Chapter Two – Hunter

 

Three months in a virtual tomb. No music, no conversation, no fresh air. No feel of true wind over my face. Only rock and concrete surrounding me like the reinforced walls of a grave. My hair and beard growing long and unkempt. After all, it wouldn’t do to give a prisoner a razor.

I stood beneath the air recycler’s vent, a beaten and torn copy of Pride and Prejudice in my hand as I lifted my nose to the musty breeze and tried to catch a scent of the outside world. The final fifty pages of the book were missing, but it didn’t matter. I’d read and reread Ms. Austen’s work more times than I could count since its publication. I closed my eyes and pictured myself flying over Georgian England, my wings wide as I caught the drafts coming off the northern Atlantic. I swooped down low over Pemberley Estate, restraining myself from scaring the carriage horses, or the passengers within.

Somehow, though, this was the worst three-month imprisonment ever.

I’d spent a year in a Turkish prison in the 18th century. The rats had been my only friends, that jaunt. My only sustenance, too, aside from the small bowl of gruel given to me once every two days by the guards.

Then, I’d spent another six months in San Quentin in the 1960s. My crew had broken me out that time, but not before I’d baked my way through the summer. Air conditioning wasn’t much more than a dream back then, and temperatures had reached into the triple digits Fahrenheit within our cells.

At least with that one, I’d been able to watch Johnny Cash and June Carter perform while under the watchful gaze of the state prison guards. True, we couldn’t cheer or clap, not unless you wanted a beating, but I didn’t care at the time. It was music, at least. And it even reminded me of my childhood, even though it was far removed from the fiddling jigs of the Irish isles, and blended with the blues scales of the African men and women who had been brought in chains to America. But that man, he had soul. True soul. The kind you can only have when your life is measured in years, not millennia. The shortest flames burn brightest, or so they say.

So I had books. I had silence.

Between that and the MREs they served up to me three times a day, this place was positively the Ritz.

I’d been alive longer than the United States, the unified state of Italy, and the German nation. I’d outlived Communist Russia. If worst came to worst, I’d just outlive Col. Harrington and his cronies. Their children would be my captors, and finally forget what I was even in prison for. And I certainly wouldn’t tell them.

How could I? After all, even I had no idea.

In the end, what was three months to a creature that was over four centuries old? Especially when you considered that I’d already been on the colonel’s leash for nearly the last decade? This was all just a minor, inconvenient drop in the bucket.

Kris Cole, on the other hand, was a different story. I wondered, not for the first, second, or even fiftieth time, how she was handling all this. She was younger than I was by a few centuries, not that it showed, of course, but I didn’t think she had nearly as much experience as I did with incarceration.

How was she faring? Was she lonesome for St. Louis yet? For the shifters who served in the organization below her? Was she distraught over her former boss being the instrument of her imprisonment?

And, of course, I considered that auburn hair of hers. The curve of her back, her toned arms, her warrior’s heart. Her keen blue eyes, and the way they seemed to pierce through my bullshit.

Kris was, simply put, unlike any creature I’d ever met.

The sound of the lock on the door being thrown sounded, stirring me from my reverie beneath the air vent’s stagnant breeze. It brought my thoughts back, but not my attention. I just kept my focus on the wind from above, my eyes tightly closed, my breath even.

It would just be one of my black-masked, military-fatigued interrogators here to ask the same questions over and over again till he got bored enough to leave. I still didn’t exactly know what they’d achieve by asking and re-asking. Back in the early days, they at least had the courtesy of bringing out the heated pincers to encourage your answers. Here? Here, I couldn’t even get waterboarded.

Didn’t they think I was worthy of torture? How demeaning.

Heavy bootfalls thudded as my soldier-of-the-day walked into the cell. They came to a stop in the middle of the room. Something about the way they stepped, the way they slightly rolled their heels, was familiar to my trained ears.

“Lackeys are done with their questions?” I asked, eyes still closed.

“Have a minute, Hunter?”

“Well, it doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere.” I opened my eyes and turned to face the architect of my ten years and three months of torment. “You have me warded in so tightly, I can barely even remember what it’s like to have scales. Don’t you, Colonel?”

“You might be right about not going anywhere, especially if you don’t play your part. You’ve always known that.”

My lips drew back in a grimace, my beard scratching my cheeks as the wild hairs brushed over my skin. “My part, Harrington? You mean of being your good little lap lizard?”

