Well, at long last, another update. I thought I'd be on more, it's looking like not. I'm on first shift, and still living in a house where I can't get on the internet until 10 at night... since i go to bed at ten in order not to be a zombie in the morning, things aren't exactly looking up. I have managed to delve into hunters... a little more, not a lot, most of what I've got on the next chapter I just did tonight, htough I must say it was actually running smoothly. I'll let you have it, see what you all think, though it's a bit confusing, and not going at all like it was supposed to... it seems my notes were just wrong, wrong, wrong... lol....

Anyway, missing you all... and I am totally serious about that, no matter how lame, or self deprecating a statement that is... I finally have a life, sometimes still I wish I didn't....


Chapter 4
Meeting
42.28685 North
89.05238 West

Jim Carey wasn’t waiting for her in the terminal(or under it; the tarmac was a weathered and torn mess, but it still seemed like the gates of Troy after the Greek horde. Sadly, this respite would be just as short lived) when she disembarked from flight 197 in Rockford, Illinois. There was no limo waiting. No hint of the crisp winter air. No snow. Her briefcase didn’t say SAMSONITE and the—
It was too bad; she could have done with a weekend in Aspen.
Okay. Dreams and fantasies aside; it was time to switch into serious mode.
The tunnel that led from the plane into the terminal was small and narrow. Pink carpet jumped up to caress the soles of her blue swashed Nikes. The walls were a smokers shade of white, broken down the middle by a thick blue plastic bar. The air was stifling and hot. Chokingly bitter with scents: Cologne. Perfume. Ralph Lauren. Destiny. Spears. Cocaine. Marijuana. Tar. Death. Stale cigarettes. Stale beer. Sweat. Fear. Crazy. Insane.
The stately old woman with the hearing impairment who had sat next to her on the plane hurried past as Rhari lingered, fingers trailing over one blue railing, attempting to calm herself. The woman smelled stringently of talc and to a lesser degree those same scents Rhari’s nose must have detected over half the women passengers; perfume, nail polish, sweat; and oddly, chrysanthemums.
Rhari staggered and a male passenger half stopped as if in indecision as to whether or not he should help. Eyes trailing slowly upward over the light plaid carpet, Rhari watched the aristocratic form recede; hips wiggling menacingly, shoulders tight, arms in motion, the dark coal gray of her suit pulling tight in all the right places.
Somewhere close a passenger still waited. Rhari could feel his arms extended half toward her, half in indecision, half in worry. Was she sick? Was she hurt? Scents rushed at her, blinding, tight; chokingly tight. The roar of feet was thunderous, the thrum of voices the background riff to a monstrous guitar solo. Outside jet engines rumbled into takeoff position, the sun stumbled blithely through a smattering of light storm clouds. Rhari’s breath whistled down her closing throat.
She felt something touch her shoulder, a hand, and rocked in shock as his smells washed over her, washed over her as though the mans touch was the destruction of a wall, or the dropping of a shield; the end of distraction?
The smell of urine, light, but there—probably dribbled to a pant-leg after a hurried shaking—the sickly sweet tinge of some heavy aftershave; and vellum: Calf skin. A scent that could never be forgotten once one had visited the bowels of the councils archives. Flesh is a material that no amount of scraping and smoothing can mask—washed over her
Scent reveals more in one instant than a lifetime of comfortable forgery.
Rhari sighed, almost a sound of ecstacy. The tightness in her throat eased, in a moment vanished altogether. The world turned around her, effervescent slow, trickling like rain through a wet, gray fog. Shapes were indistinct, obscured through red veined eyes. The scrape of flesh sliding over her suede jacket was sandpaper over metal loud.
Rhari turned and stood, feeling the hunter fade slightly into the background. Not far, but far enough to free her thoughts. She needed time
(room)
to think.
The man who stood before of her was of medium build, tall, but not incredibly so, dressed loosely in the brown jacket and slacks of some fifth avenue connoisseur. The gray in his hair was a match to the suits’ charcoal striping, almost meticulously so. Together they complimented each other in a way that brought a less than handsome face some touch of down home country charm; country boy charm—absent a prime of fifteen years or more.
