The Hunt (The Wilds Book Two)

by Donna Augustine

  I opened it back up and yelled, not caring who heard me, “By the way, I don’t like you right now,” and shut the door again.

  I lay on the bed for all of a minute before I marched back out and into his room, pushing the door open.

  “Why are you so intent on helping me get my magic back, anyway? What’s in it for you?”

  “Before you lost some of your magic, Tiffy said the Wood Mist wanted to talk to you. Maybe if you get it back, they’ll try again.”

  I held the doorknob, but didn’t feel like slamming it anymore. I thought he’d weighed vengeance at a higher price than Tiffy. I might’ve been wrong.

  “I still don’t like you right now, but I’ll probably not hate you tomorrow.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Chapter 25

  I sat on my haunches by the lake and threw a stone out toward the center, focusing on a leaf floating on the surface. It skipped once before it sank, falling way short of its mark. Nope, didn’t look like the magic wanted to work today either.

  I felt Dax nearing before he was standing beside me. “Come on. I’ve got something we need to do.”

  He turned and left but I remained where I was.

  I heard his footsteps stop. “We need to go now.”

  I stood and turned around, stuck my hands in my pockets, and didn’t budge any farther. “Why? Is there going to be another conversation like there was last night?”

  Nothing more needed to be said. The message was clear. He’d crossed one of my lines pretty badly yesterday. I’d lain in bed for a long time last night thinking about the wounds he’d poked at. I didn’t plan on letting him ruin another day. I was taking a stand on this one. Yes, I still needed him, but I had my limits.

  He did a single shake of his head. It might not have seemed like a huge concession, but he got it. It was enough, for now.

  I took a step toward him and then we were walking side by side.

  “You do know we are equals, right? You could try asking me to do stuff sometimes.” How was it that I ended up always doing what he wanted? He did often have some good ideas of what to do, but still. Here I was doing it again just because he shook his head, and I thought that maybe there might be a tiny hint of remorse.

  I was going to have to stop this easy capitulation. It would give him a big head. I corrected myself. Bigger. I should probably ignore at least one out of every three demands if I wanted to retain any self-respect in this relationship.

  “Who said we’re equal?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Of course we’re equals.” Perfect example of what was wrong with him.

  “If there was one plate of bacon left in the world and we were both starving, I’d be eating. Nothing about that is equal,” he said as we walked toward the gate.

  “Then how come when there isn’t that much food you always share?” I asked, while I watched him signal to the guard to open the gate, and then we walked over to his bike, which he’d left here.

  “Because I need you alive.”

  “What if you didn’t? If there were only one piece of jerky and we were starving, you wouldn’t give me half?”

  “I’d give you half because you’re one of my people.”

  “So what does that mean for everyone else you meet?” I looked at the people milling around the town center we’d just walked through. “Like some of the people here at the Rock?”

  He shrugged. “I guess that means they’re fucked.” He didn’t seem to care that several of them heard him as they passed by us.

  “Wouldn’t you feel bad?”

  He tilted his head slightly closer as if he were about to tell me a secret. “No. I’d feel full.” His lips turned up in the hint of a smile and we climbed onto his bike.

  I had a strong feeling he wasn’t teasing me, but I had enough problems right now. I’d have to save the hypothetical world from starvation another day.

  I was pulling my knees and arms tight as Dax maneuvered us through the opening with barely an inch to spare. Sometimes I wondered how the bike stayed upright with the way he drove. Dax’s driving was in rare form today, and I pressed my cheek against his back as he cut us too close to a tree, then a bush, before I closed my eyes.

  The one thing I really hated was the lack of communication when we were on the bike. We’d whipped through the forest and I had no idea where we were going. That was what I got for wasting time on hypothetical jerky questions.

  He stopped the bike about twenty minutes later, and the first thing I did when I got off was ask him, “What are we doing out here?”

  He got off quickly after me and got to work stashing the bike in some shrubs. “One of the first dinners you ever had at the house, Bookie asked you if you were a hunter or a gatherer. Do you remember?”

  I wasn’t sure where this was coming from or how to answer. Of course I remembered everything about that night: Fudge’s cooking, the conversation, the way the fireplace had crackled in the background, and the blue patterns on the plates. Every minutia of that evening had been burned into my memory.

  Finally, I answered, “Sure.” As if it had been no big deal.

  “You said you were a hunter that night.”

  Yeah, I remembered that clearly too. I’d said that back when I had a much higher estimation of my abilities. I’d still be a hunter, with or without magic, but it might take a bit longer now.

  He stepped in front of me. His eyes looked nearly as intense as when he was in beast form. I was starting to wonder if the glow was always there under the surface if I looked close enough.

  “Are you ready to hunt?”

  I knew there was only one prey he was talking about. Dark Walkers.

  I’d dreamt of hunting Dark Walkers for the majority of my life. For so many years I hadn’t been able to because I’d been stuck in the Cement Giant. Then I’d been stopped out of fear for my friend’s lives, two of which died anyway. I’d spent a month staring at these monsters when I was taken to the holes for inventory, being held back from doing more, all because of Dax. It looked like the fetters were finally off.

