Page 359 of Hunters and Prey

Chapter 5

Helgi stared at me from her mattress, squished against mine. Her body was tense, ready for action. There was no way she’d be sleeping. We lay facing each other, eye to eye, breath mingling. It reminded me of the old days when she’d come running to the farm to get away from her drunk mother or one of her mother’s drunk men. We’d lain like this in my bed, covers drawn over our heads, and shut out the whole world. It was like that now, except the darkness was our blanket and this cage was our haven. A single lamp was lit on the other side of the room, turned so low that it barely provided enough light for normal night vision to kick into gear.

I reached for Helgi’s hand. “We need to get some rest.”

Her lips turned down. “And what if they come in and do something to us while we let our guard down.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, we’re in cages. You can’t get more guard-down than that. If shit is gonna happen, it’ll happen. I, for one, want to be energized enough to counter it.”

She sighed. “Yeah, point.” Her gaze slipped over my shoulder to where Dante was sleeping. Not that she’d see much in the dark aside from a shadowy lump.

I shifted closer to her. “You don’t trust him, do you?”

Helgi’s lips tightened. “I don’t know. I get this vibe off him. Like he’s lying but not lying. Ugh. I can’t explain it.”

She’d put my thoughts into words perfectly. “I get you. I feel it too.”

“Really?” She grinned. “Is that what you’ve been feeling?”

“What?”

She shuffled closer, her tone dropping to a soft whisper. “You were real up close and personal a little while ago. Up against the bars.”

She was diverting, but I’d let her have it if it soothed her nerves. “He was trying to provide cover. He backed off when I told him to.”

Helgi studied my face. “You think he’s hot.”

I exhaled through my nose. “It hardly matters what I think.”

Helgi snorted. “This is so fucked up. You finally find a specimen you might want to fuck, and we get taken prisoner.”

“Shhh, keep it down.”

Helgi pressed her lips together. “Anya. What are we going to do? Seriously?”

And here was the real issue. “I don’t know, Hel. I really don’t know.”

She blew out a sharp breath. “I do. We’re going to do whatever it takes to survive. We’re going to have each other’s backs, and we’re going to get the hell out of here. It’s just another job, except this time we’re going to save ourselves.” She squeezed my hand. “You want to tell the story?”

Optimism was our buzz word, and right now Helgi was giving us a big dose of it, because this was by far the worst situation we’d ever been in. I doubted even our little game was going to help, but I laced my fingers through hers just as I’d done all those years ago in her barn. Her adult face melted away, and she was a child again, just turned thirteen. Her lip was busted and her eye was swollen and we were huddled behind bales of hay, our gawky, long-limbed bodies wrapped around each other as we hid from one of her mother’s many men.

I’d made up the game then. The story game where we wrote what would happen next. I’d pressed my forehead to hers, I’d taken her hand, and we’d woven a tale. A story about two formidable women: strong, powerful, able to best any man. They would travel throughout the Outlands righting wrongs and aiding the weak, and during the tale our tears had dried and a new resolve had been born.

“We did it, didn’t we?” Helgi said softly.

She was recalling it too. I smiled. “Yeah, we did.”

“And we can do it again.”

I squeezed her hand. “Yeah. We can.”

Helgi began to tell a story, and somewhere along the way sleep took me, pulling me into its arms and cradling me in memories of yesteryear.

The cave was warm and dry, and the meat on the fire smelled divine. The dark shadow, lit by the flames, ate. He didn’t lift his horned head, not once. He didn’t offer for me to partake in his bounty. He finished it all, even the bones, and then he looked up, wiping his monstrous face on his fur-cuffed arm. He was wiry but strong, all limbs and calves, and older than me by enough years to instill the desire to follow.

“I’m not your savior. I’m not your guardian. If you want to eat, you need to hunt. If you want to eat, you need to work for it.”

The thought of killing again made my stomach turn; it brought to mind my adopted father’s face, his still-dead eyes and the blood, so much blood.

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