He leans in closer, voice dropping. “How are the men doing with Tuck?”
Gods, it’s been a shit day.
I shake my head with a huff. “Never easy to lose a Hunter. Even if he wasn’t truly one of us, you know?”
“Lesson learned, eh?” Lou says, sipping through a sigh.
“Yeah. Lesson fucking learned, Lou.” I tip the rest of my whiskey into my mouth as he rests both elbows on the bar to look me square in the eye.
“You tried, boy,” he says. “It was worth a shot. We need more Hunters out there.”
Don’t I know it.
I groan, sore body shifting in my chair, and my glass thuds onto the bar top. Thankfully, I know how to squelch the anger from my losses, to bury it so fucking deep and catalog the pain for later. “Yeah, we do need more men. And I’m about to send half of them to the Night Kingdom territories.”
Lou clears my glass, swiping the rag from his shoulder along the bar in its wake. “Aye, I heard we’re losing ground down there.”
“Yeah, Southern Continent vamps are crossing the channel to take advantage of the upheaval. We can’t give up all that progress.”
“Damn straight, we can’t.” The deep wrinkles around Lou’s eyes crease with his frustration. “We’ve been working on that territory fortoo long, and Mother Diane’s son didn’t die for no fucking reason.”
“Agreed,” I growl. “Forever may he rest.”
“Forever may he rest,” Lou replies.
We’re taking it from all angles. In the south, the Night Kingdom territory is a mess with no ruler in place, but it’s given us an opportunity to try to eradicate the unstable vampire population that can’t put together coordinated efforts. Goreon is just the opposite: The Goreon king’s speed and strength, his wealth and army, and his ravenous bloodlust have everyone timid; his court bows to his whims. We live inhisworld, but the time is coming—we can’t continue with the way things are.
The era of the Hunter will dawn. Soon. And I’ve been trainingourarmy while we work tirelessly to protect our towns as far as we can stretch our warriors.
I throw a coin on the counter and snatch my cloak from the stool beside me. It floats over the knives sheathed at my hips, and I stride for the exit.
“See you tomorrow, Kade?”
I wave without looking back. “See you then, Lou.”
The mangled wooden door slams, and my eyes adjust to the darkness within a second, my magic whirring, golden threads spinning and humming in my veins.
Mother Diane lives two streets over, and the doorknob of her cottage rattles in its hole when I let myself in. The house is dark, the air damp with the lack of fire and life.
I slip inside through a curtain of mildew and strike a candle. My eyes skirt to the unmade bed and piled dishes in the single-room home. Empty liquor bottles are littered about.
Remorse floods me. After all these years, I didn’t realize she was struggling with the loss of her son to this extent; it’s been over a decade. And she always wore a sly smile at Lou’s tavern.
My magic is heavy, gold solidifying under the weight of a dead Hunter and the pain his mother endured. Denying her own magic so her children would inherit it, and then losing her son when he was so young, is a cruelty I can’t imagine.
Silence surrounds me as the curling wind blows snowdrift through the door.
She’s not here.
And I wonder if Mother Diane chose her fate to escape this agony.
“Forever may you rest,” I whisper, boots rooted in the entryway, staring at a Mother’s sorrow too profound to hold. I wish I had known she needed us.
Perhaps that’s peace: for this life to finally end. To discover what exists on the other side with the gods. The alternative, being turned into one ofthem, is far worse a fate. There is pride in death, at least where I come from. And we usually meet it defending human life, and that is an end I will always embrace.
I secure the door, breath billowing in the frigid air, and head toward home with a hand on a hilt, weaving the cobbled streets of Southend. After ten minutes of hugging shadows, with magic spinning and sensing for vampiric threats, the twirl ofchimney smoke from our rundown, three-story manor beckons me toward warmth.
Climbing the front porch of the Hunter safehouse, I kick snow off my boots on the landing and curse when my sore palm encases the doorknob. I should’ve called it quits on training sooner and saved my grip if I can’t even grab a damn handle.
