Chapter Text
The bang of metal on metal jolted Jack awake, but his shout was more from Moggy yanking on his beard than from the noise the loose corrugated panel had made. The black cat sitting on his chest yowled as she tried to free her front right paw from his full, gray-streaked beard.
“Shh, mi gordita, shh,” Jack soothed. He added “Fix the pinche panel again” to his mental to-do list as he waited for the stray cat he’d adopted–or perhaps she’d adopted him–to calm enough so he could untangle her claws.
He’d stopped shaving in December, when the Ozark Mountains were fully in winter’s grasp and the long trek from his isolated cabin turned treacherous. The beard had helped keep him warm, as it had the other times he’d been roughing it in cold weather. The amount of gray in it this time was a shock. He was showing his age, he supposed, and remembered Ted’s comment when he’d first complained about gray in his hair: “You don’t look a day over 150.”
Although Jack missed his partner, he was certain that he was well. He would have known if he weren’t by a deep, intuitive sense that something was wrong. That instinct had led him to Bloodstone Manor to rescue Ted last year.
The rescue had nearly ended in disaster. Elsa–the fierce, compassionate hunter Jack and his wolf had fallen hard for–had turned it around. Shortly after meeting at her father’s funeral-turned-battle-royale they were working together, fumbling their way forward to survive. She’d reached out to him and Ted, they’d reached back, and they’d become something : a kind of family, perhaps, or simply an oasis of love and safety in an often-cruel world.
Hunters searching for Jack and his sister Lissa under their original, 200-year-old names had prompted him to go into hiding. No one around him was safe… except for Moggy, who hissed again at Jack’s fingers working her claws out of his beard.
“Oh, hush,” he half-heartedly scolded as a wind gust rattled the loose panel again. “You’re as grouchy as Elsa sometimes.”
The cat meowed a protest before tugging her paw free. After licking it a few times, she slow-blinked her golden eyes at Jack and hopped over the edge of the cot to the floor.
Jack rolled onto his side to peer at the woods beyond the broken window in the far wall and enjoy more of Elsa’s scent before he got up. The scarf she’d looped around his neck and sent him off with six months earlier had served as a pillowcase. Its soft mohair bundled together out-of-season clothes, providing both a headrest and reminder of the woman he missed dearly.
Moggy leaped onto the primitive table set under the window, sat beside Jack’s burner phone and the raccoon skull Ted had decorated with moss for el Día de los Muertos , and demanded breakfast.
Jack inhaled deeply to enjoy what little of Elsa’s scent remained on the scarf and raised an eyebrow. “You’re half-feral. Go hunt.”
The cat held his gaze.
“All right,” Jack sighed. The cot’s springs creaked as he got up.
A few steps across the uneven plank floor took him to the other end of the cabin. The structure’s two windows illuminated plain wooden shelves attached to log walls. Plastic, metal, and glass containers protected the food he’d bought or gathered himself. Even with Moggy’s hunting skills, mice were a constant problem. Despite having patched dozens of holes and rechinked half of the log walls with mud mixed with ash, mice still found their way in.
Jack selected a long piece of beef jerky, a strip of which he tore off and tossed on the table. He and the cat enjoyed their chewy breakfast as Jack lit a small fire in the barrel stove in the corner closest to his cot. Then he dipped water from the bucket under the washstand, filled the old-fashioned kettle, and set it on the stove to boil.
Although Moggy’s company had staved off the worst of his loneliness, both he and Elsa–and surely Ted, although they weren’t able to communicate directly–wanted to end Jack’s self-imposed exile. The problem was knowing when it was safe to return to civilization. Hunters would always exist, but when would the ones looking for him and Lissa tire of the search? Why were they after him, anyway? He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come looking for him with his birth name. Where had the hunters who’d appeared on Elsa’s doorstep gotten that information?
With coffee steeping in the French press, Jack carefully tugged open the motley assortment of wooden boards that served as a front door. Weather had taken its toll on the vertical planks held together by 1x6-inch boards nailed across the top and bottom. Nails rusted and wood dry-rotted, resulting in more nails needed to patch bad spots. Shoring up the old door had been second only to emergency repairs of the roof, which badly needed reshingling. With its mismatched shingles and odd pieces of corrugated metal, the roof looked even worse than the front door. At least it was mostly waterproof now.
