The Iron Hunt

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “No,” I said firmly. “I do not.”

  Suwanai hesitated, studying my eyes. I let him. I had not killed anyone in Seattle. Not yet. Not anyone human, at least.

  After a moment, he inclined his head. “If we have any more questions . . .”

  “Of course,” Grant said gently, ever the upstanding citizen. The detective nodded, still frowning, rubbing the bridge of his nose as though the gesture comforted—or pained— him. He did not look back as he pushed open the kitchen doors, but McCowan did. Just once, at me. A furrow edged between his eyebrows. I met his gaze, unblinking, and after a moment he ducked his head and let the doors swing shut behind him.

  I remained very still, afraid they would come back—but when they did not, I slowly, carefully, released my breath. Grant limped near, wrapping his arm around my waist. He drew me back against his chest. I stayed there, grateful.

  “This is all wrong,” I said quietly. “Not just the murder, but the fact a dead man had my name.”

  “And that the police found you here,” Grant replied.

  We both looked at Rex. He stared back, holding up his tanned, scarred hands. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You must know something.”

  “No way. I’m not in the loop anymore.”

  “You’re all in the loop,” I muttered. “I don’t care how dried up your umbilical cord is.”

  Rex stared at me like I was viler than a splat of diarrhea. “You just don’t care, period. You’re still looking for an excuse to kill me, Hunter.”

  “I don’t need an excuse.” I tugged sharply on my gloves. Mary stared, but I no longer cared if she saw my tattoos.

  Rex, despite his bravado, stepped back. Grant grabbed my arm. “No time, Maxine.”

  I did not relax. “I need to find out what Badelt wanted, why he had my name.” I hesitated, thinking hard. “He was in that alley for a reason.”

  A man who worked for himself would not waste his time in a part of town that had no good bars, entertainment, or restaurants only a poor university student could love. It had rained last night, too—a hard, cold rain that had pounded most of the garden into a limp green shag of grass and leaves. Not good weather for walking the street just for the fun of it.

  Grant seemed to read my mind. “A lot of homeless live on University Ave. Someone might have seen Badelt. Or we could track down his office first, look for answers there.”

  That was the smart thing to do, but I needed air, some time alone. My skin still crawled, and not just because of the boys. “I’ll head down to the university. You make the call. No one’s going to tell you much, though. Confidentiality issues.” Not unless Grant went in person. His special brand of persuasion did not work over the phone.

  “It wouldn’t have been one of us,” Rex chimed in, and I knew what he was really saying. No demon, no zombie, would hire a private investigator to hunt me. It would be like paying money to find Mount Everest. If Mount Everest had teeth and claws and could eat people.

  Which meant someone human wanted to find me.

  Or maybe I had already been found.

  I thought about my mother. Her lessons. She had taught me not to keep friends, to avoid roots. Born a loner, trained to be one. Safer that way, for everyone. No home but the boys.

  But here I was. Hunter and hunted. With friends. A home and roots. My taste of the forbidden fruit. And I could never return to what was, what had always been— what should have been. I knew the difference now. I was too weak to give it up.

  I stood on my toes, kissed Grant hard on the mouth—and glanced over his shoulder from Rex to Mary, who still watched us, eyes narrowed. Withered mouth creased into a frown.

  “I’m sorry about your jar,” I said to her, and she hitched up her shoulders, the crease between her eyes deepening.

  “Go with Gabriel,” she whispered. “Gabriel’s hounds will guide you.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but Grant gave her a sharp look. A chill swept through me. My stomach felt odd. I had the terrible feeling I had just been thrust upon the proverbial crossroad, and had stumbled blindly onto a path that fairy tales warned about, the hard kind that showed the way to an enchanted castle, a forest of brambles, quicksand, and pits full of hungry dragons. A path that led to either death or glory. Neither of which interested me.

  I had seen enough death. I had suffered glory.

  Now I just wanted to be left alone.

  CHAPTER 2

  EVERY now and then while I was growing up, my mother would turn down the radio, and say, “There’s one thing you need to know about demons, baby. It may keep you alive.”

