Title: The White Horse (7/?)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Jim Kirk was a strange man. A silent man. No one knew much about him or, if they did, were not willing to say what they did know, especially to the town’s newest magical occupant. Not that Leonard McCoy cared. He had an old curse to track down and unravel by the year’s end. Meanwhile a killer was tracking him. AU.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
or at AO3

“Still pissed?” The man asking didn’t seem particularly upset about the notion that Leonard might be.

To make the point that he was in fact still pissed (beyond that, actually), Leonard continued staring silently through the windowpane at the morning fog. He had never seen the fog so thick. If he got loose, got away, Decker would never find him. The asshole deserved to run face-first into a tree.

Said asshole behind Leonard laughed, a thing the man seemed extremely fond of doing. Leonard was certain now it meant the guy was genuinely insane.

“Don’t bother,” Decker told him. “By the time I did catch up to you, you’d probably be dead or worse.”

“What’re you, a mind-reader now?”

“I’m just sayin’… there are bad things beyond these walls, Mr. McCoy. You’d be smarter to stay with me.”

“Yeah well, fuck you.”

Decker (Matt, the man had named himself but Leonard didn’t want to pretend to be friends with the person holding him hostage) came to stand beside Leonard’s chair. His eyes glowed.

Leonard met the reflection of those eyes in the glass, unnerved and also fairly certain he shouldn’t look into Decker’s gaze directly, just like how a man wasn’t supposed to look into the sun. “If you would give me some clue why you won’t let me go, I might try to be understanding.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

Leonard snorted because that was more than true. He didn’t want to be understanding. He wanted to get the hell away from this backwoods cabin. It was small and dank, and the door looked damn flimsy to be the only thing between them and one of Decker’s ‘monsters.’

Not that Leonard believed there were monsters in these parts, other than the guy at his back. He asked almost plaintively, “When’s that friend of yours get here?”

“I thought you had an aversion to me and my friends.”

“From where I’m sitting, if I have to pick between you assholes, the guy I don’t know seems like the saner choice.”

Decker’s teeth were a flash of white behind his beard. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You would,” Leonard retorted. He rattled the handcuffs binding him to his chair. “How about removing one of these?”

“You look like you know how to pick a lock… so, no. Better for you to stay there until Chris gets a good look at you.”

“Of course. And I get a bullet in the head if he doesn’t like what he sees.”

Decker shrugged.

Leonard cursed under his breath and glared at the faint line of trees he could barely see through the fog. He could have been in Riverside hours ago. Instead his car was in a ditch, he had up-close and personal confirmation Spock was on his tail, and now he was a kidnap victim.

“If I had my own gun,” he snarled, “I’d find that fucking deer and shoot it between the eyes. This is some bullshit!” Angrily he jerked at the handcuffs; the metal didn’t give in the slightest, nor did the wood of the chair.

Decker started to say something, perhaps an insistence concerning the ‘deer’, but they both heard the distant slam of a car door. In the next instant Decker had a shotgun lifted to his shoulder, cocked, and trained on the cabin door.

Leonard twisted around as best he could, both to see the door and Decker, demanding, “Where the hell does that thing come from?”

“Keep your mouth shut,” Decker warned him, “otherwise I can’t concentrate.”

Leonard’s heart rate decided to increase on its own. He swallowed so his mouth wouldn’t seem so dry. “It’s probably the guy you said was coming over.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Please don’t shoot anyone, Leonard thought, feeling sick all of a sudden. Please, please don’t shoot anyone. He didn’t think he could stomach seeing someone’s brains all over the wall. That was the kind of thing he couldn’t fix.

A pair of footsteps stopped just outside on what Leonard assumed was a porch; because the sun was rising on that side of the cabin, the legs of the newcomer cast a shadow under the door. The silence in the room grew thick.

On a nearby table, Decker’s cell phone rang. The man slowly shuffled in that direction but never took his line of sight down the barrel of his gun from the door. He squatted slightly and hit the Answer button with the tip of his elbow.

A voice said, “Are you going to shoot me or let me in?“

“Thinking about both.”

Leonard wasn’t certain if that was possible but he wisely held his tongue.

“Open the door, Matt.” That seemed partly command and partly exasperation.