The cool, humid air felt good on Jack’s bare arms and legs, and the view was stunning as always. Below a bright blue sky dotted with wispy cirrus clouds, a meadow stretched a few hundred meters to the south, ending at a steep drop-off with the Arkansas River valley sprawling below. Relatively young oak and hickory trees bounded the clearing east, north, and west.
Bobby, the middle-aged white man who rented the hunting cabin to Jack for $100/month, had said that the meadow was the remnant of a larger pasture where his ancestors had planted crops and grazed livestock. The original log cabin had stood in the same spot, and had been destroyed by a falling tree during an ice storm decades earlier. Bobby’s father had salvaged what he could and built the cabin that Jack currently called home.
Moggy darted outside, trotting through the yellow-flowering vines that had sprouted from pumpkin seeds and flesh he’d discarded months earlier. A short distance from that was the small chicken coop he’d cobbled together from a wooden pallet and saplings he’d cut with his hatchet. Jack didn’t hear the hens clucking, but it was still early. The chickens were probably laying.
He headed for the outhouse, which Bobby’s ancestors had thankfully placed downwind from the cabin. The path took him along the east wall, past the steel bolt he’d driven into one of the stout oak logs. Two chains ending in manacles rested in the shallow hole his wolf had dug to better access the cabin’s crawlspace. Most full-moon mornings he woke up under the structure that had seen better days; the marks where his other side rubbed their wrists raw against the restraints were a small price to pay for the comfort of knowing that they hadn't hurt anyone.
After washing up in the washbasin, Jack poured coffee into his sunflower mug and sat at the table. He tapped the screen: 6:02 AM, 29% battery, and a handful of new messages waiting.
The phone’s lock screen said it was 6:02 AM, its battery was at 29%, and new texts had arrived. Making a mental note to connect the phone to the solar charger before starting work on the loose roof panel, Jack tapped and swiped to bring up the new messages.
pulled up the conversation.
Elsa had written, There was a beautiful sunrise here this morning. The timestamp said 5:56. A minute later: I might take a walk, get some exercise.
Jack smiled faintly, picturing the trail behind the manor. Maybe she was still standing at the edge of the trees, phone in one hand, waiting for his response.
Good morning! he typed. That sounds like a good idea.
He hesitated. His fingers hovered over the screen, then tapped again.
I wish I were there with you.
A beat.
I know I say that every morning.
He sipped his coffee, then added one more.
But it’s true.
And then, after a pause: I would like to see your face.
The messages sent, he waited a moment, watching for the "read" indicator that didn’t come. Maybe she’d already tucked the phone into a jacket pocket. Maybe she wouldn’t check it again until the end of her walk. That was okay. He set the phone aside and drank more coffee, imagining Elsa in her black sleeveless shirt and long pants hiking through the woods surrounding the manor. In his mind’s eye she moved quietly and swiftly, a predator moving through her territory with eyes open and ears alert. She’d dispatch any threats and help any creatures she encountered along the way. The fact that she’d forged relationships with him and Ted was proof.
What if another group of hunters was in the woods watching the manor, waiting for the right time to strike and claim the Bloodstone for themselves? Elsa hadn’t mentioned any new assaults. She’d been busy with the manor’s affairs and the occasional hunting job, she’d said. Apparently there’d been more vampire activity than usual in the months they’d been apart. She might need his help!
Jack remembered the vampire head he’d seen in the Bloodstone Manor rotunda and told the hulking Scotsman he’d fought a few times. He’d neglected to mention that “a few times” was actually “once” and there’d been much more running on his part than fighting. Ultimately he’d splashed enough holy water on the wretched thing to slow it down so he could hide inside the town church. He didn’t know who’d staked the murderous thing dead, but was glad that someone had.
Elsa would be fine on her own.
Resigned to that fact, Jack picked up the phone, touched his fingertips to the soft moss adorning the skull, then headed outside.
As the phone charged thanks to the small solar panels mounted on the south end of the cabin, Jack strode through tall grass toward the chicken coop. Moggy crouched nearby, lapping at something on the ground.
“What did you catch, mi gordita?” he called.
The chickens were silent, Jack realized, as Moggy looked up and licked blood from her nose.
Jack’s stomach clenched. “Oh no.”
He sprinted up to the black cat, almost hoping to find that she’d killed one of his three chickens, but she hadn’t. Instead she crouched beside a small pool of congealing blood. Some of it trailed off to the east toward the woods. The wind gusted, stirring white and brown feathers and bringing a hint of a mink’s musk to his nose.
