AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER 1
Hunter Garrity awoke to the click of a gun.
His grandparents kept a night-light in the utility room, but either it wasn’t working or someone had killed it—his basement bedroom was pitch-black. His breathing was a shallow whisper in the darkness. For an instant, he wondered if he’d dreamed the sound.
Then steel touched his jaw.
He stopped breathing.
A voice: soft, female, vaguely mocking. “I think you dropped this.”
He recognized her voice, and it wasn’t a relief. His arms were partially trapped by the sheet and the comforter; he couldn’t even consider disarming her from this angle.
“Calla,” he murmured, keeping his voice low so as not to spook her. He had no idea how much experience she had with guns, and this didn’t seem like the right time for trial and error.
“Hunter.” The barrel pressed harder into the soft flesh under his chin.
He needed her to move, to shift her weight. Right now, she was just a voice and a weapon in the darkness.
He let out a long breath. “How did you get in here?”
“I drugged your dog and picked the lock.”
It took great effort to keep still. He had a knife under his pillow, but going for it would take about three hours in comparison to the amount of time it would take her to pull the trigger. “You drugged my dog?”
“Benadryl in a New York strip.” Her voice turned disdainful. “You don’t even walk your dog on a leash.”
He never walked Casper on a leash. His grandparents lived on an old farm. Like he should have considered that psycho teenage girls might be leaving tainted steaks for his dog to find. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”
“You know,” she said, ignoring him, “I thought about just burning this place down. Kerosene, match, whoosh.”
“What stopped you?” He slid his hand beneath the blanket, just a few inches to see if she would notice.
She didn’t. “Nothing. There’s still time.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “If you wanted to start a fire, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“We want you to get a message to the other Guides.”
“I don’t know any other Guides,” he hissed.
Well, he knew one, but Becca’s father was just as far off the grid as Hunter was.
His hand slid another few inches, clearing the blanket.
“Come on, Hunter,” she said sweetly. “Aren’t you your father’s son?”
Her voice had grown closer. She was leaning in. The gun moved a fraction of an inch.
All he needed was a fraction.
He swung for her wrist, going for deflection, ducking under the movement. His other hand was free, flinging the blankets at her while he slid to the ground. He threw a punch where her knee should be, but she was gone already, somewhere back in the darkness.
He tried to slow his breathing, his heart, trying to convince his body that he needed to hear.
“Nice try,” she said.
He focused on the air in the room, asking the element to reveal her location more precisely, but it was never something he could force. He had to wait.
