Elite: A Hunter novel (2 page)

I shuddered. “This isn’t something I really want to get into the habit of doing.”

“May not have a choice, kiddo,” said his brother gently, mopping his own head with his gold bandana. “You’re the only one of us with a Hound you can ride.”

I swallowed hard, but I could see his point.

“You said when we were in the chopper that this was a
small
Drakken!” I countered. We’d come up with this idea on the fly, on the helichopper ride in to the site. It was a very, very effective strategy, and unless we did it within sight of one of the Folk, not one that the Drakken would ever learn to avoid.

“It was,” Steel replied, his mouth quirking as he tried not to laugh at me. “We’ve never seen anything smaller than that.”

I had no good reply for that, so I got down off Dusana and let him join my pack. The Hounds—my pack of eleven, and the six belonging to Steel and Hammer—all clustered around the dead Drakken. It looked as if all they were doing was breathing hard, but what they were really doing was inhaling manna, which is a sort of magical energy, a force that they live on, and what puts the power behind Hunters’ magic. Everything alive has manna, but humans, even non-magic ones, have more of it than anything that comes from Otherside. Mind, something the size of a Drakken has loads and loads and loads, as much as all the Hounds together could “eat.”

Hammer was on his Perscom. “Drakken down. Need disposal crew,” he was saying.

“Disposal crew dispatched, Elite Team HSJ. ETA fifteen minutes,”
came over all three of the radios on our Perscoms. He probably hadn’t needed to call that in, since the little ubiquitous cameras that hung around every Hunter were hovering discretely in the background, but it was better to be sure. Something like a Drakken carcass might attract more Othersiders if it didn’t get disposed of quickly.

“What are they going to do with that thing?” I asked, a little queasy and a lot curious. Hammer looked at Steel, and they both shrugged, as a breeze blew the oddly mingled scents of crushed blueberries, crushed greenery, and valerian tea over all of us.

“Never asked. Probably goes into the soup for the vat farms, or gets made into fertilizer,” said Hammer. “There’s a market for things like skin, claws, teeth, horns, and tusks, though. Rich people have books bound in Drakken skin or make boots and shoes out of it. They get decorators to make display pieces out of bones, teeth, claws, and all. Sometimes have artists carve stuff out of them or make composite works.”

“I was at a reception at Premier Rayne’s palace once,” Steel offered. “There was a chair made out of teeth and bones. People were sitting in it and taking selfies.”

I shuddered again, this time revulsion mixing with fear. Hammer nodded. “I know, right? Sure, we have the Barriers, but…if anything ever comes through the Barriers, I’m thinking you might as well paint targets on all those fancy apartments with dead Othersider knickknacks in them.”

Our Hounds began drifting back toward us, now gleaming and prosperous-looking with all the manna they’d taken in. Hammer and Steel’s were pretty typical for Hounds; they looked like oversize mastiffs with heavy coats; Hammer’s were ebony and Steel’s were chocolate. Mine were a disparate bunch. There were the two that I “inherited” from Karly that looked like wolves, except wolves made out of shadow. That was Hold and Strike. Then there were the two that abandoned their previous Hunter, Ace, when he betrayed
everything
about being a Hunter by trying to murder me during my last Elite Trial. That was Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai. Their heads looked a bit like a cross between a wolf and a big cat, almost exactly like some of the French gargoyles I’ve seen pictures of. They were an all-over silvery gray.

And then there was my original pack: Bya, Dusana, Begtse, Chenresig, Shinje, Kalachakra, and Hevajra. They were…not like any Hounds anyone here at Apex City had ever seen before. In fact, the only other person I know of who had Hounds like mine was my mentor back on the Mountain, Master Kedo Patli.

For one thing, they could choose what they wanted to look like. Right now they were in their “normal” forms, which is to say, like something out of a psychedelic vision. They ranged in size from pack-alpha Bya, whose head was just about at my rib cage, to Dusana, who was big enough to ride on, to Begtse, who was about as big as the shed you’d put Dusana in. They were covered in multiple patterns picked out in multiple eye-watering colors, and sprouted horns, tusks, teeth, spikes, and ridges in ways that made no sense or logic. But when we weren’t Hunting, they were generally a pack of black greyhounds with fiery eyes.