Decker stayed silent for some seconds before relenting. “Fine, but I’ll give you fair warning—whether you’re my good pal or some fucker wearing his face, I can and will kill you.” Then he lowered his gun and went to the door.

Rather than opening it as Leonard expected, Decker stood in front of it and muttered something. A second later the knob turned, the door opened, and sunlight cut into the gloom of the cabin’s interior.

“Goddamn,” Leonard said, staring at the back of Decker’s head. “Please tell me you aren’t a witch.”

“He’s not,” replied the man who had stepped inside.

“Though I did have the opportunity to become the familiar of one,” Decker cut in, smirking. He tapped the side of the shotgun’s muzzle against the newcomer’s chest. “What’s the secret password?”

“There is no secret password, and you already broke the ward.” The man, amused if the look in his eyes was anything to go by, was taller than Decker by a few inches, leaner, and older. Despite that he sported a peppering of grey at his temples, Leonard had the impression the fellow still had sharp reflexes, enough to defend himself against any attack Decker might make. Leonard couldn’t decide if that made him feel better or worse.

The man pushed the shotgun away from his person and strode toward Leonard by the window. He introduced himself as Christopher Pike. “You’re McCoy,” he said.

“What I am is cuffed to a fucking chair,” Leonard growled.

Wordlessly Pike pulled a switchblade out of a pants pocket and flipped it open. Leonard’s stomach did a flip of its own. But in the next minute, Pike had used with the knife’s tip to jimmy open both of Leonard’s handcuffs, saying by way of explanation, “He always loses the key.”

Leonard rubbed at his sore wrists and eyed the man who had freed him. “Is this the point where you expect me to run? So you can hunt me down and skin me alive or some shit like that?”

“Is it?” asked Pike in return, tone mild. Even his eyes looked calm.

Decker’s just looked crazy, especially since Leonard was now free to move about. “Seriously, I’m getting bored here. And confused. Why would you let him go before we question him?”

“About what?” demanded Leonard. “I don’t even know who you two goobers are, let alone what you want from me!”

“Matt, you need to shut up for a minute. Don’t listen to anything he says, McCoy.”

Leonard muttered, “I’ve tried not to.”

“Now…” continues Christopher Pike, dragging another chair over toward Leonard’s so they are sitting face-to-face. “I do have some questions for you. Here’s one that should be easy: may I call you by your first name? You can call me by mine. Chris, not Christopher, please.”

Leonard bared his teeth in what might, vaguely, pass for a pleasant smile. “Sure. Call me Karl.”

Pike sat back in his chair, amused. “Okay… Karl.” Then he drew a piece of paper from the inside of his jacket, unfolded it, and lifted it for Leonard to see. “But I have to wonder… maybe the authorities spelled your name wrong?”

Leonard stared at the Wanted poster bearing his face. “Damn.” He looked at Pike. “How long has that been circulating?”

“In these parts? About a month.” Pike tucked the paper back into his jacket. “Let’s start again. Hi, I’m Chris.”

Leonard grimaced. “McCoy… Leonard McCoy.”

“From Mississippi?”

“Sometimes. I’m on the road a lot.”

Pike crossed his arms, and Decker drifted to stand at the man’s back, shotgun tucked in the crook of his arm. He didn’t say anything but he grinned. Leonard was well and truly beginning to hate the bastard.

“From what we know, Leonard, you’ve been on the road for a while. Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois—visiting a lot of lake towns and reserves.”

At first, Leonard thought they had found his research and his map but then he remembered he left it in the car by the roadside. “How do you know that?”

“We’re hunters, Mr. McCoy, and no matter how the government feels about what we do, our network crisscrosses theirs. If you’re on their radar, you end up on ours too.” He smiled, and this time Leonard saw nothing friendly in it.

Leonard let his disgust hide the apprehension in his voice. “You’re allied with the Feds?”

“Oh, no,” interrupted Decker too cheerfully, “we hate those pig-bastards. We shoot them in the face.”

“Matt, I said no talking—or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

Decker rolled his shoulders like he was looking forward to that scuffle. He stage-whispered to Leonard, “He hides a Magnum in his left boot. Twenty-two caliber. It’s quaint.”

Indicating Loony Bin with an incline of his head, Leonard asked Pike, “He’s not human, is he?”

