CHILD of the HUNT Read online

  Shock was the one who had named her Treasure. He was at least nineteen—she was sixteen—and he was her partner on the streets. They stole stuff together. Little stuff. It kept them going. They never took anything from poor people. They took things from people who looked like Cordelia Chase. Or even from people who looked like her mom, she had to admit. And her mom’s stupid best friend from church, the one in the out-of-date coat, Lesley. Liz and Lesley. It was so cute how their names both started with L.

  Connie wanted to vomit.

  “What’s the haps?” she asked Shock.

  “Something’s going on, man,” he told her. Whenever he called her “man” it reminded her that they were just friends. Sometimes it made her a little sad but it also helped her remember that he had promised to stick by her. If he ever told her he loved her, she would get scared, because then he would be much more likely to leave her. That’s what love did to people. You just had to look around and you knew it was true.

  Her mother had succeeded in getting Bobby Lopez to leave her.

  Shock went on, “Everybody’s freaking out down at the park.”

  Most nights they slept in Weatherly Park. Every once in a while they found an alley or an abandoned building, but the park was okay and a lot of the street community hung there at night.

  “Freaking out how? Why?” she asked, smiling as he slid his hand into her back jeans pocket and kissed her forehead. Maybe they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend exactly, but they were a team. She really liked him, and that was one reason she wouldn’t come in from the streets. Her parents hadn’t liked Bobby, and they would hate Shock. And she would never leave him out here alone.

  “They say some more bodies turned up.” He clicked his teeth together like he was eating something. “Some perv was nibbling at them again.”

  “Gross.” She shook her head.

  “I’m thinking maybe we should move on.”

  She flared with panic. Shock had left Sunnydale and traveled for years. He’d only been back a week or so when they’d hooked up. She didn’t know why the thought of crossing the town border made her so nervous, but it did. Kind of like she was almost back home if she stayed in town.

  Not that she wanted to go back home. But the world, she had discovered, was not all that much better than her own backyard.

  “But we’ve still never seen anything. I think it’s all a crock. Something the police made up to keep us out of there,” she said anxiously.

  Something rippled across his face—pain, a bad memory, she didn’t know what. Then it was gone, hidden away like most of Shock was hidden away from her. He might not be her honey, but she was the only person in the world he could open up to, share with. He had confessed that to her the first time they’d met, when both of them were going through the dumpster behind the Sunnydale High cafeteria, gathering up the leftovers. She’d only been a runaway for two nights, and doing such a bad job of it she was thinking about going back home.

  Standing behind her now, he tugged on her hair, jerking her head back slightly. She didn’t know what to say, because maybe that was like, flirting with her, and she wasn’t sure what to do if he did flirt with her. They had been on the streets together for six months, and he had never tried anything. He said he called her Treasure because he found her in a dumpster like a buried treasure. He said she was “a find.” He was the nicest guy she had ever met, and after a while she relaxed around him.

  He tugged harder on her hair, hard enough to pull out a few strands. Mostly out of reflex, she shouted, “Hey!” Then she quickly added, “Sorry, it hurt,” because she was always very polite to Shock. He didn’t have to hang with someone as young as she was—even though she was very mature for her age—she often passed at the Bronze for much older—and she was grateful beyond words that he did. If she’d been out here all alone, she would have been dead by now. Of that she had no doubt.

  Behind her, he said, “What?”

  “Ow!” This time it was like someone had nicked her scalp. She half-turned and gently batted his arm. “Stop pulling my hair, Shock.”

  He cocked his head. “You’re tripping, Treasure.” He held up his free hand. His other was still in her back pocket. “I’m not touching you.”

  “Well, you were—ouch!” She clutched the back of her head. “Something’s in my hair!” she cried hysterically. “Something’s biting me!” She started screaming and lowered her head for Shock to see. “There’s something in my hair!”

  “Stand still!” Shock ordered her.

  “Connie?” Liz said, her voice high and stunned. “Connie, is that you?”

