C
HAPTER
31
T
hese arms were like steel. Hunter couldn’t even get leverage.
Especially since the ground wouldn’t let go of his feet.
“Stop fighting,” a voice growled in his ear. “I’m trying to help you, kid.”
Michael Merrick.
Hunter stopped fighting. Michael’s hand came off his mouth.
“We need to help her,” Hunter said. He felt like he was choking on his words. “We need to—we need—”
“If you run out there, he’ll kill you, too. Just—”
“Come on, Hunter!” yelled Silver. “You have three seconds.”
Michael tightened his grip before Hunter realized he was trying to surge free. A hand was over his mouth again.
“One!” said Silver.
Hunter couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see past his own rage. Michael wrestled him to the ground.
“Two!”
He had no idea what was going to happen at three, but he had to—
A gun went off.
For the longest time, Hunter couldn’t hear anything but the blood rushing in his ears.
He couldn’t think.
He couldn’t think.
Then he realized Michael still had a death grip and was murmuring in his ear. “Keep still. Come on, Hunter. Keep still.”
The leaves around them were shaking.
No, that was him, trembling, making the leaves shake.
Leaves
. Foliage had grown up and around them. Hiding them from sight.
Or it would be if Hunter didn’t ruin the illusion. He swallowed hard, squeezing his eyes shut tight.
He felt tears on his cheeks.
Kate was okay. She had to be okay. It had to be a ploy.
But he’d seen those arrows pierce her body.
He’d heard the gunshot.
No. They would get out of this. He could heal her. Michael could help.
Kate.
He couldn’t sense her at all. He could sense Michael’s fear and Silver’s patience and the danger in the air, but
he couldn’t feel Kate
.
“I think he’s leaving,” said Michael, his voice barely a whisper. “Keep still.”
He didn’t want to keep still. Silver was standing
right there
. Shock was filtering into fury, and Hunter wanted to shoot that motherfucker in the head. His fingers were itching for a trigger, to feel the kick and recoil and taste vengeance.
“Go ahead,” called Silver, as if he felt the rage in the air and found it satisfying. “Try to shoot me.”
Michael tightened his grip. “No, Hunter.
No.
You blow our cover and we are
screwed
.”
So they waited.
Silver waited.
The sun crept into the sky and fed warmth into the woods, narrowing shadows between the trees. Tension slid through the leaves and choked Hunter, until he was ready to shoot Michael, just to escape it. His shoulders began to ache from being pinned so long.
It felt like hours.
It probably
was
hours.
She was alone out there. Probably in pain.
Hang on
, he thought.
Just hang on.
Finally a cell phone rang, out there in the woods. Silver’s. He answered, but his voice was too low to carry.
Hunter caught the word
terminated
.
He couldn’t breathe again.
But Kate could be faking. Waiting Silver out, too. Like Casper had been waiting at the house.
The conversation was short. Silver slipped the phone into a pocket and strode out of the woods.
Michael still didn’t let Hunter go.
“Wait,” Michael said. “I want to wait until I feel a vehicle leaving.”
Finally—
finally
—Michael released him.
Hunter swung around and hit him. As hard as he could.
Then he was scrabbling through the underbrush, stumbling once he found his feet, slipping out of his shoes in the mud. His breath was hitching again.
When he saw Kate, it was like his brain didn’t want to process all of it. He saw her shoes, the borrowed jeans, again splattered with blood.
The pink shirt.
The bloodstains. The arrows. The flies, already collecting.
Then he saw her head and wished he hadn’t seen any of it.
She hadn’t been waiting. She hadn’t been in pain.
He wanted to touch her and he didn’t.
He was going to be sick.
Michael caught him and jerked him back. “Don’t,” he said. “You can’t touch her. You can’t have this traced back to you.”
Hunter shoved him in the chest, throwing all his strength into it. His voice was raw and edged with pain. “You made me wait! We could have saved her.”
“No, Hunter—”
He hit him again. “We could have—she’s—”
“It was
too late
. He’d stabbed her through the chest. Hunter, it was too late.”
“Damn you!” Another shove. “We could have—she’s—she’s—”
And then he was sobbing and Michael caught him, holding him tight.
“I’m sorry,” Michael was saying. “I’m sorry.”
Hunter let himself have about fifteen seconds of pity. Then he shoved free of Michael’s hands and swiped the tears off his face.
He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want anything.
His fists were clenched at his sides, and he suspected he’d completely lose control if he let go.
“We need to move,” Michael said quietly.
“I’m not just leaving her here.”
“Hunter—”
“I’m
not
just leaving her to get eaten by insects and wild animals.” His voice was shaking with fury. “Do you understand me? So either get a shovel out of your truck or I’ll dig by hand.”
“No shovel,” said Michael.
“Fine.” Hunter took a step forward.
Michael caught his arm. “I’ll take care of it. Just give me a minute.”
Then he knelt in the dirt and put a hand against the ground.
He was right: it only took a minute. The earth just swallowed her up, gradually at first, her body sinking into the dirt as if the ground was simply giving way. But then the hole began to fill in over her, grass and foliage growing back into place.
As if nothing had happened.
Hunter stared. He’d thought this would be better—but it was worse. He needed the action, the
physicality
of digging a hole. He needed the closure.
This was more like erasure. He dropped to his knees and touched a hand to the ground.
The last twenty-four hours had gone too fast. From mistrust to friendship to—to
what
? He felt like he’d almost caught something precious, only to have it shatter as soon as he touched it.
He knew better than anyone how life could change in the blink of an eye.
But this—this seemed too unfair. His throat tightened and made it hard to breathe again.
He had nothing to remember her. Nothing. Not even a picture. He didn’t even have her texts on his cell phone.
