CHILD of the HUNT

by Christopher Golden

  “What happened to your arm?” she asked anxiously.

  “I gave blood.” He shrugged. “Didn’t want to.” Then he smiled at her concerned expression. “It’ll be okay. Promise.”

  “How’d you find us?” Giles asked Angel.

  “Long story,” Angel replied. “I’ll tell you all about it over a beer sometime.”

  The two regarded each other. After a beat, Giles gave a quick nod and said, “It had better be a Guinness.”

  Angel smiled faintly. Then he said, “Cordelia saved my life,” he said to Xander. “Oz’s, too.”

  “A big save for Queen C,” Xander said, attempting to high-five her with his unpunctured arm.

  Cordelia punched him.

  It was almost as though everything was all right again. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

  “All right,” Willow said, looking at Angel and Giles, “let’s hear the plan. I want to know exactly how we’re going to pull this off.”

  Buffy had been offered new clothing. She declined. They offered her meat that was cooking over a fire, but she remembered the centaur in the forest, and shook her head. There was a little Summers policy she hadn’t had to institute very often, but it had to do with not eating anything that could hold a conversation.

  The hunting horn blew, but this time there was a keening, almost mournful note to it that was different from the triumphant ring of before. All the bodies of the Huntsmen Buffy had killed were thrown on the fire and burned quickly. Amazingly, none of the others seemed hostile to her. She had just slaughtered half a dozen of them, and they didn’t seem to care.

  But then, what was their life but hunting and killing? They were already dead. And she had been chosen to marry Roland, which would one day make her Queen of the Hunt. If they wanted to continue with the illusion of life that they had, they would have to treat her with respect.

  If the chance came, she might be able to use that. If the chance came.

  She looked for Roland, her only friend among these nightmarish beings. What would it be like, to have him as a husband? To ride through the night forever with him at her side? Would his kindness drain away? Would that soul she had come to admire mutate into an oily cloud of smoke?

  Finally the horn sounded again. Roland trotted up next to her on a fire-snorting, stamping mare, and Buffy looked closely at him. He hates this, she thought.

  “Mount your horse, Buffy,” he told her gently. “And take your weapons. This is the final Hunt before we return to the Lodge. My father wants vengeance on the Faire.”

  Buffy picked up the sword she’d acquired and carried the morningstar as well. There was a sort of holster for it on the horse she had chosen, and it had made an effective weapon.

  “Why do you stay?” she asked Roland as she mounted her horse.

  When he didn’t answer, she looked at him, searched his eyes, saw the pain there.

  “Why are you the Slayer?” Roland asked.

  Buffy was about to answer, when she understood that there was no need to. It had been a rhetorical question. Buffy had not chosen the life of the Slayer. She had been chosen. But she understood how vital the obligations were that had been conferred upon her, and she accepted them.

  Roland was to be the Erl King.

  “I never would have guessed we were in the same situation,” she said to him.

  “Not the same,” Roland corrected. “But similar.”

  “You know if I figure out a way, I’m going to get out of this,” Buffy told him.

  “If I could find a way, you would already be home in your bed,” he replied.

  “You have a good soul, Roland,” Buffy said. “Guard it carefully.”

  Roland did not reply, but Buffy thought his eyes welled with tears. Then the horn sounded again, incredibly loud and deep. The Erl King sat astride his fierce stallion at the center of the clearing, and he spoke loudly so that they could all hear him.

  “Enjoy the final Hunt of this cycle,” he said. “Exotic beasts for food are our primary goal. Also, reach your spirits out over the area to find the truly hopeless. Our numbers have decreased and we must add to our ranks.”

  He looked at his son. “First, however, we ride to what remains of the actors’ encampment. As you know, when our prince lost his way in the lightworld, these wretches pretended to befriend him. Sensing his power, they made him their slave.

  “Then, in an effort to come back to us, he ran from them. Our princess offered him shelter, and for this, we thank her.”

