At first, she struggles, and I’m afraid we’re both going to fall. Then whatever’s been crashing toward us breaks through the brush and the girl freezes in my grip. Together, we watch as two squat four-legged creatures thunder past us down the path, silent except for the sound of their footsteps and…an odd, soft but high-pitched mechanical whine.
They pass through a small clearing just before they race out of sight, and moonlight glints off two metal muzzles hanging open to reveal row upon row of sharp metal teeth.
Before I can truly understand what I’m seeing, they’re gone, thrashing through the forest as if they weigh as much as a transport shuttle. And considering that they’re machines, they just might.
I hold the girl immobile against me long after the sound of the metal hounds’ steps has faded, mostly because I want to touch her. The feel of her ribs expanding against my chest with every shaky breath she draws is hypnotizing. Arousing. She feels fragile against me. I could break her in half with one arm, but all I want to do is keep her up here with me. Where she’s safe, at least for the moment.
Safe from everything but me.
And too late, I realize I’ve fallen for the bait.
Surely if she knew she was a lure, she wouldn’t be trembling so fiercely in my arms. Surely she’d be struggling more to make herself heard. To get me caught. That would be okay too, because every time she shifts against me, my cock swells a little thicker. Aches a little deeper. Which is probably scaring the shit out of her.
But I can’t let her go until I know she won’t scream.
“Shhh…” I whisper into her ear, even as I loosen my grip on her face. “Okay?”
She nods frantically, and her hair brushes my cheek. She smells sweet, beneath a light layer of cold sweat. She smells like cookies and sex, and if the hunter didn’t already know that combination was guaranteed to get my cock hard, he just got really fucking lucky.
The last thing I want to do is let her go. I want to push her back on this thick branch and tear her clothes off. But I remove my hand from her face. Because I’m not that much of a monster.
Yet.
She sucks in another deep, shaky breath. Then she tries to turn so fast that I have to brace myself against a branch to keep us both from tumbling to the ground. When she realizes her mistake, she freezes again, and this time I clutch the branch between my thighs to brace myself, then I lift her and settle her into the sturdy fork of a branch a little higher than the one I’m on. She’s small enough that that puts her just above eye level with me.
The girl clings to the tree trunk and stares, wide eyed, at the ground.
Finally, after a few more deep breaths, she looks up until her gaze meets mine. Then she starts trying to push herself farther out on the branch, away from me. She’s as scared of me as she is of the metal hounds.
Can’t say I blame her.
I reach for her, trying to pull her back toward the trunk, where the branch she’s on is strongest, but she jerks away from my hand, then has to scramble to grab the trunk again to maintain her balance.
I seize her arm and haul her closer. “The branch is too thin,” I explain in a gruff whisper, though I really don’t want to speak until I’m sure the hounds can’t hear us. “Stay near the trunk.”
She frowns, confusion warring with the fear shining in her eyes. Then she opens her mouth…and starts to babble.
Of course she speaks the common language. Because it’d be too easy to be able to tell her to shut the fuck up in words she’d understand.
I’ve picked up a little of the common language over the years, so I squint at her mouth in the shadows and listen closely for words I know. But she’s speaking too quickly and softly for me to understand a damn bit of it.
“Shhh.” I hold up one hand, in the universal signal for stop. She frowns at me and her mouth snaps shut. I close my eyes for a second, mentally grasping for the words I do know. “Name?” I whisper in her language.
She looks relieved. “Maci.” She lays one pale hand over the small, round shape of her left breast, cradled by a black sports bra. Then she starts speaking again, gesturing at the ground path, then growling and making snapping sounds with her teeth. And though I can see that she’s asking about the metal hounds, I don’t actually catch a single word she’s saying.
I put my hand over her mouth again while I struggle for a couple more words she’ll understand. This is exactly what I was afraid of. She’s too loud and too slow. She’s going to get us both killed.
