3. The Rest is History
King regularly kept her company in the twilight hours for the next two weeks. In the mornings, she contorted him, pulled him apart; in the afternoons, Dex trained him, built him up. Sommerfield monitored his weight and diet, and Zoe formed a one-girl cheer-and-jeer squad. Sommer had been behind that. "He works harder when there are ladies to impress," she had told Abby, smiling secretively and knowingly, which was more than a little annoying. Subtle, Sommer wasn't.
Another meeting later, they agreed to allow him access to the talents of their last member. It wasn't easy, trusting him with this last, most important aspect of their lives. But he'd earned it, and, as far as they could tell, he wanted it. Even if he didn't know it yet.
"Hedges," Abby nodded to him as she approached, slurping on her bottled water, King in tow. They were both sweaty from the usual aerobics and yogic stretching, King more so. The nice thing about leaving him with Hedges for the later morning would be the chance to expand her routines, return to her normal activity. But, first things first.
"Morning," Hedges mumbled. Depending on which way you looked at their schedule, it was either his relative late, late night, or far too early into his morning, and it showed.
"Are we getting Hedges on the treadmill with us today?" King inquired, lightly, teasingly. Abby bit down on a grin; in the two weeks King had been exercising regularly, he'd walked, run, biked, or climbed more miles than Hedges did in a year, and he knew it.
"I have better uses for my time," Hedges huffed.
"Hedges is brilliant," Abby placated him. "And brilliance is its own form of exercise."
"Why can't I just sit around being brilliant, too, then?"
"It's a question of raw material," Hedges countered. "Some of us have it, others don't."
"Play nice, boys, or we're all doing splits tomorrow." She watched King wince at this, if only internally. It was getting easier to read his reactions, even those he did not outwardly display. "Hedges, if you will?"
"Certainly," Hedges clapped and rubbed his hangs together as he surveyed his bench. "Where to start?"
She had an idea. "How much experience do you have with handguns, King?"
He answered honestly after a moment. "None. Never had them at home." That made sense. Few, if any, countries were as perversely attracted to guns as the U.S., Canada included.
"Something light, Hedges." Abby instructed, and Hedges plucked up a tiny .22 from his table, offering it to King.
He eyed it without taking it from Hedges. "What is this?"
"It's a standard twenty-two caliber pistol, nothing too fancy. Old ladies carry them in their handbags in L.A."
"Damn," King snapped his fingers, "Left my purse back at Danica's. Abby, you have one I can borrow?" She gave him a look. "Seriously, what am I going to do with this?"
"Learn how to shoot it without breaking your arm," Hedges informed him, cheerfully. Hedges hadn't gotten a chance to lord over King much in return for all the teasing he got. He obviously relished this opportunity. "There's a target range outside. This one's loaded with standard ammo. When you start hitting more padding and less air, we might trust you with something more dangerous."
"We have a system," Abby elaborated before King could mouth off again. "There are levels of comfort and skill with weapons. To give you an idea, Zoe is a level ten."
"A level ten."
"It means she's set foot on the shooting range and fired something at the opposite end. It means she's held a weapon in her life."
"You mean she ran out there once with her teddy bear and threw it farther than the reach of her arm." King crossed his arms, petulant. "No way does that kid rate any level on any scale."
"She does on mine," Abby said, defensively.
"Mine, too," Hedges chimed in, smugly. And you don't, he didn't need to say.
"Sommerfield," Abby continued, "is a level nine."
"Wait a second, just wait," King held up both his hands. "You're telling me I rank somewhere below a kid and a blind woman when it comes to being able to defend myself?" Soberly, Abby nodded. "Okay, just wanted to know where I stood. At the bottom of the shit pile. Why am I not surprised?"
"Cut it out, King," Abby made chopping motion with her hand to silence him. "This is serious."
"Sommerfield is a nine," Hedges continued, gleefully, "because she knows how to fire several weapons without hurting herself. We run into familiars often enough that being able to shoot in the right direction is a worth knowing how to do. If she can locate them with her ears, Sommer's not a bad shot." Lost in his admiration, Hedges missed King cocking his head sharply, regarding Hedges seriously at the mention of 'familiars.' It wasn't a term they'd used much around him. One more conversation that had not yet happened but would have to.