Moggy slow-blinked at him, then returned to her meal.
The blood smelled good, Jack reluctantly admitted to himself.
“Predators,” he murmured, steeling himself for the carnage he’d find in the coop. The improvised structure had protected the hens for six months. Jack supposed that was something.
He walked up to the coop, recalling the steps to prepare fresh fowl for cooking. He hadn’t needed to do so in decades and would be happy to never do it again. Nevertheless, the opportunity of an excellent meal for him and Moggy had presented itself. They’d eat well tonight.
Bloody French Quarter.
Technically, the low-slung buildings of the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, an eclectic mix of historic architecture and new construction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, were a little too far west to be part of the most famous section of town. The man stalking down the narrow alleyway behind the boarded-up church didn’t care. Thanks to his enhanced senses, the racket from Bourbon Street was giving him a headache from nearly two klicks away.
He stood more than six feet tall, but his step was silent in spite of his heavy body armor and billowing leather trench coat. There were hundreds of weapons, both magical and mundane, hidden all over his body, but nothing clanked or rattled when he moved. He had been in the business too long to allow himself such an amateurish mistake.
His nostrils flared, testing the night air for the faintest trace of blood.
If he’d had a choice, the hunter would have stayed on what he thought of as the saner side of the Atlantic. Europe was rich enough with prey, and people there knew to stay out of the way of a tall, strapping man with a sword in his hand, even if the sword was Japanese and the man clearly wasn’t.
But in America, people saw his dark skin first, even before they heard his Soho accent. And enough of them had bought cheap katanas from shopping-mall kiosks that they weren’t impressed by the hunter’s weapon until he sliced a vampire in half with it. And then there was only the screaming.
The hunter paused in midstride, pulling in a lungful of putrid alley air and sifting through the smells, discarding the ones he didn’t care about. Garbage. Vomit. Alcohol. Dead rat. Mold. Gasoline. Stale coffee.
There.
Blood.
And something else, too.
The hunter moved like a fleeting shadow toward the rickety stairs at the back of the church.
A heartbeat later, he was in the church’s attic, creeping forward across storm-weakened floorboards as he followed the scent of blood and prey through near-total darkness. There was something moving up ahead of him, pacing back and forth in a silence as perfect as his own. Something that was, to his enhanced eyes, shaped like a man, at least when it passed the clerestory window and was backlit by the faint glow of the street outside.
It didn’t smell like a man, though. And the shadow of a still body on the floorboards and the salt-and-iron tang of freshly spilled blood told him everything he needed to know.
The figure reached the end of its short path, turned, and took two steps through the dark before the edge of its silhouette touched the light of the window.
The hunter’s sword was well-oiled. It slid from its scabbard without a sound.
The prey took another step.
Swift as a cat, the hunter sprang.
The prey was gone before he touched down, and he spun, slicing the darkness in case he got lucky. But there was nothing to cut but air, and the hunter bared his fangs in a silent snarl as he whipped his head around, scanning the shadows for the killer he sought.
“Evening, Eric.”
The hunter froze.
“Nice night for meeting an old friend, wouldn’t you say?”
The hunter stood over the body under the window, his upper lip still curled in a snarl. “That’s not my name,” he growled.
“My apologies,” the voice in the darkness drawled. It had a New Orleans accent, with touches of somewhere else that the hunter couldn’t quite place. “Blade. You mind getting your boots off my crime scene?”
Blade’s lip curled, exposing his fangs a little more. “Your crime scene?” he rumbled. “Is this your work, then?”
There was a little huff from the darkness. A huff that Blade knew was completely unnecessary, since the lungs that had made it hadn’t needed to breathe in decades.
“My crime scene,” the voice said coolly, “as in I’m the one investigating it. It’s not a complicated turn of phrase, Blade. Didn’t I catch you marathoning Law & Order in Miami, once?”
Blade growled.
“Touchy, touchy.”
There was a soft rustle, as of fabric on fabric. The prey wanted him to hear it, he was sure.
“Why don’t you put that thing away, and we can have a civilized conversation?”
His lip curled more. His growl was louder now.
There was a deep, resigned sigh from the darkness, just as unnecessary as the huff had been. It was followed by the distinctive click of a revolver being cocked.
“You know,” Blade rumbled, “that a bullet won’t kill me.”
