Wild Hunt

by Bilinda Sheehan

We raced after the girl. She was fast, but her terror made her clumsy and she fell before she reached the forest. Within the blink of an eye, she was back on her feet and running once more, the very branches of the forest tearing and clawing at her as though they, too, sought to join the chase.

  The scent of her blood filled the air, blossoms and copper and nothing like the scent of human blood.

  The thought was enough to snap me back to myself and my steps faltered even as a cry of triumph rang from my throat. She’d fallen again and we were close.

  Knowing how close we were to getting our quarry, my thoughts were consumed with catching the girl.

  She screamed, one long, agonising cry of terror that ripped the night, and the beasts I ran with joined with her, our howls of anticipation causing the trees themselves to tremble.

  Racing into the clearing, I was behind only the Heart Hounds, the tentacled creatures bringing up the rear. The girl was backed against a tree, her hands outstretched as though she could prevent us from claiming what was rightfully ours.

  “Please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, please….” Her frightened pleas met my ears and I shook my head.

  “The Fae do not lie, child. You knew the rules and the price to be paid….”

  Moving forward through the Heart Hounds, I paused in front of her as she dropped to her knees.

  “Do not do this, please!” she pleaded, the terror in her eyes tugging at my heart.

  She was just a child; she hadn’t known what she was doing.

  The thought was enough to send the Heart Hounds into a frenzy and I felt them begin to turn on me. The Hunt was losing its hold; I could feel it ebbing away like the moon pulls the tide.

  “Liar,” I whispered, pulling the small obsidian dagger from my belt and slicing it across her chest.

  She screamed again, her blood welling forth, violet and beautiful.

  The creatures surrounding us descended, her screams growing wet as they feasted upon her, ripping her body apart and spreading her across the forest floor.

  Lifting the blade to my mouth, I tasted her blood, letting it soak across my tongue. Grief as sharp as any blade ripped through me and I dropped to my knees and howled my misery to the night and anyone who would listen.

  I awoke with a start, sweat coating my skin as I stared around at my familiar surroundings. My hands still felt sticky with the dead Fae girl’s blood and I glanced down at them, but there was nothing to see.

  I could taste the sweet blossom of her blood on my tongue and I ran for the bathroom.

  Reaching the faucet, I turned it on and quickly rinsed my mouth out with as much water as I could get into my hands.

  It was simply a dream, and yet it had felt so real. It hadn’t been me but it that hadn’t made it any less real. How could they do that to one of their own? How could they join with the Hunt that had ripped her asunder? How did they live with themselves after it? The one whose dream I had shared had howled their grief to the sky, but it hadn’t stopped them from bathing in her blood after.

  It was nuts. I was sick and tired of getting glimpses into the perverse and twisted crimes that took place in the human realm. The very last thing I needed was blow-by-blow playbacks of what went on in Faerie.

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door and I slowly made my way back into the room to drop onto the bed.

  Nic poked his head into the room, and without thinking, I straightened up and stared at him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. The question sounded a lot more accusatory than I’d intended. But then, he had been the one making assumptions over the way Jason and I felt about each other.

  “Graham called me, asked me to come round and stay with you….”

  Shaking my head, I dropped my face into my hands and scrubbed them across my eyes. I needed something to clear the clinging terror from my dream out of my head and pondering why Graham had called Nic over here wasn’t going to help.

  “I need coffee,” I said, pushing up onto my feet and making my way to the door.

  “Are you all right?” Nic asked, catching my hand and forcing me to meet his gaze.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. If I was going to relive the horror of the dream, then I needed to do it in a place where I only had to talk about it once. The thought of having to discuss it over and over again filled me with dread.

  “Liar,” he said, the word causing me to jerk out of his grip and back myself up until my body was pressed against the wall. “Whoa,” he said, lifting his hands in surprise and surrender, “what did I say?”

  “It’s not you, it’s just a dream I had…. Well, more of a vision, and that word….” I shuddered at the implications of it all.

  Nic nodded and dropped his gaze to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice almost inaudible, and it took my brain a couple of seconds to process what he was saying.

  “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. There was no point in carrying on the argument we’d had the night before. He wasn’t the first person to be misled by something in a book supposedly written by an expert, and he wouldn’t be the last.

  “Last night, if I’d just….” He trailed off and then crossed the room, pausing in front of me cautiously as he stared down into my face. I could see his hesitation and it quickly dawned on me that he wasn’t going to reach out and touch me without my consent first.

  “I’m fine, Nic, I’m not fragile,” I said. The words were woefully inadequate but I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  “Graham told me what that thing tried to do last night…. What it did to you at the crime scene….”

  Swallowing past my fear, I nodded. I could still remember the feel of the Fae’s magic crushing mine beneath it, tendrils creeping into my head as he tried to take control of me. I’d fought him, but I had known without a doubt that my magic was no match for his. The only thing that had kept me safe had been the demon mark; without it, the Fae would have claimed me as his own, he would have made me do things that….

