Hunter's Oath

by Glynn Stewart

  “Tell me: am I bleeding on the carpet?” I murmured to Mary.

  She snorted.

  “No, but somebody definitely bled on you. Not sure the staff are picking that up so much as just all of the mud, though.”

  I shrugged. There wasn’t much I could do about it. Talus or Robert could have glamored themselves to look normal. I didn’t have that option.

  Once in the stairwell, however, there was no one to give me unusual looks, and I took a small moment of relief in that, even as we climbed up thirteen floors. The blank wall between the twelfth and fourteenth floors, however, mocked us.

  “In a regular hotel, this might be a maintenance floor, only accessed by the utility elevator,” Mary pointed out. “Or there’s a secret entrance…”

  “Or it doesn’t matter,” Inga replied. She gestured and I felt her Gift flare to life. One moment, it was a plain wall, with the almost-decorative false-stone pattern so common in modern buildings.

  The next, it turned out that there was a secret door—as the Valkyrie tried to tear a hole through the wall and the entire panel came out under her strike. Plaster and brick shattered, the metal framework of the concealed door clattering to the floor like thunder.

  “No one missed that,” Theino said calmly, ditching his blazer to reveal the same Kevlar vest he’d been wearing earlier and a concealed harness for a machine pistol of the same ilk as the one Mary carried. “Not fae. Not mortal. They know we’re here.”

  I wasn’t sure just where Inga’s sword appeared from, but it was in her hand as the goblin spoke. Mary’s machine pistol was out, and her pupils thinned as she drew more of her bestial other nature into herself.

  I slipped the black wooden stock out of its holster and let its runes warm my skin.

  “Chernenkov probably hasn’t made it here yet,” I pointed out. “Let’s go find out who she was running to.”

  30

  The thirteenth floor of the hotel wasn’t laid out like a hotel. It looked like there might be some hotel rooms at one end of it, but the side we entered had a wide-open lobby that looked like it could be closed off into individual conference rooms.

  The wreckage of the door lay in the middle of one side as we entered. Most of the space was empty, but a small cluster of fae had been having some kind of discussion at the other end of the lobby-slash-conference room—next to what looked like a vault entrance.

  Knowing Unseelie—knowing supernaturals in general—it was probably an armory. The way half of the people in the room had rushed through the heavy metal door when we’d arrived suggested that guess was correct.

  Somehow, I was unsurprised to see that the central figure in the group of half a dozen fae was Gráinne herself, her hag friend at her side. The Unseelie Noble stepped out to face the intruders, but whatever she’d been ready to say died on her lips as she saw me.

  “You,” she hissed. “That’s not possible. You’re dead.”

  “And how would you be so sure of that?” I asked as my friends spread out around me. “As I recall, the person who shoved a dagger in my heart was a Masked Lord, someone so very confident in their ability to tell me that my Queen would follow me into death.

  “Unless you were there, Gráinne, how would you know?” I gestured around us. “Though, so far as we can tell, this place is a safehouse for the Masked Lords, which means I must demand your surrenders until we can bring in investigators from the High Court’s staff to go over the place with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “This is a secure facility of the Unseelie Court. You have no authority here, Seelie,” she spat.

  I sighed.

  “Miss Gráinne, you forget yourself,” I warned her. “I am a Vassal of the Queen of the Fae. My authority is the High Court’s authority and I speak for them, not the local Seelie Court. You are all suspected of treason against the fae. Lay down your weapons.”

  The Unseelie Noble chuckled sadly.

  “It seems you are harder to kill than I expected, but all you have achieved is the death of your friends,” she told me. The cold iron mask materialized in her hand, teleporting from wherever it was stored by some inherent magic of the mask itself.

  “We both know how this ends,” she told me as she placed the mask on her face, the glamor sweeping over her to render her unrecognizable once more. “We both know the steps. But so be it. Let us dance.”

  I smiled.