  I would listen, even though I knew what was coming. I loved listening to my mother. She tried hard, even though our lives were frightening, to control the horror. To feed it to me in bits and pieces so that I could sleep at night and not dread the next forty-odd years of my life. And though she left some things out, she managed to tell me enough, in her own way, to keep me going.

  My mother was a lady. And while she almost never used foul language, when she shut off the music, that was the one time she always broke her rule.

  “Demons are bad motherfuckers,” my mother would say. “And as such, must be handled with care. Ourselves included.”

  I drove the Mustang in the rain. It was only late afternoon, but the clouds were so thick and dark with storm, the headlights from opposing traffic burned like lighthouse beacons in my newly sensitive eyes. I rubbed them, remembering pain. I could still taste my blood.

  Seattle in winter was an awful place to be. Always wet, hardly a glimpse of the sun except on rare days when it burned briefly free and rained down rays of precious ghostly light; or at night, when clouds slivered and stars glittered, and the moon, when it rose, glowed.

  The only good thing about the weather was that it suited my wardrobe: long sleeves, high necks, jeans, and gloves. I never showed skin. Nothing but my face, and even that was a concession to vanity. My face, from the top of my neck to my hairline: the only part of my body not covered in tattoos. Part of my deal with the boys, the same deal generations of my ancestors had made. Our way of blending in with society. An illusion of normality.

  I stayed under the speed limit. The Mustang was a target for traffic cops: red and gleaming like Snow White’s poison apple. Classic sixties fastback, with a backseat custom-designed to be more comfortable for the boys. Leather buckets, retrofitted stereo, chrome detailing. An engine with thunder in its veins. Very sharp. I loved my car.

  Teddy bears filled the back, most of them dismembered. Empty bags from various fast-food joints covered the floor, along with a sack of nails, bolts, and screws. Snack food. Tasty, I had been told, with jalapeño sauce and fries.

  Steve Perry wailed on the radio. I turned down the volume, and the rhythmic beat of the windshield wipers took over. I was still in the warehouse district, a crumbling neighborhood of pale concrete, shattered sidewalks, and broken windows. Too much chain link. I had lived here almost two months and seen businesses come and go— artsy types, mostly. Cheap rent. Bare-bones revival and decay. The Coop, Grant’s homeless shelter, was one of the few living fixtures in this fringe area of Seattle’s downtown.

  Zee tugged on my skin as I drove. All the boys did. Felt like bits of my body trying to peel away. Not a good sign. Like I needed another. I touched my nose, rubbing the outer edge of my left eye. My heart beat faster. I saw words in my head, my mother’s neat script. She had kept journals. Big ones, leather-bound, with thick heavy paper that still smelled like incense and rosewater. I hauled them around in the Mustang for five years after she died. Now they sat in a carved wooden chest on the wooden floor of a warehouse apartment.

  I knew every word. Every syllable and curve. I could still feel the imprint of her fingers through the indents of ink on the stiff pages, and the grooves—sometimes, when I was very nostalgic—felt sacred. As though her soul resided in paper.

  I recalled that my mother wrote about pain. Odd, unordinary
aches. She kept copious notes. It was probably time I did the same. Not for posterity, but survival. One day someone else would need to learn from my experiences. Written words would be my only voice after I was murdered. The only thing I could pass on, besides the boys.

  Such as this fact: My mother suffered only one bloody nose in her entire life. Accompanied by temporary blindness, sharp pain in her eyes.

  She wrote that down, made a point of it. A separate chapter. Because afterward, a lot of people died. Afterward, she almost died.

  Unfortunately, except for those small tidbits, the rest of the story was lost. She had gotten rid of it, ripped the pages out. Before I was born, I suppose.

  But not everything. One line, just before the break in her discourse. Like a ticking bomb found under an airplane seat, or cold laughter when you thought you were alone.

  The veil opened, wrote my mother. The veil opened, and something slipped through.

  SOMETHING always slipped through.

