Hunted

Chapter Four
Clash

By

Lily of Trust

It was quiet down this stretch of street. Extremely quiet, actually. It made the hairs on the back of Kylan's neck stand on end. He kept his hand constantly on the pommel of his sword, and his eyes never ceased flicking from window to window. Non-humans wouldn't be living this close to a Dome, so any activity was likely to be either some kind of magic-born monster, or perhaps a Hunted mage, which were usually worse. To his left and back, he could see Terry gripping the handle of his gun with more force than was necessary. The younger man's other hand remained on his belt, resting upon one of the charge packs for the gun. The energy weapons were absolutely useless without a pack. Hunters carried as many as they could when out on patrol, as the charge packs were only good for one shot before needing to be replaced. A brief smile tugged at his lips. His brother would be fine; more than fine actually. Kylan had been in this line of work long enough to be able to tell the difference between those who would stick it out, and those who would flinch away from orders.

The Commander of this sortie was a tall, solidly built military type in his mid fifties. Commander Copelan had been in the game of non-human annihilation since before Kylan had been born. The Commander wasn't impressed with the hotshot from Seattle. Scores and practice results were nothing compared to the real thing. He withheld judgement on the newbies until after he'd seen how they worked under fire. Though Copelan sincerely hoped that this patrol didn't encounter a Hunted. Those freaks were more trouble than they were worth, and a group of cadets didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. He knew. He'd been up against all of the New York Hunted at least once in his years of service here.

"Sir?" A rookie on his right asked quietly. "Are we looking for anything in particular?"

"Yeah, it doesn't look like there's anything out of the ordinary on this street." Another spoke up. "'Cept maybe some magical rats!" His statement caused a ripple of amusement to run through the group.

Copelan whirled on them, his hand going to the sword at his belt. He too found them incredibly useful, especially when one ran out of charge packets to load into the energy guns. Or when the weapons themselves backfired or malfunctioned, which was just as frequent.

"What was that, private?" He growled into the unlucky one's face. "You'd better pray that rats are the worst we see t'night, boy. Any o' them non-human's'd rip your throat out easily as shredding paper!" The recruit went pale and swallowed so hard his Adam's Apple bobbed.

Kylan kept his face straight, though he desperately wanted to grin. He'd heard a great deal about the Hunted in New York. That was part of the reason he'd wanted to be transferred here; those mages were legend across the continental U.S. Even the Hunted in other cities spoke of them with something approaching awe. His eyes drifted past the unfortunate rookie, and the irate Commander, to the street ahead. His instincts were prickling at him again.

"Ky?" Terry asked softly, reading the tenseness of his brother's body and figuring something to be wrong. "What-?"

"Something's coming this way." The older sibling said just as quietly. He had an uncanny ability to see danger approaching....

The sound of thin metal hitting asphalt ricocheted around the street. Everyone froze in their places, panicking. It came again, and again, rhythmically now, almost as if...

"Someone's...kicking a can?!" Terry exclaimed, puzzled.

Copelan spun away from his men (boys, really), drawing both gun and sword. From the darkness of the street before them, two darker shadows melted. The sound of whistling came clearly to their ears now, like some pedestrian was out for a late night stroll.

Yeah right.

An aluminum can, which had once held green beans, or so the label said, rolled to a stop before Copelan. The Commander didn't even look down at it. Instead, his eyes narrowed to the figures forming.

"Aw hell Copelan, figures it'd be you." Kitai smirked, speaking as though she'd encountered him by himself, and not with a score of men behind him. "You always get the rookies, doncha?"

The Commander snarled silently at the two women confronting his patrol. Just what he needed. He could sense a few of the Hunters behind him relaxing their guard. Two women. Two short women. Two short, rather attractive women. Copelan rolled his eyes internally at the denseness of the group. Appearances counted for less than nothing. They should have known that at this stage of training.

"Mitsuri." He said calmly, eyes down to mere slits by now. "This isn't your usual beat."

