CHILD of the HUNT

by Christopher Golden

  Roland only hung his head once more, soft brown eyes downcast. “I’ve done all I can,” he said. “However I can help you, I will. But I am as much a captive here, in my way, as you are. I ran away, don’t you understand? I wanted to know what kind of life the lightworlders led.”

  “Then the actors found you,” Willow said. “The people from the Renaissance Faire?”

  Roland nodded. “They were so nice at first. My friends. But they were never my friends. It was no accident that they found me. They’re witches and warlocks . . . and worse, some of them. There’s power in me. Not that I can use, not in any real way, except just to live. But having me around seemed to increase whatever magic they used.”

  “A kind of supernatural battery,” Giles muttered, fascinated. He’d never heard of anything like it, but it seemed eminently plausible. “Since you are a homunculus, you’re built to contain things, a vessel of sorts, yes? You must have accumulated magic from traveling with the Hunt all these years, a kind of reserve. It’s only a theory of course, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”

  Xander was staring at him. “Could you stay on the issue, here?” he said desperately.

  “Yes, sorry,” Giles muttered, and looked back to Roland, whose face was etched with pain and regret. “What is it?” he asked. “I’m sorry, have I said something . . .”

  He let his words trail off. Giles had been tactless, and he knew it.

  “A hamunkli?” Roland asked, softly. “I . . . I never knew there was a word for what I am. Are there . . . others like me?”

  There was a bit of hope in the boy’s eyes, and Giles couldn’t bring himself to crush that hope.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really know how you came to be. You have a soul, or spirit of some kind, yet no human parents, at least not in the sense of natural biology.”

  “I don’t really understand it either,” Roland admitted, uncomfortably shifting his weight. “My mother . . . gave part of herself, some of her life. Some of her dreams, my father said. He gave some of his own dreams and combined them, and then he put them in me.”

  “Your mother was Lucy Hanover?” Willow asked gently.

  “I never knew her,” Roland said.

  “She was a Slayer, like Buffy,” Willow explained.

  “Just tell everyone, Will,” Xander said, exasperated, and nodded toward Brian Anderson.

  “Ignore me,” Brian said. “I just want to get out of here. I’d like to get Treasure out of here, too. I mean Connie. Connie DeMarco. She rides with them now.”

  Roland sighed. “Treasure is to be my wife. Father has decreed it. He is the king and so it shall be. Upon our return to the Lodge, there will be a wedding. One day she will be Queen of the Hunt. My father would never let her go. He will never set any of you free. It just isn’t done,” Roland said regretfully.

  “Then we’ll free ourselves,” Xander said.

  Giles watched the prince of the Hunt carefully. Saw the tiny smile that played at the edges of Roland’s lips.

  “Nothing would make me happier,” Roland said.

  Then he turned and walked away, leaving them to whisper among themselves a dozen ideas for an escape attempt, none of which seemed remotely feasible. The camp was controlled chaos, but a chaos that contained dozens of beasts and men and supernatural beings whose only talent, only purpose, and only joy was hunting and killing their prey.

  This is insane, Giles thought. A primitive asylum of caprice and bloodlust. Several horses snorted fire where they grazed nearby. Hounds bayed. Huntsmen grunted and roared battle cries. The fires crackled. The dark faerie cackled madly and capered, staging violent battles with one another that took them in a horde back and forth across the clearing.

  Still, he would not give up. Somehow, they would find a way out.

  The filthy, bearded Huntsman was called Lars. His stomach rumbling, Lars tore barely cooked flesh off a boar’s leg with his teeth. He grunted, but was otherwise silent. The horn had been blown, a signal. The final Hunt in this place would commence soon, but it wasn’t just the Hunt this time. No, there was vengeance to be had. Murder to be committed for a purpose. A novel event, to be sure. He looked forward to it.

  He sat by the fire, enjoying the gristly meat, the way the flesh slid off the bone, the way bits of muscle hung on and had to be torn away. It was almost as pleasurable as the Hunt itself. A sound off in the trees distracted him, the snapping of a branch. Lars paused in his chewing. Glanced into the woods.