Moving on, Abby picked up the thread where she left off. "You move up in levels first based on your general, operational knowledge of a variety of weapons," she ticked off on one finger. "Second to that is your skill with the weapon, your comfort with it and ability to use it safely."
"Last," Hedges finished, "is accuracy."
"And, when these powers are combined, I am Captain Planet. Yeah, yeah, what else?"
"Listen to Hedges, King," Abby warned. "If you want to be a help to us, you need to be proficient."
"Abigail, here, is a level one," Hedges beamed at her.
"Which means she's handy with many tools."
Jutting out her chin, defiantly, Abby stated, primly, "Without a scope, I can hit a target at a hundred yards if I had to. And I don't take out anyone with me who's not at least a level five."
King looked her over, searching for the chinks she knew he would never find. Her abilities, she did not doubt, though the intensity and focus of his gaze unnerved her. "By 'take out,' you mean...?"
"Take hunting."
"Hunting vampires."
"Of course," she said, unsure of where he wanted to take this. Why else would they keep him around? "We figured we might as well make you useful while you're with us."
Something had not yet sunk in. "You want me to kill vampires?"
"Not yet," Hedges interrupted, drawing King's attention away from her, for which she was thankful. He might have stared a hole through her otherwise. "It was a thought we had."
"No one bothered to ask me."
"Okay," Abby said. Enough of this. "I'm asking you now. Do you want to kill vampires?"
King opened his mouth once, then shut it, reconsidering. "I know of one I'd like to see dead," he began, haltingly. "But I don't know about doing..." King gestured helplessly at the weapons in front of him and at Abby, "this," he ended, limply.
"I'm not asking you to do it yet," Abby urged him. "Just giving you the chance to try."
"I don't know," King grumbled, his eyes on his shoes. "I didn't really think..."
"What, King? What's bugging you about this?" He would truly be inhuman if he could jump right into their line of work with no debate or doubt. If they could work through that, however, he might just be worth the effort as a hunter.
King scratched his chin, at the two-day old stubble there. To the casual observer, he appeared unshaven, unkempt. However, unlike his clothes, which were disheveled from belonging to a man twice his size, his growing beard was a choice, not a consequence. As he figured out how to phrase his concerns, Abby traced with her eyes the definite lines King had shaved into his face. They were a tad wobbly, amorphous because of short growth and lack of practice, but it was a purposefully groomed pattern, and, insanely, it gave her hope. Another attempt to regain something lost was another step in the right direction.
"I guess," King said, finally, "I guess I just never thought about it."
"Go on," Abby encouraged him.
"I've gotten my ass kicked by a woman half my size for years. I'm just used to thinking that way, which is why I'm scared of Whistler." She smiled, holding her tongue, waiting out his sarcasm for the next fit of seriousness. "It honestly never occurred to me. Plus, my guidance counselor said I should be an investment banker."
Abby couldn't suppress a snort at this. "That's hard to imagine."
He winked at her. "I look pretty good in a suit." And she didn't doubt it. He looked pretty good in Dex's hand-me-downs, malnourished and underweight as he was.
"Well," Hedges said, returning to the matter at hand, "We'd be happy to get you on a flight to New York and the stock exchange if you're not interested." He started to put the twenty-two away, but King slapped his hand down on the weapon.
"I didn't say I wasn't interested," he kept his eyes locked with hers. Desperation there. "What kind of benefits do you offer?"
"Revenge, mostly," Abby answered, honestly.
"Security?"
"Only what you take the trouble to make for yourself."
"And what," King swallowed, fighting pride that would otherwise hold back the words, "what about..."
"What about your family?"
"Yeah. I ought to let them know I'm alive."
"Why? Would they miss you?" Hedges broke in, flustered by the unspoken communication between them that he was not privy to.
"They might not," King said, absently, still staring into her, through her, past her. Hedges took this as more of King's flippancy, but, in his eyes, Abby could see the hurt. How could someone so careless care so much?
"You can contact them, if you wish. I wouldn't recommend it."
"Connections to our past lives are usually dangerous for all parties involved," Hedges explained. "Vampire budgets are bigger than ours, they have more resources, more eyes out there than we do. We've only managed to escape discovery by being cautious, operating autonomously."
