The Hunt (The Cage 2)

She gripped the edge of the table hard. Somehow this had all gotten out of control. The sun seemed to grow brighter until it was blinding.

“I understand you,” he continued. “And I want you to understand me. I want you to stay awake at night thinking about me again, like you used to. It was so difficult not to go to you, those nights, and answer every question you had, and ask you a thousand of my own.”

She remembered those nights in the cage. Nok would be snoring at her side, the boys asleep on the floor and Lucky downstairs keeping watch, and Cora would stare at the black window, wondering about the creature behind it with the black eyes, more curious than she should have been.

“Say yes,” he whispered. “We can change the world, you and I.”

With her eyes closed, she could almost believe he wasn’t Kindred at all. Just a young man whispering into her ear on a warm summer day. A rush of feeling found a crack in her head and flooded into her heart. Conflicting emotions pushed against each other in her chest, as her vision went blurry.

“Yes,” she whispered. It had been the plan all along—agree to work with him, only to betray him later. And yet this didn’t feel like a lie.

He brushed her cheek.

That spark.

Her eyes snapped open at the same time something tugged in her mind. No. She looked through the curtains at the other dancers, Makayla and Roshian, Jenny and another Kindred. Cassian was no different. This was a man who’d betrayed her. A creature who had kidnapped her.

Her vision went white with anger.

Suddenly Cassian let out a hiss and jerked away. Cora jolted, blinking hard, trying to calm down the rush of fury running through her. When her vision finally cleared, she saw him clutching his left hand. Blood seeped from his palm.

She blinked, confused.

A spiky metal jack flashed in the sunlight. One of the jack’s sharp points was embedded deep in his metallic skin—skin that was nearly impossible to pierce.

“Why did you stab yourself?” she blurted out, her head still throbbing.

“I didn’t.” He looked at her carefully. “You did. You were so upset that . . . it doesn’t matter why. What matters is that you moved it with your mind.”

She stared at the welling blood in his palm. She’d wanted to hurt him, as he’d hurt her. She’d wanted him to feel pain—and he had.

She reached for a curtain to steady herself. This wasn’t like when she had used her abilities before. This wasn’t a pleasant sensation of power, but pain and dizziness and bile rising in her throat. “I . . . need . . . to sit down.”

Her breath started to come too fast. For weeks she’d been trying to capture this sensation again, but now it was too much, too fast, too sudden. It had felt right, before, but now it felt dangerous. She shoved the curtains away, stumbling into the lodge. Makayla stopped dancing with Roshian. Dane looked up from the bar.

Everyone’s eyes went to the dark blood dripping slowly from Cassian’s hand.

She looked around desperately.

The entrance was sealed. There was nowhere to go. From one of the lounge tables, the Council members and Fian watched her intently, their card game forgotten.

Oh god. Not now. Not while they’re watching.

Her head ached. She concentrated on not moving anything else, not making the lights flicker, not doing anything to give herself away in front of them. More blood dripped on the floor. Bright red.

She touched her nose and her fingers came away wet.

Then she crumpled to the ground.

12

Leon

LEON STUDIED THE MAP that Bonebreak had scribbled on the torn-out page of a paperback novel. The lines were as shaky as the creature’s voice behind the mask, jerking and twisting and sometimes ending randomly, supposedly showing him the way safely through the supply tunnels from Bonebreak’s shop to the sector that housed the Axion delegates.

Deliver this provision pack to them, Bonebreak had said, handing Leon a damp wrapped package. And don’t open it.

Well, no danger there. From the faintly rotting smell emanating from the package, Leon was the opposite of curious to know what was inside. He’d heard rumors of the Axion’s penchant for body parts—pretty depraved beliefs for a supposedly highly evolved species.

The air in the tunnels was so thin his lungs ached. He wheezed hard and shoved the map in his back pocket, then crawled down the tunnel, following a track that blinked with faint lights. His left shoulder still ached from where they’d sewn on that rubbery shielding to brand him as one of them.

Bottom-feeders, he thought. This kind of sneaking-around-in-ducts shit was meant for someone small, like Rolf. Leon was as cumbersome as a rhino and about as loud and—

He stopped.

Ahead, a thin line near the bottom of the tunnel shimmered like sparkly fishing wire. He inched closer and adjusted the headlamp Bonebreak had given him. It was attached to the upper half of a Mosca mask, and it smelled like death. The light shone on the shimmering wire. Not wire, exactly. It was clearly broken in places, more like a hologram or laser beam catching the chalky air.

It had to be one of the cleaner traps Bonebreak had warned him about. Trip it, and he’d combust in a ball of fire.

Slowly, he eased a leg over the trap, his muscles shaking. If only there were more air to breathe. As it was, he felt so light-headed. Pull yourself together, he ordered himself, easing one hand over the trap, then the other. A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead and fell toward the trap.

He cringed, bracing for an explosion.

But the drip landed a fraction of an inch to the left. Dizzy with relief, he eased his other leg over, and then collapsed against the tunnel wall, breathing hard.

“Try to clean me,” he muttered. “You can clean my ass, is what you can clean.” He dug in his pocket for a shard of chalk and marked th

e wall on either side of the trap with a cartoon bomb. He shone the headlight to admire his artwork.

Not bad.

After more crawling, and two more cleaner traps that he marked with pictures, he reached a point where the tunnel changed to roughly hewn rock, though the bluelight track continued on unabated. The surface was dusty against his hands. Ahead, the tunnel led past a handful of small metal doors.

“Well, shit. This isn’t right.”

He pulled out Bonebreak’s map but didn’t see anything that indicated little doorways in a row. The map was useless. Bonebreak was probably trying to lead him straight to his death.

A whirring sound made him look over his shoulder. A square package was coming down the tunnel, guided by the bluelight, just high enough off the ground so it wouldn’t trigger any cleaner traps. He knew the Kindred had all kinds of crazy powers, but seeing a floating box hurtling toward him was still too weird to process, until he realized the tunnel was so tight that there wasn’t enough room for the package and for him. He crawled faster, sweeping the headlight left and right to search for any of the nearly invisible traps. He finally reached the indentation for the first small doorway and threw himself into it just as the package hurtled by.

He pressed his back against the door, waiting for the package to pass. Okay, hurtled might have been an exaggeration. The package still hadn’t even passed by yet. FedEx was faster than this.

He settled back against the doorway to wait, and sniffed the thin air. Was that . . . horse shit? And were those . . . voices? Yeah, voices. Coming from behind the door. He pressed his ear against the crack. One voice was masculine and almost familiar. Leon made out a single word.

Zebra.

Zebra? Well, why not. By now he was used to weird shit. At least the voices were speaking English. He sniffed again, and it smelled stronger. He pressed his ear against the door, trying to muffle the sound of his wheezing.

“I’ll put the zebra back in its cell,” the voice said. “Mali needed your help anyway.”

Leon’s hands started shaking. He recognized the voice now. It was Lucky. And Mali must be close too. Mali, the crazy girl with stringy braids and ninja moves who, somehow, though he’d never have imagined it in a billion years, he actually kinda liked. Liked liked. He’d refused to acknowledge it in the cage, but that was what happened when you had weeks with no one to talk to but Mosca: You accepted tough things about yourself, like an undeniable attraction to a weirdo.