theshot_yougot | Recent Entries

It's all part of a plan. The first one she's ever made and followed through with any long term commitment. The plan in question: have a normal life. No ghosts, no demons, no illegal firearms under her pillow, nobody dying just when she's figured out she likes them.

Normal lives mean university degrees. Normal university life as far away from father and brother as possible. This year as far away as possible means half way around the world. Not just in America, but in California.

American college life is kind of brilliant, as it happens. Underage parties, road trips, and the opportunity to share a room with a really hot Amazonian premed student. A shame, really, that Jess is not just straight, but seeing someone.

Leah loves the drive from Metropolis to the farm on any day. Hanging out in Sam's Porsche, the window down, chatting and listening to him describe all the new sights as they go. They come here rarely enough that the seasons change, and talking about the autumn changes is a decent substitute for seeing them.

And today is a extra special reason for driving out there. They're going to see Sam's nephew.

Leah and Pterychimon were still in the kitchen when the others were in the living room.

Well, most of the others. Bill stands in the doorway between the two rooms, leaning against the frame. His daemon Cyana was perched a few feet away on the back of a chair, where Eddie was still giving Robin the tour. The New Yorker's voice could be heard from here.

“These control panels are in every room, and control the light, heating, music from one place, with an override if she needs it that's keyed only to her biosigns. And the security system feeds right into Pax HQ.”

He sounded excited.

“You're going to turn all that bollocks off the second Eddie leaves, aren't you?” he asked his daughter, only sounding faintly amused.

“Yeah,” Leah said, smiling to herself. “And he bloody well knows it too. It just makes him feel better, y'know?”

“I do.”

Pterychimon finished his run of the work surface and returned to Leah, running a loop around her waist before his head twisted a helix down her arm.

“I like it,” he said. “It's not cold.”

Eddie and Robin and their respective daemons moved on into the dining room/study area, and more out of earshot.

“What colour is it, Bill?” asked Leah.

It was a second before he replied, and when he did, he sounded surprised that no one had told her this.

“Creamy white cupboards with a reddish granite worksurface,” he offers. “The metalwork is dark grey in a wrought-ironny type way. Terracotta coloured floor. The walls are a soft beige.”

“Ugh, really?”

“Sorry, kiddo. I don't think your friends have any colour sense.”

--------------------

She spent the first hour after they'd gone backwards engineering Eddie's security system so that Px HQ would call her when in trouble, not the other way around. That was so worryingly easy she reckoned he'd made it so to give her something to do.

She spent the rest of the evening hanging her art, with Pterychimon watching from under the coffee table, where he curled up to fill the space perfectly.

Occasionally he offered an opinion on whether or not he thought the painting was straight.

“I'll never understand why you like them, though,” he says.

“That's because you've never had good eyesight,” Leah replied, her hands running along the top of the canvas for her newest purchase, which she's never even seen. “And you've definitely never had taste.”

There was an audible spirit level in one of the boxes, they both knew. The box into which she'd dumped all the helpful 'for the visually impaired' devices that people had bought them in the past year, that they had every intention of donating to charity the second it wouldn't be missed.

When that was done, and with all the other boxes still stacked ever so neatly in the appropriate rooms, Leah let Pterychimon talk her to the couch, where she flopped on her back, hands closing around the control for the sound system as she flicked to Number of the Beast.

At the other ends of the room from each other, woman and cobra finally began to relax.

Independence.

The drive home, one minor breakdown aside, is pleasant and chatty; unusual mostly in being more chatty than usual. Occasionally Leah will let a silence fall for long enough to be comfortable, but she always pushes for a conversation when a topic occurs to her.

She wants to hear him.

When they get to her apartment, she's acting more or less like herself, finding her way from the car to her door, inviting Sam in and immediately heading for the kitchen.

"I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a drink."

*headdesks* I don't even know why I'm doing this...

Ben Ross wasn't exactly a nice guy to start with, but after his murder he got considerably worse. First his murderer, then successive of his mother's boyfriends met grisly ends. Jacqui and her remaining daughter Leah were questioned a number of times in relation to the deaths that appeared to surround them, but with nothing remotely conclusive: it was just a horrid coincidence that drove Jacqui deeper into drink, blossoming psychoses and inexplicably into the arms of each successive man.

Young Leah didn't fold in on herself. Convinced this was Ben plaguing her family, she fought back. The library proved surprisingly fruitful in providing relevant information, and she took it upon herself to dig up his remains, salt and burn them. Then, threatened with being put into full time psychiatric care, she ran away. It was while she was living on the streets of Liverpool that she was found by the hunter William Creswick, who took her on as an apprentice and an adopted daughter.

Based in London, William and Leah became active hunters across the country, keeping in only nominative contact with hunters in other countries. The British hunter network is fiercely insular and family bonds rare; William has an on-off relationship with Sarah Gray, another hunter, which tends to be more off than on.

