I feel a rush of movement before the kelpie surges out of the water behind me, and I drive my right arm around and forward without conscious thought.
He bares his teeth when my knife slips between his ribs. Those teeth are sharp and plentiful, and he’s no longer the pretty thing he was before. The bones of his face jut out too far, skin stretched over them so it’s nearly transparent.
When he speaks, the sound of a hundred overlapping voices falls from his mouth. All his victims. “What do you think—”
The kelpie gurgles and I twist the knife, my grip on the handle tight enough that it hurts.
“Iron,” I say. “Spelled iron.”
He howls, and his fingers are tipped with claws, so when he slashes at me, he cuts through my shirt and the skin beneath. I don’t let go. I clench my teeth and withdraw my blade, this time plunging it in where his heart should be.
Two laboured breaths and he goes still. His hands slap against the surface of the water, and when I pull out my knife and push away, he sinks into the lake’s dark depths.
I let out a breath. My hands shake from the adrenaline—and anger. This was supposed to be an easy job, but that kelpie wasn’t young or powerless. All those voices… He must have killed hundreds of people, just not all here.
He is no longer my problem. No longer anyone’s problem. I tuck my knife away and swim back to the shore.
I strip off my socks and my shirt, and only when I’m wrestling into my jacket do I realise I’m not alone. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I don’t reach for my knife.
The Huntsman always inspires that feeling in me.
“He took more work than you were expecting,” he says, and when I look to my left, he’s standing there, watching the lake.
He doesn’t glamour himself around the Hunt. Or around me, anyway. My eyes track over the way his pointed ears emergefrom long, dark hair. Full lips hide sharp teeth, but he doesn’t look like the kelpie, not really.
Our Huntsman is high fae. Far more powerful than the creature I just killed in the lake. I canfeelit. Feel it alongside the power he gave me when he asked me to join him.
“If you were watching, you could have helped,” I reply grumpily, shoving my right arm into the sleeve of my jacket.
The Huntsman’s eyes cut to me. All the fae are difficult to read, but he’s more difficult than most. Still, I think he’s not angry with me for my impudence.
No, if he’s here, then he wants something.
I like that even less.
“You did well,” he says, and I huff, snatching up one of my boots.
“What do you want?”
“You serve the Hunt.”
I don’t respond to that. We both know I do.
“I have need of you in London.”
Thatissurprising. I pause, my boot halfway on my foot. “London? Why?”
“Did you hear anything about what happened there last year?”
I shrug. I do not keep in touch with the rest of the Hunt aside from the occasional letter, and the last of those was… a few decades ago, probably. It is likely longer than that since I last saw Vladimir or Asher. Jeremiah and Paxton I have seen more recently as they were assigned to watch over a wolf pack a few hundred miles away, but even my last meeting with them took place more than five years ago.
Why should I need to speak with them? The Huntsman communicates what I need to do, and generally, that is to ensure that the fae who have crossed from the Otherworld are not causing trouble.
The Highlands are one of their favourite places to come to—aside from Ireland, perhaps—and so it’s not as if I’m not busy. This has worked for us for at least seventy years. I’ve watched this landscape change, the cities grow. I’ve kept the people here safe.
“Not really.”
“A vampire attacked.”
