Hunter's Salvation

by Shiloh Walker

  But waking next to Jess was amazing.

  Although he knew she was in turmoil, knew she was filled to the breaking point with pain, grief, and guilt, it was all contained. None of it leaked through her shields. He lay in the bed, sprawled facedown, and she was pressed against his side, one arm around his hips. Her lips were close to his shoulder blades. He could feel the soft, gentle rhythm of her breathing and her heartbeat.

  It was—soothing. He couldn’t think of a better word to describe it.

  He’d had lovers before who were gifted, who knew how to shield, but they had been fellow Hunters. There was a decided lack of restful attributes among the Hunters. Even the Healers had to be warriors.

  Sex had always been just that, a need to satisfy, a basic urge for satisfaction and on occasion for companionship. Hunters who didn’t die young often faced long, lonely stretches of years, and they learned to take what pleasure they could where they could and not seek out more.

  Long, peaceful moments of silence after making love to a woman were not something that had been placed before Vax often. Odd that he should find it here, with this woman. She was most definitely warrior material. She had so much fight inside her, so much anger. So much guilt.

  He couldn’t feel any of it, but he could see it in her eyes.

  “You always think this hard when you wake up?”

  Her voice was drowsy, and he lifted his head from the pillow so that he could look at her. Her eyes were still closed, but as he looked at her, her lashes lifted. She smiled sleepily at him before closing her eyes again. “Too early for you to be thinking so much.”

  “It’s past eight.” He didn’t have to look at the clock to know what time it was. He had wanted to be gone by now, but they hadn’t gone to sleep until after two. He wasn’t going to complain, though. Even tired and worn-out as he was.

  She just grunted. “Until I’ve had three or four cups of coffee, it’s always early.”

  Vax laughed. He wouldn’t mind a caffeine jolt himself. And some breakfast. His belly rumbled, and he amended that silent thought—a big breakfast.

  She opened her eyes again, glaring at him. “You’re still thinking.”

  Grinning, he lifted a brow at her. “What am I supposed to be doing?”

  She blinked. “Go back to sleep?” She sounded hopeful.

  “Can’t.” Six hours of sleep was a lot for him, and he wouldn’t get any more for a while. And they did need to get going. But he couldn’t work up the interest to move. She shifted beside him, and he felt the gentle press of her breasts against his side. His cock stirred, and he decided he did have an interest in moving, so long as the movement ended with him on top of her, inside her. Just as he was getting ready to flip over and cover her, though, she pushed herself onto her side. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see where she was looking.

  At the intricate tattoos on his back. She reached out, brushing the tip of her finger along one of them. “You got a thing for feathers?” she asked softly.

  He grunted.

  Jess slid him a sideways glance. “Is that grunt a way of not answering my question?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on to trace another one. He didn’t have to see his back to know which one. It was the black one, the one that looked as if a raging lunatic had carved it into his flesh.

  That wasn’t too far off. After Cora had died, he had parted ways with sanity. He’d sat in the ashes of Cora’s funeral pyre and used his magick to carve the design into his flesh. Magick and rage didn’t make for steady control, and the tattoo was wicked long and ugly as hell.

  As she traced her finger over one feather, Vax felt the muscles in his back twitch. “Do these stand for anything?”

  He was silent. He didn’t want to answer that question. But he couldn’t keep quiet, either. Finally he said, “You know much about Native culture?”

  “No.” As she answered, she traced the outline of another feather. As her fingers brushed over his side, he twitched a little. “You’re ticklish.”

  “Am not.” But he shifted away from her hand, rolling onto his back. “Nobody knows who my parents were. It’s a possibility that one of my parents was Lakota. I was found in Kansas City at a church when I was a baby. Probably just a couple of weeks old. They turned me over to the orphanage.” Closing his eyes, he remembered. None of his memories from his childhood were clear—he’d long since forgotten most of it. It was probably a good thing. The bits and pieces he did remember were blurs of hunger, pain, and cold.

