Page 6 of The Hunter

Good dreams will come stealing.

Of freedom and laughter

and peace ever after…

His mother smiled, though blood leaked from the corner of her mouth and trickled into her hair. Her skin was so cold. Waxy. But the pool in which he sat was warm. Enveloping them both.

Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping…

And watch I’ll be keeping—

His voice caught on a sob. Then another. He couldn’t go on singing. But he didn’t have to.

She coughed. Her chest heaving. Then it deflated, hot breath hitting his skin like the words she could no longer say. Out and out and out until she was perfectly still.

Christopher couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming. Loud, long, ear-shattering peals of desperation. Screaming like their soul might escape through their throat. Screaming loud enough to wake the gods. Loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the nightmarish place he’d called home. To be heard over the storm, and the thunder, and the silence of his dead mother.

Christopher wished the screaming would stop. But it didn’t. Not for a long, long time.

Eventually the fire died. The stones cooled the blood beneath him and turned it to ice. The shell of his mother cooled also. As the warmth seeped out of her corpse and she stiffened to a heavy weight in his young, trembling arms, all that was warm leaked away from him, as well. He felt it leaving with a mild sense of curiosity.

It felt… like water. Sitting in pool of water. It was only water. Surrounding him. Covering him. Caked to his skin. Filling the cracks of the stone. The space of his container.

Water. He understood now. He’d learned the lesson Master Ping had been trying to impart to him. There in the stormy darkness he was learning to be like water. Patient. Ruthless.

Laying his heavy mother on the slick ground, he stood, feeling as though he had no bones. As though he didn’t reside in his body. But out of it. Around it. Like the water.

All the water on the stones.

He stood facing the door, still as the stone, and began the forms he’d been drilling earlier in the rain. When the door opened he would go to Master Ping. He would tell him that he understood now. That he was like water.

Ready for death to flow from his hands.

CHAPTERONE

London, 1877

Twenty-two Years Later

“I don’t kill children,” Christopher Argent informed the solicitor who seemed to be attempting to hire him to do so. “Or deliver them to their deaths.”

Sir Gerald Dashforth, Esquire, perched uneasily behind the desk, and persisted in eyeing the closed door as though he anticipated the need to scream for help at any moment. The man matched the furniture in his Westminster office, expensive, waspish, delicate in an almost feminine manner, and the most offensive shade of puce. He peered at Argent from behind wire-rimmed spectacles perched on ears that had long since outgrown his head.

Argent pondered the few observations he’d made about Dashforth in the minutes since he’d met the lawyer. The man was paid above his station, and yet still spent more than he made. He conducted business with the unscrupulous desperation of someone living well above their means. He was fastidious, vain, intelligent, and greedy to the point of immorality. He’d made a career of being the unassuming absolver of his clients’ malevolent misdeeds by whatever means necessary.

For example, hiring the empire’s most expensive assassin.

“I have three unequivocal policies that my clientsmustbe aware of.” Argent ticked them off on his fingers, beginning with his trigger finger. “The first, I don’t intimidate, maim, rape, or torture, Iexecute. Secondary, I leave no messages, clues, or taunts behind for the police or anyone else, handwritten or otherwise. And tertiary, I don’t kill children.”

Dashforth forgot to be afraid for a moment, and his thin, dry lip curled up in an imperious sneer. “An assassin with a code? How very droll.”

“Not so droll as a confirmed bachelor who pays to bugger young, foreign boys.” Argent didn’t only rely on observation.

“How dare you accuse me—”

Argent stood, and the lawyer gasped in a breath so abruptly, he choked on his own spittle. It wasn’t just his uncommon height that reminded the man of his fear, Argent knew. It was the contrast of his appearance. The flawless press of his expensive suit against the unfashionable breadth of his body. The crook of his repeatedly broken nose against his aristocratic features. The gold and diamond cuff links above hands so scarred and callused from years of forced labor, they could never have belonged to a man of blue blood.

“The daylight is fading, Sir Dashforth,” Argent stated calmly over the man’s indelicate fit of coughs. “And I mostly work in the dark.” Turning from the sputtering man, he counted out five measured paces.