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No. They would get out of this. He could heal her. Michael could help.
Kate.
He couldn’t sense her at all. He could sense Michael’s fear and Silver’s patience and the danger in the air, but he couldn’t feel Kate.
“I think he’s leaving,” said Michael, his voice barely a whisper. “Keep still.”
He didn’t want to keep still. Silver was standing right there. Shock was filtering into fury, and Hunter wanted to shoot that motherfucker in the head. His fingers were itching for a trigger, to feel the kick and recoil and taste vengeance.
“Go ahead,” called Silver, as if he felt the rage in the air and found it satisfying. “Try to shoot me.”
Michael tightened his grip. “No, Hunter. No. You blow our cover and we are screwed.”
So they waited.
Silver waited.
The sun crept into the sky and fed warmth into the woods, narrowing shadows between the trees. Tension slid through the leaves and choked Hunter, until he was ready to shoot Michael, just to escape it. His shoulders began to ache from being pinned so long.
It felt like hours.
It probably was hours.
She was alone out there. Probably in pain.
Hang on, he thought. Just hang on.
Finally a cell phone rang, out there in the woods. Silver’s. He answered, but his voice was too low to carry.
Hunter caught the word terminated.
He couldn’t breathe again.
But Kate could be faking. Waiting Silver out, too. Like Casper had been waiting at the house.
The conversation was short. Silver slipped the phone into a pocket and strode out of the woods.
Michael still didn’t let Hunter go.
“Wait,” Michael said. “I want to wait until I feel a vehicle leaving.”
Finally—finally—Michael released him.
Hunter swung around and hit him. As hard as he could.
Then he was scrabbling through the underbrush, stumbling once he found his feet, slipping out of his shoes in the mud. His breath was hitching again.
When he saw Kate, it was like his brain didn’t want to process all of it. He saw her shoes, the borrowed jeans, again splattered with blood.
The pink shirt.
The bloodstains. The arrows. The flies, already collecting.
Then he saw her head and wished he hadn’t seen any of it.
She hadn’t been waiting. She hadn’t been in pain.
He wanted to touch her and he didn’t.
