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I perched on a boulder holding my gun, my arm relaxed at my side, eyes tracking the barren wasteland before me. A tuft of tall, dry grass rustled, its golden stalks hiding a predator. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to do nothing while Fin walked across the open sand between me and the grass.
Emerson was fiddling with some sort of infrared heat tracking...thing, and he'd put an earpiece on Fin that we obtained from our generous new patron. We were trying out Theo's equipment to see if it worked before we actually depended on anything the human gave us.
I guess we'd see if Emerson was able to give the little leprechaun any helpful information with his invention. And we'd see if Fin was getting any better at reading his environment the way I'd been teaching him.
The leprechaun's steps slowed, but he didn't stop. I could see him tense up. Either Emerson had confirmed there was something living in that grass, or Fin's instincts had finally kicked in and he could feel that little zing down your spine that meant a killer was watching you.
The dry grass rustled again, and I silently fluttered the fingers of my empty hand on my thigh, my body coiled and ready to spring. Come on guys. Don't fuck this up.
A tearing animal scream rent the air, and a hundred or so pounds of fiend sprang out of the grass, leaping at Fin's small form. I brought my gun up, but still didn't pull the trigger. My fangs bit into my bottom lip, drawing blood as I made myself stand down.
Fin didn't flinch. He wasn't surprised. Either he'd sensed the thing or Emerson had given it away. The leprechaun simply rolled onto his back to make up for his limited flexibility, like I'd shown him in training, and fired his Fin-sized sawed-off shotgun into the beast's belly.
The fiend continued its arc through the air and landed on top of the leprechaun, but Fin was able to shove it off and roll to his feet, grinning. I narrowed my eyes, not watching Fin as he headed back toward me. My eyes were still scanning the barren plain. That four-foot-tall cluster of hardy, sharp-bladed fiendgrass was the only shelter for miles. It would be damned weird if there was only one fiend sheltering in it.
Emerson emerged from the Jeep where he'd been running his little toy, joining Fin to help drag the fiend carcass over for skinning. It was a chimera—a loose term used to describe a mixed-bag of fiends that didn't fit any easy human label. This one had the body of a golden cat—maybe a cougar—with six legs, three eyes, a couple of hooves, and a sharp, bird-like beak. Whatever the fuck it was, we'd cash in the pelt at the hunter's association.
I lifted my chin, scenting the air, pulling on my half-developed cat-shifter senses. "Behind you, morons!" I ground out.
Fin spun, but he didn't get his gun up in time. Emerson did the Emerson thing and grabbed the leprechaun by the back of his shirt, tucking the smaller guy under an arm and rushing back toward the Jeep. Our Em was a lover, not a fighter.
Fin swore in his native language the whole way back, insisting the ogre put him down so he could fucking shoot something.
I rolled my eyes and leveled my gun, picking off two more chimera with efficient head shots. Fin was lucky that first one had died. Fucking fiends tended to be nearly invincible unless you got 'em in the head.
I stood and jumped down off my boulder, slowly walking toward the clump of grass as it rustled and a fourth, larger, chimera emerged. This fiend was clearly the alpha of the group of fucked-up beasts. While the smaller ones came up to my mid-thigh, this damned thing could look me right in the eyes.
I sighed and pulled a knife from my leg sheath. Seriously. I had to do all the fucking work. "Well," I said, when the cat stopped and growled at me. "Come on already. I've got shit to do today."
It crouched low, then lunged, massive paws outstretched, claws longer than my fingers curling in toward my head. I squeezed off a couple shots, then raised my knife and spun, using the momentum to slash my way through the thing's furry throat.
I didn't quite spin far enough out of the way. Blood sprayed everywhere, coating me in thick, hot wetness. I side-stepped the twitching corpse and raked the fingers of my knife-hand through my chin-length hair, pushing the sticky strands back out of my face.
Turning, I found Emerson and Fin staring at me. Fin looked mad. Emerson just blinked wide red-brown eyes at me, as if he couldn't decide what to think.
"Thought you were going to butt out this time, Sabertooth," Fin huffed, jamming his gun under the front seat and heading my way.
I rolled my eyes. "Thought you were going to actually do your damned job without getting killed this time, leprechaun."
I eyed Emerson as the hulking half-ogre made his way to the new corpses, his skinning knife in hand. "And I thought you were only the tech guy."
He hunched his broad shoulders and looked at the ground, scuffing his boot in the shifting sand. "I couldn't let Fin get hurt."
I rolled my eyes skyward. "Gods." Leveling my dripping knife at him, I pinned him with a scowl. "One of these days, you're gonna rush in to save someone, all your attention on them, and take a fiend right upside the head. You're big, Em. Not fucking invincible."
His shoulders hunched further, but he at least met my eyes, briefly. "Sorry, Sam."
I huffed. Morons.
Tucking my gun into the holster at the small of my back, I went to help them skin the damned chimeras.
"How'd the infrared work?" I said, after a long stretch of cutting through cat hide in silence.
