Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  Rose hovered overhead, sailing through the spot where a perfectly reasonable crypt arch had been just a moment before, when my back hadn’t interrupted its continued existence in the same spot it had occupied for hundreds of years. “Did ye figure it out yet?” She wore a very un-Rose-like grin, which was disquieting, and her hand glowed with a blue superheated plasma now, which was probably worse.

  “That you put the ‘suck’ in succubus?” I asked, mouth thick with blood from where I’d bitten my tongue on landing, and shifting painfully as I felt Wolfe rushing to piece me back together. “Yeah, I got that. I’m a little fuzzy as to why you’ve been playing my faithful ladyservant these last few days when you could have just crushed me while I was sleeping.”

  Rose cocked her head at me, then smiled again, enough to make me shiver. All that human kindness she’d shown me the last few days? The warmth that had come to define her for me? All gone, leaving nothing but cold disdain that leaked through in her answer. “Well…because I didn’t know ye, of course. I mean, I knew you as well as everyone else did, which was…not at all, really. I knew the TV you.” She leaned closer, but not close enough I could put a fist through her smirking face. “I wanted to know the real you.”

  “Why?” I looked around; there was nothing but stone fragments to throw at her. What else could I toss at her but rocks? A really well placed one, if it got past her gravity powers, might bust her skull, but that was pretty iffy. She was damned fast, faster than me, and that was cause for worry when taken in combo with everything else. “Were you looking to write the next unauthorized biography?”

  “My dear…” Rose said, smirking almost sadly, “have you seen what I’ve done to this town? Bending people to my will? If I wanted to, it wouldn’t be unauthorized at all.” She leaned in a little closer. “And I’m debating on that. But the truth is…I wanted to make you suffer like you’ve never suffered before.”

  I stared up at her. “Just because? Or did you have a non-psychotic reason?”

  Her jaw tightened. “Oh, I’ve got a very good reason indeed. You ruined my life…and you never even noticed.” Her eyes were crazy wide, and also…just crazy.

  “Care to shar—” I started to say, but she rained down pain on me like a Scotland sky letting loose with rain on a summer day.

  She hit me in a hundred places, the strikes coming seconds apart. Each one felt like a touch at first, and then my nerves caught up with how hard she’d hit me. Internal organs ruptured. Bones broke, shattering into pieces. I spat blood in a mist, and gave up any thought of getting up, now or ever.

  “Now, take a deep breath and sit there, Sienna, my love,” she said as I nearly choked on my blood. “You see yourself as a righteous hero, don’t you? I caught a few whiffs of that in our conversation. But you’re not that righteous, really—just between us girls?” She leaned in, face hovering over mine. “You’re a scared little twat, frightened of her mommy still after all this time. Yeah, now I know you, don’t I?”

  She stepped back, and here I saw the Euro biker over her shoulder. “This is Eugene. Ye’ve seen him, haven’t ye? He’s the flyer who’s been taking poor Frankie around town.” She grabbed him by the neck and brought him close, and he just stood there, eyes wide open, letting her take hold of him. He jerked a few times, spasming, and then his eyes flickered closed, and he dropped, dead, the puppet’s strings cut. “I guess I didn’t really need his power, but…”

  “You know,” she said, eyes boring into mine. She took a deep breath through her nose, savoring the feeling of a newly absorbed soul, I was sure. I’d felt it before myself.

  “Did ye enjoy the taste of Frankie? He’s a rare one, that fellow. I’d never seen that kind of power before we unlocked that lad.” She was smiling impishly, and my brain started to work again. If I could get a hand up, use Frankie’s superblastingripperbadass power against her… “Of course, I had to make it look like he had others…you’ve met a Rakshasa before, haven’t ye? Illusionist? Any one of Frankie’s powers that I couldn’t use for him at a distance, like the fire dispersion or gravity? I had to make out of an illusion. Him flinging chunks of ice? Chopping up the couch with a lightsaber when he really just punched it in half? All my Rakshasa abilities, pulling the wool over yuir eyes. Dead useful, that power…”

  My hand shook, moving at my side. Wolfe…how’s that healing coming along…?

