Hunted

by Dean Murray

  The change happened so fast that I blinked and missed most of it, but before my words had even died in the air I was standing only a few feet away from some kind of wolf-man monster who looked like he was about to rip my head off.

  "How did you get here? How did you find me?"

  I opened my mouth to respond, but he grabbed me by the throat and slammed me into a steel girder so hard that I saw stars.

  The sheer terror I was feeling was messing with my senses. I was trying to talk around the panic surging up from my gut, but all I could think about was the way that it felt like a prickly wind was pushing me back against the structural member at the same time that his hand pinned me against it.

  We stood there staring at each other for what felt like an eternity and then suddenly the entire building rang like a gong. Still holding me several feet off of the ground, the monster walked back over to the edge of the building and looked down. I was just able to see the man we'd been watching—at least I assumed it was the man we'd been watching.

  He'd transformed into a beast that was almost a mirror image of the one that had me by the throat and seemed to be climbing up the outside of the building. It was hard to be sure, he still seemed to only be a few feet below us, but now the ground looked to be quite a ways below him.

  "You can't be him, not if he's coming after us, but you're inarguably here so I guess I'm not as unique as I always thought." My captor looked back down at the beast that was climbing towards us and shook his head. "I don't know who you are, but this is the only warning I'll provide. You need to stay away from me. I'll let you go this time. Go ahead and jump out. I'm not holding you here now."

  It was like he was a raving lunatic. Nothing he was saying made any sense. How could I possibly jump anywhere when he was still holding me by the throat? The sheer ludicrous nature of what I was experiencing finally got to me. I opened my mouth as he relaxed his grip slightly and instead of a scream of terror, laughter bubbled out of me.

  Seriously, a talking wolf-man was holding me by the throat and telling me to jump. My subconscious had gone ape-crap crazy this time.

  "I will not be mocked."

  The words wouldn't have caused me to even bat an eye, but his fist tightened around my throat to the point where his claws started to dig into the back of my neck. The glee washed out of me, instantly replaced with the terror that the situation called for.

  "I just wanted to know who he was."

  It came out barely more than a whisper, but he didn't seem to have any problems hearing me.

  "Trust me, you'll be much better off if you never see Kaleb again in your entire life."

  The crash of splintering glass as Kaleb climbed up the outside of the building was getting closer. My captor closed his eyes for the briefest of seconds and then sighed.

  "I wish we had more time to talk. If you're what I think you are, then you need some guidance, but we simply don't have time. I'm going to be hard-pressed to get out myself now. We've burned up too much time talking while Kaleb has approached."

  I opened my mouth, not because I had a question to ask him, but because it seemed like the situation called for a whole host of questions. He shook his head at me.

  "There's no time. Just remember that this place isn't safe. You'd be far better off if you simply stayed away. Think of home, of those you love."

  Before I could even process what he'd just said he pivoted with a strength that exceeded even what I would have expected out of such a massive body and threw me towards a nearby wall.

  I'd been on rollercoasters that created less g-forces than what he generated. Time slowed to a crawl as I flipped end over end towards a pair of steel girders. I started to black out, my vision narrowed down to a tiny tunnel, but his last words were echoing in my head. If I was going to die then it was only right that my last thoughts be of my dad, my mom, and Cindi.

  I hit the massive beams with enough force to shatter every bone in my body. I felt them all break as my body wrapped itself around the one on the right and then my head impacted with the one on the left.

  I woke up with my heart pounding, positive that I was about to die. Some of the other dreams I'd had, dreams that had seemed more vivid when I'd been asleep, were already fading away from my memory, but the dream with the two wolf-men was still as strong as when it had happened.

  I still couldn't explain it, but somehow I knew that what had happened was in its own way as real as anything else I'd ever experienced. My dreams were real, and despite the fact that trying to find Kaleb might get me killed, I still had an almost unstoppable urge to go back to the unfinished building and see if I could talk to him.

  Chapter 3

  I'd lost track of how many days it had been since my fight with Janessa, but it seemed like it shouldn't still be such a big deal among the rest of the student body. I'd spent so many years trying to stay safely anonymous only to have it ruined in the course of five minutes.

  There was probably a life lesson in there somewhere, but I was having a hard time getting past the fact that everyone in the school seemed to know me and they'd split themselves firmly into two camps. On the one hand there were the rich and popular kids, all of whom seemed united in their hatred of me. For the most part they didn't seem to like Janessa any more than I did, but as nearly as I could tell they were all weighing in on her side because I'd upset the natural order of things. Nerds and loners like me were supposed to bow down to their kind of people, not get into fights with them, especially not fights in which the nerd came out more or less on top.

  The other camp consisted of all of the nerds, drama geeks, loners and anyone else who didn't either fit in with the popular crowd or regularly abase themselves in the hopes of being able to work their way into the A-list kids.

  I wasn't particularly liked by most of these kids either, but they were just super excited that somebody had finally stood up to Janessa. Apparently she was a monster to just about everyone in the school who wasn't at least as rich and cool as she was. I'd known she was bad, but I hadn't realized she was that bad.

