Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-10-21 18:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | rhiannon lee |
Flying Solo
Who: Rhiannon
What: A very brief hunting trip
When: Present, Afternoon
Where: San Bernardino, CA
Rating/Warnings: Low (Language)
Rhiannon: ‘Where are you?’
She hit send on the text message and resumed her slow pacing of the parking lot outside the D.J. coffee shop. The address was correct: 265 E. 40th Street. It was a dated strip mall with a sixty-year-old diner sandwiched between a cleaners’ and a collectibles shop. The palm trees seemed to have caught whatever disease was killing off this part of town. They were half-dead and bare to the upper reaches. Rhiannon’s contact - Kelly, a retired hunter with a bad back who had traded in her weapons to be a middleman - had picked the location, but she was half an hour late.
Next to her, a car rumbled to life. Rhiannon listened to its loud muffler. The driver lit a cigarette, flipped his sun visor, and pulled out of his spot. She wandered into it and sat down on the curb, stretching her legs out on the warm pavement. She thought about lighting a cigarette and remembered they were in her car back at the hotel, and she was quitting, damnit. When her phone buzzed a few minutes later, Rhiannon could have predicted the gist of the text before she even read it.
Kelly: ‘Cancel.’
“Shit.”
Cancel. A meeting that had been on the books for days, a whole host of rearranged shifts at the gym, a three-hour drive from Searchlight to San Bernardino, and just ‘cancel’? The hunter brought the device to her forehead and tapped it, the corner of her case a painful, repetitive exercise in letting a small action go a long way. Like a valve letting off steam rather than allowing a tank to explode. It was the third cancellation since the summer, too many to be coincidental.
Rhiannon took a breath and thumbed a text back: ‘Did the vampires stake themselves?’ From every indication, there was a nest of them in a house in Carousel, gorging themselves on unsuspecting neighbors.
She watched as this particular contact tried to figure out what to text back. Maybe nothing, like the first one had done. Maybe a vague excuse about the threat leaving town, like the second.
Kelly: ‘Sean took care of the nest last night.’
“Motherfucking--!” Rhiannon climbed to her feet and looked around the parking lot. She walked to each of the parked cars in turn, scanning the empty seats for any sign of her uncle. When that was a dead end, she went back into the diner to see if she’d somehow missed that dark head of hair among the people eating scrambled eggs at four o’clock in the afternoon. There was no sign of him, and no sign of her cousin Rob.
She planted her palm against the diner door and headed back out into the heat of the afternoon, her ring clanking on the glass. If Sean wanted to get back at her, this was a great way to hit her where it hurt: not the wallet, but by cutting off her network, one link at a time. Rhiannon knew that’s what this was, because she’d seen the payout for the job and it wasn’t enough to cover food, hotel, and gas from Chicago to California. Sean lost money coming here.
Hunting contracts weren’t always well bankrolled. In her world, it went like this: an area had a problem (vampire, were, hybrid, whatever). Word got out about mysterious deaths or disappearances. Hunters got wind of it, the network was tapped, and a hunter (or a group of them) went in and took care of it before things got out of hand. Money was an afterthought. It was barely a per diem, unless a town happened to have a generous benefactor (everybody’s favorite banker/ oil baron/ real estate tycoon grandpa). If the payout was big, Rhiannon had to ask herself why. Usually it meant that somebody (human or not, individual or entity) wanted an artifact, an undisputed piece of land, an opportunity to interrogate or experiment on somebody, better neighborhood stats, or someone out of the way. Whatever it was, Rhiannon had to settle that with her conscience before she took the cash.
That was why cheap was better, if not for the Corrigans, then for her. She had taken this contract because she loved to hunt. It was supposed to take her outside of her routine, challenge her, let her do something more than drift from one random Nevada staking to the next. In the months since she’d cut herself off from Sean and Rob, Rhiannon had needed these lifelines to the bigger picture of hunting to keep her from feeling rudderless
That was what Sean wanted to take from her, and he was doing a bang-up job of it. Rhiannon was so pissed she could scream. If she’d found her uncle in the diner parking lot, she would have thrown herself at him, fists flying. But there was nothing to do except go back to her motel, pack up her car, and check out early. Rhiannon made quick work of a couple of city blocks, using the walk to talk herself out of driving to Chicago to set his new house on fire.
She was halfway to Searchlight, coming out of a dead zone, when she got Sean’s text message.
‘See what happens when you fly solo?’