by White, Gwynn
Anyone with any sense would take one look at me and make a wide berth. Hell, if I saw me out on these streets this close to midnight, I’d turn around and head straight the other direction.
Whoever this is, though, is trying to match their steps to mine to cover the noise. I pick them up on the echo, just a tiny bit off. My pursuer doesn’t have a tag-along charm, or I might have missed the ricochet of the sound off the buildings rising up around us.
Dammit.
I don’t have time for shit like this.
I never have time for shit like this.
Somehow it always seems to find me, though.
The problem with being followed at night in Blood Heights is that the sort of person who would ignore the obvious signals broadcasting “I’m dangerous” to the regular Heights denizens is one of three things: 1. desperate; 2. crazy. 3. really, really scary.
I suppose “carrying a death wish” is a possible number four on that list, but those types can be taken down easily enough, so they don’t worry me. Numbers one through three, though? They can do some real damage before they go down.
So I skip a step, hopping over a pile of broken glass to catch the syncopated beat of my would-be hunter’s stumble, then let the footsteps match mine again.
I know how far back he is now. And with that information, I can stretch my senses out just a little, catch the flavor of his intent.
He thinks he’s a hunter.
My nostrils flare and I flash a sharp grin at the thought.
Johnny’s expecting me tonight, as usual half-hoping I won’t show up to pay on the debt I owe. Some night I won’t—and when that happens, the self-proclaimed King of the Heights will put a bounty out on me.
Tonight, though, I’ll be there.
After I take care of the wannabe hunter who’s on my tail.
I don’t have time for this.
But I’ll make time.
I take a quick right into a nearby alley. It’s got better lighting than a lot of them, sharp shadows striking the walls on either side, but like most of the Heights, the character of the passageway changes quickly. I move from the well lit portion into a slightly darker section. The shadows here seem to crawl, lingering against the ground for a while before sliding up the sides of the buildings.
Right where the alleyway narrows, a single dim bulb flickers in a cage-like light fixture over the back entrance to some shop, casting its weak light in a circle. The light probably means something—that the owner is in, or out, or available for sex or blood or magic—but I don’t know this part of the Heights very well, and I can’t decipher its message.
What I do know is that when I pass by the door, the light will illuminate me to anyone around.
I can’t have that.
Although I topped off my reservoirs before I left my one-room apartment, I don’t want to use what I’ve got stored before I get to Johnny’s. No telling what he’ll ask for tonight.
Best be prepared.
Something new, then.
I bite down on the inside of my bottom lip, hard enough to pierce the skin with my tooth. Magic requires a sacrifice, and for this magic, a very little blood will do. Only a tiny thrust of will, fed by blood and powered by magic, serves to pop the bulb, creating a pool of black. I slide into that darkness and pull a see-me-not out of my jacket pocket. The copper taste in my mouth tells me I still have enough blood to activate it, so I slip the metal disk into my mouth.
The charm fizzles against my tongue when it goes live, letting me know it’s working.
The fizzle isn’t necessary, but it’s a good indicator that the spell is working, and I’m glad I decided to spring for the extra.
Now I wait, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
The erstwhile hunter slides into view, a darker form among the shadows in the alleyway.
He moves well enough for a novice, but it’s clear to me that he’s never tailed anyone in the Heights before. He doesn’t know how to use the darkness to his advantage, and even now that he’s lost the sound of my footsteps, he hasn’t stopped to reconnoiter.
The see-me-not is short-lived—I can already feel its tingle starting to fade—but I’m fairly sure I’ve got time for one more glance inside him before the charm stops working and he becomes that much more likely to see me.
I breathe in, focusing my own desire to know his intent into a pinpoint laser-beam designed to slice through to the truth, rather than the broad net I cast earlier to get a general sense of him.
He’s blundering on, convinced that I’ve gotten ahead of him, too far away to hear or be heard by him.
The sense of himself as a hunter does not go deep.
In fact, this time I can taste the edge of dread on it, so I probe just a little deeper, cutting away all the extraneous hopes and drilling down to the fear.
Sheer terror.
This is one of the desperate ones.
I can use that.
Tensing the muscles in my hands, I roll my fingers closed. With an audible snick, my weapons pop from between my knuckles—four curved, sharpened blades on each hand.
When I went to the shaman-doctor for a weapons outfit, I specifically requested them. I saw them in an old movie, though the man who had the bladed hands in the film worked hard to stay human, to avoid becoming a monster.
That’s where we’re different.
I don’t care if I’m monstrous.
And I’m pretty sure I’m no longer human.
For just an instant, I wish I had on better shoes, something lighter that would give me the advantage of speed. But I chose these for their durability—and their metal toes. I don’t have knives in my feet, but a good hard kick with these boots will sometimes leave an opponent gasping on the ground.
So I do the best I can to roll forward onto the balls of my feet and allow my hands to float lightly at my sides, blades at the ready.