  He made a courtly bow in Buffy’s direction. She gave no response.

  He continued, “But these same blackguards desecrated her dwelling and forcibly took him back to their encampments. The chief of the faerie reports that several of the warlocks, those who disgraced our prince and the Hunt itself, still live. The Lodge closes its doors to anyone who does not have the blood of these, our enemies, on his lips when we return.”

  “Promise?” Buffy muttered.

  Then the horn was blown a final time, and the Erl King led the charge out of the clearing and into the woods. Instantly, Buffy felt the world change. She had been in horrifying, surreal situations, more times than even she could believe. But this was something else. She was part of the Hunt now, on the other side of that veil of mysticism and predation. The very air seemed different, tasted different. The forest seemed to part before them as if it served the Hunt willingly, and perhaps it did.

  The ends of Buffy’s hair crackled, sparks flicked from the ends of her reins as they streamed in the growing wind. She shivered with a deathly cold.

  She wondered if she would ever be warm again.

  One of the huge black bucks ran alongside her horse. She wondered if it had once been a target, the prey, rather than a creature of the Hunt.

  Her horse breathed fire. Its eyes were ablaze. Yet it was cold as ice under her thighs. It knew without her encouragement precisely where it fell in the procession. Hooves pounded, the hounds bayed as they nipped at the horses’ heels, their own paws never quite touching the ground. Buffy couldn’t help herself. For a moment, she felt an electric jolt of power. Of hunger and bloodlust. As the Slayer, she knew what it was to be a hunter, to stalk a thing and kill it, to prey on an enemy. But this was something else completely. For as the Slayer, she was sadly outmatched and outnumbered by her enemies. It was a war.

  What the Wild Hunt did was pure slaughter. Plunder. They were barbarians, but for just a moment Buffy thought there was a certain freedom in barbarism.

  Buffy shivered in horror as she pushed the thought away. She would not become part of this, not become one of them, even if it meant her death. Somehow, she would break her oath to the Erl King. For the moment, however, she could think of nothing but holding on to her horse’s reins.

  They thundered through the woods, black mist in the trees dissipating as they passed. The air pulsed with energy; at times trees and bushes shimmered with a blue aura. The Hunters shimmered with black.

  Despite the darkness that flowed through the branches of the forest, Buffy glimpsed, in the distance off to her left, a flash of white fur. It had to be something very big to be seen so far away. A sasquatch or something? she wondered. After the centaur, she was willing to credit anything she might see in these woods.

  A pair of Huntsmen, who’d obviously seen it as well, tore off through the trees in pursuit. A moment later, she heard a roar of almost human agony, and a whooping cry of triumph from the Huntsmen.

  Buffy thought about the people from the Renaissance Faire. She had no sympathy for what was going to happen to the ones the dark faerie had left alive. They were evil, no question, and deserved what they got. Buffy herself would have killed them in self defense. But murder? Cold-blooded, hunt them down and kill them murder? She didn’t think she could do that.

  She also couldn’t think of a single thing she could do to stop it from happening.

  The horse snorted beneath her. Buffy looked next to the path as one of the hounds rocketed through the tr
ees. Its paws traveled well above the forest floor and it turned and glanced at her with its burning eyes. It snarled a moment. Maybe it was her scent, but the hounds still regarded her as the enemy.

  There was an inhuman roar ahead. The Erl King, Buffy thought. Horses began to whinny and there was a great deal of shouting. Buffy pulled up on the reins of her horse as Roland slowed his mount and dropped back beside her on the wide path.

  For the first time Buffy noticed that all around them the forest had somehow become less dark. The black mist that had enshrouded the woods was gone, at least in this spot. She could even see the stars, and the moon.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Then the Erl King shouted again, and Buffy looked ahead. Past the mounted Huntsmen who had crowded around each other, many of them getting down from their horses. Past the trees. For the first time, Buffy saw what had stopped them.

