The Hunter; The Chase; The Kill

by L. J. Smith

  It didn’t look like fun. They were trusting to fate. No—to Julian, a much more dangerous proposition. Trusting that when he’d said Jenny’s friends could leave, he had meant alive.

  And trusting to Grandpa Evenson, Jenny thought, that the rune of containment would contain. Tom reached to take her hand in both of his. The sky was a blaze of rose and gold.

  They looked at each other and stepped out that way, together.

  They were falling as the sun appeared. In that instant the entire sky around them turned a color Jenny had seen only once before. An unbelievable luminous blue, the color of Julian’s eyes.

  No matter how often you faint, you never really get used to it. Jenny came to herself slowly. She was lying down, she knew that first. Lying on something cool and very hard.

  Mexican paver tiles.

  She sat up much too fast and almost fainted again.

  The first thing she saw was the Game.

  It was sitting in the middle of her mother’s solid ponderosa pine coffee table. The white box lid was on the floor beside the table. The rune Uruz was dull as rust.

  The Victorian paper house itself was tall and perfect, its printed colors richly glowing in the rosy eastern light. The only difference Jenny could see was that the slips of paper they’d drawn their nightmares on were gone—as were the paper dolls they’d drawn of themselves.

  It all looked so innocent, so wholesome, with the Tupperware tub of Joey’s crayons sitting beside it.

  “Maybe it was all a dream,” Michael said hoarsely.

  He was on the other side of the table, with Audrey, who was just straightening up. Her glossy auburn hair was windblown into a lion’s mane. It made her look quite different, quite—free.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Dee said with uncharacteristic quietness, uncoiling her long legs and standing. “Summer’s gone.”

  Zach picked himself up and sat on a leather footstool. He said nothing, but rubbed his forehead as if his head hurt.

  Jenny looked at Tom.

  He was sitting up very slowly, using the table as help. Jenny put a hand under his arm, and he looked a “thank you” at her. He’d changed. Maybe even more than Audrey. He looked battered and sore, and he’d lost his air of always being in control. There was a new expression in his eyes, a sadness that was almost grateful at the same time. Jenny didn’t know the word for it.

  Maybe something like humility.

  “Tommy,” she said, worried.

  The rakish smile was crooked. Battered as his devilish good looks. “I thought maybe you were really staying with him. To save me—and because you wanted to. And the thing was, I wouldn’t have blamed you. I sort of realized that when he gave you the ring.”

  Jenny, who had been about to protest, looked at her hand. Any lingering doubts about last night being real were shattered. It was there, shining on her finger.

  “I thought definitely you really were staying with him,” Audrey said. “You had me convinced you honestly wanted to—and it was all a trick?”

  “It was the truth. I was doing it of my own free will, and I did want to stay—long enough to make sure Tom and you guys got out.”

  “I knew,” Dee said.

  “It’s those brains of yours again,” Jenny said, looking straight at her.

  “And I always thought you were such a sweet little thing,” Michael was musing. “So simple, so honest . . .”

  “I am—when people treat me fairly. When they don’t kill my friends. When they don’t break their word. I figured he made up the rules of that game, and trickery was a legal move. So I did it.”

  Audrey persisted. “And you really never felt anything for him? That was all an act?”

  “Just call me Sarah Bernhardt,” Jenny said.

  She hoped that Audrey wouldn’t notice she hadn’t answered the question.

  “Who cares?” Michael said. “We’re home. We did it.” He looked around at the sunlight flooding in through the sliding glass door, at the ordinary Thornton backyard outside, at the pastel walls of the living room. “I love each and every one of these baskets,” he said. “I could kiss the tiles we sit on. I could kiss you, Audrey.”

  “Oh, if you have to,” Audrey said, not bothering to fuss with her hair. She leaned forward and so did Michael.

  Dee, though, was still looking at Jenny, her night-dark eyes serious. “What about the betrothal?” she said. “The ring? You’re supposed to be promised to him now.”

