Chapter Thirteen – Hunter

 

I swore under my breath as I scattered the group of nesting spiders from the corner of my work table where I’d been previously fiddling with one of the new locks one of the shifters had brought me nine months ago. The mechanism had been sitting there, untouched and undeciphered, since Kris had come to me with her invitation to a late-night drink.

Looking back, I should have turned her invite down. Should have just said I was fine for the night, and called it an early evening. Then I wouldn’t have been dragged all the way to Alaska for three months. And Harrington wouldn’t have been able to get his clutches right back into me.

I slumped down into my work chair, frowning down at the scuffed and scraped table in front of me. Idly, I ran my palm over its surface, read the scratches and cuts and gouges like Braille hieroglyphs telling me of my long imprisonment within this organization.

This time next week, I could be free of this place. Free of Harrington, and his stony, almost inhuman, eyes. File in a burn barrel somewhere, smoky tongues lashing at the sky, I could be anywhere in the world a day later. Paris, Beijing, Moscow, London, Rome.

Back to living the good life, and not stuck in some backwater like St. Louis.

All I had to do was sell out one of my own. The Turks had told me they’d release me under the same conditions, all those years ago. They’d promised I could go, charges dismissed, if I only gave up my cohorts.

Because selling her out was exactly what this was. A deep thrumming in my marrow practically sang it to me, telling me that whatever Kris was going to sign up for was more than she could handle. That it would be the wrong choice for her, even if it was by Harrington’s side.

Maybe especially because it was by Harrington’s side.

But, even if I was free next week, what would I do? Look up my old crew? Look up Molly, Zigg, and Case? They were all human, had no knowledge of the supernatural world. What kind of shock would I give to their systems by showing up, completely unchanged after nearly a decade of work here? Would they just believe in my clean living?

No, I’d have to put together a new crew. A new team. Was I even up for something like that? It had already been hard enough to put my trust in the FMS team, and here I was already considering throwing that away for my own interests.

A knock came at my office door, jarring me away from my own dark thoughts and back to reality.

“Hunter?” Kris called from the hallway, her hand tentatively trying the locked door. “You still in there?” The doorknob jiggled again, and I sighed as I heaved myself up from the chair and went over to the door, steadily beginning to flick back the deadbolts.

“May I help you?” I asked, trying to sound annoyed, as I opened the door for her.

“Wish you wouldn’t lock the damn door,” she said, pushing past me on her way in. “It’s a fire hazard.”

“I’m a dragon, Kris,” I said. “We’re both dragons. Fire is part of our vocabulary.”

“But still,” she said, stopping in the middle of my workspace and looking around, arms crossed.

I sighed, shook my head as I closed the door behind her. I leaned back again, my own arms crossed over my chest as I watched her pinched face and searching eyes survey the room around her.

“What’s troubling you, Kris?” I finally asked.

She looked as if she were about to reply, to tell me the real depths of what was bothering her, with her mouth partially open and her eyes lit for just a moment as she turned back to me. But, just as she was about to speak, she stopped herself short, waved me off. “It’s nothing.”

“No,” I said, pushing off the door and walking back over to my work station, “clearly it’s not nothing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come into my lair.”

She sighed. “It’s Tabitha. She’s upset with me.”

“Upset with you?” I paused, put everything together with one look at her face.

“She says we’ll worry about it later.”

“Never a particularly good sign, especially when there’s a witch involved,” I said, smiling a little. “That just means they’ll have time to pick out their spell.”

She chuckled. “I think she’s just hurt with the way this all turned out. She’s holding it against me that I came to you first with all this.”

“Can you blame her? She’s probably having more difficulty understanding it than even I am, Kris.”

A groan escaped her lips as she came around beside me and leaned back against the heavy tool box where I kept a couple of my drills, the aluminum and steel frame creaking as she put her weight against it. “I know,” she said, shaking her head. “I really can’t. But, she’s helping us anyways.”

“Us?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “Is there still an ‘us’ in this?”

Kris, her attention now absently focused on the workspace in front of her, just shrugged. “I still want your help on this.”

“My help?”

“Are you just going to respond in questions every time I try to speak to you?”

I grinned. “Am I?”

“Shut up, Hunter. And, yes, there’s still an us. I still want your opinion on whatever else we find about what’s going on.” She paused as she picked up a stray lock pick, biting her lip with one incisor.