“Mostly,” Pike said, “but never when it counts.”

“Fellas, I already know what makes me special.” Decker’s eyes glinted at Leonard. “I’m more interested in why he is. I told you, Chris, he was lit up like a Central Park Christmas tree.”

Leonard tried to make sense of that. “I don’t ‘light up’, you ugly bastard. That was probably my car, or—” He bit off the rest of that sentence, thinking about the thing which had run him off the highway in the first place. It wasn’t a deer, but these assholes didn’t have to know that.

“Or what?” Leonard was asked. Pike gave him this look like the man had caught an inkling of what he’d been thinking.

Leonard glared at them. “Or hell if I know! A meteor in the sky, or a goddamn spaceship! Why don’t you goons make sense for once?”

“Name-calling will get you nowhere, Leonard.”

“Except a hole in the ground,” added Pike’s partner.

Leonard jumped to his feet. “Fuck both of you!”

Pike sighed and leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers. “Listen, you seem like a decent guy. I can give you two more chances to be cooperative. After that, I will start breaking your fingers, then your arms, so on and so forth. There are more than enough bones in the human body that we could play this game for quite a while.” He stopped as if the pause was to allow Leonard to consider the options. “I’ll be honest with you, son… I don’t have a taste for torture like I did in my younger years but I can do, and I will, because there are things at stake here that matter more to me than your life.”

Knees weak, Leonard sat back down. “You’re not very comforting here, Chris.”

“I never intended to be comforting. I want answers, and you have them. You want your life, and I can give you that. Fair trade.”

Leonard mulled over the possibility that he could make it to the door without a bullet in his back. It didn’t seem likely. At length he said, “The first time your certified friend over there said I shone like a beacon I didn’t know what he meant, and I still don’t. It’s true I have… power but—”

“The Mark on you tells me that. What don’t I know?”

“—but that doesn’t turn me into a goddamn glow stick, except maybe to another person who knows magic.” He sucked in a breath and wanted to smack his forehead for being so dumb. “Which, of course, he has.”

Decker tugged his ball cap low over his eyes and started grinning again.

“You said you weren’t a witch!” Leonard accused.

“He’s not,” Pike repeated.

“Well he sure as hell ain’t a mage. I’d feel it, so that leaves only the idiots who ask for power, like life isn’t already fucked up enough for those who are born with it! ” He focused his attention on Decker. “My god, man, find yourself a house, a wife, and a picket fence. You fuck with magic, it fucks right back with you. They teach that shit in kindergarten these days.”

Pike’s shoulders were shaking. Leonard realized when Pike pressed his knuckles to his mouth, he was laughing.

“It’s not funny,” he said, indignant. “My life has been a shithole since I was seven.”

Pike’s shoulders shook one last time. Then he lifted his head and held out his arm, drawing back his jacket sleeve.

Leonard stared at the scar-tissue on Pike’s wrist for a long time before it made sense to him.

“I understand a lot better than you think I do,” the man said. He withdrew his arm and covered his wrist again. “Matt, tell him what you were hunting last night.”

Oddly, the mirth in Decker’s expression melted away. His grip on his gun tightened, and Leonard had a second to fear somebody was about to get shot.

“There’s a… spirit. It looks like a man but it doesn’t speak like a man. You could walk past it on the street and you’d never know what it truly was. It—it’s been around a long time, on this earth. Too long.” For a moment, the man almost seemed to sway in place, gaze turning glassy like he saw something far, far away no one else could. His voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s going to start feeding again, Chris, I can feel it. You have to help me.” The skin around Decker’s eyes grew taut. He closed his eyes as his voice rose again. “Help me stop it!”

Watching Decker on the cusp of some kind of madness, Leonard could only think to ask, “Does it drown its victims?”

Decker’s eyes flew open when he said that—and there was nothing remotely human in them.

“NO!” Pike shouted half a second before Decker jerked the shotgun into position and fired at Leonard.

Leonard had dived for the floor the moment he saw Decker in all his mad glory, thinking, too late, too late, shit, too late! Something exploded over his head in the wake of the roar of the gun and rained down upon his head. He kept his face pressed against the floor, waiting for pain, for blackness or whatever it was that came hand-in-hand with death. He heard Pike shout again, maybe Decker’s first name or the beginning of a spell, but didn’t dare get himself involved.