  “What about it?” Jenny said quietly. “I’m going to throw the ring away. With the rest of this garbage.”

  In a single motion that brought Zach’s head up, she crushed the paper house, smashing it flat and flatter. She put it in the white box, like filling an overstuffed suitcase, pushing it in where it wouldn’t fit. She scooped up the game cards and jammed them in, too.

  Then she took the ring off. It came quite easily, not sticking to her finger or anything. She didn’t look at the inscription.

  She dropped the ring on top of it all.

  Then she put in the paper dolls of the Creeper and the Lurker. As she picked up the third doll she paused.

  It was the boy with the shocking blue eyes.

  They seemed to be looking up at her, but she knew they weren’t. It was just a tagboard cutout, and the original was locked away under a rune of constraint that would hold, she hoped, forever.

  She hadn’t let go of the Shadow Man doll yet.

  It was your Game. You hunted us. You told me to become a hunter. You just never expected to be trapped yourself.

  What would this world be like without a Julian in it? Safer, certainly. Calmer. But poorer, too, in a way.

  She’d beaten the Shadow Man, but it was strangely hard to consign him to oblivion. Jenny felt a pang of something oddly like regret, of something lost forever.

  She put the doll in the box and crammed the lid on.

  There was a roll of masking tape in with Joey’s crayons. Jenny wound tape round and round the bulging white box, sealing it shut. The others all watched in silence.

  When she finally ran out of tape she put the box on the table and sat back on her heels. A smile began somewhere in the group and traveled from one person to another. Not a partying kind of smile, just one of quiet relief and joy. They had made it. They’d won. They were alive—most of them.

  “What are we going to say about Summer?” Tom asked.

  “We’re going to tell the truth,” Jenny said.

  Audrey’s eyebrows arched. “No one will ever believe us!”

  “I know,” Jenny said. “We’re going to tell them anyway.”

  “It’ll be all right,” said Dee. “After all we’ve been through, we can deal with it. As long as we’re all together.”

  “We are,” Jenny said, and Tom nodded. In the old days—last night—it would have been the other way around.

  Audrey and Michael, who couldn’t seem to separate from each other, both nodded, too. So did Zach, who was for once paying attention to the rest of them, instead of being off in his own little world.

  I think it actually helped him, Jenny thought suddenly, to know that his grandfather was only calling up demons and not insane after all.

  “We can call the police from the kitchen,” she said aloud.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was Dee who made the phone call, because Audrey and Michael were looking out the kitchen window together, and Zach wasn’t the talking type. Jenny and Tom had moved a little away from the others.

  “I wanted to show you this,” Tom said.

  It was a tattered scrap of paper. It had several things drawn and then crossed out—Jenny thought one was a rat. The only thing not crossed out was in the middle, and Jenny couldn’t tell what it was.

  “I’m a rotten artist. I thought you could tell by the yellow hair and green eyes.”

  “I’m your worst nightmare?” Jenny said, only half joking because she was completely bewildered.

  “No. It was hard to draw, but it was wh
at I meant at the end when I told Julian I guessed it had to happen. The name of the Game was face your worst nightmare, and that was mine. Losing you.”

  Jenny could only look at him.

  “I’m not good at saying it. Maybe I’m not even good at showing it,” he said. “But—I love you. As much as he does. More.”

  All Jenny could think of was hibiscus bushes. Little Tommy in second grade. The boy she had decided she was going to marry—on sight.

  Something was tugging at her inside, but she knew she had to put it—even the memory of it—away forever. Never think of it again. And never let Tom know.

  Never.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered. “Oh, Tom, so much.”

  It was at that moment they heard the glass break.

  Dee was hampered by being on the phone. Tom was hampered by Jenny. The others were just plain frozen.

  Still, it was only a few seconds before they ran back to the living room, just in time to see two figures ducking out the broken sliding glass door with really astonishing speed.

  The white box wasn’t on the coffee table anymore.