The phone
.
He fished her phone out of his pocket. What had Silver said?
I’d say the idiotic move was turning on your cell phone.
He’d been tracking her. Hunter turned it off.
But he put it back in his pocket.
She’d mentioned sacrifice. She’d done this for him, lost her life to protect him.
Well, hell if he was going to let that go to waste.
He looked up at Michael. He couldn’t talk.
So he just stood up and started walking.
They sure as hell couldn’t drive his jeep anywhere. But Michael didn’t have the truck or their SUV—he had a rental car.
Casper was locked inside.
That was shocking enough to make Hunter stop short.
Michael shrugged. “He was in the woods. I saw him first. I didn’t want him to get hurt.”
Hunter nodded. He knew he should say thanks—but he wasn’t ready to thank Michael for anything yet. He didn’t care about this car or why Michael had it. He didn’t even care where they were
going.
But when he climbed in the car, Casper put his head on Hunter’s shoulder and whined. Hunter rubbed the dog’s muzzle.
Michael pulled a phone out of his pocket and dialed. When whoever answered, he spoke low. “Hey, it’s Michael. Can you meet us at the hotel? Yeah, I found him.”
Had to be Hannah.
Hunter’s throat felt thick again.
He still couldn’t believe Kate was dead.
Gone.
He was shaking again.
One girl, reduced to nothing more than a memory and a cell phone. Her mother was dead and she’d never mentioned a father—would anyone else even
miss
her?
With a start, he realized he didn’t even know if
Kate Sullivan
was her real name.
And he wasn’t sure how much of his reaction was shock and how much was mourning. He’d known her a week. Somehow it felt like a lifetime, so much intensity crammed into such a short span of days.
Hell, so much intensity crammed into the last twelve hours.
They’d escaped Silver at the Merrick house only to . . . what? It would have been easier if this had happened
there
.
Fate must fucking hate him.
He could still remember the smell of her hair, the way her skin felt under his fingertips.
The whole thing was senseless.
“You okay?” said Michael.
Hunter shook his head. He had to press his fists into his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said. His voice was rough. “Jesus, kid. I’m sorry.” He put a hand on Hunter’s shoulder.
And that—
that
—was too much. Hunter smacked his hand away. “You’re
sorry
? What the hell do you care, anyway? You left me here! You
left
! You fed me some line of bullshit about caring about the target on my back, and then you were gone! No one gives a shit about me until there’s a mess, and then suddenly everything is my fault! I can’t please anyone, and every time I try, I’m just one big fucking disappointment. Everyone is on me to pick a side. How the hell am I supposed to pick a side when everyone hates me? And the one person who
didn’t
hate me was just killed in front of me.”
Michael took a long breath. “I don’t want to kick you when you’re down, but you don’t exactly make it easy to trust you, Hunter.”
Great. Of course. His fault again. He looked out the window.
“Yesterday afternoon, you left suddenly, right?” said Michael. “With Kate, a stranger, someone you’ve been very secretive about.”
Hunter didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to listen to any of this, but the alternative was thinking about Kate’s body disappearing into the earth as if she’d never existed at all.
“And then,” Michael continued, “there’s a news report that Noah Dean disappeared and a pentagram is painted over his door.
This happened while you were gone
. Gabriel said you’d attacked the kid Friday, after telling us that you weren’t going to do anything. What were we supposed to think?”
Hunter couldn’t deny any of that—especially since he’d been in the mountains, wondering if the
Merricks
had something to do with Noah’s disappearance.
“You were still going to leave,” he said. “I heard your conversation with Gabriel, when you didn’t want me to know.”
Michael looked somewhat stunned. “My conversation with Gabriel?”
“The morning after the carnival. You were talking in the kitchen, and you specifically said,
I don’t want him to hear us.
”
Michael opened his mouth. Closed it.
“Save it,” said Hunter.
“No,” said Michael. “I just—Jesus, if you thought we were leaving, why didn’t you
say something
?”
“Because you didn’t want me to know!”
“Okay, first of all, we weren’t talking about you. We were talking about James.”
“You—what?”
“James. Hannah’s son. When I said I didn’t want ‘him’ to overhear us, I meant the five-year-old with ears like a tape recorder. If we
were
going to leave, I wanted Hannah to hear it from me, not a rumor from her kid.”
This had to be bullshit.
Right?
“Fine. If you didn’t care whether I knew you were leaving,
why didn’t you tell me
?”
“Because that’s as far as the conversation went. The movies make it sound like it’s easy to pick up and change your identity, but it’s not—especially not for four people, two of whom are identical twins. They’re all underage, easily identifiable—hell, I’d probably get in a shit ton of trouble with the state if they knew I’d even considered it. But no, Hunter, our plan was not to pack up the house and leave you here, with no warning at all. Is that what you’ve thought? All this time?”
Hunter stared out the window at the trees whipping by, and felt about six years old. His eyes were raw and his throat swollen. “Yeah,” he finally said.
“God, you’re as bad as my brothers.”
It loosened something in Hunter’s chest, this revelation. He didn’t feel quite so alone. “You really weren’t going to leave?”
“No. We were going to do exactly what we discussed,
together
: let the Guide deal with the middle schoolers and wait to see if that would lead to more trouble.”
Hunter scowled. If he’d known that then, he probably wouldn’t have talked to Silver on the quad on Friday. He wouldn’t have attacked Noah Dean, and he and Kate wouldn’t have been on the run.
And she might still be alive.
Sacrifice
.
“But now,” said Michael, “we’re hiding in a hotel.”
“Hiding?”
“Yeah. The Guide obviously went after that kid, and we didn’t know if we were next.”