  “I lived in the orphanage for a while. I ran away a lot. People would bring me back. I don’t know how old I was when I finally managed to get away for good. Lived on the streets. Picked pockets, gambled. Wasn’t very good at the gambling. That started changing when I was a little older, eighteen…maybe nineteen. I started winning. I knew who had the good hands, who didn’t.”

  “Empathy?” Jess asked.

  “Yeah. Came into my gifts late. The Empathy came first. Wasn’t too long before saloons started kicking me out. They were convinced I was somehow cheating.”

  Her hand had stilled on his back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the perplexed look on her face. “Saloon.” She said it slowly, as though she was unfamiliar with the word.

  He gave her a crooked grin. “Yeah, saloon. You know, dancing girls, whiskey, poker.” His smile faded and he reached up, skimming his fingers over the ends of her hair. “I don’t know how old I am, Jess. I was grown when the Hunters found me, talked me into joining them. That was in 1850.”

  Her jaw dropped. She blinked, opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, but never said anything. Her eyes had a vague, startled look to them. When she finally spoke, her voice was weak and thready. “1850?”

  “Yes.” He looked down and stared at the hand she had rested on his chest. He covered it with his as he sat up. “Then I only had a couple of feathers.” With his free hand, he reached over his left shoulder. He could just barely touch the tip of that first feather. He couldn’t see it, but he didn’t have to. “As my Empathy grew stronger, I thought I was going crazy. One night, a woman was raped in the saloon where I was gambling—she was one of the whores, a young girl, just trying to feed her son. Some bastard raped her, practically tore her apart. I didn’t know what was going on—all I could feel was her pain. I could taste her blood. I ran out of the saloon, trying to get away from it. Hid in an alley. God, I thought I was losing my mind. Then he came walking out of the saloon. He had her blood on his hands, and he was smiling.”

  Vax let go of Jess’s hand and lifted his own, staring at them. “I killed him. When he walked by the place where I was hiding, I snapped. I grabbed him by the throat, hauled him into that alley, and killed him. I strangled him and I watched his face while he died. Then I ran.”

  Scrubbing his hands over his face, Vax took a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened after that. I didn’t ever want to see another person again. I think part of me hoped I’d die in the desert.”

  WHEN he opened his eyes, he thought maybe he was dead.

  He’d spent enough time out in the desert with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Had he finally died of thirst?

  “No. You are not dead.”

  The words were stilted, spoken with a halting sort of cadence that Vax was familiar with. He turned his head and wasn’t surprised to see an old Indian man sitting by the fire. Smoke spiraled upward, drifting through the small aperture in the top of the teepee.

  As Vax watched, the Indian reached down beside him and lifted a gourd. “Here. You drink.”

  Vax didn’t take it. “Where am I?”

  Instead of answering, the Indian said something that Vax couldn’t understand. But the words were lyrical, and deep inside, Vax felt something throb in response. The Indian repeated it and stared at Vax, as though waiting for some kind of answer. Then he shook his head, looking a little disgusted. “You talk like a white man. Dress like a white man. You do not even know our tongue.”

  “I a
m not—”

  But he couldn’t say it. Vax was Indian. Or at least half Indian. A half-breed didn’t have a place in either world. But at least when he lived among white people, he understood what they were saying.

  “I can teach this to you.”

  Vax’s heart skipped a beat. Then it started beating twice as fast. “Teach me what?”

  “Our ways. Our words. Your ways. You may have white-man ways and white-man eyes, but you are not white man. You are Lakota. I feel this in you. You feel it, too.” The old Indian pushed the water towards Vax once more. “You drink. You need your strength.”

  No. All he needed was a gun and a bullet. Or a knife. The bullet would be quicker, and he sort of liked the idea of blowing his brains out. That would sure as hell put an end to the weird images he kept getting. Feeling pain for no reason. Anger. Hurt. Fear.

  “A bullet is not the answer.”