  Tom and Dee, of course, ran into the backyard. But even Jenny, standing by the broken door, could see there was no chance. The two figures were over the wall and gone before their pursuers got close. After climbing the block wall and looking around, Tom and Dee came slowly back.

  “They just disappeared,” Dee said in disgust.

  “They were flying,” Tom panted.

  “You’re not in the best of shape, either of you,” Jenny said. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t really want to give the Game to the police anyway. It probably won’t work for anyone else.”

  “But who were they? Shadow Men?” Michael asked.

  “Shadow Men in sneakers,” Dee said, pointing to a muddy footprint on the tiles.

  “But why would they want to—”

  Jenny tuned him out. She was looking at the broken glass and trying not to think. Even from behind, those two guys had looked familiar.

  But surely what she’d said was true. The Game had been meant for her; it shouldn’t work for anyone else. Besides, it was squashed now, ruined. And even if it did work for someone else, what were the chances of them making it all the way up to the third floor, into her grandfather’s basement? And even if they did make it there, what were the chances of them opening a white closet door?

  “Good riddance to it,” Tom said. In the early morning light his dark hair shone, and the green flecks in his eyes looked gold. “Everything I care about is right here,” he said. He smiled at Jenny. “No more nightmares,” he told her, with open love in his face, in front of them all.

  Jenny went into the circle of his arms.

  * * *

  In a vacant lot, two boys were panting, looking behind them for pursuers.

  “I think we lost them,” said the one in the black bandanna and T-shirt.

  “They weren’t even trying,” said the one in the black-and-blue flannels.

  They looked at each other in a mixture of triumph and fear.

  They didn’t know what the box was, despite a night of watching the blond girl’s house. It hadn’t been until dawn that they’d worked up the nerve to break in—and then the white box had been there on the table, waiting for them.

  They knew only that ever since seeing it they’d been compelled to follow it, fearing it and wanting it in equal measure. It had dominated their thoughts, sending them after the girl, keeping them up all night.

  And now they had it, at last.

  One of them flicked out a knife and slit the tape.

  THE CHASE

  For Joanne Finucan,

  a true heroine and lifelong inspiration

  CHAPTER 1

  It wasn’t so much the hunting. It was the killing.

  That was what brought Gordie Wilson out to the Santa Ana foothills on a sunny May morning like this. That was why he was cutting school even though he wasn’t sure he’d get away with forging his mom’s signature on another re-admit. It wasn’t the wildflower-splashed hills, the sky blue lupines, or the fragrant purple sage. It was the wet, plopping sound when lead met flesh.

  The kill.

  Gordie preferred big game, but rabbits were always available—if you knew how to dodge the rangers. He’d never been caught yet.

  He’d always liked killing. When he was seven, he’d gotten robins and starlings with his BB gun. When he was nine, it had been ground squirrels with a shotgun. Twelve, and his dad took him on a real hunting trip, going after white-tailed deer with an old .243 Winchester.

  That had been so special. But then, every kill was special. It was like his dad said: “Good hunts never end.” Every night in bed Gordie thought about the very best ones, remembering the stalking, the shooting, the electric moment of death. He even hunted in his dreams.

  For one instant, as he made his way along the dry creek bed, a memory flickered at him, like a little tongue of flame. A nightmare. Just once Gordie had dreamed that he was on the other side of the rifle sights, the one with dogs snapping behind him, the one being hunted. A chase that had only ended when he woke up dripping sweat.

  Stupid dream. He wasn’t a rabbit, he was a hunter. Top of the food chain. He’d gotten a moose last year.

  Big game like that was worth observing, studying, planning for. But not rabbits. Gordie just liked to come up here and kick them out of the bushes.

  This was a good place. A sage-covered slope rising toward a stand of oak and sycamore trees, with some good brush piles underneath for cover. Bound to be a bunny under one of those.

  Then he saw it. Right out in the open. Little desert cottontail sunning itself near a squat of grass. It was aware of him, but still. Frozen. Ter-rif-ic, Gordie thought. He knew how to sneak up on a rabbit, get so close he could practically catch it with bare hands.