The gray of his hair did match the striping, but little else. Where in everything else he was dark, dark skinned, dark eyed—even dark dressed, and Rhari had the immediate impression that he always dressed so—the remainder of his hair, that is to say, that which wasn’t charcoal striped, was a light golden blonde bordering on a white reflective of days spent beneath a bright California sun.
His hair and suite seemed designed to draw ones eyes—almost purposefully—and where ones eyes were drawn, purposefully, was most obviously the place they needn’t be. Still, Rhari lingered for a moment longer, not unsure, not blaspheming to that voice screaming at her in warning, only... something.
Then she did look away, and not up or left of right, but slightly downward. He stared at her, through her, with eyes seemingly set aglow by some inner fire, eyes whose dark brown iris’ seemed to burn with untold depth. Her own eyes flickered lower, to a plain, straight mouth caught in the last stages of hiding some emotion. She returned her stare to eyes and caught that same fleeting retreat there, some emotion caught uncovered and quickly concealed. His brow twisted in worried lines for a moment, and they too vanished.
what—
He attempted a smile, a quick, fleeting thing; an awe shucks, corn chucks attempt that was easily bolstered by his bygone farm boy image.
Rhari was having none of it, for that matter, the hunter was having none either. For a moment that fleeting other rushed forward and Rhari felt a threatening growl trickle into her throat, a sound too low for the human ear to hear, but apparently not low enough for this man. She watched his smile falter, no, not falter, she watched it ripple, like the surface of a pond under a heavy onslaught of wind, first twisting one way, then the other, caught in a tide that for one moment brought the reminder that all was not under it’s control.
And then Rhari was twisting away. The mans movement came faster than the eye could follow, faster than the retinae could deliver the image to the brain, but none of that mattered. For one precious moment training kicked in, kicked her in her tailpipe Debra might have been like to say, Rhari ducked the blow, then let the Hunter take her away.
It wasn’t until later that she came to question that other actions, her other half, her other third really. When the shit hit the fan, when the man had made to slug her, the Hunter made the most unexpected move in the world. It ran.
Rhari was twisting on the balls of her feet, heels already lifting free of the floor—heels that weren’t really heels but appendages still trapped beneath human flesh because she couldn’t let it go that far—and she was bookin’ it.
She loped through the crowd as easily as a — biped can lope down a crowded airport —. Not pushing and shoving, not drawing attention—she wanted anything but that—cutting and weaving, ducking and dodging, something had drawn out a side of the Hunter she had never seen, a fight or flight reflex that she hadn’t even realized the beast possessed.
And why not? Why shouldn’t it, it was no less natural, no less a creature of nature than she herself. More tame than others, more cunning, and so less willing to risk life and limb if chance afforded escape rather than a fight that might prove to end most likely in death.
Rhari didn’t understand the impulse that had signaled this sudden retreat; nay, not retreat: Treat? Lunge? Withdraw? Perhaps flight, that sungular word best describes it, for in her mind no other makes sense.
She moved through the crowd, sinuous and —. Her flight didn’t call for the risking of life or limb, it was a dance, an orchestrated — that led her almost unconsciously to each clear spot, to each thinning, each breaking where man and woman and child parted and they way ahead was clear. And all the while behind her she heard him coming on. Only his path was not kind and gentle like her own, not undisturbed. She heard the angry rustle of the crowd, the cries of shock and dismay and pain as people were shoved and pushed aside. She heard him coming, fast, but not fast enough. Her speed increased, dizzying, until every step, every — almost was a dance.
She broke from the end of the hall, exploding into the departure lounge where a security guard was no more than a memory in the blur of he eye. She saw him fumble with his gun, uncertainty plain on his face, replaced only moment later by a faint sense of alarm as he heard the cries of outrage that came from behind him.