The Huntress (26 page)

Fiercely denying any thought that he might have started to trust her, he stalked out into the corridor and bellowed her name. When he got no response, from her or anyone else, he finally realized why the ship seemed so still. The engines no longer throbbed under his heels. They must have landed. On Xerxes or had she taken him somewhere else? And where the hell was she?

Swiftly he searched the ship. The transport was missing and so were Mea, Regan, and the android. Full of thwarted anger, he barreled into the infirmary. “Where are they? Where’ve we landed? Why’d she drug me, goddamn it!”

“Calm down! There's no need to shout. I can hear you just fine. They are in the transport, collecting the information needed for the present mission. We are on Xerxes, as promised. As to why she drugged you, well, that’s my fault in a way.”

Ema paused and Stone stalked toward her table, vibrating with aggression.

“Spill it or I’ll—”

“No need to threaten. You humans! So volatile. She and I had an argument a few days ago when you decided to stay on board. I accused her of taking my advice, and she didn’t take the accusation well.”

“What advice?” he muttered between clenched teeth.

“After the last time you deserted them, I told her she should—let’s see, I believe my exact words were ‘drag his butt back here and give him what he wants for a few days, then see whether or not he feels like running away.’ She insisted that you’d been given free choice in the matter, and I disagreed.”

Stone began pacing, mouthing a string of curses.

“Not that I think she deliberately forced you. She would never have hurt you like that. But humans are frequently driven by their hormones, and I think you were pressured into the choice you made by simple biology. Anyway, Mea took my accusation very much to heart and was determined to give you the opportunity to make a clean decision. She said she needed to know that any choice you made was a free one, not hampered by physical or emotional blackmail. She drugged you so you wouldn’t be swayed by them when we arrived on Xerxes, one way or the other.”

His swearing gained volume until he was shouting.

Ema raised her own voice, sounding at the end of patience. “What did you want her to do, Stone, force you to stay?”

“Yes! I mean, no. Fuck!”

Her laughter drove him out of the infirmary, and he stormed up the corridor to the control room, vision tinted red by a haze of fury. Ignoring the tremor in his hands, he quickly initiated launch protocol. “You wanna play, Hunter? We’ll play,” he said in a guttural snarl, but the ship’s systems would only let him get so far before he was pushed out. With a curse he started over, and got the same result. As he was trying a third time, the intercom clicked discreetly to his left.

“Ahem!
I hate to bring this up because you seem just a little bitter, but Mea locked you out of the systems this morning. She said you could take anything else but the ship.”

He let out another string of curses and looked for something to throw.

“Well, am I getting an education today! I don’t think that last one’s anatomically possible, though…”

He found a digital pad on one of the seats and flung it at the intercom, turning away as it exploded with a satisfying crunch.

“Temper, temper…”

Her voice followed him out of the control room, and he seriously considered going back into the infirmary and smashing her crystal. But if it wasn’t Mea’s neck he was wringing, it wasn’t worth his time. Stalking down the corridor to his quarters, he decided it was past time he shook them off the back of his neck and got the hell out of there.

“Way past fuckin’time,” he muttered under his breath while he yanked a carrysack out of the wall and shoved clothes into it. When that was done, he marched to the mess hall and pilfered some field rations before heading back to the control room and the weapons stashed there. Seething with pent up anger and frustration, he outfitted himself with nearly every kind of equipment and weapon there was in the receptacle. When he was satisfied, he swung into the corridor and down to the hatch.

When the hatch opened, Stone rocked back on his heels at the wall of intense, baking heat. The sunlight was a sullen orange color, but the shadows were all wrong for it to be a sunset. Stepping out onto the ramp against that heavy heat, he looked up and found out why. There were two suns, one a red giant and the other a smaller yellow, the giant chasing the other across the sky like a huge, malevolent, and bloody god. Their combined force created an angry orange ambiance, making the air shimmer with dense heat.

It suited his mood just fine. Stalking down the ramp, he left the port without a single look back, feet kicking up little puffs of dust from the landing pad.