I watched her profile in the dim yellow light of my desk lamp, the way her eyes shone and sparkled as she slowly twirled my pick between her long, graceful finger and thumb. If she had any regret for all the years of fighting, of living among the humans, of defending their safety and security, her eyes and face didn’t show it. Instead, there was a certain kind of determination in her eyes that I found almost admirable. One of these humans had, in fact, just imprisoned her for three months as a security precaution, but here she was debating about whether or not to join him even after the fact. All because she thought it might be for the greater good. All because she thought she might be able to make a bigger difference in the world than she could here.

And here I was, tasked with being a Judas goat. Of leading her down a path opposite to my own inclinations. All so I could be free. So I could do what? Return to a life of crime?

Pitiful. Especially when thrown in the face of Kris’s motivations.

Now, why she would want my opinion on the bastard, was beyond me. I’d be the last person I’d ask.

She glanced in my direction, a smile dancing on her lips. “You trust Harrington less than anyone I know,” she said after a moment, answering my question before I could even ask it. “That’s your worth to me right now.”

I bit off my next question, reframing it as a statement before I spoke again. “I’m to play devil’s advocate, then.”

“Something like that,” she replied with a little nod. Kris seemed to consider my words for another moment and nodded again, this time more emphatically. “Yes, exactly that.” She paused. “Tomorrow. She’ll have something for us tomorrow.”

“Which way are you leaning, now?”

“No preconceived notions,” she replied, her eyes distant. “I’m just waiting to see, to look at all the facts.”

“Not all the facts are always in files,” I replied, turning back to my work station. “There’s always a gestalt to a subject. Something you can’t just read or see on the page.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, just carefully laid my pick back almost exactly where she’d found it, her fingers moving with the precision of an agent who’s used to searching other people’s belongings without their knowledge. One look at her eyes, and I could tell there’d been some change behind them. What kind of change, though, I had no idea.

“A gestalt, huh?” she asked, almost as if she were feeling the word in her mouth, rubbing it along her gums and over her tongue. “The essence?”

“Words on a page can hardly ever capture the whole person,” I replied, picking up the lock I’d been fiddling with and angling it into the light to better observe its edge, “or a whole organization. You need to really observe the person at length, and even then you still need to make educated guesses as to motivation and beliefs. And, sometimes, the only thing one can trust is their own instinct when presented with a person. A file or dossier never does a person justice, not when you’re presented with the hard, incontrovertible truth that they are a person. A real-life, thinking, feeling person. Unfortunately, we don’t exactly have that kind of time, do you?”

Mentally, I kicked myself for using the word ‘we’ near the end. Here I was, already falling into her little trap.

“Philosophy from the thief?” she asked after a moment, her words as soft as a spring breeze.

Lips pinched, I sucked in a breath as an image of Molly and Zigg flashed to mind. I’d never even kept track of them after being put to work by Harrington. They were known associates of mine already, and any research I did on them would have just ended up in some PRB file. Or worse.

“It’s been a long time since I was one of those,” I said after a moment. “And, besides, even thieves need to learn to live with themselves. Otherwise, our lives are rudderless and uncertain.”

Kris didn’t reply at first. Instead, she pushed off from the set of shelves, the heavy piece of shop furniture barely rocking with the weight of her slight form, and went to leave. She put a hand on my shoulder, still silent, and squeezed slightly.

A shiver traveled up my spine at the unexpected tender touch, and I tried to remember the last time anyone had graced me with that kind of care. I’d had women embrace me like that, their fingers lingering on me for longer than was appropriate in polite company. But this wasn’t sexual. This was something deeper, formed from a kind of understanding at a primal level.

And then it was gone, and she was moving through the shop more quietly than combat boots should allow, sliding through with a kind of spectral grace only thieves and combat operatives attain.

I didn’t turn to watch her go, only tracked her movements as she quietly went to let herself out.

“Hunter?” she asked as she went to let herself back out into the hallway beyond.

I looked back at her over my shoulder, eyebrow raised. Our eyes locked, and we seemed to hold each other for a moment, an eerie echoing resemblance to the way she’d held me just a moment ago.

“Thieves aren’t the only ones who need to learn to live with themselves.”

“Yes, Kris,” I said, nodding slowly. “I know.”