Elite: A Hunter novel by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

mountains….” Then he blinked. “I wonder if you got letters too?”
    I didn’t mention that I could get letters anytime I wanted them now. Bya had been taking notes for me to my Masters and back. But that was just my Masters.
    “Maybe I did. I haven’t been back to my rooms yet.” Now I did want to get back there, and not because I was hiding from the storm.
    “Don’t let me keep you. I was reading mine and I’m only halfway through them.” He smiled and ducked his head and blushed a little, which let me know he’d had more than one from his girl.
    “Jessie?” I asked. “That’s her name, right?”
    “It is.” Now he looked awkward, like he was a tweener or teener in the throes of a first crush. Which I guess would be normal for his people, since they pick a one-and-only, if they get to pick and not get arranged marriages. So he’d never flirted or experimented the way my people did. It was cute, actually, the way he blushed on and off. He had it really bad for this girl.
    “Thanks for letting me know about the letters!” I said, and gave him a little two-fingered salute as I turned to go.
    “Thanks for bringing me pizza!” he called after me.
    I headed down the halls, which normally were empty but now had the occasional person in them, mostly people in the staff uniforms. Sure enough, when I opened the door to my rooms, there was an open box full of envelopes on the little table next to the sofa.
    Now more than ever I was glad I wasn’t under that intense camera scrutiny that the non-Elite Hunters were. My reaction to word from home wasn’t anyone’s business but my own.
    There was a big stack of letters from my Masters, using just their names and with the return address being Anston’s Well rather than the Monastery. The ones on the top were all from Master Kedo, and I plopped down on the bed and tore open the first one.
    The letters were cryptic, but just in how he was coding things about Hunting, as if he and the others were doing it the hard way, the way that Apex thought they were Hunting, with guns and traps and explosives, instead of with Hounds and magic. Unlike the messages he sent back with Bya, he also took the time to just catch me up on ordinary things happening at the Monastery and with the other Hunters and Hunters-in-training there.
    That was good. Not so good were letters from Lady Rhiannon and Ivor Thorson, a couple of the other Masters, basically advising me that some of the people down in Anston’s Well and other villages were…not impressed with what I was doing. Apparently, the settlements and villages that had receivers had been getting the four hours of my channel every day by burst-cast—I guess they did that with every Hunter that hadn’t come out of Apex: sent their channel stuff back via burst-cast so people could see how their local hero was doing. And there were people who thought I was getting a swelled head and were not shy about saying so.
    Ivor and Rhiannon weren’t saying that they thought I had a big ego. In fact, they said it was a good thing that I was Elite now because there wasn’t as much coming back via burst-cast to give people gossip fodder, and when there was something, I was always part of a bigger team. But they did warn me that some folks I’d thought were friends were…turning out to be…not. That those people were spreading all kinds of gossip about how I was getting above myself.
    Honestly, it gave me a real sick feeling in my stomach to read that and the names of people I thought I trusted, because how could I ever counter that? It wasn’t as if I could go home and show them that I hadn’t changed, that I wasn’t wallowing in all that luxury and fame they were seeing, and thinking I was better than them. My eyes stung, thinking about it, and for a minute, I forgot about the storm.
    That was when the storm reminded me—all of us in HQ—that the bad old days of the Diseray were not entirely gone.
    The entire building shook, rattling