The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  “And everyone’s alive,” Beth said. “I can live with that.” She looked levelly at the Hunters, as though reminding them that their part of the bargain wasn’t quite done yet.

  “If you don’t mind, we will be going now,” the woman said, taking the deck from her goon and tossing it into the backseat of the sedan. The guns weren’t lowered until they were tucked inside, and the doors shut, and the driver took off.

  Only then did Dylan actually relax.

  At that point, the cameraman shoved his now-useless camera into the back of the van and hit the top of the vehicle with an open palm. “You can come out now, you worthless coward.”

  The driver’s-side door opened, and a young man, barely shaving age, popped out. “Because what?” he demanded indignantly, “I could do so much, out there with youse? I should get myself shot or sliced, that would make you feel so much better?”

  “Yes!”

  “Tough!” And he dropped back into the van and slammed his door shut.

  “Let’s go, man,” the cameraman said, then stopped and looked at Dylan. He cracked a grin, shook his head and reached into the open side of the van, pulling out a pile of fabric. “I don’t know if they’ll fit, but better to be nailed by the fashion police for tacky than the real ones for indecent exposure.”

  Dylan thanked him for the offer, but indicated the knapsack Beth was bringing over, with the extra clothes he’d bought the other day. Thankfully he had kicked off his cheap sneakers before changing—that habit was trained into them all about the third time they had to pay to replace their own shoes—and he was able to retrieve them off the sand and slide them onto his bare feet.

  “It would have been a hell of a scoop,” the reporter was saying to her, sadly. “Even if nobody would have run the tape. An exposé on crazy rich people who hunt other folk for their skins? Wild, totally wild.”

  “You want to have fun, and help us out, too?” She turned to the cameraman. “Was I right, or was I right?”

  “You were right,” he said, with that tight grin back on his face, and he pulled out a small black object.

  “You son of a bitch,” the reporter swore. “You were taping this, too?”

  The cameraman shrugged eloquently. “Remember when we lost sound last year, during the rally? They give us such crap equipment in this van, I’ve been running backups ever since.”

  “You don’t have the film anymore, true,” Beth said, “but you do have proof. I bet there are any number of magazines that would take the story, even without pictures. And pay for it, too.”

  The reporter tilted his head like a sandpiper, waiting for her to continue. She smiled at him, a sweet smile filled with mischief that Dylan could already recognize.

  The cop car rolled into the parking lot, and cut the sirens the moment they realized that there was no obvious danger. Dylan, now dressed, went out to greet them, giving Elizabeth and the reporter more time to work out whatever it was she had up her sleeve.

  Chapter 13

  It took some quick talking, something Dylan had never really thought he was good at before, to convince the newly arrived police officers that everything was fine, no need to worry, sorry for the trouble.

  The first cop out of the patrol car, a slightly overweight man with hair gone gray at his close-cropped temples, moved like an old walrus, slow and ponderous. Dylan wasn’t foolish enough to underestimate him, and kept his own movements slow and unmistakable. Like a walrus, this man could do damage if he thought there was a threat. “Can I see some identification, son?” Walrus asked when Dylan ran out of steam.

  Dylan moved his hand automatically to the back pocket of his jeans, where he had been storing the money clip, before remembering that he didn’t actually have any identification on him. Recovering quickly, he started to tell the patrolmen that his identification had been lost during the canoe-dunking they had told the truck driver about—was it only two days ago? Walrus listened with seeming good humor, but it wasn’t until Beth and the others joined them, supporting his story, that they relaxed, and the second cop let his hand move away from where it had been hovering disturbingly close to what Dylan assumed was a gun holster under his jacket.

  Even afterward, the patrolmen—Walrus, and his partner, who looked barely a pup, probably still on his first razor—were doubtful, but polite. “They just left, after all that?” Walrus took the lead in the conversation, while the younger one wrote everything down and frowned a lot. “And you never saw any of them before?”

  “The woman, yes, just like I told you. The others, never.” Dylan had absolute honesty on his side, mostly. They—newly minted lovers trying to get a weekend away—had been menaced by a woman who had stalked them from Elizabeth’s hometown all the way here, for no reason they could determine. They had tried to get away from her, to the point of changing their plans midtrip and ditching their luggage, but to no avail. The woman had brought goons with her to their motel room, goons with guns, and that had scared the hell out of them. They’d panicked at that point, understandably, and run. The first chance Beth got, she had called the police.

  The woman had found them again at that point, and tried to force him, Dylan, into coming with them, threatening Beth unless he obeyed. However, when the news truck came by and started waving a camera around, the woman and the goons got in their car and drove away, clearly not wanting any publicity—or witnesses.

  “I never even heard her name,” Dylan said. “I don’t even know how she learned mine!” Mostly truth, there.

  Mentioning anything to do with seal-kin, magic or skin-hunters was obviously out of the question for anyone involved. Beth had emphasized—what had she called it? Right—“Keep It Simple, Stupid”—when she went over the plan the night before. The less they embellished, the more reliable they would sound. The more reliable—and stupid—they sounded, the more the cops would believe them. It was a strange theory, but it seemed to be working. The Hunter would soon learn that the media hadn’t been as muzzled as well as she’d thought.

