Hunter's Oath Read online

“I don’t think that’s working,” she taunted me. “You should have done more research, little fae. I am immortal.”

  I sighed and tossed the guns aside as I calmly stepped between the fanged horse-woman and the door. I don’t know why I even bother with guns sometimes. With an effort of will, I called on my half-will-o’-the-wisp mother’s gift and conjured a whip of crackling green witchfire as I faced the Pouka.

  “You only get to be immortal if you live to leave this room,” I told her. She snarled at me, and then I wiped the snarl off her face with a slash of the whip.

  Unlike the bullets, where the wounds faded almost as quickly as they were inflicted, she felt that one. The faerie flame, a construct of fire and Power, burnt into her skin and she lurched back in pain and shock.

  That seemed to work. Unfortunately, since Chernenkov now felt threatened for the first time since we’d shown up to bring her in, it also pissed her off. With a snarl, she partially transformed, suddenly producing six-inch-long razor claws out of her hands as her fangs extended and she charged at me.

  I slashed my whip at her feet, not doing a lot of damage but throwing off her balance so that instead of ripping out my throat, her claws merely stabbed through the upper right side of my chest. I felt my lung give way as she ripped her claws out, and gasped for breath as she smiled evilly.

  “You still lose,” she snarled at me through a mouthful of fangs.

  By now the smell of chlorine in the storage room filled the air. A number of the canisters were leaking, and the thought of just why this much chlorine was in a storage room at a giant public event was niggling at the bank of my head.

  What was also tingling at the back of my head was that this was a maintenance storage shed, and chlorine reacts explosively with turpentine. Like the several jugs of it on the shelf behind Ms. Chernenkov.

  My whip vanished away, and the Pouka closed in to finish me off as I gasped for breath. Finally, somehow, I got a full breath of air into my functioning lung and a half and used it to focus.

  I shot my hands out as she stabbed down, and launched a blast of something that caught her mid-strike. My right hand hit her with pure force, enough to pick her up and throw her into the rack with the jugs of turpentine—and then flung a blast of green flame from my left, which surrounded her and blasted the turpentine cans open.

  The Pouka struggled back to her feet, opening her mouth to say something when the chlorine in the air met the turpentine spilling onto her and the sparks from the bolt of faerie flame that had thrown her across the room.

  It was a relatively small explosion, all things considered.

  2

  I woke up from what was a thankfully short bout of unconsciousness to the feel of a burst of healing Power being blasted into me by Robert. The Fae Noble was crouched over me in the wrecked office, a cloth held over his mouth.

  “The storage room is filled with chlorine,” he told me urgently. “We’ve called in a hazmat team under a ‘terrorist threat,’ but the gas is spreading and we have to get out of here now. Can you take us Between?”

  I blinked away the fuzz of explosion-induced unconsciousness and glanced around the room. fae were far more tolerant of poisons like chlorine than humans—hence my surviving in the storage room at all—but a high-enough concentration in the air would be fatal to us, too.

  For a moment, I felt inside myself, where my Power lived. It had produced some odd effects today, but it seemed to still be fully present, a burning furnace that fueled my gifts.

  “Everyone grab my hands,” I told Robert and the Gentry, coughing slightly in the increasingly acrid air. A moment later, they had taken hold of my hands and arms. With a deep, half-choking breath, I stepped sideways.

  Between has no air. This means that those walking with me breathe what I want to breathe, and that’s not the poison-laced crap we’d left behind. For once, the cold crash of Between and the icy nature of breath were a blessing, it’s chill air free of the chlorine that was close to killing even us.

  Lord Oberis had been teaching me the skills of walking Between in recent months, allowing me to focus on a familiar point and move us toward it. The others walked with me, unable to even breathe if I released them. This was only a safe way to travel for those who had the Gift to walk it on their own. Others could only travel Between with the help of one with that Gift.

  The easiest place for me to find was where I’d been taking my lessons. A minute or so after our entrance into Between, I returned us into reality standing in front of the desk of the man who ruled Calgary’s fae.

