Hunter's Oath

by Glynn Stewart

  “Funny. Because I still feel like I came pretty close to getting gutted with an ax,” Mary said sharply.

  “Nah, you had them in hand,” I repeated. “Anybody smart knows never to corner a lynx!”

  The arrival of Barry’s truck cut off the conversation there.

  17

  The big werewolf hopped down from the pickup truck and wrapped his cousin in a tight embrace.

  “I’m glad you got here in time, brother,” Barry told me. “Sometimes, it takes way too damn long to get out to the truck and get moving.” He shook his head. “It’s nice to have a friend who can teleport to the right place.”

  “I wish it was that fast,” I admitted. “If Mary wasn’t able to take care of herself, I wouldn’t have been here in time.”

  “Which he did,” Mary insisted, taking my hand firmly. “Even if he’s determined to pretend I’d have been fine, we both know I would not have been able to get away from the damned sniper.”

  Barry shook his head.

  “Just what have you been dragged into, Clan-sister?” he asked softly, looking over at me.

  “Fae politics, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “And some additional bullshit around this Pouka. I thought she was alone, but…”

  “Then she brought thugs?” the werewolf asked dryly.

  “Redcaps,” I said. “About as stereotypically ‘thug’ as fae get. Murderous half-feeders with an attitude problem. There weren’t supposed to be any in Calgary, so she brought in outsiders.” I sighed. “Sadly, I think a lot of redcaps live down to the stereotype by working as muscle for hire.”

  “So, she imported hired muscle. I guess we saved her some money,” Barry noted.

  “I want her, Barry,” I said flatly. “If we find her sniper perch, can you track her?”

  He bared his teeth.

  “You’re a Clan-friend and a personal friend,” he told me. “And you’re Mary’s boyfriend and this bitch has killed too many innocents—and she came at Clan Tenerim. This isn’t a favor anymore, Jason.

  “This is Clan business now, you understand?”

  I nodded, sighing again. That had its advantages, I supposed, but I didn’t want to drag the Shifter Clan into this.

  “She’s Unseelie and she’s terrifyingly powerful,” I warned him. “This isn’t a fight Clan Tenerim wants to take on. I want your help, Barry, not to add to Tenerim’s graveyard.”

  He and Mary both growled at me in perfect sync.

  “This is Clan business,” Barry repeated. “Clan honor. Clan blood. By blood and steel and heart, you are ours, Jason Kilkenny. Do you understand me?

  “She came at you, and we let it go because you have your own fights and politics. But now she came at Mary and you, and the Clan won’t let that stand. Can’t let that stand.”

  I inclined my head in acknowledgement. I should have known better than to underestimate just how highly Clan Tenerim valued the fact that their last Alpha had declared me Clan-friend.

  “I understand,” I told him quietly. “I owe your Clan as much as you owe me. I would not drag you into this fight, but I need your skills.”

  “Good,” Barry said. “Because with Mary by your side, this was always going to be our fight.”

  The cops were all over the strip mall when we returned, the bodies of the redcaps laying where they fell with yellow plastic tarps over them, while the officers gently and competently interviewed the potential witnesses.

  No one was going to be of much use to the police, I knew. What security cameras I could spot were out in front of the mall, and there were no windows into the alley. The only people who’d seen anything had been Mary and me…and our sniper, which I was presuming to be Maria Chernenkov.

  “We were in the alley,” Mary said quietly. “Building to the north of us, concrete security wall to the south. Shooter didn’t have a lot of options for location. Either east-west or up high.”

  We were across the street from the mall, and I kept a careful eye on the officers as Mary rotated, studying the angles.

  “You were facing me down the alley and had him,” she continued. “Shot didn’t pass me, so not from the east. If she’d fired from the west, you wouldn’t have had nearly as much blood on you and she wouldn’t have clipped your clothes.”

  She…was better at this than I was. I would have just been checking every high spot within a kilometer or so, but Mary was listing off the details and turning.

