Author: Hedge
Spoilers: All the NW books, especially Huntress.
Rating: PG or PG-13, for slight violence, implied sex, and language.
Disclaimer: The universe this takes place in and any characters you recognize from the books belong to the lovely L.J. Smith. Azrael, Zeke, and the plot belong to me. Will and the Elite belong to my friend Wicked, and are on loan.
Synopsis: The thing about being a spy is that almost no one knows whose side you're really on. This creates problems.
Aspen considered the drained body lying at his feet with a critical eye. Old and unattractive, but she had put up a relatively good fight, and she had been tasty. Unlike her son, a middle-aged man who helped her run this little corner store. His struggle had been the half-hearted one of someone who didn't really care about life anymore, and he had tasted stale.
No wonder. The man had still lived with his mother, for crying out loud.
Humming under his breath, he leaned back against the counter to wait. He had followed the little miss's admittedly limited trail to this tiny store, and he could stay here indefinitely until she showed up again, supping on whatever other customers came in both to keep them silent and to keep himself at full strength. With the beating she had taken, he would be able to kill the woman with a limited amount of fuss.
Smiling his satisfaction, he lifted
a pack of gum from the rack next to the cash register and prepared for
the wait.
Azrael rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them up, and reached up to tug the brim of her jacket's hood forward. It was risky to go out, perhaps, but she had been driving everyone, including herself insane just sitting around. Sitting still and having nothing to do wasn't something she had ever done often, and it wasn't something she was very good at. Within two days, she had been pacing incessantly. After a week of this, Keely had lost patience and decided that she should start doing household chores with some of the others. So for the past few days, Azrael had been cleaning, cooking, and running errands, while she waited for her fingers to mend enough for her to go back to the Elite and leave the job of 'envoy' to someone else.
Right now, she was heading for the local corner store. What had originally been a trip for tissues for Claire Goddard, who was in bed with a bad cold, had turned into a full shopping trip when everyone and their soulmate had decided they also needed something 'while she was out'.
"Cold?," someone said quietly, and Azrael glanced sideways at Hugh, the same young man who had escorted her to the infirmary when she had first come the sanctuary. She shrugged in response, and ducked her head to indicate that she didn't feel much like talking. And once again, she was amazed at the ease with which he took that silent request. Anyone else would have ignored it, made a second attempt, or felt compelled to make some sort of noise to fill the silence. But then again, she hadn't met any wakened Old Souls before him. Maybe the seemingly endless patience with people was a part of that.
They arrived at the shop, and as Azrael pushed the front door open, the little bell attached to it jingled merrily. She opened her mouth to greet the little old lady who ran the place, but froze when she saw who waited in front of the counter. "Out, now," she snapped at Hugh, backing up rapidly herself, not because she thought she could avoid a fight but because it would be disastrous to be cornered inside the cluttered little store. She had a moment's warning before the brown-eyed vampire slammed into her midsection in a movement that would have been called a tackle if it hadn't been so agile, more like the pounce of a hunting cat then anything else.
She didn't give him a chance to get a good hold on her, kicking and hitting almost wildly, more concerned with getting free then injuring him. Finally, something connected, and his arms loosened enough for her to squirm free and scramble to her feet. He climbed to her feet at a much slower pace, arrogance and grace in every line of his body and face, and she used the time to fumble a long, wooden knife out of it's sheath. She cursed inwardly at the clumsiness of her hands, two of her fingers still bound up so that they would heal.
Her drawing a weapon only seemed to amuse him, and with a shrug, he removed his own weapon, a two-bladed knife that bore faint resemblance to the horns of a bull. It was a nasty piece of work, really, all black-stained iron with a leather-wrapped hilt.
He feinted to her left, and she started to bring her blade up to block it before she recognized what he was doing and flung herself sideways to avoid the real stab, to her unprotected right. She slashed at him when he was still recovering from that strike, more to stall for time and regain her balance then to actually hurt him.
The man drew back, looking more wary now. She used the opening to glance back at Hugh, wanting to make it clear that she expected him to stay out of the fight. She had to resist the urge to cheer when she saw that was exactly what he was doing, staying several body lengths back to give her room to move, and keeping her between him and the vampire so she didn't have to worry about him becoming Hugh, boy hostage. His usually calm expression was somewhat clouded, but not panicked, which both made her impressed with him and had the rather strange effect of calming her as well.
She started to turn back at her opponent, and therefore a kick that would have snapped her neck only connected a glancing blow to her jaw. All the same, it hurt, and it sent her sprawling on the sidewalk, knocking the breath from her lungs and stunning her. Her head swam; she couldn't concentrate or breath properly. It was only for a moment, but she knew enough to know that a lost moment in a fight like this could get a person killed. Was going to get her killed.
Which was when someone's sneaker hit the vampire in the head, soon followed by the other shoe. Someone was throwing their shoes at a Night World bounty hunter?
No matter how unconventional, however, the tactic was working. The bounty hunter was distracted, and Azrael used that to make a rather desperate move from her sitting position. She lashed out with both feet, aiming for his right leg. Heavy boots connected solidly with his knee, and the joint made a muffled, wet sound as it broke. With a cry of rage and pain, the man topped over, loosing his balance when he lost the use of one of his legs. It would heal with typical vampire quickness, of course, but it would keep him down long enough for her purposes. Once he had six inches of wooden knife in his chest, he wasn't going to be doing a lot of fighting.