  The trick was to make the rabbit think you didn’t see it. If you only looked at it sideways, if you walked kind of zigzag while slowly getting closer and closer . . .

  As long as its ears stayed down, instead of up and swiveling, you were safe.

  Gordie edged carefully around a lemonade berry bush, looking out of the corner of his eye. He was so close now that he could see the rabbit’s whiskers. Pure happiness filled him, warmth pooling in his stomach. It was going to hold still for him.

  God, this was the exciting part, the gooood part. Breath held, he raised the rifle, centered the crosshairs. Got ready to gently squeeze the trigger.

  There was an explosion of motion, a gray-brown blur and the flash of a white tail. It was getting away!

  Gordie’s rifle barked, but the slug struck the ground just behind the rabbit, kicking up dust. The rabbit bounded on, down into the dry creek bed, losing itself among the cattails.

  Damn! He wished he’d brought a dog. Like his dad’s beagle, Aggie. Dogs were crazy about the chase. Gordie loved to watch them do it, loved to draw it out, waiting for the dog to bring the rabbit around in a circle. It was a shame to end a good chase too soon. His dad sometimes let a rabbit go if it ran a good enough race, but that was crazy. What good was a hunt without the kill?

  There were times when Gordie . . . wondered about himself.

  He sensed vaguely that his hunting was somehow different than his dad’s. He did things when he was alone that he never told anybody about. When he was five, he used to pour rubbing alcohol on earwigs. They’d writhed a long time before they died. Even now he would swerve to run over a possum or a cat in the road if he could.

  Killing felt so good. Any kind of killing.

  That was Gordie Wilson’s little secret.

  The bunny was gone. He’d spooked it. Or . . .

  Maybe something else had.

  A strange feeling was growing in Gordie. It had developed so slowly he hadn’t even noticed when it started, and it was like nothing he’d ever felt before—at least awake. A . . . rabbit-feeling. Like what a rabbit might feel when it freezes, crouched down, with the hunter�
��s eyes on it. Like what a squirrel might feel when it sees something big creeping slowly closer.

  A . . . watched feeling.

  The skin on the back of his neck began to crawl.

  There were eyes watching him. He felt it with the part of his brain that hadn’t changed in a hundred million years. The reptile part.

  Gingerly, flesh still creeping, he turned.

  Directly behind him three old sycamores grew close enough together to cast a shade. But the darkness underneath was too dark to be just a shadow. It was more like a black vapor hanging there.

  Something was under those trees. Something else had been watching the rabbit.

  Now it was watching him.

  The black vapor seemed to stir. White teeth glinted out of the darkness, as bright as sunlight on water.

  Gordie’s eyes bulged in their sockets.

  What the—what was it?

  The vapor moved again and he saw.

  Only—it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be what he thought he saw, because it—just couldn’t be. Because there wasn’t anything like that in the world, so it just couldn’t—

  It was beyond anything he’d ever imagined. When it moved, it moved fast. Gordie got off one shot as it surged toward him. Then he turned and ran.

  He went the way the rabbit had, slipping and slithering down the slope, tearing his jeans and his hands on prickly pear cactus. The thing he’d seen was right behind him. He could hear it breathing. His foot caught on a stone, and he fell heavily, arms flailing.

  He rolled over and saw it in the full sunlight. His mouth sagged open. He tried to scoot away on his backside, but sheer terror paralyzed his muscles.

  Deliberately it closed in.

  A loose, blubbery wail came from Gordie’s lips. His last wild thought was Not me—not me—I’m not a rabbit—not meeeeee—

  His heart stopped before it even got its teeth in him.

  Jenny was brushing her hair, really brushing it, feeling it crackle and lift by itself to meet the plastic bristles in the static electricity of this golden May afternoon. She gazed absently at her own reflection, seeing a girl with forest green eyes, dark as pine needles, and eyebrows that were straight, like two decisive brush strokes. The hair that lifted to meet the brush was the color of honey in sunlight.