Wings and Shadowthief by May Sage
Choices
The huntsmen compound, situated in the heart of TriBeCa, looked like just about any other tall, glass and silver skyscraper in Manhattan from outside. Indeed, a great majority of the grim folk walking in or out of the sliding doors under the watchful eye of two armed guards wore smart suits and polished shoes.
A keen observer might have wondered why all seemed particularly muscular, or noticed the outlines of weapons cleverly concealed under their gaberdines.
In Oldcrest, the huntsmen didn’t need to blend in, but here, doing their job would have been considerably more difficult if they walked around dressed like video game adventurers.
Jack wore a royal purple velvet suit. Not his color of choice—it wouldn’t have made the cut for his top twenty—but the only man who wore his size in the Drake compound was the king himself. When the king lends a purple suit, one wears a purple suit. At least the shirt underneath was black.
He didn’t feel out of place because of the ridiculous accoutrement as much as the fact that the two guns usually on a holster were conspicuously absent. Walking in unarmed made him feel naked.
Jack nodded to the guards as he walked in. He couldn’t remember the name of the youngest one, though the butch brunette with an undercut showing off her huntsman ink seemed vaguely familiar.
The silver-haired, short guard smiled. “Good to see you home, sir.”
Was it?
Jack doubted every word of that statement. Being here, so far away from England, wasn’t good. And New York had long since stopped being his home.
“Thanks, Benedict. How’s your lady?”
“Still on my case about retirement, although I stopped active duty.” The man sighed.
Jack walked in to avoid responding. Benedict was pushing sixty. He ought to retire. Huntsmen were encouraged to quit the field in their forties, if not earlier—and many of them died young on duty. Like professional athletes, they were fitter in their youth, and the gods knew they needed to be fit to fight rogue sups.
But being a huntsman was a vocation, not a job. No one wanted to let it go.
The receptionist beamed as he appeared. “Jack!”
“Alice.” While his mouth formed his trademark flirty smile, his heart wasn’t in it.
He used to have a thing with Alice, back in the day. Neither of them had taken it seriously, but they hung out when he was in the city, and he’d taken her back to her place a time or two—never to the Hunter condo. If he ever brought a girl home, his mother would have locked them into a room ad vitam aeternam, or at least until she was sure he’d knocked her up.
His desire to revisit their fling was non-existent, though Alice wore the red lipstick he liked so much and one of her low necklines.
“How long are you sticking around?” she asked, her tongue wetting her pretty lips.
Nothing. He felt nothing except a faint sense of unease. “You know me. I’ll be on a plane back as soon as I can.”
The huntsman rolled her eyes. “You take planes now?”
He usually did for long distances. “Can you let my mother know I’m heading up?”
She frowned, hands typing away at her screen. “She’s seeing someone important. You might want to wait.”
Flirty as she was, Alice wasn’t about to reveal anything about her boss’s schedule—even to him.
“She’s expecting me,” he replied, heading toward the staircase, though there was an elevator available.
Jack never liked to be confined in a cage if could help it. And he certainly could use the few minutes it took him to scale the thirteen floors.
He never quite knew who he was going to deal with. Goofy Becca Hunter, his mother, or the head of the huntsmen. One wanted grandbabies. The other wouldn’t hesitate to end him if it was what the job demanded.
His mother’s office was smaller than one would have thought—and no wonder. She spent as little time stuck inside as she possibly could. Jack passed by the empty office, glad to avoid being stared at from behind the imposing, red mahogany desk, and made his way toward the conference room farther into the corridor.
Through the glass doors, he could see a small crowd gathered; his mother stood at the head of the table, in front of her imposing office chair, and his father was one of her two guards, seated at her right. Jack almost grinned when he spotted Tris at her left.
Tris was nowhere high enough in the pecking order to be Becca Hunter’s guard in an official meeting. She must have begged until his mother relented and let her attend.
