Who Hunts the Hunter (25 page)
Little more than two meters away stands a tall figure wrapped in a dark cloak. A hood and mask cover his face and head. Gloves cover his hands. A sort of hazy red corona radiates from around him.
Monk guesses this is the Master.
He can’t move.
“Come, my dear hunter,” the Master says in a quiet, reassuring, fatherly sort of voice."Come to me.”
Monk feels his whole body tingling, trying to move forward, but his feet are locked in position, glued to the dusty floor. Minx moves forward. She moves to face the Master and lifts her hands to his shoulders. Something happens then. The Master’s cloak swings out, encompassing Minx, and then ... Monk isn’t sure. It’s like the cloak becomes a dark cloud hiding Minx and Master both. Monk stands there watching, unable to move, and there’s just this cloud of darkness hanging there before him.
A while passes.
The cloud of darkness fades. The Master comes back into sight. He lowers his cloak. Minx turns and comes to Monk, lifts her hands to his shoulders, and smiles."You booty,” she says softly."Get it?”
“Huh?”
“Now it’s your turn.”
“My turn?”
“To feed the Master.”
“Huh?”
“If you don’t, he’ll die,” Minx whispers, “and if he dies, we die.”
That would be bad. If they died, Minx would die, and then Monk couldn’t stand living."How do I ... ?”
“You know ...”
Minx thrusts her mouth against his and exhales deeply. The warm gush of her breath brings him a rush.
The
breath
of
life
... Their life. The Master’s life. Monk nods. He gets it now. Minx takes hold of his arm and leads him forward, one step, then another, closer and closer, till the Master’s opening his cloak, growing larger and larger, infinite, and the Master’s saying, “Come to me, my hunter. Come ...” And Monk goes.
The name of the place is Brogan Bail Bonds. It occupies a ground-level storefront in a five-story brick building that’s almost lost amid the cheesy stroboscopic pandemonium of the street. Glaring neon signs and flashing laser adverts illuminate nearly every window of every building; some reach right over the street. Adstands along the curbs add their thumping, echoing, electronic syncopated soundtracks to the rhythmic humming and rumbling of passing traffic and the chaotic shouts, cries, and wails of two-legs pouring along the walkways.
Autofire weapons chatter in the distance. A siren whoops from somewhere nearby. The air smells of meat and sweat and the poisons of the sprawl. Tikki watches Brogan Bail Bonds from across the street. The crowds of two-legs provide cover and she’s in disguise anyway: wig, facepaint, duster.
An Asian male steps up close.
“You wanna
sumara
?"
That’s a Japanese word meaning “bare penis.” A synonym for condomless sex. Evidently, this part of the Bronx is one of those where a female standing alone on the street for more than a nanosecond is assumed to be whoring."You like it rough?” Tikki asks.
The male smiles, then looks down. Peering out through the front of Tikki’s duster, pressing into the male’s gut, is the muzzle of a TZ-115 Colt submachine gun.
“I’m a memory,” the male says.
And the memory fades.
At just past three a.m., Tikki catches sight of a pair of tall figures: one with lots of white hair, the other with ears, elven ears. They go through the front door of Brogan Bail Bonds and out of sight. Tikki crosses the street and pauses on the walkway. Amid the stench of the passing two-legs is a smell, a collection of scents that she remembers from the cabin along the Road to Nowhere. It’s the stink of the elf male she’s identified as Elgin O’Keefe, alias Tang, and the other female accomplice, Whistle.
Instinct says go right in, take the front door, smash it in if need be, and Tikki’s more than tempted, but she heads down the block and turns the corner. Along the cross-street, she finds an alley that leads down behind the rear of the buildings to the back door of Brogan Bail Bonds. The door is locked, but her Magna 2 passkey should take care of that. She puts the passkey to the lock, sheds her wig and duster, and brings up, in one hand, the Colt SMG, and, in the other, the Viper A-12 automag. The door clicks. She pushes inside.
