Hinterland Book 3: The Wolf's Hunt (Hinterland Series) Read online

  She burst into the kitchen and blew past Mrs. Mitchell to the stairs. Raleigh hadn’t ascended those stairs since the fateful night she and Dax came home alone from Hinterland to find the house ransacked and Mr. Bishop, Sr.’s notebook stolen from Bishop’s wall safe.

  She bolted up the stairs with Dax on her tail. After the break-in, Mrs. Mitchell made it her personal mission to restore the house to its former condition. She went to great lengths and expense to clean everything up, replace every item of furniture, every thread of ruined carpet and curtain, and redo the wallpaper. She made the whole house as pristine as it was before the break-in. No one would ever know the state they found things when they came home.

  Raleigh blocked all that out of her mind. She couldn’t let the past distract her. She couldn’t remember Bishop standing over there under the window or him sitting in his wing-backed chair in front of the fire.

  She charged down the passage to Bishop’s office work room. Mrs. Mitchell outdid herself on this place, although she couldn’t restore it to what it was. She couldn’t make head or tail of all his papers, and she didn’t even try to replace his potions or his helmet microscope. She cleaned out the broken glass and debris. She stacked the papers on his desk and left them alone.

  Raleigh paused in the door. Dax panted behind her, and they both gazed in on this mausoleum to their fallen hero. Raleigh’s eye skipped over every inch of the place. She had no idea where to start. She would have to go through every detail of Bishop’s life, even the part from before she met him. Did she really want to do that? Did she really want to dig into Bishop’s life, going back who knew how far?

  She really had no choice. She might get lucky and find the information on Bishop’s client lying around on the top of those stacks of papers, but she held out little hope of that. Either way, she couldn’t back down on this, no matter how much it hurt. She would find out more about Bishop than she ever wanted to know, more than he ever wanted her to know.

  She crossed the room to the desk and picked up the first piece of paper. It was an invoice from the local wheelwright for repairs to the carriage out in the barn. A bold hand-scrawled across the bottom: Paid. She checked the date. The invoice was more than three years old. Raleigh chuckled.

  Dax whispered over her shoulder. “What? What did you find?”

  She turned a happy smile on him. “It’s nothing. He was a pack rat. He kept every piece of paper that ever crossed his palm. Run downstairs and bring back that basket from the kitchen hearth. Unless I’m mistaken, we can throw out most of this and make our lives a lot easier.”

  While he did as she asked, she set the invoice on Bishop’s chair and picked up the next piece of paper. It was a letter from the Perdue United Cab Service, dated more than twenty years ago.

  Dear Sir

  Thank you for your inquiry into the accident dated August 17, 1753. Unfortunately, our service no longer employs the driver involved in that particular accident. The nature of the accident rendered him unable to work, and he retired to his brother’s farm near Henleyville. He informed our service he never intended to drive for a living after his unattended coach caused the death of an unsuspecting bystander. Thank you once again, and please inform us if we can assist your inquiry further.

  Kind wishes, Ronald Forsythe

  Perdue United Cab Service

  Perdue, Maryland

  Raleigh frowned down at the paper in her hand. Why would Bishop keep this letter for so long? Only one explanation made sense. The accident in question occurred when Bishop was a young man. It involved a coach killing an unsuspecting bystander.

  The story Bishop told her of his father’s death came back to her. Bishop’s father, Mr. Bishop, Sr., worked as a slayer before his death. He died crossing the street when a coach raced out of control and trampled him in the street.

  So Bishop wrote to the Cab Service to locate the driver of the coach. Did he find him? The letter gave no indication. His father’s death haunted Bishop for the rest of his career. He never found out for sure if his father’s death was an accident or murder.

  Raleigh turned around to set the paper on the chair along with the invoice, but she hesitated at the last moment. Her hand hung in mid-air. Should she get rid of this relic, too? Bishop thought it was important enough to keep, so maybe she should, too.

