The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  “All right? You think I should be all right?” She was so far from all right she wasn’t even on the same planet anymore. She was so far from all right she had come around again, and everything was just wicked fine and dandy.

  “You’re not all right.” He sounded miserable. “I never wanted… I’m sorry.”

  “Dylan.” God, the man just melted her, even when she was furious. “No more sorry, okay? Let’s just…deal with this. Okay?”

  He swallowed hard, his throat contracting tightly. “All right.”

  She gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “I don’t suppose you could whistle up a boat, so we don’t have to swim all the way back to the island?”

  Or, worse yet, all the way to the mainland, because there was no way she could manage that.

  “Whistle? No.” He had an odd look in his eyes now, like he was thinking of something far away, something he couldn’t believe he hadn’t remembered before. Then he smiled, and the wicked joy in that toothy grin was a revelation. “But I might be able to sing up something.”

  Beth quickly discovered that he wasn’t joking. The islet they were on was barely enough rock to earn the name, and he went out on to the farthest spar of rock, perching on it like an oversize gull, telling her to wait on the more comfortable shore.

  The wind was in a lull, but it still carried back to her bits and pieces of the music he was, literally, singing. It was wordless, atonal, and should have been unpleasant, but reminded her instead of the whines and hums whales used to communicate. She wondered briefly if he was going to call up a whale to swallow them whole, like Jonah, and recognized the signs of hysteria bubbling back up. Skins. What would her skin be worth? Why would anyone want it? Was she going to be stuffed like an elk over a fireplace? Or used as somebody’s sick idea of luxury car upholstery? Or…each idea was worse than the last, and she was getting close to curling up in a ball and going totally nonresponsive. Rather than give in to it, or the fear of those…Hunters that was nibbling at the corners of her mind, she got up and made herself useful. It had rained a few days before—maybe one of these rocks had preserved a puddle of water they could drink.

  There wasn’t much to see—the entire islet was barely the size of her house, most of it underwater, and nothing more than some mosslike plants grew on the rocks. One bad storm and the entire thing would be awash. Luckily for them, the weather was calm and clear.

  On the other side of the islet she got lucky, discovering a shallow rock under the overhang of another that had collected enough rainwater to be useful. Using hands to cup it would waste too much, between the splashing and the inevitable spilling, so she got down on her hands and knees and lapped at it, just enough to remoisten her mouth and feel her brain cool down a little. Water helped. Food would help more; she hadn’t stopped for breakfast before coming down to the beach, and the swim had tightened her stomach sharply. Whatever craziness that man did to her insides, it wasn’t affecting her appetite, at least.

  When Dylan was done doing whatever it was he was doing, she would tell him about the water hole. And then they would figure out which direction they would need to swim in.

  A bird circled overhead, and she shaded her eyes and looked up at it. “Lucky bird, having wings,” she said. “And you, woman, if you still smoked, you could have lit a fire and called for help that way.” Of course, the swim would have ruined any matches or lighter she had on her, and if she still smoked she would not have been able to swim out this far in the first place, probably. So useless all around.

  The bird dipped its wings and flew away, and she went back to find out what Dylan was up to.

  “Gave up, huh?” she asked, on seeing him back on the rocky beach they had been sitting on. Then her jaw fell open in shock at what rested just above the wavelets lapping against the shore: a small canoe, painted garish pink like something from a Barbie Goes Camping kit. A frayed rope dangled from the bow, evidence that it had come loose from a tie-up on some dock somewhere.

  “No paddles,” Dylan said apologetically, like he was embarrassed that he hadn’t been able to present her with a yacht, skipper and chef to go with it. “But I figured we could improvise.”

  This time, when the laughter came, she let it.

  “Elizabeth?”

  She waved off his concern, letting the tears run down her face unchecked. He looked unconvinced, but sat next to her and held her hand in his own, patting it occasionally, until she was done.

  “All right.” She wiped her eyes one last time and sighed. “No paddles, huh?”

  “Damn, damn and thrice damn.” The Hunter paced up and down the sidewalk in front of her car, a completely innocuous dark blue sedan with the engine of a race car. Like the Hunters themselves, it was designed to blend into any surroundings, to not excite any notice, to disappear when someone looked for it. It was designed to be successful, not idling, wasting time and money while the prey escaped and clients agitated for results. The sort of people they had for clients, you did not want them agitated.

  Her cell phone was in her hand, but rather than placing a call, she was slapping it against her thigh in rhythm to her pacing. What a mess, a total and unmitigated mess. Two of her team had gone back to the village to check the bed-and-breakfast the selkie had been staying in, but it was a wasted effort, she knew that already; the creature wouldn’t go there once it had gotten away. Once in the ocean, it would have retaken its natural form, slipping on the waves to safety, out of their reach.

  She blamed herself for that; foolish to have confronted it on the beach, a novice Hunter’s mistake, but the timing had seemed right. After ten days of studying its movements, she had determined that it was predictable in its behavior, like most of its kind. During the day it was in the village, interacting, and in plain sight. She needed it alone, caught off guard and without the protective coloring of humans around it. The early-morning walks on the beach had looked perfect: there would be no distractions, no witnesses and no one to interfere with her contact-and-confirmation. The woman’s presence looked to be a problem at first, and then a surprising godsend—the creature seemed protective of her, which would limit its options. That had been her idea, anyway.

