Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  I thought maybe I’d try to call Josh—not that we were going to be able to meet up or anything, but a nice long call when we were just able to chat about nothing without cameras around would be fun. That was all that was on my mind as I made my way through hallways that actually had people in them for a change.

  Well, my day got decided for me as it turned out; when I got back to my room, my vid-screen was flashing with a Report to armory on it. “Acknowledged,” I said. It went out and I turned right back around, wondering what Kent wanted with me in the middle of a storm.

  BY THIS TIME, I had figured out that Armorer Kent was the unofficial leader of the Elite. Everyone deferred to him, and although Dispatch in HQ sent the Elite out, he was certainly the one in charge of assigning Hunters who weren’t Elite to their patrols. And he decided who trained, with whom, and with what. He also chewed us out when we messed up. I was pretty sure I’d done well yesterday, so I was not expecting any kind of rebuke. More like bracing for a very challenging workout or some other sort of session with him.

  When I arrived at the armory and opened the door, Kent was waiting for me, wearing his usual asymmetric scarlet-and-yellow Hunt gear. He was the brightest thing in the room, which was filled with every sort of instrument of mayhem I could imagine, and a lot I had no notion how to use. He quirked a finger at me, silently telling me to follow him. Now I was really puzzled, and did so. He led me to his little office, opened the door, and waved me inside, closing the door behind me, with himself outside.

  Kent’s office was as Spartan as his signature gear was flamboyant: brown carpet, brownish-gray walls, with a couple of beautiful landscape pictures that were clearly taken before the Diseray. There was someone sitting in the high-backed leather chair behind Kent’s utilitarian gray metal desk, with the back of the chair facing me. That person spun the chair around as I entered, and—

  —it was my uncle! He was in his prefect uniform, which meant he considered himself on duty, regardless of the storm; I’ve seen him in ordinary civilian clothing, but not often. As always, I was glad to see him. As always, I was very happy to see no hint of being worn down by the threat that I now knew hung over him. Still as erect, fit, and calm as ever. He might be going bald and getting gray, but that’s the only sign of age on him.

  He chuckled at the dumbfounded look on my face. “How did you get here?” I blurted.

  “Armored pod,” he replied, waving at a chair. I plopped down into it. “I was going to talk to you soon anyway, but with this storm”—he waved his hand at the ceiling—“nothing is going on; at least, nothing that the police and rescue services can’t handle without me, and Kent’s office is more secure than mine.”

  I didn’t have to ask him what he meant by that. Uncle might be the prefect of police and, on top of that, in charge of all the Hunters that aren’t in the army, but he had political enemies, and one of them was probably behind the attempt to murder me. “What can I do for you, Uncle?” I asked immediately.

  “I’ve discussed this with Kent,” he said, leaning forward, which made me lean forward too. “I want someone absolutely trustworthy to run the patrols in the storm sewers under the Hub…the City Center. It’s getting too dangerous for my police units.”

  I nodded. This was something the Cits couldn’t ever know, or it would send them into a panic. Nasty, dangerous Othersiders are getting in past the Barriers, and it’s getting worse. If the Cits knew that what they thought were special effects to sex up the Hunts were in fact real, the city might shut down. People would be afraid to go to their jobs, afraid to walk on the streets. They’d know what we Hunters know and what some of the police and Psimons know: that they are not safe, and that only the Hunters’ vigilance keeps the horrors off their throats.

  What Uncle had just told me confirmed what I had suspected. The police couldn’t handle what was penetrating into the very heart of the city anymore. That was also probably why he elected to come here to talk with me about it and not risk that his enemies would discover this and use it against him.

  “Kent thinks you can do it solo because of the size of your pack,” Uncle continued. “The sewers aren’t big enough to send down more than a pair of Hunters at a time, at any event.”

  I thought about that. “I’ve got a pack big enough for three,” I admitted. “If Armorer Kent thinks I can do this, then, yes, Uncle, I will.”