"It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." The kitsune said nonchalantly. "Me'n Lynnie here figured we'd do you a favor and give these greenies a taste of what they're in for. Separate the men from the boys, as it were."

Kylan sucked in a sharp breath. Mitsuri? Lynnie? So, these were two of the Hunted he'd heard about, and not just some random non-human wandering too close to the Dome. His sword slid loose from its sheath, even as the fox-eared girl drew her own rapier, and the teal haired woman beside her slid a wicked looking dagger loose from her left boot. Whether or not these two looked intimidating, their reputation packed quite a punch.

"What it going to be, Commander?" Linette asked, her musical voice dancing with amusement. "Remember, we don't attack unless provoked. That's our code."

"Not that we wouldn't enjoy it if you did cause us to counter." Kit added brightly.

Someone among the twenty young men in the group panicked. A gun went off with the curious 'FSSSSHHHHT!" sound, much a cork popping loose from a shaken bottle of champagne. The lance of green-gold laser fire blasted towards the taller girl at incredible speed.

With contemptuous ease, she sidestepped the shot, drew a gun from her own holster, and put a normal lead bullet through the forehead of the marksman.

For a moment that stretched on into eternity, no one moved, no one breathed, and no one made any move to draw their own weapons. The nineteen remaining recruits stared in horror at the corpse, gazing upon the thin wisp of smoke rising from between the eyes with a kind of morbid fascination.

Copelan came out of his shock with an enraged roar that startled most of the other Hunters into the air. The Commander slammed a charge pack into his gun and promptly emptied it by opening fire on Linette. The vampire evaporated into her smoke form quicker than the human eye could perceive, leaving Copelan to face Kitai.

The Commander discarded his gun, hurling it away to clatter against a sewer grill. His sword leapt free of its scabbard, cashing downward to strike sparks off of Kit's rapier. The fox girl held her ground, parrying the blow with almost languorous ease. Instead of meeting Coplean's blows head-on, where his superior strength would have easily overwhelmed her own, she deflected them to the sides. With every flick of her wrists, the long flexible blade of her own weapon licked out in a blur of liquid steel, drawing thin, bloody lines through the Commander's clothing.

Egged on by an almost mob-like mentality, several of the other Hunters surged forward to turn the duel into an all out brawl. Kit dispatched of them easily, landing her blows with her fist instead of her sword. A few expert taps to the skull, or a nice solid foot planted in the groin or kneecap was enough to put most down for the count.

"Oh God..." Terry breathed, his blue eyes flickering back and forth between the body of the young man, and the battle raging before them. "Th...they....he's dead!!!"

"They warned us." Kylan replied grimly, green-brown eyes narrowing behind his lenses. He pushed them further up on the bridge of his nose and tensed slightly as he debated the wisdom of joining the fray.

"Well I'll be damned," A feminine voice mock-gasped. "Somebody was listening!"

The observing Hunters turned almost as one, much to the amusement of the vampire standing in their midst.

Linette smirked and waggled the fingers of her left hand in a tiny little wave. One of the young men off to her right snarled and snatched his blaster, loading a charge pack instinctively.

"Bitch!" He roared, firing expertly on a target that was no longer there. Fangs bared in a feral grin, Lynn re-materialized beside him, and rapped him sharply in the temple with the pommel of one dagger. He slumped to the pitted pavement in a boneless heap, his weapon falling from nerveless fingers.

Kylan's frown deepened. In such close quarters, energy guns would be too dangerous. The likelihood of hitting another Hunter, instead of the elusive vampire currently decimating the remaining humans, was far too high. It was going to have to come down to hand to hand eventually. At all costs, Kylan wanted to keep this skirmish from involving magic. He had no actual desire to see Hunted battle spells up close.