  “You forget one thing,” I told her. “Here, you haven’t trapped me in one world. Plus, well.”

  The whip stock in my hand warmed further as I channeled magic through it. Flame and Force flashed out, forming the green-white whip once again.

  “Someone gave me a present since we last ‘spoke’.”

  An Unseelie will-o’-the-wisp flung fire. Redcaps emerged from the armory with assault rifles and opened fire. Mary and Theino opened fire with machine pistols. Gunfire echoed in the confined space. Fire flared—and Inga and I charged.

  Gráinne came to meet us—and her hag ally flung Power. Inga and I stepped Between, emerging on top of the Noble and the Greater Fae challenging us. More Power flared and Inga parried the hag’s force strike with her sword, closing with her as the Noble lunged at me.

  I caught the glamor-blades Gráinne had summoned with the Fire of my whip, shattering her spell as I closed. A shield of glamor appeared in midair, deflecting the whip as I struck at her, and a familiar cold iron knife stabbed at me from beneath.

  I stepped, emerging from Between behind her and striking out with a bolt of flame from my free hand. She moved with blurring speed, parrying the firebolt with a newly conjured glamor-blade—and three mirror images of the Unseelie Noble flashed into existence.

  One of them collapsed as a russet-furred lynx leapt through it to hit the will-o’-the-wisp behind it. There was a short and painful scream, and the amount of random fire flickering around the room dropped dramatically.

  I was keeping enough track to be sure which images were illusions, and struck out with the whip again, wrapping flickering green fire around Gráinne’s sword hand as she moved to strike at me.

  For a moment, I thought I was about to end the fight there—Nobles weren’t that much tougher than Gentry, and I’d cut a Gentry’s hand off with the whip earlier. We struggled, and then her Power closed down over mine, severing the whip as she flung herself backward.

  Her skin was smoking, burn marks visible on her wrist even through the glamor as she snarled at me.

  “What are you?” she demanded. “A changeling can’t fight me!”

  She flung glamor-blades at me, a dozen knives of deadly-sharp solid illusions.

  I stepped Between again, emerging farther away and to the side of the salvo of knives. The rest of the fight was going our way. The will-o’-the-wisp and the redcaps were down, and Mary was back in her normal form. Both she and Theino had stolen the assault rifles the redcaps had returned with and were starting to lay down fire on Gráinne and the hag.

  The hag was dueling Inga and losing, hard. The hag had Force and Fire and Glamor. The Valkyrie met Force and Fire with Force and stepping Between—and illusion was irrelevant against a woman who could smash walls with her fists.

  As I watched, Inga’s cold iron knives flipped up over her shoulders and slammed into the hag’s chest. The old-looking woman froze in mid-gesture, her Power flickering out as the cold iron poisoned her.

  Then I turned to Gráinne.

  “It’s over. Yield.”

  “You know nothing,” she spat—and charged. A flickering glamor of spiked armor and flashing blades formed around her as she came at me.

  Inga met her halfway, steel meeting glamor as the Valkyrie charged the Noble. I could barely see them move, both of them faster than I was. Then Inga went flying, smashing into the wall with blood leaking from a dozen wounds.

  Gráinne was limping as she faced me, though, and I could see blood pooling on the floor under her.

  “The Covenant demands the Cold Death for treason,” she snarled at
me. “I will die standing first!”

  Fire flickered out from the Wizard-forged whip handle again.

  “I don’t have it in me to send another to the Cold Death,” I told her. To walk Between required a very specific Gift. Without it, anyone left Between froze and suffocated, dying slowly as a place utterly inimical to life sucked them dry.

  That was the Cold Death. I’d taken one man to it to save the city. I wouldn’t condemn another one to it if I had a choice.

  Gráinne charged. I struck, Fire flashing across the room in a blow she didn’t even try to dodge. The blast burnt through her chest and throat, flinging her backward as I burnt away her heart and ribcage.

  She was dead before she hit the wall.