  At the end of the path there was a wall. An undulating mass of black mist, but much thicker than what had swirled through the forest before. Somehow it had been drawn in, coagulated, and formed a hardened mass that now prevented them from moving forward. The wall was at least thirty feet high, and from the look of the flowing morass ahead of them, quite thick.

  The Erl King screamed in fury and brought his sword down with all his might on the black wall. Its oily surface was moving, swirling, and the sword cut through the mass a ways before it was trapped. The wall was like tar. It was a chore for the king to remove his sword, and when he had, the wall was no worse for his attack.

  “What is it?” Buffy asked Roland.

  “I was about to ask you that,” Roland replied. “I thought your friends might have had something to do with it.”

  Buffy thought about that, but neither Giles nor Willow had enough knowledge of magic to do something like this so quickly. She looked at Roland and shook her head.

  “Are we trapped here?” she asked.

  “It certainly seems that way,” he replied. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. My father has never been defied like this. His will is very powerful.”

  Buffy looked back at the wall, completely baffled. The Erl King and several Huntsmen were still attacking the thick, swirling magic of the wall. They weren’t giving up yet. Buffy’s concern was what might happen when they did give up. Her oath was magic, as Giles had told her. She could think disloyally, but if she tried to move toward the king in a hostile fashion, or ride off and leave the Hunt, her body would not respond.

  She’d tested it, of course.

  But as long as they stayed in this forest, or even in Sunnydale, there was hope that somehow she would figure out a way to free herself.

  If they returned to the Lodge, however, left the world Buffy knew completely, then all of her hope would die. And in order for her truly to be part of the Hunt, to become one of them, Buffy would have to die too. To die, and live on with black magic in her veins. She wouldn’t be human anymore.

  If that happened, she had already decided what she would have to do. Her only recourse.

  She would ask Roland to kill her.

  Though he felt horribly guilty for leaving the others behind, Brian was ecstatic when the darkness around him began to abate. It was still night, but it was his night. Real and tangible. Nothing magical at all about it. He wanted to shout his relief. Instead, he picked up the pace even more, despite his injuries and his exhaustion.

  He couldn’t wait to see his father.

  Then he rounded a corner in the path, and saw the inky black mass at the edge of the trees.

  Brian stared at it for a moment, then he ran toward it and came to a stop only inches away. He reached out his hand, but found himself too terrified to touch it. A short mental war ended with him admitting his fear, giving in to it. He fell to his knees, brought his hands to his face, and began to cry. He sobbed loudly.

  Then he heard a voice.

  “He’s not one of them, then?” the voice said. It was deep and hearty.

  “No, just a boy,” the other replied.

  Brian looked around but saw no one. Thought he must be going mad.

  Then a hand shot through the inky blackness as if it weren’t there, gripped him by the wrist, and hauled him through the black wall as if it weren’t there at all.

  He fell to the grass, stumbled, and rolled partway down a short hill into a gulley that separated the embankment of Route 17 from the forest. From the bottom of the gulley, he looked up at his saviors. A hugely fat man in tattered clothing held his hands up to the black wall that blocked the woods from sight completely. Only the tops of the trees were visible. The man’s chest shone with light, almost white, but tainted somehow with a pinkish glow.

  There was another man there as well, dressed in green. The green man’s hands glowed with crackling energy that flew from his fingers to the wall and back.

  “You escaped, then?” the green man asked. “How did you manage that?”

  “What are you doing?” Brian asked, stunned by what he saw, but too emotionally drained to be afraid.

  “Keeping them inside,” the fat man said. “What does it look like, boy?”

  “Like magic,” Brian said softly.

  Both men laughed.

  “King Richard and I are going to be here until morning, son,” the green man said. “If the wall falls, we’re both dead men. We’d be grateful to you if you could run up the road to that twenty-four-hour diner and get us some coffee.”

  Brian stared at them as though they were both insane. Neither of them said another word after that, and he noticed the sweat on both their faces, the strain of keeping the wall intact. Keeping the Wild Hunt trapped within. He watched them for nearly ten minutes, never putting voice to any of the other questions in his head. He didn’t really want answers, he decided.

