Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

21: Bait

"Nothing is safe here," I pointed out, crossing my arms. My fingers touched the ripped leather of  my bracer. I dragged my finger along the smooth skin beneath it. "And it won't ever be. If we're going to rescue these other girls, we can't have everyone grab a limb and drag Jessie away into the night. And that's if the Lord decides her limp body is worth taking."

Dakota shrugged. "So we leave her behind as a valiant sacrifice. Isn't that a nicer fate? If she's not up by tomorrow,  even if her skin has yet to hold an open house for maggots..."

I groaned. "Can you not refer to her like that?"

"That depends," she snipped. "Can you stop pretending like she's going to be okay? She's not waking up, Tay. She's just trapped in another kind of death. Is one kind of misery better than another?"

"Are you going to go in there and put her out of it?"

Dakota was silent. At last she rolled her shoulders back, thrust out her chin and said, "Well, she's your charge."

"Say we do abandon her like you want," I said, rubbing my chin. "What about the next time? Who will we use then?"

Shail stretched between us, rumbling away at Dakota as she pressed her elbows into the cat to leer through the gloom. "How many brides are we talking here? At some point, you've got to bring us to the castle. At some point, you'll be hurting us, not helping."

"I'll know," I promised, studying the rocks overhead.

Her head shook. "That's the thing about gambling. You start getting the hang of it, making larger and larger bets, and then just as you chase that final win, the house takes all your money."

She was right, but what she said wasn't something I hadn't wondered myself, especially after losing Jessie that way. If I had just taken Jessie, the girl might still be...Here. "Will it make you happy if we set a goal?" I said, pulling my braid out. While neither of us had a comb, it felt good to do something normal, even if it was a simple action like combing my fingers through the dirty locks.

"It'll make me happy if you stick to it. You said it yourself, I can't get into the castle on my own. I'm trusting you."

"We'll say twenty."

She edged around Shail to join me. Even though we were both damp and filthy, somehow she still looked pretty beneath the grime as she wound her hands through her hair. "Too high," she said after some time. "Ten."

"If you see a Lord you like better, stay with him." On this matter, I refused to budge. "Any more than twenty and I think we'll run into trouble staying hidden. And if we can't handle that many, we'll call it quits sooner."

"When you say twenty," she began, "you're including yourself, right?"

"Excluding," I said, raising my eyebrows. "I'm a Lady."

"Seems to me like you count towards everyone else's total," Dakota observed.

"I don't care about anyone but us."

"Whatever." I sensed the resigned comment was her way of saying she accepted my resolve. "Two down, eighteen to go."

"I don't want to get caught, either. It's going to suck for a long time, but if we don't try, it's only going to be worse," I admitted, watching her tie the end of hair with a strip of her dress. She glanced over at me, blue eyes questioning, but looked away again just as quickly. As soon as the light had brightened another few tones, she asked to borrow my knife to make a spear.

We spent the morning watching Shail paddle around the water and sharpening Dakota something that could, at a minimum, skewer a fish. Finding a Lord was no easy task, especially since the only land we felt comfortable with was so close to where we spent the night. Before we could do anything, we had to scout out a better area or find one of the demons and go from there.

And before that, we had to eat. So spears it was.

Shail's contribution was exactly the sort of help you'd expect to get from a creature of the feline variety- which is to say, he held the title of chief surveyor. When he was feeling particularly curious, he'd meander over to our rare catches: small, silver-backed fish with fat bodies and long whiskers. 

Dakota, perhaps suffering a change of heart, volunteered herself to act as live bait. I told her she didn't have to, that we could find a Lord and just watch him until we learned where he kept the brides, but with curls of wood shavings in her lap the woman touched the end of her spear and said she wanted to be the fox in the hen house.

Eventually (and quite hungrily, since the cat had stolen breakfast) we left Shail at the waterfall and headed deeper into the forest, north of the spider's nest, where Dakota claimed she'd come from. It was an unnerving walk, though my companion made it look a stroll through Central Park. I trailed behind her so far back and to one side that I could barely see her lithe frame clambering over fat roots and over upended boulders like some a small, pale fox in a temperate jungle. She stopped every now and then to sweep the sweat from her forehead, let out a breathy sigh or girly screech or sometimes both. Using her spear as a walking stick, hips swaying in her shortened gown, she was a perky, bold target.

Perfect target, if I was being honest.

But what mattered to me, as I hunkered down in the bushes like a creep, what mattered to me was whether or not I'd be able to keep up with whatever monster carried her away.

...And also that she'd survive the encounter. I might not have liked her, but I wasn't mean enough to wish her dead.

Just wanted to share with you all the cake my mom and aunt got for my birthday. My aunt really wanted it put online, lol, so I thought Wild Side and Hunted would be fair enough places to display it!

Stephen King: "I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose."

The sheep and the bear are from two of my book covers here: Counting Sheep and Run Cold.

...Let's see what monsters I turn loose on Monday.