  A moment of shocked silence followed our arrival, and then Oberis, a tall Fae Lord with shoulder-length blond hair turned off the paper-thin computer monitor sitting on his black walnut desk and leaned forward, steepling his fingers as he faced us with a concerned look.

  “I take it this means your mission had problems.”

  “She’d brought enough chlorine to gas half the Stampede,” Robert explained bluntly. “I called in a hazmat team to contain it, but the canisters were broken in the fight. It was messy. Jason blew the chlorine up, but…”

  “But it remains a threat,” Oberis agreed calmly. “Give me a minute,” he instructed. A portion of his desk slid aside at a touch, and he withdrew a plain black smartphone with no branding I recognized.

  “This is Oberis,” he said briskly into it as he accessed an icon. “We have an incident at the Stampede,” he continued after a pause. “A hazmat team got called in to contain an apparent chlorine bomb; make sure any remnants of ours are out of the way and that the team is successful.” He paused again, listening. “Good luck,” he told whoever was on the phone, and then returned it to its alcove on his desk.

  “There are some useful leftovers from the Enforcers,” he told the two younger fae in his office. “MacDonald may have dissolved his own minions, but the structures and allies they integrated into mortal authorities remain. They’ll make sure Ms. Chernenkov’s remains don’t attract attention.”

  “There won’t be much in terms of remains,” Robert replied. “Jason blew her up.”

  “Nothing else seemed to be working,” I admitted sheepishly. “She took a bunch of cold iron rounds and didn’t even seemed fazed. Fire and Power seemed to work, but…”

  “Fuck me,” Oberis whispered. “Cold iron didn’t bother her? At all?”

  “Just the impact throwing her back, from what I could tell,” I told him. “I may as well have been carrying regular bullets.”

  A much more comfortable experience for me in general.

  “Does that mean something to you, my lord?” Robert asked.

  “Yes,” the ruler of Calgary’s fae said grimly. “It means young Kilkenny has made himself a mortal enemy, and one who will not be brought low by many means.”

  “She’s dead,” I objected.

  “No, she’s not,” Oberis told me flatly. “If cold iron didn’t not kill Chernenkov, even your Power-infused flame will not have sufficed. She is not what we thought she was.”

  He turned to the Gentry with us and considered them for several moments.

  “Karl, Jacques. Can you leave us, please?”

  The two men, still dripping onto Oberis’s moss-carpeted floor, bowed and obeyed. That left Robert and me alone with the city’s most powerful fae.

  He rose and turned his back to us.

  “Tell me everything,” he ordered grimly. “Leave out nothing.”

  I had been through the Fae Lord’s idea of a debrief before, but that didn’t make it any less intense of an experience. Some of it was practice on Oberis’s part—he’d been leading fae organizations for something like a century, after all—and some of it was magic.

  “Telekinesis, huh?” the Lord finally said with an intrigued glance at me. “I was wondering if that was going to come out sooner or later.”

  “My lord?” I asked. “You were expecting this?”

  “The evidence suggests that your father was not merely a Hunter but a Noble of the Fae C
ourts,” Oberis reminded me. “He would have not merely possessed the gifts of a Hunter but also the gifts of Force and Glamor.

  “You may not inherit all his powers, but I still expected to see more,” the Lord told me. “We will increase your training, though you may wish to inform your mistress yourself.”

  That, I was sure, would please Mabona to no end. A more powerful minion was a more useful minion. On the other hand, for reasons no one was yet willing to explain to me, Mabona hated being reminded of my father.

  “That comes with the job,” I admitted. “But…what was Chernenkov if she wasn’t a Pouka?”

  “Oh, Ms. Chernenkov is a Pouka,” Oberis told me. “But like most of the inhumans that cross the line between breeds of supernatural, the Pouka are extraordinarily hard to kill.”