  A smelly little dark faerie tore the boar’s leg from his hands and scurried off toward the trees. Little vermin, he thought angrily. Distract him and steal his food. They were doing it all the time.

  Lars shouted at the vicious green rodent to stop, to bring back his dinner, but the faerie ran into the forest where two others joined it. With a war cry, Lars snatched the battle axe from his belt and lurched into the forest after them, swinging toward the ground, but never even coming close to catching them. They moved swiftly through the dense tangle of undergrowth and into the trees, and then were gone, too fast for Lars.

  Dejected, Lars sighed, and turned to walk back to the clearing. His eyes glowed red in the dark, and he reminded himself that he didn’t really have to eat. He’d died centuries ago, by any human concept of the word. It was part of the ritual, part of the Hunt. But it was the part he liked best. Lars hated to miss dinner.

  Another branch snapped off to his right. Lars lifted the axe, thinking the faerie had come back. Something moved behind him. Lars turned, and someone clubbed him in the face, shattering his nose and cracking his skull. The club slammed down on his head again and again, but Lars kept trying to rise, trying to lift his axe. The Erl King had promised him that once he joined the Hunt, he would hunt forever.

  Then the club became a spear, its pointed end slammed through his chest and pure, oily, roiling darkness came out in a thick mist, like blood on the water.

  Lars would never hunt again.

  Buffy hefted the axe for weight, nodded grimly, then relieved the Huntsman of his dagger as well. Or what was left of the Huntsman. The body had collapsed, almost caving in on itself to become a dry husk. The dark mist that came out of him floated up into trees and joined the seething, almost living darkness there, like mercury flowing together.

  “Okay, that’s creepy,” Buffy said to herself.

  But quietly.

  She wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.

  Moments later she stood at the edge of the clearing, behind a huge tree, and scanned the area, trying to decide on her first move. Too many Huntsmen. Too many dark faerie. Too many hounds. Even the big deer looked dangerous. She spotted the Erl King. He’d mounted his horse and was riding across the clearing toward a girl Buffy’s age who seemed relatively normal except for her clothes. Not far away, Roland was running his hands over the mane of a black, fire-eyed stallion. He seemed to be whispering to it. Like the teenaged girl, Roland was dressed, now, like the Huntsmen, in leather and fur. But nothing so elegant as those words implied. These garments looked handmade, roughly tanned and sewn.

  A slave again, Buffy thought. Poor guy.

  Then she saw the cage. Her heart leaped as she realized Giles, Willow, and Xander were alive. But that was just the first step. The easy part. The hard part was keeping them that way. As stealthily as she was able, Buffy made her way through the trees around the clearing.

  As she took another step forward, something crunched beneath her foot. She looked down, grimacing, at the crushed body of a dark faerie. After a second’s hesitation, she reached down and smeared some of the creature’s fluids on her clothes and face in an effort to mask her scent. She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the stench, like skunk spray, only worse.

  She passed the horses where they were grazing in front of a stand of trees, and several of them started snorting and stamping. Buffy caught her breath and froze behind a tree trunk, waiting for the shouts of discovery. Nothing happened.

  Then she crept fowa
rd, abandoning the safety of the trees and began to run.

  One of the hounds started to bay, and she figured this time the jig was up.

  There was nothing to do but go forward. If she stood out in the open like this, she would be noticed. But as she jogged on, the beast calmed and the moment passed.

  She reached a clump of bushes and counted to one hundred before sprinting across the few feet to the back of the cage.

  “Buffy!” Willow said in a hoarse whisper.

  They were all there, with a guy she didn’t recognize. Yeow. Pale face, white hair . . . for a split-second she almost thought it was Spike, a vampire who’d tried more than once to kill them all. Then she realized he was a human. A terrified human.

  Willow looked as though she’d been crying, streaks on her grimy face. Xander had a big bruise on his forehead. Giles seemed supremely relieved. They were all bruised and bloody, but appeared otherwise intact. She glanced at the guy she didn’t know, wondering how much she should say in front of him. Then she realized how stupid that thought was.

  He was here. He knew the world wasn’t what he’d thought it was.