The guy sees me when he steps into the darkness left by the broken light bulb. Just my luck, the charm fizzes out at that instant. But suddenly popping into sight works to my advantage, too. My opponent freezes for a heartbeat when he sees me, and that’s all the time I need.
My training takes over, honed almost to instinct. In seconds, I’m in under his defenses and my blades are crossed at his throat. With one swift motion, I could almost take his head off, simply by uncrossing my wrists and returning my arms to my side.
Something stops me, though.
I still have my probe sunk deep into his mind, and the scent of his fear … isn’t right.
My blades are so perfectly placed that when he swallows, the motion of his throat causes a tiny rivulet of blood to run down his neck. I have to hold myself back from leaning forward to catch it.
Every drop counts, every bit can go toward paying Johnny, but there will be more than enough to catch later. For now, I simply watch his eyes, waiting for him to come to the conclusion that there really is no way out.
Instead, he speaks in a hoarse voice. “Irina Petrov?”
That’s when my reading of him finally pushes deep enough to see the whole picture—not like mind-reading, but a snapshot of his intent.
He sees himself as a hunter, yes, but not like I am a hunter. He is not a predator. Not a killer. He was hunting me down to talk to me. To make some sort of proposal. The desperation I felt was very real. The source of it, though, feels familiar.
Too familiar.
“What do you want?” I ask, letting my knives nick him just enough to remind him how precarious his situation actually is.
“I want to help you.” His eyes are a startling green, bright against his brown skin. His face sports about three days’ worth of stubble, and this close up, I can tell that although he might not have any tag-alongs, he’s fairly popping with a variety of other charms.
He is better prepared for the Heights than I expected.
“I don’t need any help.” If I were smart, I would cut his throat, take any un-activated charms, and drain him of
all possible power. Then I could pay Johnny and have reserves to spare.
Or pay Johnny more, maybe.
Instead, I flex my fingers and draw the blades back in, simultaneously taking a step backwards.
“I’ll let you live this time,” I say in my harshest voice. “Next time, I won’t.”
Instead of doing the smart thing and hauling ass back down the alleyway and off to wherever in this godforsaken city he spends his days, the man with the pretty eyes follows me, matching me step for step.
“I think you do need my help,” he says. “Because I know where Johnny DeMarco is keeping your sister.”
He pauses, watching for my reaction.
But I’ve been working on schooling my expression to utter blankness for what feels like an eternity. In reality, it’s less than a year since Johnny came to me with his demands and dragged me down into his nightmare city.
Despite my lack of expression, though, my heart leaps in my chest at Pretty Eyes’ next words.
“I can help you save Tatiana.”
8
I woke drenched in sweat and terror.
I wasn’t sure either was my own—no more than the visions that came to me in the dreams.
At least today I could take another shower to wash it away. The physical residue, anyway.
Light still shone in through the windows when we headed down to the basement and into the tunnels.
Once we’d shut the basement door behind us, Rafe’s flashlight illuminated only the next few feet of our path. I shivered in the cool, slightly damp air.
“How has this tunnel never been discovered by anyone else?” I asked Rafe, my voice echoing a little. I more felt than saw his shrug in the darkness beside me.
“Oh, it has. Plenty of people use it to get in and out of Brochan City. But we’re all motivated to limit the number of people who know its location.”
“Motivated?” Coit asked, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
“We don’t want the slavers finding it.”
My shiver now came from more than the air, and even Coit’s response was subdued.
Slavers. Pretty much the worst of the Rift scavengers, they made a living out of capturing the poor lost souls who fell through the Rift and landed in Brochan City—or elsewhere, though Brochan was the most likely place for people to end up. Sometimes the slavers put on a good show, pretending to be there to help. The Rift refugees, disoriented and frightened, then went with the slavers willingly.
Those who didn’t come easily were captured and tortured into submission.
Mostly, the men were taken and sold to provide labor.
Those were the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones—those caught by the least scrupulous of the slavers or those who were too recalcitrant or disobedient or ill-prepared for hard labor were sold off for other reasons. Some went to blood cults to become human sacrifices to the Rift.
Some were placed in arenas and expected to battle monsters much stronger than they.
The women and children were auctioned off at a higher price. I shuddered to think what happened to them afterwards.
There were monsters of all kinds on Tehar.
We walked silently for a long time, cutting under land that might have been impassable on the surface—or, at the very least, full of the kinds of monsters who had teeth and claws and would devour you in one sitting.
Glancing over at the barely visible profile of our guide, I was reminded that not all monsters were entirely monstrous, either.
After a while, he said, “This next stretch is straight for a good long while. I’m going to turn off the flashlight for a while to save the batteries. They’re hard to come by around here.”
“No Walmart,” Coit said, and the two men snickered.
Whatever that meant.
When Rafe clicked off the light, the darkness surrounding us was complete in a way I’d never experienced before.
If not for the sounds of my companions’ footsteps and their breathing, I might have been convinced I was the only person in the tunnel.
Maybe the only person in the world.
