The Hunt (3 page)

“Ladies and gentleman,” the bartender said, though there was only the one guest, “I am most pleased to announce a record-breaking hunt!”

Though his delivery was slightly stilted, his words weren't as flat as Mali's way of speaking, so he must not have been taken from Earth as young as she had been. At his announcement, another Kindred guest came through the veranda doors, dressed in safari clothes that looked bizarre against his metal-like skin. He dragged a bobcat by one leg. A rifle was slung over his shoulder.

“The first kill of the day!” the blond boy said. “This bobcat
weighs in at nineteen kilos, and let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, these animals are fast, with a top speed of . . .”

Cora felt her head spinning as the boy went on. The bobcat's blood streaked the floor between her and the stage but was mopped up quickly by the dark-haired bartender. She rubbed her temples, feeling like she was going to be sick. “That's real blood,” she whispered to Cassian. “Real rifles. You thought I'd be safe
here
?”

Cassian led her toward a row of alcoves separated from the main space by wooden screens. “I had no choice,” he whispered. “You would not have lasted long in the Harem menagerie; girls never do. They would have drugged you in the Temple, and I need your mind sharp. There are fewer regulations here, yes, but that is why I chose it. We shall be able to work together privately.” He gestured toward the nearest alcove, which contained a table laden with dice and decks of cards. “Kindred come here to gamble in private. It isn't unusual for them to want a human companion to serve them drinks or to play card games with. As soon as I handle Issander, no one will spare a second glance to what we do here, alone.”

She glanced at the alcove with its low lighting and soft cushions. “Alone?”

Despite the fact that he was cloaked, his breath seemed suddenly shallow. She wondered if he too was thinking of the last time they had been alone, standing in the surf, when he'd pressed his lips to hers.

“For the training,” he said curtly. “You will need to master your perceptive abilities if you are to succeed.”

Worry crept up her back. “Succeed at what?”

He leaned close. “The Gauntlet.”

Lucky

“I'M SERIOUSLY SUPPOSED TO
wear this?” Lucky held up
the faded khaki shirt, matching shorts, and dented pith helmet the girl had just handed him.

The girl giggled. She had to be at least fourteen years old, but from the way she chewed on the end of her mousy-brown braid, she seemed much younger. Behind her, two rows of cells spanned the walls like prison barracks. About half of them were occupied by wild animals: a kangaroo, a hyena, a lioness asleep in the corner.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. For days he'd been locked alone in a tiny observation room he could barely pace in, trying to figure out what was going on and what had happened to the others. He finally had someone he could talk to, and she could only giggle.

“Listen . . . What was your name again?” he asked.

“Everyone calls me Pika.” Her nails, he noted, didn't look like they had seen soap and water in years. “It's the name of a rodent. But, like, a cute rodent.” She grinned, revealing a few missing teeth.
“I like animals. That's why they put me back here. At home my parents raised, um, I forget what they're called. Oh! Ferrets. They said I could start raising my own when I turned twelve.” Her face fell momentarily, as though remembering that twelve had come and gone long ago. She swallowed nervously. “Anyway, I like animals.”

Lucky rubbed his nose harder. “How long ago were you taken?”

“Three years,” she said, then frowned. “Wait.” She counted on grubby fingers that were marked with lines and circles, just like his. “Four. Maybe five.
Vampires of the Hamptons
had just started. Is that show still on? Did Tara ever hook up with Jackson?”

His head was seriously starting to ache now. “I never watched it.”

Pika's face fell.

“Listen,” he tried again. “Have you heard anything about a girl named Cora? She has long blond hair and—”

“They said you're good with animals too,” Pika interrupted. She grabbed his hand and led him along the wall of cages toward a warren of back rooms that smelled like unwashed feet. There was a medical room, a feed storage room, and a shower room with drains in the floor—which, judging by Pika's smell, didn't get nearly enough use. He'd never imagined he'd think this, but he almost missed the cage. At least it hadn't reeked.

Pika went to the end of the corridor and cautiously pushed open a bright red door. “Take a peek,” she whispered. “But don't let them see you.”

The sound of music came from the door.
Jazz?
Well, after the collection of wild animals, nothing surprised him. He glanced through the crack to find a safari lodge straight out of the British
Empire, with a bar and lounge furniture and—was that a giraffe? Before he could take it all in, Pika shut the door.