  “Damn it,” she swore again, putting the phone away and narrowly resisting the urge to kick the nearest tire. She should have had the men shoot the damn thing, and be damned the possible damage to the hide. Or, better yet, to shoot the woman, keep it from reaching the water. That was the second rule hammered into them during training: never, ever let the prey reach water. Once in its seal-form, a selkie was useless to them—it was the transition that was important, the transition where the human skin could be taken and made useful. Once the beast was in seal form, a Hunter had no leverage, no access to the magic that made the beasts so valuable.

  But she had held off, afraid to damage the skins beyond use. That was the unforgivable sin, even more than allowing escape—making the skins un-harvestable, unusable. Once a target was confirmed, even a bruise on the skin was considered the mark of an amateur. A tear or rip in the hide, and the shape-change would not work on the client, making it nothing more than mediocre upholstery.

  And so she had held off, properly, and in any other situation, the Hunt would have been over, her shot at the major leagues gone. Alone, the selkie would have slid into the waves, disappeared and been lost to them. But it had taken the woman along. A woman with the same feel as all the others of the breed, enough that she’d thought at first there were two for the bagging, doubling her profit from this Hunt. Unfortunately, they had seen her swimming in the waves in human form, so she wasn’t a shape-changer, despite the similarity in appearances. Interesting. A half-breed, maybe? There had always been rumors that they could breed with humans, but as far as she knew it had never been proven one way or the other.

  The woman shrugged, letting the question go. She snapped her fingers, and one of her remaining men stepped forward, ready for orders. “Call in a helicopter. Now!” A boat would
be useless: there was too much area to cover. It would be expensive, in money and favors, to call in a copter, but from the air they would be able to scout the surface, hopefully spot them before they reached any sort of safe haven. With the woman swimming, even if the male had changed form, they couldn’t have gone far.

  Two of the men who came with her stayed on the beach, their eyes scanning the immediate area, their hands never straying far from their now-holstered weapons. She snorted. Gun-happy idiots. Even the best shot couldn’t guarantee only a flesh wound. That was the first thing they learned: dead, a selkie was nothing more than a curiosity. They needed to be alive in order to give up their skins. If she had a decent team, a trained team…

  If, if and if. Useless damn conjecture. There weren’t as many Hunters as there once were. That was a simple, inescapable fact. Fewer retired soldiers, fewer ex-mercenaries, fewer people with the guts to do what needed to be done, to get the job done. So she had book-trained desk jockeys fumbling in the field, and only a handful of them she would want to have to depend on in a crunch.

  Never mind. They would do the job she set them to, and she would do the rest. That was why she was Hunt Leader.

  As Hunt Leader, she also had to do the unpleasant things as well as the enjoyable. With one last scowl at the water line, she flipped open her phone and pressed the first number on her speed dial.

  “Sir.” She took off her sunglasses while speaking, as though her boss could see her. “Yes, sir. There has been a slight change in the plans. I may need to expand the scope of the Hunt.”

  Chapter 8

  Afterward, all that Beth could remember of the long, painful paddle back to shore was how her shoulders ached, and that the makeshift driftwood paddle cut into her hands, leaving a long red scratch across her palm. Her brain seemed to have shut down in the aftermath of Dylan’s revelations.

  Skins. Hunters. Her.

  Why her? Why him? Why would anyone want their skin?

  The only things she could come up with were so sick, so insane, she…she could believe them, because people were sick and cruel and did things that humans shouldn’t do. But this…didn’t feel like that. Like some kind of dark, twisted “National Weird News” headline. It felt…

  Surreal. Strange. But Dylan was taking it so calmly, more annoyed that he had been caught off guard than horrified by the very idea, that Beth found herself following his lead, staying calm and focusing on getting back to the mainland.

  She still wasn’t sure what to think—how often do you get told there is someone, or a bunch of someones, out there who thinks of you like a particularly exotic coat?—but when it came down to deciding between a possibly crazy man who saved your life and a crazy woman who ordered people to shoot at you, and was maybe going to skin you? She’d take the one not shooting, every day.

  The fact of the matter was, whatever craziness Dylan had, he was protecting her from worse.

  “Land.” His voice was low, barely carrying the short distance from the stern of the canoe to the bow. “Over there.”

  She had been so deep in thought, in concentrating on not noticing the soreness in her arms and back, that she hadn’t even realized they were coming into a small, undeveloped harbor.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m not used to seeing the coastline from this side. My family…we weren’t much for sailing.”

  “Huh.” There was the sound of the makeshift driftwood oar hitting the side of the canoe, and he shifted, making the small craft shudder under the change in balance. “Ship your oar, let me take us in.”

  She put her own bit of driftwood across her lap thankfully, not even minding when cold salty water dripped onto her legs. At this point, a little more water wasn’t going to make any difference. And it was surprisingly nice, sitting back and letting Dylan pilot them in, his smooth stroke propelling the canoe over the waves into the shallow water, coming up on the sandy beach with a final surge.

