"Tea and rum, if you've got either," David Valentine said, dripping from head to foot on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. His coat trapped the wet of his shirt better than it kept the rain out.
"Got both, Coastie."
"The hotter, the better," he said, pulling his hand through his slick hair again to get it out of his eyes. The gesture gave him a chance to look at the corner table. A silent mental alarm had tripped a switch in his nervous system, warming him better than any fire. Details stood out: florid printing on the bar bottle labels, the meshed ranks of gray hair on the barman's arms, a blemish on a prostitute's neck, footsteps muffled by the sawdust scattered on the floor, the rancid smell out of a spittoon.
The officer leaned across the corner table to speak to his men. Valentine trembled as his mind raced.
"You cold, Marine?" a whore asked, brushing a wet lock of hair behind his ear. Gold lame and blond hair covered what little skin she didn't have on display. "I got a way-"
She'd been attracted by the uniform. Ironic, because its thick, high-quality fabric and solid brass buttons repulsed him every time he put it on. Whenever he looked at himself in a mirror, he saw the Enemy looking back out of his own eyes.
"Some other time, perhaps." Valentine turned away from her.
His conscience hammered at him until his eyes shone wet with more than rain. Fool! Lazy, irresponsible fool! Over a year's worth of preparation, service to the Kurian Order under a false name, all turned to shit and flushed. Just because he'd been tired and felt like coming in out of the weather.
Valentine racked his brain for the name, picturing the hawkish face in the hammock that summer in the Yazoo Delta during his training in Free Territory. Lewand Alistar, a freshly invoked Wolf six years ago and posted missing, presumed dead. So the Reapers hadn't killed him after all. Perhaps he had been captured and turned; perhaps he had been planted in Southern Command as a spy who saw his chance to get away clean. Whatever put him in a Carbineer's uniform in New Orleans was immaterial. The fact remained that mutual recognition occurred.
Valentine remembered Alistar as a quick-witted, active comrade. A hot mug of spiked tea arrived, and Alistar chose that moment to rise and take up his coat. Valentine blew into the steaming crockery. Alistar's companions shifted their chairs around. They pretended to watch the barmaids and hookers, but all three heads were pointed at Valentine.
Valentine heard Alistar move behind him. He readied himself to turn and fight, should the footsteps approach. But the Quisling left the Easy Street in a hurry. Typical of Alistar-not heroic but smart. No wonder he wore a major's cluster in the Kurian Zone.
Valentine needed to get out of the bar, too, without being impeded by Alistar's comrades, who he guessed had been ordered to keep him from leaving. He reached into his pocket, wadded a ball of money in his hand. He raised his mug in a come-hither toast to the whore who had approached him.
"Interested in a little fun and a lot of money?" he asked, his rough voice low.
"Always," she said, smiling at him with a decent, if tobacco stained, set of teeth behind compound layers of lipstick. "My name's Agri. Like as in agreeable to anything."
Valentine thrust the money into her shirt, pretending to feel her up. "Glad to hear it. There's a hundred and then some, Agri. Which girl here rubs you the wrong way?"
"Huh?" she said.
"Quick, or a man. Who don't you like here?"
She dropped the attitude at the quiet urgency in his voice. "Umm, there's Star," the woman said, leaning out to look around Valentine's wide shoulder. "The head of hair with gold earrings. She's always breaking in and screwing my work up."
He followed her gaze. "Which one is she, in the pink?" he asked, spotting a prostitute with a mass of wavy hair framing her face like a lion's mane. "Okay, I'm going to go talk to her. I want you to start a fight, fast."
"And that's all I gotta do?"
"Make as big a scene as you can. Yes, that's all."
"Shit, Marine, I'd do that for free."
Valentine turned away from her and moved to the darker woman in a hot pink half-top. "I've heard you're quite a woman," Valentine said, raising an eyebrow suggestively. The whore cocked her head and smiled welcomingly.
"That's my up, you bitch!" his paid prostitute shrieked.
Noisy, even better, Valentine thought.
Star reacted with a speed that would have done credit to many of Valentine's former comrades in the Wolves. She planted herself, lowered her hips, and spread her arms.
The two women fell to the floor, fighting bobcats spitting and hissing at each other. A ring of hooting barflies formed around the combatants. Valentine backed through the crowd, snatched a hat off of an unattended table, and moved out the door before any of Alistar's soldiers had a chance to push through the crowd to guard the exit.
The conditions could hardly be worse for tracking a smart man in the crowded-and dangerous, thanks to prowling Reapers-city with a two-minute head start. Night, rain, and the rickshaw-cluttered streets all conspired to hide his quarry. Visibility nil-the big bosses never bothered much with public lighting. Most men would not have had a chance.
David Valentine was not most men. He was a Cat, one of the select specimens of humanity called Hunters trained by the Lifeweavers to fight against the abominations of their vampiric brethren, the Kur. The Kur controlled most of the planet, and the regions that remained outside their grasp, like Valentine's adopted home in the Ozarks and Ouachitas, owed much of their freedom to the sacrifices of the Hunters.
The Hunters, outnumbered and weak compared with the Reapers and the other creations of the Kur, relied on enhanced senses, physical ability, and tight mental discipline. The last was of paramount importance. The Reapers, the Praetorian Guard of Kur, tracked human prey by reading lifesign, psychic auras sent out by sentient beings.