  “There.” She pointed. There was a small apartment building, about six stories tall, a block to the north. “She fired over the strip mall, probably from the roof of that building. Could have broken through the locks or climbed the outside, but that explains why she didn’t take the shot immediately.”

  “She likely didn’t head up until her redcaps had cornered you,” Barry concluded. He shook his head with a chuckle. “She didn’t think they were going to take you down either, I think.”

  “I don’t particularly feel like trying to run up walls myself,” I told them dryly. “Walk with me?”

  Mary shivered but nodded.

  “Okay.”

  Barry looked confused. “Brother?”

  “Take my arm, Barry. We’re walking Between It’ll be cold, but it’s safe. I promise.”

  The two shifters each took one of my arms, Barry looking confused and uncertain as he did so, and I stepped forward with them into the Between.

  The werewolf inhaled sharply as the crisp chill washed over us, and started to jerk away. I pinned his hand with my arm instantly, using Inga’s training in reinforcing my strength with telekinesis to hold him in place.

  “Do not let go,” I told him. “You can only breathe here because I will it, and I don’t know if I can extend that to someone who isn’t touching me.”

  “Fuck me,” he breathed. “This is Between?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “And from here, we can just walk up to the roof of that building. Hang on.”

  The “ground” was what I willed it to be, but we could see a shadow of the real world around us. We moved forward, and I adjusted our path to lift us off the ground and bring us up six stories and over a block of intervening space in less than a dozen steps.

  “You can breathe, Barry,” I pointed out to him. “It’s safe. Hell, in a lot of circumstances, you’re safer breathing here with me than anywhere else.”

  “Like if someone blows up a few tanks of chlorine?” he said in a tone of “huh, that makes sense.”

  “Exactly.” I stopped, checking around to be sure we were actually on top of the building. “This is our stop. Hang on and…step.”

  The roof of the apartment building was covered in gravel to help with drainage. There was a small hut-like structure to allow for regular access, which was closed and locked. For a moment, I thought we’d misjudged—but the smell of cordite caught my nose a moment later.

  Our shooter had fired six times and hadn’t bothered to collect her brass. Discarded shell casings were scattered across the gravel. Leaving them would probably make the human police feel better, but…yeah.

  “Once we’re done, we’ll want to clean those up for our Unseelie friend,” I said quietly. “The last thing we need is the mortal authorities actually tracing any of our supply chains for weaponry.”

  “Fair,” Barry allowed. The werewolf was squatting where the shooter had to have been standing, and his nostrils flared in pain as he winced. “Silver. Not Bane, but silver…”

  “And cold iron,” I agreed. “I’d guess distilled garlic, too. Triple-kill rounds. Ruin everybody’s day.”

  “Yeah, missed the garlic with the silver,” he admitted. “It’s her scent, too. In case anyone wasn’t sure it was our horsey bitch of an Unseelie.”

  “I didn’t have much doubt,” I told him, “but confirmation is good.” I grimaced. “Though, to be fair, sending redcaps after Mary and shooting cold iron rounds at me is enough for me to be willing to put them down, whoever they are.”

  “No shit.” Barry shook his hea
d. “Came from the west. Left north.”

  He followed the scent to the edge of the building and looked over the side, down at the parking lot.

  “She climbed up. Jumped down.” He shook his head, then pointed. “You can see where she landed.”

  I’d missed it, mostly because I hadn’t figured there’d be a visible mark. Chernenkov had landed in the grassy lawn, tearing up sod and dirt.

  “I suggest we take a more…sedate approach in our own return to the ground,” I said. “Between is cold, but I’m more comfortable with it than jumping.”

  Barry snorted, but he took my arm nonetheless. A moment later, the three of us stepped out onto the ground floor, in the shelter of the building’s brick stairwell. No witnesses to our arrival—and I hoped no one had seen Chernenkov jump.

  “All right, she’ll be easier to track as a wolf, and you’ll attract less attention as a couple walking their dog,” Barry told me. “Time to fur up. Let’s see if we can catch her this time.”