“Something like that.” He paused, looking around the room at my bolted-down furniture. “I always thought of it more as enforced reform. You atoning for your past, and all that.”

“The only problem with that notion is that a man can only change when he wants to.”

“Fair enough.” He came farther into the cell, his steps slow and measured. “I figure a dragon’s no different, then.”

“Worse, I’m afraid.”

He nodded, hands clasped behind his back. He bored into me with those steely grey eyes of his. The kind of eyes that were like a rumbling thunderhead on the horizon. “Not a surprise, to be honest.”

I didn’t reply, just stayed there with my arms crossed over my chest. When you have nothing to say, it’s always easier to not say anything. Speaking first gives the other person power. Never fill the void with needless speech. And, with Harrington, you had to hold onto as much power as you could; otherwise, he’d snatch it from your grasp before you realized it was even up for grabs.

“Probably want to know why you’ve been down here.”

“I’ll admit, I am curious.”

He continued like I hadn’t even spoken. “Not that it should be any surprise that I took extreme cautions once I realized Kris had been stupid enough to bring you along. She was supposed to barely even realize you were around, not even give you a second thought unless you were absolutely necessary.”

“Well, it’s not my fault she found the keys you’d hidden,” I replied. “Who else was she going to turn to? One of those shifter heathens of hers?”

“Should’ve known,” he said, his voice glum. “Why’d you even come along, Hunter?”

“Kris asked.”

He chuckled. “I think she did more than that. What did she offer you?”

I walked away from my spot beneath the vent, came to a stop in the middle of the room, and turned to him. “What makes you think she offered anything?”

“Gut instinct,” Harrington said. “I know you both. I know she’d never trust you unless she had to. More importantly, I know you’d never do anything for free.”

“Maybe you were right earlier. Maybe I did change? Maybe I did help her out of the goodness of my old, decrepit heart?”

He smiled a cold, ruthless smile that had more in common with the world just outside the bunker doors than it did with a human one. I could practically see the permafrost on his lips. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Hunter. Never bullshit a bullshitter.”

“Well, why don’t you ask her, then?”

He sighed. “What makes you think I haven’t already?”

“Ah,” I said. “So this is one of your little games you’re so fond of playing? Sorry, Harrington, but I’m not in the mood for your little brand of psy-ops.”

“Not in the mood for some friendly conversation?”

“I’d say this is anything but friendly, wouldn’t you?”

He smiled again. “Don’t worry, I have an idea of what she offered you.”

“Why bother with asking?”

“Why not?”

We both stared at each other in silence for another long, pregnant moment. Once again, I let him be the first to speak. After all, I’d spent the last three months in near silence. What were a few minutes more?

“She offered to help you find the file, didn’t she?”

I didn’t respond, just tried to keep my face as impassive as possible.

Harrington’s smile broadened the merest fraction of an inch. Somehow I must have given it away, and he’d seen it like the human lie detector he was. “I need you to do a job for me,” he said suddenly.

I raised an eyebrow. “What kind of job?”

“One that’s right in your wheelhouse, I’m sure.”

“What if I won’t do it? Going to tie me down with silver cord like you did in Bermuda, and force another geas on me?”

He frowned. “Not exactly. Don’t think I’m not capable. If anything, I’m even more so than before. Defense Board has enough funding to make the PRB look like a rotary club.” He turned to face me. “I need you to be my eyes and ears over the next week. Everything that happens, I need you to report it back to me.”

Spying? On his former men? That didn’t sound right. “Why do you need me?”

“Because more resources are better than less.”

“What if I refuse?”

“That file Kris is supposed to be helping you find? I’ve still got it, Hunter. I may have left most of my life behind in St. Louis when I left the agency to come up here, but that doesn’t mean I left that right alongside it.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat, choking it down like a piece of unchewed meat.

“You want to refuse the job, that’s just fine by me. I’ve been itching to release your file for nearly a decade now, just to see if I can wipe that smug goddamned look off your face.”

“I’d just disappear, Harrington,” I said, trying in vain to make my voice convincing. I didn’t even succeed in convincing myself, though. “I’d get away.”

“I tracked you down once, Hunter.” He gave a little wave to the bunker surrounding us as he turned to me, locked me with those withering steel grey eyes of his. “Think this isn’t going to help me? Facial recognition, gait recognition, voice recognition. We can find a terrorist anywhere in the world in days with all this tech. Think I can’t find a handsome dragon who likes the finer things in life? Don’t make me fucking laugh.”