  It was all kind of dizzying, especially given that I'd never managed to learn the names of most of the people who were now either shooting me nasty looks or patting me on the back and giving me high-fives as I walked through the hall.

  I kept hoping that it would all die down. I'd wanted to just serve out my detention and then go back to being anonymous, but a day or two after I got in trouble the administration finally got around to investigating my accusation that Janessa had been cheating on her history exam. From what I'd been able to gather secondhand, it sounded like Richard Parsons pretty much cracked as soon as they got him in a room by himself. He backed up everything I'd said, which had caused the principal to check Janessa's locker.

  She probably would have gotten away with a mere slap on the wrist except they found hundreds of dollars' worth of drugs in her locker. She'd been suspended within hours of that little discovery and her parents had shoved her into rehab so fast that nobody had even known what happened to her until some of the cheerleaders had gone over to her house to find out why she'd been missing practice.

  News that Janessa was out for at least the next six weeks had rushed through the school like wildfire and had further sealed my infamy. For all that I hadn't anticipated any of the events that had occurred as a result of Janessa and I trying to rip each other's heads off, the thing that really took me by surprise was how hard it all was on Cindi.

  Although we'd never been rich, Cindi's looks and status as a cheerleader put her firmly in the popular camp at school. Her friends were exactly the people who'd once largely ignored me but who now hated me.

  I expected her to just go with the flow. She and I hadn't ever been particularly close. It was hard to be friendly with someone who was better than you in practically every way. The logical thing for her to do would have been to at least give me a cold shoulder when we were at school, but if anything she was going out of her way lately to try and incl
ude me.

  I'd been suspicious at first that she was just trying to get me around her friends so that they could make my life miserable, but the first time that one of them had tried, she'd put them in their place so fast that everyone's jaws had just kind of hit the floor and stayed there until lunch ended.

  Given my druthers I would have just avoided the other cheerleaders and waited for everything to blow over, but Cindi reaching out to me like that meant that I had to at least make an effort to hang out with her and her friends. Honestly I couldn't have cared less about the friends, but I didn't want to let Cindi's peace offering go to waste.

  We'd had some absolutely spectacular fights in the past. Things got a little better once we were both in high school, but I still felt a lot of the time like there was something missing in our relationship. Sisters should be closer than what we'd managed so far in our lives.

  I'd never talked to Cindi about that in so many words, but that was how I felt, which helped explain how I ended up out at the football field after school, sitting on the tired old metal bleachers at the fifty-yard line, rather than back home cleaning the house.

  The cheerleaders were having tryouts tomorrow to fill Janessa's spot, which meant that Cindi and three other girls were busy leading two dozen hopefuls through the practice cheers that the tryouts would be based on.

  It was actually pretty painful to watch, but not for the reasons that I'd expected. I'd expected to be bored out of my mind watching a group of girls perform the same few cheers over, and over, and over again while I tried to work on my homework.

  Instead I found myself unable to study for other reasons. The girls trying out were simply awful. They were obviously trying and Cindi and her friend were doing their best, but none of the girls seemed to be able to get the routines down, especially the last one that they were supposed to be learning.

  It didn't make any sense. I've never been one of those people who are able to remember a string of movements well enough to actually perform anything, but this routine was super easy. I'd already memorized it despite the fact that I was only halfway paying attention.

  As the allotted time for the practice started to wind down I could tell that a lot of the girls were getting frustrated by their inability to master the routine. Alice Backman—at least I thought that was her name—finally threw down her blue and white pompoms and stalked over in my direction to get her books off of the bleachers.

  Cindi started in our direction too, obviously wanting to reassure Alice, but she'd been on the other side of the group so it was going to take her a minute to get here.

  "I'm never going to get this last one. It's just too hard. I thought maybe that I could come and memorize all of them enough that I could practice them on my own later, but this last one is just too complex. I can't remember more than just the first five or six movements."

  "I could write it down for you if you wanted. I mean so that you could have it to study later tonight."

  Alice gave me an incredulous look. "Is this your way of making me look bad? Write down a bunch of random stuff so that I'll go practice the wrong routine and look like an idiot? Is that why you came today? Just so you could make someone else's life difficult?"

  I'd already turned to a blank piece of paper and had written down the first three parts of the routine, but now my pen stuttered to a halt. Apparently Alice didn't approve of me getting into it with Janessa. It was actually a bit odd. Alice was trying out for a spot on the team that never would have opened up if Janessa hadn't gotten kicked off, but apparently that didn't matter enough for her to cut me any slack.

  "Actually I'm only here because of my sister, Cindi. We usually walk home together and I thought I'd just sit here and study while I waited for her. I was just trying to help, but if you don't want any help it's no skin off of my nose."

  "She's really your sister? I'd heard rumors, but it's kind of hard to believe. You know, given how cool and pretty she is and how, well, you know, ordinary you are."