King, finally, shifted his gaze to Hedges. "You guys sound like terrorists."
"We're really just misunderstood."
"Vampires make the rules in this game," Abby expanded. Why had she said that? King was staring at her again, his face blank on the surface, the expressions lurking underneath. Uncanny, how he could hide any reaction if he wanted to. "Vampires," she began again, "isolate people, trap them, either in their service or as their victims. My father lost his family to vampires. I lost my father to this," she gestured to the room around them. "Sommerfield lost her husband, Dex lost his brother."
"And Hedges lost his stair master."
"Not funny," Abby warned. With Hedges present, she was loath to give up his reasons for joining the Nightstalkers.
He saved her. "I was almost taken in by a vampire."
"Like you, only he wised up at the last minute," Abby pronounced, triumphant. "Hedges, as I said, is brilliant."
"Or maybe he just didn't have the right raw material for the job. Maybe he got passed over and is still getting back at the vampires for it."
"Keep pushing, tough guy," Hedges smiled, dangerously. "I'm the man who gives you what you need to defend yourself."
"In other words, you're not the one I want mad at me if join the vampire scouts."
"Nightstalkers," she corrected him.
"What?"
"We call ourselves Nightstalkers."
"You're kidding."
Abby crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't have a sense of humor, remember?"
"Yeah, but there's sense of humor and there's..." he trailed off, glancing between her and Hedges. "You're serious."
"Deadly serious," she confirmed, raising an eyebrow that dared him to find fault, to make a joke. "Are we quite finished?"
"I had more, but you go ahead."
"Hedges, ammo demo, please." Moving around the table behind Hedges, she watched as he brought forth various types of ammunition in a variety of calibers. As he designed all their bullets, and as all were custom jobs, each type of vampire-specific bullet sported a unique pattern to distinguish them from one another.
"This one," Hedges picked up a .45 caliber bullet with a blue-tinted top circled by a silver spiral, "contains chemicals akin to what you would find in a disposable glow stick. Crack the tip, and the chemicals fuse and emit a burst of UV light. They're explosive rounds, so the chemicals mix on impact, and boom, presto, miniature daylight that chews right through your average vampire."
"Sun dog," King rechristened it.
"Hey, that's not bad," Hedges admitted, smiling and scratching his cheek. "Not bad. Sun dog," he tried it out.
"Next," Abby prodded him along. Hedges was a genius inventor, to be sure, but he lacked any talent where names were concerned. The UV bullet had been invented as the 'UV bullet,' and not gone any farther. Maybe he and King could get along after all, one designing the weapons, the other naming them something appropriately fetishistic; it increased the bad-ass factor, something Hedges sorely lacked.
Hedges selected a bullet with a silver tip. "Silver hollow points. Your typical hollow point crumples on impact, making it hard to trace using traditional ballistics methods. This one contains silver nitrate, a toxic substance in its own right, and one that, if placed near the vampire heart, will seep into it."
King took the bullet from Hedges. "You don't need a direct hit with one of these."
"Not necessarily, no," Abby explained. "It helps, but if you don't hit the sweet spot, you at least will probably still get him."
He tossed the bullet up in the air and caught it, weighing it in his palm, thoughtfully. "So, you don't have to line up your lucky sevens to hit the jackpot. Cool."
She shrugged. "More or less." It was a fair analogy of the odds. Getting a close but not direct hit with a silver hollow point would ash the vamp nine times out of ten.
"We have similar ones," Hedges indicated a nearly identical bullet on the table. This one had a copper-colored tip. "Garlic-filled."
"Garlic," King deadpanned. "That's movie bullshit."
"It's not usually fatal," Hedges hastened to add. "It stings them, mostly, burns like a son of a bitch if injected or ingested."
"It's for interrogative purposes." Abby ignored King's non-expression of incredulity. The change in his features was subtle, but a tiny jump of his eyebrows, the downward tilt of his head, all spoke of disbelief. "We haven't used it much. It's for subduing vampires long enough to ask them one, maybe two questions."
"Then you sic the nastier stuff on them."
"Exactly."