  There was more than a touch of relief in Uncle’s expression. And then he leaned over the desk to speak very softly. “I can’t go into details, Joy, but there’s something very wrong down there. Something more than Othersiders getting into the sewers, and something I don’t want to trust to anyone else. I want you to be extra careful, but also keep your head on a swivel for anything that doesn’t look right to you. I’m asking Kent to put you down there as soon as it’s feasible. And if you find something you can’t put into a report, then exercise your privilege as my niece and ask for a face-to-face with your good old uncle.”

  I nodded, and he sat back in the chair as if he had never said anything at all.

  We chatted for a while about inconsequential things after that. He relaxed, and so did I. I asked him more things about my dad and mom, and whether or not he knew any of my Masters himself. It was such a relief to actually be able to talk about home without censoring every word that came out of my mouth!

  As it turned out, he knew Lady Rhiannon when they were both kids, before his whole family moved to Apex. And he knew Master Begay and Master Jeffries, who were now senior, senior Masters, as just Hunters.

  Just as we were talking about Master Jeffries, another of those gut-clenching barrages of thunder shook the entire building, and the lights dimmed for a moment. I held my breath, afraid they would go out—but they came back up again.

  “Storms like this remind me of the time the Thunderbirds came over Anston’s Well, and all the Hunters had worked together to create a Shield to protect the entire village from them,” he said. “I was only a kid then. Just ten years old.”

  I’d heard the story from Master Begay, who had only been a Hunter then, but this was a chance to hear it from Uncle! “What was that like?” I asked, a little breathlessly.

  “I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately,” he told me as I leaned forward in my chair to listen. “We knew the storm was coming, and we’d need firewood to carry us through because we wouldn’t be able to get outside once it started. Everyone who was old enough to carry even a little wood was out by the splitters, gathering up as much as we could hold and running it into the houses. I can’t remember how many armloads I’d carried—twenty, forty, maybe more—when Sheila Yazzy screamed and dropped her wood and pointed at the sky. We all looked up and saw them, coming in on the storm front. Black against the clouds, you knew the minute you clapped eyes on them they were something other than eagles. Long necks, long forked tails—they had raptors’ beaks and eyes that glowed brilliant red. Even as high as they were, the eyes shone so bright you could see them from the ground.”

  I’d seen Thunderbirds at a great distance, though never more than two at a time. I could see it in my head, the towering, charcoal-colored storm clouds, stark against the blue sky, and black against them, the Thunderbirds. Like cutouts of black paper, because they soared more than they flew, and with that storm wind under their wings, they wouldn’t have had to flap at all. You would hardly know they were living things, except for the movement at the tips of their wings, their heads shifting as they would look down at their prey, and those fiery red eyes.

  “We all stood there, paralyzed, when someone, I don’t know who, had the presence of mind to run and blow the alarm horn. That broke the spell on us, and we ran for shelter. The two Hunters of Anston’s Well—that would be Shadi Newsom and Yanaba Yellowhorse back then, they put up their Shields to cover the whole village, and just in time, for the first of the Thunderbirds canted over sideways and began a diving run. Have you ever seen them attack?”

  I shook my head. There hadn�
��t been Thunderbirds anywhere near the Mountain in all the time I’d lived there—only way, way off in the distance, and they never menaced us. I knew that the story of this attack was the reason why.

  “They dove out of the sky, but not like a falcon or an eagle with folded wings. They came down slowly, in a descending spiral, with their wings spread. And as they came, lightning struck from out of their eyes and their mouths.”

  It was easy to picture; something Drakken-size coming down in a lazy curve; my insides knotted up as I imagined it, because when an Othersider takes its time moving in on you, it’s because that monster knows it’s got you right where it wants you, and you’re basically a mouse looking up at the talons of an owl.