“Oh, I know.” The voice sounded almost bored. “But a silver one’ll hurt like a hangover, and you’re smart enough to avoid that particular risk.” In the gloom beyond the window, the hunter could just make out a dark figure that twitched its head toward the front wall of the attic. “There’s an old milk crate under the window. Have a seat.”
Grudgingly, Blade did.
“You know I can always just kill you,” he reminded the figure as he lowered himself onto the creaking slats of the crate.
“A lot of people can kill me,” the figure replied, almost distractedly. “And somehow I manage to keep getting up in the evening.”
It stepped forward into what passed for the light, still holding the revolver in its hand.
The thing in front of Blade looked exactly like a slightly built white man in his thirties with rumpled brown hair, dark eyes, and the collar of his camel trench coat turned up around his weathered face. He stood over the body of a young Black man in dark clothing whose blood was seeping into the floorboards from two small holes in his throat.
“Put your sword away,” the vampire Hannibal King said. “It’s rude to threaten folks.”
The katana returned to its sheath without a sound.
“You were expecting me,” Blade said coldly.
King rolled his eyes. “For about the last fifteen minutes, yes.”
“Only that long? When you’ve left a trail of seven bodies across New Orleans in the last nine days?”
Something flashed in the vampire’s eyes.
“You keep accusing me of things I did not do,” he said softly, “and we’re going to have a real problem on our hands.”
It was Blade’s turn to huff.
“This right here,” King said, pointing downward at the corpse with the hand that wasn’t holding a revolver, “is Augustine Toussaint. Twenty-eight years old. He went missing after he finished his shift tending bar on Bourbon Street, two nights ago. His family asked me to find him.”
“They hired a vampire?” Blade sneered.
“They hired a detective,” King corrected. “I run a business, Eric. I don’t just threaten tourists for a hobby.”
Blade scowled. He’d never been able to figure out exactly how King had learned that Blade had been born under the name Eric Brooks, but the vampire had never been above taunting the hunter with his extensive knowledge of the older man’s past.
Hannibal King was reputed to be one of the greatest detectives on the planet. Some people would have said one of the greatest detectives alive, if they were unaware of all the facts.
“Someone,” Blade rumbled, “has been on a killing spree in this city. Someone with fangs and the stink of the grave on them.”
King arched an eyebrow. “Really? That’s all you’ve got? How long have you been working this case?”
“How do I know you aren’t the one responsible?” Blade pressed. “This is your city, vampire. And the only thing standing between you and a bloody rampage is your precious oath. Your promise never to feed from a human being.”
King’s face was stone. He leaned over Toussaint’s body and put his head a few inches from Blade’s, staring into the mirrored lenses of the hunter’s sunglasses.
“Smell me,” he said. There was hoarfrost on each word.
“What?” said Blade.
“Smell me,” King repeated. “I’m right here. Get a good sniff.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“What am I going to do, poison you with my cologne? Take a whiff or admit you’re a coward.”
Blade bared his teeth and inhaled through his nose.
“What do you smell?” King demanded.
“Vampire,” Blade growled.
King straightened up and tilted his head back to gaze at the ceiling. “I’m wasting my time,” he said to no one in particular. “My one wild and precious unlife, and I’m wasting it trying to teach an idiot to smell what’s under his damn nose.” He looked back at Blade. “Now smell the body.”
“What do you expect me to—”
“Smell it.”
Glowering, Blade bent forward and sniffed at the corpse.
“Death,” he said.
“That’s it?” King snapped. “Just death?” He bared his own teeth, conspicuously un-pointed. “Do it again.”
“I don’t have to—”
The barrel of the revolver came up, level with Blade’s eyes. “Do it. Again.”
Blade sniffed grudgingly.
“You smell it?”
Blade frowned. “Is that—”
“Roses?” King’s grimace became a smirk. “It sure is. Specifically, rosa canina. Dog rose, it’s called. It’s a wild cousin of the stuff you grow in gardens. How’s your Stoker, Mister Blade?”
Blade scowled.
“A wild rose stalk,” the vampire explained, “can be laid across a vampire’s coffin to keep him in his tomb. It’s not quite as powerful a deterrent as holy water or a stake, but it works well enough. It’s a shame more people don’t know about it. Now tell me, Blade, do you smell rosa canina anywhere on me?”
Slowly, Blade shook his head.
