Elite: A Hunter novel (29 page)

Steel’s Wall, reinforced by his brother’s.

Behind me, Knight whipped the assault rifle off his back and laid it down on my left shoulder. I understood immediately what he was doing, clapped my hands over my ears, making a protective sound-muffling magical shield over them, and froze. So did Dusana.

There was the muffled
crack
of the rifle right next to my ear, followed by a second shot. The first round must have been steel-jacketed, since nothing obvious happened to the Drakken, but the second was an incendiary round, and the eye nearest us blossomed with flame.

The Drakken tossed its bruised head up, shrieking. The rifle barked twice more, and the Drakken lost his other eye.

Now blinded, all he could do was flail with claws and tail, shaking his head from side to side. And then—he wasn’t
shaking
his head; it was being battered, as if by blows from a giant fist. Hammer, surely—and from the tension in Mark’s body behind me, White Knight was getting in his fair share too.

I ran through my bag of tricks in my head, trying to come up with something that would work against this huge creature, because even blinded, it could still kill any of us that got within range of that tail or the claws. And suddenly I had it, and a moment later, I sent a sticky version of my net spinning across the air between us, aiming for the Drakken’s right foreleg.

I caught it, then waited until the left came within range, and caught that as well. Catching the first leg hadn’t done anything because I hadn’t anchored the net. Catching the
second
leg, however…

Unable to see what was happening and not able to feel what I had done until it was too late, the blinded Drakken tried to lash out and pulled his own legs out from underneath himself. He toppled over sideways, his head hitting the ground with a
boom
. I netted his head to the ground and held on for dear life, as the rest of the team and all the Hounds descended on the downed Drakken to finish him off with magic and steel, tooth and claw.

And when he finally lay still, Kent said in my ear,
“All right, Joy. Ready to bring us another?”

MORNING CAME, AND WITH it the real fighting, with close-air support and artillery, both from the walls of Zion and the field. At that point, it was clear we’d win this time.

A pack of three Hounds caught the last fleeing Minotaur and brought it down.

A small group of us took down the last Drakken.

And it was over.

I sat down right where I was, in the churned-up dirt and blood and bits of Drakken. I was on the far side of the carcass, alone, since I’d been blinding it with magical fireworks. All I could do was stare stupidly at the gigantic head in front of me. The head looked to be about half the size of a locomotive, though I could have been wrong about that. I could not believe we’d taken down, not just one, but four of these things.

All I could think about at that moment was…nothing. I was literally too tired to think. I should have been starving, but I was at the point where I was even too tired to be hungry.

And that is when I heard a strange, high-pitched keening sound above and behind me that made every hair on my body stand straight up with terror.

I turned, ever so slowly, looking over my shoulder…and at first, saw nothing except what I took to be a pole or the trunk of a dead tree. Then I looked up…and up…

If it hadn’t been towering twenty feet over me, I would have said it was a cellar spider—the kind people call “daddy longlegs.” I gaped up at it, a hideous blob-shaped thing with eight shiny eyes looking down at me, slowly clicking its mandibles at me. The blob balanced high in the air on eight legs that would have been spindly—except they were as thick as my arm.

And only all those years of defensive martial arts and good instincts saved me when it struck at me with one of the front legs. I shoulder-rolled out of the way, but that brought me farther underneath it, and to my horror, I saw a spear of white coming right for me. It could spit webbing!

Bya hit me and knocked us both out of the way, and the webbing splatted down into the earth where I had just been. If I’d still been there, it would have enveloped me completely. Bya put up his Shield, and belatedly I put up mine, and the next glob of webbing splatted against the combined Shields, leaving us untouched.

Then the rest of my Hounds appeared. Hold, Strike, Myrrdhin, Gwalchmai, Dusana, Chenresig, Shinje, and Hevajra each swarmed a leg, grabbed it in their jaws, and
pulled.
Bya and I backed up between Dusana and Chenresig as the Hounds immobilized the giant spider and slowly began to pull it down to ground level, splaying it out so it couldn’t move. That was when I began pumping bullets into the body, while Bya, Kalachakra, and Begtse hosed it down with fire.

The sound of gunfire brought the other Elite running, or as close to running as they could manage, but by the time they got there, we’d managed to get through the spider’s weak Shield and burn it to a crisp.

My Hounds let go, and the legs reflexively curled up toward the body, leaving us gazing at a blackened blob in the middle of a forest of twenty-foot sticks.

And we all stared at the thing.

“What…is…that?” someone managed as a couple of cams zoomed in from the other side of the dead Drakken and began circling what was left of it, taking pictures.

“A spider?” I said feebly. “I mean, I guess it’s a spider.”

“Another new Othersider,” Kent said in disgust. “First snake-men from hell, and now this.” He looked over at Hammer and Steel. “Anything like that in what your ma’s studied?”

They shook their heads. I couldn’t see their expressions under the masks of caked-on dust and blood and sweat they wore. Disbelief, maybe. Maybe just exhaustion.

“Where the hell did it come from?” someone asked hoarsely. “It wasn’t anywhere on this field before, was it?”

They all looked at me. “I dunno,” I said. “I was just sitting here, and then I heard this weird sound, and when I turned around, it was rising up behind me.”