He shouldered aside other Hunters, working his way through the melee, and finding himself in the path of the vampire's right hand blade. Instinctively, his own sword rose to counter the blow. Kylan had a brief glimpse of violet eyes widening in surprise, before Linette stepped back and disengaged their weapons.

Linette quirked an eyebrow and fell back into a knife fighter's crouch. She'd been a tad bit thrown to find someone so relatively young wielding a sword with such competence. Old fighters like Copelan knew the value of a close range weapon, but the hotheads of this day and age did so love their new guns.

Without giving her much of a chance to recover from the first blow, Kylan rushed the wary vampire, sword out before him in search of some weakness in her defense. But as their blades met again, metal ringing and rebounding off metal, he felt growing surprise within himself. His weapon was larger, and heavier, with a longer reach than those fighting knives she used. She should be staggering under the strength of the blows, pushed back until she had nowhere to retreat to. She shouldn't be able to deflect his attacks, much less block them so solidly, turn them aside and use the opening to her own advantage.

And yet she was.

There were no signs of panic in her eyes, only a faint glimmer of amusement, and perhaps even a little bit of grudging respect. Kylan felt a vague ache in his shoulders, and he wondered a bit absently how long they'd been fighting each other in circles. A change of tactics was obviously called for.

The young Hunter from Seattle stepped away from her next slash, and quickly ducked down, whirling in low in an attempt to cut her knees out from under her. Linette reacted with inhuman reflexes, clamping the blade of her right hand dagger between her teeth, planting her now free hand on Kylan's shoulder, and vaulting over his head to land behind him. Before he could recover, she spun on one foot and lashed out with the other, connecting hard with his spine. Kylan sprawled forward, got an arm beneath himself and quickly rolled back to his feet. The combatants eyed each other with new caution, circling warily as the onlookers watched in stunned silence. By now the obvious risk of using the energy guns was apparent to them as well, and no one wanted to chance hitting Kylan just to get a shot in at the violet eyed vampire.

Down the street a piece, Kitai found herself up for more of a challenge than she'd expected. Copelan had learned from their past duels, and seemed to have caught on to most of her old tricks. Lazing about and allowing him to work himself into a lather wasn't going to work this time, and her lighter weapon was ill-suited to blocking the attacks of his own. She didn't have Linette's advantage of vampiric strength. There was quite a trail of unconscious Hunters between the original starting point of the battle, and their current position, however. She considered it a point of pride that she'd managed to keep up such a level of attention on two separate struggles. Ryokan was going to chew her out for this later, but for now, she was having fun!

Copelan glared darkly at the kistune before him, lunging full out towards her middle. Kit sidestepped barely in time, catching a shallow gash across her hip. Hot blood ran down her leg and squelched in her boot, but at least the Commander had given her the opening she needed. While he was still extended in full lunge, she slammed her knee up into his stomach, and followed through by crashing her elbow down onto the back of his neck. The older man's body jerked in pain as she kicked him away, backing up and keeping an eye on him as he pushed himself back to his feet.

"You're a tough old bird, Commander, I'll give you that." Kitai acknowledged, nodding her head briefly. "And I do respect you. Too bad we can't see eye to eye."

"You and your filthy kind," Copelan spat, wiping away a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. "All of you out to destroy humanity. Haunting this city like some kind of vermin. Your time is over! You should have faded away into legends back in the medieval days, when mankind was still gullible enough to believe in you!"

"But I'm real, aren't I?" Kit challenged, stung by his words. "Or is the pain you're feeling just a ghost of a myth?" Fire crackled in her eyes, their normally mellow chocolate depths glowing from within with an oltherworldly light. But Copelan was a swordsman, and she was not going to sink to perception he held of her people by defeating him unfairly with magic. No matter how tempting it might be to forcibly ram a fireball up his ass.

