Ben Wake
I simply can’t believe that Heather is hopping on a plane right now to fly to Ohio to buy a motorcycle. The BMW G650 GSs she is riding is perfect for what she needs. But the Duke III is just that much more perfect, apparently.
Maybe separating our paths for a while isn’t a bad thing, though. It will muddle the trail for a while, and it is in character for her to be obsessive about her equipment. I remember from the days when I was first training her, the one thing I wished she would lose was her tendency to find one thing she liked, and stubbornly stick to it to an impractical degree.
I should back up eleven weeks or so. I had stayed in Omaha for a few days activating a burner identity I’d set up, to hold me over until I could establish somewhere new again. The wonders of the modern age are that all of the work for the burner can be done online, as long as I and a few forged documents had a way of meeting each other. I was just waiting on my passport to be delivered to a local delivery service for an in person pickup. I was literally an hour or two from getting the call when the door to the room I was renting opened suddenly, and there was Heather, the Negre hunter that had picked up my trail. She had weapons out already. I was reworking the calculations of whether killing myself then and there would actually get them completely off the trail or not, when she set her gun and knife down on the table between us.
“You got yourself out. Can you help me?” she asked.
One thing I know about vampires, and especially Negre, is to always assume there is a layer of deception involved in any dealings we have with each other.
The thing is, I trained her. I had learned to tell when she was lying. And she is terribly resistant to change. That was the thing that kept her from ever evolving beyond being a good hunter to a great one. And it is why I chose to stay at the cabin and lay as low as I could with Ivy instead of immediately running. I knew her methods, and I knew that she would try to find people that might know where I had gone, and watch what they did, while she also cast the net around hubs that I would be likely to travel through. She has a great mind for that kind of coordination of the Negre network to do the grunt work while she would split her personal investigation across multiple fronts. And that was why the moment I saw Carl on the property, I had to assume she would likely be out there within hours, and that I had to separate from Ivy and get noticed by her network.
“You know I can’t believe you,” I said. But I am reworking my calculations. If she is being honest with me, which I can count as a definite possibility, Ivy is safe. If she is lying to me, I can at least see if Ivy is of any interest to her. And if Ivy is of interest, I last saw her in the company of Nathan, who strikes me as somebody that can protect her, at least for a while, especially if Ivy will open up to him. So throwing myself out the window and taking one of my own weapons to myself could be discarded as an option.
“I know that. Just like I can’t trust you, because at the first sign you think I’m a risk to you, you’re going to kill me.”
“This puts us at an impasse,” I told her.
“Can you extend your stay in this room?” she asks me. Keeping half an eye on her, I pull out my phone and check the app. “Two more days,” I say.
“Do it, then find another room somewhere nearby. We’ll leave all of our weapons in this one, and we’ll go to the other room, both unarmed, and we’ll see if we can reach some sort of trust framework.”
So we did that. We took full advantage of the two days that we knew our arms were in a separate location, with nothing in our possession but the clothes on our backs and my phone, while she told me everything that had happened since she left my tutelage in 1965. It was an ongoing interrogation, me looking for places her story might have been inconsistent or contradicted itself. I found none. And in that time, she asked nothing of me, only telling me what she had picked up about me when she realized I had moved to Colorado. Yes, she knew I moved socially with a thrope and that I’d taken a warm lover. What surprised me is when she revealed that Nathan is a demon. When she explained to me the chain of logic by which she deduced it, I could come to no other conclusion myself.
“So the hunter that was after me, that something killed out in the woods in January. Nathan did that?” I ask.
“Yes. You had correctly deduced it was a demon, but you were fooled by trappings of a completely random encounter that he had laid around the entire thing. The whole time you were in Stokers Mill, you spoke daily with a demon. One that was letting you live, and one that I realize had actually spoken to me once, knowing full well what I was, and had probably been within feet of me at least one other time, and it did not touch me. I had started hunting you, thinking that this conversation we are having right now might happen. The second time I realized that the demon had been within striking distance and did nothing but mess with my bike, I realized things in the world are starting to change, and that it’s way past time for me to get on the side of right.”
At the end of the two days, wisdom and my survival instincts told me to still distrust her on principal, but I was tentatively willing to take her at her word enough to work with her. We went to pick up the last of my burner identity credentials, and decided to start moving around the country, to give the illusion she was still following me, and to take eyes away from Stokers Mill. She hadn’t reported to her handlers that she suspected she was on my trail, just that she had detected a high-value target in the area. That would usually indicate somebody in a leadership position in one of the other clans that the Negre were not in temporary alliance with. Negre hunters are given a good degree or autonomy in their work as long as a head is delivered to the castle within six months to a year.
As of this moment, having just dropped Heather at the airport, we’re only four months into her actively hunting me. She has a little more time before she needs to either bring a head, or call in help for the hunt. Two months, at least, that we can travel around together while we pretend I have been flushed into the open and she is in pursuit.
I decide to spend the two days it will take her to pick up the motorcycle and meet me again seeing what I can find out about Ivy from a distance. I know that I cannot directly contact anybody in Stokers Mill. Paul and Carol, even if I would dare to contact them, would know nothing. I kept my life as opaque from them as I could. None of Ivy’s closest circle would be safe to contact, because I have no idea how they would take me getting in touch. The might create the kind of noise that would draw others of my kind to town, just because they sensed the disruption. Logging into any of my social networking would be a bad idea, in case any of my false identity had been discovered. But logging into the site of the local newspaper, creating sock puppets to just see what people in Stokers Mill are saying in public posts are safe.
I pick up nothing about Ivy that really says anything. She graduated, but she is not on the scholarship roll for one of the most prestigious ones she had applied for. Probably because she’d missed some critical tests while she was hiding in the woods with me. I could make up for that financially easy enough. Money is not a problem for me, even getting a large amount of it is easy enough. But I owe her way more than compensation for the money she lost to make up for what I had done to her. For what may still happen to her as a result of our brief relationship.
I burn more than an afternoon on the endeavor, and know barely more when I started. I find myself terribly agitated and feeling helpless. The thought crosses my mind that I must feel like Carl does when he feels caged and unable to act directly to remedy a situation he is in.
The thought of Carl sparks something in me. It is afternoon, I have been hiding out indoors, away from the sun, all day. You can traverse a good distance overnight. I could make it to Stokers Mill by morning. At least pass near the house, long enough to just put eyes on Ivy for a moment, make sure she is well.