  “Buffy, thank God,” Giles whispered.

  “What happened to everyone else they captured?” Buffy asked in a low voice. “I don’t see any other prisoners but you guys.”

  “The others were all taken through that mist,” Willow explained, and Buffy looked over at the black fog that enshrouded the east end of the clearing. “It leads to wherever they come from, I guess. They call it the Lodge.”

  The guy Buffy didn’t recognize came a bit closer to the bars. “I’m Brian.”

  “Buffy.”

  “There were a few others who were taken as servants, like me,” he said. “Treasure . . . I mean, Connie, she joined the Hunt.”

  Connie DeMarco? Buffy blinked in surprise. That must have been the girl she’d seen.

  “Why?”

  He shook his head, his haunted eyes drifting away. “I don’t know. They told us if we swore our loyalty, we could ride with them. That we wouldn’t be prisoners.” He moved his shoulders and sighed raggedly. “I figured out there, in here, what’s the difference?”

  Buffy agreed. She didn’t understand how anyone could willingly join, could want to be a part of the Wild Hunt. But then she thought about Billy Fordham and his loser friends, all of whom had wanted to be vampires, and some had died for that fantasy.

  “But you’re a slave,” she said. “Right? And she’s a Hunter.” And if slavery was the other alternative, maybe she could understand Connie’s choice a little bit.

  “Yeah.” He looked hard at Buffy. “Listen, there were other people in here with me and Connie at first. But they . . . they didn’t make it. The Erl King told us we’re only allowed one mistake, and they already made theirs.”

  “Then we won’t make any,” Buffy said grimly, pushing her hair away from her eyes.

  “Have you got anything you can use to get us out of here?” Giles asked her.

  “I could break you out myself, I think,” she said quickly, eyeing the bamboo. “But it’s gonna make a lot of noise. If I can create some kind of distraction . . .”

  Giles frowned. “You must be careful. The odds are too great. The Huntsmen and the Erl King are bad enough, but with the hounds and the dark faerie, you might as well be fighting an army.”

  “I’ll stay clear of them,” Buffy said, and pulled out the dagger she’d stolen from the Hunter she’d destroyed. She handed it through the bars to Giles. “Use this to break the lock or even cut through the bars. I’ll draw them away, and then . . .”

  “Buffy, what is it?” Willow asked.

  The Slayer let out a long breath as she realized her plan wasn’t going to work. “Nothing. It just occurred to me that I’ve got to wait until Roland is out of the center of the clearing. Do they put him in here with you?”

  “What, the little dirt prince?” Xander asked, almost under his breath. “Sorry, Buff. He’s one of them. Let’s concentrate on getting the actual humans out and let the evil fairy tale creatures fend for themselves, okay?”

  Buffy stared at him, then glanced at Willow, who looked away. Giles adjusted the way his glasses sat on the bridge of his nose.

  “It’s a long story, Buffy,” he said, “but Roland is the Erl King’s son. It’s only thanks to him that we weren’t also taken to the Lodge. He had run away, and now . . .”

  “Now they’ve taken him back,” Buffy finished for him. “So he’s still a prisoner, family or not, right?”

  “Well, it’s clear he’d rather be somewhere else, but he seems to be staying of his own free will. Though it’s obvious there is some fear involved in that decision,” Giles explained.

  “Typical teenager,” Xander said dismissively. “Parents are a little tough, so take off. Then the real world turns out to be tougher than you think and, hey, the parents don’t seem so bad.”

  “The real world is tougher than you think,” Brian said. He seemed to have folded in on himself. This discussion was personal for him, that much was obvious. Then Buffy realized who he was. Brian Anderson. The runaway.

  “Sometimes Xander talks without putting much thought into it,” Buffy told Brian, her tone gentle. “Sometimes he forgets who he’s talking to. I left for a while, too. But this isn’t like my life, or your life. Roland’s father is evil for real, not just in his head. I’m not leaving here without hearing from him that he wants to stay.”

  Giles ran a hand through his hair, winced as he touched a bruise he had obviously forgotten. “I’m not certain that’s at all wise,” he said. “Trying to get to Roland could cost us all our lives, yours included, Buffy.”

