Patricia Briggs - Hunting Ground

“Look,” he said, jerking his wrist free, “cut it out. That’s not funny.”

“No,” breathed the man, who had somehow gotten behind him while Jody had been talking to the girl. “Not funny at all.” And there was a sharp pain in his neck.

“Where is someplace private?” the old man asked after a little while. “Someplace we might play together for a while without anyone seeing us?”

And Jody led his new friends a few miles away to a place on the Sound where he knew no one would come.

“Good,” said the man. “Very good.”

The girl closed her eyes and smiled. “The traffic will drown out the screams.”

The man leaned over and put his mouth to Jody’s ear. “You can be scared now.”

Jody was scared for a very, very long time before they threw him into the water for the fish.

“THE rocks will keep him underwater until they won’t be able to tell how he died,” said Ivan.

“I still think we should have left him naked hanging from a tree like that girl in Syracuse.”

Ivan rubbed the top of her head. “Dear child,” he said, and sighed. “That was a special case; she was a message to her father. This one was just play, and if we let the silly humans know we killed him, it would interfere with business.”

She looked at the bloody drumsticks and sighed, tossing them in after the body. “And nothing interferes with business.”

“Business keeps a roof over our heads and lets us travel when we want to,” Ivan told her. “You need to wash your face, princess, and put your clothes back on.”

A great mountain peak broke through the white mist and ruled in awesome splendor over the soft sky and Anna held her breath. Mount Rainier, she thought, though her geography of the Cascades was shaky. There were mountains spread out below them, but this one was orders of magnitude larger than the lowly ripples in the land below it. Gradually, other great peaks revealed themselves in the distance, drowning in clouds.

“Hey, Charles?”

The mountains were on Charles’s side of the plane. Anna leaned as far toward him as she could without touching him-he was flying the plane, and she didn’t want to distract him.

“Yes?”

They were wearing headsets that protected their sensitive ears from the noise of the engine and miked their voices to each other. In her headphone, his voice was low enough to make the speaker in her ear buzz even though it was turned to the lowest setting.

“Just how many planes does the pack have?”

This was the second she’d been in.

“Just the Learjet,” he told her. “If you lean any farther, you’re going to strangle yourself. This Cessna is mine.”

He owned a plane? Just when she was starting to think she knew him, something else would come up. She knew that he handled the pack finances-and that their pack was not in any danger of being penniless anytime soon. She knew that he himself was financially stable, though they hadn’t really talked about it much. Owning a plane was a whole different category of financially stable, like Mount Rainier was a whole different category of mountain from the hills she’d known in Illinois.

“Aren’t we on pack business?” she asked. “Why did we take this one?”

“The jet needs five thousand feet to land,” he said. “That means Boeing Field or Sea-Tac, and I don’t want the government to be following us around all week.”

“The government follows you?” She had a sudden picture of Charles strolling along with dark-suited men creeping behind him, trying to stay out of sight and failing, with cartoonish exaggeration.

He nodded. “We may be a secret from the rest of the world-but the wrong people know who we are.”

And that was why the Marrok had decided it was time to bring the werewolves out to the public. “So the wrong people are following you?”

He smiled wolfishly. “Only when I want them to.”

She considered that smile and decided she liked it on him. “So where are we landing?”

“At an airstrip maintained by the Emerald City Pack. It’s about thirty miles from Seattle.”

The plane bounced, dropping fast and tickling her stomach. She gripped her armrests and laughed as Charles brought the plane back to level. “I really like flying.”

He dipped his head and looked at her over the top of his dark lenses for a moment. Then his mouth quirked up, and he turned his attention back to his instrument panel. The plane tilted to the left.

Anna waited for him to right it, but they just kept tilting all the way upside down and continued smoothly over until they were back upright again.

Over her laughter, he said, “This plane isn’t rated for aerobatics, but a roll is only a one-gee maneuver.” He tilted the plane over the other way, and said, “Properly done.” And then he danced the plane through the sky.

She was breathless, and her diaphragm ached from laughing by the time the plane settled back on level flight. She glanced at Charles, who wasn’t even smiling. He might have just as well been flying patterns over a grain field.

He hated planes just as he hated most modern technology. He’d told her so. But he owned one-and by golly he knew how to fly it. When he drove his truck, he was cautious and controlled. So why had he decided to play barnstormer in the Cessna? Was he just entertaining her, or was he enjoying himself?

A woman should know more about her mate. When the mate bond had first settled in, she’d believed she would. But her initial ability to feel him had faded, buried under his self-control and her defenses. She could feel the bond between them, strong and shining and impenetrable. She wondered if it felt the same to him, or if he could read her through it whenever he chose.

“This is Station Air November one eight eight three Victor requesting permission to land,” he said, and it took her a moment to realize he was talking to someone other than her.

“Go ahead, sir. I mean, go ahead, eight three Victor,” said a stranger’s voice. “Welcome to Emerald City Pack territory, sir.”

Charles dropped them abruptly through the scattered clouds, past white-coated mountains, to the soft green valley below. Before she realized there was a landing strip, the wheels touched down with a gentle bump.

The place where they landed looked nearly as remote as Aspen Creek. Though there was snow a hundred feet or so up the foothills, down where they had landed it was as green as if it were summer. Greener. Except for the landing field and a hangar, the land was awash in trees and bushes.

People jogged up to the plane from the hangar as Charles pulled his headset off and unbuckled.

He withdrew from her, thinning the bond between them painfully. If he’d warned her beforehand, she would have kept quiet: three years in her first pack had given her power over her pain. It was surprise that forced the whine out of her throat.

Charles pulled his sunglasses off his face and looked at her with a frown. Sudden comprehension widened his eyes-“I never thought…” He turned his head and said, not to her, “All right. All right.” And the painful collapse of their bond ceased.

Wolf-eyed, he leaned toward her and touched her face.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to shut you out. I just…”

He stopped, apparently at a loss for words.

“Donning your armor?” she suggested. “It’s okay, I just wasn’t expecting it. Do what you have to.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he said, looking out at the approaching men, “These are not the enemy. Not this time, anyway.”

He was out of his seat before she could say anything. And what would I have said? He closed himself up so that he could kill if he had to, so that he wouldn’t like any of them too much. So he wouldn’t hesitate in carrying out whatever had to be done.