  Goosebumps spread across my skin. Not from fear, which would have been the rational reaction to his question, since my magic was on the fritz, but from excitement.

  “When do we start?”

  “Now.”

  He didn’t wait for me to say anything else—he left and expected me to follow. This time I was right behind him.

  “We go on foot from here.”

  My muscles were already tense, body ready for action. “Where are they?”

  “I spotted a group not long ago that looked suspicious.” He stopped and lifted his head to the air and then pointed up ahead.

  It was a couple hundred feet farther when we came upon the group of three that were settling in and making camp.

  He looked at me with the same question he’d had in the numerous holes we’d visited.

  I nodded. He was right. They were Dark Walkers.

  He motioned for me to stay put while he took off. I knew he was doing a perimeter sweep to make sure there weren’t any more. When he came back, there was no time to talk. He walked right into the middle of the camp.

  I hurried after him, not wanting to be left out of the fun. The group of three turned toward us and Dax hooked his finger toward me and said, “She’s the Plaguer you’re looking for.”

  If I wasn’t positive I was standing on the dirt, I would’ve sworn the ground had disappeared beneath my feet. That was how it felt to hear him say that.

  I didn’t have time to scream at him or ask what he was up to, as he walked to the perimeter of the clearing and leaned against the tree.

  Hurt, a kind I didn’t know existed, burned in me. Was Dax betraying me? The Dark Walkers looked at him, as I did. It didn’t take long for us all to realize the same thing. I was on my own. One even had the nerve to laugh before they swarmed me.

  I had a knife in both hands before they got in range. I’d think about his betrayal
later. Right now I needed every ounce of my attention focused on not getting killed.

  The first one made a grab for me, its hand tight on my wrist, but I used the knife in my free hand to cut through it. My knife didn’t hesitate, slicing his flesh and bone as if it were butter. The Dark Walker stepped back, screaming as he did. If he didn’t look so shocked at what I’d done, I would’ve thought it was a natural thing to cut through him so easily.

  I glanced over at Dax quickly, thinking maybe he was going to step in as the other two came at me from different directions. He remained leaning on the tree and was looking at his nails.

  I lunged in the direction of one of the Dark Walkers and landed a knife in his eye socket.

  I squatted, quickly dodging a blow from the other, and with my right hand launched the other knife into the third one’s chest. My knife found its home easily. That was when I thought I heard Dax yell from the side to leave one alive, but there was no stopping me. With the one knife left, I attacked the one with no hand and sliced across its throat to finish the job.

  I stood, knife still steady in one hand as it dripped black blood, and the last one fell to the ground gurgling.

  Surrounded by my dead foes, I turned on Dax where he was finally straightening up from his leisurely position. He walked over and clucked his tongue.

  “Didn’t you hear me? You weren’t supposed to kill them all.” He nudged one of the bodies with the toe of his boot. “Now who are we supposed to interrogate?”

  “You bastard!” I screamed, not caring if there were five more Dark Walkers hiding around the bend that might hear me. “You could’ve gotten me killed. I thought you were supposed to have my back? What is wrong with you? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “If I’d stepped in, that would’ve ruined the experiment.” His calm somehow made it worse and fueled my own anger.

  “Oh, well, then don’t let the matter of my life interfere with your experiment.” I kneeled beside the body and wiped my knife off on the Dark Walker’s shirt, making sure I didn’t get any additional blood on myself.

  “You’re fine.”

  I reached down and retrieved my other knife from the chest of the Dark Walker and replace it at my ankle. I wiped my palms off on my legs. “I don’t know what type of people you run with, but I thought we were on the same side.”

  “We are, but I needed to know for sure,” he said as he moved around and surveyed my kills.

  “Know what?”

  “If you could get past the block when it really counted.”

  “You could’ve found out a different way.”

  “None of the other ways were as reliable. Relax. You weren’t ever in mortal danger. I knew they weren’t going to kill you. Whatever their purpose for you is, they want to keep you alive. Plus, I was here. I wouldn’t have let them seriously hurt you.” He stood and let out an annoyed sigh. “I can’t believe you didn’t leave one alive for me.”

  “Really? Because I can’t believe you left me fighting all by myself.”

  “Your lack of trust says more about you than me. Luckily, I’d predicted as much, and used it to my advantage.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you don’t trust anyone, and I took advantage of it.”

  “And you’re so trusting?”

  “Never said I was, but I’m not sure how many times I have to save your ass before I gain a little of it.”

  I wasn’t sure if him telling me he’d wanted to keep me alive was draining the anger or if the adrenaline leaking out was taking the edge off. It could’ve been the fact that there was relief mixed in too. I might hate his tactics, but the result made me feel pretty damn good. I could take care of myself, and that was why I didn’t walk over to him and punch him in the face the way I’d contemplated a few minutes ago.

  As I calmed down, I saw something else in his expression. A lot of times, maybe even most of the time, Dax tended to look at me with an expression of tolerance. I got it—he was a lot older, might have seen a few more things than I had. But he wasn’t looking at me like that right now. He was looking at me like maybe, just maybe…

  “You were pretty amazing,” he said.

