He glided through her memories, chasing the tendrils of darkness. Tendrils? Ropes, rather. Thick cables that moored her consciousness. Envy and bitterness and paranoia and hatred--the four guy ropes of her innermost self, holding the rest in place.
He followed these cables to a childhood memory shrouded in shadow, relegated to the drawer where humans shove things they'd rather forget and tell themselves something never really happened, not like that, perhaps not at all, but simply as a remembered scene from a novel or movie.
This memory was real, though, whatever the woman might tell herself. He watched it unfold through her eyes, and as she dove into a swimming pool he caught a glimpse of her ten-year-old self reflected in the water. She dove under and stayed as long as she could. When she surfaced, gasping, a young boy called to her. She ignored him. He called again, his voice taking on a whine, and from some distant place a woman yelled for the girl to look after her brother. Except the girl didn't want to look after him. She was sick and tired of looking after him. It used to be just her and her mother, until her stepfather came, and then the boy, and now everything was different. Everything.
Her brother whined again, said Mommy promised they would play together in the pool. The girl tried to ignore him, but his whining droned like a mosquito in her head.
"You want to play?" she said finally, turning on him, and his chubby face lit up. He was too stupid to even notice how angry she was. Too selfish to care.
"I'll be a shark," she said. "You have to get away from me."
She dove under and pretended to snatch his feet as he kicked. He squealed and laughed and splashed, and the patio door squealed shut, their mother going inside.
The girl kept playing just long enough to be sure their mother wasn't coming right back out. Then she dove, and this time she grabbed one chubby foot and yanked him under the water.
The Huntsman surfaced from her memories as she was saying, ". . . threatening me? The business is finally successful--due to my hard work--and now he swans in and decides he wants to play a role. What he really wants is to steal it from me."
Ah, some things never change, do they? the Huntsman thought. If it isn't your little brother, it's your ex-husband or your business partner. Everyone else is to blame for your unhappiness. But you show them, don't you? Such a dull and ordinary exterior hiding such a dark and twisted soul. No one suspects a thing. But I do. There has been a miscarriage of justice here. I will fix that. It is my job to fix that.
They left the cafe, strolling along the crowded city street, the dog sticking to its master's opposite side and staying as far from the Huntsman as it could manage. The beast sensed danger there, danger and threat. The woman just kept talking.
"And now he wants me to go to Chicago," she said. "Have you ever been there? It's an absolute shithole."
She didn't pause for the Huntsman to answer, but on this point, he would have agreed. Even the mention of that city made his temper rise, darkness swirling, and the dog whined, ducking its owner's absent pat.
Chicago. That was where he'd lost his hound.
No, not lost. She had been stolen from him. The second hound he'd had snatched away. His Cwn Annwn pack had taken the first when it banished him. Cast him out with neither hound nor steed, claiming the beasts wanted nothing to do with him.
"No?" he'd said. "Bring them to me, and let them choose."
"Let you infect them, you mean. Destroy them as you have destroyed yourself. You are lucky we let you leave with your life."
Luck? Is that what this was? Banished from his pack, stripped of his hound, his horse, his brothers. This was not luck. It was a curse. And his crime? He had dared question the boundaries of his duties as a Huntsman. Question the restrictions that kept them from truly fulfilling their calling.
The job of the Cwn Annwn was the taking of souls. The execution of those who themselves took lives. Yet they were shackled by one incredible restriction: they could claim only the souls of those who killed fae or humans with fae blood. They might look into a human's eyes and see the blood of a thousand on his hands, yet if none of that blood was fae, the transgressor could not be touched.
We protect the fae. We seek justice for the fae. Humans must seek it for themselves. That is not our place.
It was a constraint that made Cwn Annwn cry out at night, reliving the horrors they'd seen in human eyes, unable to exact justice for the dead.
Except they could. There was no cosmic force actually stopping them. Just a rule. An old and outdated rule.
So the Huntsman had broken it. Quietly and on his own, without hound or steed, he had cleaned the world of human filth. His pack leader knew it. Knew and turned a blind eye because he understood that the Huntsman acted righteously.
And then . . .
Then came the day when others found out, when his leader feigned shock and horror, banished him and kept his hound.
The Huntsman had found another cwn, though. A broken hound. A fellow outcast. He'd nursed her to health only to have her stolen from him in Chicago. By a human girl, no less.
No, not entirely a girl. That helped soothe the memory. His hound had been taken by an incarnation of Matilda of the Hunt and given to her consort, Arawn, lord of the Otherworld.
Either way, his hound had been stolen, and the memory still burned.
He needed a new hound. And he was working on that right now. He would take a hound and see justice executed upon this monstrous woman who walked at his side, blathering about her business partner.
"It's not fair," he said, and she stopped short and looked at him. "What he's doing to you, how he's treating you, it isn't fair. You built a business, and then he slides in and tries to steal it from under you."