  “Just be ready for my distraction,” she said, and faded back into the trees.

  When she was back on the south side of the clearing, as far away from the cage as she could get, Buffy surveyed the area once more. She noted the locations of the Huntsmen, the hounds, Roland, and the Erl King.

  She thought about going deeper into the woods and shouting, drawing their attention, running through the trees. Imagined herself maybe taking one of the horses. That might work, she thought. She’d need one to outrun them. But she had no idea if the horses would let her ride, or try to throw her. Plus, that plan didn’t leave any room for her to talk to Roland.

  To create a distraction and get to Roland, Buffy thought, there’s really only one possible course of action. Buffy braced herself, took a deep breath, crouched low, and ran into the clearing with the axe clutched in her right hand. She leaped over an exposed root and paused behind a stone formation that jutted from the earth.

  Three Huntsmen were cleaning viscera from their weapons, grunting to each other as they sat around a flickering fire only a few yards away. Buffy headed directly for them. A hound spotted her and started toward her, growling loudly. She spooked a buck as she passed it, and the animal quickly moved away from her.

  Buffy ignored the hound.

  She was ten feet from the Hunters when the hound’s growls attracted their attention. Then they saw her. All three of them stood at once, weapons rising. Buffy stopped, planted her feet, held the axe above her head with both hands, and threw it. The double-bladed battle axe spun through the air and buried itself in the chest of a dark elfin Huntsman with a splinter of bone and a blast of black mist that shot from its chest cavity, with a sickening hiss.

  The Hunter went down. The other two glanced at their dead comrade with wide eyes, as if Buffy was going to wait for them to comment on what she’d just done. The Slayer didn’t wait. She pressed the attack. Even as one of the Huntsmen raised a wicked-looking sword, its blade flickering in the firelight, Buffy spun, kicked the sword from his hand and into the dirt. Another swift kick, directly to the gut, and the Huntsman fell back into the fire and stayed there, screaming. The blaze ate him like a voracious beast, consuming him instantly, leather and fur bursting into flames along with his hair and scraggly beard. Fire exploded from his eyes, and then from the empty s
ockets black mist spurted as though from a wound.

  “Ick,” Buffy muttered.

  It was his screams that finally got the camp in motion.

  The third Hunter was a woman she’d noticed before, bald head and talismans dangling from her many piercings like a horrible S&M Christmas tree. Already Buffy heard the pounding of hooves, heard shouting. The bald woman lifted her hand and Buffy’s eyes widened as she saw the weapon there. It was a Swiss morningstar mace, something Giles had shown her only in books. A long metal shaft with a chain at one end, and attached to the chain a huge spiked metal ball.

  The woman’s eyes blazed as she began to swing the ball on the end of the chain. No fancy kicks, no flips, nothing from a distance would work, Buffy knew. Before the Huntress could even aim an attack on Buffy, the Slayer moved in close. She drove the fingers of her right hand into the bald woman’s throat, crushing her larynx. The Hunter faltered, tried to bring the morningstar down on Buffy’s head. The Slayer grabbed her left arm, ducked behind her, breaking the arm, then reached up and grabbed the hand that held the mace.

  With the chain that held the spiked ball to the metal shaft, Buffy broke her neck. Black mist escaped from her mouth.

  Hooves pounded earth. Buffy glanced up, saw a Hunter bearing down on her with a sword raised to hack at her. She swung the morningstar, whipped it around the blade as the Huntsman passed by and the sword was pulled from his hand.

  Buffy dropped the morningstar, lifted the heavy, gleaming sword, and turned to face the rush of Huntsmen moving toward her. The dark faerie were there as well, but only a few of them. The others hung back, laughing madly. The Huntsmen paused as three hounds rushed through their ranks to attack Buffy.

  She turned and ran. Three of them at once would be a deadly distraction.

  The girl was behind her. Connie DeMarco. Treasure, Brian had called her. She was on a horse, and she had a sword. But she wasn’t really one of them, not yet. She was still alive. Buffy wasn’t about to kill her. But maybe that meant Connie was also not quite ready to kill indiscriminately.