  She set it in a different location on another corner of the desk. She picked up the next sheet. It was a lift of ingredients for one of Bishop’s potions. Raleigh read down the list of ingredients.

  Idunt hair oil

  Bueh recnibetl

  Ruoib brain, well mashed, 7 parts per quart

  Eodhea toewrerq

  Raleigh laughed to herself. She didn’t recognize half the words on that list, but maybe this recipe would come in handy someday. She put that on top of the letter from the Cab Service.

  Dax came back and set the basket next to Raleigh’s feet. She dropped the invoice into it, along with a bill for delivery of seven cartloads of coal from five years before. The next ten papers, she discarded along with the bill.

  She smiled up at Dax. “Feel free to help out.”

  He stared down at the desk with wide eyes and shook his head. “I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “Most of this you can’t go wrong with, and if you think there’s the slightest chance anybody would want to keep it, put it over here.”

  Dax approached the next stack of paper. He picked up the first sheet and read it over. Then he laughed and slid it into the basket. “You’re right.”

  She picked up the next leaf. She scanned it. It was another list of items invoiced from a shop, dated eighteen months prior. She almost threw that out, too, when her eye fell on some of the items. Splatter grenades, cube lasers, cloak of invisibility.

  Her eye skipped to the top of the sheet. She read a single word: Pringle. She put the bill on the keep pile. She would love to talk to Pringle right about now. He must know a lot more about what Bishop was working on than just about anybody else in Hinterland.

  She went through another ten sheets of useless rubbish before she found another letter.

  My dear Knox

  Your correspondence always gives me so much pleasure I don’t know how I ever survived from one letter to the next. You know I would love to see you again, and it pains me that you chose to remain aloof from me. I would give anything to explain why I made the decision to break off our engagement, but I now believe I am doing the best thing for both of us by keeping that information to myself. I am now and shall always be your fervent supporter and ally. We worked together for many years on countless jobs, and I’m sure we shall continue to do so into the future. We can be partners and allies without getting married, and I shall always love you as much as I ever did.

  I hope to see you again very soon. I am and always shall be,

  Sincerely yours,

  Angela Cross

  Raleigh put the letter on the keep pile, but her fingers burned from touching it. She shouldn’t have read it. She shouldn’t have peeked in on Bishop and Angela’s private affairs. So they weren’t just involved with each other, but actually engaged to be married when she broke it off. Why?

  Raleigh would never find out the truth, and she didn’t want to. On the other hand, Angela worked with Bishop for years. Angela was a highly placed Guildsman of the Martial Arts and a slayer in her own right. She worked for Soto doing God knows what. Maybe she knew something Raleigh could use to find Bishop’s client. She might even know something about his father’s death.

  Dax and Raleigh worked the rest of the day to sort through Bishop’s papers. They discarded half the papers on his desk, but they found nothing directly stating who he was working for.

  Raleigh sighed. “Oh, well. I wasn’t really expecting to find anything.”

  Dax nodded toward the wall safe. It still stood open the way they found it. “What about that?”

  “What about it?”


  “Aren’t you going to go through it? Maybe there’s something in it.”

  Raleigh put out her hand and plucked the contents out of the safe. She waved it in the air. “There’s nothing here. There’s the folder of customers from the blue mussel farm, and there’s the deed to this house and some other properties in Bishop’s family. They won’t help us.”

  “What about the blue mussels?” Dax asked. “We need some more anyways. We could get them from the farm instead of the market.”

  Raleigh shook her head and slid the papers back into the safe. She didn’t close the door. She couldn’t unlock it again if she did. She didn’t have the combination.

  “The market is closer, and since we won’t have the twen much longer, there’s no sense buying more than we need. We can get a small amount from the market and that will be the end of it.” She turned away. “We better get downstairs. It’s suppertime, and Mrs. Mitchell will go on the warpath if we’re late.”