“That’s because I’m not wearing any. No vampire does, for obvious reasons. And a man working the back of a Bourbon Street bar wouldn’t be wearing a rose cologne that lingered two days later. People have allergies now. He’d get fired. And according to his family, Mister Toussaint didn’t wear cologne of any kind, let alone something as unusual as dog rose.”
“So it was left by the killer,” Blade said slowly.
“Gold star for you.” King’s smirk widened into something like a genuine smile, and the revolver vanished into his coat. “Now, for a little extra credit, who do you and I know who leaves fang marks in people’s necks and doesn’t mind the smell of dog rose?”
Blade stared.
King rolled his eyes again. “He doesn’t mind the smell of garlic, either.”
Blade’s eyes widened. “Morbius,” he breathed.
“Exactly. Michael Morbius, the only vampire whose origins aren’t supernatural and therefore don’t include the same weaknesses we old-timers have.” King sobered. “I think the Living Vampire has fallen off the wagon. He’s been wearing that awful cologne for years to show off, by the way—how did you not notice?”
“I’ve been busy,” Blade muttered.
“If you say so.” King didn’t sound convinced. He glanced down at the body. “I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make, if you don’t mind, before you’re stuck with me.”
Blade blinked. “What?”
“The case,” King said, looking back up at him. “I assume you’re going after Morbius.”
“I—I guess I am.”
King nodded. “Then I’m coming with you. Better than getting in each other’s way. And like you said, it’s my city.”
“You found Toussaint,” Blade pointed out. “Your job’s done.”
King gave him a long, searching look. In the low light from the clerestory window, the color of his eyes was impossible to discern.
“I suppose you’d see it that way,” he said at last. “But I don’t.” He looked away. “There’s a bar three blocks riverside of here. The Fleur-de-Lis. I’ll meet you there when I’m done. Give ’em my name and they’ll let you stay as long as you need.” He produced a smartphone from somewhere in his coat. “If you’re not there, I’ll find you, easy as I did this time.”
“You didn’t find me,” Blade reminded him.
“Didn’t I?” King shot him a devilish grin. “I knew you were coming when you were more than a block away, my friend.”
“How?” Blade demanded.
“Clove oil,” King said simply.
Blade stared.
“You put choji oil on your sword, right?” King nodded at the scabbard. “You take good care of that thing, as you should. Proper care of an antique katana like yours requires periodic treatment with a mixture of mineral oil and clove oil called choji oil. You’ve been rubbing it in for years. It’s on the blade and the scabbard. There aren’t a lot of men walking around the Tremé who smell like that stuff and also don’t make noise when they put their feet down.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Blade asked.
King regarded him with dark, colorless eyes and a faint, humorless smile.
“Wouldn’t we all like to know?” he replied.
There was definitely something wrong with the way Elsa had settled herself. Nothing major – just an uneven patch of ground under her left hip, or maybe a knot of tension in her lower back from lying still too long. Either way, it was enough to make her shift her weight to her right side.
While she was at it, she wriggled just enough to fish her phone from her pocket. Under the circumstances, she ought to take the chance to message Jack while she still could. Part of her was surprised he hadn’t already blown up her phone with a string of bright-eyed, early-morning texts, but he probably thought he was letting her sleep.
She bit her bottom lip, thinking, then typed:
There was a beautiful sunrise here this morning
It had been magnificent. Also cold and damp, and the position she’d held in order to keep a clear view of the runway and its associated buildings had been pure hell on her upper back, but the beauty was undeniable. Under other circumstances, she might even have snapped a photo.
She swept her binoculars over the front of the maintenance hangar again. Still no one to be seen, and it was – she checked the time on her phone – very nearly an hour since the last signs of life. Force of habit and a series of narrow escapes in her youth told her to wait a little longer: a few more minutes, just in case.
Her thumb hovered over the screen before adding:
I might take a walk, get some exercise
That wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either. Walking would feature in her morning: three or four hundred metres at least to the front of the hangar, and at least twice that to get back to where she’d stowed her bike. And if she messaged Jack Going to check out some bad guys but it’ll probably be fine or I think there’s at least a 90% chance no one is going to try to kill me this morning he’d only start fretting. They’d been down that path more than a few times over the last couple of months and, honestly, being slightly economical with the truth seemed like the easiest way to avoid unpleasantness. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Jack, with his peaceful little cabin up in the Ozarks, sending her carefully framed pictures of home-cooked meals, unspoiled streams, and whatever local rock had caught his eye that day. It was idyllic. It was quaint. It was… maybe even a little dull, not that she’d ever say so? He was clearly happy, and she couldn’t begrudge him that. If she struggled to respond with appropriate levels of enthusiasm to pictures of his geological finds (it might be a rare fossilized crinoid calyx to Jack, but it was just another grey rock to her), that was definitely her problem rather than his.
