Half Lost (The Half Bad Trilogy #3) - Sally Green Page 0,9

it too. And I want to get into the camp. There’s someone with them. I’m convinced of that. And it may be Annalise. There’s probably no more than six of them. Six I can take.

Six plus Annalise. If they’ve found her they’ll take her back as a prisoner. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d be a hero to them: she shot Marcus, and perhaps Gabriel’s right and she was a spy for them all along. Perhaps it was her who told the Hunters about the apartment in Geneva and the cut that led to Mercury’s cottage.

I need to take a closer look.

I’m weaving slowly and silently down the valley through the trees. The ground is bare in places but in others the trees thin and brambles block my path. It’s dark by the time I work my way through, and the distant hissing in my head from mobile phones is louder, so I go invisible and move silently on.

Then I see the first Hunter, a guard. I watch her for a minute or two. She stays in her position looking out to the forest.

If there are six Hunters, I’m guessing two will be on guard while the other Hunters are resting, eating, or perhaps already sleeping.

I move back and circle round to find the other guard. She’s at the edge of a small clearing. Two guards, as I thought. I’m making my way round to the first guard again when I pick up the hissing sound of a mobile phone. A third guard! But I can’t see her. She’s invisible.

So, three guards. I’ve not been right round the camp so I do that now and, guess what, I pick up another hissing sound, another invisible guard. Four.

I go past her and back to the first Hunter, one of the visible ones. I find a place to watch from and let myself become visible. After an hour or so, I hear footsteps—a fifth Hunter, coming up behind the first. This one is older. She walks up to the first Hunter and says a few words. The younger woman nods and goes back into the camp. I can’t see flames or smoke from the fire but I reckon it’s only thirty meters or so further on. The older Hunter looks relaxed but not lazy, like she’s done this a thousand times before. It’s the middle of the night and she’s probably dog tired but she casts her gaze around, seems to look at me, and my heart races, adrenaline kicking in. Has she spotted me?

I stay still. I don’t think she’s seen me. I’ve done nothing to give myself away. I’ve been sitting here well back, well hidden, though not invisible. I need to stay put. Any movement will alert her. Even going invisible now may change a shadow or a shape.

My breathing seems loud and I force it to calm.

Wait.

And she looks away. She’s continuing to scan the area slowly and carefully but she hasn’t seen me. It was chance that she looked my way.

I need to work out what to do. There’s four guards. Four guards means at least six Hunters in total but probably more. They know someone killed their two friends. From my tracks they’ll know the killer was alone, that he killed with a knife. Will they know it’s me? I’m sure Celia would be smacking her forehead at this point, telling me, Of course they know it was you!

And that means they’ll be hoping I will come back. So this is a trap. And again in my head I can see Celia saying, Are you stupid?! Two visible, two invisible. They want you to think they’re a smaller party than they are.

It’s a pretty basic trap, but it’s a trap for sure. The one thing I think they haven’t realized about me is that I can sense their mobile phones.

What do they know about me? They know I’ve eaten my father’s heart; they have his body so they’ll have worked that out. So they know I’ve got his Gifts. They know what his Gifts were but they won’t know which ones I’ve mastered yet. They probably know I won’t have mastered them all. They probably think I will, given time, so catching me sooner is better than later. Obviously they’d rather kill than catch me. This is definitely a trap.

And the other person in there? Could it be Annalise? They might know I want her. They might think I’ll want to rescue her. They might have caught