  Chapter 3

  Dax and Raleigh went back downstairs. They found Mrs. Mitchell dishing up the evening meal into wooden bowls on the kitchen table. The fire blazed on the hearth and made the kitchen comfortable.

  Dax closed and bolted the outer door against the night falling outside. The three of them took their places and started eating. Dax glanced up and sucked his spoon. He cocked his head and pointed it at Raleigh. “Did you ever think of going back to the Guild of Martial Arts?”

  Raleigh’s head shot up. The sound of a human voice during a meal in this room clanged against her ear, but when she saw his blue eyes sparkling across the table, her surprise faded. “No, I never thought of it. Why do you ask?”

  He took another bite of his food. “Think about it. Your brother set off that explosion for a reason. He was a member of the Guild, and he and the other Guildsmen sure acted like they knew what they were doing. None of the other Guildsmen tried to stop him. He must have been acting under orders from the Guild, or else they approved of what he was doing.”

  Raleigh blinked across the table. “What are you saying?”

  “Just think about it for a second. He wanted to destroy the building, but he never intended to destroy the Guild itself. They must have reformed somewhere else after they fled the building.”

  Raleigh looked sideways to see Mrs. Mitchell glaring back and forth at Raleigh and Dax with her fierce eyes. She didn’t want anybody disturbing the peace of her shrine to Bishop’s memory. Now here was Dax, not only speaking at table, but discussing work like Bishop never died in the first place.

  Dax stuck his spoon in his bowl. “Your brother couldn’t have destroyed the building to stop you taking the twen. He and the other Guildsmen saw us take it. He knew you had it in your shirt pocket. He destroyed the building to stop the hammaslahti.”

  Raleigh swallowed hard. For the first time since coming back from Hinterland, she experienced the old wonder and amazement at Dax and his capabilities. Maybe he went into a grief stupor the way she did when they lost Bishop. Unlike her, he never stopped thinking. His mind still searched for a way to grapple with this situation.

  “The Guild of Martial Arts is still operating somewhere,” he said. “The cabal is still looking for the twen, so maybe the best way to find the cabal is to find the Guild. There must be a lot of people who know where they reformed.”

  Raleigh looked down at her bowl. “I’m sure there are, but the cabal wouldn’t have hired Bishop to find the twen.”

  “Why not? Dax asked.

  Raleigh cocked her head. “What did you say?”

  “I said, why not? Why wouldn’t the cabal hire Bishop to find the twen?”

  “Because they already hired Soto to find it.”

  “They could still have hired Bishop.”

  Raleigh stared at this man she used to consider a boy. The longer he talked, the more she realized she didn’t know the first thing about him. She had no idea what he was capable of. He could be a hundred times more intelligent than she was.

  Why didn’t she think of this before? The cabal could have hedged its bets by hiring, not only Soto to acquire the twen, but Bishop, too. Soto died in fear of his life from someone who hired him. He gave his most sensitive papers into the care of his brother Fuki.

  That suspicion would have gone both ways. The cabal would have sensed Soto turning against them. They would want to stack the deck in their favor to get their hands on the twen if Soto screwed them over.

  Soto wound up dead in the forest with the cabal’s emblem seared into his chest. That would appear to indicate he crossed them and got killed, exactly the way he feared he would.

  Raleigh shook those thoughts out of her head. “Running after the Guild of Martial Arts won’t get us any closer to handing over the twen. Tomorrow we’ll go through the rest of Bishop’s papers, and then we’ll go to the market to get the mussels.”

  Dax lowered his eyes. He didn’t say, “Yes, Sir,” to her the way he would have to Bishop, but he might as well have. She was his senior. If she said no, he had to go along with it.

  They finished the meal in silence, much to Mrs. Mitchell’s relief, but something changed at that table. The house didn’t die with Bishop. They were back at work.