It was no wonder that he was reacting to his comfortable lifestyle by fixating on the frankly minor levels of risk involved in hers. But Elsa had been trusting her luck to sharp instincts and sharper steel for far too long to take well to being fussed over from a distance.
In person, now… she would probably have been inclined to cut Jack some slack if he’d wanted to indulge in a little face-to-face mollycoddling. There might be definite compensations to that scenario, and she’d cheerfully admit that she’d let her imagination run loose on them in considerable detail over the last six months. But she’d not set eyes on Jack himself since she’d kissed him goodbye on the windy station platform at Brandeis, and his texts and letters were a poor substitute.
She’d been optimistic, back in November; there had been so many potential leads in the hunters’ personal effects and in their vehicles that she’d hoped she might get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Jack before Christmas. But one by one they’d petered out and come to nothing: dead ends, burned trails, missing pieces. Hunters were secretive bastards on the best of days, and these had been worse than most.
By the time February had come around, she’d been forced to start from first principles. That meant picking up the threads of the North American hunter scene that she’d walked away from two decades before, trying to blend in with a world that would happily see her new friends dead for the imagined offence of being not entirely human.
It had made her distinctly tetchy.
She had at least picked up enough intelligence to put together a partial picture of hunter politics over the last couple of years. There had been some kind of schism, although no one she talked to seemed clear what had triggered it. Again and again she heard stories of hunters dropping off the map all over the eastern United States – not vanishing, precisely, but cutting off contact with friends and colleagues and heading off on mysterious assignments. That had to count as odd, to begin with. And no one, absolutely no one, seemed to know the names Jacob or Elisabeta Russoff. That meant her murderous visitors, and the plot against Jack that they represented, didn’t belong to the old hunter world. They had to be connected to this new faction.
All of this left her better informed, but not much further along in terms of an actual solution to their problem. For the last few weeks she’d been reduced to following anything hunter-related to that seemed at all out of place, hoping that sooner or later something would prove to be relevant. Which was what had brought her here, watching an airfield from a wet patch of grass at the crack of dawn.
She’d been here once before, in her early teens. It had been the sort of place where people paid extra for discretion: hunters with more weapons than luggage, cargo holds carrying things with too many teeth, all of it handled with no questions asked.
Apparently, that had ended a year ago. The office was shut down, the number disconnected. Officially, it was dead, and its old patrons had made other arrangements. Unofficially, she’d heard rumours. Whispers of flights still running in and out at odd hours. Late at night, or just before dawn. The kind of flights that catered to people even less forthcoming than the average hunter.
It probably meant nothing, but she didn’t have a great deal to lose at this point, and a few hours lying on her belly in cold dew watching the sun edge over the treeline wasn’t the worst way she’d ever spent a morning.
Sure enough, a single-engined turboprop aircraft had come in to land just before sunrise; there’d been a bustle of activity as three or four figures disembarked and unloaded several crates into the maintenance hangar. That had been an hour ago. Since then, nothing.
It was virtually an invitation to go and take a closer look.
Not that she had any expectation that any of this would relate to her own problem; it was a matter of consistently following loose threads wherever they led and hoping that eventually one or two of them would tie up. This morning would be uneventful enough that what she’d told Jack was very close to being true; it barely even counted as equivocation.
A tiny voice inside her suggested that Jack wouldn’t see it that way, but she squashed it down ruthlessly.
More than an hour, now, since there’d last been a sign of human activity. Almost instinctively she took inventory: dagger in the thigh holster, throwing knife secreted in her left jacket sleeve, and her childhood dirk in its customary place in her boot. There was also a .357 revolver tucked away in a shoulder holster – something she’d had to adjust to again now she was back on this side of the Atlantic – but she still felt more comfortable with the blades. She glanced at her phone; Jack hadn’t seen her messages yet, but as soon as he did she expected a flurry of responses. Best to turn it off until she was done. Shoving the phone deep into her pocket and stowing the binoculars in her tactical crossbody bag, she got to her feet.
Time to take that walk.