  I trailed off. Thinking about what could have happened wasn’t going to solve the issue at hand and it wasn’t going to catch the son-of-a-bitch before he tried the same thing again.

  But did I really want to catch him?

  The question caught me and knocked my thought process sideways. My demon side had posed it and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that actually, I didn’t want to catch the Fae responsible. I wanted to kill him. I wanted the Wild Hunt to rip him asunder just as it had done to that poor girl I’d seen in my vision….

  “I know you’re not fragile, I know you’re a fighter, but I want you to know that I’m sorry. If I hadn’t behaved like such a jealous, possessive asshole, I would have been here. I could have helped….”

  Pushing my dark thoughts aside, I smiled up at Nic and shook my head. “You’re incorrigible, do you know that?”

  “What?” he said, a smile lighting his face.

  “That you think you’d have been here,” I said teasing him gently.

  “Oh, I see, it’s like that now is it?” he teased right back, wrapping his arms around me.

  I couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled up from my core and I really didn’t want to either. Nic made being with him so easy, and despite us having a slight wobble the night before, the fact that we could both make each other laugh put a huge tick in the positive box as far as I was concerned.

  His expression turned serious as he pinned me against the wall and his lips found mine before I could get another word out.

  The kiss was the type to buckle the knees and send the world spinning off its axis. His hands slid behind me and beneath the sweat shirt I wore so that he was cupping my ass with his large hands. I forgot to breathe when he dragged me closer and crushed me to his front, allowing me to feel every hard, muscled inch of him with nothing but the thin fabric of our clothes between us.

  My cell phone rang and I groaned but Nic dropped his mouth to my jawline and proce
eded to plant feather-light kisses along it. “Ignore it,” he said.

  “I can’t. The case is a big one and it’s kind of all hands on deck,” I answered slowly, extricating myself from his grip.

  Reluctantly, he let me go and the moment his arms were no longer around me, I felt his absence keenly. I wanted to ignore the call, to return to his warm touch and lose myself in his passionate kisses.

  Scooping up the cell phone, I pressed it to my ear.

  “She wants to see you,” the voice said, and it took me a couple of seconds to realise who was on the other end of the line.

  “What?” I said. I’d been expecting a call from Graham but definitely not from Jason.

  He sighed and said it slower, as though repeating the words in the way one would speak to a three-year-old was going to make me understand just what he was rambling about. “She. Wants. See. You,” he said again.

  “Who wants to see me, Jason? You’re not making any sense.”

  Nic stiffened at the mention of his brother’s name and dropped the pretence he’d been making at not listening to the conversation.

  “Lily, she asked to see you. Says she’ll only speak to you and that it’s important…” Jason said, and then the line went dead, leaving me to stare blankly at the phone in my hand.

  “What did he want?” Nic asked, doing his best to keep his jealous feelings to himself. But it didn’t matter; he couldn’t hide them from me and I could read him like a book.

  “Lily wants to see me, says it’s important,” I answered as I dumped the cell phone on the bed and then made my way to the wardrobe.

  What exactly I was supposed to make of her sudden summons, I had no clue. Had she decided to come clean, tell Jason everything? And if that were the case, then why ask to see me at all?

  Perhaps she just wanted to see the panic and fear in my eyes when she made her announcement. Something like that was certainly more than plausible where Lily was concerned.

  “I thought she was refusing to see you,” Nic said, dropping down onto the bed next to the cell phone.

  “She was, but….” Poking my head out of the wardrobe, I shrugged and dove back in. “Your guess as to what she’s doing is really as good as mine. Where she’s concerned, anything is possible.”

  “What will you say to her?”

  His question caught me unawares. I’d been so focused on what she would say to me that I hadn’t even considered what I might say to her. There were so many questions I wanted answers to, but a high security prison for preternaturals wasn’t exactly the place to ask said questions, even if I could be sure that no one else would accidentally spy on us.

  “I don’t know…” I said truthfully.

  Nic didn’t answer, and I cast a look at him over my shoulder but his eyes were focussed on the floor, his gaze troubled.

  Clearly he felt the same way I did about family. Nothing they ever did was trustworthy and how you were supposed to handle them … well, the day I ever figured that one out, I’d be able to sell it and make a small fortune.

  But from what I could tell, at least Jason actually loved his brother; he’d obviously changed but not enough to damage the way he felt for his family. I couldn’t claim the same feelings on Lily’s behalf toward me. Given half an opportunity, if she thought it would benefit her, she would sell me down the river.

  And if I was honest about it, I would do the same to her, if only as payment for the pain she’d caused from the moment she decided to walk into my life once more.

  Chapter 10

  The prison resembled some sort of huge concrete and steel box. From what I could see from my vantage point in the car, there were no windows and part of me wondered why.

  Obviously, you couldn’t hold a vampire in a cell with access to daylight, but surely the option would have been a good idea, in case something went wrong? And anyway, what kind of trouble could the rest of the prisoners cause with access to a little sunlight?

  The car drove in through the barricaded gates and the screech of metal as they closed behind us reminded me of nails on a chalk board.