  I nodded some understanding. The same cold iron round that would be fatal to Oberis would be excruciatingly painful for me, my quarter-human blood enough to shield me against our bane. My girlfriend, on the other hand, was a wildcat shifter. A cold iron round wouldn’t even slow her down, whereas a silver round I could ignore would drop her in her tracks.

  Pouka were fae, not shifters, but they had links to that breed as well. And then, on top of that, they were feeders. It was a twisted mix of Power, one that gave them gifts most of us couldn’t anticipate…

  “But immortality?” I said aloud.

  “From what you describe, were Chernenkov a shifter, she would be what they call an Alpha,” he said grimly. “Because she is one of ours, we call her type a Noble. She would be a Pouka Noble…and she is not supposed to be.”

  “We were briefed on her,” I noted. “I remember being warned she’d take a lot of killing, but we pumped her full of cold iron and then incinerated her in Power-infused flame. You’re telling me she still lives?”

  “Yes,” Oberis confirmed with a sigh. “A Pouka Noble, along with being simply stronger in every sense than their lesser sisters, has a third form—their shadow. And their true essence is their shadow. You can burn their flesh and shatter their bones, but their shadow is invulnerable to such things and will regenerate the body.”

  That sounded…painful. Regeneration from severe injuries sucked. I could heal from almost any injury, though it took time. Regenerating from being burnt to a literal crisp in a chlorine-turpentine explosion?

  “So, she’s alive,” Robert noted. “Which means we still need to hunt her down.”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Oberis agreed. “I will speak to Kenneth, see if he can locate her, and touch base with some old friends to see if they can advise how to fight her.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going to guess that the process we just put her through hurt, at least?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” the Fae Lord told me. “It will have hurt a lot, and it will take her days to reassemble herself. She’s going to remember you, Jason. Finding her would be wise, but at this point, she’s going to come for us. Specifically, she’s going to come for you.”

  I sighed. I definitely needed to talk to Mabona.

  “And here I was just getting used to not having anyone hunting me.”

  “You are a Vassal of the Queen of the Fae,” Oberis pointed out. “I would never expect that to be a long-lasting sensation on your part.”

  I’d been in Calgary at this point for a little over six months. I’d spent about two-thirds of that time working for a courier company, before Mabona had finally convinced me that mundane employment was a waste of my time, given what she was prepared to pay me.

  Not that I was doing much with the money either way. I didn’t have a car and I lived in the same apartment in the basement level of a small complex on a hill above the downtown.

  The apartment was empty when I got home. Like me, my girlfriend Mary Tenerim no longer worked for a mundane employer. My employment with the Queen of the Fae was only semi-voluntary, however, where her job as one of the coordinators of shifter affairs in the city was her choice.

  Grandfather—few of us who’d met him bothered to refer to the old cougar shifter Alpha as Enli Tsuu T’ina—hadn’t wanted the job of running the shifter clans, but the same mess that had nearly killed both Mary and me had left him with no choice.

  He’d pulled together a staff from all of the shifter clans, who now took on the task of keeping that notoriously troublesome species in something resembling peaceful order. Mary was one of his most-trusted aides, a position of honor and trust—with commensurate compensation and time demands.

  We could afford so much more than this little apartment, but the demands our work placed on us sucked up our time…and it wasn’t in the nature of the supernatural to live in flashy homes or, well, to take out mortgages.

  It wasn’t like our jobs had salaries we could prove to a bank, after all.

  Being alone in the apartment was useful for now, however, even if the place felt quiet. I poked at the wards a friend had laid on the space for privacy, my Power sufficient to at least test that they were working even if I couldn’t create the magical silencing and protection effects myself.

  I turned on the computer and linked into the Fae-Net, a private portion of the darknet no mortal would ever find. Even from there, however, there were private networks and secured sections even most fae wouldn’t find.

  I logged in to one of those places and entered a request. My mistress didn’t do anything so normal as using scheduling software, but she did have a portal that would send a notification to a smartphone that I needed to speak with her.

