Hunter Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Mercedes Lackey

  Cover design by Marci Senders

  Cover art © 2015 by Shane Rebenshied

  Lettering by Russ Gray

  Designed by Marci Senders

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1937-4

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  To the loving memory of my mother, Joyce Ritche, who was always there for me, and was from the first my biggest fan

  YOU COULDN’T SEE outside the train windows at night; theconductor had opaqued them. Most people probably wouldn’t want to see out anyway. I looked around at the rest of the passengers in the car—I’d noticed when I got to my seat that I was the only one there who was under thirty years old. I’d seen flashes of fancy railcars like this in vids, and while waiting for track clearance at the Springs station, when I’d been down there with my Master. Stepping into the sleek silver tube with its rows of heavily padded blue-gray seats had felt unreal. As I covertly examined the people around me, in their clothing that was obviously not handmade, I wondered if they were trying to figure out why I had invaded their expensive, important world. They’d been studiously leaving me alone in that way that said they were curious but didn’t intend to actually say anything, while I stared at the reflections in the dark windows and wished I were back in my little room. Or maybe they already knew what I was. Master Kedo had told me on the drive down to the Springs station that all the personnel on the train were told about me, so maybe the passengers were too.

  Now I was the only one still awake. Pretty much everyone else had their seats in the recline position, their cocoons on, and their privacy hoods over their heads and shoulders. It looked like a scene out of one of the drama-vids we watched now and again, the ones that turned up in the weekly mail. I didn’t care for them much, but my best friend, Kei, loved them, so I always sat through them without a complaint. That’s what friends do, right?

  Well, okay, maybe some of them were watching their own selection of vids in there, but you couldn’t tell; they’d have their buds in and their glasses on. There was just row after row of reclined seats, skewed so no one quite had his head in someone else’s lap, each person bundled up tightly like a swaddled baby, with soft black mounds over the top halves. The cocoons were made of some fabric I’d never seen before, soft and plush, like kitten fur. I’d watched as they settled in for the night, and a lot of them had asked for Nightcaps. If something bad happened now, they would all die without ever knowing they’d been in danger.

  All but me. My seat was reclined, of course. I didn’t have any choice in that; all the seats had reclined and swiveled for night at the same time. The conductor did that for the whole car. But I hadn’t fastened down the cocoon, and I wasn’t going to use a hood. I certainly wasn’t going to have a Nightcap. My Masters would have a litter of cats if I even looked at a Nightcap.

  Well, no, they actually wouldn’t; my Masters didn’t do that sort of thing. But they’d give me that look that said You know better than that, which actually made you feel a lot worse than if they’d had a litter of cats.

  I wanted to look out, even though I knew the view would be no different from daytime. The track was safe enough—well, as safe as things ever got out here below the snow line. It was enclosed in a wire cage that was kept electrified for five miles in front of and behind the speeding train. Back when things were finally being put together again, after the Diseray, that was one of the first things the army had figured out: the way to keep the trains safe. Outside the cage, though, that was different. Some places were safe, protected. Some…not. Some were hell on earth.

  I’d seen that hell on earth once, a small version of what could happen when the Othersiders decided there was a choice plum to pick and they were going to pick it. Two years ago; I was fourteen then. Summer, of course; in winter, all the settlements are relatively safe, protected by snow and cold. Anston’s Well was—still is—a nice place, with nice people in it. About thirty families, big enough to have their own storehouse and trading post. The Othersiders must have decided it had reached a point where it was big enough to bother with.

  The first I’d known about it was when I got woken up from a sound sleep by the Monastery alarms. My Master Kedo was pounding on my door as I was stamping my boots on. “Summon!” he’d said, so I’d summoned my Hounds, who’d joined his four that were milling about in the hall outside my room, and we’d met the rest outside in the snow. Everybody, and I mean everybody, had piled out of the Monastery. Even the oldest and youngest; and the ones with no magic and no Hounds were armed.

  When we’d gotten down to Anston’s Well, about a third of the houses were on fire, and there were monsters in the streets, trying to pull down people who were holding them off. There were more monsters just outside of the palisade around the town; that was where Kedo had sent me. The Hounds and I…it was just a blur for most of the night. I did a lot of shooting—some magic, but mostly shooting—while the Hounds kept what I was shooting at too busy to come at me. Kedo had given me an AK-47 with incendiary rounds, which the Othersiders I was up against did not much like. The turning point had come when the rest of the Hunters from the other settlements finally reached us. By dawn, we’d driven the Othersiders off. The bodies that didn’t dissolve, I think they carried off with them. We lost that third of the houses that were on fire, but we were so lucky…just two deaths, though nearly everyone who wasn’t a Hunter was hurt or burned. But like Per Anston had said, “We can rebuild. We can’t resurrect.”

