Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

  Inches from her face was a nightmarish visage, snarling fangs and red-gold eyes. She screamed, every muscle going rigid as she tried to struggle free, but claws dug into her skin on all sides, giving her no room to move. She stretched out with one arm anyway, ignoring the tearing pain of it, fingers brushing the hilt of her fletching knife.

  “YOU GAVE US YOUR WORD.” The voice was almost unrecognizable, the roar tangible against her face as the teeth flashed in the firelight. The claws tightened, piercing her skin all over and causing her to cry out in pain and terror.

  Yeva’s hand closed around the knife, and with a scream she brought her arm up in an arc, sinking the knife to its hilt in the Beast’s shoulder. Its roar of rage and pain overtook hers, and she let her arm fall again as the room spun into blackness.

  Yeva woke once more in darkness, body cold and stiff. She dragged herself to her knees, her aching body prompting recognition—she was back in the cell. Her fingers found multiple puncture marks across her shoulders and chest and legs. The blindfold was gone, but she was in darkness again. She explored the confines of the cell by feel and found nothing, no manacle and chain, no blanket, and no tray—and no lamp. This time, the door was locked.

  No fire, no blanket, no lamp; she had little heat to conserve, but little was better than none. She sank onto the floor and drew her knees up to her body, ignoring the way the movement sent aches screaming down her limbs. She dropped her head, clenching her teeth together.

  I am locked in a cell, she said to herself, mind stuttering and unfocused as she tried to follow her father’s advice, with no food and no light and no hope of escape. And the one friend I had is the monster that killed my father.

  Her eyes burned, but when she lifted her head they were dry. Carefully she stretched out her legs one at a time, biting her lips when the movements tugged at sore muscles and punctured skin alike. Then her arms, then her back, then her neck. She had no weapons and no plan but she was quick, and maybe—just maybe—if the Beast thought she was wounded it would give her a chance to run.

  She was doing her best to clean the dried blood from her skin when the door swung open, a huge blackness filling the space. She had never seen the massive shadow before, but then, she had not been looking for it. She had been looking for a shape the size of a man.

  “Get up,” said the Beast.

  Every muscle was rigid. The voice was still the one she knew, the musical bass with hints of wildness. But she recognized its ferocity now—and the voice no longer warmed her. Her bones were like ice.

  “No.”

  “Get up or we kill you now.”

  Yeva clenched her jaw so tightly it ached. She dragged herself to her feet, playing up the soreness of her muscles and acting more stiffly than she felt.

  “Come.” The shadow threw the blindfold at her and then moved from the doorway.

  Now was her chance. Its back was turned, and she could try to run. Yeva glanced at the lighter area of shadow that told of the empty corridor. I am the captive of the monster who killed my father, she thought with sudden crystal clarity.

  She hadn’t left her sisters behind for nothing. She hadn’t tracked her father and discovered him dead, only to die herself the captive of a Beast.

  She knew now why she was here. She would see the monster dead.

  Yeva fell into step behind it, following it by smell and sound down the corridor. From the sound of its steps it was limping. Her knife had wounded it. She felt a surge of satisfaction so strong her ears rang with the triumph.

  “Where are you taking me?” she whispered, lifting the blindfold into place and securing it behind her head.

  Into the quiet came its despicable voice once more. “Training.”

  BEAST

  We were wrong. There is no animal in her. The way she speaks to us now, so full of fury, is more human than anything we have experienced in many long years. Animals don’t hate. That is the rightful domain of humanity.

  It is better this way, that she see us for what we are. We are pleased. She is strong still, despite her illness, and skilled. She will do what we require of her, and it will be done. We will be free.

  There is no more subterfuge, no more pretending at humanity. We do not have to provide her assistance or hide in the shadows. We do not have to listen to her voice or her stories, we do not have to suffer her giving us a name as though we are a man. We do not have to feign feeling.

  It is better this way. She has seen us and that, too, is freedom. It will go quickly now. We know this.

