Black dawn (17 page)

"There was a little food stashed here," Jeanne
said, digging under the hay and pulling out a small
packet.
"Dried meat strips and oatcakes with
salal
berries.
We'd better save some for tomorrow,
though."

Maggie tore into the dried meat hungrily. It
didn't taste like beef jerky; it was tougher and gam
ier, but right at the moment it seemed delicious.
She tried to get Cady to eat some, but it was no
use. Cady just turned her head away.

She and Jeanne and P.J. finished the meal off
with a drink of water, and then they lay back on
the bed of hay.

Maggie felt almost happy. The gnawing in her stomach was gone, her muscles were loosening up,
and she could feel a warm heaviness
settling
over
her.

"You were going
... to tell me about
Bern
..."
Jeanne said from the other side of Cady. The words
trailed off into a giant yawn.

"Yeah."
Maggie's brain was fuzzy and her eyes
wouldn't stay open. "Tomorrow
. . ."

And then, lying on a pile of hay in a tiny shack in
a strange kingdom, with three girls who had been
strangers to her before this afternoon and who now
seemed a little like sisters, she was fast asleep.

Maggie woke up with her nose cold and her feet
too hot. Pale light was coming in all the cracks in
the boards of the cabin. For one instant she stared
at the rough weathered-silver boards and the hay
on the floor and wondered where she was. Then
she remembered everything.

"Cady." She sat up and looked at the girl beside her.

Cady didn't look well. Her face had the waxy
inner glow of somebody with a fever, and there were little tendrils of dark hair curled damply on
her forehead. But at Maggie's voice her eyelashes
fluttered, then her eyes opened.

"Maggie?"

"How are you feeling? Want some water?" She
helped Cady drink from the leather bag.

"I'm all right. Thanks to you, I think. You
brought me here, didn't you?" Cady's face turned
as if she were looking around the room with her
wide, unfocused eyes. She spoke in short sentences,
as if she
were
conserving her strength, but her
voice was more gentle than weak.
"And Jeanne, too.
Thank you both."

She must have heard us talking
last night, Mag
gie thought. Jeanne was sitting up, straw in her red hair, her green eyes narrow and alert instantly. P.J.
was stirring and making grumpy noises.

"Morning," Maggie said. "Is everybody okay?'

"Yeah," P.J. said in a small, husky voice. There
was a loud rumble from her stomach. "I guess I'm
still a little hungry," she admitted.

"There're a couple oatcakes left," Jeanne said.
"And one strip of meat.
We might as well finish
it off."

They made Cady eat the meat, although she tried
to refuse it. Then they divided the oatcakes sol
emnly into four parts and ate them, chewing dog
gedly on dry, flaky mouthfuls.

"We're going to need more water, too," Maggie
said, after they'd each had a drink. The leather bag
was almost empty. "But I think the first thing is to
figure out what we're going to do now. What our plan is."

"The first thing," Jeanne said, "is to tell us what
happened to
Bern
."

"Oh."
Maggie blinked, but she could see why
Jeanne would want to know. "Well, he's definitely dead." She sketched in what had happened after
she and Cady had started running through the
woods. How Gavin and
Bern
had chased them and
had finally driven them into a corner on the boul
der pile.
How
Bern
had
climbed
up
and
changed
...

"He was a
shapeshifter
, you know," she said.

Jeanne nodded, unsurprised. "
Bern
means bear.
They usually have names that mean what they are.
But you're saying you tried to fight
that
guy off
with a stick? You're dumber than I thought." Still,
her green eyes were gleaming with something like
wry
admiration, and P.J. was listening with awe.

"And then-there was this lightning," Maggie
said. "And it killed
Bern
and Gavin ran away." She
realized, even as
she said it, that she didn't want
to tell everything that had happened with
Delos
.
She didn't think Jeanne would understand. So she left out the way their minds had linked when they
touched, and the way she'd seen his memories-
and the fact that she'd dreamed about him before
ever coming to this valley.

"Then I filled the water bag and we heard Sylvia
coming and he went out to make sure she didn't
find me or Cady," she finished. She realized that
they were all staring at her. Cady's face
was
thoughtful and serene as always, P.J. was scared
but interested in the story-but Jeanne was riveted
with disbelief and horror.

"You're saying
Prince Delos
saved your life?
With
the blue fire?
You're saying he didn't turn you over
to the hunting party?" She said it as if she were talking about Dracula.

"It's the truth." Good thing I didn't tell her about
the kiss, Maggie thought.

"It's impossible.
Delos
hates everybody. He's the
most dangerous of all of them."

"Yeah, that's what he kept telling me." Maggie
shook her head. The way Jeanne was looking at her
made her uncomfortable,
as
if she were defending
someone
unredeemably
evil. "He also said at one
point that he killed my brother," she said slowly.
"But I didn't know whether to believe
it...."

"Believe it." Jeanne's nostrils were flared and her
lip curled
as
if she were looking at something dis
gusting. "He's the head of this whole place and ev
erything that goes on here. There's nothing he
wouldn't do. I can't believe he let you go." She con
sidered for a moment,
then
said grimly, "Unless he's got something special in mind. Letting you go and then hunting you down later. It's the kind of
thing he'd enjoy."

Maggie had a strange feeling of void in her stom
ach that had nothing to do with hunger. She tried
to speak calmly. "I don't think so. I think-he just
didn't care if I got away."

"You're fooling yourself. You don't understand
about these people because you haven't been here.
None of you
have been here." Jeanne looked at
P.J.,
who was watching with wide blue 'eyes, and at
Cady, who was listening silently, her head slightly
bowed. "The Night People are
monsters.
And the
ones here in the
Dark
Kingdom
are the worst of
all. Some of them have been alive for hundreds of years-some of them were here when
Delos
's
grandfather founded the place. They've been holed
up in this valley all that time
...
and
all
they do is
hunt.
It's their only sport. It's all they care about. It's all they do."

Maggie's skin was prickling. Part of her didn't
want to pursue this subject any further. But she
had to know.

"Last night I noticed something weird," she said.
"I was standing outside and listening, but I couldn't
hear any animal sounds anywhere.
None at all."

"They've wiped them out. All
the
animals
in the
wild are gone."

P.J.'s
thin little hand clutched at Maggie's arm
nervously. 'But then what do they hunt?"

"Animals they breed and release. I've been a slave
here for three years, and at first I only saw
them
breeding local
animaLs
-cougars and black bears

wolverines
and stuff. But in the last couple of
years they've started bringing in exotics.
Leopards
tigers and things."

Maggie let out her breath and patted
P.J.'s
hand.
`But not humans."

"Don't make me laugh. Of course humans-but
only when they can get an excuse. The laws say the vampires can't hunt slaves to death because they're
too precious-pretty soon the food supply would
be gone. But if slaves get loose, they at least get to
hunt them down and bring them back to the castle. And if a slave has to be executed, they do a death hunt."