“Dogs. Gone.” I want to tell her that they’ll probably be back, whatever the hell they are. That we have to find some place safer to hide. That she’s been doing everything wrong, and it’s a miracle she’s not already dead. But I don’t have the words for that, in her language. And it’s possible she gets part of that from my disgusted expression alone.
She’s still frowning, but this time I can tell she’s thinking. “Name?” she asks, pointing to me.
“Callum. I’m Callum.”
“Callum,” she repeats, staring straight into my eyes. As if she recognizes me. Then she starts to talk again, and this time she holds her arms up, miming shooting a rifle. “Hunter.”
“Yes.” I’d recognize that word even if I didn’t understand her gesticulating. When my pop was arrested for poaching on government land, I picked up several words related to his case, from speaking with the public defender. Because Pop had refused to accept government help for the same reason he’d refused to teach his children the common language.
He was a crazy separatist bastard.
One of the words I’d learned was hunter.
“Yes, I know there’s a hunter. That’s why we need to get out of here. He’ll probably follow the same path you did.” And now she’s looking at me like I’m babbling.
Gritting my teeth, I indicate with gestures that I’m going to climb down from the tree and that she should follow me, putting her hands and feet where I put mine. Quietly.
Maci nods. Then she watches me climb down, and when I’m sure it’s safe on the ground, I gesture for her to join me. But her limbs are short and thin, and climbing down proves impossible for her. After a valiant attempt, she winds up hanging from the limb I was sitting on, resigned to dropping to the ground.
I catch her before her feet hit the dirt, and with her body pressed against mine, I can’t resist burying my nose in her hair and inhaling her scent again. When I reluctantly set her down, she scrambles to put space between us, her distrustful gaze studying me.
At least she has decent instincts in one area.
I hold my palms up to show her I don’t plan to hurt her, and when she relaxes enough that I’m sure she won’t bolt deeper into the woods, I realize she doesn’t even come up to my shoulders. She’s tiny.
And as I glance around the forest, on alert for any sound that doesn’t belong, I realize I have no idea what the hell am I going to do with Maci, now that I’ve rescued her from the metal hounds.
What the hell am I going to do for either of us? There’s no endgame here. The only way out of the hunting enclosure is in a body bag, and I’m not even sure they bestow that dignity on dead inmates. And while I’m perfectly willing to die, as long as I take the hunter out first, was there really any point in me saving Maci’s life, only to get her killed alongside me?
Yes, my stiff cock insists. There was definitely a point.
The best-case scenario within the enclosure is a long hunt, but that will only extend our lives by a few days. My plan had been to let the hunter get ahead of me, then hunt him instead—one big fuck you to the warden before I die. But that was before I knew about the metal hounds. And Maci.
“Callum?” She looks up at me as if she’s trying to read my thoughts. Then she says something I can’t understand and starts heading toward the east—the direction the sun will rise in a few hours. I grab her arm to stop her. I want to head north, opposite the direction the hunter will be coming from.
She tries to pull out
of my grip, but just because I’m not holding tight enough to hurt her doesn’t mean I’m just going to let her go. “Why?” I ask, pointing toward the east, and though she may not know the word, she knows damn well what I’m asking.
“Robo-dogs,” she whispers, and when I shake my head with a scowl, she makes a growling noise and snaps her teeth again, then points to the northwest.
Oh. That’s her word for the metal hounds. She seems adamant that we’ll run into them if we go my way, and she actually has a point. I’d rather listen carefully for the hunter than risk coming across those hounds again. At least until I find a weapon to use against them. So, I lead her toward the east.
Every few minutes, she stops to listen, her head turned to the northwest. Her eyes closed. Only she doesn’t seem to be listening, so much as she’s…feeling something. Like I stopped to feel the warmth of the sun on my face after months in a cage—only without the pleasant association.
