Wild Hunt - Kali Argent Page 0,30

female, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but it made her hair stand on end.

“Um, what am I looking at?”

“So, this is approximately where the team found you.” He tapped a squiggly yellow line. “There’s not much around here.”

Mackenna bit her lip and nodded. She still didn’t understand what he was asking her.

“Do you know if the camp was a ski resort?” Cade asked, comforting her by resting his hand against her lower back.

“No, not like that.” The camp had been situated in a valley with mountains on three sides, but not the kind that skiers would find hospitable. “I think it might have been an inn.” She wrung her hands together as she tried to find the words to describe it. “There was just one big building, then some smaller cabins sprinkled through the woods around it.”

Cade rubbed his hand up and down her spine. “Do you know which direction you were coming from when you found the highway?”

“From the east.” That much she was sure of, but she couldn’t say with certainty how far she’d traveled.

“You couldn’t have gotten far on foot,” Luca said as if he’d plucked the thought from her head. “That puts us somewhere around here.” Uncapping a red marker, he drew a circle on the map that encompassed about three square miles. “There isn’t even a town here technically. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“Okay, kid,” Lynk interjected, pushing to his feet to offer her his chair at the far end of the table. “It’s time for the hard questions now.”

She was twenty-six, hardly a kid, but she accepted the moniker in the spirit in which it had been intended—as well as the seat he’d offered. “What do you want to know?”

Rounding the table to join her, Cade shoved at Rhys’ back a couple of times and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Get the fuck up.”

Jesus, they were going to have to work on his people skills. “Why don’t you share my seat?”

He grunted and glared at the male, but eventually, he sat down in her vacated chair without argument. Once she was settled on his lap, he wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled the side of her neck.

“Remember, you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, and if you need a break, just say the word.”

“It’s okay.” Taking a deep breath, she held it for a count of three, then released it slowly. “I can do this.”

“We’ll start with something easy.” Deke sounded as tired as he looked, but he smiled kindly when she lifted her head to meet his gaze. “How many are there?”

She’d expected the question, and for days, she’d been trying to come up with a number. “At least thirty that I remember, but I’m sure there were more.”

“Any women or children?”

“A few of the Hunters were female,” she confirmed. “I never saw any children.” If there had been little ones in the camp, they’d been kept far away from her and the other beasts. She didn’t think that was the case, though.

“I’ve never heard of Hunters kidnapping Gemini or holding them captive.”

There was confusion in Orin’s voice, but also a fair amount of anger. As a werewolf—evident by his scent and glowing eyes—he’d likely had his own run-in with the fanatical group of humans. Maybe, like others in the room, he’d lost someone he loved to the Hunters. The one thing she was quickly coming to learn was that everyone had a story, and few had happy endings.

“They wanted to learn about us.” She swallowed hard and pressed deeper into Cade’s embrace. “How to hunt us. How we healed. How much…how much pain we could tolerate.” Her pulse tripped into a gallop, but she pushed down her fear and kept going. “They wanted to know if they could use what makes us special to help humans. Their words, not mine.”

Lynk jerked his head up from where he’d moved to stand by one of the windows. “What does that mean?”

“They were trying to find a way to use Gemini to make humans faster and stronger, enhance their senses, and initiate a rapid healing response.”

“They experimented on you?” The big shifter looked like he might be sick.

Mackenna didn’t blame him. She hadn’t even gotten to the worst part, though. “Not just us. Humans as well. Hunters, I think.” Some she had recognized, but she couldn’t be sure about the others. “None of them survived.”

A chorus of growls and curses went around the table, and