Page 128 of The Hunt

“So where are you? You haven’t taken off somewhere with a boy, have you?” Dad said, chuckling softly.

I coughed to clear my throat. “I’m on Wildercliff Island.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a long moment. Then my father finally spoke again, all traces of humor removed from his voice. “What did you just say?”

“I’m on Wildercliff Island,” I repeated. “I’m in the Hunt.”

Silence again.

“Everly… is this some sort of sick joke?” Dad finally asked in a low voice.

“No. I’m here.”

“H-how is that possible?” His tone had turned frantic now. “What the hell are you doing there? Do you have any idea how dangerous that place is?”

“Jake signed me up. He was pissed at me about the breakup.”

“That little bastard. I’ll fucking kill him. I’ll—”

“Dad! Listen to me!” I cut in. “I didn’t call you to talk about him. I called to talk aboutyou.And judging by your reaction to what I’ve said so far, you know exactly what the Hunt is, don’t you? You know everything that goes on here.”

“I… yes. I know.”

I steeled my jaw. “I need you to tell me everything. How you ended up working for The Wild Hunt. What you do for them, and why. How much you know.”

“Oh, Christ,” he muttered. His voice had thickened so much that it was clear he was crying. “FuckingChrist.”

“Pull it together, Dad. My life is at stake.”

“All right.” He inhaled deeply. “They approached me about a year after your mom got sick. They wanted me to act as a consultant on a project they had in mind, with the potential for it to become a regular job. You would’ve been seven or eight at the time. The money they were offering me was good. Astoundingly good. But I said no.”

“Why?”

“It was just… odd. Far too odd for me to ignore. I run an engineering contracting firm in St. Louis. So what on earth did a bunch of rich guys from the East Coast want with me? Why not hire someone closer to them? And why were they offering so much money? There was clearly something wrong with the deal.”

“Right. But you eventually changed your mind. Why?”

“You were so young back then, Everly,” he muttered. “You had no idea what was going on with your mom.”

“I knew she was sick,” I said through gritted teeth. “I always knew.”

“Sorry, honey. That isn’t what I meant. Of course you knew she was sick. I just meant… we tried to keep the financial side of things from you. You were too young to have to worry about money on top of everything else you were going through.”

“You’re talking about Mom’s treatment costs?”

“Yes, and the surgeries, too. The hospital bills were astronomical. I can’t even tell you how much it all came out to, because it’s such a ridiculous figure that it doesn’t sound like it could possibly be true. Our insurance refused to cover most of it, too,” he said. “It was hard, especially with your mom no longer able to work, but I tried my best. I made some major changes. I sold one of the cars, took you out of your private school, and subdivided our land to create two extra blocks, which I sold to a developer. That covered us for a while.”

“But it wasn’t enough in the end?”

“No. The medical debt… we were up to our eyeballs in it. So I subdivided more of the land. Re-mortgaged the house. Sold everything I could. It still wasn’t enough.” Dad let out a heavy sigh and went on. “The Wild Hunt approached me again, asking if I’d changed my mind. That’s when I realized why they cameto me in the first place. They were looking for people exactly like me. Desperate people who couldn’t afford to say no.”

“That sounds about right,” I muttered. I cleared my throat and went on. “What did they want you to do?”

“Their last engineering project manager had passed away, so they needed to replace him. They had a lot of projects in mind for something they referred to as a hunting game. Firstly, they needed refurbishments for the tunnel system on the island, because it was very old, and parts of it were rotting away or caving in, which made it quite dangerous to traverse. There were also plans for underground structures and cabins. Some were new, and others were old but needed fixing up. And then… there were also plans for elaborate traps.”

“So you knew they were killing people,” I said in a low voice. “It wasn’t really a game.”

“They didn’t tell me the truth about it. They had to tell mesomething, though, given the nature of some of the design projects. So they settled on a half-truth, I suppose,” he said gruffly. “I was told that this so-called game involved death-row prisoners who’d done terrible things in their lives. Absolute monsters who were set to be executed soon. Peter Jennings told me that a lot of rich people were willing to pay a hell of a lot of money to watch these people being hunted to death. The last prisoner standing would be awarded money and freedom.”

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