  That voice. That nasally, whiny voice.

  “Run,” Connie said to Shock. “Get me the hell out of here.”

  “Connie!” Liz shouted. She ran after them. “Connie!”

  Her mother’s voice became a wail on the wind as Connie and Shock flew into the night like ghostly kites, his duster streaming out behind them.

  As they rounded a corner, tears dripped down Connie’s face. Then, panting, she stopped beneath a streetlight and bent her head forward. “Maybe it’s a big spider,” she said. “Find it. Ow! It’s biting me!”

  “Hold still.” He started combing through her hair.

  There was a rumble in the distance.

  “Rain tonight,” he grumbled. “Great.”

  “Ow!” she shrieked, wagging her head as the pain seared her scalp. “Hurry up!”

  “I don’t see . . .” Shock said. “Hey, wait!”

  In a blind panic, Connie ran from him, clutching at her head.

  Just off the main drag, in a condo complex with a quaint Spanish motif, Jamie Anderson surfed his entire Mega-Gold cable package, but nothing grabbed his attention long enough to make him stop switching channels. He pretended not to realize it when his left hand grazed the bottle of Scotch on the end table beside his recliner. He didn’t let himself register the act of bringing the bottle to his lips. But nothing could hide the hot, burning sensation of the whiskey tearing down his throat.

  He knew how much was left in the bottle—about a third of it. He also knew how much more he could drink and still be able to function at work: none.

  So he took one more swig for the road, then resolutely put the bottle back down.

  A few months ago he had met his neighbor, Rupert Giles, on a Saturday morning while they were collecting their mail from the boxes in the foyer of their building. Jamie knew he smelled boozy and looked terrible and made some offhand, joking remarks about having had a bit too much the night before. A typical Californian would have brushed it off, said something innocuous—not for nothing were there fences between every single house in your typical southern Californian suburb—but Rupert Giles had surprised him.

  The Englishman had leaned against the wall for a moment, regarding Jamie with genuine sympathy. He’d said, “Recently, I found myself escaping into the bottle. Not to imply, of course, that you’re doing anything of the sort. It’s merely that . . . well, I found no genie at the bottom of a bottle. Only a demon I thought I’d escaped.”

  Jamie had almost told him then of the struggle each day had become. No, it was not the days that were impossible. It was the nights. The nights of tossing and turning, of taking things to knock himself out so that he could perform at work. Of drinking to stop feeling. Of searching for anything to escape the constant, relentless worry.

  But then the fear would close in. The fear that he would be too far gone to hear the phone if Brian called. He would wake up in a sweat, calling for his son, his wife, and check the phone machine again and again and again.

  And scream into his pillow.

  Four years of living hell, night after night.

  But he was a man in a hard line of work, and crying in your beer didn’t cut it. So even though he had wanted like anything to tell this virtual stranger the whole sad story, Jamie had muttered something about not having demons, just missing his son. Then he’d averted his eyes, pretending that he didn’t want to t
alk about it.

  But he did. He really did.

  He had turned to go, quickly, so that the other man wouldn’t see the tears.

  It wasn’t until their second encounter, at the high school, that they’d really connected. Once a semester or so, the police sent somebody over to the high school to talk to the kids about suicide, running away from home, and the ways to get help before getting that desperate. Jamie knew the Chamber of Commerce didn’t want the stats publicized, but Sunnydale had an alarming truancy, runaway, and mortality rate among its young-adult population.

  This semester, he was the one who had drawn what he and his buddies on the force called “Downer Duty”—insisting that yes, of course he could handle it; no, it wasn’t too close to home. All day he had stood at the front of classroom after classroom. (An assembly, it had been decided, was too large and impersonal. The kids might want to ask questions.) He had dutifully passed out the info sheets about national hotlines and the new runaway shelter set up by Liz DeMarco—a local woman whose own daughter was a runaway. High time for something like that, too. Maybe if that shelter had been around when Brian ran . . .