Fin braced his hands on the carcass he was skinning and used his entire bodyweight to flip it over. The he started hacking at the other side. "It was handy. He told me there was something in there, at least."
Emerson sighed, his big hands surprisingly nimble as he worked. It must come from all that practice manipulating tiny electronic components and crap. "It needs more tweaking. The com system had a good connection at first, but it went all patchy there at the end. And all I could see was one big hot spot on the infrared. It was probably all of them clustered together." He frowned, clearly annoyed with himself. "I...got distracted by what Fin was doing, or I would have seen there was still more action on the screen after that first one went down."
I flicked a bit of fat off the tip of my knife and wiped blood off my cheek with one of the less bloody spots on my sleeve. "Well. Now you know. Don't ever take your eyes off your environment. Just when you think you've got things handled, that's usually when it goes to shit."
He nodded.
Fin rolled his eyes. "Yes Sir, Saber, Sir."
I growled. "You guys are getting better at this, but you still stink. And bad hunters are fiend chow."
Standing, I rolled up the pelt I'd removed and headed toward the Jeep so I could tie it down to the rack. "I'd like it if you both stayed breathing," I muttered, swallowing down my emotions. They wanted to learn how to hunt. I couldn't baby them, or they'd end up soft. Soft and dead.
Emerson joined me, heaving his pelt up top, then turning to take mine. I'd have to climb up there using the step side, but he could reach just fine from the ground. I eyed his massive form as he strapped the pelts down with rope. Bungee cord would work better, but with the limited production of stuff like rubber and plastics since the rift, that kind of thing was expensive. I saved the bungees for more important shit. Rope though? That I always had in large supply. You just never knew what you were going to need out here.
Emerson turned and his eyes met mine. I stared into those warm brown orbs, wondering just why the hell he insisted on this hunter crap, when he was so gentle. He was hiding it better these days, but I knew he hated killing things, and skinning them made him nauseous.
I had never asked him, but I had a feeling he'd seen a lot of violence wherever he came from. It was what ogres were known for.
He ran a big hand through his hair, and I swallowed, realizing I'd been standing there, just staring at him. I turned to go, but he grabbed my shoulder, halting me. He didn't grimace when he realized he'd just put his hand in a bunch of chimera gore. I was covered in blood from head to toe.
"You okay, Sam?" he asked, his voice lowered so Fin wouldn't butt in with snarky commentary. The ogre gave me a sorrowful look. "It must be hard, killing cats."
I blinked at him. He thought I was upset because...? "Oh," I said, finally catching on. "Because I'm half feline shifter?" At his nod, I rolled my eyes. "Please. I'm not that pathetic."
He opened his mouth, probably to tell me how it was okay to feel shit. I shrugged out from under his hand, trying not to remember those big mitts touching me in other, more pleasant, ways. For fuck's sake. Hadn't I just said I wasn't pathetic? "Don't even start," I warned him. "I'm a hunter, Emerson. I kill shit. It's what I do. End of story."
Besides, these were full fiends with completely animal faces. I'd killed much, much worse things in my life. Things that were far more human. Things like me. Those were the ones that gave me nightmares. I squared my shoulders and prepared to go back to the weird ignoring-the-elephant-in-the-room thing me and Emerson had been doing ever since I got smashed, let him see me naked, and sucked his giant dick.
"Sam," Emerson whispered, those soft eyes still full of sadness. "Can we talk ab—"
I stepped back and yanked my gunky long-sleeved shirt off over my head, balling it up and throwing it into the back of the jeep, where Fin was waiting for us to finish loading up. The leprechaun grimaced when the ball of filth hit him, kicking it to the floorboards with a muttered, "Nasty. Asshole!"
I smirked at him and turned away from Emerson and all his...niceness. I didn't want to talk to him about anything but hunting. I didn't need to hear him say how that whole fairy moonshine thing was a huge mistake and he really should stick to his own kind. Or real females. Or...something.
Ogres weren't usually into the whole poly thing anyway. Someday he'd find some big ogre half-breed female who'd love to be his possession and could easily ride a cock the size of a fucking tree stump, and I'd just be a bad memory.
He sighed heavily behind me but didn't say anything else as he went to load up the rest of the pelts and cram himself into the passenger side of the Jeep. I had removed the door on his side for this run, so he had more room for his knees and elbows, but he was still all folded up to keep his head from hitting the ceiling.
I pulled my seatbelt across my thick, blood-splotched sports bra and started the Jeep, comforted by the familiarity of this. Of me and my equipment navigating the stretch of desert wasteland outside Westhold while I searched for monsters to kill. My eyes flicked up to check the rearview and I met Fin's moss green eyes. He lifted one red brow in a snarky, questioning look. He was pointedly staying out of whatever was going on between me and Emerson. But his facial expressions said it all. He thought I was being an asshole and Emerson was being a moron, and he was just waiting for us both to get our heads out of our asses.
Life had been so much less complicated back when it was just me, my weapons, and some shit to kill.