  I wouldn’t show how scared I was now, like I hadn’t then; I’d spent a lot of time learning how not to show it, but I was scared. Of course, I wasn’t from a place that was precisely safe, but it was safer than most of the territory we were speeding through. And I was going to be going out there into the worst parts of it, if not now, then soon. It would surely be no more than a year before I was patrolling it.

  I’m a Hunter, and that’s my job. There is no more important job in the world. Hunters stand between the monsters of the Breakthrough and ordinary people. If it hadn’t sunk in before, that sure had been made clear to me the night Anston’s Well was attacked. I knew those people; they were my neighbors, and a couple of the hurt folks were my friends. They’d come up to dance at the Safehaven flings, and I’d run off the Othersiders from their fields, and…that was when I knew for certain-sure that there was nothing more important than being a Hunter. Because being a Hunter meant I could do something about the Othersiders that no one who wasn’t a Hunter could do. It had been the Hunters, not bullets, not RPGs, who had turned the tide that night, who had kept Anston’s Well from being another one of those casualties in the wa
r between the Othersiders and humans. This isn’t a job you pick, it’s a job that picks you—but if I’d been given the choice, I’d still be a Hunter. That morning—on the way back up to the Monastery in the back of the truck, my Master Kedo had given me this long and searching look. The measuring kind. I guess he must have seen what he wanted to see, because he’d ruffled up my hair and said, “Now you are a real Hunter, chica,” and leaned back and closed his eyes, looking satisfied.

  One of the stewards was making his way through the rows, checking on everyone. He had on the dark green uniform of the Train Service, which looks military, but isn’t, and had a serious, square face with ginger hair. I wasn’t sure why he needed to check on people, but this was an expensive and very exclusive way to travel, so I supposed the illusion of always being served came with it. No one flies but the military, of course; the skies are just too dangerous. There are other trains, not like this one, where people are packed in like cattle; they have to hump their own luggage, bring their own meals. I saw them at the station, and it looked like the old pictures of people fleeing from a war.

  Not me. I was told that once I was away from my Masters and home, I would always get the star treatment, partly because of what I am, partly because of my uncle. That was another thing that felt surreal. It was hard to think I’m related to someone important. It certainly didn’t make any difference up on the Mountain.

  The steward paused at my row, and I tensed a little, expecting a rebuke, or a demand to lie down and sleep, like everyone else. But instead, he leaned over the man between me and the aisle, and whispered, “Are you really the Hunter?”

  I nodded. His eyes went wide. “You’re so young!” he blurted. “You’re just a girl!”

  I thought about telling him that I had been a Hunter since I was nine; then I thought better of it, since that didn’t fit with the story I was supposed to tell, and I should start using that story right now. The Masters and the Monastery aren’t even supposed to exist, and when someone turned Hunter they were supposed to go to Apex City immediately, anyway. There aren’t a lot of Hunters, after all. Maybe one person in a hundred or two hundred is born with the ability to do magic, and maybe only half of them become Hunters. There’s not another place like the Monastery on the whole continent, at least not that I know of. Back at the beginning of the Diseray and the Breakthrough, Hunters tried to train themselves, and about half of them died before they mastered their magic and learned how to work with their Hounds. So having Hunters report to Apex for proper training was the law; it was probably a smart law, too.

  I just shrugged at him.

  “Can I see the Hounds?” the steward breathed.

  That took me by surprise. “Here?” I asked. “Now? I mean, sure, but…would that be…polite?” The Hounds are not exactly quiet about making their entrance, and I wasn’t sure if even earbuds and cocoons would insulate these other important personages. Nor how they would feel about being awakened by a full pack.

  Now, the Hounds would probably love it. Sometimes I think that they feed off of admiration as much as they feed off of manna. Although, maybe admiration is another sort of manna.

  He glanced at the rest of the passengers, but when he looked back at me, his face was all lit up with excitement, and I couldn’t help smiling at him a little. Sure, for me, I summon the Hounds, and it’s just Tuesday, but even for the folks in the settlements on the Mountain, seeing the Hounds is a special thing, so how much more special would it be for someone who spent most of his life taking care of rich people in a train?

  “The rec car is empty,” he said eagerly. I nodded, shucked myself out of my cocoon, and edged into the aisle. I followed him through two more cars full of silent cocoons and into the rec car. We picked up two more stewards on the way. One of them stopped and whispered something into a grate at the end of the car; I guessed that was probably the car-to-car comm, or something like it.

  He was right, the car we ended up in was empty. The autobar blinked its lights at us, then went back to wait mode when we didn’t go get ourselves drinks. The game consoles were silent, as were the gambling tables.

  There was some clear space at the back with fold-down exercise machines. That was where I went. By now I had quite an audience, and more were coming; that steward who had whispered into the radio must have spread word about what I was going to do through the rest of the train. It made me a little nervous because I didn’t usually do this with an audience; normally the Hounds are already with me when people see them. I closed my eyes and envisioned the Mandala; that opened my mind to the Otherworld.

