In the darkness of his lair, the predator licked his wounds alone.
He had bound his left arm as best he could, stemming the bleeding with paper towels and gaffer tape wound tight, but there was nothing that he could do about his damaged pride. Samir cursed himself for not noticing the hidden man, furious to have allowed complacency to dull his edge. There had once been a time when he had nothing to fear out on the hunt, the apex hunter in this urban terrain, but now an usurper had somehow made him into prey. He would not let it happen again.
Samir had grown up in this war. It had claimed his parents and replaced them, raising him from the day he had left school until his emergence as an adult carnivore, the most trusted killer in the separatist militia. His instincts had been honed by years of fear, by the constant threat of strike and counter-strike by state forces and rival rebel gangs alike; Samir had claimed several dozen lives himself, and witnessed several dozen ways to die. Having ambushed many naive enemies, he knew better than most that every shadow could harbour his foes, and yet today the hidden man had caught him all the same.
Some instincts were still fresh, and Samir had managed to turn and flee as the gun fired: the bullet had clearly been aiming for his heart, but it had torn a path through a bicep instead. Pain and blood are a small price to pay for life. He would have to finish the job later, and a damaged arm would make for a much harder kill, but at least he would be sharper now; if complacency had followed his dominance, it had been shed with the half pint of blood. He would never be caught lax again.
"Hello Samir," said the teenager in his room.
Impossible, the killer's mind replied, but not before his instincts had responded first. Samir snatched up the gun he had kept close, but he saw that the boy held no weapons of his own. The intruder's hands were empty; he only carried a digital clock under his arm, the current date and time displayed. A bomb? Samir could see no fuse or room for explosives, but he stepped backwards out of natural caution, as if a few more feet of air could stop a calculated blast.
Once his racing mind caught up with his reactions, he considered that such a blow was unlikely to come. If the teenager had wanted to kill him, he could have done so when he'd first arrived; Samir had been oblivious to his visitor, and might have died before he realised he wasn't alone. Instead, the boy had announced his presence, choosing to greet a man he could have shot down just as easily. Not an assassin. The boy looked too soft to have killed, although Samir had claimed his own first blood at a similar age. What, then?, he wondered. A messenger?
"Who are you?" he demanded, his gun arm still thankfully holding firm. "Where did you come from?"
The latter question seemed more pressing than the first. Whatever the boy was, Samir had somehow failed to see him coming; unless he proved to be a ghost, that would be a source of worry in itself. A second surprise, this one in the house he knew best of them all, told Samir that his instincts had begun to fail. Years of vigilance, and then two lapses in one day. If that was the case, in this most deadly line of work, his death would surely follow soon.
Samir was not ready to die. He was still young, and he had only recently clawed his way to the top of this violent world. Excuses flooded through his brain, justifications for him to cling to and convince himself he was still fit to fight; perhaps the blood loss had temporarily dulled his mind, and that the second lapse was just an effect of the first, or perhaps he was distracted by the pain.
Even then, Samir was far from unconscious, and the boy must still have used exceptional stealth to reach him silently. Such an ability was rare, and many lifelong killers had failed in their comparable attempts; the assassin knew of one man with the aptitude required, but his name was Samir and he lived in this house. He had never tried to sneak up on himself.
