Heart of the Hunter

by Alex Foster

  "Good luck, Dakota."

  She took another deep breath. "Hey, if this doesn’t work … thanks for last night … it was nice."

  "More than that it—"

  "Come back to us," Callie finished.

  Dakota gave a nod to Reina; she swung the little door closed. Darkness pressed against her and the temperature inside seemed to increase dramatically. It was her imagination, she knew. Deep breath in and out.

  Calm.

  Dakota closed her eyes and focused inward. She thought about the voice that constantly taunted and plagued her. For so long it was something to avoid, to run away from as fast as she could, but now she needed it front and center.

  Nicholas had used her, all of her fears and doubts, and now she wanted to take that power back.

  "Come on, come on," she mumbled. "Where are you, you little prick?"

  I know what you are doing, he whispered. You can’t fight me. You can’t outthink me because I’m in your head.

  "We are going to change that," she said.

  Nicholas laughed. Exactly who do you think you are, Dakota Clark? Have you forgotten what you are?

  "I’m different now. This is my second chance."

  A pity fuck from a couple of whores and you are a brand new person?

  Power roared in Dakota’s ears. She kept her eyes close but knew red-white electricity crackled over her hands. She fought to keep her breathing even. They care about me. I think they could even love me.

  The voice changed and sounded like her father again. Oh, Dakota, I never even loved you. I couldn’t wait to get rid of you. Why do you think you worked alone?

  Dixon was right. I always knew it was just a matter of time, a matter of waiting for just the right mission.

  Dakota tried to control the voice, to make it change back, but instead of taking a firmer hold on it she felt her grip slip. Behind her eyelid the blackness wavered and she was outside a Circle facility. Stars twinkled overhead. She saw her past self on the ground, the hunters around her body. They made sure she paid the price for betraying Circle trust.

  Her father appeared next to her, bullet holes and dried blood on his shirt. "I'm glad I didn't live to see this. Or your mother. You think I was disappointed in you, at least she was spared seeing what you grew up to become. The worst kind of traitor."

  She tried to close her eyes in the vision but couldn’t stop seeing the memory.

  The Dakota on the ground tried to get away and screamed when the hunters turned their power on her. She winced as an echo of the agony from the scene reached her. Sympathetic scars appeared on her face as she remembered how the magic had cut through her skull.

  The image suddenly changed and she was standing in an office inside that same facility. The one she shared when she was training Callie.

  A ball thudded against the wall next to her head. The rubber stress ball she used to keep in the top drawer. "I played you so hard," Callie said, seated in Dakota's chair with her feet up on the desk. She wore the white suit she'd had on when they went to New York City for the first time. When Dakota began to realize that she was growing too attached to her new trainee.

  "I knew when we went to the city," she said and the ball rebounded off the wall and back to her hand. "When I saw how completely I had convinced you, I knew I would get everything I needed to bring down The Circle. You were such a dupe. You believed I cared."

  "I’m not playing your game," Dakota said.

  Callie threw the ball at her, hard. "Of course you are!" She was on her feet and in her face in a blink. "I’m going to keep you in here, reliving every single horrible moment of your pathetic life. The same way you imprisoned me inside my lifeless body."

  Dakota sneered at Kane. "Pardon me for being a crap shot. I meant to send you to the literal hell. I’ll do better next time." She turned on her heel and moved to walk from the office.

  But it was already gone and she was back outside in the night. The hunters walked past her without seeing her, leaving a burning body behind them.

  Dakota stared at it, watching herself go up in flames. She thought back to those bodies in the motel room. Breath hitched in her throat and bile rose when the smell reached her. She tried to back away but couldn’t move.

  One of the hunters stopped in front of her and brushed hair behind her ear. "This is where you always end up, Dakota. This is where you belong."

  "No." Hot tears threatened to spill out of her eyes but she couldn’t even move to wipe them away. "I didn’t see this — it can’t be a memory. I was already … this isn’t real."

  He met her gaze. "Are you sure? Maybe you were still alive, just enough to feel the flames?"

  "No." She refused to let him implant that memory and struggled for control again. "It didn’t happen that way."

  The outdoor scene was gone and in its place was a living room. Scorch marks marred the walls and ceiling and furniture lay haphazardly around the room. Dakota blinked; didn't know where or when she was. She couldn’t remember anything bad ever happening to her in a place like this.

  Then her past self stepped into the room from a hallway. She was haggard and injured. In her hand was a gun. "Those telepathic hangovers are a bitch," she said, wiping a hand over her forehead.

