….

  I climbed up onto his back, squeezed my eyes tight, and held on for dear life.

  It didn’t help. But at least we made it back to my room in one piece.

  I didn’t so much throw myself onto the bed as collapse there; I fumbled for my Perscom and strapped it back on, checked the time—it was only mid-morning, impossible as that seemed—then lay there in a sort of stupor until my stomach recovered enough to decide it was empty and should be filled. There had been a text message from Josh, but I hadn’t felt like reading it when I got back, and I still didn’t feel like reading it now.

  Feeling as limp as a wrung-out cloth, I made some tea and drank it, ate some fruit, then checked that text message. It was simple enough. If you need me, call me. But it made me feel a little…a very little…better. I still didn’t feel up to answering it, so I dropped back into my stupor. Maybe I even dozed a little. It was the vid chiming that broke me out of it.

  I half expected another text from Josh or one from Mark, but it was just an impersonal message noting that I hadn’t appeared in the mess hall for breakfast and offering me a lunch menu for a robot to bring to the room. My brain was a mess and nothing looked good, but I picked some stuff at random so the system wouldn’t nag at me to eat.

  Before the food turned up, I realized that I was going to have to pull myself together, at least to the point where I could think. The best way I knew to do that was to meditate, so I sat myself zazen—in what they call lotus position—on the messy bed. And I know you might find this hard to believe, but once you’re really trained in meditation, you can meditate under just about any circumstance. Meditation lets you clear out your thoughts and let your subconscious go to work on problems. You might not have answers when you come out of it, but at least you’ll get the problem sorted out into manageable bits.

  That’s pretty much what happened when the robot turned up at my door and it chimed to let me know it was there. I didn’t have a plan, but I at least had some idea what I shouldn’t do.

  While sitting there, my memory had turned out the useful bit that the armorer could make vids go away. Now, whoever had set up the ambush might have been caught on vid, or might worry that he would be, which would mean he’d want to make sure someone who could make vid footage go away would be someone he would want to be friendly with.

  So for right now I had better not go to the armorer with any of this, even though Uncle had said I could ask him things. Not yet, anyway. Not until I was sure.

  As the list I was tallying up of who I couldn’t trust started to get longer and longer, I realized two things. The first was that it was a good thing I had picked soup for lunch, because I don’t think I could have gotten anything else past the cold lump of fear in my throat. And the second was that the list of people I could probably trust was a lot shorter than the other one.

  Three people, in fact: Uncle, Josh, and Mark. That was more or less by default; if I couldn’t trust my uncle and the Psimon he trusted, I was already in deep kimchee, and if I couldn’t trust White Knight, all my instincts were off.

  I can’t tell you how tempting it was at that moment to sneak down to the armory, grab some weapons, pack up my old clothing and some survival supplies, call Dusana, and bamph out of there. Once we got outside the city Barriers, we could live off the land as we made our way home….

  But that wouldn’t be getting justice for Karly. It would definitely trigger a hunt for me that would start at the Mountain, and that was the last place I wanted anyone snooping right now. And it wouldn’t make things easier on Uncle; in fact, that would pretty much play into the hands of whoever was threatening him. I knew for certain-sure my Masters would say, if I were to ask them for advice, that I should stay here and face things.

  My Masters would tell me that there were seldom coincidences where Hunters and magic were concerned, and would remind me that if I needed a sign I had to stay here, I’d just gotten two—Dusana bamphing with me, and Karly’s Hounds joining my pack.

  So where to go from here?

  I thought about Mark…but he wasn’t any better off than I was. Worse in some ways. He had relatives of his own—and a sweetheart—who could easily be threatened, at least until they moved out to the Springs. That left me with one person who might be in a position to find out things for me. Well, two, but I didn’t want to call more attention down on Uncle by doing anything to hint that I was beginning to get wind of what was going on. That left Jos
h. I left him a text—just, I really need to talk to you right now, which was what anyone who’d just lost a good friend would say. And then I waited.

  AND WAITED. Not that I really expected an answer right away, but…it seemed like the minutes just crawled by. I knew what I couldn’t do. I knew what I wouldn’t do. Neither was a lot of help just now. I still had no good idea of how to protect myself from whoever was out there trying to get me, much less how to get some rough justice for Karly. And yeah, I was still scared.