  How’s not being murdered coming along? he threw back.

  Uhhh…poorly?

  Same, he growled. I’ve never seen a body this damaged, ever. Not even my victims, in some cases.

  That’s…bad, I thought.

  “I picked this spot for us,” Rose said, “when I laid out that first body here, the one I knew would draw you to town. This graveyard has a rich history, of course. But that’s not why I chose it…any graveyard would have done.” Her eyes swam in front of me. “Can ye guess why?”

  I blinked at her, and readied my ripper blast, steadying my hand. If I could just catch her in this… “Because you’re fucking dead?”

  I went to trigger it, stepping into my head, and Frankie reared up within, an angry specter in my mind, furious howl of rage catching me by surprise. NO, he said.

  It landed like a slap on the side of my head, his refusal, and then, a moment later, Rose seized me by the face. I shot fire at her and it disappeared like it had never existed, the memory of the heat flicking like a sunny day across my flesh and then gone as though there’d never been anything but the cold. I fired a net at her face and it was gone a second later, shredded by gravity. I tried to rise with flight, but she pressed down on me, both hands on me, and crushing me into the ground. I tried to reach for my last power…the last gambit…

  Bastian, I said, make me a dragon…

  And for a moment, there was nothing but silence.

  Then…I heard the screaming.

  It was in my head, in my skin, all across my body. Nerve endings jangling, a fire in my very flesh, cries of pain in my ears. It was the sound of Wolfe and Gavrikov and Bjorn and Zack and Eve and Bastian and Harmon and even that bastard Frankie, and one other voice in the chorus of agony…

  Mine.

  My skin was burning, on fire with pain, and Rose was doing it to me, her fingers digging into my flesh, burning me to death with some kind of power—

  Succubus power.

  The sound in my head was a cacophony of pain, and suddenly one voice after another went still and quiet, the screaming quelled, until there was only one voice remaining where there had been so many before—

  Mine, alone.

  Rose pulled from me, letting go of my face, withdrawing with a breathless gasp, something dark and sated showing on her face, peeking out of her dead eyes. I toppled back, landing roughly on the soft earth in the middle of the crypt, smell of dirt and blood mingling together in my nostrils. Rose breathed, just breathed, leaning down over me, inches away from my face so I could see every pore and smell her faint, sweet, sickly perfume, and I said:

  Wolfe.

  There was no answer.

  Gavrikov!

  Nothing.

  Bjorn! Zack! Eve!

  Nada.

  BASTIAN! HARMON!

  The only sound was the wind blowing through the graveyard, broken at last by Rose’s quiet laughter as she lurked above me.

  “Did ye figure it out yet?” she asked. “Where your little head friends went?” I had a sickening suspicion, but I could not seem to give voice to it. My head lolled, against the soft earth, the pain still coursing through my skin like it had been peeled from me, layer by layer.

  Something settled in my gut as the realization burrowed into my head, something I’d never had to come to grips with before, never even considered. My belly boiled, nausea sweeping it, threatening to empty the contents of a stomach I had yet to fill today. Even still…I wanted to throw up emptiness.

  Because emptiness…was all I had left inside.

  “You’re…the stronger succubus,” I said at last, the
wave of nausea sweeping and rising at the thought of what she’d just done.

  She raised a finger and pointed at the side of her head, grinning, fingers twisting in her red hair. “That’s right…they’re in here. Now…now yuir little souls? They’re mine.”

  50.

  Rose let out a long, bloodcurdling cackle, and it echoed across the empty graveyard. I couldn’t see straight, something felt so off in my head. The skies stretched black above me, the last light now faded and darkness swept in, held at bay only by street lamps somewhere beyond my sight, beyond the curtaining wall that wrapped the burial grounds.

  She leaned in over me, red hair falling over her face like a tunnel between us. “Now what are you going to do, my lonely little dove? Ye’ve lost your power, your little souls—no fire, no flight, no healing, no dragon—only you, ye poor little thing.” She laughed, and it carried a deep malice that I hadn’t even caught a hint of when I’d been traveling with her like a partner over the last few days. “Now, my dear…you’re powerless. You’re not even the stronger succubus. So—”

  I didn’t wait for her to finish her explanation, because in spite of the ringing silence in my ears, I’d come to the conclusion it was going somewhere I didn’t want to go—probably toward my death, now that she’d drained me of all the souls in my body save one—the one that came factory installed.