Their ability to change form was one big difference between them and the other Hounds around here. For another, they’d accepted other peoples’ Hounds into their pack. Nobody had ever heard of that happening before. Normally when a Hunter dies or somehow makes his Hounds desert him, they just go back to Otherside. But these four hadn’t, giving me the biggest pack anyone had ever heard of, a pack of eleven. I think that huge pack was why Hammer, Steel, and I had been sent out after a Drakken, instead of a bigger team. My Hounds had been the safeguard; while Dusana and I had been leading the Drakken away, they had been coursing silently alongside, just in case something went wrong. And they had been prepared to jump in and start harrying the Drakken in case Hammer and Steel hadn’t been able to kill it right away.

The last difference between my Hounds and every other Hunter’s was that they were doing things with me and for me that I’d never even read about Hounds doing before. Like Dusana
bamphing
me along with him.

That would most likely give me an edge over whoever was trying to kill me. Besides Ace, that is. Because although the former Hunter Ace was currently in army custody (and locked up when he wasn’t out under guard to use his magic against the Othersiders the army deals with), Ace had been working with someone else, someone who had never been caught.

Steel cocked his head to the side; listening hard, I could hear the heavy
whomp whomp whomp
of a couple of cargo helichoppers. “That’s the disposal crew,” he said. “We might want to move back to the station and the landing pad.”

Since I had no particular wish to watch and maybe get splattered with yuck, I nodded, and we all backtracked along the path between the blueberry bushes I’d taken leading the Drakken away. The guys started helping themselves to berries as we walked, which was all the invitation
I
needed to do the same. Sure, we get whatever we want to eat at HQ, and Hunters get fed really, really well, but working magic makes you hungry.

Fruit off the bush is always the best, anyway. The berries weren’t the same as wild blueberries; they didn’t have the same intense, slightly tart flavor, but they were bigger and sweeter than the ones back home, and I liked them better than the so-called “blueberry jam” they served at HQ.

The guys were slowly recovering as we walked. The bushes were as tall as Steel’s head, and the ground between the rows had some sort of dense, small-leaved ground cover growing over it, to discourage weeds. The stuff was hardy; it didn’t really even seem bruised by us walking on it.

“Good Hunt,” Steel said, around a mouthful of berries. He was the strategist of the two brothers, as I’d learned on the chopper ride into the drop zone. This was the first time I’d worked with them alone, rather than being in a full six- or eight-man Elite team.

His brother grunt-laughed. “Any Hunt you can walk away from is a good Hunt.” He and Steel fist-bumped. The helichoppers must have landed, because there were no more sounds from their blades, but there were other noises behind us now. A breeze carried the sound of chain saws revving up, so the cleanup crew was already at work. Otherwise the only thing you could hear out here was the sound of wind in the bushes and the songs of birds and beneficial insects. That was part of the job of the ag-station—growing bugs that ate other bugs and releasing them at the proper time, and maintaining food stations that attracted bug-eating birds. There’s a lot of farming stuff we don’t do that they did before the Diseray, and spraying poison all over everything is one of them.

When we got to the station, some of the techs were already outside, fixing the transformer and jury-rigging a link to the wind array, and the rest were looking at the deep scores in the concrete of the building. They kept glancing at us rather shyly, as if they wanted to thank us but were diffident about it. Steel solved that by walking up to them as casually, as if we had not just flattened a Drakken.

“Everyone all right?” he asked. They seemed to take that as the cue that it was okay for them to flock around us and ask for autographs. Crazy, right? But believe it or not, Steel and Hammer both reached into thigh pockets and pulled out little palm-size cards with their pictures on them. Right there, after just having killed a Drakken, they were signing their names, as if they weren’t ready to drop, as if they were in a club or a bar. I was hanging back, but Steel beckoned me forward and pulled out
another
set of cards from his other thigh-pocket. This lot had the whole Elite unit on it, including me. I didn’t remember posing for that, but I suppose that someone had pasted the picture together from our individual shots. So I signed those. And our Hounds milled around and accepted attention from anyone who’d give it to them. Mine reverted to greyhound shape as soon as they saw the crowd, maybe to keep from scaring anyone, although at this point you’d think all those people who’d watched my channel would know what they looked like.