  I wanted to say something spiteful, like maybe point out that she was the girl out there least likely to make it on the squad because she bungled every third piece of the routine, but I gritted my teeth and finished writing down the first half of the routine.

  "Yeah, that's about what I thought. You're all big and bad when it comes to picking on Janessa when she's vulnerable and strung out, but you totally back down when somebody stands up to you."

  That did it. I ripped the sheet of paper I was writing on out of my notebook and balled it up before throwing it at her feet.

  "Here you go, it's only the first half of the routine, but based on what I saw out there you're probably not going to even make it through that. Don't say I didn't try to help though. I've always tried to be nice to anyone with special needs."

  I'd taken things too far and I knew it, but I was just so tired of people picking on me. The fact that she was here trying out for the cheer squad didn't make her better than me, it didn't give her license to be mean.

  Alice stepped towards me like she was about to attack me too, but Cindi arrived and cleared her throat.

  "Hi, girls. What's going on?"

  Alice bent down to pick up the paper at her feet and then turned towards Cindi with a sugary-sweet smile on her face. "Your sister just tried to sabotage my chances to get on the team by writing down the wrong routine and giving it to me. I really think you should ask her to leave so that she doesn't cause any more problems."

  Right, like me leaving three minutes early would make the slightest bit of difference to Alice or any of the other girls.

  Cindi took the piece of paper without saying anything and smoothed it out against her leg, running her hand along the paper and down the blue material of her skirt. She read down through it and then stopped and read it again, slower this time. Once she was done she handed it back to me.

  "Adri, can you finish this?"

  "So I can help her? Not very likely."

  I got a head shake and a frown. "Please just do it for me?"

  I rolled my eyes and then jotted down the rest of the routine and passed the piece of paper back to Cindi.

  Cindi scanned down through my additions and then turned to Alice. "I think you owe Adri an apology. This is the exact routine we were just trying to teach you."

  "Really? Are you in on it with her or something? Is this about that time I forgot to invite you out to Crater Lake?"

  Cindi sighed and handed Alice the paper. "Go check it with one of the other girls if you want. Or don't, it doesn't really matter to me, but practice is over so I'm done here."

  Alice opened her mouth like she was going to argue with Cindi, but my little sister just gave her the kind of look most of the cheerleaders gave me and after a second or two Alice grabbed her backpack and walked back to where the other cheerleaders were answering last-minute questions from the other hopefuls.

  Cindi watched her leave and then turned back to me. "How did you do that, Adri? I didn't think you were paying that much attention."

  "I wasn't. I don't know, I guess the routines just stuck with me. It's not like they're difficult. Honestly I don't know why Alice and the others were having such a hard time remembering the moves. Actually doing the moves is probably tougher, but memorizing something like this should be child's play, even for them."

  Cindi was looking at me like I'd just grown another arm or something. "Adri, that's the hardest routine the squad does. Miss Winters wasn't actually expecting any of those girls to get all of the routine, she just wanted to see how far they would be able to get. It took me two weeks to get that routine down. The entire squad struggled with this one. For days we did nothing but practice this routine every waking moment we could find and then dream about it while we slept."

  I shrugged, but I knew that the motion wasn't very convincing. I wanted to tell her that I didn't know what was going on, that it was all some kind of fluke, but I didn't want to lie to her. She'd actually just hit the nail right on the head. I hadn
't even remembered where my knowledge of the routine had come from until right then.

  She'd dreamed about the routine, all of the cheerleaders had. They'd spent their nights working through the routine and I'd somehow shared at least some of their dreams. I should have remembered sooner than I had, but none of it had stuck with my conscious mind until something triggered an association between the practice sessions and the real world.

  "Will you try something for me?"

  The request took me by surprise. Cindi was usually so self-contained that it was rare for her to ask me for anything.

  "Maybe. What do you need?"

  "Can you try to do the routine for me? The hard one, the one that you wrote down?"

  I shook my head. "No way. I'm not making a fool of myself, especially not in front of someone like Alice."

  "What about if it's just me? No, wait, that won't work, you'll never believe me. What about if it's just me and Sheree?"

  I didn't understand why she thought someone else needed to watch me trip over my own feet as I tried to perform a routine I'd never practiced, but she'd picked the one and only girl in the school that everyone liked.

  Sheree Fieros was so incredibly nice that you couldn't even hold the fact that she was pretty and talented against her. I couldn't imagine Sheree making fun of anyone. She was the kind of girl who once I finished up my routine would tell me how well I'd done, and she'd really mean it, even though we'd both know that I'd done a terrible job.

  "Cindi, I don't get why you want me to do this."

  "Please, Adri. We'll go around the corner of the school and it will just be the three of us. I hardly ever ask anything from you but I'm asking for you to do this now. For me, as your sister."

  I opened my mouth to tell her that I wasn't going to do it, but I couldn't get the words out. I'd been wanting for us to be closer, but that kind of thing didn't happen without taking some risks.