Chapter Twenty-One – Hunter

 

The hour hand had struck three by the time my poor BMW finally limped home.

“Ugh,” Kris said as she got her first whiff from inside, hand covering her mouth. “Maybe we should have both stayed at a hotel room.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Thought it would be bad, but not this bad.” Off to the side of the door, I keyed in my security system’s six-digit PIN and disabled the motion and IR sensors throughout the sprawling structure I occupied.

The smell of dead, and in some cases rotting, plant life filled the air to the brim, as if the decaying vegetable matter was fighting against itself in one last struggle to get out the window and into the St. Louis street. I had known it was going to be bad, but I never could have imagined it would be this bad.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I can get used to anything.”

I flicked on the lights and ceiling fans as I walked into my domicile, leading her deeper into the brickwork and steel building. Built sometime in the 1900s, the warehouse had probably never seen better days. I’d reinforced everything, put in new glass, and stripped all the graffiti and rust from its walls.

“This all yours?”

“Yes. Figured if I was going to live here for a while, I might as well invest in something worth my time. All the privacy of a neighborhood, none of the hassle of neighbors. Just businesses and machine shops.”

“Except for from nine to five.”

“Well, I’m hardly ever here during that time, so I can’t see why I should care,” I said, leading her into the spacious living room.

Minimalist furniture adorned the room, along with bits of art and mementos I’d procured during my travels. From rice paper landscapes hanging from one wall, to a Florentine broadsword I’d trained with when not much older than a hatchling. I’d moved on to superior weapons in my later years, but it was with that sword that I’d gotten my first taste of any formal melee combat.

“Lots of leg room,” Kris said. Her whole home could fit in this one room, I imagined, and she looked around with an appreciative gaze. Her eyes fell briefly on my old sword, and she nodded. “Nice museum piece. Functional?”

I grinned as I went into the kitchen. “So oxidized, it would probably fall apart if the wind blew wrong.”

“You could at least get the dust in their eyes,” Kris replied as she sat down on one of my couches. “Ever think of that?”

I chuckled as I got two bottles of water from beneath the counter. By the time I’d brought one of them back to her, the sound of her light snoring already filled the air. She was splayed out on the couch, one hand on top of her backpack, where it sat on the ground beside her, and the other flung out behind her head. She was small enough that the couch might as well have doubled as a single bed for her.

“Kris?” I asked quietly, wondering if I should try and nudge her.

She didn’t respond. Just lay there, her auburn hair falling down her face beautifully.

A wave of feeling from before, when I’d felt the rush of protective instinct hit me in the car, came rolling back, but more tender this time around. I sighed as I stuffed my hands in my pockets, considering the evidence of her wrath that had been left behind. I’d known she was a trained operative, but nothing had prepared me for that.

Five men in her home. Correction: five very dead men in her home. All transmuted into corpses within less than a minute, if the sounds of gunfire were to be believed.

And here she was, looking just as beautiful and composed, even in rest.

God, why was I feeling this way? Was it the exhaustion? Was it just my conman instincts kicking in? Or could it be something deeper?

I sighed, went to the linen closet in the entry hall, and found an extra pillow and blanket. I took them back into the living room and, careful not to disturb her, arrayed the blanket over Kris’s sleeping form.

She came awake for a moment as I tried to nudge the pillow beneath her head. The way I was leaning down over her, I was less than a foot from her face.

“Hey,” she said, her voice containing a dream-like quality, as if I’d pulled her straight from the Sandman’s clutches. Her hand went to the pillow, her fingers brushing against mine.

“Hey yourself,” I replied, not moving.

“Must have dozed off.”

“It is late,” I agreed, the proximity of her body to mine sending long-dormant feelings through my body. Natalya would fall asleep on the couch sometimes like this in the early fall, when I’d have a giant fire going in the sitting room downstairs. We’d stay up late, sipping vodka or wine, with me reading to her in English or French from either Dickens or Hugo. Some nights I would pick her up and carry her up to the bedroom, others I’d curl up beside her on the expansive couch, hold her tight against the cold.

“You okay?” Kris asked, her hand looking for a moment as if it had some sort of impulse to move.

I shook my head, dismissing the thoughts of Natalya and that long-ago time. “We’ve got an early morning tomorrow.” I went to straighten up, but found I couldn’t force my body to move. Couldn’t force it to part from Kris’s beautiful, warm company.

Her eyes gazed into mine for a long moment, and she looked as if she were about to say something further, but instead bit her lip and cut off the words.

I swallowed hard, finally won a small victory over my own form, and rose. “Now that you’re awake,” I said, looking down at her from a standing position, “want me to get that guest room made up?”

Kris shook her head. “Too much trouble, and we don’t have enough time for that. Here’s fine.”

I nodded. “Yes. Probably right. Good night, Kris.” I left her alone, turning off the lights on the way out.

“Hunter?” Kris asked from the living room couch, her voice hushed.

I turned back to her. “Yes, Kris?”

“This place is secure, right?”

I nodded. “As safe as a thief can get it. Have a feeling whoever that was underestimated you, though, and they’ll be licking their wounds. Definitely bloodied their nose in this skirmish.”

“Underestimated us, you mean?”

“Not exactly,” I replied, smiling in the darkness. “You’re a typhoon, Kris Cole. A miniscule bit of mayhem just waiting to be unleashed. And they didn’t even get to see you in your true form.”

She chuckled. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Get some sleep. I know I am.”

I disappeared from the living room and made my way back to my bedroom. After a minute in the restroom, I came back out and flopped down on my bed, my mind going back over the night. Not the fight, either. But the way I’d seen Kris’s body move. The way she’d disarmed that man as fluidly as water flowing down a river, how she’d moved with the force of nature.

I threw my forearm over my eyes, growling at myself. “Just stop, Hunter. This is good for neither you, nor her. Get this shit out of your head.”

It didn’t work.

I lay there for the next thirty minutes, thoughts of Kris dancing through my mind. Because, no matter how different we were, I still couldn’t stop thinking of her.