  “And you never got a name, or the license plate of the car?”

  “No. Sorry.” He hadn’t even thought to look at the car at all, once people got out of it. Beth might have, she was more used to such things, but if she had, she didn’t volunteer anything. Her part in the plan at this point was to be shaken and fragile, as needed, to drive home the fact of the woman Hunter as threatening, dangerous.

  “And you gentlemen can confirm all of this?” the younger cop asked the news crew. He was blond and brawny and Dylan didn’t like him on sight, all the more so when his blue eyes checked Beth out, toes to ears, spending way too much time lingering on her hips and chest. The urge to head-butt the boy was repressed only because it would probably not be as effective in human form as it would as a bull seal.

  “The part we saw, yes,” the reporter said solemnly, and then shut his mouth with an almost audible snap. Whatever he knew, he was keeping to himself, for his own reasons. Dylan wondered, briefly, what Beth had said to him, just before the cops arrived.

  “And believe me, we saw enough.” The cameraman slung his equipment over his shoulder and offered his hand to the cops, who shook it automatically. “I’m Max. That’s Tom, our engineer and master of the truck. Pretty boy over there’s Tyler, our anchorman-in-training.” The cameraman had a surprising amount of charm when he put the camera down, taking over the conversation entirely. “Man, we were totally bummed to miss a story. Not that I’m not glad you’re okay, guys,” he said over his shoulder to Dylan and Beth, “but man, it would totally have gotten us the lead on tonight’s broadcast.”

  The reporter, Tyler, leaned back against the side of the van and let the cameraman roll. Beth rested against Dylan’s shoulder, and he draped his arm around her, watching the younger cop open his notebook again, like he was going to start going over their story yet one more time. “I’d really like to go home now,” she said in a small voice, right on cue. “It’s been a horrible day.”

  The
senior cop knocked his partner’s shoulder before he could start writing anything more. The older man was well past midcareer and closing in on retirement. His partner might have wanted to push the story for more detail, but the fact that the news crew was there, and Dylan and Beth were clearly on affectionate terms—meaning that Dylan probably wasn’t the “he” the 911 operator reported the caller being afraid of—supported the facts presented and smoothed over the things they weren’t exactly being up front on.

  “I totally understand, miss,” the older man said. “Since you’ve chosen not to press charges, all I can do is remind you to be careful for the next few weeks, both of you, and that if you see this woman again, or any of her companions, you call us right away. Better safe than, well, you know.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Beth said with heartfelt agreement, widening her eyes and nodding like a little girl. Dylan was pretty sure that he heard the driver of the van stifle a snicker. They weren’t buying her helpless act, either. Thankfully, the cops didn’t know how strong his mate actually was.

  With nothing else to do, the two cops put away their notebooks and got back into their car. After a short conversation and a call to their dispatcher, they pulled out of the parking lot, lights and sirens off this time. They passed a beat-up SUV pulling in, towing a small boat behind it.

  Beth stiffened under Dylan’s arm, turned to watch the newcomers. The SUV pulled off into a far corner of the lot, and a man with two young boys got out and, totally ignoring anything else going on in the parking lot, started unloading supplies for a day out on the water.

  Beth shivered for real this time, unable to take her eyes off them. Dylan watched her, worried. How long was it going to take before she stopped seeing Hunters behind every stranger’s face? When would she become so paranoid she would start seeing them behind a friend?

  “You guys need a ride somewhere?” Tom, the van’s driver, asked.

  Beth forced herself to turn her back on the newcomers, responding to the offer with a smile. “We’re heading to the ferry. If that’s not too far out of the way for you?” She really did want to go home. Home, her own bed, her own blanket over her head, and maybe not come out for a month. Or more. Dylan could feel it in her, that longing for something familiar, something reassuring. The fact that her familiar and reassuring was so at odds with his own…

  It would work out. She was his mate. It would work out. He had to believe that. He couldn’t lose her, not now.

  “They pay us to drive all over the place,” Tyler was saying, “so one place is as good as another. If you don’t mind riding in the back with the beast over there…”

  Max bowed with mock gallantry and shoved open the side door. “Mi disaster area es su disaster area.”

  They climbed in and discovered that Max hadn’t been exaggerating by much. The entire back of the van was filled with equipment, more equipment, and far too many crumpled bags from fast-food restaurants.

  “They might be waiting for us,” Beth said quietly, settling onto the bench seat and making room for Dylan next to her, while Max scrunched next to what looked like a generator, holding on with one hand to a bar welded to the van’s side for obviously that exact holding-on purpose. “Back home.”

  “I know.” He kept his voice low as well, although Max, sensing that they weren’t in the mood for group conversation, had a pair of headphones on now, and had busied himself with some of the mysterious tech, allowing them a sense of privacy even in the crowded confines of the van. “We have cost the Hunters the profit of at least one skin, and it isn’t as though my people are common on the rocks to begin with. I don’t think they will try for you again, though. They’re not certain enough, and we’ve already caused too much attention to be cast their way, just as we planned. It may be enough to make them back away permanently.”