  She started to climb out, and her legs buckled under her. Dylan was there, his arms under her knees, swinging her up into a scoop carry, so that her arms automatically went around his neck, her cheek resting against his chest.

  “You did great,” his voice assured her, but it was the feel of his body against hers, supporting her, that made her actually believe it. Skin to skin, she didn’t think he could lie to her.

  He deposited her gently onto the sand, then waded back out with one hand on the rim of the canoe, pushing it against the waves until the little pink boat was caught up in the retreating water, floating out toward the open ocean.

  “For the next person who might have need,” he said, almost apologetically, when he came and collapsed next to her.

  “Yeah.” She had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t much care. He had gotten them onto dry land with a pink canoe and no navigational tools other than some sort of inner compass. In her book, he was a big damn hero.

  “So what now?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  All right, he was a big damn hero with limits. That was all right. He might know about…whatever he knew about, but she was the land-dweller here.

  The term came naturally into her mind, and she hesitated. There was something she knew, or should know…a story her father had told her and Tal, when they were very young, maybe, or a book she had read…

  It didn’t matter, wasn’t important. Stories would wait until they were somewhere safe.

  “We can’t go to the authorities,” Dylan said. “Not until we know how they found me. They could have connections anywhere, but probably they heard about my being washed up through the police, or…” He paused, and a look of pain washed across his face. “Or the clinic.”

  “No police about the people who’re shooting at us. Right. Great. We need to go under their radar, at least until we have an idea who we can trust, and time to come up with a real plan. My credit cards are probably ruined—” that long in salt water was ruinous “—but we shouldn’t use them, anyway. Or my ATM card, either. I’ve watched enough TV to know that’s the easiest way to track someone and it sounds like these people’ve got too much insider information already. So, short of mugging somebody, we’re stuck with whatever cash we’ve got on hand.”

  Dylan dug into his front pocket, pulling out a wad of bills that were much the worse for being drenched in salt water and then drying in his pocket. “I have…four hundred dollars?”

  Beth swallowed hard—who carried that much money on them, so casually?—and then hid her shock and relief in an equally casual acceptance of the information. “That will do for a bit. We need to find a place to get new clothing, some food, because I for one am about to collapse with hunger—” and her stomach growled right on cue “—and we need a place to stay long enough to figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  She thought about adding “and we need to call the cops” to her list, but stopped. Not because she didn’t intend to do that, no matter what her big damn hero said, but because she needed to do it in a way that left Dylan out of the story. Whatever was going on, however he had landed on the town beach two weeks ago, clearly he was off the grid, and wanted to keep it that way. Whatever sick game he was part of, with Hunters and skin-stealing, and carrying large amounts of cash earned under the table doing handyman work… She owed him that much, at least, to keep the cops off his back if that was what he wanted. Even if he was a crazy man, and this was all his fault.

  “Come on.” She stood up and tested her legs. They were shaky, but managed to support her, so she reached out to encourage Dylan up. He, annoyingly, stood without any obvious difficulty.

  “We’re footing it?”

  She had never heard the term before, but knew exactly what he meant. “Yep.”

  The beach was a narrow one, barely worthy of the name, like any of a hundred little inlets. A sign at the end told them that they were on State property, and that fishing with a permit was allowed between the ho
urs of 4:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. There was a graveled turnoff, and a narrow dirt road without any signs or indications as to where it led. Beth paused, realizing that she didn’t even know where they had landed. It wasn’t Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but it might have been Cape Cod—or maybe they had gone all the way around to the mainland?

  “Only game in town,” Dylan said, letting go of her hand and shoving his into the pocket of his jeans, staring down the road like it was paved with burning hot stones.

  “Yeah.” She couldn’t work up any enthusiasm, either. But curling up on the sand wasn’t an option.

  They walked a mile or two along the road until it joined up with a paved one, and hailed a passing pickup truck. The driver, a grizzled man in his fifties, took one look at them and started laughing, but a story about an overturned canoe and car keys lost at the bottom of the bay earned them the right to pile into the back of the truck for a short drive to the nearest shopping plaza.

  “Thank God for Target,” Beth said, staring up at the familiar red sign with mixed disbelief and relief and walking through the electronic sliding doors. The sudden immersion in noise and bustle, normally annoying, was like music to her ears, and she stood there for a moment, just enjoying it. A world with Target was normal, familiar.

  Dylan touched her arm, and she turned and accepted a wad of bills from him to supplement the thirty dollars she had found in her own ruined wallet. “All right, I’ll meet you back here in an hour?”

  He looked a little taken aback at being abandoned in the front of the store, and Beth almost laughed. She would finish her shopping and come back to find him—she suspected that he would still be standing there, looking helplessly at socks, or maybe distracted by the electronics department. Typical guy, no matter where he came from.

  She kept her own shopping simple: two pairs of jeans, a package of cotton underwear and one of plain white socks, a dark blue sweatshirt without a logo and a pair of plain white sneakers. If someone was actually hunting them, the last thing she wanted to do was give anyone anything to remember.