P.C. Cast - Hunted

Erik turned to her as he tucked me under his arm. I didn’t need to look up at him to know that he had an easy smile on his face. Erik was a seriously good actor. The face he was showing Kramisha was under control, with just the right amount of sexy, got-caught-in-the-act to it.

“Hey there, Kramisha,” he said smoothly.

On the other hand you have me. I could barely stand, let alone speak. I knew my face was beet red and my lips looked bruised and damp. Hell, I probably looked bruised and damp. “Kramisha, did you see anything over there in the tunnel?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the shadows behind us and managed to sound only semi-porn star and breathless.

“No, girl, I only seen you and your boy here sucking face,” Kramisha said quickly.

I wondered if maybe she hadn’t answered a little too quickly.

“Aww! Are Erik and Z making out? That’s so sweet!” Seemingly from nowhere, Jack suddenly materialized behind Kramisha, Duchess woofing and wagging by his side.

“Z, don’t freak. You probably just saw more of those bats,” Erik said, squeezing my shoulder reassuringly before he nodded at Jack. “Hey there, Jack. I thought you’d be basking in a hot shower by now.”

“He’s gonna, but he came to help me get some towels and stuff,” Kramisha said. “And, yeah, there is definitely bats down here. They don’t mess with us if we don’t mess with them.” Then she yawned and did a seriously impressive stretch that made her look like a long, lean black cat. “Since you here, how ’bout you two helping Jack carry the stuff back to the showers and I’ll just take me a little beauty sleep?”

“No problem. We’d be glad to help,” I said, regaining my voice and feeling like a moron for letting bats in a dark tunnel almost scare the poopie out of me. Jeesh, I must really need some sleep. “Erik and I·ƒI were just heading to the bathrooms.”

Kramisha gave us a long, slow look that wasn’t any less knowing because she was sleepy. “Uh-huh. You looked like you was headin’ to the bathrooms.”

I felt myself blush again.

She turned, and I thought she was going to (bizarrely) walk right into the tunnel wall behind her, but instead she disappeared into it. Then I heard a match strike and a flickering lantern illuminated a hollowed-out section of the tunnel, just a little bit smaller than Dallas’s room. Kramisha hung the lantern on a spike and then looked over her shoulder at us.

“Well? What you waitin’ for?”

“Oh, yeah, okay,” I said.

Jack, Duchess, Erik, and I moved up beside Kramisha to look into the new room. It actually had shelves built into the squared cement walls and looked just like a tidy closet. I gazed at neat piles of folded towels and, weirdly enough, big puffy bathrobes that Duchess was nosing around.

“Is that dog sanitary?” Kramisha asked.

“Damien says that a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s,” Jack said, patting the big yellow Lab on her head.

“We ain’t humans,” Kramisha said. “So could you please keep her big wet nose off the merchandise?”

“Fine. But try to remember that she’s been through a trauma and her feelings are easily hurt.”

While Jack pulled Duchess over to him and had a very serious conversation with her about keeping her nose off things, I stared at the piles of stuff. “Huh. Who knew all this was here?”

“Aphrodite,” Kramisha said as she filled our arms with terry cloth. “She paid for it. Or her mama’s gold card money did. You wouldn’t believe all the stuff you can order from Pottery Barn if you got unlimited credit. It’s made me decide once and for all on my future career.”

“Really? What do you want to do?” Jack asked. Duchess sitting politely beside him, he held his arms out to be filled with towels and robes.

“I’m gonna be an author. One of those rich ones. With an unlimited gold card. Do you know people act different to you when you got you some serious credit?”

“Yeah, I guess. I have seen store people kiss the Twins’ butts,” Jack said. “Their families have money, too.” He whispered the last part like it was a big secret, which it wasn’t. Everyone knew the Twins’ parents were rich. Okay, not Aphrodite rich, but still. They’d bought me boots for my birthday that cost almost $400. That’s definitely rich to me.

“Well. I decided I like me some butt-kissing. So I’m gonna get me some. Okay, that’s enough stuff. Come on. I’ll walk partway back with you, but when we get to my room, I’m crashing. Jack, you can find the way back to the showers, can’t you?”

“Yep,” he said.

We walked down the tunnel, following it as it curved to the right. The next blanketed doorway we came to was covered with a shimmering strip of purple silk.

“This here’s my room.” Kramisha saw me staring at the amazing material masquerading as a door, and she smiled. “It’s a curtain from Pier One. They don’t deliver, but they do take unlimited gold cards.”

“It’s a great color,” I said, thinking how moronic it was for me to be imagining booger monsters in every shadow when the place had been Pier One–decorated.

“Thanks. I like me some color. It’s an important part of decoration. Wanna see my room?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Definitely,” Jack said.

Kramisha looked from Jack to Duchess. “She potty trained?”

Jack bristled. “Of course. She’s a perfect lady.”

“She better be,” Kramisha grumbled, then she pulled the curtain to the side and made a graceful flourish with her free hand. “You may enter my space.”

Kramisha’s room was about twice the size of Stevie Rae’s. She had two lanterns and a dozen scented candles lit, which gave the fresh paint smell a hint of citrus. She’d obviously recently painted the round cement walls a bright lime color. Her furniture was dark wood—bed, dresser, nightstand, and bookcase. She didn’t have any chairs, but piled around the room were huge satin pillows in bold purples and pinks, which matched the linens on her bed. On said bed were half a dozen books, with bookmarks in them or lying open, like she was in the middle of reading all of them at the same time. I noticed that they, along with the books in the bookcase, had Dewey Decimal stickers on their spines. Kramisha noticed me noticing.

“Central Library downtown. They stay open real late on weekends.”

“I didn’t know the library let you check out this many books at the same time,” Jack said.

Kramisha fidgeted. “They don’t. Not technically. Not ’less you do a little this and a little that with they minds. I’ll give ’em back soon as I can get to Borders and buy my own,” she added.

I sighed and added “committing library theft” to the list in my head of things the red fledglings needed to be encouraged to stop doing, and as I made the mental addition I also chastised myself. Kramisha definitely looked guilty about ripping off library books. Would a kid who still had monstrous tendencies be worried about petty theft? No, no, hell no, I told myself, automatically wandering over to the bed to read some of the titles. There was a huge copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, as well as an illustrated hardback of Jane Eyre, which was piled on top of a book called The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee. There was also a hardback edition of Dragon-flight by Anne McCaffrey lying beside Thug-A-Licious, Candy Licker, and G-Spot by an author whose name was blazed as Noire. Those three books were open with their extremely nasty-looking covers spread wide. Totally curious, I put my pile of towels down on the bright pink bedspreaded bed, picked up Thug-A-Licious , and began reading at the open page.