  It is better.

  It is better.

  It is better.

  EIGHT

  YEVA FOLLOWED THE BEAST as it led her through a maze of corridors. She stumbled more than once, but the Beast did not offer its shoulder to guide her, and she did not ask. She thought there was a slight upward slant to their path, but she could not be sure until cold, clear light burst upon her, bright enough to see even through the blindfold.

  The sensation of the heavy underground fell away, the air coming alive again with movement, smells, and distant sounds of life. The sun, pale and cold in the winter sky, was tangible on her skin.

  For the briefest of moments Yeva forgot her fury, stumbling along through the snow and breathing the sharp freshness of the air as someone who’d been suffocating to death. But her relief faded with each step, as she struggled blindly in shin-deep snow. She focused on each breath, the stabbing of air in her lungs, trying to memorize how far they were going, what turns they made.

  “Remove your blindfold.”

  Yeva halted, reality slamming back into her and jarring loose her half-formed mental image of where they were. She forced her hands to steady as they pulled the blindfold from her eyes. She stood, blinking, half blinded. The sky was overcast but the snow was brilliant enough that she could barely see.

  At her feet she made out a familiar shape. Her father’s bow, and next to it her quiver.

  “That is your target.” The Beast sat on its haunches like a huge wolf some distance from her, its immense body in no way diminished now that it was outside instead of in the confines of the corridors. Its thick, shaggy tail wrapped neatly around its body like a cat’s.

  “You will shoot the target, and if you succeed we will try at a farther distance.”

  Yeva reached down for the bow, not bothering to shift her gaze from the creature long enough to see what target it was indicating. She ought to have felt relief and triumph that it had provided her with a weapon—but she felt only ice. She fitted the grip to her palm, and though she turned her eyes toward the target, she saw nothing but a red mist descend over her vision.

  “Shoot when you are ready.”

  Yeva drew in a deep breath as she nocked an arrow, mind calculating the arc between the target she was meant to hit and the Beast to the side. Not far. She blinked the haze from her eyes, the bloodlust rising in anticipation. Releasing the breath she was holding, she drew and twisted to the side to aim at the Beast, then released the arrow in one smooth motion.

  The Beast barely moved. It lifted one paw and flicked the arrow aside in midair, where it buried itself in a tree.

  Yeva stood staring and panting, the hands holding the bow suddenly nerveless. It was impossible. Nothing could move that fast, animal or man. The Beast stared back at her, the red-gold of its eyes unperturbed.

  “Again,” it said, with no sign of the fury it had displayed when she’d pulled the blindfold away by the hearth.

  For all its power, the bow would not help her. She let her arms fall and dropped the weapon into the snow at her feet.

  “No.”

  The tip of the Beast’s tail flicked. Irritation. “You will try it again, or die.”

  “Kill me, then.” Yeva knew she ought to be afraid, but there was only room inside her for anger.

  With careful deliberation the Beast rose to its feet, the size of it once again robbing Yeva of breath. It came toward her, each paw landing so softly that it made no soun
d in the snow. Yeva stood her ground, even when the Beast halted only inches from her face.

  “You will do it again,” it said in its low, dangerous growl, “or we will kill your family.”

  Yeva froze.

  The Beast sat back down, the musky-sweet smell of its fur nearly overpowering in the frigid cold. “Ah,” it said, bitter satisfaction coloring its otherwise emotionless voice. “Yes. You will do as we order from now on, or we will kill them all.”

  She had told him about each of them, about Lena’s scolding and Asenka’s twisted foot, Albe’s clumsiness and well-intentioned gestures. She had described the trees around the cabin, how it nestled at the fork of a stream that ran to either side of it. She had described the house.

  “Pick up the weapon.” The Beast’s eyes bored into hers.

  Yeva’s began to water from strain and cold, burning in the freezing air. She stooped, not taking her gaze off the monster as she retrieved the bow. She pulled another arrow from the quiver at her feet, fingers closing around its shaft like she was clinging to her last hope of survival in a howling blizzard.