  Out of the blue, some girl had raised her hand, asked, “Have you heard from Brian?”

  The pain and, yes, the shame, had flooded through Jamie like a double shot of Scotch. For a moment, he had been speechless. He fumbled and stammered, unwilling—and unable—to share his private agony with this sweet young kid.

  But Rupert Giles, seated in the back of the room (the librarian, having no actual class of his own, had come in to listen), cleared his throat and said, “It’s my understanding the shelter is looking for donations, yes? Perhaps a fundraiser might be arranged by the Key Club. Or some such, ah, benevolent organization. It’s quite a worthy cause.”

  The conversation was deflected away from Brian, but the girl continued to look troubled. Maybe she’d had a crush on him. Jamie decided to talk to her after the class let out, but he lost track of her in the swirl of departing students when the bell rang.

  Rupert had come up to him, said, “Are you all right, old man?” and invited him for some tea in the library.

  They had talked, venturing into dangerous territory, although the Englishman was very English, indirect and a bit guarded. Protective of his own privacy. That was okay. Jamie had never been very good at speaking about how he felt anyway. Maybe that was why Brian had left.

  That was when Jamie figured out where he’d heard Giles’s name before. Or, rather, read it. On a case file. About the Sunnydale High teacher who had been murdered and her corpse left in her boyfriend’s bed. Giles had been the boyfriend.

  Rough stuff.

  It hadn’t been his case, but once he knew Rupert’s connection, Jamie poked around a bit. So far, nothing had turned up. Didn’t look like anything would. He never mentioned his inquiry to Giles, but the man had extended the hand of friendship to him, and Jamie wanted to return the gesture in his own way. No. He wouldn’t mention it—except to comfort the man on the rare occasion when he might bring it up— until he found some new information that might help. He also never bothered to tell Giles exactly how long after his girlfriend’s murder the librarian himself had remained the prime suspect.

  Now—as he remembered the man’s kindnesses, and realized that he had too few friends since his own family had fallen apart—Jamie thought briefly about taking Rupert up on his offer to call whenever he needed to talk. He glanced at the clock. It was nearly four in the morning. Even British librarians had a limit to their benevolence.

  Rupert had been the school librarian going on three years. He’d never met Jamie’s son. The man had still lived in England when Brian had left. Giles couldn’t know what a terrific kid Brian had been.

  It was Brian’s birthday. He was nineteen tonight.

  If he was still alive.

  Praying that he was, Jamie Anderson toasted his son’s birth with the good stuff, keeping the rotgut hooch for the other three hundred sixty-four nights of the year. Praying that he would hear from his son. Praying Brian would call again.

  Once. Just one phone call, in the last four years. Six weeks after Brian had run, the phone had rung, just once.

  Sarah had glanced at Jamie and caught her breath. Staring at him, she had picked it up, cleared her throat, and rasped, “Hello?”

  Afterward she managed to tell Jamie Brian’s entire conversation, word for word, before she collapsed: “Mom, I’m okay. I’m alive. I’ll call again soon.”

  Jamie had not gotten to hear Brian’s voice. He had never felt so cheated in his life.

  Brian had never called again.

  Now Sarah was gone, too, from an inoperable tumor, and Jamie still waited by the phone to hear his boy’s voice.

  He took another swig of Scotch, mentally calibrating just how drunk he was. If he took something in the morning to perk himself up, he might be okay.

  Well. Not okay. He would never be okay. But he might be able to work.

  He put the bottle back down and changed the channels four times, five, seven. Every program was the same. They were always the same.

  Everything was always the same.

  He thought about his gun.

  He thought about the bottle.

  He thought about his child.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number, which was handwritten on the back of one of Jamie’s own business cards. It had sat by the phone so long that it was coated with a layer of dust.

  The connection was made. The phone was picked up on the first ring, almost as if the other party had been waiting for his call.

  “Giles, ah, Rupert?” Jamie said softly. “I’m sorry. It’s late—”

  “Not at all,” said the British man, very politely. “I’ll just put on a pot of coffee.”