At first, she keeps her distance as we walk. She may prefer me over the hunter and the hounds, but I’m twice her size, and she seems to know it’s no accident that I’ve been sentenced to death-by-wealthy-hobby-hunter. And if she has two brain cells to rub together, she understands the basis of a woman’s worth on a prison planet. Any prison planet.
But when I haven’t tried to kill or molest her after half an hour, she begins to relax a little, and I decide it’s time to teach her how not to get us both caught. I point out roots before she can trip over them and twigs before she can step on them. I show her how to place her feet carefully and silently, and how to duck beneath branches rather than pushing them aside, both because that’s quieter and because it cuts down on the number of scratches and welts she’ll accumulate. And she’s already got quite a collection.
When she no longer sounds like Godzilla stomping through twentieth-century Tokyo, I start to relax a little. As if she can sense that, she reaches out and touches a tree trunk as we pass it, and she whispers her word for it. Then she watches me expectantly.
“Tree.” I tell her, and as she touches the next trunk, she repeats the word softly to herself. Learning it. It’s kind of cute.
Then she plucks a bright red leaf from a low hanging branch and says her word for it. And the game is no longer cute. Wanting to learn my language is fine, but expecting me to learn hers? Spelling things out for me like I’m a brain-damaged child?
I grunt and ignore her.
She says the word again and waves the leaf in front of me. I snatch it from her, then crumble it in my fist. And I keep walking.
Maci doesn’t follow. In fact, she’s so quiet I’m not sure she’s still there, but I’ll be damned if I’ll check. She needs me more than I need her, and as long as that’s the case, we’re going to do this my way.
But I didn’t rescue her just to let her wander off…
I groan, and I’m about to turn around when her footsteps stomp toward me. Like Godzilla. Again. She steps in front of me holding another leaf and shoves it in my face with a fierce little angry expression. As if she has nothing to fear from me. Then she says her word again, and this time she follows it up with a much softer, “Please.”
I know that word too. The little badass is using her manners.
A hellcat—hellkitten, anyway—that knows how to purr.
I scowl so she won’t see how amused I actually am. “Leaf,” I tell her. I pluck it from her and crush it in my fist, then I turn her around by her shoulders and give her a little push. We’re not going to stand around here giving each other vocabulary lessons all day, when we have a hunting rifle to avoid.
But half an hour later, she hasn’t even looked at me again, and I realize that her vocabulary lesson, as annoying as it was, gave me an excuse to keep looking at her without seeming predatory. With a sigh, I break a twig from a nearby branch and tap on her shoulder. She turns, still frowning, and I hold it up for her to see. “Twig.”
Her eyes light up like I just handed her a slice of cake, and she repeats the word. Then she kicks a root and gives me her word for it, and I realize I’m a huge sucker. But at least she’s talking to me again.
Her words are more familiar to me than mine are to her, because you’d have to have grown up on an atmosphere-less moon never to have heard the common language. But she seems just as eager to learn mine as she is to teach me hers. And her memory is very good.
However, after a few minutes of our new game, I realize that though it’s a decent way to pass the time and a good excuse to keep looking at her, a vocabulary lesson made up of local flora won’t help me figure out who the hell she is, and what the hell she’s doing here.
Or how the hell I’m going to get us out of this.
My plan to hunt the hunter won’t help Maci. Even if she’s only bait, they’re probably willing to kill her to get to me. But if she helps me kill the hunter, she’ll have a murder on her record, and that’s an automatic death sentence.
The only way I can help Maci is to get her out of the enclosure before I kill the hunter. I have an idea. But until we can say something more meaningful to each other than tree and leaf, I have no clue how to explain that idea to her.
6
MACI
The blue-eyed man is named Callum. And he’s a total grouch. Not that I can blame him; he’s been sentenced to death just like I have. Still, if he hadn’t literally plucked me from the ground and hauled me into a tree seconds before those rabid robo-dogs would have ripped me to pieces, I would have already left him and headed off on my own.
I still might.