  No good explanation. Just that long ago, demons lived upon the earth. Many demons. They killed and consumed, and there was a war. People fought back. Humans. Others who were not human. They built a prison out of air, a prison made of layers and rings and boundaries, and they placed the demons inside, separating them by strength and viciousness and intelligence.

  And then they sealed the demons up. Forever.

  Except, nothing lasted forever. Not even the boys, though they had spent the past ten thousand years giving it their best shot.

  Someone must have figured as much. Someone who could make a difference. Someone who created the Wardens, men and women with the speed and power to guard this world against a break in the prison veil. Humans, constructed to fight demons.

  Humans, destined to save the world.

  But the Wardens had not survived, either. They did not have the boys.

  Leaving me. The last.

  The women in my family had always been the last.

  And the veil had opened.

  Again.

  HERE was another truth: I had spent my entire life on the road. I never went to school. My mother taught me, and based on some things I had seen over the years, I would say she did a pretty good job. We always hit the bookstores and libraries in every city and small town, and I learned to tell a lot about a place by the kinds of books that were carried, or the attention given a library. The best I had ever seen was in New York City. The worst in Paoli, Indiana.

  Seattle was not so bad. But the bookstores downtown cared more about literary fiction than commercial reads, and that was indicative, I thought, of the social atmosphere. Yuppie, a little too preoccupied with what other people thought, and only superficially friendly.

  The number of homeless kids was another strike against the city. University Avenue was the worst. Maybe not as bad as Rio de Janeiro, but for the United States, it was up there. And two hours after leaving the Coop—two hours spent walking the streets in the rain, trying to uncover answers—I found myself in a dark alley off the Ave, near the sprawling Gothic splendor of the University of Washington, a child huddled near my feet.

  A lot of children. Rain had driven them into doorways, under tattered awnings, or here, in alleys, under cardboard and garbage bags. I smelled dog, and saw a ruffed brown tail sticking out from under a slicker, alongside gangling limbs and pierced noses and glittering eyes. Tattoos rocked the shadows. Not mine. My clothes still covered me from neck to toe, my fingers snug in my gloves.

  I had ten minutes left. Sunset was coming. I could feel it on my skin. Streetlights were already on, sour fluorescent lines seeping into the alley. Storm clouds had not abated, and were so low and thick with shadow and rain and fog, it could have already been night.

  I blinked rain from my eyelashes and crouched. Peered into a box shoved tight against the Dumpster, and found a pair of eyes like snow and stone: white and gray, framed in black eyeliner. Boy. Hardly fourteen. Not old enough to grow more than a weak black fuzz on the tip of his chin. He wore a thick coat and jeans with holes in the knees.

  His aura was clean. No demon inside his soul. Not a zombie. Just messed up, all regular.

  “Hey,” I said gently, wishing I had a photo of Badelt. One taken while he was alive. “I’d like to ask some questions, if that’s all right.”

  The boy had sharp eyes. Old as dirt. He studied me, and I held still, unblinking, counting seconds as my skin tingled and tugged. Sun going down. Somewhere, beyond the dark clouds.

  “You’re not a cop,” said the boy quietly.

  “Kid,” I replied carefully, “the last thing I am is a cop. But I do need information. A man was murdered around here last night. His name was Brian Badelt. White hair, long face.”

  Just five blocks away. Yellow police tape still in place, and a cruiser parked at the entrance. Forensics team not done yet, apparently. I had walked past, collar pulled up, and gotten a quick look—just as any curious passerby might. Seen nothing except slick concrete and shadows, and the memory of a dead man’s face. No answers in that. Nothing that could help me understand why he had my name, or whether he was looking for me. And if so, why that search had brought him here.

  I wanted to know if he died because of that search. Because of me.

  Maybe the crime-scene investigators already had the answers. Or not. Over the past two hours, I had learned that police had already approached most of the transients living on this street. Based on the almost nonexistent levels of cooperation I had received, I doubted Suwanai, McCowan, or their crew had discovered much. Not unless they played dirty, something I was unprepared to do. Adults and kids had enough problems, homeless or not.

  But I saw something in the boy’s eyes. Gave me a feeling the others had not. He had a softer gaze. Like the streets had not quite driven the sweetness from him. Made my heart hurt. Made me want to do something I should not.