I narrowed my eyes, took a step towards him. “Think you’re that good, do you?”

He smiled an executioner’s smile as he advanced on me. When he spoke, his words were as cool and measured as I’d ever heard them. “Oh, yeah. And I think my men are, too. Might take weeks, might take months. But I’ll find every alias you create. I’ll bleed your hoard dry as you desperately pay for new lives to stay ahead of me. By the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be begging to get that geas put back on you, just so you can get three hots and a cot. Think your year in Istanbul was bad? I got news for you—the Black Eagle makes that Turkish prison look like a goddamn church camp. The head of Russia’s FSB would personally give me a tug-job just for a chance to spend five minutes with your file. And, if that’s not bad enough, I’ve got one more thing I can do.”

I didn’t reply. Honestly, my stomach was too busy trying to eat itself, and my heart was clearly contemplating suicide.

“Do you know who Lao Tze is, Hunter?”

I nodded. “He wrote the Tao Te Ching. Of course I know who he is.”

“Legend has it that he and the ancient Taoist masters could bend the river and sky dragons to their will. That they could force them from their heavenly positions and make them mere mortals, no more than lesser men. He recorded it on a scroll, where it was defended by monks until Mao’s men came as part of the Cultural Revolution. After that, it was carried away from China and into Taiwan, and from there to California.”

I’d heard of this tablet before, but had always thought it was just an old wyrm’s tale. The kind of thing elder dragons would use to scare us children. I didn’t reply, though, just listened. My eyes must have betrayed my recognition, though.

“Would you believe me if I told you I had a rubbing of that scroll, Hunter?”

I gritted my teeth. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I wouldn’t dare? Dare what? Strip you of your dragon-hood? What in all our years of interactions leads you to believe that?”

I turned away from him, my palms clammy and moist, a chill running up my spine. Months in a prison? Perchance a moment of respite from the world. Years? Well, why not? There were, of course, consequences to all our actions. I was no stranger to accepting them, that was for sure. Death, even? If it came down to it, yes, I might even take that on.

But to lose my night-immortality? To have my wings, my breath, my very power stripped from me by some impudent human? That would be too much of a humiliation.

Hands gripped into fists at my sides, I turned back to him. “Fine, Harrington. You want me to be your eyes and ears? I’ll do it. But on one condition. I want my file back when this is done.”

A bark of laughter escaped Harrington’s lips, a cruel sound that echoed in the small cell. “Think it’s that simple? You trade a week of snitching for a lifetime free of me?”

My lip curled. “What else do you need from me? Haven’t I given you enough already? Ten years of my fucking life spent protecting humans.”

“What can you give me?” he asked, his own lip curling as if we were mirrored. “I’ll tell you what you can give me. Kris Cole. I want her here at the PDB. You’ve got a week to deliver her.”

I shook my head. He wanted Kris here, working for him again? “Why don’t you just ask her, Harrington? She’d be the last person to turn you down.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “But it turns out she’s torn about coming aboard. You, Hunter, get to be my seamstress. You’ve worked with her long enough to know how she is about being pushed. She might take orders and follow the chain of command, but I’m not her commander anymore.”

“So you want me to manipulate her?”

“No, I want you to subtly convince her to join up with me. With us. One week is all you have, too.”

“Why me?”

“Because she knows our history, now. Everyone else at Full Moon has been like a son or daughter to me. Not you, though.”

“I don’t want this, Harrington.”

“Well, Hunter, what is it they always say about playing with the hand you’re dealt? You can fold now, or you can go through the river. Your choice. You know what happens if you fail, and you know what happens if you win.”

“And what happens if I fold?” I sighed. “One week? That’s all?”

“Telling me you’re rusty?”

I grimaced, shook my head. “No.”

“Good.”

I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat at the thought of having to manipulate Kris this way. While we hadn’t exactly become magically close over the last year, I still felt like I had a certain kind of camaraderie with her. It’s hard not to work with someone for that long without allegiances of some sort forming.

And here was Col. Harrington, trying to bend those bonds to his will.

“One week.”

“Good. Now get to mending. You and Kris leave in two hours.” He turned and walked back to the door, pounded his fist three times on it. He glanced back at me as the lock thudded out of its housing. “And Hunter?”

“What, Harrington?”

“I don’t think I need to tell you about the consequences of discussing your mission with anyone, do I?”

“No. I believe I can infer those for myself.”

“Good dragon. Do what you’re fucking told, and I’ll let you off your leash.”