“That's the lodge,” she said. “That's where Dane and Makayla and the others work, the important ones. You and me, we stay backstage with the animals. Don't ever go through this door. Got it?”

“I guess—”

“Come on.” She tugged him back down the hallway into the main room of cells. The lioness had woken and was flicking her tail. “What animals have you worked with before?”

“I lived on a ranch,” he said, blinking. His granddad's farm felt so distant. He could barely picture the barn where his motorcycle had taken up the first stall on the right. “Chickens, horses, dogs. A stray cat.”

“We don't have those here,” Pika said, climbing up a short flight of metal stairs to the upper row of cages, where she went to the lioness's cell and threw in a pellet of something that smelled like rotting bread. “I've heard there's a farm menagerie somewhere, or maybe it was a rodeo. Anyway, here it's about hunting.” She swung down from the upper story, landing with a thud on her feet.

“You mean the Kindred
hunt
these animals?”

Pika giggled. “Well, that's the whole point, isn't it? We're in the Hunt. Each menagerie specializes in something that helps the Kindred release their emotions. Fighting, or drinking, or racing cars . . . Here, they hunt.”

Lucky gripped the bars of the closest cage to steady himself. “I thought they were supposed to protect lesser species. That's their whole moral code.”

“They don't actually
kill
the animals,” Pika explained, as
though he were slow. “Their rifles look like ones from Earth, but they aren't. They use
these
instead of bullets.”

She dug around in her dirty safari clothes and came back up with what looked like a used fireworks casing. “It knocks the animals out. Makes them go numb. Bleeds a little where they're hit, but that's it. They drag them back to the lodge, make a big show of the hunt up onstage, everyone's supposed to clap, and then they dump them back here for you and me to patch up so they're ready to be hunted again.” She blinked at him like it was all supposed to make sense. “See? It's humane. They don't kill them. If they hurt them, we just make them better.”

Lucky's fingers curled tighter around the bars, squeezing until his knuckles were white. He thought again of his granddad's farm, and this time the memories were clearer. He remembered his granddad hobbling out to throw kitchen scraps to the chickens and collect any eggs. When hens got too old to lay, his granddad would slaughter them and they'd freeze the meat for winter. All that death had bothered Lucky. But somehow, that seemed more humane than this.

A
thump
sounded from the long corridor. The faint sound of jazz trickled from the hallway.

Pika grinned. “Take a look!”

She hurried back down the corridor, where the red door was propped open. Two humans, a boy and a girl in safari clothes, dragged in a heavy burlap sack. They eyed Lucky with interest.

“They actually found somebody to help you back here?” the boy teased Pika. He had an Australian accent, and hollow cheeks that spoke of malnutrition.

“And he's cute,” the girl said in a matching accent, appraising
Lucky, scratching a sore on her neck. “Has all his fingers and toes and everything. Prime stock, not like us rejects. What, did you fail out of an enclosure?”

Lucky cracked his knuckles. “Something like that.”

“I'm Jenny. This is my brother, Christopher. And this”—she nudged the burlap sack with her toe—“is Roger.”

Blood seeped from the sack, seriously creeping Lucky out.

“Come on. Dane will have a fit if we aren't back soon.” Jenny grabbed her brother's jacket and they turned back to the lodge. Lucky craned his neck to look out the door, hoping for a glimpse of other human kids to see if Cora was among them, but the backstage door thudded closed. Pika reached out and squeezed his biceps, making him jump. She giggled. “You're strong.
You
carry Roger.”

Dazed, he knelt by the burlap sack. He started to pick up the corner, gagging on the tangy smell of blood. He followed Pika back down the hall to one of the smaller rooms. It had a clogged drain in the floor and medical equipment on the walls. Pika pointed to the center of the room, where he set down the sack. She opened it, and he saw fur, in a pattern that he recognized.

“A bobcat?” he said. “Jesus, I thought it was a person.”

“Jenny named him Roger.” Pika started muttering to herself as she dug around amid the equipment in a cabinet.

Blood poured from a deep puncture on the bobcat's left shoulder. Its eyes were open and glassy. Its chest didn't move. It looked as dead as anything he had ever seen.