  That was when my Perscom went off again, and I grabbed for it.

  But it wasn’t Josh. It was Mark…and his message was awfully peculiar.

  Work will do you more good than crying in your room. Come join me. Of course, the message came with his location on the map.

  That just didn’t sound like Mark. Was this some kind of trap? Had someone gotten hold of his Perscom, or cloned it, and was setting me up? I thought about texting him back, then I thought better of it and tried voice.

  He answered almost as soon as I pinged him. “Good, you’re awake. You should come out here to work.”

  Then, a completely different voice added, “Absolutely. Get some sun.”

  Josh’s voice.

  Either whoever was trying to get me had managed to get to both of them, or else this was Josh’s answer to my not calling him.

  I felt Bya poking at my brain, so I brought him through, just as Mark spoke up again. “You really should get out here, Joy. The sooner, the better. Got to go.”

  I looked at Bya. Bya looked at me, then nudged my wrist, the one with the Perscom on it. I showed it to him—I don’t know why I did, it just seemed like the thing to do. The Perscom was still showing Mark’s location, and even though I’d never had any indication that the Hounds could get a read off of a Perscom, in the next moment, Bya had bamphed out.

  I think this might have been the moment I stopped being surprised at my Hounds. I mean, I’d always thought of them more as my partners than anything else, but this was when I started thinking of them as being like a bunch of human partners.

  I waited, deliberately keeping myself from fidgeting by concentrating on what I was doing, one little thing at a time. This time I wasn’t going to go out half prepared. I didn’t have access to the armory weapons, but I did have knives, a crossbow, and a short spear, all of which I had brought with me, and all of which were among my old things. I didn’t put on one of my city Hunting outfits; I dressed myself in my old Hunting gear. And a few minutes later, I got a vague, distant feeling from Bya that everything was fine.

  I took my Perscom with me, intending to use it to get a pod, but there was already an unmanned pod waiting for me, door open invitingly. I got in, and since the door closed and it took off immediately, I was obviously the person it was waiting for.

  It left me at one of the Barrier pylons, one of the ones with a door in it. The door answered to my thumbprint and Perscom, and I crossed through into Spillover and followed my map.

  I didn’t have to go too far.

  I noticed the little dot that represented Mark coming toward me, Bya with him. I stopped long enough to cast the Glyphs and bring the rest of the Hounds over, with Strike and Hold milling with the rest of them. I didn’t want to be caught unaware by anything. It looked as if the two new Hounds had settled right in with mine.

  We moved quickly but cautiously toward Mark. The first sign I had of him was one of his Hounds flying by overhead, obviously looking for us. It did a quick turn and circled overhead, then flew back in the direction where Mark was. We all met in an area between two rows of what had once been houses, in the middle of a cracked and broken-up street. He didn’t say anything, just waved to me and turned around without waiting for me, and Bya trotted over to me.

  I was going through so many emotions it was almost making me sick. I had to get myself under better control, because right now I couldn’t afford to lose control, not for a moment.

  It was a struggle. It’s one I am not sure I would have won if it hadn’t been for Bya on one side of me and Dusana on the other. But by the time we got to this…forest of buildings all tumbled against each other, I had my Hunt face back on, and my control was mostly back.

  There was a camera hovering above Mark. I took a quick glance around. I didn’t have one. Had I somehow escaped notice? When I looked back at Mark, he made this little stay there motion, so I did, backing off into the shadows of some walls that looked like they were probably going to stay put.

  “All clear!” That was Josh’s voice, and I didn’t need Mark waving me over to know I should go to meet them. Josh was actually in that warren, and he led us deeper in, down some stairs and into a basement—or maybe it was one of those old shelters, because there was what was left of metal bunk beds bolted to the floor inside. All the Hounds crowded in with us. The camera stayed outside. Josh had a light with him and put it up on top of one of the upper bunks.

  “Did Uncle send you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I volunteered. The prefect couldn’t think of any way to get to you without being monitored. But I have a hacker friend in the Hunter-vid department who owes me a favor, and I figured it was worth the risk to come myself.”

