The Hunter Read Online Free

thought you two were together.”
    Colt grunted as he crumpled the page into a ball. “She might be easy on the eyes, but I’d be as likely to shack up with a mountain lion as that little blond hellcat. She’s a good thief, but you can’t trust a shifter.”
    “Then why didn’t you just shoot her?”
    “There wasn’t time,” he hedged. The fact was he’d been too damn busy trying to locate the deposit box of a deceased Hunter named Diego. It was rumored to hold a clue to a map revealing the location of one of the pieces of the Book. He hadn’t been paying attention to how short China had cut the fuse. The damn explosives to get out of the jail had blown too soon. He suspected it was a double-crossing gone wrong.
    In the end he’d climbed from the rubble before the authorities arrived and had to leave both China and the deposit box behind and move on to his next lead in finding his pa’s part of the Book. He’d had no doubt she could fend for herself, and frankly she was Darkin, so he wasn’t all that concerned in the first place. One less Darkin in the world wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “Do you think you can get him a message?”
    Marley shook his head. “His receiver isn’t working. He can send messages, but I have to telegraph him in return. I’m going to fix it next time I travel in his direction.”
    “If you telegraph him, tell him to watch his back. That China McGee is bad news and if he needs a thief, he should look elsewhere.”
    “Certainly.” Marley scooped up the bullets off the tilting tray and grabbed Colt’s hand, facing it palm upward. “Don’t forget these. I do hope they make the proper impression.”
    Colt grinned. “If you mean by impression a hole eight inches deep, then I’m betting they’ll be just fine.” He began putting them in the individual loops holding the ammunition on his gun belt. “Thanks, Marley.”
    Marley shoved his spectro-whozee-whatsit goggles back onto his forehead. “Don’t mention it. I do my best for the cause. Where are you off to next?”
    “I’m going to see a man about a mine.”
    “Still looking for the lost pieces of the Book of Legend, are you?”
    “Last year I took down a dozen supernaturals prowling around. Last month alone it was five. This month ten. It’s gettin’ worse.” For the last three years he’d been talking to every Hunter he could find, scouring every scrap of written information he could lay his hands on, to piece together the location of the different remnants of the Book of Legend.
    The Legion had become so fractured over the centuries that none of the branches—not the Hunters in Europe, nor the ones in Asia, nor those in the Southern Hemisphere—knew the true locations of all three pieces. But his latest discovery of his mother’s diary led him to believe the clue in Diego’s box wouldn’t lead him to Pa’s part of the Book, which was his main focus.
    Better to risk his neck on a sure thing than a rumor in a deposit box in the clutches of that shifter. “I don’t know how big the crack has gotten in that gate to Hell, but things are slidin’ through faster and faster. If we don’t get that Book put back together, there’s no tellin’ how long humanity’s got.”
    Marley threaded his fingers up through both sides of the cotton-like fuzz on his scalp. “I say, I didn’t realize it was as bad as all that. Perhaps you ought to take this as well.” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a corked brown bottle with no label.
    “Whiskey?”
    “Holy water. You may find you need it.”
    Colt chuckled. “You may be right. It might be pretty hard to come by in Bodie.” The saloons and houses of ill repute in Bodie outnumbered the churches by forty to one.
    “Bodie?”
    “According to what I found in Ma’s diary, that’s where the mine is.”
    “But isn’t Winchester in Bodie?”
    “Last I heard.”
    Marley nibbled thoughtfully on his bottom lip. “You’re in more trouble than I thought.”