That puts her in a narrow hallway leading toward the front of the building. There’s a pair of doors along the right and one at the top of the hallway, through which comes a tall lanky figure with pointed ears, wearing a black armored vest and dark gray fatigues.
As he turns from closing the door, he stops and looks at Tikki and makes a face like he’s surprised, but he doesn’t smell surprised, not in the least.
“Hands,” Tikki says.
“What’s the meaning of this?” the elf says, lifting his hands."There’s no money here.”
“We have biz,
man
.”
“And what would that be?”
O’Keefe glances toward the floor and something in his scent changes. Tikki stops in mid-step, freezes. O’Keefe glances toward her left foot, now extended out before her. Just the tip of her shoe touches the floor. She presses downward with the tip of that shoe, just a little, then a little more. Abruptly, the entire section of flooring between her and O’Keefe falls away and crashes into the next level down.
A trap. She was expected, maybe baited into coming here. That means she is facing dangers she can only guess at.
Instinct rises—fur rushes over her face and a low animal snarl rises from the back of her throat. O’Keefe whistles. Tikki’s index finger squeezes down on the trigger of the SMG, but then with a deafening roar the wall to her right explodes.
The Colt stammers. O’Keefe staggers back. Tikki sees a flash of blue light. She hears a roar that rises into an agony of static. She feels the impacts from shattered bits of the wall to her right and a second impact as she hits the wall on her left. She realizes she’s being hurt in a hundred different places. She knows some of the injuries are serious, maybe serious enough to kill a two-leg outright, and she feels herself changing, her body swelling, her clothes bursting, even as she staggers and falls.
Then it’s too late.
Amy brushes at her eyes and smiles. Bandit smiles back, then turns and heads down the hallway toward the elevators. The hallway’s empty, quiet, still. It’s getting on toward dawn now, definitely time for him to leave. He pauses to look back and wave, then goes through the door to the stairwell.
The details of Amy’s problem are hard to keep straight, but the main point is simple enough. She thinks someone’s skeeving her corp. Finding out if that’s true will probably take more than just a few simple tricks. The major players are mages; mages make things strange. Bandit’s last direct encounter with a mage, over in Newark, resulted in an violent eruption of uncontrolled magic that destroyed a limo and left a parking lot full of debris. He should probably keep in mind the thought, just in case, that it won’t help Amy if her corp’s labs are blown to bits.
Bandit pauses on the landing by the third floor. Something’s shimmering in the air. When he shifts to his astral perceptions, he sees an aura like a muscular figure in fringed hides, feathers, and beads, clothes like an Amerind might wear. But this is no mere Amerind—it’s a shaman, a powerful one. He calls himself Dark Rain Hunter and he wears many masks. Tonight, the mask of the eagle covers his head. This probably means trouble. Eagle is lord of the sky and sees all that occurs on the earth below, and despises all that is ignoble.
“Be wary,” Dark Rain Hunter says."Men watch.”
“What men?”
The answer comes in images: a mountain lion creeping stealthily through heavy brush; a crow fanning its wings, hovering above treetops. Bandit pushes his spirit body onto the astral plane, steps out through the walls of the condoplex and looks around. Near the entrance to the tower sits a van. Inside this are two men with a lot of technical equipment. Far above hovers some device, maybe a surveillance drone. Are the men and the drone watching him? or are they watching Amy? or someone else entirely? Bandit doubts that Dark Rain Hunter would give him warnings unless the danger affected him specifically.
He returns to his body, then climbs the stairs to Amy’s level. They will have to be very careful from now on.
Tomorrow, they will meet covertly.
As the dust from the explosion slowly settles, O’Keefe struggles up to his feet. He feels like he’s been beaten about the chest with a mallet. Breathing is a minor agony. Fortunately, none of the shots from Striper’s hurried burst seem to have penetrated his vest.