Kent limped toward the thing, then past it, muttering to himself. Or maybe to his Perscom. He paced about a hundred yards away from us, zigzagging back and forth, looking and muttering. He got to a spot where there were some scraggly trees, looked around some more, and finally came back to us.

“There’s a hollow place back there. It must have been lying in ambush,” he said. “Body fitted into the hollow, legs folded up.”

“But…” Scarlet started to object, then shook her head. “Natural camouflage, maybe a little bit of illusion, and its Shield. And luck, that none of the shells hit it.”

“That wasn’t luck. That was good shooting on the part of the Zion gunners; they only fired when they knew they could hit something,” Retro pointed out, running a filthy hand through his sweaty blond hair. It struck me then, weirdly, out of nowhere, that he looked like a lankier, punkier version of Josh. When you’re bone tired, strange thoughts crop up in your head. “About time we had some luck! For an ambush bug, it was pretty ineffective.”

“It wouldn’t have been, if Joy didn’t have such a big pack,” said Knight. “That’s all that saved her. Well, that and good reflexes.”

Retro looked at me and grinned. “You need to keep those reflexes sharp. That’s a good reason to dump the creepy Psimon and start dating me!” he whispered at me. I rolled my eyes.

Then I sat down again, hard, shaking once reaction set in. I didn’t say anything. Scarlet sat down next to me and buried her head in her hands. She looked like a wreck. We all looked like wrecks. In the time I had been an Elite, I had never seen the team looking this bad after a fight.

Have you ever heard of anything like that spider thing?
I asked Bya.

Never.
He flopped down next to me and morphed into greyhound.
This is a new thing. I do not like this.

Was this what that Folk Mage meant?
I asked him reluctantly.
Is this why we should be wary? Why nothing is what it seems? Because now they are going to unleash new things on us?

I don’t know that either,
he replied unhappily.
I do not like not knowing.

I bet you’d like to go home,
I said with sympathy, and opened the Way.

That is, I tried to open the Way. It kind of spluttered and died. I was literally out of every possible sort of energy—magical, physical, and otherwise. I looked up at Kent, as the rest of my Hounds gathered around me. “Uh…sir?” I said hesitantly. “I’m…gonna need a chopper all to myself. I can’t send my Hounds back yet.”

He snorted tiredly. “You aren’t the only one, kid. Do you mind waiting to be picked up last? You’re the best defended of all of us right now.”

Because of my pack…
I nodded. “That’s fine, sir. I can wait.”

“All right. Let me go organize our rides,” he replied, and limped off.

I glanced over at Retro, who was sort of slumped over his knees, his eyes glazing over. “You still okay?” I asked.

He looked at me, and I could tell he had really smacked the wall. “Uh…I guess. Why?”

“You’re not hitting on me,” I replied.

He thought about that for a minute. “Then I guess I must be dead, huh?” And from somewhere, all four of us managed a weak sputter of a laugh.

By the time the choppers came for Retro, Archer, Scarlet, and their Hounds, we were all getting a little bit of a second wind back, but doing anything with magic was right out of the question.

They left me alone then, until the last chopper could come for me and the pack. I did try to open the Way again, but I just couldn’t manage it. I managed to stagger away from the carcass of that last Drakken and over to the relatively clear area where the choppers were landing. Then I sat down again, with my back against what remained of a shattered tree. For some reason, no one was coming out of the city to scavenge off the Drakken carcasses.

They have more sense than to bring Drakken pieces into their walls, where they are likely to attract more Othersiders,
Bya said dryly.
Unlike those fools in Apex.

He had flopped down next to me, while the others prowled around me, alert for trouble. I closed my eyes for a moment. I thought I could hear the chopper in the distance. I couldn’t wait for it to get here.

That was two big city fights with huge Othersiders within a week of each other. And the second one was bigger than the first. The first had clearly been to snag Ace, but why the second? The only reason we’d been able to handle this “Incident” was because we’d had artillery in the field and on the walls, and close-air support. This had been a much bigger force than Bensonville. So…
why?

And was worse to come?

We’d all staggered into showers, thrown on whatever was at hand, and now were either sleeping in our quarters or trying to muster the energy to eat something. Hounds were flopped down around the lounge, trotted curiously in the hallways, or joined their Hunters in their quarters.
None
of us could dig up what we needed to send them back, and since the Hounds themselves were replete with manna, they were content to remain.

It was the first time
I
had seen Hounds in the halls, but evidently it wasn’t anything new to the other Hunters, because no one paid that much attention to them. So it finally dawned on me that although that fight had seemed like the end of the world, here at Apex, maybe it was just the Elite doing what the Elite did.

With a pack the size of mine, there just wasn’t enough room in my suite for them all, so although I would have loved to just drink about half a dozen meal-drinks and lie flat on my bed, we were all in the lounge and I was sprawled over a chair. Since they were stuck here until I could muster enough juice to send them home, I wanted to be with them.

Word had gotten around that the Elite had saved Zion but hit the wall doing so, and the other Hunters were keeping out of our way. I think that was the way pretty much every one of us wanted it.

My brain would have ordinarily been buzzing with unanswered questions, but I was so tired it felt like my thoughts were forcing their way through tar.