  The big man shimmered and was gone, replaced by a large wolf. An unfamiliar observer would probably think he was a husky or something similar, if only because his body language was much friendlier than any wild animal’s would ever be.

  He waited a moment for Mary to produce a leash and collar to disguise him, and then took off towards Chernenkov’s landing spot, with Mary and I falling in behind.

  As Barry had figured, even the police barely gave us a glance-over as we left the parking lot, following Chernenkov’s scent. A young couple with an oversized dog, out for the walk the animal definitely needed. Too far away to have heard anything out of the chaos that had swept over the area.

  If they identified the building as the sniper’s perch, they might have changed their mind—but the only reliable way to do that would have been to examine the Pouka’s leftover brass, which was now jingling in my pocket.

  Barry was doing a spectacular impression of a big, happy, well-trained floofball of a dog, bouncing forward and sideways to the “limits” of the easily-broken leash but always returning to “heel” at the sight of another animal or person. Despite the seeming joyful randomness in his movements, however, he was definitely leading us on a specific path.

  Chernenkov had fled north, moving deeper into the suburb and weaving a twisted course around and through about ten blocks of houses before she exited into a massive park area. There were more dogs and people around at the entrance, but Barry led us through them with practiced ease.

  Once we were out of sight of the crowd, the werewolf growled and took off in a straight line. Fast as Mary and I were, we were hard pressed to keep up with Barry’s run. We’d be very obvious if we were seen, but Barry was clearly relying on our superior senses to avoid interception.

  I appreciated his rush. The trail had to be growing cold now. Chernenkov would go only so far before acquiring a vehicle, which would dead-end the trail. We were probably already too late, a thought that was reinforced when we came down a hill into an almost-empty parking lot.

  Barry sniffed forward into the lot, beelining to an empty spot between two large SUVs and circling it quickly as he poked around. Finally, using the two SUVs for cover, he shimmered and transformed back into a massive dark-haired young man.

  “I love hunting old supes sometimes,” he told me cheerfully.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m guessing she had a car here and is gone?”

  “You get half a dog treat, Jason my brother,” he told me. “She’s gone, but she didn’t have a car here. She stole a car. And she’s, what, two hundred? Hundred fifty?”

  “Younger than that,” I said bluntly. “But yeah, old by human standards. Your point?”

  “She stole a Flexfuel car.” He grinned at my blank face. “That means it can use a bunch of fuels, usually mixes of gas and ethanol. Smart engine, adjusts the mixture, but super-distinctive scent.”

  “Oh.”

  “Especially if the sensor is off calibration and the owner’s been adding ethanol manually,” Barry concluded. “She thinks she’s cut off the trail, but I can track that vehicle till she runs it out of gas.”

  He paused, then sighed.

  “On foot, sadly, but I can follow her. I suggest I do just that…and you two go get my truck.” His grin widened.

  “If nothing else, my shotgun is in there and we may need a quick getaway.”

  18

  Mary went for her cousin’s truck. I went back Between to pick up my own Escalade from the suburban office parking lot I’d left it in. I even had an email from Masters letting me know when she’d scheduled the next meeting for.

  It said a lot about how much the accountant knew about our world that she didn’t even question the fact that I’d unexpectedly teleported out of her meeting room due to a crisis. People like Meine Masters and Jiang Kuang—and Shelly Fairchild, for that matter—were a critical part of our ability to interface with and stay hidden from the mortal world.

  They were also our greatest vulnerability to exposure, a risk mostly mitigated with threats of terrible retribution and deliveries of fat stacks of cash. My experience suggested that the latter, combined with the “health plan” of having access to supernatural healers, was the best course.

  Somehow, I doubted that whoever was handling Maria Chernenkov’s accounts had particularly fond feelings for the Pouka Noble.

  With the potential consequences of my abrupt departure apparently smoothed over, at least for now, I drove back to the north of the city, following a continually updating GPS waypoint being fed to my phone by Barry’s.

