Page 12 of Hunted

When it shuts, I’m sure I imagine the ominous click that follows.

Her rheumy eyes dart back to me. ‘You’re running. Not fast enough but you’re running.’

The word lands like a stone dropped into water.

I take one slow step closer to the door, then gasp when a cold wall meets my back.

Did the room move?

Did I?

‘Everyone is,’ I repeat, tilting my chin to hide the alarm building inside me.

Her gaze narrows and she leans forward on bony elbows. ‘You’re running from a creature with old blood.’

My heart stutters. ‘N-no. You’re… I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if this is one of those scammy fortune-telling things, I didn’t sign up for⁠—’

She lurches forward, eyes no longer rheumy as they drill into me. ‘A vampire who thinks he owns you.’

I don’t speak.

Or can’t.

My jaw feels wired shut.

She nods once, satisfied. ‘I can smell him on you.’

Ice crawls up my spine. ‘That’s impossible,’ I whisper through gritted teeth.

She cackles, her fingers tinkling through a bowl of beads that seems to have appeared from nowhere. ‘The impossible is my speciality, girl. Ask anyone in The Quarter.’

The pressure at my back intensifies. I don’t feel my feet moving, but somehow I’m closer to her now. ‘What… what are you?’ I ask.

Her mouth curves downwards. ‘Someone who survived a great many things and lived to tell a tale or two.’ Her gaze rakes me up and down. ‘Perhaps I’ll yet live long enough to tell yours too. If you don’t die before you’re twenty that is.’

The air between us changes.

‘How do you know h-how old I am?’

She points a ringed forefinger at me. ‘You don’t have long, child. If you intend to survive what’s coming, start by asking fewer foolish questions and listening harder.’ Before I can rebut that, she continues. ‘You can’t outrun blood,’ she says quietly. ‘Therefore you must rewrite it.’

I don’t understand then.

But I stay.

Probably… okay, definitely because of the cold wall that pushes me back every time I try to head for the door. But also because my instincts, muddled as they are, don’t think she’s about to kill me.

Not immediately, anyway.

The first night, she lets me sleep in the back room.

The second night, she asks my name.

‘L-Lyra,’ I say, my tongue twisting around the name I fear more than I want to admit.

She tilts her head and sips a brew from the ugliest mug I’ve ever seen. ‘That name is an albatross that will drown you in your sleep if you carry it around much longer.’

I swallow at the stark truth, but say nothing.