Chapter 11
Hunter
The studio has a musty smell, like old vinyl, burned coffee, and the two cigarettes I allow myself every show.
Ares is sprawled under the desk, his brindle head on my boot, snoring like a chainsaw with asthma.
It’s worse since the fire. Outside the station, the campus is dead; inside, the playlist is keeping me awake.
I lean into the mic, voice low, smoke curling from the stub of my first cigarette pinched between my fingers.
“Forsyth never sleeps, babies. She just pretends. She closes her eyes and waits for the Shadows to come carry her secrets away. The ones who tuck the city’s sins into the dark.
You’re listening to Royal Noir, and this is Hunter Sorrin reminding you: every corpse has a story, but only the dead get to keep it. ”
I let the reverb on my voice die, cue the next band on my curated playlist, Bauhaus, and kill my mic.
That’s when the booth door opens without a knock.
Everly won’t be here for another few hours, but it’s not the morning DJ in the doorway.
It’s DK. He steps through the haze in a black leather jacket, black jeans, silver flashing in his eyebrow, lip, nose, and ears.
He drops a burner phone on the console. The screen is cracked, but glowing with a single text.
Body down. Pier 19. North warehouses.
I feel the shift in my blood, the old pull. “Girl?” I ask, giving him my attention.
Damon shakes his head. “Male. Unknown age. Looks like a Scratch deal that ended with too many holes.”
I exhale, smoke passing through my lips. “Fuck, that shit is pervasive.”
He smirks, but it’s thin tonight. Tired. “Clock’s ticking, Hunt. We need him in the ground before sunrise, or the rites won’t take.”
“Dude,” I gesture to the soundboard. “I can’t just leave my shift.”
“I got you a replacement.”
On cue, Mateo pops his head in the door, his long dark hair pulled back in a manbun. “Hey, man.”
“Hey.” I give my fraternity brother a glance and then look back at DK. “I’m not handing the station over to some random person.”
“Did you just call me random?” Mateo places his hands on his hips, indignant.
“I mean, random to the station. I had to go through hours of training and work my way up to getting my own shift. One fuck up, and there are plenty of people willing to take over.”
“Look,” DK scratches the back of his neck, “handling shit like this is our job. I know you don’t like it when there’s a shift in routine, but we can’t leave that body out there.”
He’s right.
Mateo steps forward. “I do have some experience,” he adds. “I worked at my high school station. It can’t be much different.”
I run a hand through my hair. “It’s not like I have much of a choice.”
Before I move out of the way, he’s already eased into the seat and has the headset down over his ears. He gives us both a grin and a thumbs-up. “Have fun.”
Ares gets on his feet the second I do, ears pricked, making sure he’s not left out.
I stub the cigarette, pissed about losing out on the second one, and shrug into the jacket hanging on the back of the chair. No robes tonight. We are the city’s undertakers, but not the kind that embalm and shake hands.
When someone dies wrong, the living call us.
No police. No paperwork. We come in the black van with the tinted windows and clean up the scene.
Once we’re back on Barons’ territory, we wrap the body in linen soaked in river water and myrrh, then carry it down into the crypts beneath our lands, where the soil is consecrated with blood older than the city charter.
There’s a rite for every kind of death.
Gunshot? We wash the wounds with wine and salt and whisper the names of the roads he’ll never walk again.
Overdose? We burn cedar and poppy and bind the arms so the soul doesn’t claw its way back up the throat.
Unclaimed girls are stripped bare, their clothing burned in a bronze basin so no echo of the fight clings to the shroud. Then they’re laid out on a slab engraved with peacock feathers that will watch over them as they pass from one realm to the other.
No questions. No judgment. Only respect. Even the bodies that come from East End, already zipped up in a body bag, because the dead remember who treated them gently.
I scratch Ares behind the ears. “Komm.”
DK pushes open the station door. “Van’s running. I’ve got the shroud in the back.”
The van’s headlights flash over the chain-link fence, tires crunching over broken glass and river stones as we ease onto the concrete parking lot of the old warehouse.
Moonlight barely cuts through the fog crawling in off the water, it’s too thick and dark outside.
The building itself looks like it should have been torn down decades ago, red-brown flakes making up most of the walls.
“What is this place?” Carson asks, killing the engine. He was in the driver’s seat when I climbed in the passenger seat with Ares. Two other Shadows, twins named Jace and Slade, sit on the bench next to DK in the second row. They’re the muscle.
“A fucking dump,” DK says, pulling on a leather glove.