  King City wasn’t visible from the prison; the closest town was at least fifteen miles away and from what I could tell, the government had bought up most of the land surrounding the prison itself. There was even a rumour that in some of the barren stretches of land, they’d placed land mines and other assorted deadly weapons as a deterrent to the prisoners contemplating escape—and also in case anyone thought it was a good idea to try and break in.

  I’d never heard of anyone trying to break into one of the prisons, but attempted prison breaks were a pretty regular occurrence.

  The car wound its way up the hill to the main entrance, which would have looked more at home on the front of a fortified castle.

  The moment the car came to a halt, someone opened the door and I slid out into the cold morning sunshine. Seven guards stood at the entrance, their black armoured gear hiding most of their bodies; even the helmets they wore had black tinted visors down the front of them. They were armed, and from where I stood, I could see their weapons didn’t have the safeties on.

  The car I’d got out of drove away as smoothly as it had arrived, its tyres silent on the slick asphalt.

  “You brought your ID?” Jason said, appearing out of the group of armed men and approaching me slowly.

  “Yeah, and my badge and gun.”

  “They’ll want to take the gun and badge; you can’t bring anything like that in with you in case it’s used against you…” he said, gesturing for me to walk ahead with him.

  As we approached the large iron doors, the tell-tale flash of security cameras told me whoever was manning the inside already knew we’d arrived and the doors swung open without us having to lift a finger. I stepped inside; the air itself buzzed with static and I could feel it prickle along the back of my neck, strands of my hair frizzing into life and floating around my face.

  Jason paused next to a white screen and waited until a green light flashed overhead. I copied him, leaving my gun and badge in the small lockable box supplied to me. And after a couple of seconds the light turned green for me, too, and another, smaller door swung inwards.

  The place looked pristine and the glare from the all-white walls, floors, and ceilings made it almost uncomfortable to walk down the length of the corridor. Static continued to buzz, worse in some areas as I followed Jason silently through the maze of hallways and heavily-fortified doors.

  We stepped through another of the fortified doors and Jason turned to me. The expression he wore more than a little intimidating as he studied me carefully. “What does she want from you?” he said, his gaze searching and probing mine.

  “I have no idea. I was hoping maybe you could tell me,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could.

  He shook his head and sighed. “As you can imagine, beyond the first interview I had with her, she doesn’t want to talk to me at all. We simply stare at each other day after day in a never-ending game of who will break first.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him so I kept silent. If he wanted to confide in me then I wasn’t going to stop him. Anything he could tell me about how Lily felt or what she was planning would be a good thing.

  “And she didn’t say anything about why she wanted me here?”

  He shook his head and pulled another key card from his pocket. “When she asked me to bring you here, it was first thing she said to me since the night she turned herself in.”

  Struggling to keep the surprise off my face, I nodded. None of it made any sense. She had to have a reason for turning herself in, but why it would involve giving one interview and then never speaking to anyone again … well, that wasn’t something I could quite wrap my head around.

  “You can’t touch her, and if she tries to give you anything, stand back and we’ll take it from there…” he said as he pressed the card to a keypad. One of the walls swung inwards to reveal a small, square cell.

  Stepping inside, I s
tared at my surroundings in surprise. It resembled more of a padded cell than anything else; there was nothing in the room aside from Lily and she sat in the centre of the room on the floor, her long dark hair hanging limply around her face. Showering was obviously a luxury they couldn’t afford the inmates much access to.

  “Hi, Lily,” I said, keeping my voice low and as unthreatening as possible.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come, especially after everything that happened between us,” she said, her voice hoarser than I remembered, as though she’d spent a lot of time screaming.

  Lifting her face, she smiled at me, the purple bruises that ran in a thick line down one side of her face from hairline to jaw only emphasising how pale she’d become.

  “Please have a seat. I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything more comfortable than the floor, but they’re not big on furniture in here….” There was a bitterness in her voice that seemed out of place in someone who had brought this on herself. She’d given herself in to the authorities; had she not known what awaited her inside the preternatural prison system?

  “What happened to your face?” I asked, quickly taking in the other bruises that decorated every inch of exposed flesh that peeked out beneath the white jumpsuit.

  “Things happen in prison and I’m not allowed the use of my magic in here, not even to protect myself. Sometimes the other prisoners get a little over zealous,” she said, tilting her head to the side to reveal several bite marks down one side of her neck. “And sometimes it’s the guards,” she whispered, running her fingers down the side of her face. “They don’t like it when we scream,” she said almost imperceptibly, “and they don’t like the word ‘no’; it makes them mean.” My stomach clenched in discomfort.

  We’d had our problems. Lily had killed innocent people; she’d had her vampire allies kill an innocent child and she’d wanted me to take the life of another. She’d caused immeasurable pain to those she’d come into contact with; she was one of the bad guys and we were supposed to be the good guys.

  She should have been safe in here, from the other prisoners but most particularly from the guards…. How were we supposed to protect the innocent if the line between good and evil was so irreparably blurred and damaged?