The Hunters — Friday, March 1, 1991, 5:50 PM

24th Diocese, Five Points

Denver, Colorado

The bench grinder threw sparks against the workshop wall in Cherry Hills. Past midnight. Marcus worked the oak by hand after that, testing each point against his palm until the tip dimpled skin without splitting it. Three stakes between them when he was done. He held one up to the fluorescent tube.

“Tony told us a stake stops the heart,” Marcus said. “He didn’t tell us how you get close enough to use one on something that moves like he does.”

Flash took the stake. Good weight. Dense grain. The kind of thing you’d use to anchor a fence post, not kill a man. He set it beside the other two on the bench.

They divided the load the way they’d divided everything since the basement burned. Marcus carried the hardware – two stakes, the .38, the Beretta – because Marcus could disappear. Flash carried nothing but himself because Flash was the one who’d walk through the front door and sit where they could see him. One stake stayed in the IROC-Z. Insurance nobody planned to use.

The drive from Cherry Hills to Five Points took twenty minutes and dropped twenty degrees. Thirty-one and falling toward twenty-two by the time Flash killed the engine on Welton Street. Thin crescent moon. Old snow along the curbs, packed down by foot traffic and going gray. The 24th Diocese occupied a converted warehouse at the corner, two stories of noise wrapped in brick. Gothic rock thumping from the upper floor. Industrial bass shaking the glass on the lower. Marcus peeled off before they reached the door, slipping into the gap between the building and a dumpster where the streetlight couldn’t reach.

Flash paid the cover and went in.

The floor was wrong.

Thursday crowd, but thin. Bodies moving under the lights but not enough of them, and the ones standing still were standing too still. The bartender kept glancing at the basement stairs with the regularity of someone who’d been told to watch. Flash read two of them: one near the stairs, one behind him toward the entrance. Not dancing. Not drinking. Occupying positions the way soldiers occupy checkpoints.

No Tony.

Six minutes to one.

Flash crossed the floor. Behind him a bottle fell off a ledge and burst on the concrete, and the bartender’s head swung toward the sound. Flash took the stairs.

The basement hit different. Strobe light turning everything into a sequence of still photographs – bodies caught mid-motion, faces blanked white and then gone. The bass was a physical presence down here, something that lived in the sternum. Industrial floor, concrete walls, no windows. One exit: the stairs Flash had just come down.

In the far corner, away from the speakers where two people could hear each other, Tony sat in a folding chair. Jacket off. Sleeves rolled. Sitting very still, which was wrong for him – Tony was a pacer, a shoulder-roller, a man who burned nervous energy the way Flash used to burn through cigarettes. The stillness said captive.

Two figures flanked the chair. Standing the way the watchers upstairs stood.

Flash punched his right hand into his left palm. “Talk.”

Tony’s voice came out thinned, the boredom of a man reciting terms he’d been told to deliver. “This is Duke. Edward’s lieutenant – you’ve heard the name from me. The other is Edward’s as well. They’ve been with me since sundown.” He paused, and the pause cost him something. “I am not your ally tonight, Flash. I am the most interesting thing Edward has caught in three years, and he has finally decided to do something about it. You walked into the middle.”

Flash’s eyes went to the stairs behind him. “Make what quick?”

“You were not an experiment,” Tony said. “You were a demonstration. Prestor could make Kindred with a needle. No sire. No Embrace. No Court permission. Edward burned that basement to kill the method, and the method is loose because it’s in the five of you. He doesn’t want your faces for the Masquerade. He wants the recipe.” Tony’s hands stayed flat on his thighs, pressed there. Held there. “And the dose in the black case is not a cure. I’ve watched Prestor’s kind chase that bottle for ninety years and never seen it save anyone.”

Duke spoke for the first time. Flat, like a man reading a bill of sale. “He’s done now.”

Flash put his back to the stairs. Motioned once behind him – a signal Marcus would see and no one else would. “Who’s done?”

Duke stepped off Tony’s flank. The muscle – Earl – slid wide to split the angle, opening the space between Flash and the two of them into a triangle with no good corner. Duke said, “You’re done, Flash. Edward doesn’t need five of you. He needs one to take apart and learn from. You’re the one standing closest.”

Eight feet and closing.

Flash kept his hands open. Kept talking. “So Edward gets one and lets the rest scatter? That’s not control. That’s a demonstration that his city leaks.”

Duke pulled a half-step in. The words bought that. “Edward doesn’t want a solution tonight. He wants the four of them scared and the one of you cooperative.”

“What if I decide to go willingly?” Flash said. “Tell you where they sleep?”

Duke stopped. The offer was a bright object in a dark room, and Duke’s eyes locked on it the way a dog locks on a thrown ball. “One. Down here. Now. You give me a name and an address, and if it’s the kind of place a Kindred sleeps, we go up.”

Eight feet had become six. Duke had come all the way off the bottleneck. Behind Flash, in the space the stairs made, Marcus arrived with the stakes and the guns, invisible and armed.

Flash gave Marcus the look that meant now.

Everything happened inside three seconds.

Marcus drove the first stake into Earl’s back. Earl hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard him, hadn’t felt anything until the oak punched through his jacket and found ribs. Earl dropped to a knee, hand closing around the shaft where it entered below the shoulder blade. Not down. Hurt and not down, the wood lodged in muscle, not heart.