"So, what we have here are the basics, all you'll ever need to kick ass and kiss ash. Except for stakes, of course," Hedges rubbed his hands together, pleased with himself.
"Stakes." King had stopped asking questions and just begun conveying confusion or skepticism by repeating the offending phrase until an explanation was forthcoming. It was a perversely successful tactic with Hedges, who abhorred a conversational vacuum almost as much as King.
"Silver stakes," Hedges quickly produced one, holding it out for King to inspect. Abby watched his arm dip under the unexpected weight. A pure silver stake less than half a foot long and two inches in diameter weighed close to five pounds; theirs were a bit lighter, as the core was constructed around an alloy, but there was enough silver coating the stake to give it considerable heft.
King rolled it around between his palms, fingering the bottom and looking, significantly at her. "Where do you put the batteries in, Abby?"
"Not funny," she said, automatically, though it sort of was. Plenty of times, she'd thought the same. Sign of a weak mind, finding phallic symbols in anything longer than it was wide. But it did sort of look like...ahem.
"So, what's this for?" King held the stake in a fist, stabbing at the air in front of him. "For when you want to get up close and personal?"
"Sometimes. If you're good, you can throw it and hit your target." Abby raised her chin. She was that good.
"I'm working on a rifle, actually," Hedges brought over his latest project, what they affectionately referred to as 'the Beast.' "The army discontinued use of these three-barrel rifles last year. I've got loads of spare parts to work with. With a little more elbow grease, they'll be able to fire stakes." He glanced, nervous, at her. She nodded. Why not make his day? Hedges beamed. "Abby's dad wants one."
"Buttering up dear old dad before you pop the question. Real smooth, Hedges. If it were my daughter, I'd say yes." Hedges paled then flushed. King had no idea what he was talking about.
"It's not for him," Abby informed him. "It's for his partner. My father mainly works on weapons, like Hedges."
"Ah, so he's brilliant," King nodded, sagely.
"Very," Hedges said, reverently. Hedges prayed to a sacred trinity of slayers: her, for a variety of reasons mostly unrelated to killing vampires, Blade, and, at the top, her father. She prized the hunt, Hedges valued the ingenuity. Though he built upon, tinkered with, even surpassed Whistler senior's gift of invention, Hedges would hear nothing of displacing the man who started it all.
"Father's partner," King repeated, pointedly.
"Yes. He's part of a team, like us."
"Not like you, though."
"I don't need a partner."
"Don't want," King corrected her, and Abby's protest died in her throat with her mouth halfway open. She didn't want a partner, that much was true. But it was also fair to say she didn't need one-hadn't needed one yet.
"Either," she confessed, unrepentant. "I manage on my own."
"Not really," Hedges rolled his eyes. For the first time since bringing them together, Hedges and King shared a joke at her expense. "Abby, honey, we love you, but we'd like to love you a lot longer."
"Me too," King said, intensely. His face remained still, impassive, but his eyelids opened a little wider-he was only half-joking. The little things, it was always the little things that gave him away.
"You wouldn't believe the state this girl's in when she gets back. Sommerfield is going to put her on an allowance. For every dollar we waste on stitching her up and putting all her various parts back into place, she gets one less mp3."
King made a face at that. "What's an Em-Pee-three?"
Abby blinked, stunned, at him. "You really don't know?" A bewildered glance at Hedges proved him to be just as taken aback. "It's a digital music file."
"Like a CD?"
"Well, like a-a track on one," Abby stammered. This had happened more than once already in his short tenure among the Nightstalkers. Someone would make dated joke, gabble excitedly about a new gadget, and King's expressionless face would go that much blanker. It was hard to remember, given how little he admitted to not knowing, that, when he was subjugated to Danica Talos, the world still feared a massive Y2K computer failure.
"Here," Abby reached over and fished in Hedges' drawer for her mp3 player. It was a small thing, only one hundred-twenty-eight megabytes, and hung from a lanyard loop that fit over her head. "This is a player." King closed his hand over it, weighing it against the stake in his other hand. "In that device, I've got about thirty songs. Not all high quality, but not bad." King opened his palm, staring at the little blue player cradled there as if he expected it to explode.
