SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (17 page)

“You’re on the payroll?”

“Hunting’s hunting, right?”

Jake doesn’t look convinced by that. He hands her back the paper, looking her straight in the eye. “Never seen him before.”

“You’re sure?”

“If I said it, it must be true.”

Skeptical, Silver wonders where his allegiance lies these days. There comes a time when you’ve been stuck in this world for so long, you start to forget where you came from. She’s seen it happen before. One day you’re you. The next day, you’re one of them. Just like that.

The snap, that’s what they call it.

One day, you just snap; your sanity finally breaks under the pressure of the Fringe District’s unrelenting punishment. Like a hyoid bone fracturing in a choke hold, it’s a fatal point of no return. After the snap, the psychological damage caused by your imprisonment becomes officially irreparable. You become a lost cause.

Lost, and damned.

Of course, Jake’s hired help are watching him closely, and nobody likes a snitch. He relies on these people for his livelihood, and he can’t be seen to be a tattle tale.

“Now, tour’s over.” He locks eyes with Silver. “Why don’t you take your little maggot out back and go fish someplace else?”

Alice wants to object to the nickname, but Silver grabs her by the hand and pulls her away. Following the rickety-looking, manmade tunnel out of the basement, Silver feels like she’s in an old mineshaft. As dangerous as this place looked when she’d first seen it, it was even more perilously close to collapse now. Propped up by wooden planks and piles of bricks, the support beams running along the tunnel roof are cracked and splintering.

“When you change your mind,” Jake calls out after her, “you know where to find me.”

Alice keeps her eyes pinned to the ground, trying not to trip on the uneven terrain.

“What’s he talking about?”

Silver doesn’t get a chance to lie. Emerging from the tunnel, back into broad daylight, she’s slapped in the face with the smell of manure. In a small courtyard, Chimera dung is gathered in wheelbarrows and used as fertilizer on Jake’s meager vegetable garden. One person dumps the dung on the dirt while another rakes it around.

Bingo.

Silver locks eyes with the Dodger, and he’s frozen to the spot.

Of course, when he finally gathers his wits together he runs, but the effort comes too late. Both Silver and Alice make chase, and Alice sees this as a way to get back on Silver’s good side after inadvertently exposing her combat proficiency in the bar.

All this time, Silver has viewed Alice as a dependent; someone who needs her care and protection. For as much as Silver harbors concerns about Alice’s genetics, she’s grateful for the distraction Alice has provided.

Alice is a reason to keep trying.

Having her around has given Silver the stimulus to forge onward, despite her circumstances. Despite the shame, the humiliation, the broken heart—all of it.

Alice speeds up and darts through an archway to take a shortcut. She manages to get in front of the Dodger, stands in wait for him, and greets him with an elbow to his face when he reaches her hiding spot.

Crack!

Clutching a broken nose, he falls to the ground, gushing blood. Only a split second behind him, Silver has to slam on her brakes not to run straight over top of him. Alice is beaming a smile at her, proud of her work, but Silver isn’t won over yet.

“Who
are
you?”

The smile falters and neither of them are paying due attention to the Dodger. Alice folds her arms defensively, gently rubbing a sore elbow. By the time Silver hears metal scraping against concrete, the time for evasive maneuvers has already passed.

Thwack.

A hollow metal rod clouts her across the face. Made from lightweight steel, once the handle of a cheap shovel, the rod isn’t enough to break bone, but it
is
enough to piss her off.

She snatches the shaft out of the Dodger’s hand and gives him a good smack on the shoulder. He doesn’t fall, so she hits him again.

Again.

Once more.

He falls to the ground, but Silver’s not satisfied. Frustrated with the day’s events, the possibility she’s been lied to by Alice, and about being hit in the face by a crackhead, she beats on him until he begs for her to stop …

And then she keeps going.

Kicking him in the ribs, she winds him. Barely a second later, and without really thinking about it, she draws her gun.

Alice’s sharp intake of breath is the thing that finally halts her.

The whole world stops moving, just for a moment, and Silver takes her finger off the trigger. Forcing herself to calm down, she holds her breath and silently counts to ten.

On ten, she holsters her weapon. Rolling him onto his front, she kneels on his back and pulls his hands behind him, cinching them up in a pair of Luka’s handcuffs.

“You’re under arrest, asshole.”

“You’re not an Agent,” the Dodger, Dwayne, sputters, his face smooshed against the fragmented concrete.

“No, worse. I’m a bounty hunter.”

Silver clambers off his spine and hauls him up by the waist band of his pants. In doing so, something slips out of his pocket and hits the ground by her feet.

Drugs.

Maybe Silver’s day just got better.