At the foot of the hall lies the beast, and she’s
huge
! O’Keefe taps the remote on his belt to bring up the missing section of flooring, then walks down the hall to have a closer look at Striper in her natural form. The paranatural rants speak of shapeshifters’ “dramatic coloration,” but that does nothing to describe the effect of this tigress’s black-striped, blood-red fur. It gives her the character of something out of a nightmare, a very primal, violent nightmare.
Surrounding the tigress is a faint blue-green aurora. Whistle stands in the new opening through the hallway wall, her hands uplifted, fingers bent arcanely. The magic she casts is their only reliable way of keeping Striper quiescent and therefore harmless until properly confined, but this is hardly a panacea. In fact, it’s the only spell the mage knows that might be used in this regard, and it’s very draining.
“How long can you hold her?”
“Are you kidding?” Whistle mutters, features intense with concentration. The rest of her answer comes through clenched teeth."After blowing through that wall? Half an hour. Forty-five minutes at most. And by then you’ll have to carry me out.”
It will have to suffice. They’ll have no second chance.
O’Keefe flips open the cover of his wristfone to call for the muscleboys he’s engaged for the occasion. Striper looks to weigh even more than he had supposed, 300 kilos at the very least. Alone he’d never get the beast out of the building, much less to her destination.
Fortunately, they don’t have far to go.
The roar of the minigrenade seems likely to shake the old brick walls of the tunnel into dust. Brian’s Nightfighter visor shows the muzzle of Art’s Ares combat gun spitting red fire. Twenty meters up the tunnel a figure nearly the size of a troll staggers, slumps to the ground, then explodes.
There’s no other word for it, but it’s like no explosion Brian’s ever seen in his life, not even during the flame-up he attended in North Africa with Commando One. The figure on the floor of the tunnel glows like a lamp, then suddenly the grayish dark of the tunnel is filled with streaks of dazzling white, flashing outward in every direction, like headless comets going faster than light. Art shouts; Brian goes prone. The flashes of white vanish through the tunnel walls, ceiling, and floor, and then the real strangeness begins.
A greenish sort of haze, sparking and glinting like some high-tech energy shield, swells out of nothing to fill the tunnel like a barrier between the fallen body and Brian and Art.
“What the frag ...” Brian feels the hairs standing up on the back of his neck."Art?”
No answer.
Then an orangey sort of orb, semitransparent, like a bubble, but about the size of a melon, rises from out of the prone figure and floats up into the haze, then drifts up and
down like it’s bobbing gently on zephyrs of air.
A second orb rises, then a third, and a fourth ...
“Watch it, kid,” Art growls."Don’t shoot. You’ll bring the whole tunnel down.”
“What the ... what are they?”
No reply.
Three of the orbs come floating nearer: one high, one low, one in between. They come through the sparking greenish haze like it isn’t there. The lowest of the three comes drifting right toward Brian’s visor, then slowly turns and disappears through the floor of the tunnel. The other two drift past Art. One pauses mere centimeters away from the muzzle of the combat gun, then slowly rises and disappears through the tunnel ceiling. The third and last drifts on by, down the tunnel and out of sight.
“Mother of Mercy.” Brian crosses himself.
But then Art’s moving ahead. Brian gets to his feet and follows. The greenish haze is gone. Twenty meters further on they pause beside the body. It’s sure big enough to be a troll, but it looks like none Brian’s ever seen. It’s half melted into the floor of the tunnel. The chest is an empty cavity, like melted plastic, everything fused and congealed and scorched black, and it smells really bad.
“This is magic,” Brian says."This is fragging magic!”
Art turns to face him, lifts up the visor of his Kelmar helmet, scowls, and says, “You don’t know the half of it, kid.”
Brian rubs at the thick stubble swathing his face. They’ve been down in these tunnels too fricking long.
At just past ten a.m., Amy steps into her outer office, palmtop in hand."I have some business to attend to,” she tells her aide Laurena."I should be back around two.”
Laurena lifts her eyebrows in question.
“Let’s say I’m in conference.”