  Swinging a piece of broken gravestone, I managed to catch her in the blind side, suddenly thankful that she hadn’t gotten her hands on a Cassandra-type in her mad rush to suck up any meta power she could.

  It cracked her solidly in the head, and Rose let out a grunt of pain. I rose and punched her in the jaw twice, catching her completely off-guard. I didn’t chance it any more right then, either. My next blow was my index finger and middle jammed full force, directly into her eyes.

  I could tell I popped them both, hitting them with meta force like that. She did something, though, that I wasn’t expecting, some power unleashed that I hadn’t felt before. My body was propelled through the air like Gavrikov had launched me, sending me flying over the top of the crypt wall and sailing through tree branches. I took a few hard hits as I crashed through stone walls, including one to the back of the head that scrambled my brain even more than it already had been before I came down in the middle of a street with a solid crack.

  “SIENNA!” Rose screamed, half mad. A geyser of flame and energy blew out into the sky like a tower of light, a beacon that even my flagging brain couldn’t miss. “I will find you, you little shit! You think this is it?” A blast of blue lit up the night. “I’m yuir worst enemy! I’m going to hurt you worse than anyone ever has, including yer ma! You hear me? This isn’t over!”

  I believed her, and felt the cracking pain of a few broken ribs along my front and side. I didn’t know whether they’d happened in the landing or when she’d hit me with that blast that launched me, but they’d happened…

  And with Wolfe…they weren’t going away anytime soon.

  “Find her!” Rose screamed in the darkness behind the wall, and somehow I knew she had allies with her now, like that Euro biker dude she’d drained. Maybe the Edinburgh cops that “Frankie” had turned against me.

  All along, it had been Rose, running the longest con I’d run across since…well, since Sovereign had revealed himself for who he really was.

  The rumble of a car in the distance woke me to the approach of a vehicle, and I realized I was lying on a road. I picked myself up, staggering, the hardest time I’d had fighting back against gravity since before I’d gained Gavrikov’s powers. Stumbling feet warring with my warped sense of balance, I put one foot in front of the other and dodged out of the lane as the headlights approached.

  Rose had a guy who could fly, and the cops on her side, and heaven only knew how many other people.

  I was just one girl, alone in a foreign country, the whole damned world against me…

  And I was no longer the most powerful metahuman in the world.

  I was just an ordinary succubus now.

  …Being hunted by the most powerful meta in the world.

  All the pains, the broken bones that I couldn’t immediately heal, the chill of the night air…I started to shake, but I needed to keep my head. I left the road, out of the headlights, dragging myself into the bushes on the other side. I kept myself from collapse by the barest margins, grabbing solid boughs within the bush and using them to prop me up. I ignored the stinging feeling of nubs and small branches pushing into my palms. Among the cacophony of other pains, I barely noticed them.

  “She went that way!” Rose called, and I heard voices acknowledge her. Flashlights clicked on, more beacons in the night, beyond the graveyard wall, and I could hear the steps of a search party leaving the graveyard.

  I rustled the bushes, peering out at the approaching car. It was a bigger one, a truck of some kind, built for transporting goods and high off the ground. As soon as it got close, I loped into a hobbling run, slid underneath, the pavement tearing at my bare skin on my shoulders. Ignoring the pain, I seized a solid hold under the truck and felt it grip me, dragging my skin along the road until I could lift my weary body up under the frame.

  My entire body ached, screamed at me, but I didn’t dare let go. I would hold in this position for hours, all night if I had to, for miles and miles, until hopefully Scotland gave way to some other place, like England, or maybe eventually France, if I was lucky. I would go until I couldn’t go anymore.

  There was a desperate danger out there in Rose, who wanted to hunt me. To hurt me.

  To kill me.

  And against that…I saw only one option.

  I was going to run away.