  That was the moment I knew I could trust him completely. Because he had just risked everything. If whoever was after me found out about him, he’d have an even bigger target on his back than I did. And he was a Psimon and part of PsiCorps; he could be ordered back to the Corps and not even Uncle could countermand that, because Uncle didn’t run the Corps. Once he was back in the Corps, he would just disappear—and could be “disappeared,” and no one would be the wiser.

  “How long have we got?” Mark was asking as I wiggled into the room among the Hounds.

  “Half an hour at worst, an hour and a half at best.” Josh turned to me. “My friend is glitching the system for us. You’re still showing as in your rooms. Knight’s camera is reporting itself as offline, but they won’t bother sending a new one for a while, because he’s not a top-ranker when you aren’t around.”

  “Has Uncle got any idea who was behind the attack on Karly?” I asked a bit desperately. “At all?”

  Josh shook his head silently. “The prefect obviously didn’t tell me everything he knows; that’s way above my pay grade. But…okay, he knew that people would probably try to get to him through you if he showed you any kind of favoritism. But he told me he never, ever thought anyone was going to try to actually hurt you. That’s—” Josh shook his head.

  “It’s stupid, is what it is,” Mark rumbled. “I don’t care what political crap you’re getting into, we need all the Hunters we can get.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking as if he was thinking about pulling some of it out.

  “It’s insane,” Josh agreed. “By our standards. But remember, it might not have been intended to hurt Joy, at least not badly. She’s…she’s crazy good, and so are her Hounds. So…” He shrugged, looking distressed.

  “Or maybe not,” Mark said darkly. “I mean, think about it. Maybe at the beginning, before she actually got here…but after that save at the train, it was obvious she was not just another turnip like me, who might be useful as leverage one day. Once it was clear that her abilities were that good, she might have gone from being ‘useful leverage’ to being ‘too potentially dangerous to leave alive.’”

  “Why?” I asked aloud. “I mean…what would be the point?” Just because something looks like a conspiracy doesn’t mean there actually is one. “Besides, what if most of this is coincidence, except for the Vamp? We know the Othersiders have been hitting us with increasing frequency and nastier critters for the past year. If it’s an exponential increase, the way I think it is—I could just have been unlucky enough to turn up when the curve shot up into the sky like a rocket. Ace hit a Vamp too, remember, and a bunch of the others had some pretty nasty things pop up on their territories in the last two weeks.”

  Knight and Josh looked at each other. “She’s right. We can’t
be sure of anything,” Josh said, finally. “But if someone is coming after Joy, the likeliest reason is to try to put pressure on the prefect and blackmail him into favors, or into taking sides.”

  “Could gambling factor in too?” I asked, voicing the thought that had occurred to me—gods, it seemed like years ago now.

  “There is a lot of money changing hands,” Josh said slowly. “Any time there’s money flowing, things can get nasty. So that might be one more complication.”

  “She’s Ace’s chief rival now,” Mark said, his expression darkening. “And Ace just got knocked out of the top spot. That could make a whole lot of folks unhappy.”

  “I don’t know a lot about high-level politics, because everyone wears Psi-shields, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be all three things,” Josh agreed. “Gamblers backing Ace, somebody wanting favors from the prefect, and somebody wanting the prefect to take sides. They could be working separately or in any combination.”

  I looked from Josh to Mark and back again. Both seemed to think that actually was likely. I swallowed. Suddenly my uncle’s warnings took on a much darker tone.

  “Let’s just concentrate on who got that Vamp in. I don’t know how that could be coincidence,” I said finally. “I don’t know how it could possibly have been Ace. Hasn’t he had eyeballs on him every single minute since his brother was killed?”

  Josh looked at Mark. Mark grimaced. “He’s got the psych-techs watching him like hawks for signs of a breakdown. I know that for a fact. That means face-recognition running on every single passive cam in and around the HQ, just in case he tries something clever, like ditching his Perscom.”

  I nodded. “An ordinary Mage probably couldn’t have held him for long enough to persuade him, and then when the Magic Bindings were off, why would the Vamp cooperate? And the same goes for a Psimon….”