  The Beast rose and turned its back, moving toward where it had been sitting when she removed her blindfold. Yeva lifted her arm to stab the arrow down into its spine.

  “If you try to kill us again,” said the Beast without turning around, “make certain you succeed.”

  Yeva froze again, her arm suddenly heavy as lead.

  “For if you try and fail, your sisters will pay the price. You we will keep alive long enough to watch.”

  “Again.”

  The Beast’s voice had become so familiar that Yeva’s ears almost didn’t register it. She felt it like a vibration deep in her chest, a stirring of the fury still surging through her veins. He brought her outside day after day to shoot at the same target, an old, gnarled tree with a blackened spot of rot the size of her fist. First he made her shoot at thirty paces, then forty, fifty. Her accuracy with her father’s stiffer bow was not what it had been with her own, but she’d abandoned her lighter bow when she took up her father’s weapons to pursue the Beast that killed him. As her strength improved, though, so did her aim with the old, heavy bow. Each day she was made to practice, and each night she was returned to the frigid, dark cell to eat cold rations and sleep. At first she stayed wakeful and restless, pacing, thoughts thrashing against the confines of this prison, seeking a way out—but as the days passed she could not help but fall into exhausted, dreamless sleep.

  Instead of loosing the arrow she’d drawn in numb response to the command, she lowered her bow and closed her eyes.

  “I said again.” The Beast’s voice rose, and though there was no anger in it, Yeva could sense the quickening, the intensity of it. “Your aim today is worse.”

  “I cannot,” Yeva said, dropping both bow and arrow into the well-trodden slurry of ice and snow at her feet. “My shoulders ache—I’ve had no rest, no time for my muscles to repair themselves.”

  The Beast—sitting, as it always did, just far enough away that she could not lunge for it—rose up from its haunches and narrowed its red-gold eyes. “The need for rest is a human weakness.”

  “And I’m human,” Yeva snapped, exhaustion robbing her of good sense. For the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care if she angered her captor. For the moment, she forgot about the cabin nestled at the fork of the river, her sisters and her friend, her dogs, the lives she had to protect. For this moment she could only think of the bone-deep ache in her body and the certainty that she could not aim even one more arrow.

  “An illusion,” the Beast snarled. “You only imagine you need rest.”

  “Is it an illusion that my arrows cannot strike their target today?” Yeva braced her feet against the ground, determined not to give in to their desire to buckle beneath her and send her sprawling in the slush. “Is it imagination that yesterday I missed the tree entirely and lost one of my arrows?”

  The Beast was silent, continuing only to stare at Yeva with that unnerving, unblinking animal gaze. She stood her ground, willing herself not to shiver. Days, maybe weeks, had passed and she still could not reconcile the animal eyes with the fact that its fanged mouth formed speech, that its lips could purse and flatten and curl around words like a man’s.

  Yeva drew her cloak around herself, stepping back from the bow. “You tell me I am training, but you do not tell me what I’m meant to be training for.”

  “Because you do not need to know yet.”

  Yeva clenched her jaw. “You insist I shoot at a dead tree, but unless it is some archery competition in some distant kingdom, this training is worthless. No target stands there, waiting to be shot at again and again.”

  The Beast didn’t answer immediately, and if it were a man, Yeva would think him hesitant. But it only looked at her. Unblinking. Unmoved. Then, ponderously, it replied, “We have need of a hunter.”

  Yeva’s skin prickled, and she suppressed the surge of anticipation threatening to show itself in her features. It was the first hint of an answer she’d ever received from the creature. “Why?”

  “There is a certain quarry we require captured.” The Beast’s bass rumble of a voice was as unruffled as ever.

  Yeva scanned the Beast’s face for some time before realizing she was searching for some hint of its thoughts in its expression—some human hint. But this was no human. She swallowed hard on the white-hot anger that had sustained her since she learned the identity of her captor. “Capture your quarry yourself. You lay traps as efficiently as any hunter.”

