Hunters descent, p.3
Hunter's Descent, page 3
Ruri wrapped warm arms around her. They felt so good and Mary Alice longed to let herself relax into the refuge they promised, but she couldn’t.
“Tell me,” Ruri whispered in her ear. “Tell me what’s got you so wound up. What you’ve been hiding from me since that night.”
“I can’t.” Ruri would never look at her the same way again if she knew. Mary Alice could not handle seeing the love Ruri felt for her turn to hatred or, worse yet, disappointment. The wolven put so much stock in pack, in family. Stiletto hadn’t been family, but she was a compatriot, a sister-in-arms, and Malice had ended her. It hadn’t even been an honorable death. She’d suffocated her while Stiletto was unconscious through the actions of another. If there was a more ignominious way to die, Mary Alice wasn’t sure she could think of one. Killing Stiletto was supposed to bring her some peace of mind; instead Malice couldn’t get her out of her head. When Ruri left her, her isolation would be complete. She would be left all alone with her ghosts, and her squadmate would lead the pack. What did you expect after killing Stiletto? Puppy dogs and rainbows? She shook her head in a vain attempt to silence her own mocking question.
Ruri didn’t push it. She simply held Mary Alice against her until the tears stopped flowing. It was times like this when she thought she might be able to love the wolven. And that only made Ruri even more dangerous.
“That email from Uncle Ralph is probably in my inbox.” With infinite care, Mary Alice extricated herself from Ruri’s embrace. “I need to get the logistics nailed down so we can get out of here.”
Ruri squeezed her closer for a moment, then let her go. “You have to talk to me sooner or later,” she said.
Mary Alice lifted one shoulder in noncommittal response. It was unlikely, and right now what she really needed was to be alone to gather herself and try to figure out what she was going to do with this whole mess.
She made her way to the living area to pull up her email. The exposed beams overhead provided something to stare through while her mind wandered, not seeing the screen of her laptop. Toenails clicking against concrete pulled her away from her thoughts. Ruri’s golden wolf settled herself in front of the couch. Mary Alice slipped her feet into the tiny gap between Ruri’s belly and the floor, allowing her feet to become nice and toasty. She sighed and relaxed against the beat up back of the sofa and opened up her marching orders.
Chapter Three
Ruri shifted again and pulled at her seat belt for what had to be the fourteenth time in the past half hour. Wind whistled through the window cracked open on her side of the truck. Mary Alice set her jaw and glared through the windshield. If Ruri squirmed once more, she swore she would yank the steering wheel from the column, toss it out the window, and consign them both to a fiery wreck in the trees lining the road. It was sunny, which was nice enough but made for treacherous patches of black ice along the two-lane highway through this stretch of Wisconsin’s woods.
Ruri put one foot against the dashboard and pushed back against her seat.
“Do you have to do that?” Mary Alice tried to smile to take the sting out of the clipped question, but she was pretty sure all it looked like was a baring of teeth.
“Do what?” Ruri started bouncing her knee up and down. She turned to look out her window and tapped her fingertips against the door.
“Move. Constantly.” Mary Alice firmed her grip on the wheel, being careful not to crack it. “It’s very distracting.”
“Sorry. I’m not very good being cooped up for a long time.” She stopped tapping her fingers, but the knee kept bobbing away.
“Clearly.”
Ruri’s grin was cheeky. “We could stop at the next gas station. Get some snacks, give me a chance to stretch my legs.”
“That’ll be the third time this trip. We’ve only been driving for four hours.”
“I wouldn’t say no to some cheesy poofs.”
“Another bag?”
“Or I could go back to entertaining myself.”
“No. That’s fine. We’ll stop at the next one I see.”
“Or we could talk.”
Mary Alice froze, then rolled her shoulders to cover her discomfort. “About what?”
“Anything you want. We don’t have much in the way of conversation. Usually your mouth is occupied doing…other things.”
“I don’t recall you complaining.” Mary Alice bit her lower lip and shot Ruri a sideways glance. Ruri’s grin had gone from cheeky to positively wicked, and it kindled a fire low in her belly.
“I’m not. But since you can’t do anything like that now, we might as well get some different uses from that talented mouth of yours.”
“If you want.” As long as they didn’t talk about the night they took down MacTavish, Mary Alice was willing to discuss most things. “What do you want to talk about?”
“So here’s something I’ve been wondering for a while. Why do you call us supranormals? Pretty much everyone else refers to us and the other groups as supernatural. Or paranormal.”
“Umm.” Mary Alice chewed at her lip. She was never sure how much of her work she should share with her lover. The question seemed fairly innocuous and she couldn’t see how it would hurt to answer it. Ruri already knew about her existence and that she answered to a government handler. “It helps weed out those in the know among humans. When paranormal became popular, people started talking about it a lot more. And then there’s that TV show. From what I gather, the term helps ping on people who might know things they shouldn’t.”
“How would your bosses even know what people are talking about? Are they trolling Tumblr looking for people posting about supranormals?”
“Among other things, I’m sure.”
“Other things? Like what?”
“I don’t think I should answer that question.”
“Oh my god, they’re listening in on phone conversations, aren’t they?”