  Inga looked like crap. Theino had taken a couple of solid hits and was poking delicately at his right tusk, which appeared to be about half-missing.

  Mary, as usual, looked gorgeous. Maybe a bit sweaty. People, even fae, weren’t very good at shooting someone whose size changed at random.

  “Someone will have called the police,” my girlfriend noted. “Even if the management knows who they work for, they can’t keep the staff from calling the cops when they hear gunfire. This floor is not that well sealed for sound.”

  “Listen,” Theino told her in response. Mary looked at him in surprise, and the goblin held his finger to his lips.

  All I could hear was silence. Not even the mechanical noise of the hotel—or the elevator shaft less than twenty feet from us.

  “They may not have been sealed with mortal means, but the place is silenced by magic and Power,” he told us. “The door may be a bigger problem. We need someone with illusions.”

  “Shove it back up for now,” I told him. “Then call Robert. He’s with Talus; one or both of them should be in good enough shape to make their way here.”

  I turned back to Inga as the goblin went back over to the door.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said with a pained smile. “Going to be is the critical phrase, though, Jason. I’m going to need a few hours and a couple of really good steaks.”

  “Chernenkov is still on her way,” I told her.

  “You have to catch her,” Inga told me. “Hell, you need to take her alive, from what the Queen told me. You’ve got those iron spikes?”

  I tapped my coat.

  “Yes.”

  “One will hurt her. Two will slow her down, a lot. Three will trap her in place, rob her of her ability to jump through shadows. Once you’ve pinned her, you can capture her as easily as kill her. Kill the shadow, the Pouka won’t have much left.”

  I looked at Theino and Mary. One of the advantages of my ability to identify supernaturals was that I could tell when one of us was hurting. Theino was in far worse shape than he was pretending. At a guess, he’d taken at least one bullet he was trying to hide.

  “Mary, stay with Theino and Inga,” I told her. “There’s got to be a first aid kit around here somewhere; see what you can do about their injuries.”

  “I’m not…”

  “Were you or were you not shot?” I interrupted the goblin roughly. “I’m not blind, Speaker to Outsiders.”

  The formal title had the impact I hoped. He bowed his head and shifted slightly, revealing where blood was slowly oozing out through his vest.

  “I will heal,” he noted.

  “But you’re useless to me now,” I told him. “I want the three of you alive, people. I’ll deal with Chernenkov.”

  I wasn’t sure I could.

  But on the other hand, I’d just defeated an Unseelie Noble. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, either, no matter what help I had.

  31

  Fortunately for the sensibilities of the hotel staff, the armory the Masked Lords had been maintaining also included several changes of clothes, one of which fit me.

  Clad in fresh jeans and sleeveless vest, I cleaned my coat and threw my “battle ensemble” back together. I even found some extra magazines of cold iron that would fit my Jericho, reloading the pistol and tucking the spare mags in my coat.

  By then, Theino had managed to call in help and Mary had bandaged up his and Inga’s wounds. The safehouse looked more like the triage area of a war zone, with wounded being treated on the tables and the dead shoved in a corner, but my sympathy for the Masked Lords’ minions was…limited.

  Inga waved me over as I started to leave, coughing up a small amount of blood as she did.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

  “I’ve had worse,” she told me. “Listen, Jason. You need to be careful. There’s more going on here than I think either of us knows.”

  “Well, Chernenkov is Andrell’s lover, and I’m pretty sure Andrell is a Masked Lord and they’re trying to take Calgary as their new base,” I replied. “I’m not sure what else could make things more complicated.”

  She laughed, then coughed up more blood.

  “There are a few things,” she admitted. “Secrets I was sworn not to betray. I have other oaths as well, though. Jason…if the Masked Lords realize what you are, they will move hell and earth to hunt you down. You have to stop Chernenkov…but you can’t fight Andrell. You have to leave him to the Hunt.”

  “Not least because Andrell would eat me alive with one hand tied behind his back,” I replied. But there was something else, something she wasn’t telling me.