Flash moved. Blood burned in his legs and the room stretched – Celerity pulling time like taffy, the strobe snapshots slowing until he could count the dust motes between each flash. He pulled the second stake from Marcus’s belt. Pivoted. Drove it at Duke’s chest.

Duke caught it. Forearm across the shaft, redirecting the point past his ribs, and the oak scraped leather and hit nothing. Seven hundred years of something hard behind those hands.

Duke crashed into Flash. Arms locked around his torso, a grapple, not a strike – Edward wanted Flash intact and Duke was following orders even now. The grip was industrial, mechanical, the strength of something that had stopped being human long before Flash’s grandparents were born. Flash’s arms pinned, feet off the ground for a half-second before Duke drove him backward into a concrete pillar.

Flash kicked.

Not at Duke. At Earl. At the stake still buried in Earl’s back, the shaft standing up from the wound like a lever waiting to be thrown. Flash’s boot connected, drove the oak deeper, past the ribs this time, past the muscle, into the thing that mattered. Earl locked rigid. Every joint seized at once. He went over sideways onto the concrete and stayed there, frozen mid-reach, a statue made of meat and leather.

Duke’s head turned at the sound. Flash grabbed him by the jaw and held his face, held his attention, held everything in front of Duke’s eyes while behind him Marcus closed the distance.

The third stake went in under Duke’s left shoulder blade.

Marcus put his weight behind it. The point found the gap between ribs, slid past the resistance, and stopped when it reached the heart. Duke’s grip on Flash spasmed once – fingers biting into Flash’s arms hard enough to bruise through the jacket – and then locked. Paralysis rolling through him like a current switching off. His eyes went wide and stayed wide. His mouth opened on a word he didn’t finish.

Flash shoved him off. Duke toppled beside Earl. Two of the Seventh Son, wood standing out of both, rigid on the industrial concrete while the strobe turned them into freeze-frames of their own ruin.

A girl in white face paint stood six feet away with her hands over her mouth. She’d seen the oak go into Duke’s back, and she was not reading it as theater. The scream started in her chest and reached the room above.

Tony stood out of the folding chair. His guards were down, and what stood up was the actual thing – nine centuries behind quiet eyes, the most dangerous presence in the basement now that the enforcers were furniture.

“Marcus.” Flash kept his eyes on Tony. “Gun up.”

The Beretta’s muzzle touched the back of Tony’s skull. Execution posture. Tony turned into it, slow, the muzzle tracking across his temple to his forehead. No flinch. A gun pointed at something that old was a sentence written in a language the listener didn’t speak.

“You have a crowd panicking upstairs,” Tony said. “Two paralyzed bodies that wake the moment someone pulls the wood. A partner pointing a pistol at the one person who can walk you out of here.” He looked at Flash, not the gun. “I can take you through the loading dock. One minute. No stairs. No door Edward watches. Or you shoot me and run up into that.”

Flash held the posture. The gun stayed up because putting it down first was giving something away for nothing. “What do I get?”

“Out,” Tony said. “Tonight. That’s the term.”

Flash tipped two fingers down. The Beretta dropped to low-ready. Lowered. Not holstered. A concession measured in inches.

Tony led them through a steel fire door, down a short corridor stacked with PA equipment and empty kegs, and out under a roll-up door into the alley. Cold hit Flash’s face like a hand. Twenty-two degrees. Their breath – Flash’s habit, not his need – smoked in the streetlight from the far end of the alley.

Tony stopped walking. Turned.

“You’re out. For tonight.” His voice had none of the thinned-out quality from the basement. This was the real register. “Understand what you bought in there. Edward cannot let that stand. Not because he’s angry – because the rest of his city is watching how he answers it. You stopped being a loose end he wanted quietly. You’re a thing he now has to be seen destroying.”

Flash stepped closer. “You don’t get to do the mysterious walk-off. You called me to that basement. You owe me the rest.”

“The Count wasn’t in the club,” Tony said. “He reads – that’s his use to Edward. If he was anywhere tonight, he was beside Edward, telling Edward what your face meant. Edward already has more than a name. He has a temperature. A read.” Tony’s hands went into his jacket pockets, and the gesture was human enough to hurt. “The thing you haven’t asked is why Edward burned a basement over a needle. Edward didn’t invent that fear. He was told to be afraid. Someone older than Edward wants Prestor’s method dead, and Edward is the hand.”

“Whose hand?”

“Find out whose hand he is,” Tony said, “and you’ll know how much night you actually have.”

He walked. Flash let him. The alley swallowed the sound of his steps and then there was nothing but the muffled bass from inside the club, the cold, and the knowledge that the cohort had just gone from a problem someone wanted solved quietly to a wound someone needed to be seen closing.

Three blood points left. The thing behind his ribs – the new thing, the hungry thing – pushed at the edges of his thinking, coloring the cold air with need. Every passing heartbeat on the street above was a sound he couldn’t stop hearing.

Flash turned to Marcus. “We need to feed. Then we need to drive.”

Marcus was already scanning the alley mouth, the Beretta still in his hand, the invisible thing dropped because invisible didn’t matter anymore.

They moved.