“I have no idea.” But she had her suspicions. It was vanishingly unlikely they weren’t. She certainly operated as if they were.
“They totally are.” Ruri shook her head. “That’s awful. Your bosses are assholes.”
“You won’t hear me disagreeing.” Time to change the subject before Ruri started pressing her on even more sensitive topics. “How did you get changed?”
Ruri didn’t say anything for a long time. “That’s not a question wolven ask each other,” she finally said.
“Why not? It seems pretty basic.”
Ruri smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “The question is basic, the implications…less so.” She sighed heavily. “There’s an unspoken bias in a lot of packs. Like an idea that wolven who were born that way are somehow better than those of us who were made.”
“Interesting. Like cradle Catholics.”
“Cradle Catholics?”
“Same idea. Catholics who were born into the church are more Catholic than those who converted. It was a whole big thing at my parents’ church when we were kids. It always seemed backward to me. Like how is lucking into something by being born to the right parents better than going out and intentionally doing it?”
Ruri smiled. “That’s a decent analogy then. Though I doubt it leads to many brawls in the middle of mass.”
“Not so much.” She had a mental flash of Father Antonio rolling around on the floor with one of his parishioners. “It would have made church a lot less boring.”
“I bet.” Ruri went silent again. She stared out the front windshield for a while. “I’m not ready to talk about it with you.”
“Oh.” The pang of disappointment went deeper than Mary Alice had expected. “That’s okay.” It didn’t feel okay, but what else was she supposed to say?
“So what’s your origin story?”
“Origin story?” Mary Alice raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading too many comics, you know that?”
“You’re the big badass Hunter. I’d like to hear it.”
“It’s going to have to wait. Here’s the gas station I promised you.” They didn’t need gas, but Mary Alice needed a few minutes to get her head on straight before telling this story. She pulled into the small gas station. It looked just this side of rundown. If the pumps took credit cards, she’d have been surprised. “Go get some snacks, then we’ll get back on the road. I want to get there before dark.”
For a moment, she thought Ruri was going to argue, but the wolven stalked from the car and into the shabby convenience store.
She stood next to the truck while the tank filled. The sun wasn’t nearly far enough above the trees for her. In the dark it would be even harder to see patches of ice on these roads. Still, she’d have stopped twenty more times if it meant Ruri wasn’t so twitchy. Her eyes staring into the darkness of the trees across the road, Mary Alice chewed on a cuticle and tried not to think about Cassidy and who might be hassling her. She sighed and waited for the pump handle to click off, then followed Ruri inside.
Her girlfriend leaned on the sales counter across from a woman who had to be pushing fifty. Her round face was animated as she chatted with Ruri. She had that effect on people, Mary Alice had noticed. Well, most people. Some unfortunate souls realized deep down inside that they were within arm’s reach of a predator. Likely, they never realized exactly what put them off about her. This woman apparently had no such awareness.
“Oh yeah,” she said with barely a glance in her direction before turning her attention back to Ruri. “The folks up in Hawthorn County are powerful strange.”
Mary Alice gravitated toward the snacks while trying to look like she wasn’t paying attention. Hawthorn County was hard to pin down. She’d done her research. She knew it was the least populous county in the state, with barely more than 3,000 residents. Apparently that population swelled a bit with summer tourists, but not as much as other counties in the area. It was full of trees, but the logging industry was practically nonexistent. As far as she could tell, the economy was extremely depressed, which is probably how the county had been picked for a juvenile reformatory camp.
“Really?” Ruri sounded like she was hanging off the clerk’s every word. “How so?”
“They’re just queer is all. Keep to the themselves. I know people call this the ass end of beyond, but they really live up to that name.” She tsked. “You need to watch yourself up there. Why you heading up again?”
“It’s a bit of a vacation for us.”
Mary Alice cringed, wishing she hadn’t said that. The less anyone could associate her and Ruri in a way that suggested they were in a relationship, the safer the wolven would be. She snagged a bagged snack and brought it up to the cash register.
“This, the gas on the pump outside, and whatever she’s having,” Mary Alice said.
“The two of you, is it?” The woman gave them a long look.
They didn’t have time to deal with her rural homophobia. “We’re sisters,” she said, sounding bored.
“Adopted,” Ruri said with a wide smile.
“Oh,” she said. “Of course.” Still, something had thrown her off. She rang them up quickly but offered no more conversation.
“Thanks,” Mary Alice said after getting her change. “Come on,” she said to Ruri and left, not waiting to see if her girlfriend followed her.
Chapter Four
“I wish you hadn’t done that.” Ruri said as she pulled on her seat belt.
“Done what?” Mal bent forward and took a long look at the rapidly darkening sky. Dusk was almost upon them.
“Shut down that conversation. She was telling me about Hawthorn County. That could have been useful, but instead you came stomping up and got all glowery. Do you even realize you do that?”
“What do you mean? I was perfectly polite.”
“Sure you were, in that ‘I’m going to rip out your tongue and feed it to you’ way you have. I don’t know, Mal. There’s something about you that puts off humans sometimes. It’s like they know you could take them out without even thinking about it.”