  Inga winced.

  “I…I can’t say more,” she replied. “But promise me, Jason. She’ll run to him—and you can’t fight him. You can’t. The consequences…”

  “I’m not planning on fighting a Fae Lord, Inga,” I told her. “But I can’t let Chernenkov get away. Too many have died. Too much blood, too much bullshit.”

  Inga winced, closing her eyes as Mary put iodine on one of her injuries.

  “I know. Do…do what you must, my young friend,” she told me, her eyes still closed. “Just know that…you can’t come back from what comes next.”

  With those ominous words echoing in my ears, I left the safehouse. The elevator delivered me smoothly to the main floor, where the calm normality of the lobby confirmed our assessment of the soundproofing on the thirteenth floor.

  No one here was aware there’d been a gunfight upstairs. I couldn’t help but shake my head as I walked out into the parking let, shielding my eyes as I looked up at the setting sun.

  Chernenkov had fled by shadow, but she couldn’t go far or fast doing that. As I understood it, that was more draining for her than stepping Between was for a Hunter like myself. She hadn’t grabbed the helicopter she’d arrived in, Talus’s people would be dealing with that right now, but she’d almost certainly have a car somewhere.

  I found a bench next to the parking lot entrance and began to study the cars coming in. The trickiest part to all of this would be to avoid public notice…but I had a plan for that, too.

  I hated to call someone’s else’s misfortune our good luck, but there had apparently been a major accident on Deerfoot Trail, the major arterial highway carrying traffic from the southeast of the city to the northeast.

  That had bought us the time we needed to deal with the safehouse while Chernenkov was, quite literally, stuck in traffic. Of course, that had left my companions wounded and drained more of my own resources than I’d prefer, but what choice had we had?

  Also, I felt significantly less drained than I would have expected. I’d gone toe-to-toe with an Unseelie Noble, conjured some of the most powerful combat magics I’d ever wielded…but I felt as fresh as if I hadn’t fought her.

  That was weird, to put it mildly. It was also helpful, as it meant that I actually might stand a chance against Chernenkov when she arrived.

  I had no idea what she was driving, so I found myself checking each car as it pulled into the lot. The biggest potential problem would be if Chernenkov had somehow been warned that we’d assaulted the hotel safehouse.

  If she had, this was going to be
a long, pointless wait.

  Fortunately, it appeared that either she’d lost her phone or no one had managed to send a warning. I’d been outside for about fifteen minutes when I spotted her. She was driving a black coupe, something on the cheaper end of sporty, and was slowing down to enter the parking lot when she spotted me.

  I half-expected her to try and run me over. Or pull out a gun and go for a drive-by.

  What I was not expecting was for her to slam on the handbrake, pull a perfect bootlegger’s turn into the other lane, and floor it in the opposite direction.

  There was a limit to what I could do in public, but I started running after her as I assessed my options. A blip Between while no one was looking—I hoped—helped me keep up as she twisted the car around the traffic heading toward Deerfoot.

  Even with fae reflexes, she was going too fast to adjust for the stack of stopped vehicles when she flung the car toward the on-ramp. Deerfoot southbound was as clogged as the road she’d been stuck on coming north, and the on-ramp was a solid mass of cars.

  She hit at least three before the coupe came to a complete halt, smashing vehicles into each other as she created one of the worst multi-car pileups I’d ever seen.

  The shouting and honking had barely started before Chernenkov was out of the car and running. Another quick jump Between and I was after her as we pulled away from humans into a green space of scrub and dirt.

  Apparently, Chernenkov was much less certain about how a fight between us would go a third time.

  The saying I’d heard before, with reference to ships more than anything else, was that a stern chase was a long chase. I could jump Between faster than Chernenkov could jump between shadows, but she was running and I was pursuing.

  And there was only so much disappearing and reappearing either of us could do. There were humans around, even if we started in a green space. Even running after each other was almost guaranteed to get calls into the police.