Page 107 of Hunted By Fae
Emily gives a faint nod before she lies down.
And for all her moral quandaries, she finds sleep pretty fucking fast—and her gentle snores are quick to rise.
Shocking.
TWENTY-TWO
BEE
The woman watching from the snow-dusted car keeps her pistol aimed at me. Her mud-brown eyes are narrowed, but they shift over my shoulder to the person behind me.
I don’t make a move.
Not with the blade pressing into the cartilage of my throat, the warmth of a body too close to my back, and the restrained breaths disturbing the air at my earlobe.
I can only stare at her as she asks in a thick Boston accent, “What you doin’ all alone?”
The same thick accent comes from the guy behind me, and I know it’s a guy the moment he adds, “Ain’t safe out here.”
“You got people?” she adds, and it all feels so very fucking rehearsed. “They around here?”
There’s no point talking my way out of this one.
Like I said, it’s rehearsed.
These two have a play they perform for people they come across.
It’s a hostile play.
But I sure as shit don’t tell them I’m alone. That makes me useless, and if they believe me, a quick kill before or after they rob me blind.
So I smile, tight, nervous even, and throw my gaze around the darkness that presses against our pocket of dusty light.
“Oh?” Her dark eyebrow arches, fuzzy and too close to touching in the middle of her forehead. “They around here, your people?”
The stink of the guy’s hot breath on my skin smells faintly of tinned tuna and cheesy crackers with undertones of cola.
My breathy answer comes with a tremble in my voice, “No…”
I fake it.
I fake the nervous lick of my lips, curving them inwards, before I throw my gaze around the darkness again.
“No?” Her grin warps, and even in dusty light, I can see the chipped tooth beside her missing canine. She took a hit, whether a punch or a fall, it cost her. “Then what you lookin’ for?”
“Them.”
Her grin twitches before it starts to fade. Her gaze cuts above my shoulder—and she locks into a silent stare with the guy.
“I saw one,” I add, breathy. “Just back that way. He was alone.”
Still, she’s staring at the guy, but she asks, “Did it see you?”
My mind snags on ‘it’.
But it’s not really the time to get into that.
So I answer with, “I don’t know.”