  There was no easy way to predict how long it would take her to get back to me. So far as I understood, Mabona normally operated on Irish time, and she did, despite her phenomenal level of Power, still need to sleep.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised, though, for the videoconferencing software on my computer to almost instantly announce an incoming call. I wasn’t sure just how much of what happened to me the Queen was aware of, but she registered at least something from all of her Vassals.

  “Kilkenny,” she greeted me brusquely as her dark-haired image filled my computer screen. “How, exactly, did you manage to blow yourself up this time?”

  I snorted. Apparently, she knew at least that much.

  “In my defense, I was blowing up a rogue Pouka as well,” I told her. “Except, apparently, we’re dealing with a Pouka Noble.”

  The Queen glared at me, then sighed and nodded.

  “Who?” she asked. “There are supposed to be seventeen of those, total, and I know where they all are.”

  “Maria Chernenkov, the Pouka we were hunting here, is apparently your eighteenth,” I told her.

  Mabona grunted.

  “That would make her significantly more dangerous than we expected when you agreed to Lord Oberis’s request,” she noted. “You are intact?”

  “I am. Apparently, she’s likely to have survived being blown up too.”

  “Sadly, yes,” she confirmed. “I will see additional equipment delivered to your apartment, assuming you haven’t moved out of the hole in the ground yet.”

  “You keep me busy,” I demurred. My Queen objected to my living conditions more than I did.

  “You need to nail her shadow to the ground with cold iron,” Mabona told me bluntly. “This is exactly as easy as I suspect it sounds if you’ve fought her. Once isn’t enough, either.”

  I sighed.

  “Three times?”

  “Three times,” she confirmed. “Three cold iron spikes through her shadow… and even then, you will still have to fight and kill her. If she is a Pouka Noble that the Fae Council does not know of, her life is forfeit.”

  “She snuck into the city and murdered at least three people we know of,” I reminded my mistress. “By Lord Oberis’s command, her life is already forfeit.”

  “That is only going to get more complicated,” Mabona told me. “With Kenneth MacDonald having dissolved his Enforcers and stepped back from running the city…”

  “So far, everyone is playi
ng nice,” I reminded her. “So far, so good.”

  “Such never lasts,” she warned. “I felt a spike of Power when you fought the Pouka. Something new, my Vassal?”

  “The gift of Force, My Lady,” I told her. “I unleashed a level of telekinetic power I have never wielded before.”

  Given that until today I’d envied the Fae Nobles their telekinetic powers and completely lacked them myself, any level of the gift of Force was new for me.

  “This is useful,” my Queen told me. “And dangerous. Lord Oberis will not have time to teach you what you need to know, especially if you are to fight a Pouka Noble and win. I will see that a trainer comes to you.”

  “Lord Oberis suggested he would be able to do it,” I noted. I wasn’t going to argue with her—but I also wasn’t going to turn down Oberis’s offer.

  “He is about to become much busier,” Mabona said grimly. “The High Court of the Fae has received a petition to open an Unseelie Court in Calgary.”

  That gave me pause and I swallowed as I looked at my boss on the computer screen.

  “I thought the Council supported Lord Oberis?” I asked carefully.

  “I support Lord Oberis,” Mabona corrected sharply. “The Fae Council as a whole is…not entirely enthused with the concept of joint courts. I think some of my fellows suspect that if we let too many of them form, the Seelie and Unseelie might start getting along on a grander scale, and who knows where that would end?”

  She snorted.

  “Even of the nine of us, most class themselves as one or another,” Mabona concluded. “It’s a bloody stupid division in my mind that’s caused more blood and heartache than it was ever worth, but it is what it is. And the High Court must not merely be neutral; we must appear neutral.”

  “Of course, my lady,” I agreed. I wasn’t sure I understood—but what changeling was going to argue with the High Court?

  “Which means the petition passed,” she told me. “Lord Oberis will be informed by dawn and Lord Andrell will be arriving in Calgary at eight PM in two days on the flight from Dublin. I’ll make sure you have the flight number.