Page 1 of The Hunt

Prologue

Everly—Aged 9

June 28th,2013

10:38 pm

It wasRhett’s idea that caused all the trouble.

All seven of us—the kids who’d been brought to Wildercliff Manor for the first week of summer vacation—were sprawled on the rug on his bedroom floor, the glow of a single bedside lamp casting long shadows that danced with every movement. A pile of pillows and blankets created a makeshift fort against the darkness, and in front of us lay a mountain of snacks that the boys had stolen from the kitchen earlier in the night.

“So, this one’s like… a ghost that can make you hear all these crazy whispers,” Jake said, frowning deeply in an attempt to seem spooky. His face made me giggle instead. I’d known him since last summer, and he was too nice to be scary, no matter how hard he tried.

Samantha rolled her eyes, a chocolate chip cookie crumbling in her hand. “Ugh, that’s so lame,” she said.

“Yeah,” Rhett said stiffly. “I’m sick of ghost stories.”

“Me too,” Ari added, leaning forward to grab a candy bar from the haul in the middle of the rug.

“Well, what else can we do?” Benji chimed in, stretching his skinny legs out in front of him as he leaned back against the pillows. “It’ssooooboring here at night.”

“Honestly, it gets pretty boring during the day too,” Merritt said, raising a brow. At eleven and a half, she was the oldest here, so I always listened to everything she said. She was really cool, too. Not a snob like Samantha. “The internet doesn't work, so I can’t watch anything on my iPad or play any games. And we already watched all the good movies here.”

“I know.” Samantha sighed. “Why do our parents make us do this every year?”

“It’s not that bad,” Jake said. He sounded annoyed. “It’s only for a week, and then we always go somewhere else really cool. Like the Bahamas last year.”

“But why can’t we just go straight to the cool place?” Samantha said, voice turning even shriller and whinier. “Why do we always have to come here first?”

“Wildercliffiscool!” Jake insisted, glancing at me. I could tell from his expression that he wanted me to back him up.

I hesitated, not quite knowing what to say. I wasn’t from the same group as these kids—I was only here because my father worked for Jake’s father—so I wasn’t used to flying all over the world and visiting exotic places like the rest of them. I definitely wouldn’t see a visit to this gigantic mansion as a boring, annoying thing that I desperately wanted to get over and done with, either. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever experienced, and it was also the first time in my life that I’d visited the East Coast.

Actually… it was the first time I’d visitedanycoast.

I didn’t want to say any of that, though. The other kids would probably all think I was the biggest loser on the planet.

I shrugged in what I hoped looked like a casual way. “I guess the beach is pretty nice,” I said lightly, as if I didn’t really care all that much.

Samantha smiled sweetly at me, but there was something sharp behind it. “You live in St. Louis, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “There’s no real beach there, so it probably feelssocool for you to visit one. Not boring like it is for us. I mean, back at home we have our own private beach, and it just gets soold, you know?”

Benji nodded. “Yeah. It’s like, when you see something all the time, you just get used to it, I guess.”

I swallowed hard, knowing exactly what Samantha meant when she said I was ‘lucky’. It was code for ‘poor’, given all the other stuff she’d said over the last few days.

I didn’t like how she looked down on me that way, because I knew from school how people liked to pick on kids with less stuff, and I could always tell how horrible those kids felt about it.

It was stupid, anyway. My family wasn’t even poor. My dad was the head engineer at his own company, and my mother used to be a doctor before she got sick last year. We had a big two-story house on a big block of land. We even had a swimming pool, and at my school, I was considered to be one of the ‘rich’ ones.

But compared to the kids around me now, my life back home felt small and inadequate. They all lived in mansions on huge estates with their own staff. One of the boys—Rhett—even had a private jet. His family could take it wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

As for Jake… this enormous, sprawling mansion was just a vacation home for him. That was probably why he got so defensive over it—because his family owned it. He didn’t needto, though. Anyone with eyes, apart from Samantha, would be envious of such a big, beautiful house.

“Maybe you can swap lives with Everly, then,” Rhett piped up, dark eyes narrowed on Samantha. “Seeing as you’re so jealous of her living in Missouri. I’ll even lend you the jet to take you there.”

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