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But when it came right down to pulling a trigger, it wasn’t hard at all.
Her mother always used to say it was for the greater good. Kate wondered what she’d say about that now, after everything that had happened.
She watched Silver’s fidgeting for another moment. “Do you expect them to be hard to kill?”
His eyes left the gun to flick up and meet hers. “Nervous?” She matched his tone. “Of course not.”
He smiled, but there wasn’t anything amiable about it. “You have some familiarity with weapons, yes?”
Kate picked up the Glock and took it apart in four seconds. The bullets plinked out of the magazine onto the table. “A little.”
“A bullet to the head is one of the few sure ways to kill them.”
“I have some familiarity with killing, too.”
“So I’ve heard.” He ignored her attitude and started putting the stripped gun back together. “I’ve seen an Air Elemental take four shots to the chest and still come up fighting.”
ER 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.