*******

Stone was watching the two suns battle it out on the horizon several hours later when Mea’s transport darted into his line of sight. He was on the roof of the tallest building in this port city, which wasn’t saying much—it was only a three-story. All the buildings were low and long as though flattened by the force of the suns, radiating out from the spaceport like disjointed spokes on a wheel. As far as he could see, Xerxes was a rocky desert, flat at the port, but rising to the north into a huge mountain range thrust into the sky in broken, accusing fingers.

After he’d calmed down some and his brain started working like it was supposed to, he chose this building to watch for their return so he’d know when she started hunting him again. In his mind it was definitely when and not if. She’d put herself, family, and friends in danger and had spent too much time and effort on this little game of hers to just drop it. He’d become expensive prey, and she couldn’t afford to let him go now. He was positive that she’d hunt him again.

But this time, he was ready. She wasn’t the only one who knew how to hunt, and this time he was armed to the teeth with every gizmo and gadget in the hunter playbook.
Let’s see how she likes being stalked for a change,
he thought with a feral grin as he watched her transport dock with the
Starfire.
Maybe he’d take
her
prisoner for a while.

He relished this thought for a second, his heart jumping to an eager pace at the possibilities. He was starting a final check on his weaponry when a silver flash caught his attention. Lifting his head, he stared in puzzlement at first. It looked like the
Starfire
was lifting off. Just then the yellow sun lost its battle, dropping below the horizon with a suddenness like death, and the world was bathed in crimson light. The
Starfire
turned and flashed with reckless speed across the bloody sky like a scalpel over an open wound.

As Stone tracked its progress, reality hit home.

She was leaving.
And that was only the first of the blows reality dealt out. They rained down on him like an avalanche.
She was letting him go. She’d been telling the truth. He was losing them both.

One last bright gleam and the
Starfire
was gone. The now familiar pit opened its jaws at his feet. This time there was no scrambling back from the edge, no escape. The ground didn’t crumble—it disintegrated, and he plunged into endless darkness, swallowed whole by the realization that he’d been running the wrong way.

Do you really think you’re better off alone?
He finally had the answer.

He staggered, catching himself against the abutment at the edge of the roof, eyes still fixed on the sky where they had gone. Everything he could have wanted, everything that might have made him whole. Gone.

Pain.
Sharp claws stabbing through his chest and ripping him open. The sensation was so real, he looked down to see if his guts had pooled around his feet, but there was no wound, no blood except that of the dying sun. It was only despair in the plunging darkness of his mind that was shredding him like a ravenous animal.

Dazed, he turned away, moving slowly like a man in a nightmare. Shouldering the carrysack, he descended to the street. He wandered directionless for a while, not noticing the strange and alarmed looks he got from passers by.

Eventually he ended up in a bar. The place fell dead silent when he walked in. He didn’t notice. Slumping onto a seat, he stared sightlessly past the bartender. The man sidled up to him, waiting for his order. He didn’t notice that either.

After a long, thick silence, the bartender cleared his throat. “Need a drink, mister?”

Slowly Stone’s attention focused on him, and the man’s forehead beaded with anxious sweat. “Yeah.”

With clumsy hands, the bartender pulled out a creditor.

Stone put his thumb on the scan plate. “And keep ‘em comin’,” he added in a hoarse voice.

When the man saw the amount of Stone’s credit, he cheered visibly, smiling. “What’s your poison, sir?”

“Don’t care. Something strong.”

“Strong I got.” He moved away to make the drink, eyeing Stone over his shoulder. “Ya look like a dog done shit in your shoe. What’d ya lose, your best friend?”

“Heaven,” Stone croaked, attention sliding away again into that dark place. “I lost heaven.”

If he had looked up, he would have seen the man pause and stare at him with something like sympathy in his eyes. Moving back to Stone, the bartender placed a drink in front of him and said solemnly, “Welcome to hell, mister. Welcome to hell.”

Chapter 22

Conley found him at the bar ten days later. “You look like shit, convict.”