  “Shadi and Yanaba had gotten the Shields up just in time; if any of those bolts had struck the wooden houses or the wooden palisade around the village, they would have gone up in flames. I ran, then, and got as far as the porch of the community hall, but there I stayed.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought I could accomplish, but it felt as if I ought to be there. I suppose that’s why whoever was blowing the alarm horn stayed at his post too.”

  “How many Thunderbirds were there?” I asked. In my mind there were ten or so of them, the first one coming down lazily, firing off blinding lightning bolts that were just barely absorbed by the Shield, the rest firing off their lightning from higher above, and the thunder rocking everything like the thunder outside was shaking our building.

  “Six, eight, it was hard to tell. At least six, probably no more than ten or a dozen. The storm hit about that time, sleet sheeted down out of the clouds, and there was lightning lashing everywhere, not just the lightning coming from the Thunderbirds. I didn’t hear anything like that constant barrage of thunder until we moved to Apex and the whole family was in our first apartment here, in a big storm like the one going on outside.” He reached over to the cool-cabinet on the wall, got a bottle of water, and handed me one. I took it wordlessly.

  I knew those early winter storms, when it wasn’t quite winter but you could still get something as bad or worse than a blizzard. And the Thunderbirds would have been augmenting what would have been a bad sleet storm and turning it into something worse. The only thing that the village had going for it that day had been that the Thunderbirds didn’t like the cold any more than any Othersider did, so they had controlled the storm and kept it to rain where they were flying.

  But such rain…if it was anything like today, here and now, from the community hall where Uncle had been standing, he wouldn’t have been able to see the gate to the palisade through the pouring rain.

  “Shadi and Yanaba wouldn’t have been able to hold out for very long under that punishment, but it wasn’t more than fifteen, twenty minutes before the first of the roving Hunters came down from the Monastery. Hunter Begay was the first, but the rest weren’t far behind him. I didn’t even realize they were there until, all of a sudden, there were four people out there in the clearing in the middle of the village. Then six. Then eight.”

  They were all there, in my mind, standing in a tight little circle, facing out, hands outstretched as they bolstered the Shield. Master Jeffries and Master Begay must have looked like stone statues, anchoring the rest.

  “Between their combined Shields and the relentless lightning from the Thunderbirds, even people like me could see the Shields. It looked like someone had put up a glowing dome of light over the whole of Anston’s Well, light that shifted colors the way the colors shift in a soap bubble. By that time, I was riveted. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.”

  I’d seen that too, seen what happened when more than one Hunter combined their Shields to make one big shield. That was what the Elite had done for the last of my Trials. But this one would have been fluorescing every time a lightning bolt hit it, and—that was where my imagination failed me. It must have been glorious and utterly terrifying at the same time. “Then what happened?” I asked as he stopped to take a drink.

  He smiled. “Ah, well, then the Masters came down. By that time, some of the Hunters had run out of manna, a couple of them had drained themselves to the point where they were passing out. Shadi was the first; she just dropped where she stood, right down into the rainwater that was ankle-deep at that point. That was when I woke up and ran out there and started dragging or helping people into the shelter of the porch, out of that pouring storm—and people in the community hall came out to my shout and brought them inside into the warm.”

  I felt a burst of pride for the little boy who became my uncle. At any moment, that Shield could have failed and he’d have been Thunderbird chow. But he’d run right out there to help. No wonder he’d turned into what he was.

  “Hon Li was the eldest Master then. He had four huge Hounds that he said were Tibetan mastiffs, sacred temple dogs, and they were the size of your Dusana. He brought them through the Portal, while the rest of the Masters bolstered the Shield. And then at his command, they dropped the Shield, and a bolt of light so bright I couldn’t even look at it lanced up from his hands and hit the Thunderbird just overhead square in the chest.”

  It must have hit the ground like that meat avalanche, the Drakken we’d felled!

  “It dropped like a stone, without a sound, and as soon as it hit the ground, those four Hounds were on it. One on the neck, one on each wing, and one in the middle of the back, while the Masters brought the Shield back up before the other Thunderbirds had time to react. The Hounds had that thing broken and dead in moments. And then the lightning stopped.”

