“Good job, partner,” Heath said, giving my arm a squeeze.
All I could think to respond with was a goofy grin. Before I could do something to embarrass myself further, Xavier’s voice rang out through the trees. “The tracker! It’s showing up! The receiver is working!”
Everyone shot up and rushed toward him. Even Kiev and Corrine arrived with their rumpled children.
“Thank God!” Vivienne whispered.
A red light at the base of the receiver had started flashing, even as an arrow emerged on the screen. It spun around wildly at first, but then settled, pointing deeper into the woods.
“I wonder why it started working only now,” Micah said.
“Maybe we needed to be closer,” I suggested hopefully. “Maybe we’ve gained a lot of ground on them.”
“Hm,” Micah murmured. “Well, while it’s working, we should follow the device. This will hopefully save time. A lot of time.”
Victoria
I felt quite disconcerted by the care Bastien was showing toward me. Mostly because I simply did not understand it. We were still basically strangers to each other. His behavior almost made me suspicious, although he had done nothing to earn my suspicion.
I looked at him, frowning, as he scanned the trees around us. “We should keep moving,” he muttered through the satchel and belt still clenched between his teeth.
“Where to now?”
He paused, looking hesitant. “I need to find out how wide these hunters’ strides across our realm have become. The mountain lair we just left, my family’s lair, is one of the closest to where the hunters set up their base. I am supposing that we were among the very first to be affected. The second closest tribe that I know of is the Tuftbrook tribe. We have never been on very good terms with them, but we have not been inimical either… You might be surprised how few packs get along with each other,” he added with a dark look. “If these hunters wish to divide and conquer, if that is their strategy, division already exists in this realm aplenty; it’s ripe for the picking.”
“You think the hunters might have reached the Tuftbrooks already?” I asked.
“It’s possible. Perhaps they found allies among traitors there, as they did in my pack. Or, I believe more likely, they could have just wiped them all out… But I wish to visit and see for myself. I have hope they are still there.”
And so I resumed my seat on his back and we began to travel again. I ended up closing my eyes for most of the journey—I’d been woken up abruptly, likely in the middle of a sleep cycle, and now I felt like death. Of course, there was no chance of actual sleep.
After about an hour, he assured me that we were about to arrive and then, without warning, he came to a stop so sudden I almost got thrown off his back. Bastien’s head raised toward the treetops. Following his gaze, I realized what he had spotted. My breath hitched. Perched on a high branch—and thankfully facing the opposite direction—was one of the mutants. Then I spotted another one, two trees along.
I expected Bastien to turn around and begin running in the opposite direction. It seemed obvious to me that the hunters had already struck here, as we had feared. But he kept creeping forward, even as he swerved to avoid direct visibility by the mutants above us.
My breathing was coming hard and fast as the trees began to thin and we approached a clearing. The ground sloped from the edges downward, and in the center was a wide hole in the ground. It looked like a giant rabbit hole or… a wolf hole. Hunters in uniforms carrying guns were milling in and out of it.
Come on, Bastien, let’s go! I was praying in my mind. What if they had installed alarms around here? We had witnessed enough to understand that they had taken over the lair.
Finally, Bastien stepped backward and began running in the opposite direction, away from the hunters, away from their mutants. Once I guessed we had traveled about ten miles, he slowed to a walk.
Still, he remained quiet.
“So, they took over the Tuftbrooks’ lair,” I said.
“Yes,” he grunted. “They are—or were—a tight-knit group, and I did doubt that any of them would be willing to submit to the hunters or cooperate with whatever it is they have in mind. The hunters have raided the place and either killed them or kidnapped them, or maybe a mixture of the two.”
Shivers ran through me as I caught screeching in the distance, a reminder that we were still close to the mutants.
“We should find some shelter for the night,” Bastien said, picking up his pace again.
We traveled through the forest until we reached another spread of mountains, a smaller one this time, and thankfully less steep. Bastien began climbing and stopped about twenty feet up, where we came across a small cave. He crept inside and I slid off his back, touching down on the rocky surface.
Bastien set down the satchel and the belt he had been carrying in his teeth. He nudged the satchel toward me with his nose. “Please take out my clothes.”
I hadn’t known that he’d put clothes in here. But as I rummaged through, I found three clean sets. He must have packed them while I had been sleeping. I pulled out a shirt and a pair of pants as well as, ahem, underpants, and handed them to him. He collected them between his teeth and then dropped down over the edge. I wasn’t sure where he planned to change, but I stood back quite a distance…
When he returned, he was a man again, fully dressed in his clothes. It was a good thing that he’d come when he had, because it had started to rain. We backed deeper into the cave together, bringing the belt and satchel with us. We found a couple of flat rocks and sat down.