Bellowing like some enraged bull, the Commander charged her again, though some of the speed and impetus of his earlier advances was missing. Instead of striking at her with his sword, he lashed out with a closed fist nearly the size of a football. Kit yelped in surprise and slid her sword in sideways, punching through his side and out his back, just as his fist impacted with her ribs and sent her crashing back to the sidewalk. She managed to keep her grip on her sword, which came free from his body as she flew backwards. Copelan clamped a hand over the freely bleeding wound. It hadn't struck a lung, and had most likely missed any major organs, but it still hurt like hell.

Kitai struggled to pull herself up from the mini-crater her landing had created, and fought to get her feet beneath her. Her eyes went in and out of focus so quickly she could barely tell which was which, and all she could see was Copelan standing in the middle of the street, keeled over and panting, but glaring defiantly at her. This match was a draw. Neither of them had any resources left to draw upon.

Linette heard Kit's cry of shock, but stubbornly kept her attention on Kylan. She had grown up on these same streets, in this city, and she knew more dirty tricks of the trade than any other streetfighter New York had yet to see. A slow smile curved at her lips as she rushed Kylan in a startling change from her usual tactics. Normally it would have been suicide to deliberately throw herself within the reach of that larger blade, but Linette had never cared much for personal safety. The Hunter sucked in a sharp gasp of surprise as she barreled right towards the strike. Her outline actually blurred to his sight as she ducked under the strike and came up about two inches from his face. Their noses practically touched as she stepped down hard on his instep, raking the sole of her boot down the side of his shin. For a brief moment, all Kylan registered was the agonizing pain spreading up his left leg. He never saw her elbow coming, until it landed a sharp blow to his nose with a /cracking/ noise that echoed down the street. Kylan staggered back, his free hand clamped over his gushing noise.

Then Terry was there, catching his brother from behind and supporting him until his head cleared enough to stand on his own past the pain. Surprisingly, Linette didn't press the attack, but remained where she was, in a low crouch, one dagger clenched in an underhanded grip, the other in overhand. Her breathing was deep and slow, and her almost impossibly bright eyes remained fixed on his past the lenses of his glasses.

Slowly, she straightened, fastidiously wiping her daggers clean on the hem of her tank top. None of the other Hunters made a move to fire, especially not since she sheathed her daggers and drew her gun. The muzzle remained pointing down towards the street, but no one doubted she'd fire if she felt she had to.

"You're good, Hunter." Her voice rose over the hush, strangely musical after the exertions of battle. "Very promising." She tossed her hair over her shoulder with an imperious flick of her hand. "Now take your wounded and leave. I'll do the same, and no one else dies here tonight." Teal bangs fell into her eyes as she nodded towards the body of the fallen Hunter.

Abruptly, her body vanished, leaving a cloud of smoke in its wake, nearly indistinguishable from the dark of night. Down the street, the kitsune could no longer be seen, though if any of the Hunters had cared to look closely enough, they might have seen a small, black, four-tailed fox trotting briskly down the street.

Terry looked down at his brother, fighting back rage, not at Kylan, but at himself. Why hadn't he done anything?! Common sense reasserted itself, cooling his temper almost immediately. His only weapon had been an energy gun, and the last thing he wanted was to hurt his brother. His only other option would have been to attack the vampire girl physically, and his only weapons were his fists. Seeing how neatly she'd dispatched Kylan with a bit of foul play, he doubted he would have had much of a chance against her, and might even have gotten in his sib's way.

"Ky? You alright?" He asked quietly, watching as Kylan wiped blood from his upper lip. It seemed his nose wasn't broken, at the very least.

"I'm fine." Came the curt, but far from snappish, reply. "Just smarting a little." Whether it was his shin, his nose, or his pride that hurt, Terry didn't think to ask. "I think I've had to face a rather...painful revelation, Ter."

"What's that?" The younger brother asked dutifully.

"The only reason we've won so far is because we outnumber them." He didn't clarify the 'we' and 'them'. He really didn't have to. "If they had as many people as we do, with those kind of fighting skills, and that kind of guts...we'd be extinct Terry."