  He paused dramatically. I waited, clutching the bottle of water in my hands.

  “Hon Li gestured, and the Masters took the Shield down again. We all looked up. The remaining Thunderbirds were just—hovering. As if they were in shock, totally dumbstruck by the fact that we’d killed one of them. There was even a pause in the storm, as if the storm itself was in shock. It was so quiet…so quiet. And then Hon Li bowed to the Thunderbirds.”

  “He—what?” I said, not sure I had heard him right. Master Begay hadn’t told us this part. Then again, by that time Master Begay had been one of the ones passed out.

  “He bowed to them,” Uncle repeated, “and then he spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but I think somehow it could have carried for miles—it just had that sort of quality about it. You have lost one of your own today, and now you know what we can do. Of a courtesy, I think that you should leave us in peace, he said. Only that. And just like that, the Thunderbirds shot straight up into the clouds, and disappeared.”

  Master Begay had just said, “We killed one Thunderbird and the rest fled,” but then, his version had been pretty bare-bones compared to Uncle’s. He sure hadn’t told me what Elder Master Hon Li had said. Now, if I hadn’t heard that from my uncle, I am not sure I would have believed it.

  “Hon Li was a very great man,” Uncle said meditatively. “I wish there were more like him.”

  “Well,” I replied after a moment, “I do know that we’ve never had a Thunderbird attack on the Mountain since. I’ve seen them at a far distance, generally at the front of a storm, but they go about their business and they’ve never threatened us.”

  “Maybe Thunderbirds are the rare Othersiders that can be reasoned with,” Uncle mused. “Or maybe they were so shocked by losing one of the flock, they’ve decided to leave the Mountain alone.”

  “Maybe both. Maybe some other reason we’ll never figure out or understand. And maybe they’re just waiting until they’re sure Master Hon Li is long dead,” I replied.

  Uncle laughed. “That would not surprise me in the least.” He stood up. “I’ll tell Kent what your new assignment is, and he’ll take care of the rest. Enjoy your storm days, Joy.” He made a little sign that I should come over and be hugged, and I did. Then we left the office together, and he went off with Kent while I went back to my rooms.

  As far as I could tell, the storm was still just as bad out there. Someone had put music on in the halls, probably to mask the sound
of the thunder, but I could still feel the building vibrating through my feet.

  I automatically checked my vid to see if there were any assignments, but of course, there weren’t. Well. Now I was on another secret mission from Uncle, or something like that. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a secret mission, but nobody but he knew what the heck I was supposed to be looking for down in the sewers.

  The walls vibrated, and the storm growled, deep in its throat, feral. Not like a cornered beast, but like one that had its prey in sight. It wasn’t supposed to have hit us this hard….Why had it diverted?

  I didn’t know enough, and I knew too much. I sat down on the sofa and decided to see if I could get a call through to Josh. I wanted to talk to someone, and maybe he already knew about this assignment. He picked up right away, but what I could see of where he was didn’t look like either Uncle’s office or his own apartment. The lighting was subdued, he was in a corner, and it looked like I was getting the feed from his Perscom camera. He wasn’t wearing his black-and-silver Psimon uniform; he was in something that looked comfortable and casual, and his blond hair was mussed.

  And it’s weird, but seeing him relaxed and completely at ease made me feel better. Maybe subconsciously I was thinking that if he was stressed out, that was the signal I should be. “Hey!” he said, sounding as pleased to see me as I was to see him. “Enjoying your storm day?”

  “I don’t know yet; I just got breakfast,” I said. I figured if he knew Uncle had come over here, he’d know what Uncle told me, and if he didn’t, it was something I should keep to myself. But…I really, really wanted him to know about it because I desperately wanted to be able to talk about it with him. On the other hand, I couldn’t just blurt out the questions—channels being monitored and recorded, and all—so I just came up with something to say. “Guess what! They gave us pizza last night!”