As we walk, I stay out of Callum’s immediate reach while I silently weigh my options.
I could strike off into the woods on my own—assuming he doesn’t try to stop me—but despite a month spent setting and checking traps in the woods in zone four, I am woefully unprepared to navigate on my own. I don’t have the time or materials to set game traps. I can’t reach the lowest branches in most of the trees. And in the category of self-defense, my record is abysmal, with the single exception of Steven Hansen, and killing him is what got me into this mess in the first place.
So, on my own, I’m as good as dead.
Callum may or may not be planning to kill me, and even if he does turn out to be a murderer biding his time, would being killed by him be much different than being killed by the hunter?
Either way, the truth is that he’s damn useful, and if I learned anything from Audra and Tyson it’s that if someone offers you help on Devil’s Eye, you take it. Even if there’s a price. After all, Tyson “bought” Audra for sex before he fell for her. And I’m in much bigger trouble here than I was in zone four.
Harris and Dalton didn’t say anything about robo-dogs. The thought of what else they might have neglected to mention is enough to give me hives, but despite Scott Hansen’s unfair advantage, I’m pretty sure I’ve already outlived my life expectancy. And hopefully cost several guards a lot of money.
Thanks to Callum.
My best course of action seems to be learning how to talk to him.
I can’t quite place Callum’s language, which isn’t much of a surprise, considering he’s the first person I’ve ever met who doesn’t speak the common language. But I like the sound of it on his tongue. And the way his mouth looks as he forms the words—even when he’s scowling.
But the asshole really makes me work for a vocabulary lesson.
It takes me forever to break through his grouchy outer layer—though I’m not sure I’ve broken through very far—but eventually he gives in and teaches me some of his words. Soon I realize that if I pretend not to have heard him, he’ll lean closer and say the word again. Despite my certainty that he’s as likely as not to be a cold-blooded murderer, when he leans in like that, his blue-eyed gaze glued to mine, I feel…something.
I feel warmer inside—almost tingly—in spite of the rapidly dropping temperature. He’s oddly magnetic, for a grouch. Possibly because he’s gorgeous, in a hulking, wall-of-muscle kind of way.
; We’ve learned each other’s words for tree, and leaf, and twig, and flower, and forest, when Callum stops so suddenly I almost expect to find a smoking hole burned right through his chest by a laser rifle. Pulse racing, I squint into the darkness ahead, trying to find the threat, but then he grabs me by the shoulders and turns me to face him, speaking softly and rapidly in his language.
There’s no immediate threat. He’s worked up about some idea I can’t understand.
I give him a dramatic shrug of my shoulders and shake my head, reminding him that I don’t speak his language, and Callum scowls, irritated all over again by that fact. As if it’s brand new information. Then he starts a moonlit game of charades.
He puts his hands together, side by side, with his palms facing me. Then he slides them apart and makes a soft grinding noise.
“Gate?” I guess. “You’re talking about the enclosure gate?”
“Gate,” he repeats, nodding.
“You want to go through the gate? Back to the Resort?” I ask, but he only scowls again. He doesn’t understand. And I really hope I’m wrong. Going back to the Resort would only get us killed on the spot. If we’re lucky.
“Gate,” he repeats. Then he holds up one finger and arches his dark brows, like a question mark written right on his forehead. Then two fingers and a brow arch. Then three fingers and a third arch.
“One gate?” I whisper, holding up one finger.
He gives me a firm nod and points to the south. In the direction of the Resort, and the gate that let me into the enclosure.
“Or two gates?” I hold up two fingers, and he shrugs and points to the east. Another shrug, and he points to the west. A third shrug, and he points to the north.
Callum thinks there might be more than one gate.
“You want to look for another gate?”
“Yes. Gate.” He lets two fingers walk on his opposite palm, then points to the east, in the direction we were already heading. Then he shrugs, to make sure I understand that he doesn’t know for sure that this hypothetical gate exists.
Hunter Page 6