Hedges cleared his throat. "If we're done marveling at Abby's toys," he pushed forward the .22. Without taking his eyes off the mp3 player, King placed the stake on Hedges' workbench and felt around for the gun. "The shooting range is outside. Take this with you," Hedges produced a homemade silencer. "It won't affect your aim, not that I'm worried you'll be at a point where you'd notice. I designed this myself."
"Yeah," King murmured, still mesmerized by a piece of plastic on a string.
"I'll take him out, Hedges. You keep on the rifle. We'll want the shotgun conversion, too."
He nodded. "When are you, ah," his gaze flickered to the entranced third party and back to her, finishing the question in his eyes: when are you going to meet him? Him. Dear old Dad. None of the other Nightstalkers ever interacted personally with her father. It was a precaution. No code words or bullshit, just blood to blood talk. It had taken a genetic test and details provided by her, care of her mother, to convince him she was his daughter at all. After what he'd been through of late, she didn't blame him. She hadn't told him about King yet. Another reason to meet up. She already knew he wouldn't be happy, not after his own experience, not after Blade's other partner turned out to be a traitor-and another familiar.
Hedges shook a box of .22 ammo in her face to get her attention. King was staring at her, too, having finally given up on her mp3 player as witchcraft. "For reloads," Hedges deposited the box in her open hand. "Now, go play nice, kiddies."
"This way," she jerked her head for King to follow. "Hedges," she acknowledged him as she passed. King followed without a word, the mp3 player still in his hand. Out of Hedges' earshot, she called him on it.
"What?"
"You're still holding my player."
"Right, here," he pushed it on her, only too glad to be rid of it.
Abby raised an eyebrow. "What?" He didn't answer, his serene countenance clouded and bubbling beneath the placid surface. In such disturbed, full-to-bursting quiet, they walked out onto the deck and the target range. Seven dummies, all with red hearts painted left of center, stood a hundred feet away from the white line where her speed reader stood. With a .22, they would have to get a lot closer.
Abby stopped at about half that distance and surveyed her charge. "King," she said, sharply.
"Yes."
"No one shoots so much as a spitball on this range unless they're one-hundred-percent with me, focused, and ready. If you've got something eating you, you're excused."
"Nothing eating me, not really."
"King."
"I'm good to play cowboys and indians, Whistler."
"King."
This shut him up for all of a second, in which he came to a decision. "I want to join your club."
This had the effect of silencing her, and Abby struggled to find something erudite, insightful, or wise to say. She failed, and opted for the more traditional, "Why?"
Dryly, he said, "I like the perks."
What had she told him the perks were? They talked about this, at some point, during that first workout session. Ah. "Revenge?"
"Yes, among other things."
"What made you..." she started, realizing this sounded too close to why again. "Is this because of Danica?"
"Yes and no."
"Which is it?"
"Both and neither."
"King," she sighed, exasperated. What had evinced such a change? One minute he could be utterly lost, hesitant, unsure, and the next, focused, determined, even hasty. Her fingers tumbled something in her hand. She looked down at her mp3 player. Was that it? Something so small. Little things, she reminded herself, it's always the little things. King's eyes narrowed on the device in her hand. "Because of this?"
"Because of what I've missed." He turned away, eyeing the targets at the end of the pier. "Because of what I'm still missing."
In two short sentences, he'd put to rest her fears of his impetuousness leading to ruin. In so many words, King was promising to stay, to leave the past behind, to dedicate the next years of his life to avenging the loss of the last five.
"You don't have to do this," she heard herself say. It would be years of hard work, dangerous, thankless work. His family loved him enough to seek him out, mourned him enough to keep themselves always close ever after. He had a choice. He was not the love child of man so possessed by the ghosts of his dead family that he could not see settling down with a new one. If she were forced to admit it, Abigail Whistler, vampire hunter, was jealous of Hannibal King, vampire bait, just a bit. How could such things be? "You have a choice, King. We won't make you stay or force you to leave."
"Do you regret it?" The full wattage of his personality bore down on her as he searched her through and through for a denial.
"Never a day," she answered, truthfully.
"No regrets," he repeated, slowly, purposefully screwing on the silencing attachment. It was ridiculously huge for such a small weapon, as out of place on the barrel of a .22 as King's ambition on his wasted frame.
