The Iron Hunt (29 page)

Darkness
made it worse.

I
could not see. I felt air pass over my body, the plummet of gravity, but that
was the only sensation, the only reason I knew I was still moving. I went on
and on, and finally closed my eyes. Afraid of losing myself. Unable to do
anything but endure.

I
lost track of heartbeats. I forgot the world. In my head, I heard Grant’s
flute. I saw his face, and clung to that.

I
held tight.

FINALLY,
rock.

Sprawled
on rock. Air, cold in my lungs. I had no memory of impact, just that I had been
moving, and now I was not. I saw only darkness, and lay quiet, listening hard.
I heard my heart, the rasp of my breath; farther, a drip and faint splash.
Water.

I
pushed myself up and felt like an old woman: dizzy, thirsty, disoriented. I
could not see. I waited for my vision to adjust—my eyes that had never failed
me, no matter how dark. But I saw nothing. I was blind.

The
boys were on my skin. Restless. Dreaming.

I was
also naked. My clothes, knives, boots—gone as though made of air. Including the
seed ring. I tried searching but encountered nothing. I was blind, my hands
outstretched. My belongings could have been hanging from a hook only a
heartbeat distant, but my sight was so nonexistent, I wished I could ask a
stranger if I still had eyes inside my head. I could feel them, sure, but the
possibility of losing one’s mind tended to undermine even the most obvious of
certainties.

I had
lost everything.

Desperation
rolled through me. Fear. I fought for calm. Took deep breaths. Nothing helped.

I was
sitting in a narrow, rocky crater, a broken crack roughly the shape of my body.
I could feel it with my hands. I stood slowly, teetering when my balance
faltered, and forced myself to hold very still in the darkness. Listening,
sensing. I rubbed my arms. The boys stirred against me. I heard the drip again
and started walking. Reluctant. Slow and careful, shuffling along like a baby
with my hands outstretched. I encountered nothing but air, and the stone
beneath my feet.

Until,
finally, I heard another drip, close.

I
stepped in something wet. I knelt, and my fingers encountered a pool of water
surprisingly deep. My hands lingered, allowing the boys a taste. When I felt no
resistance from them, I leaned in to drink. The water tasted cold and sweet,
which was some relief. I could live off the boys if I had to—share their
metabolism—but it would do nothing to assuage my thirst or hunger.

When
I had drunk all I could, I sat back, knees held to my chest, quiet and still.
The darkness was heavy. I had never been afraid of the dark, of empty places,
but this was the first time since my mother’s death that I had felt so totally
alone. I wished I had the seed ring. I hoped desperately it had not ended up in
Ahsen’s hands. Or that it was not lying here, somewhere, out of sight.

“Get
up,” I told myself, just to hear my voice. It sounded tinny, small, but in my
head, an endless litany: no time to feel sorry for myself, no time for fear, no
time to dwell. Nothing I did was going to make me feel better. I might as well
get going. The boys tugged at me. I whispered, “Hey. I need some direction.”

After
a moment, the right side of my body tingled. I took that as a sign.

I
wandered for a very long time. The boys guided me, and I found myself turning,
slowing, depending on tingling sensations in my limbs. I knocked my head once,
but for the most part, the path was clear and silent. I stopped only when the
boys found water again. Swift-moving, churning, and cold; a creek, perhaps. I
heard it for quite some time before I reached its rocky shore, and considered
resting. But I thought of Grant and Byron, even Tracker, Jack—the entire
world—and I kept moving. I had to.

I was
in the Labyrinth. I knew it. I could not explain how or why, or what it meant,
but I had opened the door myself. I had fallen into the world
between
,
but there were no doors here, and if this was a crossroads, then no one else was
traveling. I had a feeling I had made a terrible mistake. I was not on a road.
I was in a holding cell. A place to be forgotten, forever.

I
stopped only for water. There was no food. The boys shared, metabolisms linking
to mine, but that did nothing for the ache in my gut. After a while, too, the
darkness hurt my eyes, the strain of trying to see.

