The Hunt - Megan Shepherd Page 0,55
records, but only for one thing.”
The supply closet suddenly felt like it was closing in too tightly around her. “What?”
“You,” Lucky said. And then he clarified, “He wants your hair. The same way he wants the antlers and the horns from the animals he hunts. I guess he has a special place for a human braid on his psycho shelf of lesser-species memorabilia.”
Dane suppressed a laugh.
Cora’s hand drifted to her hair on instinct, tangling in the curls. “I thought it was just the Axion who cared about that kind of thing.”
Dane gave a shrug. “I didn’t ask why he wants it. My guess is you’re better off not knowing.”
Her feet itched to pace, but the room was so small. “Can you give us a second to talk alone, Dane?”
Dane picked up a dusty bottle of schnapps and peeked out of the cracked door. “Five minutes,” he said.
Once they were alone in the closet, Lucky ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, Cora, we can find another way. You don’t have to do this.”
She sank onto a box. “What other way? They’ll come for you day after tomorrow if we don’t, and you’re too stubborn to hide out with Leon.” She twisted the ends of her hair around her fist. “It’s just hair.”
“But who knows why Roshian wants it. Maybe he needs the DNA for something. Maybe he is a Council spy. Someone must have told the Council that you were behind our escape from the cage. This could be some elaborate scheme by the Council.”
She leveled a stare at him. “The Kindred don’t scheme. If they wanted to arrest me, they would just come take me.”
Lucky shook his head. “I still don’t like it.”
“I don’t either, but we don’t have much choice. At least Tessela and Fian are usually around, in case anything goes wrong. Roshian might bend the rules every now and then, but he can’t break them. He’s bound by the moral code. And Dane wouldn’t dare risk breaking the rules this close to his own birthday, when he’s already practically got one foot in Armstrong.”
“Still. It makes me nervous.” Lucky’s hand moved like he wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn’t, and she started toying with her own fingers. For a second, the privacy of the closet reminded her of the first time they’d been truly alone, without the watching eyes of the Kindred, beneath the boughs of a weeping cherry tree. She had seen in Lucky a boy who didn’t know his own strengths. A boy who just wanted a simple life. A beach. A beer. A guitar. A boy who, like her, had had all that taken away from him.
She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. His fingers were strong and knotty from years of farm work. The cage hadn’t changed that. “Let me do this for you,” she whispered.
His eyebrows knit together as though something troubled him. “For once,” he said, “I want to rescue you. I want to make a sacrifice for you. After what happened in the cage, that night that I—”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. She remembered that awful feeling of inevitability as they’d climbed the stairs to his room and he’d started to take off her clothes with that delirious look in his eye.
“You don’t owe me anything,” she whispered.
“It isn’t about debt,” he said. His hands surrounded hers, growing warmer.
“Then what?” she asked. “We both agreed that kiss was a mistake.”
“I know.” He turned her hand over, tracing the markings on her hand, hesitant to continue. “But there’s a reason the Kindred’s algorithm matched us together. We’re alike, in a way. We both need a greater purpose. You don’t believe it, but it’s true. The Gauntlet means more to you than you let on.”
She wasn’t quite sure how to answer, so she just watched him tracing the markings on her palm. “Maybe it does,” she said at last.
“More important than you risking working with Roshian to save my ass.”
She smirked. “Your ass is getting saved, end of story.”
The tension between them had shifted, and she turned his hand over instead, tracing her eyes over the tattooed lines in his palm. “What do you think these markings say?”
“‘Rejects,’ probably,” he concluded, and then frowned. “Yours is different from mine. Here, on your ring finger. The pinprick is a lot bigger.”
She rubbed her thumb over it, almost like she could wipe it away. “I noticed before. I don’t know why.”
“It looks almost