  Yeah, he was looking at me just like that.

  I didn’t want to feel my insides getting mushy. Worse, my cheeks growing all warm and flushed, like I’d just gotten told how pretty I was or something. I was acting like a silly girl. I wanted to be a warrior. I’d just killed three Dark Walkers and I was blushing over an approving look. Not acceptable. I couldn’t get all soft and stupid over a compliment. I didn’t need anyone’s approval.

  I knelt beside a Dark Walker, pretending to look over his body until my cheeks stopped burning. It was so much easier when he was insulting me. I knew how to deal with insults. That wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t know how to deal with this.

  He walked closer, but luckily remained standing so he couldn’t see my burning cheeks.

  “That first Dark Walker you killed when you were a child. How did you do it?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t it in the report you read at the Cement Giant?” How long could a blush last? How long could my blood stay concentrated in my cheeks like this? It seemed like it was getting worse the more I thought of it.

  “No. Only that you had.”

  I was four, but I still remembered it so clearly. I’d heard it was always like that with a first kill. I guessed being a child at the time didn’t change that. “It was a teacher at my school. I took my pencil and waited for it to be distracted, looking down at some papers. I came up behind it and stabbed it in the throat.”

  I stood, the memory fixing the blush, and walked over to the other dead Dark Walker and gave him a kick, just to make sure I’d finished him off.

  The reality of just how well I’d fought was beginning to really sink in. I’d taken all three of them on at once, all by myself. They were now dead and I only had a couple of superficial scratches. Not only that, the way it had felt still had my blood near fizzing with life. It had felt as good as it had looked to Dax.

  “How did you know these three were Dark Walkers?” I asked, as I looked down at the bodies lying on the ground.

  “I’ve had to do my fair share of killing over the years. Especially in the Wilds, it’s unavoidable. Every so often, I’d come across someone different, someone not quite made the same. Tougher, the skin would look normal, but then it would be more like armor. It’s how I knew they existed, even before Plaguers gave them a name.”

  The Plaguers had given them a name over a hundred years ago. My head jerked in his direction before I thought about how it would reveal my thoughts.

  He didn’t falter from my stare, surely guessing what I was thinking and not refuting it. Really? He was that old?

  “When you finally pointed one out to me and I killed it, I had my proof.” He pointed to the dead bodies. “This group was an educated guess. They were out of the way of every main road that leads to anything. No one else would have a reason to be out here unless they were snooping around, possibly looking for you.”

  “What about drifters or the sort?”

  “That’s not how it works out here. This area is spoken for and everyone knows it. Rocky doesn’t suffer interlopers. This area is marked clearly with Rs that are carved on a regular basis so even newcomers to the area know.”

  He walked over to the Dark Walker with a stump of an arm and pointed at it. “You shouldn’t have been able to slash that one’s arm off, not with the knives you carry. They aren’t sharp enough. You shouldn’t have been able to kill that Dark Walker with a pencil, not in a million years.”

  He squatted beside the Dark Walker and rested his forearms on his knees, looking at the stump and then at me, just like Rocky had after he’d discovered that the Skinners wanted me too. As if maybe there was more going on and I was hiding some of the pieces.

  There might have been more going on, but I was as lost as everyone else.

&
nbsp; I wiped my hands off on my shirt, making a show of how filthy I was. I lifted my head, sure I heard a stream close by. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said. “Going to go clean up a bit.”

  He nodded then finally went back to checking out the Dark Walker corpses.

  Chapter 26

  I might have fared physically pretty well, but I was really filthy. My pants were splattered and my shirt was torn and nearly covered in their blood. A little water wouldn’t do any harm. I still had to walk back into the camp later, and I scared those people enough when I was clean.

  I made my way in the direction of the sound of water, catching a couple more scrapes from some nasty bushes on the way.

  My pants were leather and a couple of splashes of water had them in fairly decent shape, but my shirt was probably going to have to be thrown out. One of those suckers looked like he’d exploded on me, probably when I’d sliced his neck. I pulled off the grey tank top and gave it a good rinsing just so I didn’t have to walk back to the Rock with Dark Walker blood touching my skin. I wrung it out best I could, but the damp cloth was irritatingly clingy and still looked filthy.

  Having done the best I could, I stood and headed back toward where Dax was, but detoured around the prickle bushes. That was when I saw it in the not-too-far distance. It hadn’t rained in a couple of weeks, but there was a mud field that looked to be a mile wide, if my estimate was accurate.

  “Dax?” I yelled, and then started back to find him, not sure if he’d hear me from here.

  I heard nothing and then he was in front of me. It amazed me how quickly he could move, and how silently. How had I never noticed how quiet he was when I first met him?

  “Do you try and make noise sometimes? Is that what it is? Because I don’t remember you being this quiet before.”

  He wasn’t paying attention to what I was saying, staring at me in a way that made my knees almost buckle. That was close to a miracle. My knees never buckled, or at least not over a look. But there he was, looking all sorts of intense, and there I was, all buckly. The energy he was throwing off felt like it was hitting me in waves. Magic, Tiffy had said, and I was inclined to agree.