I
closed them. Imagined lights on the other side of my eyelids, but those were
just tricks of the brain. So many tricks. I tried talking out loud again, but
hearing my voice, small and lonely, just made the isolation worse.

Quiet
was easier. Moving was easiest of all. I tried not to think about whether there
was anything in the darkness, watching me. I did not know what would be
worse—to be lost in a true void or to know that I was being hunted.

I
thought about my mother. I forced myself to think about that day, almost twenty
years past, standing in the snow. That bad. The zombie in his suit with his
skin flaking off, telling my mother to have another—another child. The rattle
of his screams inside the bar. Those zombies gathered, fighting to possess me.

Part
of the game,
I had read in my
mother’s journal, after she died. A game, an ancient bargain with Blood Mama.
Chance or wits, played for the life of a child. To test that child and discover
her strength. Strong enough to fight; more importantly, strong enough for the
boys. Because if a future Hunter could not fend off a demonic possession as a
child, then she had no business carrying the burden as an adult.

The
concept, brutal as it was, made sense to me—but I had never understood why
Blood Mama would care whether a Hunter was strong—or why she would have a
vested interest in maintaining that strength. Never why my ancestors would have
allowed such a test.

But I
understood now. There were demons even Blood Mama did not want to face. Demons
that were my responsibility to fight.

I
thought of my mother, pregnant, standing in the street, facing down the zombie
queen with a smile. Secrets in her heart, then and now. But I could live with
that. Even if I never discovered what she had hidden—even if I did, and it was
terrible—everything would be all right.

I
might be falling down in secrets, but I knew something true:

My
mother had loved me. No matter what.

I was
loved.

I
felt as though I walked for years. I measured time by the length of my nails
and hair. No lies there. No distortion. My nails grew long. My hair, longer.
Matted and wild.

My
mind changed as well. I did not know how it began. I never guessed. But when I
closed my eyes, as I walked, I dreamed.

Waking
dreams. Walking dreams. Swift dreams, black and white like old scratchy movies
tinted and blurred with age. I dreamed in sparks and moments, and saw women in
moonlight, pale as snow, hair as black as a raven’s wing— steel in their hands,
always, sword bound, hair bound, in sunlight, tattoo bound—and I flew with
them, I ran, and their bodies merged into one, a woman large as thunder, with
eyes like the starry night, and wolves at her back.

I
chased echoes in my dreams. I sprinted after flights of notion and fancy:
dragons wet with ocean spray and men with bows and hooves and long, sleek
tails; giants slumbering in mountain streams; or the sphinx, riddle-heavy,
crouched with a whisper. I dreamed of moons; I dreamed of war, armies breathing
down my back with armored princes begging; and I dreamed the boys unleashed as
hounds of Hell, burning the earth beneath their claws, destroying it with a
fury.

When
I closed my eyes, I dreamed. But my eyes were always closed, and here, in the
Labyrinth, dreams coated the walls, dreams painted my eyes, and as I walked,
surrounded and nourished by the boys, aching with days or years of hunger, I
lost myself in trails of blood, cast in the veins of paths I traveled,
walking—then dancing, then running.

I
ran. I ran so fast, fleet-footed as a shadow, and I did not stop, I learned to
listen to the boys, I learned to become the dark and the stone, thick and
coarse and rough with age, and I forgot what it was to walk, I forgot, and when
I stopped to drink at streams, my skin screamed to move, and I screamed, and I
screamed.

I
screamed.

I,
Hunter, in the ground, Hunter, do not die, Hunter, keep moving, Hunter, run,
Hunter, do not, do not, do not give up, Hunter. Dream, Hunter. Fight, Hunter.
Do not forget yourself, Hunter.

Remember,
Hunter.

I
remembered my mother as I drank from a cold river, the waters crashing off the
walls like thunder.