A few years after Leah joined William, they acquired another family member: Robin David, a young Mancunian man of North African extraction whom they rescued from a particularly nasty demon. Robin is haphophobic and untrusting of anyone outside of Leah and William, but fiercely loyal to them.

As Leah grew up, she became more indepedent and knocked heads more frequently with the boys, as often happens. In Early 2004, aged 18, she started heading off on jobs on her own, with only the tentative approval of William. Ten months after setting up on her own, Leah went off after a standard haunting, only to encounter the same demon who had plagued Robin. This one managed to destroy Leah's eyes before she banished it, and shed can only assume that it has since remained in Hell.

Since then, Leah returned to William's house, but hasn't been able to get rid of the urge to hunt. Now she's forced into a back seat, acting as researcher (thank god for scanners and screen readers) and planner for the hunts, relying on her phone, computer and quick brain to act as valuable back up.

Leah wanted her flat to be empty for a reason. Even now, after furnishing it herself - with a lot of help from Sam and the Birds, she'll admit - it's very sparsely furnished with the absolute minimum of furniature. Even the main room, which is rapdily filling up with computers and one work bench for a variety of projects, is pin-prick organised in a way to make any obsessive compulsive proud.

She still has contact with Oracle, of course, and days spent alone except for the radio aren't the pain they used to be, not when she can lie back on her own hand-picked sofa, with Tschaikovsky playing at a low level.

It's still a little lonely, of course.

Some days in the life of Leah Ross are better than others, but they're all boring. Somedays she just explores thoroughly every place she hasn't tried yet, others it's more desperate.

She's on her last few tins of food now, and hasn't found any more. Rationing has reduced her required intake, but she knows she's not on top of her game,thanks to extended malnutrition. So today she's gone out further, searching for something - anything - to eat.

Leah was Recurve for about two months in her early twenties. Her identity isn't exactly a secret, but she prefers to be subtle about it anyway. Her Trickshot outfit was royal blue: as Recurve she favours rich purple. There's a cape, of course, lightweight but lined, which hangs asymmetrically over her left shoulder, leaving her right arm completely free, and a small quiver available at the right shoulder. She doesn't carry many arrows: for all the look of the thing, the bow is not her primary weapon. That's why there's a small crossbow and a slingshot on her belt.

Her hood covers her face and hair (which is blonde, and bobbed short, btw) almost completely, and under the eye hole there's a fixed mask to hide any identification clues around the eyes. No high tech lenses, though: Leah doesn't trust technology much, so the only thing electrical on her person is a mic and earpiece built into the hood, and devices on her gloves that can monitor her finger movement. Sometimes team communication has to happen while quiet.

And just for the record? Right now she's completely sighted.

The beep is subtle, unobtrusive, but impossible to ignore, sounding on every speaker in the flat at the same time. One tone, then four variable clicks to let Leah know exactly who's calling.

Sighing, she lowers her bow. "All right, Trickshot?"

"It's all gone wrong," the boy whispers urgently, on the verge of panic. "They're not talking, just fighting a lot, and I don't..."

This was a mistake, Leah told herself angrily. Robin was too green to go on a mission like this. Even as recon, he didn't know which info to gather, and as far as dealing with situations...

"I need visualisation, here." Leah places the bow back in its stand, and with a few swift movements of her fingers the tactile sight powers down, letting her unscrew it from the tripod. That latter snaps into a long lightweight stick that then retracts so she can sling it on a hook on her belt.

"No time."

"Make the time, all right?"

As the boy describes the scene, she shuts down the whole practice room on automatic, finding every single arrow she had fired and returning each one to its exact position in the arsenal. She knows her space so well, that only her body needs to be there. Her mind is with the teenage boy, standing on a rooftop in East London, watching an orchestrated meeting quickly unravel into something bad.

After several briefings, his description is more than adequate, and Leah especially appreciates the information about wind strength and direction - the boy's an archer, all right.

Her body moves through her flat in the same way, with the ease and confidence of someone who knows exactly where everything is: gym to hallway to living room, to study, to desk, tapping away at her computer with one hand while the other sorts out her headset. Her mind does a visual check of everything she'd expect Robin to be carrying in his Trickshot outfit.

"You'll need smoke bomb number three, OK?" she tells him. "Before you throw it, have rubber bolts in your crossbows. You're gonna land the bomb straight in front a' the fat guy, then straight away gonna shoot Cryer to the head and the Hanson's left flank in the knee. Cryer's gang will do a runner, so will some a' the others. But Hanson's will know you're there, and tryta gun you down. Lead them to Whitechapel Tube, got that? I'm having Cuckoo meet you there."

"But if..."

"No ifs, all right? Keep me posted on whens."

Hearing the tinny explosion, muffled shouts and controlled breathing that acknowledged a potential inter-gang shoot out had turned into a single gang chasing down a masked archer, Leah gets up and heads towards the kitchen to make herself coffee. Carrie may or may not need her assistance, but she knows it'll be handled well either way. It's ruined her plans for the afternoon, though.

She's not complaining. It's nice to be in the loop...

BANG