  Chapter 1

  LOST . . . BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. LOST . . . BUT NOT forgotten.

  Buffy woke with tears sliding down her face. Had she been dreaming again about being on the road?

  She lay very still and closed her eyes tightly, feeling the pain, just giving in to it, just for one moment longer, letting it sear like a cauterizing blade. Then she deliberately wiped the tears away. If she could be very honest with herself—and these last few months had made her nothing if not honest—she knew she hadn’t been dreaming at all.

  What she hoped was that the tears were healing a very deep wound, the one that cut right through to her soul. The pain that lingered even when she smiled.

  So many friends lost. Ford. Kendra. Ms. Calendar.

  Love lost. Angel’s face filled her mind.

  Even now, her mom was trying desperately to cling to the idea that Buffy had done something that had made her the Chosen One. It was like Joyce was blaming her for making some mistake—like the punishment for shoplifting that tube of lipstick from Macy’s back in L.A. freshman year was a lifetime of battling the forces of darkness. Because if you got handed the Slayer rap because you were bad, maybe you could make up for it and get the sentence reduced.

  So very untrue.

  Buffy knew now that some people never got touched by all the bad juju. When you didn’t expect much, you got what you wanted: a husband or wife, a good job, some kids. At the mall, they bought happy little magnetic plaques they put on their refrigerators: Take time to smell the flowers. Kiss the cook. What you believe, you can achieve. Maybe they went to church, or did crafts, like Mrs. Calhoun, two doors down, who spent half the day doing paint-by-numbers. She was so proud of the finished pictures, but really, all she had to do was make sure she painted inside the pre-printed lines on the cardboard. She didn’t even have to pick out what colors to use. They came in little containers with numbers on them.

  There was nothing about Buffy’s life that was like that. Not a single place where all she had to do was stay inside the lines.

  There were also people whose lives were full of joy. People like that artist, Mary Cassatt, who must have been a very happy mom to paint all those pictures of mothers and c
hildren. Buffy could just imagine her washing a chubby little baby or tenderly rocking a child to sleep.

  Then the image of Timmy Stagnatowski exploding into dust blotted out the picture.

  No, it was not self-pity that made Buffy cry in her sleep. She was the Slayer, the one in all her generation who stood between the forces of darkness and the rest of humanity. She had accepted that, moved forward with that.

  She believed it was a personal exorcism to let herself feel this much pain, and try to find a way to let it out. Let it go. But sometimes she felt that with each tear, she was losing more than the pain. A memory. The ability to care so deeply, want so terribly . . .

  She caught her breath and stopped her tears. She could take no more, not now. It was just that it was always darkest before the dawn. That’s what people like Mrs. Calhoun or the famous baby-painter would say, anyway. But for Buffy, the world kept getting darker, and dawn seemed further and further away all the time.

  Outside, clouds were rumbling, threatening a downpour, and the sound echoed inside her room. In the back of her mind, she was always wondering, Was that really thunder? Or was it actually a portent of some as-yet-unknown evil about to descend, one she’d have to fight, to her death, if need be?

  But that didn’t make her cry. It honestly didn’t. She had accepted her duty as the Slayer. It wasn’t that she was looking for a way out.

  She wasn’t trying to run away.

  Not anymore.

  She silently gazed at what was left of being a normal teenager: Mr. Gordo, her stuffed pig, and all her stuffed animals. The butterflies on her door and her Japanese umbrellas. Some friend of her mom’s had said this was such a sweet room. Never guessing, of course, that in the false-bottomed trunk in the closet were hidden vials of holy water, bulbs of garlic, and lots of very sharp, pointed stakes.

  So sweet.

  There was her picture of Xander and Will on the nightstand. She smiled faintly. There weren’t two of Willow in the world, and Xander was likewise unclonable. Sweet friends. Good to her.

  She heard talking and frowned slightly. Did her mom have company at this hour? Or was there something in this house that shouldn’t be?