Something
small. In a hotel in some city with all the lights off except for the bathroom,
door closed so that only a bar of gold slid into the room, my mother on a cot
beside mine and the boys prowling, and her voice whispering,
In the dark
there are things that will wake inside your heart, things you never knew were
there, and you must be careful of what comes stirring; you must beware.

I was
careful, but all I had was the dark, all I had were the boys, and sometimes I
heard them in my mind, so close that should the sun ever set, I wondered if
they would leave me, if I would survive the cut. It had been a long time. We
were closer now. We were one.

At
the river’s edge the stones were round and soft, and the water was deep. I
waded into the current simply to feel the texture, to savor the difference
between water and air. The river was swift, the roar of it deafening. I had a
whim, and lay down. The water carried me like a child in a cradle, swept away.
I did not think about consequences. I did not worry about losing the shore. The
river stole me, and I laughed.

Stop,
said a voice inside my mind.
Maxine.

But I
ignored the voice. I closed my eyes. I lost myself in dreams. I lived in
another place and time, away from the darkness, and I saw Grant, the boys. My
mother was there, and it was more real than the water and my skin—my heart,
beating; my soul, caged. I dreamed of swords, and in my dream I tasted the
blade, cold on my tongue. Found it made of tears.

My
tears. I was crying.

I
opened my eyes and did not close them again.

The
waters became choppy. I hit a rough patch and went under. My lungs ached, and I
broke the surface, gasping. Started kicking, paddling, but the current was
rough. I hated swimming. I hated boats. I remembered these things, distantly,
and I did not know what I had been thinking, jumping in the river. I did not
know how I could forget.

You
lost your mind,
whispered that little
voice.
Maxine.

I
went under again, as though hands were holding my ankles, but when I tried to
come back up, my head hit stone. Terror shot through me. I grappled, swept
along, fingernails dragging across the rock above my face. My lungs screamed. I
screamed. The boys yanked on my skin, and I felt them shift, pulling and
spreading, but with a violence I had never felt. I jerked once, thinking I was
going to drown, but the ache eased in my lungs.

I
breathed. Underwater, I breathed. It tasted like stone and ash, perhaps like
blood. I was too relieved to care. I touched my face, trying to understand. But
when I did, I wished I had not.

My
nostrils were gone. So was my mouth. My eyes and ears, covered in skin. I had
no face.

Horror
pummeled me. Revulsion, dismay. I felt sick. I wanted to vomit, I wanted to cry
out, but I could not. I clawed at my own skin. I tore at my face. I screamed
soundlessly at the boys, slamming my fists into the stone above my head. I
tried to swim, but could not go back. I found no bottom, no sand.

The
stone pressed me under the water for a very long time. Longer than days and
weeks. Longer, still. It felt like forever. I was dragged by the current like a
rag doll, faceless, voiceless, and though I breathed through the boys, all I
felt was fear. I was so afraid. I was so alone. I had been buried alive and
this was a water-coffin, a tomb of flesh, swift moving.

I was
immortal now. I would be like this forever. Lost forever. Buried in water,
raging with thirst.

All
of me, raging.

But
as I raged, something woke up.

I
felt when it happened, like a prick inside my heart, and it snapped me back to
sanity as though my brain were a rubber band pulled to the breaking point
until—in a flash—pressure eased.

I was
still trapped inside my body, but as I floated down the underground river, the
water and the darkness became a nest rather than a coffin: a shift in
perception, so sweet. My flesh, a cocoon. Spinning me into something new. I
listened to myself. Heartbeats, the click of my bound jaw, the swell of my
chest as I went through the motions of breathing. Deeper, too, past thoughts
and memory; deeper yet, into blood.

It
is of us
,
this hunt, this wild
raging hunt that takes upon itself the nature of an Age, and destroys so that
others may be reborn.
Words, swift words, accompanied by a face I could
hardly recall: white hair, blue eyes, power hiding beneath wrinkled skin.