There came a crack not dissimilar to a gunshot, and a body fell hard onto the floor beside him. It was Decker. The man curled onto his side like a child, clutching at his head and whining in his throat.

“Shit,” Leonard heard. Then Leonard was hauled up by the back of his shirt to his feet.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Pike said, his face pained and furious. “Now get outside, and stay out while I bind him.”

Leonard didn’t have to be told twice. He stumbled for the door, pushed out into the innocuously warm sunshine that seeped through the lifting fog, and held onto the porch railing as he threw up in the yard. Once he had gotten down to the bile in his stomach, his heaving stopped and he went for the truck parked by Decker’s car.

He was tugging fruitlessly at the door handle of the locked door, feeling fuzzy with shock, before it dawned on him what he was trying to steal. Leonard’s hands fell away from the truck and he took a full step back.

“What the hell,” he said, voice strained, staring at the emblem painted on the side. The words below it read: County Sheriff.

It was only then Leonard realized he had somehow landed himself in the mother of all clusterfucks.

Pike exited the cabin alone. When he saw Leonard sitting on the ground, leaning against one of his truck’s tires, he said, “You didn’t run. You’re smart after all.”

Leonard threw a weed he had plucked up and twisted between his fingers aside. “What good would that have done? You probably know these roads like the back of your hand. You or one of your boys would have picked me up within an hour… Sheriff.”

“Very smart. Good.” Pike nodded approvingly. He unlocked his vehicle. “Get in.”

“Where am I going? Jail?”

“Give me some credit, Leonard. That would be a waste of my time and yours. I’m taking you to your car.”

Rocking back on his heels, Leonard eyed the man. “Why?”

“When we get there, I think you’ll know.”

Leonard looked around, like there might be another way out, but he knew there wasn’t. So he climbed in from the passenger-side and buckled himself into the seat. Pike took a moment to change his non-descript jacket for one bearing a badge and fixed a holstered weapon he removed from his glove box to the belt around his waist. Leonard watched all of this without a word, wondering if he hadn’t fallen asleep or maybe died after all. It felt damn weird to him, surreal even.

Pike started the engine, and they left the cabin behind, finally turning from a long dirt road onto a newly paved highway.

Leonard let the silence in the truck cabin stretch until he couldn’t stand it anymore. “So how does a Marked become a county sheriff?”

Pike turned the radio dial until the rock station became one that played the Golden Oldies. “He doesn’t. That burn on my wrist tracks all the way up my arm. The result of an accident, you understand. To most people, I’m just a man with a scar, not a Mark.”

“How?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Apparently I have time.”

Pike huffed, amused. “My ability was discovered when I was in my teens. Back then, it was just the start of the movement against our kind, one that had been building up since the end of the world war. There was incontrovertible proof we existed and it was public, so the government asked itself, ‘how do we make certain that we can tell who these people are?’ They came up with the Mark. It was a brand on the skin, like a tattoo. They just rounded us up—old and young—by the handfuls if they could. Some people got it who didn’t even know what magic was. It was meant to placate the non-mages who had begun to fear us.”

Pike paused, then chuckled. “But their record-keeping sucked. So you could disappear if you knew how, or knew someone who could help you. Unfortunately by the time the next generation came along, yours that is, the government had figured out how they wanted to segregate us from the masses. They stripped our civil rights out of the law and created a body of governance just for one purpose: to watch, contain and, if need be, kill us.”

He shook his head. “Every day it worsens like a disease. Children get trackers in their skin. The ones with strong abilities are taken from their families, institutionalized, re-educated. And with the digitalization of all personal information nowadays, the database on us has to have a million copies in a million places, and it’s always growing. Once you’re in the system, you can’t get out.”

Leonard said nothing. There was nothing to say. He imagined his own child having even less freedom than he did. He thought of her locked away and drugged. It hurt him beyond words. It angered him, too.

When Pike spoke again, his tone of voice reflected a somber mood. “When I said I could give you your life, Leonard, I was serious. It wouldn’t be easy but there is a chance yet for you to have something… normal.”

“But?” Leonard pressed, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.

“You have to earn it.”

“Of course,” he said bitterly. “Nothing’s free.”

