Chapter 14

 

Talia desperately needed to find a new watering hole. Or, for that matter, a watering hole in general. This place only qualified for the latter half of that term.

It had such potential, too. That was disappointing part. Nice and hidden, close to their parking garage, and a great setup with the televisions and the dartboard and the bar full of some really excellent drinks. He could actually watch decent sports, for a change! Not to mention the familiar faces. He saw several cousins he’d known from the old days, that must have stuck around. Sam and Lisa Greig, the Monaghan twins… even old Zak Bachman, who used to be Organizer for this concrete town.

And then there was the food.

Horrid.

Ryan was convinced that every item of food in the place was merely fried fat, with no real substance to it at all.

The chips had been awful. The sight of his insane sister stuffing them into her mouth had made his stomach turn. They weren’t even chips—just crispy shells where there had once been potato. He could still remember the chips his da used to make for them: big golden wedges that were perfect with anything and everything or even on their own. He had, in fact, gotten in trouble several times for eating nothing of his dinner but the chips.

Annoyed with them, he turned his attention to the cheeseburger sitting on his plate. Surely Americans couldn’t foul up a cheeseburger. It was practically their specialty.

He took a tentative bite and frowned. Something wasn’t right. Closer inspection confirmed that there was, indeed, a mound of meat on the bun, but it couldn’t possibly be related at all to a cow—at least not to any parts the cow would admit to having. He set the burger back down on his plate and glared at it. He was owed some beef. It would be the least compensation for getting dragged out to Delaware every Saturday.

He didn’t even see why he needed to be there. Talia was a perfectly competent hunter all by herself. She could surely handle teaching this little girl how not to get killed. He would be pointless. Even worse, he would be pointless in Delaware when he could be passed out in bed in Maryland.

Well, maybe his intrepid sister could be persuaded of his uselessness after one of these silly sessions. One wasted day should be all it would take to make her realize that it wasn’t worth trying to convince him to help. It wasn’t as if he would have anything useful to add. After that she would surely leave him be and he would have all of Saturday afternoon to sleep before his shift started at the bank.

Fortunately, Talia decided that it was time to take her protégé back to Delaware. The little girl seemed pleased to be going home; Ryan was getting bored as well. West’s bar was fine enough, but he never felt very comfortable in cities like this. Too many people. Too many buildings.

Entirely too much bloody concrete.

During the drive back he was treated to an unceasing stream of chatter from his sister as she explained all of her detailed plans for the upcoming training program. He had no idea what she said—he began tuning her out almost immediately. The girl sat quietly in the back, although whether she was listening or ignoring his sister was impossible to tell.

For a brief few minutes he had hope that she might drop him off at their apartment before driving all the way into Delaware. Unfortunately, she seemed to have forgotten all about him during her ongoing monologue, and she drove right through Elkton. Well, damn.

Heaven forbid he have anything better to do than ride around in a rusty car all day.

A few extra miles of highway saw him in Keeney, Delaware, and soon enough they had pulled into the driveway. The girl hopped out immediately. Talia put the car in reverse and started backing out again, but Alejandro had come out of the house and was walking towards the car. Talia stopped and rolled down the window.

“Heya, Alex,” she said, “What can we do for you?”

“I have a small problem with which I hoped you could help me,” Alejandro said. “I think that there might be a new nest of therions in the area.”

He paused, and closed his eyes. “There was an attack two nights ago in this neighborhood, and I want you to help me make sure that does not happen again.”

“That’s nothing out of the ordinary for this time of year,” Talia pointed out. “Did the person survive?”

“Yes, she is fine.”

“…Ah.” That made a little more sense. “What does Mike have to say about this?”

“I called him yesterday. He says that I am being unreasonable. That I am only after vengeance.”

“Are you?” Ryan asked.

Alejandro looked him straight in the eyes. “Does it matter?”

Ryan grinned wryly. Touché. “Not particularly.”

“We’d be happy to help,” Talia offered. “But what exactly did you have in mind?”

“I will find this new nest and I will destroy it. As soon as possible. When will you be back?”

“Two weeks, apparently,” Ryan said. Alejandro shook his head.

“No, this is not soon enough. The nest must be exterminated immediately. Is there any way you can come sooner?”

“Will Wednesday be alright?” Talia asked. “I’m afraid I have to work evenings the rest of the week.”

“My shift starts at midnight,” Ryan protested.

“That still leaves us several hours after sunset,” she countered. “They are the nocturnal kind, right?”

Alejandro nodded.

“Then we’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I very much appreciate this.”

“So tell me,” Ryan said on the way back to the apartment, “When did you start taking in strays?”

“What’s that?” Talia asked.

“Your new little student. Why do this?”

“She’s a sweet kid. You might find that out if you try talking to her. Besides, she needs somebody to at least show her the basics.”

