The Hunter

by T R Kohler

  Of that, Ember had no doubt, though she had zero interest in sitting and hashing them out.

  Not now, and definitely not with him.

  “Yeah, well, I’m new, remember?”

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Given the time of night and where they were, Ember knew that the air outside should be cold. Or at least cooler than the infernal temperature inside her room at the motel.

  With no worry about another guest - the parking lot as empty as when she’d woken up there a day before – the windows were up and the door left open, though still she could feel no reprieve on her skin.

  Even now, after all they’d been through, Hell couldn’t give them that one tiny favor.

  Standing on the threshold of the room, her arms were folded over her torso, her good arm leaning against the frame of the door. A few feet away, seated in the sole chair the room had, was John Lee Tam.

  Pulled up tight to the bed, his heels were propped on the edge of it, his tattered shirt stripped away, his torso bare. What he might have looked like at any point in the last century was now largely hidden from view, replaced by something that looked like an extra from a bad horror movie.

  Wide strips of skin stood out pink and gnarled, glistening beneath a heavy layer of salve. Faint streaks of blood remained in errant places, the prospect of a shower still too difficult given his condition.

  For all that, he looked much better than Kaia lying a few feet away, her form sprawled from corner to corner across the bed. Stripped free of the crop top she’d been wearing, she was adorned by only her jeans and a black lace bra, the open wound on her chest hidden beneath a fresh bandage.

  Staring listlessly at the ceiling, she’d barely said a word since they teleported back, her gaze vacant, blond hair splayed out around her head in a wide arc.

  The closest Ember could imagine to her ever donning a halo.

  Serving as the centerpiece for the room was the small end table that usually housed the alarm clock. Dragged into the middle of the small space by Ember a moment before, perched atop it was Kaia’s bedazzled phone, the face plate lit up, timer ticking off the seconds.

  Over the line was the sound of ringing, the tone harsh and intrusive inside the quiet of the room.

  Barely anything had been said between the odd trio since returning. Working in tandem, Ember and Tam had managed to get Kaia into position before each taking their own turn in the bathroom, cleaning up what they could, putting off what was about to occur.

  Throughout, Ember had tried to imagine exactly what she would say, the right words still evading her as the call was snatched up in the middle of the fourth ring.

  “Tell me you have the Seeing Eye,” Typhon said, cutting straight to business.

  Opening his eyes to nothing more than slits, Tam flicked a look to Kaia before casting a glance over to Ember. Nodding slightly, he ceded her the floor, content to let her be the mouthpiece for the crew.

  Whether or not that was a good thing, she hadn’t yet decided.

  “No,” she answered.

  “No?” Typhon exclaimed, his voice rising. “Tell me-”

  “They don’t either,” Ember added, cutting him off before he could get out the rest of the question. “It was destroyed during the fight.”

  Across from her, Tam’s eyes opened a touch wider, though he remained silent.

  How much of her interaction with Jonas he had seen, Ember couldn’t be certain. Nor could she base what she was about to say on the fear that he might contradict her in any way.

  The simple truth was, she had been cast into deep water, untrained and ill prepared for such a situation. She had been given explicit orders, and she had carried them out as she saw best.

  If Typhon – or anybody else – had a problem with that, that was on them.

  “Fight?” Typhon said, his voice rising again, before he paused. Letting out a long sigh, he pulled up short, allowing silence to fall for a moment, before simply saying, “Tell me everything that happened since we last spoke.”

  Offering a matching sigh, Ember cast a glance over her shoulder, ensuring they were still alone, before doing as instructed. Starting with her teleportation into New Mexico, she told of the encounter with Micah, of squaring off with Jonas.

  Omitting only the part about destroying the mirror, she filled that part of the narrative with a back-and-forth tussle between the two of them, one that ultimately saw the end of the artifact that had put all this into motion.

  From there, she sprinted through the remaining portion of the tale, describing how she grabbed the other two and brought them back. How they were all now present and accounted for, in dire need of rest and replenishment, but otherwise able to see the dawn when it arrived in just a few short hours.

  When she was finished, she felt as if she was out of breath, panting slightly as she stood waiting for his response. Had she the energy – or the inclination – she might even find herself cringing, wondering what he might say in response.

  Now, she just wanted it to be over. She wanted to curl into the sandpaper sheets on the bed and wake in a pool of sweat to find that her misshapen face was at least close to its original state and that her arm no longer felt like it might rip into two pieces at any moment.

  “The Sword of the Spirit,” Typhon asked, his voice almost quiet, “where is it now?”

  Feeling her eyebrows rise, not expecting him to have started there, Ember replied, “Last I saw, it was somewhere in the Cimarron River with Micah taking a swan dive off a fifty-foot cliff to retrieve it.”

  If she didn’t know better, she thought she might have heard a smirk, a single sharp sound echoing over the line.

  “And Jonas?”

  “Still standing on one leg out behind the barn they called a safe house,” Ember replied.

  Taking another moment, Typhon seemed to consider the information, processing it, putting it all into place carefully.