“No, there isn’t,” Pike agreed matter-of-factly, one hand steady on the steering wheel. “So a man has to know his limits. He has to know what he’s willing to pay, how far he’s willing to go for what he wants. Tell me about Joanna.”

Leonard forgot how to breathe. His fingers dug into the hard fabric of his seatbelt.

“You think about her often,” the man next to him went on to say, “and given the way you think about her, I would have to guess she’s your child.”

“You bastard.” Leonard turned to look at the sheriff in horrified realization. “You’re the mind-reader!”

Christopher Pike smiled.

“I don’t fucking believe it! Stop the fucking car!” He jerked off his seatbelt. “There’s no way in hell—” He stopped cold. “Shit. Decker. When you said you were going to bind him, you meant…” Leonard paled at the thought.

“He’s not sane,” Pike said affably, “but I need him—though I have a feeling maybe not as much as I am going to need you.” He glanced at Leonard. “That look on your face is uncalled-for. I didn’t break his mind. Mind-magic doesn’t work like that, no matter what shit they write in the pamphlets these days.”

“You’re saying he’s just off his rocker naturally? Bullshit.”

“He was already in pieces when I met him. That thing he hunts so vigilantly? It lured his little brother to a watery grave while he watched, helpless to stop it.”

Leonard almost allowed himself a moment of pity for the bastard. Almost. He argued, “He has magic.”

“No, Matt carries an illusion of it. Whatever the creature was that he saw may have taken his mind but it left behind a resonance. That’s what he follows, has been following for nearly two decades. And it’s what makes him seem… like us. But he’s not, Leonard.”

“No, he’s just your mind-puppet.”

Pike barked out a laugh.

Leonard didn’t see what was so funny. “It’s inhumane.”

“It’s no different than keeping a leash on a murderer. I don’t control him. I don’t even trick him. I just keep what’s left of his sanity from grinding away to dust and let him continue his mission. It’s a thankless task, actually.” Pike sobered. “But I do it because I want to find that thing as much as he does, possibly more.”

Leonard refused to look at Pike, knowing he wanted to ask why but determined he wouldn’t. At this point, it made no sense to involve himself in this hunter-thing. He had a difficult job to do as it was, and Joanna was counting on him to do it right.

“You said you’d take me to my car,” he muttered, crossing his arms across his chest.

“I am. You’ll see it in another mile or so. It got called into the station.”

“By a Fed,” Leonard guessed.

But Pike shook his head. “Believe it or not, your agent doesn’t seem to be willing to bring attention to his whereabouts. So until he does want us to know where he is and what he’s doing, I’m not kicking over that ant hill.”

“That’s good… I guess.” Leonard said slowly, surprised. Did that mean Spock really was on an unsanctioned manhunt? And what was going to happen to Leonard when Spock finally caught him?

He was so lost in his confusion over that, he didn’t notice where they were until Pike was pulling alongside a familiar stretch of ditch.

“Son of a bitch,” said Leonard. “You kept your word.”

“Surprise,” echoed the sheriff dryly. As Leonard reached for the door handle, he added, “A word to the wise, Mr. McCoy: don’t leave town too soon.”

Leonard eyed him, wary. “What if I decide I don’t want what you’re offering?”

A corner of Pike’s mouth tipped upward. “What if you decide you do?”

Leonard expelled an aggravated breath and threw open the passenger-side door. He didn’t wait to see Pike drive off and instead stalked to his car. Someone had towed it out of the ditch for him. It sat cold and quiet, one of its headlights cracked; he walked around it but saw no indication of vandalism.

The doors were unlocked. Leonard got in and sat down, hand automatically searching the underside of the seat to find the spare key he had taped there. When his fingers closed around it, he felt inexplicable relief. The car engine turned over after two tries.

Yet it was a long time before he pulled onto the road. Riverside was close but, now, also dangerous. It had something like a curse of its own, and that curse was already wanting to hook into him. He could turn back, should turn back, but…

Pike was wrong. How could he decide when there was no choice to begin with?

Car pointed towards Riverside, Leonard drove on.

Next Part

Related Posts:

• The White Horse (18/18) – from May 12, 2014
• The White Horse (17/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (16/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (15/16) – from April 4, 2014
• The White Horse (14/16) – from March 7, 2014