Hunted

“No,” I stiffened, getting ready to pull out of his arms. “It wouldn’t be appropriate.”

His chest rumbled under my ear as he chuckled. “Relax, will ya?”

“Then don’t talk about seeing me naked.”

“Okay.” He caressed my hair silently for a little while, then he said, “That Raven Mocker hurt you pretty badly.”

It wasn’t a question, but I still said, “Yeah.”

“Kalona doesn’t want you hurt, so he’ll be in for some shit when he gets back here.”

“He won’t be getting back. I killed him. Burned him up,” I said simply.

“Good,” he said. “Zoey, would you make me one more promise?”

“I suppose, but you don’t seem one hundred percent happy when I keep my promises to you.”

“I’ll be happy if you keep this one.”

“What is it this time?”

“Promise me if I become a real monster like them, you’ll burn me up, too.”

“That’s not a promise I feel comfortable making,” I said.

“Well, think about it because it might be a promise you’ll have to fulfill.”

We were silent again. The only sound in my room was Nala’s soft snoring from the foot of my bed, and the steady beat of Stark’s heart under my ear. He kept stroking my hair, and it wasn’t long before my eyelids started to feel incredibly heavy. But before I fell asleep I had one more thing I wanted him to hear.

“Would you do something for me?” I asked sleepily.

“I think I’d do almost anything for you,” Stark said.

“Stop calling yourself a monster.”

His hand stilled for a moment. He shifted slightly and I felt his lips against my forehead. “Go to sleep now. I’ll watch over you.”

I drifted to sleep while he was still slowly stroking my hair. Kalona didn’t once enter my dreams.

CHAPTER 25

Stark was gone when I woke up. Feeling majorly refreshed as well as starving, I stretched and yawned, which is when I found the arrow lying on the pillow beside me. He’d broken it in half, which immediately caught my attention. I mean, I’m from a town named Broken Arrow. I know what the symbolism of an arrow snapped in half means—peace, an end to fighting. There was a note folded underneath the arrow pieces with my name printed on it. I opened it and read: I watched you while you were sleeping and you looked completely at peace. I wish I could feel that. I wish I could close my eyes and feel at peace. But I can’t. I can’t feel anything if I’m not with you, and even then all I can do is want something that I don’t think I can ever have, at least not now. So I left this, and my peace, with you. Stark.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked Nala.

My cat sneezed, “mee-uf-owed” grumpily at me, jumped from my bed, and padded to her food bowl. She looked back at me, purring like crazy.

“Okay, yeah, I know. I’m hungry, too.” I fed my cat and thought about Stark while I got dressed for what I was sure would be a very weird school day. “Today we’re getting out of here,” I told my reflection firmly after I’d used the flatiron to semi-tame my hair.

I hurried downstairs and arrived in the kitchen just in time to grab my favorite cereal, Count Chocula, and join the Twins, who had their heads together and were whispering and looking a

“Hey, guys,” I said, sitting next to them and pouring myself a huge bowl of chocolatey deliciousness. “What’s up?”

Keeping her voice pitched low for my ears only, Erin said, “You’ll see what’s up once you sit here for just a few minutes.”

“Yeah, observe the pod people,” Shaunee whispered.

“Okayyyyy,” I said slowly, adding milk to my cereal and watching the kids around us with what I hoped was utter nonchalance.

At first I really didn’t notice much of anything. Girls were busy grabbing protein bars or cereal or some other favorite breakfast food. And then I realized that it wasn’t what I was seeing that was weird—it was what I wasn’t. There was none of the typical joking around going on where someone makes fun of someone else’s hair, and then someone else tells her to tell her mom to be quiet. No one was talking about boys. At all. No one was complaining about not having their homework done. Actually, no one was saying much of anything. They were just chewing and breathing and smiling. A lot.

I gave the Twins a WTF look.

Pod people, Erin mouthed to me while Shaunee nodded her head.

“Almost as a

I tried not to sound massively guilty when I said, “Stark? What about him?”

“The buttball walked through here while you were still upstairs. All like he owned the place and didn’t care who knew he’d been raping and pillaging some poor helpless pod girl,” Shaunee said, still keeping her voice down.

“Yeah, you should have seen Becca. She panted after him like a terrier,” Erin said.

“And what did he do?” I asked, holding my breath.

“It was pathetic. He barely looked at her,” Shaunee said.

“Talk about being used and then wadded up and thrown away like a snot rag,” Erin said.

I was trying to figure out what I could say that would give me more info about what Stark had or hadn’t done without letting the Twins know I cared as much as I was caring, and I thought I should maybe try to say a little something that would kinda somehow stand up for Stark, when Erin’s eyes got all wide and buggy as she stared behind me.

“Well, speak of the damn devil,” Shaunee said in her best mean-girl voice.

“Literally,” Erin added.

“Wrong table,” Shaunee said. “Your minions are all over there and there.” She waved her hand around the room at the other girls who had stopped eating and were staring behind me, too. “Not over here.”

I swiveled around in my chair to look up at Stark. Our eyes met. I’m sure mine were wide and startled. His were deep and warm, and I could almost hear the question he was asking with them.

Ignoring everyone else in the room, I said, “Hi, Stark.” I was careful not to make my voice too friendly or icy. I just said hi to him like I would any other kid.

“You look better than the last time I saw you,” he said.

I could feel my cheeks getting warm. The last time he’d seen me we’d been in bed together. While I was still staring into his eyes and trying to figure out what the hell I could say to him in front of everyone, Erin spoke up.

“Big surprise that she looks better than when you were chomping on Becca last night.”

“Yeah, watching that would be enough to make anyone look a little peaked.”

Stark broke his gaze from mine. I saw his eyes flash a dangerous scarlet as he rounded on the Twins. “I’m talking to Zoey, not either of you. So butt the fuck out.”

There was something about his voice that was deeply frightening. He didn’t yell. His expression hardly changed. Instead, he radiated a terrible sense of coiled snake, pissed and deadly and on the brink of striking. I looked more closely at him and saw a ripple in the air around him, like heat waves lifting from a tin roof in summer. I don’t know if the Twins saw it, too, but they definitely sensed something. Both of them paled, but I hardly spared a glance for them. It was Stark I was keyed on because I knew I was glimpsing the monster he’d talked about. Seeing the almost instantaneous change that came over him, I was reminded of Stevie Rae—before she’d found her humanity again.

Was that why I cared about Stark so much? Because I’d seen Stevie Rae struggle with the same dark impulses and win over them, and I wanted to believe he could win, too?

Well, dealing with Stevie Rae had taught me one thing for sure, and that was that a fledgling in this position could be a very dangerous creature.

Keeping my voice completely calm, I said, “What was it you wanted to say to me, Stark?”

I saw the struggle on his face as the kid I knew fought with the monster who clearly wanted to leap across the table and eat the Twins. Finally he shifted his gaze back to me. His eyes still glowed slightly red when he said, “I didn’t really have anything to say. I just found this. It’s yours, isn’t it?” He lifted his hand and, clenched in it, was my purse.