  Dakota smiled when she placed the memory. "Now we are playing the mind game!" She looked past the overturned sofa and saw the body of Nicholas Kane prone on the ground. Blood had pooled around his head from a neat little hole just over his right temple.

  "This has to be from me," she taunted, "because this was a pretty good moment from the life of Dakota Clark. Pretty sucky one for you."

  Behind her past Dakota followed the path of memory, leaning hard against the wall and calling a Circle clean up team.

  The body on the ground suddenly turned to look at her and blinked. "You can’t hurt me," he said. "Thanks to your whore I’m past this now."

  They shifted again back to the night under the stars. Dakota sighed overdramatically. "You know, you should really try and hold off on the nicknames — it is kind of my thing and I don’t appreciate impersonations."

  Nicholas was still in his original form but with the bullet wound healed now. He looked down at her smoldering remains. "This is pointless, Dakota. I can see all your little plans."

  She tightened her hands into fists and kept her thoughts under control. Not giving in to panic.

  "You think you are going to hold me here, buy time until Dixon can get to you and your whores"—He glanced back—"an hour I believe she said?"

  Dakota refused to let her face give him any sort of answer.

  "I already have the blood, Dakota. I’ll be long gone before your merry band could ever hope to reach me. And then I can play all I want. With anyone I want."

  The hunters appeared again and the scene reversed until they were about to kill her again.

  Nicholas started to walk away, heading back into the darkness. "You won’t be leaving here, Clark. In the outside world your body will sit in that little clubhouse until it rots. And until that happens you’ll be all mine."

  Distantly Dakota heard a bang, like gunfire, but it was lost in the roar of magical fire from the hunters. "And how long will that be?" she asked. "I thought you wanted to torture me for years and years. I’ll die pretty fast where Johnny has a stupid head."

  He stopped and looked at her with a victorious expression. "Time doesn’t move the same way here. It’s like a dream that feels like hours but is really only minutes."

  A rush of confidence filled her. "Or the other way, right? Minutes that are really hours?"

  His gaze darkened.

  "You see, Nicky-boy," she said, "I figured something out. All this time I was thinking about you and me only one way. That I could only take without giving back. And you spent so much time drilling it into my head that I realized you had overlooked it too. Telepathy is a two way street, and while you might be the driver on it nothing says I can't reach over and jerk the wheel from time to time."

>   He was frowning now and she felt his thoughts pushing at her mind. For the first time he seemed to find the tiny corner she’d been masking from him since Doe Eyes called Dixon to tell him the plan.

  Around them the scene shifted and the hunters vanished. It was brighter now and her charred corpse was fully visible. Past Callie appeared and Dakota smiled without looking at her. "I’m over this too. The ‘whore’ that you think helped you is the same one that saved me … and I was the original."

  Callie cried next to Dakota’s body. For a long while she sat there, staring at the remains, before pulling a syringe from her pocket...

  "You have invented this," he said. "This is no memory of yours or mine."

  Dakota shrugged. "I’m crazy. Who knows what sort of concepts of reality and fiction I have. I kind of like this one." She turned and watched as Callie jabbed the syringe into her own arm and drew a vial of healing blood. "Dixon was right, years ago, when he pointed out why my father never gave me a partner. I was always setup for failure. And yesterday his daughter was also right in encouraging me to take one.

  "Having a partner never applied to me — until now. See I’m not alone any longer. I have people that care about me. Don't ask me why, but they do.

  "All this time you’ve been pushing at me, telling me how worthless and alone I am, when really you were talking about yourself. Because that’s what you are, Nick: a mean little man all alone screaming at the top of his lungs hoping someone hears."

  Another bang sounded, closer this time, and Nicholas gasped with the suddenness of it. He glanced down and saw a bullet hole in his chest.

  Dakota watched as her memory self came back to life with Callie holding her. There was no screaming or pain this time. "That blood, by the way, lives outside her body. That’s why it cures others and draws itself back into her wounds when healing. And because it is alive, and part of her, it is trackable by powerful spirit channelers.

  Two them, Callie looks like she is in two places at one time. With me and with you."

  Two more gunshots rang out and Nicholas Kane dropped to his knees before her, a look of shock on his face.

  "Say hi to Dixon for me."

  The fifth bullet hit him between the eyes and the constructed shared memory flew apart into blackness.