“And her parents can’t do this?”

Talia shrugged. “Can’t, or won’t. Have you noticed how freaking overprotective that guy is?”

“So you decided to make her your pet project.”

Talia gave him a hard look. “It’s better than seeing her die on her first hunt.”

Ryan had no reply for her. They drove in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.

“I guess it’s good to get rid of a feeder nest,” Talia finally said. “Even if he’s being a bit dramatic about it. What do you think?”

Ryan turned away from the window, where he had been watching the scenery flash by. “We should have killed all of them, a long time ago.”

“What, you mean during the war?”

“Before that. Back at the beginning.” He paused, and looked back at the landscape. “Just think of how many would have lived.”

Talia frowned, considering this. “But… if there were no demons—no demons at all—then where would we be? We wouldn’t have a reason to even exist.”

“I see no problem with that.”

Talia opened her mouth but said nothing.

He stared out the window. There were billions of people out there, all just trying to make a living. Inveterate b******s, most of them, but they still had the right to live out their lives as well as they could, without being slaughtered like so many sheep. There was no soul guilty enough to deserve that, even if demons were actually thoughtful enough to inquire.

His mother had not deserved it. Neither had his natural parents, who had been killed before he was old enough to remember them. And neither had the scores of friends and cousins who had fallen twenty years ago, all victims of a traitor that should never have been.

A long time ago, he had blamed his father for not being strong enough to keep going. Talia had still been in high school, and he had barely been old enough to obtain legal guardianship. He had done the best he could for her, but he shouldn’t have had to be the parent. Even with their mother lost, Da could have stayed. For their sake.

But he understood, now.

He had lost too much.

Da had spent over fifty years seeking vengeance for the life that had been destroyed by the demons. He had killed so many as a human that the hunters had adopted him as one of their own, along with the man he had enlisted to help him, Seth Carlisle.

He had lived only to exterminate the ones who had murdered his wife and unborn child.

When he met their mother, he thought he had at last found peace. He gave the two of them the names he had picked out over fifty years before. He even bought a house, to settle down.

She died on the way home from the store, just two blocks away, while they were visiting Uncle Seth.

Da shut down after that. Ryan had a feeling that the only reason he stayed at all was to make sure that he would be old enough. He died the day after Ryan turned eighteen.

It had taken him over twenty years to understand why.

Whatever his sister might believe, Ryan had been quite sociable once. Perhaps not to the extent that she was, but he had a good many friends, and he was close to them. Some he had known since childhood, like Seth and his daughter Lily. Others were fellow hunters he had met in the years after they left New York. They had been his family, almost as much as Talia.

And they had died.

Only a few of his fellow mercenaries survived the war that ravaged the hunter populations. Only a few of the people he considered his family remained. Talia, Seth, and his young grandson Alejandro. Everyone else was just…gone.

It was in the months following the end of the war, when they were still counting their dead, that Ryan finally understood his father. One night, he quietly left the apartment he and his sister had been sharing, taking nothing with him and leaving only a brief note. That night he resolved to spend the rest of his days eradicating the demon population. He intended to destroy them all. It would take time, and dedication, but in the end it would be worth the knowledge that no more would fall.

Now, like his father before him, there was nothing else to keep him alive.

Except he had come back. He had been doing just fine on the fringes of civilization. He had been adopted as an honorary member by at least fourteen different tribes from Africa to the Amazon. He even prided himself on being single-handedly responsible for the extinction of a local variety called kushtaka. And then he had come back.

Well, he didn’t plan on staying very long. A year, tops, or whenever Talia’s lease was up on that miserable box she called an apartment. He had hoped to spend the year quietly, earning a little money and checking on his remaining cousins. He had not expected to play teacher’s aide in his sister’s latest harebrained scheme.

 

 

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Ryan woke up at eleven that night, painfully aware that he had only slept a few hours since retrieving his motorcycle. Between changing the oil and finally convincing Talia to let him cook something for supper, he hadn’t gotten to bed until seven o’clock that evening.

Oh well.

He had gone for longer without a decent day’s sleep. Besides, as he had suspected, most of his job involved keeping an eye on the security cameras. Granted, the monitors were computer screens instead of grainy black-and-whites, but that hardly changed the job description.

At least, unlike his beloved sister, he was capable of arriving at work on time. Actually, he arrived a few minutes early. When he got to the security room, the man who worked the first night shift was still sitting in front of the monitors, eating something messy. He grinned at Ryan and gave him a nod.

“Hey, Kavanagh. Have a good day?” he asked.

 “I’ve had better.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. You can always try again tomorrow. Chili fry?” he offered, holding up something limp and covered in what was, presumably, the chili. Ryan stared at in horror.

“I’ll pass, Gary, thanks.”