  The Mandala, of course, is my Mandala, the same thing that’s branded on the backs of my hands. They’re tattooed, but the tattoos trace over the actual Mandala. Every Hunter’s Mandala is a circular diagram, and every one is different. They’re really pretty, actually; if you didn’t know better, you’d think they were just fancy decoration, like regular tattoos. There’s an outer circle, then a circle of little signs inside that, one sign for each one of your Hounds, then another circle, then maybe a triangle or a square or a hexagon. There might be signs inside that, but there are always two squares on top of each other after that, making an eight-pointed star. Then in the center of that is a sign that’s you. If you know how to read them, they’ll tell you how many Hounds the Hunter has, but there are other things in the Mandala that no one knows how to read. They look sort of like the Mandalas in some of the Buddhist or Hindu god-paintings at the Monastery, but the language isn’t Chinese or Sanskrit. They get burned into your hands when your magic wakes up, the first time something really bad happens to you that involves Othersiders. If you’re born a Hunter—because you can’t be made a Hunter—the Hounds will come to you then, for the very first time, and the act of them coming over from the Otherside burns the Mandalas into the backs of your hands.

  With my eyes still closed, I drew the three Summons Glyphs in the air with sweeping gestures; if I opened them, I knew I would see the Glyphs hanging in midair, drawn in flames, which was something of my signature. Every Hunter uses the same three Summons Glyphs. They look like runes; maybe they actually are runes, but if so, no one has ever translated them. They tell the Hounds that the Hunter is calling them. My Glyphs, being drawn in fire and all, are very showy, which is odd, considering I tend to keep myself to myself and drawing attention makes me feel naked. I heard the group’s swift intake of collective breath.

  With an abrupt gesture, I cast the Glyphs to the ground, where they lay burning just on top of the carpet, and I opened the Way—and all I can tell you about that is how it feels. It feels as if I am reaching across the Glyphs with my gut and opening a door. Weird, I know. But that’s how it feels. The Glyphs make the door, and at the same time, they put a kind of seal on it that nothing can cross but the Hounds. Now I opened my eyes, in time to see them bursting out of midair between me and the onlookers.

  You know, that never gets old, no matter how many times I do it. There’s this amazing feeling, a Wow, these are my Hounds, and I brought them! And, for me at least, there’s also a feeling as if my best friends in the whole world had just come through the door into my room: an I’m so happy we’re together again! I always have that, even if I’m summoning them right before a bad fight.

  Someone gave out a nervous shriek; all seven of the Hounds turned their heads in his direction to stare with their flaming eyes. Little flickers of flame danced over their coal-black coats. Some Hounds always look the same, but mine don’t. I was one of the three Hunters on the Mountain, including my Master Kedo, who had Hounds who could change what they look like. They’d chosen to appear as black greyhounds this time, which was a good choice: there wasn’t much room in the rail car for anything bigger, they were intimidating without inciting panic, and there was no way that their usual forms would have fit.

  “They just look like dogs,” one of the stewards said doubtfully. My pack leader, Bya, looked over his shoulder at me and dog-grinned, then, before I could stop him, whipp
ed his head back around and blew a jet of flame at the doubter. There were shrieks, but I stepped in between them, right into the flame, and let it play over me.

  “Illusion,” I explained, as the panic subsided. That wasn’t the truth of course; Bya had merely ordered the flames not to burn anything or anyone, but knowing that my Hounds could turn the laws of physics inside out would only make these people’s poor brains explode. I know it made my brain explode the first few times I saw them do impossible things.

  After that, the Hounds went into superstar mode and graciously accepted the admiration of the crowd. Everyone wanted to touch them, pet them, and the Hounds were in the mood to accept buckets of that—probably since we hadn’t Hunted in two weeks, and they were bored and hadn’t gotten what they considered to be their just quota of adoration for a while. When they’re in a petable form, they go all out; their coats are as sleek and soft as the antique silks I’ve handled at the Monastery.

  In a situation like this one, I don’t have to dismiss them, they go off on their own. When they got tired of it all, they went to the Glyphs still burning on the floor and leapt through to the Otherside. Bya was last. Bya seems to like people more than the rest of them. When he went through, the Glyphs vanished, and the crowd mingled around a little more, asking me stuff about them. I felt pretty awkward, but at least they were asking me about the Hounds instead of myself, so I managed not to get too tongue-tangled. The radio at the end of the car chimed three times after a bit, and they all kind of alerted on it and dispersed back to their duties. All but the steward of the car my seat was in. I guess he got to stay with me because I was in his charge.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked, pausing at the autobar. “You might as well, the bar can mix you up just about anything.” He stood there with his hand just over the keypad, waiting.

  I thought for a moment. It was just a little intimidating, and a little intoxicating. Here I was, in a situation I had never found myself before, a situation where I could have absolutely anything I wanted.