  ✽✽✽

  Dixon lowered his gun and stared at the dead man in the raised hospital bed. Several bullets had ruined his chest but the coup de grâce was the hole dead center between his eyes. Blood and brain matter stained his sheets. The monitors beside the bed confirmed what Dixon already knew with a long steady tone.

  Sighing, he holstered his gun and stepped from the room. Nicholas hadn’t opened his eyes or drawn on any of his puppets stationed around the house. Dixon’s job had been laughably simple. He knew that meant that Dakota had fulfilled her side of the plan — she kept him occupied long enough.

  Dixon idly wondered if Katie was following his progress, if she would know the exact moment he left the location she’d given him and understood that meant Nicholas was gone. He knew of her distaste for this sort of thing and hoped she wasn't watching.

  Outside he stopped at one of the bodies of Kane’s drones, a small wiry man. He fished inside the dead man’s pockets and withdrew the vial of Callie’s blood.

  ✽✽✽

  She was aware enough to know she was lying on the ground with the warm sun beating down on her. There was the feel of grass and flowers, the smell of dirt, and it had to be a dream. It wasn’t a memory, at least not one of hers, because she never lounged like that in a park as a child. Never peeled a leaf while watching clouds float overhead. Daddy said things like that weren't important.

  Disinfectant, linoleum flooring and fluorescent lighting were the things she associated with her youth.

  Wetness touched her lips, splashing against her face. Rain? That wasn’t good. She hated rain, the way it hurt her skin when she made her pretty sparks. No, not rain. She could taste salt.

  Someone was calling her, begging her to come back to them. Them. She had people waiting for her — she remembered that now.

  Dakota opened her eyes and saw a beautiful woman looking down at her. Sunlight caught blonde hair and Dakota reached to touch it. "Hey, Calkitten."

  "Oh God."

  Callie pulled her into a sitting position and hugged her tight. A second set of arms locked around them both. "We thought you were brain dead," Reina said over Callie’s shoulder. "Do you have any idea how long you were out?"

  The fog was beginning to clear from Dakota’s thoughts. She tugged her arms free and stretched awkwardly. Her entire body felt stiff and sore. "Long enough, apparently."

  Callie pulled back first. "So he’s really gone? Nicholas is dead?"

  "Yeah. And this time it will take."

  "You’re sure, right?" Reina asked. "He’s not, you know, hiding in a diary or something?"

  Dakota shook her head. "I’m sure. No crappy sequel for him. Help me up."

  The world tilted dangerously under her feet and Dakota took advantage of a girlfriend on either side to remain upright. "Dixon?" she asked.

  "On his way," Callie said. "For real this time."

  "We should keep moving. Get out of the open."

  "Ezekiel will help with any questions or cover ups," Dakota said, moving forward. "He is the hotshot mage for rewriting police reports and making evidence go away."

  Reina made a face. "After these past few days, he’s going to love us."

  The three women began walking deeper into the park, leaning on each other the whole way.

  Epilogue

  Summer in Baltimore was in full force. Hot and uncomfortable with only brief touches of relief coming from the ocean breeze. People milled about in the afternoon heat, mages and normals, as they went about daily routines.

  Dakota Clark watched one mage in particular from across the street as he sat in an outdoor café. It had taken Miles Addison a long time to return to the city. After her breakdown in Penn Station he had vanished from the grid entirely and she had been sure he was gone for good.

  But the world was full of surprises and one day he surfaced and Ezekiel spotted him and let Dakota know. The archmage understood unfinished business and the importance of owing favors.

  Dakota tucked her sunglasses in the neck of her white t-shirt and started for the café. In her hand was one of the things she'd salvaged from her ruined car several months ago.

  Miles didn’t notice her until it was too late and she was already in the seat across from him. Her hand clamped down on his sleeve and kept him from bolting. The threat she had made about what her ability could do, and how fast, was obviously still good in his mind.

  "What do you want?"

  Dakota tossed the file folder on the table. "This is from The Circle," she said.

  Cautiously, he lifted the cover.

  "It’s your file," she said. "A complete and detailed record of your abduction, tests, and results. If you have any questions about your people and where you come from, or holes in your memory, this should help."

  "I don’t understand."

  Dakota let him go and stood. "It’s yours. Free and clear."

  "I…" Miles began flipping through the file. "...Thank you."

  "Spread the word among your little group. If they need help, I’ll do what I can for them." Dakota began walking away.

  "So," he called, "are you just going to keep showing up out of the blue like this?"

  "Nope." Dakota slipped her sunglasses back on. She was on her way back to Georgetown. "I’m going home."

  End

 

 

 
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