  Again.

  51.

  Wolfe

  Now

  Flat houses of stone and brick lay under a grey sky. A wind swayed the tree nearby, a tall pine that reached high above him, his skin prickling in the grim air. Something about this felt wrong, strange and artificial, and Wolfe felt…cold.

  “Where the hell are we?” Zack Davis asked, looking around, his blond hair rustling in the wind.

  “Scotland,” Gerry Harmon said, impeccably dressed in one of his frivolous suits. They would be so useless for hunting.

  A house with a stone wall stood to their left, a paved street running right down the middle. They stood arrayed on the pavement, right in the middle of it, no cars in sight, nor audible, nothing but the wind to cover them. To one side, a round-topped mountain stood high in the distance, rising high and bare of even a single tree.

  “We know we’re in Scotland, idiot,” Eve Kappler said, lurking next to the massive Bjorn. “But the question is…for the purposes of this delusion…where in Scotland?”

  “We’re in that girl’s head, are we not?” Aleksandr Gavrikov, pale, shaking, lacking his familiar fire, stood looking around as though something might come for him from any direction, at any moment. They all looked like that, in one way or another.

  Prey.

  Wolfe did not slouch, did not look around, waiting for the annunciation. It would come, surely, but until then…

  He could feel presence out there, in the air itself, a crackle, a hum, like living things lurking just beyond his sight.

  He knew something was coming. This Rose…she was a child of death, a hunter. She wouldn’t keep them waiting l—

  “Well, what have we here?” Her voice was calm and melodic, her hair an even brighter, blazing color in this place, against the grey, Scottish skies. She drifted toward Harmon, electric gaze meeting that of the former president, whose own appearance was so much more dowdy and dull than this fiery goddess who had appeared before them, a playful smile perched on her lips. “A telepath. I dinnae have one of you…I’d been feeling a bit covetous, but…” She floated down, dressed all in white, and touched Harmon on the face. “And so distinguished a guest, no less, the former president. Sienna did truly get into all manner of trouble, didn’t she?”

  “Up until now she hadn’t
run across anyone who could stop her,” Harmon said, a little stiffly. He was trying to keep her at a wary distance, but one could not defy a god in her own realm.

  “Times change,” Rose said with a sweet smile, and then turned her attention to Bjorn and Eve in turn. “An Odin and a fae. How boring.” And she moved past them, as though they didn’t even exist.

  “How rude,” Eve said.

  “I am the son of Odin,” Bjorn said, bristling. “You cannot speak to me this way.”

  Rose turned, still smiling sweetly. “This is my head, darling…I’ll talk to ye however I choose.”

  Bjorn bared his teeth. “You can’t—”

  He let out a scream a moment later, and Rose did not pause, did not come back to him; just stood there, sweet smile as sincere as it had ever been. “Yes,” she said as he dropped to his knees. “I can. I will. I own you now, you hear?” She leaned toward him and put her hands on her knees as if she were talking to a child. “And I have no use for you, so…shut up and be silent, will ye? That’s a good lad…”

  She moved on, brushing against Zack, who stood, looking as though ready to run from her. “And you…you were her first love, weren’t ye?”

  “Maybe,” Zack said.

  Rose laughed. “A normal human, then…but you may have your uses.”

  “You can’t use me—” he started to say.

  She grabbed him by the face and pulled him close, planting her lips on his. He reacted with shock, eyes rolling back in his head as she swept him off his feet and he spasmed, once. She broke from him a moment later and he, too, slumped to his knees, but for the opposite reason of Bjorn. “I told ye…I can do anything I want here.” She extended a hand to indicate the world, and everything as far as the eye could see, the green fields and treeless mountains. “This is my world. Here…I’m yuir bluidy goddess…so…if you don’t want to worship me…” Her voice hardened. “Get ready for hell.”

  Rose paused at Gavrikov. “You’re a duplicate as well. Stay quiet and ye’ll get along fine.” Passing him, she brushed into Bastian. “But you…you’re a unique one.” She looked him over appraisingly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever need to become a giant dragon, but if so…I suppose I’ll give you a whistle.”