Since ninety percent of the Fringe District’s inhabitants are addicted to something, on some level or another, this could be good bartering material. Inspecting the contents of the baggie, she finds crack—wow, what a shocker—and barbiturates.

Silver pockets them.

“Go home,” she barks to Alice.

“What? Why?”

“Just do as I say.”

“Why can’t I go with you? I helped catch him.”

“I have to do this part by myself.” Silver reaches for her pager. “So beat it.”

Tears in her eyes, upset that Silver’s still mad at her, Alice turns and bolts. Silver knows it wasn’t necessary to be so sharp with her, but she’s got too much on her mind to care right now. She has to page Luka and get this junkie Dodger off her hands.

Speaking of the devil, her pager beeps.

Luka.

Perfect timing.

MEET ME FOR A DRINK.

His GPS co-ordinates follow, and they’re directing her to a place she knows well enough.

*************************

Pushing and shoving junkie Dodger Dwayne in front of her, his hands still cuffed tightly behind his back, Silver directs him inside a butcher shop she has more than a little familiarity with—Kink Central. Bar in the front, pit fights in the back, bedrooms upstairs.

‘Nuff said.

Halfway across the main room of the bar, Dwayne trips and falls over a dead cat. Silver could catch him, but chooses to let him fall flat on his face, his nose buried deep in cat guts, before she heaves him back up by his wrists and drags him the rest of the way, finally throwing him down over a table in the corner.

Four Police Division Agents, Luka among them, look up from their jovial conversation to see Dwayne’s bloody face kissing their tabletop and Silver’s scowling mug looming above them, her piercing eyes directed at Luka.  

“All yours, muffin,” she glowers at him.

She turns to walk away, but not before Luka gets a good look at the glorious purple bruise forming beneath her left eye.

“Hey, wait!” he calls out, but it’ll take more than that to stop her.

Leaving Dwayne in the safe hands of his drinking buddies, Luka catches up to Silver in the parking lot and grabs her by the arm, swinging her around to face him.

“Don’t walk away from me. Are you okay?”

Silver jerks back her arm. “This is bullshit, Luka.”

“He hurt you?”

“A month ago I was shooting monsters in the face. Now, I’m getting beat up by crackheads. Let’s just say: I’m having some difficulty adjusting.”

“I’ve never known you to get so upset over a fist fight. Are you sure nothing else happened?”

“Firstly”—Silver points to her face—“he didn’t do this with his fist. Secondly, if anything else had happened you’d surely know about it, because I’d be bringing you a corpse. I’m not used to bringing things in alive, do you understand? I do dead. Dead monsters,
not
living humans.”

“Sure, it’ll take time to—”

“No, no way.” Silver shakes her head. “You’ll have to find someone else.”

“Silver …”

“You don’t get it, do you? Every instinct I have tells me to fight back. I even had my gun raised on him, for God’s sake, and the little shit wasn’t even fighting back. I had to stop and remind myself what the fuck I was doing.”

“You could’ve shot him. That would have been okay. I mean, you’d get paid less, but—”

“Geez, Luka. Why aren’t you listening to me? I don’t kill humans.”

Luka’s always known that Hunters have a sense of moral superiority over what they do. He was trained in the Hunter Division and he’s seen it for himself, but he won’t let her take the high ground today. “You know I
do
kill humans, right?”

That temporarily silences her.

“I don’t want to,” he continues, “but I do. It’s part of the job.”

“You arrest people.”

“Yes, and I lead raids on drug deals and arms trades, and people die, Silver. That’s just the fallout from it.” He takes her by the shoulders and forces her to listen. “Sometimes, there’s just no other choice.”

Silence.

“Come on,” he urges her. “Let’s go someplace else.”

Those proximity alarm bells go off in Silver’s head again, but she pays them no attention. Luka tempts her with liquor, and she allows herself to become seduced with the need to get loaded and forget about the day’s earlier events.

She just wants to feel better, and so far the closest she’s come to that has been in his company. Seeing Maydevine reminds her of her failures. Being with Alice—sharing a bed with her, no less—only reminds her of her loss, and the moments spent alone are even worse.

The liquor numbs everything a little; it’s just enough to take the edge off. It’s enough to forget about the ache in her face, and her throbbing feet. Sitting on the rooftop of a building overlooking the ocean, Silver tucks her knees up to her chin and admires the bleak vastness of it all, while Luka inspects her wrist for healing progress.

She can barely feel him touching her, and the way the alcohol is making the world sway gently back and forth is causing her to feel like she’s aboard a strange, flimsy boat. Finishing the last of the vodka, her wrist freshly bandaged, she lies back on the roof and stares up at the crystal clear sky. With its seemingly infinite depth and the sheer wealth of the possibilities of otherness, beyond the tiny, inconsequential frame of her known world, it’s frighteningly majestic.