Terry's blood ran cold, acknowledging his brother's point. "They're a threat, Ky. They'd kill us all if they could."

Kylan didn't reply, but took a few unsteady steps down the street towards Copelan. Terry followed him, checking the pulse of all those unconscious men along the way. Finally, the older sibling spoke, his voice low and thoughtful.

"Something else I just noticed," He said, as though speaking only to himself. "There's only one casualty. The man that started all this. Interesting that all the others are only unconscious. It seems they meant it when they said they only counterattacked."

"They came here looking for trouble, Kylan." Terry snapped angrily, wondering where his brother's train of thought was heading.

"Yes, maybe you're right..." Came the response. Nothing else was said, as someone used Commander Copelan's two-way to radio for a medvac, and the wounded were taken home to the Dome.

"What the hell were you thinking?!" Roarke's face was so close to Linette's she could practically hear him grinding his teeth together in rage. Amber and violet eyes locked, and neither gave any inclination of backing down. Lynn kept her arms crossed stubbornly over her chest.

"Not much at all, it seems." Jamie noted, her stinging remark drawing the barest of winces from the vampire. The older woman was on her knees by Kitai, seeing to the vivid purple and black swelling along the kitsune's ribs. Kit stood in her bra and trousers, uncaring of the men in the room. She kept her teeth clenched together, and one eye squeezed shut as she watched Jamie's faintly glowing hands run along the florid marks from her single open eye. The swelling had subsided, but it was no less painful. Jamie had very open views on healing; if she felt Kit deserved to ache a bit, then suffer she would.

"You realize that now they'll come looking for us?" Yokan growled, looking up from where he was slumped in his seat, long legs stretched out before him and arms crossed behind his head. He cocked an eyebrow at his recalcitrant sibling. Kit's lower lip protruded slightly as she returned his icy glance.

"It was most reckless of you girls." Mr. St. Paul said gravely. He fixed both young women with a stern eye. "You put yourselves in an unacceptable amount of risk. You are immortal, not invulnerable." He jabbed the end of his cane meaningfully towards Kit's ribcage.

While they had stood against all ridicule from their respective partners, the two women crumpled under the patriarch's disapproval. Kit fidgeted in a manner that had nothing to do with bruised ribs. Lynn raised her chin and met his eyes, albeit shakily.

"I think it was worth the risk," she said, speaking mostly to her grandfather. "While Kit had her hands full with Coplelan, I found someone in the rookies who could be trouble later."

"Eh?" Yokan sat up a little bit straighter, his ears pricking forward in interest. Lynn nodded, frowning thoughtfully.

"From what I overheard, his name's Kylan." The vampiress mimicked Yokan's posture, crossing her arms behind her head and stretching out her legs. "He's different from the other newbies; had a blade and damn well knew how to use it."

"Any good?" Roarke asked quietly, no longer enraged with her.

"Promising." Linette nodded. "I didn't take him all that serious, but he could have been very challenging if he'd known some of the shadier tricks. I don't think he was expecting me to be as good as I am, either."

"Underestimation on both parts." Trey said quietly from his seat off to the side. He had kept his opinions on the matter to himself so far. As yet, he didn't quite feel like one of the 'team', so to speak.

"I didn't get a look at your duel." Kit murmured. She suddenly grinned a vulpine little grin. "Was he hot?"

"KIT!" Everyone but Jamie and Mr. St. Paul threw something, a pillow, a cushion from the couch, something, at the kitsune. The fox-girl yelped and tumbled back into a chair, biting off a groan as her tormented ribs protested.

"Kylan..." Mr. St. Paul mused. "The name sounds familiar somehow...perhaps something one of the other Hunted Elders mentioned. I ought to look into this, I think. In the meantime, Kitai is to rest, Linette is to return to patrol away from the Domes, and the rest of you are to continue as per usual."

"Yes sir." Everyone replied, their voices carrying varying degrees of resignation or compliance.