The Hunt - Megan Shepherd Page 0,63

so close, and yet impossible to reach.

Blood stained Roshian’s torn safari uniform from where she’d scratched him. But it was too red: Kindred blood was so dark it was nearly black. And their skin was so tough that she could never tear it with her nails alone. She looked down at her hand—the jagged nails, and that gritty, silvery substance caked in them. It looked like circuitry. Minuscule metallic fibers.

Beneath the seeping blood on his arms, Roshian’s skin was pale. Pale.

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Anya’s voice whispered at the same time Cora realized it herself.

“You’re human.” The accusation came out as a surprise. “That’s why you can kill me.”

He clutched his bleeding eye harder. “An unfortunate fact for you.”

He cocked the gun.

“We’re supposed to help our own kind!” she yelled. “Why are you conspiring with the Kindred when they’re the ones who make us live like this?” She stretched her jaw. Her throat was going numb, and it was getting hard to speak.

“The Kindred don’t know what I am,” he said. “No one knows, except the Mosca traders who make it possible. I was a graduate student when the Kindred took me. That was before they screened their wards, or else they would have known that on Earth I’d already killed. Deer hunting didn’t quite satisfy the urge, so I studied to be a doctor. It isn’t difficult to kill patients. Wrong medication. Complications during surgery.”

He stepped closer, nudging her leg with his boot. Her foot flopped to the side, no longer in her control. He crouched down, prodding her shoulder with the tip of his gun, smiling grimly when she couldn’t lift a finger to stop him.

“I didn’t care that I’d been taken,” he said. “I like it here. I like the Kindred. They think themselves so intelligent, but they aren’t, at least not when it comes to deception. It was easy to escape from them. I’ve always been tall—at least by human standards. Well built. I thought, if only I had black eyes and metallic skin, I could pass myself off as one of them. So that’s what I did.”

She urged her body to move, but it was frozen. It was all she could do to force words from her throat. “But surely they could tell. Your mind . . .”

He ran a hand down her hair, appraising it like it was already hanging from a hook in his room. “Read my thoughts, you mean? That was easy enough to get around. They can’t read minds when they’re uncloaked, and they’re always uncloaked in the menageries. So this is where I stay. I have no life outside of the menageries and my quarters.”

Blood kept seeping from the wound on her shin, but she felt nothing. Not a single muscle would respond to her internal screams to move. Soon, she wouldn’t even be able to speak. All she would have left was her mind.

“But,” Anya whispered, “not all swords are held in the hand. Real power lies in the mind.”

“You’ve lived among them . . . without any . . . perceptive abilities?” Cora managed to ask.

He aimed the gun. “Flattery won’t help you.”

“I’m serious. Not a single . . . ability?”

His smile started to fade. “I used my intelligence alone. We’re smarter than the Kindred realize, even if their mental abilities are impossible for us.”

She closed her eyes.

“Oh, I know all about impossibilities.” She concentrated on the stick in his eye. Maybe she couldn’t yet control someone else’s mind, but she could levitate small objects. She wrapped her thoughts around the stick, imagining it was her hand, and she pushed.

The stick jerked.

Roshian screamed.

And then she pushed again. A nudge. And another. Roshian dropped the gun. She didn’t let go of the stick with her mind. She pushed it farther, steadily and slowly, letting her anger cut through the pain piercing her head, through the sound of him screaming as he crumpled to the ground, through the blood that was dribbling from her nose. He was human, and the human brain was soft and easily damaged. She pushed the stick farther, all the way, until it tapped against the back of his skull.

He collapsed facedown on the ground. Blood pooled beneath his head.

She released her hold on the stick. Her whole body started shaking, though she couldn’t feel a single muscle. She couldn’t stand. Couldn’t move. Blood poured from her nose faster but she couldn’t lift a hand to brush it away, and her skin burned, and then