“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I am. It says so right here.”
She zipped down her utility vest just far enough for me to see the text on the t-shirt below. It read: I am always right.
I laughed out loud. “Well, I guess that settles that.”
She nodded at me. “It most certainly does.”
“Well, since you know everything, how about telling me why all these bounty hunters are marching into our town?”
“Bounty hunters like to talk big and make a scene, Leda. You know that.”
I did know that actually. After all, I used to be one of them.
“I mean, why have they come here?” I said.
Her forehead crinkled in confusion. “You know why they’re here.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask, Calli. It’s too early in the morning to play cute.”
“Well, word on the Grapevine is they’re all here to hunt down the same person.”
The Grapevine was the world’s busiest bounty hunter message board.
“The bounty must be a big one,” I commented.
“One million dollars.”
“Yikes, that’s a lot of money for one person. Who can even afford a bounty like that?”
“You can, apparently.”
“I can?”
“The bounty was issued by Leda Pandora of the Legion of Angels.”
I frowned. “I don’t remember ever issuing this bounty.”
“The mark is Carver Spellsword.”
Ohhh. It was all starting to make sense now. I had told Alec to use any Legion resources he needed to find Carver Spellsword. And money was one of the Legion’s many resources. I had to admit I appreciated Alec’s ingenuity. I’d been trying so hard to play by the Legion’s rules and be a proper angel that I hadn’t considered bringing in the bounty hunters. It was a brilliant idea. Bounty hunters excelled at finding people who didn’t want to be found.
“I think one of my guys issued the bounty,” I told Calli.
“As long as you still pay in the end, I don’t care who issued it.”
“You are joining the hunt for Spellsword?”
“Why not?”
“He’s a dark angel. You don’t go after regular supernaturals, let alone ones with hell’s power bursting from their fingertips.”
“Generally, no,” she agreed. “But a million dollars is quite a lot of money.”
It sure was. I just hoped Nyx wouldn’t scold me when the time came for the Legion to pay up.
“Here comes the competition,” Calli declared.
The street was so packed with people that the bounty hunters in their vehicles were moving slower than they could have walked. At the head of the bunch was a woman riding a motorcycle. She was dressed in a sand-colored wrapped tunic and a pair of brown leather boots over beige leggings. On her back, she wore a sword with a long, curved blade.
The hunter’s pale blonde hair was braided into a long plait. The end almost brushed against the motorcycle seat. I shook my head at her lack of helmet. The bounty-hunting business attracted the sort of person who liked to dance with danger, and this hunter’s bright blue eyes definitely sparkled with a kind of wild recklessness. As I watched her drive past us, I felt like there was something very familiar about her, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen her before.
“Who’s that?” I asked Calli.
“Her name is Aerilyn. I heard she’s done a few jobs in the west over the years.”
“And here?”
“I don’t think she’s been out here before. Why?”
“She looks familiar. I was hoping you could tell me where I might have seen her before, perhaps back when I was working with you.”
Calli shook her head. “Sorry, no. Actually, I don’t know much about Aerilyn except her name. Might be a stage name, though. I’ve never heard her last name.”
Some bounty hunters had stage names, and those were usually a single name. Like Jinx, my least favorite bounty hunter ever.
The next vehicle in line was a convertible that looked so old, it might have come from the era before the monsters took over the Earth. The little car had been repainted in flashy, bright red. The top was down at the moment, giving me a clear view of the person behind the wheel.
It was Gypsy, the bounty hunter I’d met in Beyond yesterday. Today, she was wearing a pair of big sunglasses and a wide grin as she waved at the cheering crowd.
“Everyone seems much happier with the bounty hunters than they’ve been with me lately,” I commented to Calli.
“Don’t take it personally, Leda. This isn’t about you.”
“That isn’t about me?”
Several people in the crowd were carrying handmade signs. One of them read, ‘Purgatory doesn’t need a new tyrant’. Another read, ‘Go home, Leda Pandora, Angel of False Promises’.
“Things are tense right now.” Calli frowned at the signs. “And some people are incurably stupid. ‘Go home’, they say?” Fury burned in her eyes. “This is your home. You grew up here. They know that.”
“I think they’ve forgotten,” I told her. “When I was made an angel, I became someone else entirely to them.”
“Those who truly know you, know you’re still the same old Leda.”
I hoped she was right, but lately I’d started having my doubts.
“Who are they?” I asked, drawing Calli’s attention to the next bounty hunters.
There were two of them in the boxy white truck with all its windows rolled open and the top folded down.
“That’s Gemini and her husband Sagittarius,” Calli told me.
Those were definitely stage names.
“They’re both very experienced,” she continued. “Gemini was already working at the League when I joined, but she left a few years before I did to go independent. She started a business with Sagittarius, and they’ve worked every job together since. Before that, I believe Sagittarius was a contractor, doing research for the paranormal soldiers.”
Gemini had dark red hair, about chin length. Sagittarius had short white hair and a matching beard. Both of them wore the same fitted black t-shirt and brown sunhat. In fact, they were dressed identically, right down to the placement of the tiny silver gadgets on their black armbands. So they were one of those couples who’d been together so long that they even dressed alike.
“They’re good with tech,” said Calli. “Whether that means designing it or stealing it so they can reverse-engineer it.”
The final bounty hunter in the procession required no introduction. I knew him. Back when I’d worked in Purgatory as a bounty hunter, Nolan Ash had been a paranormal soldier stationed here. Now I was an angel, and he was a bounty hunter. Funny the twists and turns people’s lives took.
Like Aerilyn, Nolan was riding a motorcycle into town. The twenty-four-year-old hunter was built like the soldier he’d once been. He had spiky black hair and dark brown eyes that looked too wise for his years. He was dressed entirely in black, just like a paranormal soldier. Clearly, he hadn’t put that part of his life entirely behind him.
“Nolan joined the League,” Calli told me.
The League was the world’s largest bounty-hunting company. Working for them guaranteed you a decent salary and a lot more prestige than independent bounty hunters enjoyed. The problem was you didn’t have much choice of what assignments you got.