So weird. So very, very surreal. Back home, Hunters were just not idolized like this. But then, back home, we weren’t entertainers. And I swear, even these people, who
should have known better
because they’d nearly become lunch for a Drakken, reverted to being fans as soon as they saw us.

But playing along was part of the job, as I kept being reminded at every turn
.
“Fan service” it was called, and it was another way to make the Cits believe they were safe, no matter what. So I signed cards and imitated Hammer and Steel. Eventually the supervisor realized they should actually be working, and chased everyone inside except the techs fixing the transformer, and we went over to the landing pad to wait for the helichopper that would pick us up. Hammer and Steel were still keeping up the façade of being indestructible, but I could tell they were fading.

“How long have you been Elite?” I asked, to keep their minds off how tired they were and not trying at all to keep the admiration out of my voice. I hadn’t had much chance to talk with them since I joined the Elite ranks. Actually, I hadn’t had much chance to talk with anyone. We worked really hard: when we weren’t drilling under Armorer Kent’s eye, we were either deployed against something big or running patrols in some places in and around Apex that I hadn’t even known existed.

“Maybe not as long as you’re thinking,” Hammer mused, with a raised eyebrow. “Just four years.”

“We became Hunters a lot later than you, kiddo,” said Steel. “Powers popped at eighteen, full Hunter at eighteen and a half, got sick of the posturing and went for Elite together at twenty-one, and we’re twenty-five now.” He glanced as his brother as if to suggest he should say something.

“We decided that we had to apply together. My trick doesn’t work without my brother,” Hammer said modestly. “We did the Trials separately, though. I guess we kind of cheated on the last one.”

Steel threw back his head and laughed. “It’s not cheating if it works!” he retorted. “Our Walls are so strong, we actually never needed to go on the offensive. It was pretty funny, to tell you the truth. I got Kent; he tapped out and surrendered when he just ran out of energy after beating against my Wall to the point that he couldn’t even produce a light-flash.”

“I got Archer. I kind of hated to flatten him the way I did—he’s such a nice guy, but…” Hammer shrugged. “Playing nice doesn’t win the Trials. I just shoved, shoved his own Shield right up against him and squashed him against the big containment Shield. He was at the point of getting the air pushed out of his lungs when he tapped out.”

They both laughed. “Joy, you’ve got to look that up. The look on Archer’s face!” Steel chortled. I’d never heard a laugh I could have described as a
chortle
before. It surprised me into laughing too.

“I will,” I promised. And that was when the helichopper for our ride back came cruising in just above the berry bushes.

We opened the Way for our Hounds, who went back Otherside, looking sleek and contented. Then we loaded in, with me going last; there was a limited amount of room in the chopper, and the two big guys had to arrange themselves first because I could just squeeze in anywhere. They strapped in, leaned back in their seats, fastened chin straps to keep their heads from lolling about, and closed their eyes as the tough fight caught up with them. They were asleep within a minute; the chopper had just turned around and was starting back for home as they dozed off. They looked weirdly younger when asleep.

It had been a grueling fight for them, no matter how easy it had looked. Doing things with magic isn’t effortless—far from it. It takes energy to move magical energy, and that energy has to come from inside the Hunter. Those two had been working like champion weight lifters the entire time they’d been bashing that Drakken. I was amazed they had managed to stay on their feet and look perfectly normal for the station crew.

But that was part of the mythos we were trying to project, I guess. We can never do anything that might make the Cits lose confidence in us or think they were anything less than completely safe.

But although I’d done some to help, I was still at about 90 percent charge. I keyed my Perscom and called up HQ.

“Hunter Joy,” I said when I got the handshake.

“Go, Hunter Joy.”

“Put me back in rotation. I hardly did anything this run,” I said. Because I hadn’t, and if we got another callout, it could be that one more Hunter would make the difference between handling it ourselves, and having to call in the army. One thing I’d learned, the Elite hate having to call in the army. Calling in an artillery barrage or some of the attack choppers is one thing, but having to call in troops or army Mages or army Hunters makes everyone feel like they fell down on the job somehow. Right now, I was pretty sure most of us didn’t want to get within a mile of an army group that had a Mage with it, because that Mage might be Ace. The army took him, and the army tends to want to use what it takes. So Ace was probably out there somewhere—supervised, sure, but
not
in a prison cell as long as he was “working.”