Chapter 1. Jenny #2
I held the can over the largest wound and squeezed the trigger. Saline streamed forth, knocking clotted blood loose and hopefully cleaning out any dirt or debris. The harvester watched impassively.
“Or maybe it won’t.”
Fresh green-black blood welled and dripped down the parchment skin as I flushed the other two wounds. Her eyes flickered like lights about to go out.
“Stay awake.” I moved faster, setting the saline spray aside and grabbing forceps and a medical stapler.
I loaded a cartridge of stainless steel staples but hesitated.
Why wasn’t the harvester healing on her own?
The wounds should have begun to close within minutes once the knife was removed, but these were fresh and still bleeding.
A poisoned blade? If there was a poison that worked on harvesters, I’d never heard of it. That left the magic on the knife. A spell not just to pierce the flesh but to continue to kill, like an infection.
“Temple, where are you?” Artemis never used to leave me hanging like this when I needed her help. She’d had my back like I was one of her own daughters. She’d certainly watched over me better than my own mother. But I’d walked away from her—from both Artemis and Mom—a long time ago.
I pushed the old loneliness aside and removed my necklace. A silver tetradrachm, a Greek coin with an image of Artemis on the face, hung from a thick platinum chain. The coin had been a gift from Felipe after the ceremony binding me to the goddess.
It will protect you from supernatural harm.
I thrust the coin into the deepest of the harvester’s wounds.
It was like reaching into a death-and-mud-flavored milkshake: cold and gritty and altogether gross, even through the latex gloves.
I’d always believed harvesters were mute. I certainly hadn’t expected this one to make a keening sound like a hawk on helium. Were her eyes dimmer than before? I couldn’t tell.
I slid the coin free and repeated the process with the second wound, not knowing if it was making any difference at all.
With my other hand, I reached past the harvester to the wall. The wallpaper was a red-and-tan heraldic design from the late nineteenth century. It was original, repaired and maintained all these years by Finn family magic.
“I’m sorry about this.” I ripped a long strip from the wall.
My reward was a sharp yell from upstairs.
“He’ll be right down,” I assured the harvester.
I was working on the third stab wound when I heard the slide-slap of old leather slippers and the tap of a rubber-tipped cane in the hall behind me. The smell of denture cream joined the death-stink in the air.
Temple Finn was a legend in supernatural circles. Or rather, he used to be. He came from one of the most powerful magical families in the world, and he’d spent much of his adult life as Protector of the eastern half of North America. You could fill two dozen books with his exploits and adventures.
Nowadays, he looked like someone’s slightly addled grandfather.
He had a good four inches on me, being close to six feet tall, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he hunched over his cane.
His bushy salt-and-pepper beard was a tangled mess.
He wore plaid boxer shorts and a white T-shirt that stretched to cover most but not quite enough of his belly.
An honest-to-goddess nightcap, white with blue stripes, perched on his head.
“Do you have any idea how much your little act of wallpaper vandalism hurt?” he snapped. “Imagine peeling a hangnail and having the skin tear all the way to your elbow.”
“I called you twice,” I shot back. “If you slept any harder, you’d be dead.”
“Pah. I refuse to die on a Friday.” He glared at the sky like he was daring Death to challenge him.
“It’s two in the morning. It’s Saturday.”
“Saturday, you say?” His eyes narrowed behind the thick lenses of his plastic-framed bifocals. “Maybe it’s good you woke me up. Saturdays are tricky. What’s the problem?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he leaned in until the pom-pom on the end of his nightcap swung within an inch of the harvester’s skin like a poofy pendulum. He didn’t need a hagstone to see through the shadows.
“I think the knife left something behind, a curse or infection,” I said.
“This is old-school magic.” He peered over the top of his glasses. “Irish, from the look of it. These weapons are tricky to create. You have to take an iron blade coated in silver and imbue it with—”
“Can you help her?”
“Of course I can.” He scoffed. Taking the chain of my necklace, he tugged the coin out of the harvester. “I imagine you’ll want to wash that.”
Temple pressed one hand to the wall. The torn wallpaper snaked back into place, and the rip disappeared. With his other hand, he touched the hook of his cane to the center of the harvester’s chest.
Most of Temple’s power came from this house. His family had lived here for more than two hundred years, and every generation had left it stronger than the last. At some point in the mid-nineteen hundreds, it had achieved at least a mimicry of life.
Temple’s bond to his home was part of what made him such a powerful and dangerous wizard.
The house’s magic had other side effects, too.
Things like doors and cabinets opening for you on their own, bathwater that always ran at just the right temperature, and floors that never needed sweeping or vacuuming.
Also, I was pretty sure the mice in the attic had developed a primitive hunting-and-gathering society.
In the past, Temple had channeled the house’s power effortlessly. These days, well, there were leaks. A warm draft blew through the hall as he worked on the harvester. The old floorboards creaked. In the kitchen, the garbage disposal growled to life, then shut off a moment later.
But he got the job done. The harvester’s ember eyes brightened, and the blood oozing from her wounds hardened and flaked away like black mud.
“She’ll be hungry after this,” said Temple. “She’ll need something dead to eat.”
“Are you about to send me to forage for corpses and lingering souls?”
He stared at me like I’d asked him to change the channel on the microwave. “I was going to grab the leftover pastrami from the fridge. I’m pretty sure that’s dead. But if you want to go grave-digging, don’t let me stop you.”
“It’s two in the morning. Cut me some slack.” I smacked his pom-pom.
“What kind of nitwit stabs harvesters at two in the morning?”
“I used to do most of my stabbing after midnight,” I said.
“Pah.” He hobbled off. “I’ll be in the kitchen making a harvester special for our guest and a hot fudge sundae for me.”