Gary shrugged dismissively and continued eating. Ryan settled into the other chair and stared silently at the monitors for a few minutes. If Gary wouldn’t, then somebody should. Next to him, his coworker finished off his fries and wiped his fingers off on a wad of napkins.

“So, graveyard shift, eh?” he said conversationally. “What’s that like? I could never do it myself.”

“About the same as your shift. Just later.”

“You’re a brave man for taking it. Especially since you’re much more likely to get ‘visitors’.”

Ryan considered this and sighed wistfully.

“Oh, I wish.”

Gary gave him a funny look.

“Well, it would at least be something to do.”

“Oh, I get it,” Gary said, laughing. “You’re just messing with me. For a minute, there, you had me worried about your head.”

“My head is just fine, Gary,” he responded, his eyes not leaving the monitors.

“Yeah, I know. Well, it looks like my shift is up. I’ll see you tomorrow, Kavanagh.”

Gary cleaned up his snack and relinquished the seat to Ryan, who switched seats with barely a bored nod in his direction.

Despite the amount of money the bank spent on surveillance, encountering late-night thieves was actually very rare. With the number of locks, bolts, alarms, and inches of solid metal to break through, it was far easier to rob the place in broad daylight, when a bank teller could be persuaded to overcome these barriers without much more provocation than a gun to the face.

Which is why he generally left the surveillance room after a few minutes to take a walk. Technically, he stayed close enough to the building that he could spot any would-be robbers, so it wasn’t as if he were truly leaving his post. Anyway, that’s what he told himself. He supposed he should feel guiltier about it, but he always figured that if they knew what he was really doing, the owners would be more than happy to have somebody to get rid of things that might eat their customers.

Half an hour watching the monitors. Half an hour wandering around the perimeter. Rinse and repeat, until the sun comes up and the morning shift arrives.

It wasn’t exactly the most exciting job.

It was a job, though, and soon he would be getting his first paycheck. Then he could start helping Talia with the rent and maybe fixing up his bike. He had already needed to borrow a little more money from her to pay for gas, and he did not like that feeling.

Ryan looked at the monitors in front of him again. There was one for each of the entrances, and another for the back of the building that slowly rotated to cover the whole area. He could even control them if he wanted. Gary had shown him how to make the cameras zoom in and out on his first night. He was especially impressed when even the stationary cameras could be made to turn.

He killed the first two half-hours he spent in the security room just fiddling with the controls.

Now he just had to hope that nobody would want to see the tapes later.

A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was time to stretch his legs for another half an hour. It was about damn time. He had been reduced to coordinating the cameras in a kind of complicated dance while juggling the controls for each of them.

Talia would be so proud.

He gave the monitors one more futile glance. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and… one more sweeping view of nothing. He shrugged on his leather jacket and locked the door behind him.

The air outside was colder than it had been last night. Add warmer undershirts to the list of things he still needed. He had forgotten how cold it could get at night in this part of the world. The humidity wasn’t helping much, either. True, it was nothing compared to the air in the Amazon, where all you had to do for a drink of water was open your mouth. Then again, the air in the Amazon didn’t get below freezing.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t entirely sure how the air could be freezing and humid at the same time.

Well, maybe it wasn’t as cold as he thought it was.

It had been humid as hell that day, too. If he didn’t know better, he would think that it might rain soon. No sign of it yet, though. The few clouds he could see against the stars didn’t look like they were in the mood for rain. That was fine by him. He had seen enough rain in the past year to make him feel damp for the next decade.

Eventually the air got cold enough to shed some of the moisture; the damp air now coalesced into a cold mist that crept furtively up the dark streets as he walked along the pavement. A bat squeaked overhead, followed by its companions. He saw their shapes silhouetted for a brief moment against the bright moon.

Ryan sneered at them and kept walking.

He wasn’t buying any of it.

He couldn’t care less about a little ominous mist and a handful of bats with overly dramatic aspirations. He was as bloody alone in this alley as a person could be. No glow of a late-night mugger, no tingling hands or bloodlust, and the only thing those bats smelled like was bat.

Damn, but it was getting cold.

He had half a mind to go back inside and watch the monitors for the rest of the night. If he started up with that now, though, he’d have no hope for when it started getting really bad around February. He pulled his leather jacket around him a bit tighter, but it didn’t help much.

There was no way around it; 2am in November was just going to be bloody cold. He could at least stop acting like a pansy about it.

He continued his leisurely walk around the area. It hadn’t quite been half an hour yet, but if there were any kind of demon in the area he would have smelled it by now.

No; he would be sitting his arse for quite long enough anyway. Might as well get a few more minutes of exercise.

It occurred to him that most people would catch a nap at a time like this.

The mist must have become discouraged by its failure to frighten him. It turned into a kind of depressed drizzle, which quickly became a steady downpour just to spite him.

Right.

Bugger this.

He was going back inside to choreograph a new routine for his cameras.