I look out the window, recognizing the building.
“My dad told me once that this is where Lucia handled his import-exporting. Moving things up and down the water,” I say, scanning the area for movement.
No clue who called in the body. The burner phone tracks everything as an anonymous call, but there should be someone here to meet us.
“Moving what?” Slade asks. “Drugs?”
“Drugs. Women. Whatever he was trafficking at the time.”
DK grunts. “No wonder he got blown up.”
Him and half of the North Side.
I pull the Glock out of my bag and rack it once to feel the weight before tucking it in my waistband.
We step out into the thick air, the scent of river rot and spilled diesel.
We all drag the black cotton masks down over our faces without needing to talk about it. Only our eyes and mouths are showing.
“Carson, stay with the van and keep Ares with you.” I rub my dog's head, then jerk my chin at the thick-armed twins. “You come with us.”
“Eerie as fuck out here,” DK mutters. “Stinks, too.”
He’s not wrong. The fog swallows every sound except our boots on the cracked concrete.
A shadow moves near the corner of the building.
Four hands snap to our waistbands.
“Stop right there,” DK says, gun already raised. The figure stills. “Now, walk out here slowly with your hands up.”
I’m not sure who I expect to walk out, but it’s sure as fuck not the FBI agent that’s been down here sniffing around the missing girl cases–the one that locked up that kid from DKS.
He’s dressed in jeans and a zip-up hoodie, a Quantico logo printed over the left breast. His dark hair is pushed back off his forehead, and he looks like he’s not all that happy to be here at four AM either.
“What the fuck?” DK says, not lowering the gun.
“Settle down,” Knight says. “I’m not armed.” He tilts his head to the dark corner he came from. “Neither is she. Come on out, Nic.”
A college-aged girl steps into the weak spill of the van’s parking lights. Small, maybe twenty, hoodie two sizes too big, sleeves chewed at the cuffs. Her face is streaked with tears and mascara, eyes red-rimmed, lower lip split like someone backhanded her not long ago.
I’m not in the mood to trust him, or her, so I nod at the twins. “Check them.”
“On it,” Slade says.
While Slade pats down the agent, Jace approaches the girl. “Lift up the hoodie.” She does, showing loose jeans, but no bulges. At the small of her back is a tattoo of a coiled snake. Jace makes sure we see it.
Count property. Or, at least, former Count property.
“All clear,” Slade says, and they both step back behind us.
“Jesus Christ,” DK huffs out when I give the all clear, and shoots a glare at Knight. “What the hell is this?”
“We received a report that there’s a body down here. Information was vague, and due to the ongoing case, I caught the call.” His gaze slides over to the girl. “When I got here, I found Nicole. She told me what really happened, and this seemed more like a situation for the Barons than the police.”
DK and I share a glance. We’re new to all this, but we’ve been educated about the Barons’ system. Once the cops are involved, we’re out of the picture. DK is the one to ask, “Why the hell is an FBI agent pushing cases back to us?”
“He’s doing it for me,” the girl, Nicole, cuts in. “That body in there… it belongs to my little brother. I just want to get him home.”
My shoulders loosen a fraction. “Your brother?”
She nods hard, like it hurts. “My mom has been worried about him, and I told her I’d bring him home.” She bites down on her bottom lip. “I just didn’t think it would end up like this. I can’t have her go down to the morgue and identify his body like… like the way it looks.”
I get it. That’s half the reason the Barons do what they do. What happens in Forsyth stays in Forsyth. Frats handle frats, not badges. And Barons handle the dead.
“That sucks, sweetheart,” Jace says, “but that’s not how this works. We don’t just show up and take bodies. There’s a system in place, one you circumvented by calling the cops.”
He’s right. Knight being here–that makes it tricky.
“Look,” the agent says, “let’s take a step back. What if I’m not here as an FBI agent? What if I’m here as a representative of KNT?”
“Prove it.”
His jaw tics, and there’s a moment where I think he may just tell us to fuck off and walk, but he looks down at Nicole and that seems to bolster his resolve. He pushes the hoodie sleeve up and reveals his forearm. Inked across the pale flesh in faded ink is a snake.
“No shit,” DK mutters. “For real?”
Nowhere, not in any of the records, any of the royal fraternity accounts, does the name Alessio Knight appear as a member of KNT or any other fraternity.
“This is royal business,” he says, pulling his sleeve back down to the wrist. “And I know the system. A generous donation will be made to the House of Night by dawn.”