  “And you’re absolutely certain-”

  “I even kept a few of the shards,” Ember replied, cutting him off a second time, “to make sure they couldn’t somehow put it back together. Trust me, that thing is toast.”

  For the second time in as many minutes, silence fell. Ember stared at the faceplate of the phone, imagining the man she had met in the snow a few nights before, no doubt dressed in all black, his every hair gelled into place.

  A memory that would forever make her stomach turn, the associated images and recollections much too strong to ever think otherwise.

  “John? You good?” Typhon eventually asked.

  Tam’s eyes remained barely cracked open as he rolled his head along the chair back, glancing to the phone. “I could use a couple of days to recover, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  It probably wasn’t, but Ember couldn’t help but allow the corner of her mouth to flicker upward at him taking the opportunity when it presented itself.

  “Kaia?” Typhon asked, moving right past the statement.

  “Same,” she rasped, not even making the effort to look toward the phone.

  A long sigh was the immediate response. For a moment, Ember thought he was about to lash into them all, admonishing them for whatever he felt they had done wrong, before he stated simply, “Three days. All of you. Get off your feet and get healthy. We’ve got a shitload of work to do.”

  The twin sounds of doors slamming echoed across the parking lot as Ember and Kaia stepped out of the sedan, a nondescript Toyota that was dark green in color. They had parked in the rear of the small concrete pad. Just one of a handful, nobody so much as glanced their way as they passed over the damp asphalt, crossing diagonally over the yellow lines.

  Weaving through a pair of mid-sized SUVs, they came out on the edge of an oversized city park, the place stretched to more than ten acres in total. Elongated in an oval shape, a walking path enclosed it, a pre-fab playground serving as the centerpiece of the spread.

  Interspersed every twenty feet or so were majestic oak or pine trees, t
he sorts that looked to be decades old, their trunks thick.

  “I thought Typhon gave us three days?” Ember said. She left the question there, pausing for a moment to allow a pair of mothers pushing strollers to pass along the walking path before following Kaia to the bench sitting just inside the track.

  “He did,” Kaia replied, sliding onto one end of the bench and leaning back.

  It had been two days since they’d returned from New Mexico, almost all of it spent at the motel in the desert. For the first thirty-six hours, Ember had been left completely to her own devices, most of it spent sleeping, interspersed only with a couple of runs for food and water.

  As best she could tell, she was allowed peanut butter sandwiches, but jelly was a bridge too far.

  Same for plain black tea, though Gatorade burned almost as badly as the alcohol Rocco had given her days before.

  Where the lines were on such things, she still wasn’t quite sure, figuring only that it would likely continue to be a trial-and-error thing for the foreseeable future.

  Buoyed by the food and rest, her body had responded well. From what she could discern, the healing process was accelerated greatly in the afterlife, most of the bruising on her face already receded to shades of pale green and yellow.

  Another day or two and it would clear up completely, a welcome change, even though she was the only one that could see it.

  As for the cut on her arm, it had a little further to go, though at least it didn’t ache perpetually, the scab no longer tugging each time she moved.

  Less than a foot away, Kaia’s recovery was more difficult to discern. Both of her wounds were now hidden beneath a sweater and a jacket, both of them dressed in a similar manner to blend in with their new surroundings.

  A time or two, Ember had heard her grunt as she moved, though she hadn’t uttered a single complaint yet.

  Taking a seat on the opposite side of the bench, Ember could feel the moisture clinging to the rubber coating on the metal seat pass through the seat of her jeans. A harsh contrast to their previous stop, this place seemed to be the anti-San Diego.

  Damp and lush, everything was painted in hues of dark green, the color almost vibrant.

  “Thanks for bringing me food the last couple of days,” Kaia said. With her gaze aimed out over the park, she made no effort to look over.

  Feeling her lips part slightly, Ember made herself do the same. “You’re welcome.”

  On the opposite side of the park, a young man in a rain jacket and bare feet jogged through a pair of pine trees, a golden retriever by his side. Taking a handful of exaggerated strides, he bounced forward, using a plastic extension to fling a tennis ball far across the open lawn.

  On command, the dog let out a single joyous cry before bounding after it, hair streaming to either side, tongue lolling between teeth spread wide.

  A classic scene of a man and his dog, so common it could be seen at a thousand parks just like this one all over the country.

  “Thirty-five years ago,” Kaia said, “I was in a position much like yours. My partner was down, and I found myself squaring off against Jonas.”

  Her tone was low as she spoke, her head rigid as she stared straight ahead.

  “I messed up,” she continued, “made the wrong choice. I valued some trinket over a colleague, and...well...”

  She let her voice trail off there, not making any effort to continue.

  Nor would she, Ember surmised, the general message having been received.

  Nudging herself forward a couple of inches, Kaia slid her hands into her pockets. The down jacket she wore made a slight noise as she rolled her shoulders toward her ears, glancing only a single time to Ember.

  “Anyway,” she said, “welcome to the team. You’re going to make a great Hunter.”