It took a second for voice recognition to seep through the darkness and catch Stone, but when it did, he leapt to his feet, looking around behind Conley wildly. “Where is she?” he rasped, voice rusty with disuse.

“I came alone.” The older man eyed him speculatively for a second before placing a firm hand on his shoulder and pushing down. “Sit.”

He sat, but only because his brain was swimming with alcohol and sudden hope, making the room roll. Conley lowered his big frame onto a seat next to him as the bartender rushed over.

“Hey, you know him? Could ya get him the hell outta my bar? Don’t mind his credit, but he’s done scared away half my regulars and he’s startin’ ta stink up the—”

Conley shoved a heavy finger into the man’s chest. “Stop talking now,” he rumbled pleasantly, and the bartender’s mouth snapped shut. “Go get me a beer.” The man backed cautiously away from that finger and opened his mouth again, but Conley cut him off. “No, I don’t care what kind.”

When he was gone, Conley turned his head to look at Stone again with the same glint of speculation in his eyes.

Stone stared right back, clenching his hands into fists to hide their shaking. “Why are you here? Where are they?” he asked as calmly as he could.

Conley acted as if he hadn’t spoken, studying him for a long moment. “I hope she was right about you,” he finally said, accepting his beer from the bartender and waving the man away without taking his eyes off Stone. Then he sighed and seemed to age about a decade, slumping against the bar. “She’d better be right about you.”

Something in his face sent a stab of alarm through Stone. “What the hell happened? Why are you here?”

Conley looked away and downed the beer in three long swallows, then stared into the empty glass. He was silent so long that Stone started to seriously consider strangling him.

“Twenty-two years it’s been since I found her,” he said conversationally to the glass, as if he was picking up a story he’d started a few minutes ago. “I can’t believe it’s been that long. Just seems like a few days ago. Her parents were miners, but not Guild. They had their own cozy, little family business, but that meant they had to stay out of the main commercial lines—had to go pretty far out to find ‘roids the big sharks wouldn’t take from them. Too far out. Got them in trouble.”

“Drop the family history and just tell me what the fuck’s going on!”

Conley shot him a cold look from under bushy eyebrows. “How ‘bout you let me do this my way, Stone. Might just open your eyes about my Mea girl.” He went back to studying his empty glass, and Stone ground his teeth in angry frustration but kept silent.

“We were on a hunt, Warren and I, when we got the distress signal. Since it was so far out, we decided to answer, figuring nobody else was going to pass that way for a while. We figured wrong. When we got closer, we saw another ship leaving the asteroid Mea’s family was mining. Suspicious, but I didn’t want to chase them until I knew the status of the distressed ship. We landed, checked the ship out. Nobody home. They’d been there long enough to set up an artificial atmosphere in the tunnels and caves, so we were able to start searching right away. We weren’t far into it when we heard singing—”

He lifted his head and stared off into space, mouth pulling down at the corners.

“It was the clearest, most angelic little voice you ever heard in your life. Like a little piece of heaven. We followed that voice, and I remember thinking things must be okay, if the girl could sing like that. God, I was so wrong. I’ve seen some pretty god-awful things in my life, but what we saw when we walked into that cavern is just about at the top of my list. Her father was strapped over some kind of drilling instrument. He’d been raped, beaten, half skinned—you could see bone in places on his back. Her mother was laying in the middle of the cavern, also raped, beaten, face sliced in so many places, you couldn’t see features anymore. Both dead. Blood everywhere.

“And there was Mea, sitting with what was left of her mama’s head in her lap, singing them a lullaby. Most heart-wrenching thing I ever saw. She wasn’t even crying. Never found a scratch on her, and she never told me why. Maybe she hid until they left or maybe they just left her alone, I don’t know, but the only blood on her was from her mother. It just about ripped my heart out to look in those big green eyes and tell her she’d have to leave them.”

He paused, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. Stone’s heart was pounding out a rhythm of dread, and he felt frozen from head to toe. Something had happened, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t seem to speak into the silence, to demand an answer.