Mal got very still. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and glared into the pools of light the headlights left on the asphalt. “Other humans,” she said.
Ruri blinked at her. The comment made no sense to her.
“Don’t you mean I put off other humans?”
“Oh, that. I mean sure. I just think of you as one of us most of the time.” She held up her hand as Mal took a breath to refute her. “It’s not a bad thing. You know more about us than almost any other human alive.” She stressed “other” slightly. “That’s all I mean. Don’t get too bent out of shape about it.”
Mal’s shoulders slumped. She seemed to deflate in front of Ruri’s eyes.
“I don’t even know how human I am.” The words were so quiet that without the benefits of her wolven side, Ruri might have missed them.
She waited for a follow-up, but Mal stared fixedly through the windshield at the empty road in front of them.
“What do you mean by that?” she finally asked when the silence had stretched to breaking.
A grim smile twisted Mal’s lips. It was a relief that none of it touched her eyes. “You don’t know about Hunters at all.”
“Of course not. It’s not like I have anyone who will tell me about your little club.” Including you, she thought at Mal with all the fierceness she could muster. Surely she’d proven her trustworthiness by now.
The smile warmed into something more genuine. “I’m going to catch fire if you keep glaring at me like that.” Mal sat up straighter and shifted in her seat, unlimbering herself as best she could in the confines of the truck. “It’s not pretty. Are you sure you want to know?”
Ruri opened her mouth to say “Of course,” then closed it. Mal wasn’t asking as a piece of useless formality, of that she was certain. The question deserved serious thought and she paused to give it just that. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything Mal might say that would change how she and the wolf thought about her. Mal had kidnapped Ruri to help her sister, who she was keeping in a metal box to “protect” her. There wasn’t much worse than trapping a fledgling wolven in a cage, no matter how pure her motives had been.
“I do,” Ruri said. “And thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until you’ve heard the story. Here goes then.” Mal took a deep breath.
“I was recruited away from my Army unit after we saw combat with some things that took out half our platoon. I survived, but I got a good look at them. Said some stuff I shouldn’t have during my debrief. A few weeks later, I was transferred to a new company. They said we were an experimental Special Forces unit.” She laughed. “They weren’t lying. They really put the experiment in experimental.” Her knuckles were sharp under her skin from the force of her grip on the steering wheel. Discomfort rolled off her in spiky waves.
Ruri reached over and placed her hand gently on Mal’s thigh. She rubbed the tense muscle in slow circles.
Mal continued. “It was fun at first. We worked in small teams, did a lot of hand-to-hand work. That’s always been some of my favorite. Then it got weird. They brought in a whole bunch of old bladed weapons. That’s when I wielded my first sword. Machete first, then I got a liking for the katana. Stiletto went for long knives. She picked up dual-wielding like she’d been born with blades for hands. There were four of us in our team. We bunked together, ate together, trained together. Hell, some of us even fucked together.
“Then the docs arrived.”
The muscle under Ruri’s palm went from tense flesh to stone. She sneaked a quick glance at the dashboard. The needle on the speedometer was rising rapidly.
“Maybe you should slow down a little bit, babe,” she said quietly, accompanying the suggestion with a gentle squeeze to take out any hint of censure.
Mal twitched, then eased off on the gas until they were back down to something resembling the speed limit. She took a deep breath. “So the docs came about a month in. At first they just ran a bunch of tests. Some of the other recruits were reassigned. My team was so proud because all of us had made the cut. We weren’t proud for long. Our team was in the middle of the group. They started with Alpha and worked their way down. The mess hall was emptier every day as each team went back in for more ‘testing.’ No one came back. By the time they made it to us, the remaining teams were seriously discussing going AWOL.
“We knew when it was our day. We’d seen it coming for a week and a half. They loaded us into the back of a van and drove us off base. There were no windows, we had no idea where we were going, but we were in there probably an hour. Cerberus timed the route and marked the turns, but it didn’t end up doing him any good. We were let out in a loading dock, no way to see where the building was. They had us change into hospital gowns and put us on gurneys, then wheeled us into a big operating room. They pushed the sedatives.”
Mal stopped talking. A muscle in her jaw jumped rhythmically as she wrestled with her memories. Her hands flexed on the wheel and the muscles in her leg twitched.
“Maybe you should pull over,” Ruri said.
“Maybe I should.” Mal slowed, then pulled onto the shoulder of the highway where the snow didn’t seem too deep. Her movements were jerky as she engaged the truck’s parking brake. She grabbed Ruri’s hand in her own and held on tight.
“Are you going to be okay? If it’s too much, you can tell me another day.”
“I’m not okay, but we’re halfway there. I don’t know if I’ll be brave enough to tell you again. We might as well take advantage of what courage I have now.”
“If you say so. But I’m right here. You’re not doing this alone.”
“I know.” Mal nodded and loosened her grip on Ruri’s hand. “It’s the only thing keeping me going. Here goes. It’s all downhill from here.” She let go of Ruri completely and took another deep breath. “The sedatives weren’t enough. I came awake halfway through. The pain…” She squeezed shut her eyes and clenched her fists.
