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He fired the shot and it reverberated around the valley, a treacherous place to try leading a hunt, when every sound bounced off every tree, small hill and rock, forever ricocheting around and about.
The man went down and howled, clutching his leg. Caelan lay flat to the floor, the shadows of rocks, trees and phantom night creatures masking his whereabouts… for now.
Caelan didn’t dare raise his head. They would be on high alert now, their weapons raised, and even though they had their orders—they knew very well what it was they hunted, its reputation for ruthlessness, its cunning. They were human at the end of the day. With a desire to live.
They began to cluster after the shot, exactly as he’d expected, like that would give them an advantage. It made them weaker. But they were scared of what lurked in the dark, unlike those Ukrainians he’d just been training in the sewers beneath Kiev, whose senses were now so attuned to the dark, they could hear how many rats and what size, just from listening carefully.
Like Caelan was listening now, keeping his wits about him.
One of the soldiers applied a tourniquet to the injured man and then he was dragged by some of the others towards the edge of the field upon which they’d all decided to die on. Propped against a tree trunk, the gun-shot man wept with pain.
Big baby.
A few minutes went by as they congregated and decided what to do next. Perhaps their target wasn’t in a killing mood. It was a warning shot?
Their hushed voices carried on the wind but not loudly enough.
Still, their little mother’s meeting gave Caelan chance enough to move back into the thicker grasses, quickly elbowing his way through the dirt. God, he’d missed this.
He’d got himself upright behind a tree, when someone seemed to say, “What was that?”
It was obvious to him by this point that these men weren’t soldiers at all, or elite killers. They were cheap meat. She was desperate, then. Unless it meant… the real soldiers were at that moment up at the castle readying to kidnap his child, thus forcing him to give whatever she asked for in exchange for Logan’s safe return.
No,he told himself.
Flora and Eric would protect the bairn. No doubt about it.
The question was, could Caelan kill all these men? When they didn’t really know what they’d got themselves involved in?
Eyes were on the area where he hid, he could tell. Someone had seen enough of his shadow to warrant their suspicion he was somewhere over this way.
Caelan dashed between the trees, running with all the might his long legs possessed, heading for the thicket where he’d stashed some homemade weapons. Some of the men fired shots that didn’t even come close. Instead, they smashed trees to bits and in the chaos, gave him ample time to make it to safety.
After that, they came running into the treeline at the edge of a clearing. Caelan squatted low, and when one came within a few feet, he threw a javelin with a razor-sharp point he’d just honed tonight with his blade as he’d waited for them.
Two down.
Four to go.
He crawled, scurried, leapt and used the landscape he knew so well to encircle them, snare, then strike. The dark was his bosom buddy and like best friends, they worked together in harmony, the fear of the hunter so deep in their hearts, buried so irrevocably, they all fell one by one. Until just one remained.
Caelan crept up on him before the man knew he’d been hunted.
Knife at the man’s throat, all the others squirmed on the floor with either bullets in their legs or javelins fashioned from the very trees around them.
“Ye can all live, but, only if ye go now. Will ye go now?” asked Caelan.
“We can’t go back without you,” said the man in a strangely hypnotic accent—perhaps South American.
Caelan wasn’t sure if this was Sherry… or Sherry’s former overlords, looking to bring back Blake so they could use him for their own ends.
“Ye winna gi’ up this day, then?” asked Caelan.
“We cannot,” said the man, fearfully.
Caelan wasted no time.
He shot the leader, then he went around ripping out the javelins, until one by one, they all bled out. The two who hadn’t died yet, the ones holding their bullet-ridden legs, squirming, he broke the necks of.