She climbed to her feet slowly, a small hiss of pain passing her lips. And she probably wasn't even feeling the whole of the blow to her jaw at this point... The adrenaline was dulling the pain. She shifted her grip on the blade, and took as unsteady step towards the vampire. He was breathing hard, expression slightly contorted, but his eyes were focused and almost calculating. He was planning something, and she braced herself, figuring he was going to attempt a last-ditch effort something like her own, aiming for the legs or body.
But when he did make his move, turning swiftly onto his side and kicking at her with his uninjured leg, it hit her hand, the one grasping the knife. The blade was knocked from her grasp, and went skittering across the pavement behind her. Before she could recover it, he had swept that same leg around, knocking her feet out from under her. Using the outer wall of the grocery store as a support, he lurched to his feet, and started down the street and away from Azrael as fast as his broken leg would carry him. It was actually a pretty respectable speed, all things considered, but she knew she could catch him. First, however, she needed to recover her knife. Hard to kill him without it.
She turned, to find Hugh already scooping the weapon up off the ground. He moved back towards her, and frowned faintly, making a vague motion towards her face. "Are you ok?"
"I've been better," Azrael replied with a shrug. She her hand out, palm up. "Can I please have my knife back now?" She looked over her shoulder once, making sure that the vampire wasn't quite out of sight yet, then turned her attention back to Hugh.
He frowned, no doubt knowing what she intended to do with the weapon once he gave it back, but to his credit he didn't ask if it was necessary that she go after the bounty hunter. Instead, he held out the knife. Blade first, which went against the basic rules of handling a knife, but she wasn't about to complain, considering how cooperative he had been so far. Instead, she reached past the blade to grip the hilt...
...And touched his hand.
A spark that started at her fingers and traveled up her arm, somewhere between pleasant and painful. A feeling like her skin was moving of its own accord, twitching in a mad attempt to escape her bones. A crackling like lightning before a summer storm. A connection. And a word supplied by a mind that was not her own.
Soulmates.
She jerked her hand, and the knife, away, and the connection was broken as quickly as it had been made. Distantly she felt a sort of regret, as though she had cut short something wondrous, but mostly she felt confused. Disoriented, unfocused, and unable to think.
It was dangerous to go after the vampire in that condition. However, she somehow felt that it would be more dangerous to remain standing there with an entirely baffling human boy, and the even more baffling word he had supplied her with. It was better that she go. At least until the emotional tilt-a-whirl in her head settled down a bit.
So without a word, she turned and headed
down the street at a trot. Her quarry was out of sight, but as slow as
he would be traveling, she wouldn't have trouble catching up. She didn't
look back, and she tried not to think about what had happened, for that
just make the turmoil deepen. Instead, she bent her mind to the task of
finding the man who had tried to kill her.
She had found the vipers' nest. So to speak.
It had taken her a couple blocks to calm down, and a couple more to find the vampire, just as he was entering the Hayward BART station. It was while she was on the train, waiting for him to get off and go somewhere more isolated, where her killing him wouldn't cause so much of a stir, that an idea occurred to her. It was obviously no coincidence that the same vampire who had kidnapped her for Zeke had attacked her today. That meant that he was probably heading back to report to Zeke, which in turn meant that she could follow him to wherever the leader of the Night World was holed up at the moment.
It had not been an easy feat, following a vampire without being detected. But she had been trained by the best. Now she was seated on a bench at the bus stop, and old newspaper hiding her face and torso from view.
She was in the Tenderloins of San Francisco. Not the best neighborhood in the city, it was very close to deserving the word 'slum'. The bench she was on and the buildings were covered in graffiti and less savory things. People begged for change at every street corner. The little convenience stores sold items such as glow-in-the-dark rosaries and cheap velvet paintings of Elvis and Jesus along with the usual things.
None of it matted. What matted was the boarded up building across the way from her. It was nothing special, to most people. Stained gray stone made up the walls. The lower windows were covered with scrap wood, and the upper windows were almost all broken, jagged pieces of glass still clinging to the frames. A bum snoozed under a tattered rag that had once been a blanket in front of the door. He hadn't even stirred when the vampire she had been following stepped over him to enter the building.
Azrael smiled in fierce satisfaction. She'd get back to Daybreak, report to Will, and they would hit it tonight. Sure, her fingers weren't completely healed, and her jaw felt pretty battered, but there wasn't a chance in hell that she was going to miss out on this.
"Gotcha, bastard," she whispered, almost
too quietly to hear. When the next buss rumbled up to the bench in a puff
of exhaust fumes, she got on, letting it carry her back in the direction
of BART.
Notes: I got stuck halfway through this, so it took me a couple weeks to toss it up. Sorry folks. As compensation, this chapter has a lot of action in it, and a lot of important things happening, because this fic is starting to draw to a close.
The reason I got stuck? I hate writing action sequences. Unfortunately, for the types of stories I write, they seem to be needed. I'd be much happier writing about, say, political maneuvering in the Night World Council, with lots and lots of dialogue.
Anyways, enough of that. Many thanks to the usual people, and those who reviewed. Anaita, I hope this answers your question about the whole Will/Az/Hugh thing. If not... Let's just say that Will and Azrael as a couple is highly unlikely. They'd murder eachother within weeks, if not sooner. And that would be bad.