  “We cannot.” The Beast’s face rippled for the space of a heartbeat. In the lupine features, the glint of teeth, the red-gold eyes—for the tiniest instant, Yeva recognized it. Frustration. Anger.

  Helplessness.

  “Why not?” Yeva whispered.

  “Because we—” The Beast’s words halted as suddenly as if its lungs had no air. Its brows drew in, brows Yeva hadn’t noticed before. It shook its head, the movement traveling down the creature’s body like a shiver until it hunkered low, belly nearly resting in the snow.

  Perhaps, if she had not spent so much time in the cell telling stories, bringing to the surface the tales she’d heard as a child, or if she had not spent these last weeks the captive of a creature that could only exist in such tales, Yeva would not have had the thought that came next: He cannot tell me, for he is under a spell.

  In every fairy tale there were rules. Even the monsters could not break them.

  And where, except in fairy tales, did there exist talking beasts?

  BEAST

  We thought hatred would make it easier. That if she continued to believe we were her father’s death, her fear and her fury would free us from our human side. We thought she would become no more than a tool, a weapon to be wielded, an arrow to be loosed from a bow.

  We thought . . .

  We thought too much.

  Because while hatred is a fire only man feels, he does not hate the beast that comes in the night. Mankind fears it, fights it, drives it off, but he does not hate it. No one hates the bear, the wolf. They don’t hate the wind or the snow. They don’t hate death.

  They hate each other.

  NINE

  YEVA HUDDLED IN THE corner of her cell, cloak drawn tightly about her as she sank into a half doze. The cold seeped from the stones into her body like poison, making her curl more against herself, despite the protests of her muscles. The strain of drawing her father’s heavy bow day after day was tearing at the joints in her shoulders, ripping at a knot of tension between her shoulder blades that re-formed tighter and tighter each night she spent in the cold.

  She knew she ought to stand, ought to pace the room and stretch and remain as limber as she could. And at first, she had done so each night. But she couldn’t bring herself to move anymore. Perhaps if she tore a muscle so she could not draw the bow at all, the Beast would let her rest.

  Her mind, as it often did during these dark, silent hours, tried to turn to
ward thoughts of her family. Of her sisters, and how they would worry; of Solmir, and how long he would continue to care for them; of how long it would take them all to believe she was dead. But she could not afford to think of them, for she could not imagine her home without her father there too, and remembering him was a stab of pain as real as her broken ribs, her aching muscles. She refused to think of them, of any of them. There would be time for grief later, once she had killed the Beast.

  A sound beyond the door of her cell brought her sharply back to the present. It was nothing more than the barest whisper, but it was a sound she knew well, from days, weeks, maybe months ago. A sound that meant it was time to resume the story she’d been telling to her invisible ally, waiting in silence just beyond the door.

  Her invisible ally. Yeva could have laughed at her blindness. Ally? He was always her captor.

  Yeva shivered so violently a sound escaped her lips, a tiny moan snatched up by the hungry stones of the empty room.

  “You said you required rest.” The Beast’s voice was quieter, and for a moment there were two faces in Yeva’s mind: the one she’d imagined belonging to her friend, and the one she had seen snarling and roaring in front of her eyes when her blindfold fell away.

  She didn’t answer.

  The Beast’s footfalls came again, the soft scrape of his footpads against the stone. He was pacing in front of her door. “You require rest, and we require—” The pacing halted for a heartbeat, then resumed. “I require . . . I require talk.”

  It was the first time since she’d learned what he was that he hadn’t referred to himself as “we.” Yeva had always imagined there must be others in this place, servants or perhaps other creatures out of the old stories. Someone had cooked the potatoes she’d eaten. Someone had opened her pack and sorted through the medicine bundle, prepared trays for her, lit an oil lamp. The Beast could not have done it, not with the great velvety paws now pacing back and forth before the door.