Around the oval conference table, four witches were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts—one man, three women. One black, with an emerald green coat thrown over her chair. Jack’s attention went to her, because though she wore a dress, had soft blond waves perfectly in place, and manicured nails painted red, there was no denying her resemblance to Blair. This must be a close relation—mother or sister, he couldn’t tell. She looked like she could be in her early thirties, but witches had a way with wrinkles.
“Jack,” Becca called as he entered. “You’re early.”
“And yet you’re already here.” Discussing him before he walked in. How typical of his mother.
Unprompted, he went to introduce himself to the witches, reaching Blair’s family member first. He offered a hand. “I’m a friend of Blair’s.”
The witch hesitated. “My daughter made a friend. How charming.”
This woman sounded nothing, nothing like the bubbly, enthusiastic Blair he knew. Her voice was daggers and poison sheathed in velvet. Seductive and deadly.
Her hand felt cold when he shook it.
“Jack Hunter.”
“Well met, Jack. I’m Terra White, the head of the Salem coven.”
He frowned. Wasn’t Blair’s last name Lawson?
“Well met,” he echoed the stiff, old-fashioned phrase, moving on to the next witch. Each shook his hand, exchanging names he filed as irrelevant in a corner of his brain.
Jack only bothered to remember memorable people, and Terra liked to surround herself with weaker witches.
He circled the table, snatching a doughnut before taking a seat next to Tris.
His cousin reached out for his free hand and squeezed it under the table. “Definitely your color,” she whispered.
He wasn’t gracing that quip with an answer.
“Well?” Jack prompted.
There was a moment of silence. Becca nodded subtly, and Terra took it as an invitation. “We have researched the location you forwarded thoroughly, and can assure you there’s no witch presence in that area—not for miles, until Norilsk.”
“Norilsk?” He repeated, lost.
“The closest city to Kayerkan, the place where you landed. It’s surrounded by tundra. A few private airfields, some villages with a small population. The latest census of Kayerkan counted less than thirty thousand inhabitants.”
He nodded. He’d shown the picture of the town’s sign to his mother upon arrival. She’d apparently been busy.
“Anything else around there?” he asked.
Becca shot him a cautionary glance. Apparently, she didn’t want to get into it in front of his guests. He sighed. He was dealing with the High Guard, then.
“As for the sample of the blood you provided—”
“From your jacket,” Tris whispered before he could ask.
“—we didn’t get much, but we can certainly confirm it’s not from a human—or a witch.”
His shoulders, tense as steel since he’d entered the building, relaxed a fraction.
He hadn’t killed a human. There was that. Of course, there was a long list of things he didn’t want to hunt down either. Fledglings. Godlings. Bunnies.
“We’ve solved the blood issue,” his father said, surprising Jack.
Why wasn’t he told anything, dammit?
“The reason we asked for an appointment was more about where we can go from here, with his condition.”
Condition.
A nice way of saying part of him was fucking crazy.
Tris tightened her hold.
Terra looked at him directly. “Your case is complex. From what the Drakes and your parents report, you aren’t possessed.”
She paused, giving him a moment to confirm it. He nodded, though carefully.
“Right, in that case, the thing inside you is part of you. Putting a leash on it could be a mistake. Especially given the evidence that it’s trying to help you.”
Jack’s jaw was set. “I woke up covered in blood on another continent. Something has to give.”
Terra nodded. “Well, there are spells that could help, depending on what your goal is. If it’s a matter of remembering what occurs when it takes over, that’s child’s play. We can have a vision potion brewed—we use it to recall our own dreams. If you’d like to stop it from emerging, that’s something else entirely.” She smiled. “Especially considering the fact that the thing has, from all evidence, helped keep you alive. Alternatively, there could be ways to keep you awake, giving you a chance to control your alter ego’s actions. An amulet would work. But you’ll never be able to sleep until you remove it. And simple as it sounds, it requires a potent infusion of elemental energy—hence why we don’t make use of it.”
Jack pondered the words.
Becca didn’t need time to think. “We’ll take all three. Let’s talk payment.”