Rafe turned on the flashlight for a brief time every half-hour or so and I found myself beginning to look forward to those moments, holding on to them like a lifeline.
We stopped briefly several hours in to consume a light meal Rafe had provided—more of the dried, salted meat, and small, hard biscuits. He had also refilled our canteens at some point.
“How much farther is it to the city?” Coit asked, having finally woken up enough to do more than grunt unintelligibly. Coit was not a morning person, even when morning happened at night.
“We’ll camp in the tunnels around dawn. Depending on what kind of time we make, we might hit the entrance after one more night of hiking. Or we might bunk down in here once more.”
“How likely are we to run into any of the other people who use the tunnel?” I asked.
Rafe shrugged. “Really, it depends on how active the Rift has been. It’s been really quiet lately, which might mean nothing—or it might mean there’s about to be a sudden eruption of some sort. Hard to tell with the Rift.”
Hard to tell with the Rift.
That ought to be a motto of some sort.
About two hours after our meal, we began passing detours—places in the tunnel that branched away from the main path.
“Most of those lead off to other entrances,” Rafe said when he observed me peering down into the blackness of one.
“Have you explored them all?” I asked.
“Most of them. Some are locked the other end with locks that I can’t pick. Others lead out into completely decimated towns or villages. And some of them are blocked in by tunnel collapses and cave-ins.”
It was in one of the latter of these that we camped. Rafe led us down one of the side tunnels until we came to the point where it had been blocked in by fallen rocks.
“How do you know the rest of it won’t come down on us?” Coit asked.
“I don’t, not really. But it seems sturdy enough, and I think some of the damage here was done by tools, not nature.” He pointed with a flashlight at some of the rocks, which did, indeed, seem to have tool marks on them.
“You think this tunnel was filled in intentionally?” I asked.
“That’s the story I tell myself to make me feel better about sleeping here, anyway.” Rafe’s lupine smile gleamed out at me from the darkness, and I had to grin back.
“I don’t see what’s so comforting about that,” Coit said, shaking his head and he spread his bedroll out and dropped his pack down on it to use as a pillow. “Somebody scared enough to fill in their escape route? Sounds like trouble to me.”
“And why we’ll rotate a watch.” I glanced at Rafe. “You want to take first shift, or should I?”
“I will.” Even if I hadn’t been looking at him in the reflected light, I would have heard the eye-roll in his voice, presumably at the idea of keeping a watch on the route he’d been following for a long time without incident.
Still, once Coit and I were settled, he went without complaints, his footsteps fading away down toward the main tunnel.
Once he was out of earshot, Coit’s voice came to me out of the darkness. “Hey Larkin? How many of them terrible beers did you have at the werewolf bar the other night?”
“Just enough to keep the locals talking while I tried to find a guide. Less than one. Why?”
“Because I’m just laying here trying to figure out which one of us was drunk when we agreed to follow this guy. Usually, I’d assume it was me. But not this time. We ain’t never so much as walked a mile with anybody without you grilling them about who they are and where they came from and what they’re doing and why they’re talking to us. But this guy? You just take his hand and off we go.”
I sat in the dark, staring into the blackness before me, trying to figure out how to answer Coit’s question. He wasn’t wrong. I had accepted Rafe’s offer without much thought.
“Well, we didn’t have the werewolves after us before,” I offered lamely.
“I don’t buy it. We’ve been in tight spots before without accepting help from strangers. What’s different about this guy?”
I considered trying to explain to Coit the attraction—not just physical, either—that I’ve felt toward Rafe since the beginning, almost since the moment I set eyes on him. It would come out sounding crazed, and it was last thing I needed Coit to think about our new guide.
“You were the one who got off your horse first,” I pointed out.
“Maybe so, but as we just established, I was also the one who’d had too much to drink. You could have stopped me.”
“It’s a little late now to be bringing up objections.”
“I’m not objecting. Not exactly. Just wondering why this one?”
There was another long silence while I tried to come up with an explanation that might satisfy him.
In the end, though, he spoke again before I did. “Come to think of it, now I’m wondering why we were in a werewolf bar in the first place. You’ve been doing everything you can to avoid any of the monsters that might be snooping around, anything that might hurt us, and then all of a sudden there you are, all ready to go out to the monsters’ night club.”
My lips twisted. “That was my idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am, it sure was.”
I thought back to that moment, less than thirty-six hours ago, when I had suddenly decided that we had to have someone to show us the way into the city. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like anything other than instinct, intuition, a moment of inspiration. We had heard of the werewolf bar several towns back and had initially planned to avoid it. But then, as we rode up to the town, it popped into my mind that the werewolf bar might be a good place to find someone who went in and out of the city without repercussions.
In retrospect, that intuition felt like it might have been connected to the power I had felt running through me when I saw and touched Rafe.
“I don’t have any answers for that yet,” I said to Coit. “I think I’ll need to consider it a bit longer. Maybe re-create, or at least reconsider, what I was thinking at that point.”