  Finally, he got to his feet, felt for his wallet, which was miraculously still in his back pocket, and then started trudging along the empty highway with only one thought in his head.

  Coffee. He could do that.

  With the combined energy of the Wild Hunt focused on the wall that kept them trapped within the forest, nobody noticed the buck drift away from the main body of the Hunt. It straggled back along the path, feeling hungry and smelling something unusual. Something new. There weren’t a great many new things, and it wondered, in its way, if this were a new something it should eat, or something it should fear.

  It wandered back far enough that it reached a point where the liquid darkness still filled the trees. It stepped off the path and into the wood. The new thing was close, it knew.

  Once, the buck had been something else, something that didn’t eat meat. Now, meat was all it could eat. This smelled like good meat.

  In the darkness ahead of the buck, something growled.

  A pair of wide, glowing yellow eyes loomed ahead in the shadows.

  Powerful hands gripped the buck’s antlers, and twisted. It fell heavily to the ground, unnoticed. A small cloud of black mist escaped its mouth.

  Chapter 16

  NOT LONG AFTER THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK CHIMED twice, Mr. Chase pushed aside the heavy floral comforter his wife had insisted upon purchasing on a recent trip to Los Angeles, and rose from the cherry wood sleigh bed they’d bought the year before in Austria. He wrapped himself in his silk robe and descended to the first floor kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of natural spring water.

  On the way back to bed, he stood for a moment in the open doorway to his daughter’s bedroom. Cordelia had decided to sleep over at some friend or other’s house tonight, he recalled.

  Outside, a car with a poor exhaust system—obviously not one of the Chases’ neighbors—rumbled down the street, rattling the window in Cordelia’s room. Mr. Chase listened a moment to see if the noise would wake his wife. When he was sure it hadn’t, he walked to the window and gazed out, saw the taillights of the car just before it turned a corner down the street.

  Troublemakers. Hoods, they’d called them, when Mr. Chase had been
a boy.

  He worried about his daughter whenever she wasn’t home. But at the very least, he knew that Cordelia’s priorities wouldn’t allow her to fall into the company of troublemakers. Nope. With very few exceptions, Cordelia steered very clear of kids in the habit of causing trouble, or putting themselves in the way of danger.

  Mr. Chase went back to bed. He was disturbed to find that, for the first time since college, he could not sleep.

  In the kitchen of the Harris household, at a round Formica table that hadn’t been moved from that spot in ten years, Xander’s mother sat in the dark, sleepeating. It was something she did at least once a week. In the unlit kitchen, she smoked a cigarette (something her wide-awake self had quit two years earlier), drank warm Diet Coke, and ate leftover chicken wings from a take-out container. Frequently, members of her family would hold entire conversations with her under these circumstances that Mrs. Harris couldn’t for the life of her remember come morning.

  When there wasn’t any leftover Chinese food, chocolate would do. Cake or cookies or, even better, fudge. She frequently wondered why she just couldn’t seem to shed the twenty extra pounds she’d gained when her oldest had finally moved out on his own. Mr. Harris had joked once that she would gain a whole other person when Xander finally moved out.

  Once had been enough. After the look she’d given him, her husband had never said anything of the sort again.

  She barely blinked when her husband turned on the light. He stood in the kitchen doorway, rubbing his eyes and adjusting his pajama bottoms.

  “I suppose you noticed that Xander isn’t home yet?” Mr. Harris asked.

  “Maybe he’s out with that nice Cordelia?” Mrs. Harris replied. Since she was asleep, she was not truly cognizant of the lateness of the hour.

  “Not with those parents of hers,” Mr. Harris replied. “Not if she wants to live. Nope. He’s a senior now, and seniors, as I recall, have a lot of parties. I understand that. But we’ve got to have some rules in this house or it’s all going to be chaos.