“Now watch.” Pika pulled out a tool that looked like a long-handled plastic lighter. She grabbed a tattered cloth from a bin and wiped the blood from the bobcat's shoulder, then set the lighter-tool over the animal's wound and punched a button. The machine
started whirring. Lucky got the sense that Pika had been taught to use this piece of Kindred technology in the way you'd train a child to operate a microwave: memorize which buttons to hit with no understanding of how it really worked.

The machine whirred louder and then stopped suddenly. Pika flipped it over and pulled out one of the used firecracker casings. When she ran her fingers over the wound, it was red, but healed.

“This is the most important part,” she said, stroking the bobcat's stump of a tail. “You gotta make sure they're in their cage before you wake them up. Otherwise you're in trouble. At least with the big ones. Roger's pretty tame.”

She struggled to drag the bobcat by its front legs back to the main room and into a cage just high enough for it to stand, with a water trough and food pellets. She locked the door with a pin, then reached through the bars and set a small package by the bobcat's nose.

She tapped her own nose. “Releases a smell that revives them. It'll take a few minutes. There are pods that do the opposite too, if you need to calm one down.”

She started mumbling to herself while she cleaned up the rest of the blood streaking the floor. She didn't do a very good job. He peered into the bin where she tossed the soiled cloth and found hundreds more rags, all soaked with blood.

Lucky stared at the bobcat. The wound might be technically healed, but it still looked raw and painful. Slowly the bobcat opened one glazed-over eye.

There was pain there, and suddenly Lucky was back on his granddad's farm. He'd seen the same look in his granddad's horses when they were ill or injured. But that was different. Illnesses
couldn't be helped, sometimes horses just went lame, but this . . . This was
sport
.

His fingers curled around the bars of the nearest cage, squeezing so tight his joints ached. The Kindred had healed his busted hand when they'd taken him, and now he was in danger of breaking it again out of anger.

Something in the bottom of the nearest empty cell caught his eye. A book.
The Call of the Wild.
And in a bin in the corner, there was a blanket and one of those old-fashioned ball-and-cup games.

His head whipped to Pika. “They keep
people
in these cells too?”

She chewed on the tip of her braid. “Of course. This is where we all sleep.”

Her words sank in slowly. All of them—humans and animals, as if there was no difference. And maybe, to the Kindred, there wasn't.

In the cell, the bobcat's eyes were both open now, and it was breathing steadily, but it hadn't bothered to stand up. Why would it? It had probably gone through this dozens of times already. An endless cycle that always ended in pain.

Was this his life now? Sleeping in filth? Spending his days cleaning up the Kindred's messes? He looked at his nails, his breathing coming quick and unsteady, wondering how long before he was as scraggly as the rest of the kids.

The bobcat blinked.

“You said the Kindred hunt with rifles?” Lucky asked.

Pika's mumbling ended. She chewed harder on her braid, darting looks toward the red door that led to the lodge. “Don't get any ideas. The rifles don't work for us, only for the Kindred.
If you tried to pull the trigger, nothing would happen. Trust me, we've all tried.” She giggled again, more nervously. “The Kindred aren't stupid.”

He watched the bobcat slowly close its eyes. He sank down next to it, wanting to hide his face from Pika, his breath coming faster, the panic he was trying to swallow back. There was no going home—that's what he'd learned from their botched escape. Not for him. Not for Pika. Not for these animals either.

He gently stroked the bobcat's mangy fur.

He wished he could do more. He wished he could do
anything
. Because if the Kindred hunted animals just for sport, what did they do to humans?

The backstage door opened, and two Kindred carried in sealed crates. Pika jumped up, tugging on Lucky's jacket. “Fresh supplies!” she said, their talk of rifles already forgotten. “Oh boy! Sometimes they put in salt licks for the animals, but we get first dibs. They're
so
good. Like potato chips. Only without the chips. So basically just salt, I guess.” She trailed off, mumbling to herself excitedly as she dragged him toward the feed room.

The Kindred set down the crates. “Is it only the two of you back here?” one asked.

“Yep!” Pika said, tearing open the crate.

“Do not leave this feed room until you have finished unpacking all the supplies.” The Kindred exchanged a look, then closed the door firmly behind them.