  “I saw him,” whispered the boy, and all around us, eyes slit open, glints of cold steel in wet shadow. His admission surprised me more than it should have. So much that I had to take a moment and replay those words in my head, testing them for what I thought he had said. I saw him. I saw, I saw.

  My skin prickled. My skin moved. I rocked back on my heels and wanted to close my eyes and hug the boy, hold my breath in case he turned to smoke and disappeared. “What did you see?”

  He hesitated, and though tucked at the back of the box, I was certain he felt the other children staring. All of them, listening.

  Plastic rattled. Feet shuffled. His gaze flicked past my shoulder. I glanced behind and found a young woman. She had skin the color of a ghost, pale and flawless, with studs running the rims of her ears, in her nose, inside her tongue. Black eyes, black spiked hair dripping with rain. Canvas fatigues hugged her body. Brass knuckles flashed. So did the edge of a blade. Tough chick. Nice style.

  I turned my back and peered into the box. I had minutes at most. No time for a pissing contest. Not with a kid.

  “Help me, and I’ll help you,” I told the boy. Rain seeped down my collar, against my skin. I did not feel it. The water absorbed too quickly into my tattoos. Faster now. Heat spread beneath my turtleneck and jacket, down my stomach across my legs. My fingers burned.

  The boy stared, gaze torn, cheeks hollow. Like a ghost, biting the edge of living; unseen, unknown, unsure. Something hard tapped my skull. Brass knuckles. I ignored the girl and continued watching the boy in the box. He knew something more than just the murder. I could see it in his eyes. He knew.

  The girl hit me again. I felt no pain, just the impact against my shoulder, which sent me down, gloved palms slamming into wet cement. If I were only human, she might have broken something with that blow. Rain ran into my mouth and eyes. I licked my lips.

  “Stop asking questions,” hissed the girl, leaning near. “Or you’ll stop breathing.”

  I turned my head and looked into her eyes. Beyond the girl, at the alley mouth, cars passed in the pounding rain, headlights shining. Men and women appeared flee
tingly, walking fast with hands full of backpacks and umbrellas, heads bowed. See no evil. Suffer none at all. Such a thin veneer, between there and here. So easy to cast illusions. Especially when people were afraid to see the truth.

  I could see the truth in the girl’s eyes. She was scared, but serious. She would hurt me if I did not walk away. She would make life difficult. Made me wonder if something similar had happened to Badelt. I wondered, too, what she would do to the boy for talking. What someone else would do.

  I blinked, and the girl flashed her teeth. Then her knife. It was very small, not much longer than her palm. Hardly a toothpick. She saw me studying the weapon and smiled, like she had won.

  Inside me, the sun. Going, almost gone. No time. Not for niceties. No time to be kind.

  I grabbed the knife. Snatched a fistful of blade and it punctured my leather glove. Steel scraped my tattooed palm and made a terrible sound. The knife snapped. Hit the cement between us, but the rain drowned the clatter, and the alley was dark.

  The girl saw, though. She saw and stared, and I grabbed the back of her jacket, moving fast, marching her to the mouth of the alley. She tried to fight me. Slammed my ribs with her brass knuckles. Made an impact like a baby’s kiss. I dragged her to the sidewalk and rain ran down my face. My skin hissed. Sunset. The sun.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked the girl harshly. “Who has you scared?”

  “Fuck off,” she snarled, and grabbed my breast, fingers digging in and twisting. I felt no pain, but it shocked me. It was a surprisingly dirty tactic for a kid so young. Maybe one that had been used on her. The possibility made me sick.

  “I can help you,” I said, but she spat on me, a big, fat goober on my jacket, and that was it. No more time. “Fine. Walk away. Don’t look back.”

  She hesitated longer than she should have. Something to lose, something driving her. I wished I had time to ask. I wished I had a choice, but I could not stay here and keep an eye on the boy. I could not risk the girl continuing to engage me. Not now.

  I squeezed my fingers until she cried out, and forced myself to hold on, making certain she got the message.