  After supper, Dax oiled his boots in front of the kitchen fire the way he always did. He wore Bishop’s old suit and his gun belts, just like any slayer, but he kept to the servants’ quarters like nothing ever changed for him. He didn’t look right in those clothes. He was too big for the servants’ quarters and the kitchen now. He belonged somewhere bigger, somewhere that matched his size and strength. He belonged upstairs.

  Raleigh tuned her crossbow, and when she finished, she hung it by the kitchen door with her blade. She went down to the armory and got herself several sets of ammunition to replace the rounds she spent that morning during training.

  When she returned, she padded down the hall toward her old room, but she paused outside the door when she met Dax coming the other way. He murmured to her under his breath. “Listen. I didn’t mean to step out of line before by suggesting what you ought to do. I won’t do it again.”

  “That’s all right,” she told him. “I’m always happy to take your suggestions. You’re not Bishop’s errand boy anymore. You might be my apprentice, but you’re more like my partner now. You have every right to say what we ought to do. I’m sure you can think of a decent plan as well as I can, if not better.”

  He dropped his eyes one more time before glancing back up at her face. “Do you think….Raleigh….?”

  She waited for him to say something else. “You should go to bed, Dax. It’s late, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover tomorrow.”

  He looked down at her mouth. “I was just thinking….you know….now that Bishop is gone….”

  She touched his arm. “I know you worshiped Bishop. I know you’re hurting as much as I am.”

  His eyes glided sideways. Then he came back to studying her face. “I only wish there was something I could do, you know? I wish I could be that to you, but I never can. I can never be the man he was.”

  She couldn’t see him hurting and needy like this. Without thinking, she threw her arms around him and hugged him. “It’s all right. You’re already doing more than anybody could. You’re every inch the man he was, and you’ve done more than you can know to help me. You’re the best thing I could hope for in a disaster like this.”

  She started to let him go, but his arms tightened around her and held her. He looked into her face from inches away, and his breath warmed her skin. Quick as a flash, he darted in and kissed her.

  Raleigh kissed him back, but she made it a quick, sisterly kiss before she moved back. Her cheeks flushed. She had to get away from him before this turned into something quite different. “Anyway, it’s bedtime.”

  He nodded toward the servants’ quarters. “Are you coming?”

  She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward her old room. “I’ll just s
ay good night to Bishop, and then I’ll be along.”

  He regarded her for another moment. Whatever she and Dax could have been to each other, they could never be now. Bishop was still alive and well, blocking them from each other even more, now that he was dead.

  Raleigh smiled up at Dax and squeezed his hand. She nodded to encourage him down the hall while she retreated to the bedroom door. She loved Dax more than ever now. She relied on him. She would have been utterly lost in a sea of anguish without him.

  At least she shared this grief with someone. Bishop hovered around all their dealings. He lingered around every corner and in every room. No one but Dax could truly understand that, and no one but Dax would want Bishop to linger. Neither he nor Raleigh wanted to let Bishop go, even as a ghost.

  Raleigh waited in the hall until Dax passed out of sight toward the servants’ quarters. She couldn’t let anyone see this, not even Dax. She had to endure this moment alone. She opened the bedroom door, slipped inside, and shut the door behind her.

  Chapter 4

  Mrs. Mitchell kept Raleigh’s old bedroom as neat and fresh as ever, just like the rest of the house. She even put Raleigh’s clean clothes in here. Raleigh had to come and collect them when she wanted to change.

  Raleigh strolled into the room, and the old shade of Bishop’s presence filled her the way it always did. He was still with her. He would never leave her alone. He overflowed out of her heart and soul so she couldn’t love him enough.

  She meandered across the foot of the bed. She trailed her fingers over the satin coverlet. Weeks of washing and airing stripped Bishop’s smell from the sheets and pillow covers, but nothing could remove his essence from that bed. That bed would always breathe Bishop into her skin. He filled her up whenever she came near it.

  She sensed again his smooth skin stretched over his muscles, his eyes studying her while they kissed, his love occupying her to her deepest limits. Those sheets caressed her skin the way his hands touched her.