  “Oh, we’re not going to stop there.” She sounded exhausted, but decidedly pleased with herself. “That’s what I was suggesting to Tyler, when the cops showed up. He’s going to sell the story. One of the tabloids, you know, those trashy newspapers that constantly proclaim Bigfoot sightings, Jesus’ face seen in a sports towel, all that sort of thing.”

  He didn’t know, actually, but it sounded fascinating.

  “Nobody admits to believing the stories,” Beth went on, “but a lot of people read ’em. Massive circulation. And they never let go of a story, especially one they can gore up—a couple of Photo-shopped pictures of baby seals, and the suggestion of organized crime? Oh, yeah, headline material, for sure. Once tabloid reporters are on the scent of something that horrible, the Hunters won’t be able to operate quite so openly as before. They might even have to hire a few lawyers to defend their people, if one of them happens to take a swing at a reporter.” She was definitely pleased with herself.

  Then she sighed, the pleasure running out of her like a stream drying up. “Let them be hunted for a while. See how much they like it.”

  The sound of her exhaustion cut Dylan straight to the heart, and he wanted nothing more than to make everything all better. But he had only made things worse, by changing in front of everyone like that. If that hadn’t been caught on film, if nobody had seen it, they could have used the footage, gotten a media splash about crazies hunting people for a game, pressed charges, gotten the woman and her goons thrown in jail at least for a while, made even more of a tangle for the Hunters to deal with.

  Max started slightly and took the headphones off, leaning into the front of the van even as the radio crackled to life, static breaking into a calm voice reeling off street names and a string of numbers that were clearly code for something major going down.

  “I got it, Max. And we’re on, children.” Tyler leaned into the backseat area from his seat. “Guys, we’re almost there, but sorry we can’t stay. Job calls. Be ready to jump!”

  The camera crew let them off a few blocks from the ferry station, generating not a few stares from the tourists heading out to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The locals, inured to the strange attire of tourists and bred to the stoicism of true Yankees, made it their business not to notice anything was at all odd about the sight of a news van disgorging a couple into traffic and then speeding away before the sliding door was completely closed.

  “Well.” Dylan put his arm around her shoulders. “That was different.”

  “You say that like I would know what normal was.”

  “True.” They joined the small crowd of people heading toward the dock. She leaned into his shoulder, and he felt her exhaustion again as though it was his own.

  “Dylan. What you did back there, when you…changed,” Beth started to say, and Dylan hung his head, anticipating her words.

  “I know. I’m sorry.” This was what he had been dreading, why he had put off changing, avoided every discussion of the other side of his nature. But there was no avoiding it anymore.

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him, moving out from under the arch of his arm. “Sorry? For what? You probably saved us—that woman wasn’t the sort to back down unless her own neck was in danger. And it was…” Her voice softened as though in awe. “It was amazing to see.”

  Dylan hadn’t realized until then exactly how much his unease about Beth’s own reaction had affected him. His muscles felt as though someone had poured warm water over an icicle, making them soften and go slack in relief for the first time in days—maybe since he had woken up in that clinic and begun his pursuit.

  “You weren’t…disgusted?” Because there were stories told about that, too, along with the legends. The humans who had screamed, or run, or shot at them when they saw the change, who had shouted “demon” and “monster” and tried to run them off. The loved ones who turned away, when a seal-kin’s secret was revealed. Elizabeth was seal-kin blood, he didn’t think she would react that way…but she had been raised a human, and he hadn’t known for certain, not until then.

  “It was…” She started walking again, in sync with his steps, but she se
emed to be searching for the right word. “It scared me,” she admitted. “Scary—or at least, I was scared, did I mention I was scared? Because I was terrified. And it happened so fast it wasn’t like I really saw anything. But no, I wasn’t disgusted. It’s just…”

  His relief died as fast as it came. “What?”

  She moved away from him, such a small movement she probably wasn’t even aware of it. He was, though. Painfully. Terrifyingly. He wanted to reach for her, but was afraid to.

  “Everything that’s happened, what you’ve told me…I don’t know who I am anymore. What I am. I think I need some time to deal with all of this. All…you. Me. What just happened.” She looked down at her feet, and her next words were muffled. “Time…alone.”

  The relief was gone like it had never existed, replaced by the feeling of plunging into a bottomless cavern, of being pulled under a wave and knowing that he would never see the sky again. Foolishly, he had somehow thought that once he had wooed and won her, once they were safe, once she understood, she would have…

  What, gone off with him? Left everything she knew behind without a second thought? Accepted the fact that she had been living a half-truth all of her life?

  Yes. He really had thought that, somehow. He had really been foolish—ignorant—enough to think that he would be all that she needed.

  His mother’s sigh echoed in his skull. Trust her. Even if you can’t trust yourself. Such a small, difficult thing.

  “It’s not… I’m not…” Beth stumbled over her words, the first time he had ever seen her uncertain, and he couldn’t help himself. He put his arms around her, drawing her body close against his, feeling the way her frame shook, not from cold, or fear, but the weight of everything that had been placed on her in such a short time. And yet, even in those shivers her body rested with such trust against his, molding with such familiarity, strength to weakness, and weakness to strength, that he could not entirely despair in her hesitation.