  “HE was reading your mind?” Jess asked as Vax fell silent. A psychic shaman. A lover who was almost two hundred years old. A vampire that was playing Dr. Frankenstein. This was all too bizarre for words.

  “Two Stars was a thought senser more than a mind reader. He could pick up weird little bits here and there. It wasn’t a powerful ability. But yeah.”

  “Thought sensing.” Jess sighed. She put her head down, resting it on his chest. She could hear the slow, steady cadence of his heart under her ear. “And a shaman.”

  “More than that,” Vax murmured. His voice sounded achingly sad. “He’s the one who taught me how to control my gift enough to keep it from driving me crazy.”

  “Was he a witch?” Jess murmured. She wished she hadn’t ever asked him anything. Somehow the tatts on his back were related to this shaman. However that was, it was something that made Vax sad. There was no taking back the question now, though.

  “No. Not a witch. He was a shaman. He didn’t truly understand a witch’s magick. But he didn’t need to understand the magick to help me learn to control my Empathy. Empathy makes a person able to experience the emotions of others. Shaman magick was similar, but shamans didn’t feel the emotions of random people. They were connected to their lands, to their tribes.”

  “I didn’t realize there was such a thing as shamanic magick. I thought shamans were more or less just medicine men, or wise men.” She frowned up at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was on the ceiling over their heads, but she didn’t think he was seeing anything but the past. “So were all shamans magick?”

  “Are,” Vax corrected, his tone almost absent. “There are still shamans. They’re usually stuck on reservations damned far from the home of their peoples, but it doesn’t make them any less. All shamans had to be wise men. There’s no job description for being a shaman. They had to have the knowledge of the past, of their people. They had to have the ability to do their duties. But they didn’t have to have the magick. The magick that connected them to the earth is rare.

  “Two Stars was a powerful shaman. He was connected to the earth in ways that still amaze me, after all this time.”

  “You loved him.”

  A sad smile curved Vax’s lips. “He was the closest thing to a father I’ve ever known. He didn’t just save me from dying in the desert—he saved me from going insane. Yeah, I loved him. He was a good man.” His next words came after a long pause. “He shouldn’t have died like that.”

  Jess was almost afraid to ask. She wasn’t much into history. Most of what she knew about Native Americans had come from school. Custer’s Last Stand, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Wounded Knee—a lot of the stories had been whitewashed, she knew. Entire tribes had been wiped out by the invading armies. But as much as she didn’t want to know, she asked anyway. “Died how? Who killed him?”

  Rolling his head on the pillow, Vax stared at her. “Not a who. A what. There was a white family that had settled a few miles outside our hunting grounds. Nice people. The man and his wife respected Two Stars and the tribe. They traded with us. I remember their children came to the village once and played with our children. Then they got sick. The man came to Two Stars, begged for his help. Two Stars went. His kindness killed him—and half of our tribe. Chicken pox.”

  He jackknifed up into a sitting position and practically jumped out of bed, as though he couldn’t stand to be still any more. “That man went to help a couple of kids, and he brought back a disease that killed more than a hundred people. My family. The only family I had ever known. Two Stars took me in and taught me how to control my gifts, but it was more than that. He gave me something I’d never had—a sense of history.” He strode over to the window, staring out the window. “He gave me all of that—and when he lay dying, I couldn’t do anything to ease his suffering.”

  She watched as he reached over his shoulder, touching his fingers to one feather. The tattoo lay just above his left shoulder blade. It was black, with ridged, raised lines—the ridges she had felt on his back during the night. “Two Stars had given me an eagle’s feather—a sign of his affection for me. When the sickness spread through the village, I couldn’t help heal any of them. My Healing gift has always been weak. But I could see the sickness. I saw it on him when he returned to the village that day, but I didn’t realize what it was until it was too late. By then, warriors, women, and children had died. We had to burn everything, or more would die. I had to burn the gifts he gave me, including the feathers.”

  Jess rose from the bed and walked over behind him. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek to his back. She felt another raised line, and she shifted until she could reach up and cover it with her hand. “You did them yourself. The first one for Two Stars.”

