So it came as something of a surprise when instead of taking them out, a wave of psychiatrists, mind healers, and specialists were brought in to “make reforms.” New luxuries were brought into the Fracture barracks. New doctors were assigned to each member. New rules were strictly enforced.
They weren’t expected to maim, torture, or kill anymore. Not unless their lives or those of civilians were directly threatened. For the first time since Thaddeus snatched them from their families, they were given the gift of mercy.
They had no fucking idea what to do with it.
The team wasn’t fit for domestication. They couldn’t be assimilated or softened. They certainly couldn’t be expected to know what to do withkindness.
Each of them had adapted to the unsettling change in circumstances in their own ways. They found hobbies,extracurriculars,that scratched the itch their assignments no longer did. For Sloane, the team’s premier assassin, it was hunting.
He left the barracks without a word. Consistent good behavior had gotten him the privilege of freedom when off duty. It was another new luxury he and the rest of Fracture exploited to the fullest extent.
Sloane rarely had a plan for his hunts. He didn’t need one. The Elvish Protectorate was one of the most strictly controlled territories on the continent, but even it had its seedy underbelly, injustices, and violence behind closed doors. He rarely had to search long to find someone the world was better off without.
On this particular foggy October night, however, he wasn’t having a lot of luck.
Tension bunched the powerful muscles between his shoulder blades as he vaulted over the top of a chain link fence blocking off an alleyway. Elves valued cleanliness above just about anything, since their heightened senses made them particularly affected by powerful smells. That meant that their streets were cleaned nightly by automated bots. The same couldn’t be said for alleyways, where elves rarely ventured.
Luckily for Sloane, his full-face helmet filtered out scent. Cutting off one of an elf’s most powerful senses seemedcounterintuitive for a group raised to be hunters, but the loss was worth it. Their sense of smell was a powerful tool, yes, but it was also their greatest weakness. One whiff of the right person at the wrong time…
Of course, not smelling the rot of trash, piss, and discarded food behind a bar was nice, too.
Sloane had to rely on all his other senses to find his prey. His breath whispered out through the helmet’s filter as he landed in a crouch on the other side of the fence. His boots, steel-toed and laced high up the shin, flexed comfortably as he stabilized on the balls of his feet. He scanned the alleyway.
Besides the thump of bad music inside the bar to his right and the flash of headlights from passing cars at the exit of the alley, there was little of interest.
Fuck,he thought, gloved hands curling into tight fists. He hated going back to the barracks without a catch. It was the only thing that kept him going through the mind-numbing monotony of their new, sanitized assignments. Getting a good kill in, wiping one more stain off the face of Burden’s Earth, stopped him from losing what little of his mind he still possessed — and taking out all the pent-up aggression on his teammates.
The last time he failed, he and Arlo sparred so intensely they’d both ended up in Joanna’s clinic with half their bones broken. The repairs to the gym werestillcoming out of their pay.
But it was more than just a need for release. It was about a tangled knot of purpose and thwarted instinct, a result of all that malicious rewiring Thaddeus and his trainers had labored so intensely over. Without the hunt, he was useless. Purposeless. A weapon with no edge and no enemy.
To return to the barracks unsuccessful was, in his mind, worse than failure. It meant that he’d failed his only purpose in life.
The bar was his last hope. The sun would rise soon, and that meant that the Haight district would be flooded with vampires headed home for the day. Not all of them, just like not all of the business that was conducted within the confines of The Lush, were criminal in nature. But he’d had luck there in the past, so he figured it was a good final stop of the night.
A low metal groan drew his attention to the bar’s back door. The thumping beat of the music grew louder as it opened. A small yellow light flickered to life above the frame with the motion, casting a watery glow over the figure that slipped out.
“…next week! I’ll let you know if my schedule changes!” A chipper, feminine voice was the last thing he expected in the dank filth of the alley.
Sloane didn’t move a muscle as he waited for her to step out from behind the door. A chorus of voices called out to her, wishing her goodnight before she let the door swing closed behind her.
She was willowy, with lithe limbs and a head of long raven hair. Her skin was a deep olive tone that looked silky to the touch. When she stood there for a moment, her focus on digging in the glittery purse slung over her shoulder, he had what felt like all the time in the world to observe the soft curve of her nose and sooty fan of her lashes against the tops of her cheeks.
She was arrant. He knew it at a glance, something inside of him flinching instinctively away from the devastating vulnerability of her. To someone like him, everything about her was almost perverse in its softness.
One painfully delicate hand rummaged in that ridiculous purse, the bones of her wrist flashing beneath the sleeve of her pale pink sweater with every movement. So much smaller than his. So easy to snap.
Elves had eaten humans, once. They’d eaten pretty much anyone weaker than them, and no one was weaker than arrants— those poor humans born without even the flimsy protection of magic.
To Sloane, this pitiful little creature looked like a doe, blissfully unaware of the wolf hiding just out of sight.
Something pulled inside him; a deep, sucking sort of feeling he couldn’t easily identify. It wasn’t anticipation and it wasn’t quite hunger. It was some foreign mix of both and neither — a need that had no name, no predecessor, and no equal.
She wasn’t prey. Not the kind he sought, anyway. And yet she was something he needed to possess.
The woman stood in that dim light for several long moments, tapping away at her phone. Her lips, shiny with some sort of makeup, were set in a soft pout. The cool light from her phone’s screen reflected in them like a beacon.
The more he stared at them, the worse that nameless need became.