  Not sure how to respond, or even if she should, Ember said nothing. She met Kaia’s gaze, offering only a nod, before a flash of movement caught her attention, pulling her focus to the side.

  Beginning as nothing more than a blaze of blond hair, the source of it soon came into focus, running with abandon across the grassy sprawl, headed for the cluster of playground equipment in the middle of the park.

  Recognizing the run, the hair, even the jacket the small figure was wearing in an instant, Ember felt a ripple pass through her stomach. A weight settled over her chest as moisture rose to her eyes, a hand going to her throat.

  “Kaia,” she whispered, “where are we?”

  Beside her, Kaia pressed her chin into her shoulder, her eyes tracing over Ember’s face, taking it all in.

  “I know why you’re here,” she replied. “Typhon told me yesterday. Most of the assholes we get want to be rich or famous or immortal, but it’s not too often we get someone who willingly signs on for this to save another.”

  Turning her head back toward the playground, Ember vaguely registered the twirl of platinum hair in her periphery, her true focus on Emory.

  It seemed almost impossible he could now be just fifty yards away, that only four days had passed since she last saw him, it feeling like so much longer.

  “He’s a good-looking boy,” Kaia said.

  Moisture collected along the underside of Ember’s eyes as she stared at her son. Making no effort to wipe it away, she felt it slide down either cheek, following her jawline before dripping from her chin.

  “Does he...?” she asked.

  “Not a thing,” Kaia said. “The next morning, he woke up in his own bed, was told you were in an accident on the way to come see him.”

  It wasn’t the best cover story, but all things considered, there was a lot worse they could have done.

  At least this way, he knew her last act on Earth was attempting to be there for him.

  Unable to speak, she merely nodded, watching as he hopped into a swing and began to push himself higher, performing a move she’d seen him do a thousand times before.

  “Take all the time you want,” Kaia said, pushing herself to a standing position. Reaching out, she placed a hand on Ember’s shoulder before turning and heading for the parking lot without another word.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek of my standalone thriller written under Dustin Stevens, Ham!

  Sneak Peek

  HAM by Dustin Stevens

  Prologue

  The ground absorbs any sound made by my footfalls. Walking heel-to-toe, I make sure each foot is placed down carefully, the thick bed of pine needles insulating the earth and masking my movements.

  Moving in a serpentine pattern, I trace a path through the thin underbrush of the forest, this place one of the few in the world I have ever called home.

  And right now, this man is here violating that. Not just with his mere presence but with everything he represents. Everybody he is associated with, every intention he has in mind.

  With every thought, every realization, every moment, I am in his presence I can sense my animosity growing higher. I can feel as it raises my pulse, increases my body temperature, even tightens the grip on the rock in my hand.

  To shoot this man would be easiest. To simply sight in on the back of his skull and ease back the trigger, knowing from this distance there is no possible way I can miss.

  But the easiest path right now won’t necessarily be the easiest moving forward.

  And it would damned sure be far, far kinder than this man deserves.

  Chapter One

  The last sliver of orange has just slid beneath the western horizon as the ring announcer steps through the ropes. It sends a thousand shards of shimmering light across the surface of the Pacific Ocean with its last gasps, the sudden absence plunging the world into a state of exaggerated darkness.

  And just as they always do, the strands of bare bulbs strung high above the ring kick on a moment later, casting a straw-colored pallor over everything below.

  The aging ring is built on pressure-treated 4x4’s buried directly into the sand, spots of blood and assorted detritus dotting the canvas mat. The twin
aluminum risers are on either end, both loaded with drunken revelers, their skins painted shades ranging from tomato red to dark tan. Beers in both hands, tobacco juice or sunflower seeds hang from their lips and the assorted forms of facial hair stuck to their chins.

  Per usual, the overwhelming majority of onlookers are men, the few women that are mixed in serving clearly as accompaniment, still dressed in bikini tops from the day or already in leather anticipating the night ahead.

  No in-between.

  On the east and west ends of the ring are tons of wooden folding chairs, what were once even rows already a twisted jumble. Housing most of the regulars, they’re grouped into random clusters, seats turned so they can see some combination of the sunset, the ring, or each other.

  Considering that every last one of them had to pay to get in, I’m not sure anybody rightly gives a damn what they look at.

  Least of all, me.

  Despite the open-air venue, the recent sunset, the faint breeze pushing in from the sea, there is a palpable charge in the air. That familiar buzz that I’ve known for decades now, the unshakable feeling that seems to reach deep inside, igniting the parts of me I spend most of the week keeping tamped down.

  For the last hour, the crowd has sat and watched the undercard for the night. Beginning with less than half of what is now on hand, the combination of buckets of beer and the cheap cover charge has managed to pull in enough to fill the bleachers, easily the largest crowd we’ve drawn in a while.

  It also doesn’t hurt that the first several bouts turned into little more than backyard brawls. Bloody affairs with over-muscled men that had once been high school athletes and can’t let it go, so they come out here to the sand every weekend. Smaller guys that work the fields nearby, carrying resentment for damn near everything in their lives, entering the ring with something to prove.