Before she could protest, he raised his arm levelly, looking down the length of it, and squeezing off one round. Where there might otherwise have been an ear-splitting bang, a protracted phhhut came out instead. She scanned the target for an impact. None. King tensed his jaw, squinted, and fired again. A small tear ripped through the top of one target's arm-not the target directly in front of him. As unobtrusively as she could, she stepped behind him, raising up on tip-toe as her hand moved down to hold his elbow. Awkwardly positioned, she sighted as best she could, squeezing his arm when he was targeted. He fired again. The bullet hit high in the shoulder, near the neck, but in the right dummy.
"Not bad."
"Good, because my arm is killing me."
"Already?" Abby teased.
"I think I broke something."
"How would you know if you did?"
"Because," his voice rumbled in her ear, "I've had things broken for me enough times to know."
Tense, she stopped breathing, uncertain if he was joking again, making light of the true but currently irrelevant so it wouldn't bother him any more. He didn't relax his grip on the pistol, though his arm shook under hers.
Soothingly, she assured him, "We can stop. Sommer can look you over." She prepared to step back, to let him retire early. Maybe it was too soon. His free hand clamped down on hers, keeping her guiding hand in place.
Pouting, he twisted his head to see her over his shoulder. "I'm not telling her. She outranks me. She'll laugh." His muscles tensed under her hand as he brought his wobbly arm under control.
"Probably." He had that much right.
"You're supposed to be breaking me in, right?"
"Yes."
"So, break me."
"More?" She asked, astounded. This wasn't right. It was supposed to be about dragging him through it, not the other way around; instead, she guided but moved at his pace. He aimed and fired another round. Lower, this time, closer to the red, just outside the upper lobe of the heart. Jesus. All he did was nod, as if this result were a delayed return rather than a significant accomplishment in its own right.
"Better," he assessed himself. "Next time, I don't want to miss." The way he was going, he might not.
And did not. The second to last bullet tore through the red swatch on the sackcloth. Dumbfounded, Abby barely noticed him slipping out of her supportive embrace until he snapped his fingers in her face.
"You cheated," she said, suddenly sure of it.
He grinned. "Maybe just a little."
"How?" She demanded, surprise giving way to frustrated fury. She ought to be pleased that he possessed some skill, and she was, but he hadn't been straight with her.
"Boys will be boys, Whistler," he quipped. "I never used a handgun in my life. Buuuuuut, I got a BB gun on my thirteenth birthday."
"Son of a bitch," she swore, somewhat proudly. "In Montreal?" They let people fire those things in cities?
"Nah, I grew up outside of Vancouver," he drawled, stretching out the ou on purpose.
"Why a BB gun?"
"Squirrels," he said, matter-of-factly. "My dad used to hunt deer. I went along for the smaller game."
"Hunter? Your father's a hunter?" She stammered, stymied. Where was that in Dex's file?
"Hey, what do you know?" His grin lit up his face, and suddenly he was the thirteen-year-old in the woods, hot in pursuit of rodents. "Family business. Runs in the blood."
"It's not the same as hunting vampires."
"Yeah, vampires aren't as messy. On the other hand, no trophy antlers for the living room."
Despite herself, Abby smiled. "There are other trophies we can take. They mean more, in the long run."
"I'm in for the long run," King assured her, his tone severe and excited all at once.
"You don't know what you're getting into."
"Neither do you. You're getting a partner."
Abby snorted, derisively. "It'll be a cold day in Hell when that happens, King. I told you, I don't need or want one."
"Okay," he seemed to relent but for the glint in his eye. "It's okay. I'll let you be my partner."
"Hell?" Abby reminded him. "Freezing over?"
"As we speak, kitten." Without checking himself or aiming, King raised the pistol again, firing off the last round in the barrel. There was a plop not too far away as it sailed past the targets and landed in the water. King watched the water lapping at the far end of the pier for a long minute before shrugging, sheepish, "Well, the AC's definitely on, at least."
She tossed him the ammo. "Have at 'em." Spinning on her heel, she waved vaguely in his direction. "Let me know when I need to get out my sweater."
And she left him to it.