Predator Code (Tales from Wildhearth #1)

Chapter 20 - It Isn't Paranoia if Someone's Out to Get You

By the time she turned the bend onto the warrenary road, Jett could barely keep herself in check, claws flexing and clenching with a mind of their own as her eyes flickered in all directions, constantly on the hunt for pursuit. Grinding her teeth together until they hurt, she shook her head violently, trying to clear it of all the dark thoughts and feelings.

Jett paused at the door of the building, unable to stop herself from casting one last wary glance behind for her imaginary followers. She almost convinced herself there was nothing there in the steady flow of citykin that passed her by, but her brain didn't let it slip by.

The felkin—the female from the train—stood outside a stall across the street, limbs slack and oblivious to the kin that flowed around her. Jett blinked, but the figure remained stubbornly in her field of view, looking back with a seemingly vacant stare. Something about the felkin's eyes looked wrong—the pupils too small, the gaze focused but somehow distant at the same time, as though there was no conviction behind it.

Jett's paw curled tight around the door handle as she looked back at the felkin for a long moment. Then she looked around more carefully in the crowds, nausea twisting in her gut with a sense of inevitability. Sure enough, although he was more inconspicuous than his companion, the mild-looking deerkin was here too, tucked away at a cafe table with his chair facing the warrenary. She looked closer.

Same blank-eyed stare.

What in the Peace and Fire is this...?

Jett ran her tongue along her teeth uneasily and turned away, forcing herself to move slowly and naturally. Why were these kin following her? The little paranoid voice told her that the wolfkin might have enlisted some local help in their search.

Fighting down the urge to vomit, she tugged the door open and slipped inside, closing it gently behind her and padding across the foyer towards the elevator. She exchanged a perfunctory wave with Hiyfa but didn't trust herself to speak, not wanting to drag the old quillkin into whatever new twist had impacted itself upon her life. Jaw tight and heart pounding, she stepped to the left and punched the button for her floor.

Jett stepped out into the hall, and after a quick scan of the corridors for any wayward guests, she sprinted headlong from the elevator, racing towards her room as fast as her limbs would carry her. Stumbling to a halt at the door, she fumbled the scent key into the lock and dove inside, slamming the door shut and leaning against it, breathing heavily.

Somebody had found her; that much seemed clear, but with no sign of the wolfkin, her confusion only increased. Who had she gotten on the wrong side of this time? Had some of Rapid's people tailed her here without her knowing? Steadying her breaths, she tried to calm her mind, the tiredness sending her thoughts shooting off into all sorts of wild places. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on her breathing for a moment, in through her nose and out through her mouth a dozen times.

Pushing off the door, she crouched low and crept silently over to the window of her room, drawing the longclaw for the reassuring heft of the weapon, if nothing else. Sidling up to the window, she eased herself up and looked out onto the street below.

People passed steadily back and forth, diminutive shapes far below her vantage point, but her sharp eyes picked out the two stationary figures of her antagonists, watching and waiting. She leaned closer, watching and waiting, prepared to spend the night hunched over the window if she really had to.

But then another group of figures emerged from the night, and her blood turned to ice.

A group of wolfkin seemed to materialise from a nearby side street and approached the warrenary, parting passersby like a shoal of fish. They paused briefly to confer with the deerkin that had followed her here, and the truth hit her like a bucket of water. The pair from the train had been tasked to find her and tail her to her hideout, and she quickly realised why. If there'd been even the slightest possibility a wolfkin was following her, she would have bolted in an instant, but with these two, she'd convinced herself she was being paranoid.

If only.

She tensed as the deerkin nodded to the newcomers and pointed at the warrenary. Six enforcers loped towards the building, sheathed in night-black body armour, claws and teeth flashing in the moonlight as they moved.

At their head prowled the female, the leader. The murderer. The chill of fear in Jett's veins turned to hot anger as she glowered down at the figure, the one person, more than anyone else, that bore responsibility for turning her life upside down and inside out. Her paw strangled the grip of the longclaw as she imagined running the wolfkin through, imagined finally getting her vengeance.

The image gave her a brief tremor of satisfaction, but she quickly got a hold of herself. Whatever was going on in the city went a lot deeper than one person—killing the wolfkin would solve nothing if she didn't get to the bottom of the mystery first.

With a low snarl of frustration, she jammed the knife into its sheath and began feverishly working to dismantle the computing rig, rescuing its central block drive and wrapping it in some clothes before stuffing it into her pack. More clothes went in, along with as many of the tech bolt-ons she'd purchased from Karno as she could fit. The last of her barkstamps disappeared into it, along with a couple of packs of dried meat.

And that was it. That was all the precious things she had in the world right now. Spitting a foul curse, she grabbed the heavy mass of the computing rig and, with a yell of effort, shoved it off the table, where it smashed into a heap of junked circuitry. She wasn't about to leave anything for the wolfkin to find.

She jammed her knife back into its sheath and swept up her flashgun, checking the charge level before slinging her heavy pack across her shoulders and pulling the straps tight. Flashgun in paw, she cast one last mournful glance at the room that had served her well over the past couple of weeks, then bolted out into the corridor.

Closing the door quietly behind her, she looked left and right and took off down the hall, away from the obvious escape route of the elevator, instead heading for one of the stairwells that wound through the warrenary. A sense of resignation descended on her as she ran. It had always been a matter of time before they tracked her down.

But the deerkin? The felkin? How had they ended up getting roped into helping the enforcers? Was it as simple as a threat? Somehow, that didn't stack up for her. Enlisting random civilians didn't fit the way the enforcers operated—too much exposure to things they shouldn't see, particularly if they'd been put on Jett's trail.

She couldn't shake the glazed, trance-like look in their eyes. Drugs, perhaps? Getting the pair to help by force seemed more like something the wolfkin would do.

The sound of the elevator doors grinding open pulled her from her thoughts and back into frightening reality once more. Jett gritted her teeth, forcing herself not to turn around. The wolfkin had to know which room she'd been staying in. Accommodating as Hiyfa had been, Jett hardly expected the quillkin to stand up to a squad of enforcers on her behalf. She twisted and turned through several passages, heading for one of the more isolated stairways that would lead her down to the building's back exit.

She skidded to a halt at a T-junction in the hall, looking quickly left and right before she spotted the entrance to the stairwell—a thin hardwood slab with a bronze handle.

"You're surrounded, foxkin!"

Jett whipped around at the sound of the coldly familiar voice, her body coiling with tension as she saw the female wolfkin flanked by a pair of her soldiers at the far end of the hall. The enforcer started walking toward her at an insultingly easy pace.

"Enough running," she hissed. "It's over."

"I'll tell you when this is over," Jett snarled back, fury overriding her instinctive fear. "I know all about your little schemes, wolfie, and when I'm finished, the rest of the city will too."

Not wasting any more time trading verbal blows with her enemy, she bolted for the stairwell door and wrenched it open.

On the other side, she found the snarling jaws of a wolfkin lunging for her throat.