  He stopped moving about five minutes before I caught up with him, and I found him smoking a cigarette and sitting on the hood of his pickup truck parked on a hill overlooking a warehouse district in the Northwest.

  “Well?” I asked as I stepped out of my own SUV and stepped up to him. His automatic shotgun was sitting beside him on the hood of the truck, and I could feel the cold iron radiating from the weapon’s magazine.

  He pointed the cigarette at the closest warehouse.

  “She parked the stolen car there,” he told me. “It’s possible she’s left in a different vehicle, but no one has gone in or come out in the last ten minutes. I figured I shouldn’t go barging in on my own, since you’re so sure she’d kick my ass and all.”

  “He’s right,” Mary told the werewolf as she dropped out of the truck. She’d discarded the blazer of her business suit for a black Kevlar vest over her blouse. Instead of her little machine pistol, she was carrying a matching automatic shotgun to Barry’s portable cannon.

  “We may have big guns and cold iron pellets and our claws and teeth, but she’s got all of the above too,” my lover continued. “Now, she knows there’s shifters coming after her, so she’s probably loaded with triple-kill again—or, given the connections this bitch seems to have, even Bane.”

  That was a terrifying possibility.

  “No one goes in alone,” I told them firmly. I grabbed the long coat the Queen had given me from the truck as I spoke. It didn’t look it was going to rain—but the rubberized fabric coat had been a convenient size to conceal a lot of enchanted armor. It also did a good job of covering the leather pouch of cold iron spikes…and the cold-iron-loaded MP5 I pulled out of the back of the Escalade.

  Eric was still working on finding more toys for me to fight Chernenkov with, but it wasn’t like my Queen hadn’t already upgraded the equipment I brought to the party.

  “I’ll go first,” I continued. “If she’s expecting shifters, she may have loaded with Bane—and she may as well shoot me with plain lead. And we can hope she doesn’t have many rounds of it!”

  “Sure, let’s use my Clan-sister’s boyfriend and the local rep of a Power as a human shield,” Barry replied. “That sounds like a great plan.”

  “Fall in, joker,” I ordered lightly. “I don’t plan on burying you—and sending you in first might require that. You get me, Barry?”

  “I get you.”

 
It was still midafternoon, but the warehouse district was quiet. We were in that interim time between when all of the last shipments of the day have come in and gone out, but the workers were still busy offloading and prepping for the next day.

  Anyone in the area was hard at work. They didn’t want trouble and, well, I didn’t want to bring trouble into their lives.

  Unfortunately for everyone, somewhere in that district was a murderer who’d decided I was her next primary target. That was going to be a problem for everyone.

  We moved quietly down the hill, leaving the cars parked well away from the district as we sneaked up on the fenced compound Barry had tracked the stolen car to. It was about as solid as security got in Calgary: a ten-foot-tall fence surrounding the entire property, with two vehicle gates, both with security booths.

  The booths were the first sign of a real problem. I studied them from a distance and they were empty.

  “Were there guards here when you swung by?” I asked Barry quietly.

  “No,” he admitted. “Thought we were just lucky. Guessing the place is shut down?”

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, studying further. There was no one visible in the grounds around the warehouse, but there were more cars parked there than just the stolen one. An eighteen-wheeler was backed up to the dock.

  “No, it’s still active. Cars, trucks, the works. They’re just not bothering to run security. That’s…never a good sign.”

  Even if you had nothing to protect, someone had to open the powered gates for anyone coming in. Why would the gates be abandoned?

  Unless, I guessed, everyone who was coming and going already had a remote control for the gates and the eighteen-wheeler was mostly for show. A situation that would never be the case for an actual warehouse…

  “It’s not a fucking warehouse,” I said quietly. “It’s a safehouse. The question is…crime, ours, or hers?”

  “Whoever it belongs to, she’s in there,” Barry pointed out. “That means it’s hers, right?”