  “For the only father I’ve ever known,” he corrected, his voice hollow. “Nineteen children died in the village—because I wasn’t good enough to save them. The blue feathers are for the children. The other ones are for the friends I’ve lost.”

  Jess closed her eyes. Dear God.

  She hadn’t counted them. Some were small; some were big. But there were dozens and dozens, possibly even more than a hundred. One in particular stood out in her mind, though. It lacked the smooth, delicate precision the other tattoos had. It was jerky, almost as if a child had scrawled it into Vax’s flesh with a dull knife. She sought it out by touch, tracing it delicately. “And this one?”

  The question had barely left her mouth when he pulled away. Suddenly remote and cool, he turned around and met her eyes. “That one is for my other failure.”

  And then he grabbed his pants from the floor and left her alone in the room.

  MY other failure.

  That sounded so…polite.

  Failure didn’t quite cover what had happened to Cora. He had failed to protect her. Failed to save her. The only thing he hadn’t failed in had been her death. Oh, he had succeeded in that. He had killed her with his own hands, just like he had killed that man in Kansas City more than a century ago.

  He hadn’t choked the life out of her—no. He’d killed her by shoving a silver knife through her heart. He stood in the bathroom, staring at his reflection. All his strength, all his power—and in the end the only thing he could do for Cora was kill her.

  “We can make it right, Vax. I know we can—you just have to help me.”

  Slowly he lifted his hands and stared at them. They were trembling. They had shaken almost unbearably as he pushed the knife into Cora’s chest. They had shaken so hard, it was a miracle he had been able to do it at all.

  You do not have to do this, Diego had told him repeatedly.

  For a while, Vax had worked with Diego, a shape-shifter. The shifter had been a small, dark man who was deadly in both of his forms. He hadn’t ever talked about his past, but there were rumors that he was descended from the Aztecs. Without even asking, Vax knew that Diego would have dealt with Cora—he would have ended her life swiftly and mercifully.

  Vax hadn’t let him, though. Ending her life would be the cross that Vax would bear for failing her. When Co
ra had disappeared, Vax had almost gone insane. It had taken nearly two weeks to find her, and by that time it was too late. The vampire that had kidnapped her had already Changed her. His taint had settled deep inside Cora, and the sweet, loving woman Vax had married had become feral. Little more than a killing machine.

  Diego had tried to take the knife from Vax. Tried to send Vax away.

  But if she was going to die because of his failure, then she’d die by his hand.

  He could still remember the way she looked, hiding deep inside one of the numerous caves in the area around Carlsbad, in the Territory of New Mexico. There had been a miniscule fire flickering, giving him entirely too much light to see by.

  He could have gone to his grave without seeing Cora like that. He would have gladly gouged his eyes out if it would undo the memory of how he had found her that night.

  Blood had painted her mouth and chin a garish red. She’d fed sometime during the night, and by the looks of it, she’d drained whomever she’d fed from. Her lips were parted just enough for Vax to see the tips of newly emerged fangs.

  She was alone in the cave.

  Vax and Diego had already found the vampire that sired her. The feral had taken Cora from the bed she shared with her husband. He’d come silently one night while Diego and Vax were out Hunting, trailing after a rapist. The vampire had left but a torn nightgown and a few drops of blood and semen on the sheets.

  Vax had hoped she’d survive the Change intact.

  But after being raped by a feral vampire, sired by a feral vampire, Cora hadn’t stood a chance.

  With a hoarse cry, he spun away from the mirror, covering his face with his hands. It didn’t block out the images, though. Didn’t stop the memories from playing through his mind like a movie flashback.

  It had been too much to hope that she wouldn’t wake up.

  As though she sensed his presence, her eyes had opened while he was still standing there, trying to make himself do what had to be done. She had leaped to her feet and rushed towards him, moving with inhuman speed. But she wasn’t looking to hurt him. She had been crying.