More dairy. Terrific. “Temple—”
“I’ll eat what I want,” he snapped. “Should I make one for you, too?”
“Duh.”
This next part was easy enough. I’d stitched and stapled and superglued thousands of lacerations over the years, both on myself and on others.
Now that Temple had cleared the magical poison, the harvester’s wounds should heal up in no time.
The staples were just to speed the process and minimize scarring.
As I worked, I imagined Felipe chiding me. This is not your purpose, Jennifer.
I knew his voice, deep and smooth, better than I knew my adopted parents’.
His words had etched themselves into my brain.
He and the rest of the Guardians Council believed the Hunters of Artemis were humanity’s best weapon against the things that went bump in the night.
For more than two millennia, they’d bound young girls to a life of power and violence, never realizing just how creepy and messed-up that was.
In their defense, I had saved the world more than once, and I’d hunted a lot of truly nasty creatures. That was how I’d justified staying with Felipe and the Council for so long.
I was twenty-three when I walked out on them. At first, they’d threatened me. Then they pleaded. None of them knew how close I came to hunting them. I wanted to punish every one of the bastards for what they’d done to me.
Felipe never said a word. He just stood silently off to one side with his arms folded. To this day, I didn’t know if he was disappointed or proud. Probably both.
“You don’t own me,” I muttered. “You don’t get to tell me my purpose.”
The harvester tilted her head.
“Sorry, not you.” I finished the first stab wound and moved to the next. “I was talking to the memories of a bunch of old men and women who took an orphan out of South Korea and brought her to America to hunt monsters.”
I couldn’t tell if the harvester cared, or if she even understood, but it felt rude to work in silence without even trying to talk to my patient.
“Felipe was the one who arranged the adoption and placed me with my parents. The Council likes using orphans. They think we’re disposable, so it’s less of a mess if the binding ritual goes wrong or the kid gets eaten by a rabid adlet—that’s a kind of human/dog hybrid.”
The adlet had been one of my first hunts.
I’d been thirteen. I’d spent half my life in an orphanage and the rest in California, so I was utterly, laughably unprepared when Felipe flew me to Alaska to spend four cold, miserable days tracking the adlet who’d mauled a couple of oil-company surveyors.
I’d killed it with a blessed narwhal horn.
I used the forceps to pinch the harvester’s third wound shut. This one only needed a single staple. “There you go. If these don’t come out on their own after a week, come here and I’ll remove them, all right?”
The harvester touched the staples.
I swatted her hand away. “Don’t pick at them.”
She stared at me. She’d probably never gotten her wrist slapped before.
“Ask our guest if she wants pickles on her sandwich,” Temple called from the kitchen. “And does she prefer spicy mustard or the plain yellow kind? Oh, never mind. I’m gonna do this right, and that means fresh rye bread and Swiss cheese and spicy brown mustard and kosher dills. The works!”
The harvester retreated toward the door.
“He gets carried away in the kitchen,” I explained. “You can eat the meat and leave the rest. I won’t tell him.”
I removed the hagstone and massaged my eye. The harvester turned back into a shadowy form. I’d have magical afterimages for the next few hours, like I’d stared too long at a bright light. “I wish you could tell me who did this to you.”
Most people couldn’t see harvesters, let alone hurt them.
Was this a fluke, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time with the right magical weapon?
More likely, this was the beginning of some half-trained wannabe’s crusade against “the forces of darkness.” In which case I should stock up on supplies.
Or you could hunt, as you were born to do.
Hunt the would-be Hunter. The thought quickened my heart. Follow the harvester home, figure out where she’d been attacked, and track the attacker from there. Let the full strength and comfort of my estranged goddess fill me like it had when I was young.
In the kitchen, the toaster popped. I spun, instinctively reaching for weapons I hadn’t carried in decades.
That was one of the many reasons I’d quit. Even thinking about a hunt had me primed to skewer anything that looked at me funny. They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, all I’d had were my bow and blade.
The smell of toasted rye drifted into the hall.
I packed my supplies back into the first aid kit and imagined Felipe’s disappointed sigh.
I wouldn’t go back to being a Hunter. Not after what they’d turned me into. Not after what I’d done. This was my place now. This was my job.
Even if it means letting a dangerous would-be killer with an enchanted blade run loose?
I slammed the kit shut and latched the lid. “Let me put this away, and then I’ll be back with your sandwich.”
As before, the closet door opened on its own. I glanced at the ceiling, thinking about the wallpaper I’d torn. “Are we good?”
The house’s presence wasn’t localized to any one spot, but I always found myself looking up when I talked to it. It just felt more polite.
A small board game fell from the top shelf and struck my head, sprinkling me in dust.
“Rude,” I muttered as I put the first aid kit away. I stood on my toes to return the game to its spot. “But I suppose I deserved that.”
In the kitchen, I squeezed past Temple to grab the harvester’s sandwich. It was piled a good three inches high and cut diagonally. Each half had one of those toothpicks with the plastic frills on the end to hold it together.
I gave his shoulder a gentle pat as I passed. “Extra whipped cream on my sundae, please.”
“Duh,” he said, matching my tone from earlier.
I grinned and returned to the harvester. She took the sandwich, cocked her head, and ate the whole thing in a single bite, toothpicks and paper plate and all.
The air outside was unseasonably chilly. I looked past the harvester but saw no threats lurking in the darkness. “Be careful out there.”
“Come on, people. Ka’ai is pronounced like yippee ki yay. Say it with
me. Mggoka’ai ya ng nafl’fhtagn. I typed the whole thing out
for you phonetically and everything. Let’s start again.
And this time, say it like you mean it.”