14. Huntyr
Chapter 14
Huntyr
T he three of us stopped. Both horses felt the tension, felt the threat nearby.
My pointed ears flickered, listening for the next sound of danger.
Hungry ones were deadly, yes, but they were not exactly stealthy. The next snap of a twig to our right gave them away within a second. Jessiah and Wolf were already pulling on the horse’s reins from the ground—not to run away from the bloodsuckers, but to run toward them.
Just a few feet through thick trees and brush, and we were on them. There were three. They looked fresh, like they had yet to fall into the rotting life of living for nothing but the taste of blood.
But then, we heard the voice.
“Stop!” someone yelled. “Stop! Please!”
The two horses, along with Jessiah and Wolf on the ground, boxed in the three hungry ones, but the voice was coming from somewhere else.
“Who’s out there?” Wolf yelled. “Show yourself!”
I tightened my grip around his waist on instinct. Who would be out here with the hungry ones? Who would be defending them?
What we weren’t expecting, though, was a young girl to step out of the brush.
Jessiah pointed his sword at one of the creatures that got too close.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The girl looked no older than twelve—starving, clearly, and also terrified, but not of the hungry ones.
“Just stop,” she said. “Don’t kill them, please.”
“We have to kill them,” Jessiah explained. “Or they’ll kill us all. You understand that, don’t you?”
The young girl took a step toward the hungry ones. How the hell was she still alive, anyway? How had they not killed her already?
The girl looked at us with a brave face. “I swear to you, they are not hungry ones. They were fine just yesterday. They’re just sick. They’re just?—”
“They’re not sick,” I said, lowering my voice. “They would eat Jessiah right now if he lowered his sword. And then they would eat us, and they would probably eat you.”
A single tear fell down her dirt-stained face. Hells, she looked so tired. Had she been following them this whole time? It wasn’t possible, was it? I mean, it?—
“How are you still alive?” Wolf asked before I had the chance to intervene. He guided the horse a step in her direction, careful to avoid the three hungry ones that were now frozen—almost dazed, as if they were confused on what to do next. I’d seen hungry ones practically crawl over each other to get access to fresh blood.
These hungry ones seemed calmer, not on the verge of tearing into each of our throats. In my entire life of killing these creatures, I had never seen anything like it.
“How have they not killed you?” he asked again when she didn’t answer.
The young girl’s eyes flickered between the hungry ones and Wolf, like she was looking to them to help her.
That was when it clicked for me.
“That’s her family,” I said. “She’s with them because they’re family.”
The largest hungry one—her father, I assumed—chose that moment to let out a low growl and take a step in Jessiah’s direction. The tip of his silver sword pressed into the chest of the creature until blood beaded at the surface. “Tell me what to do here,” Jessiah mumbled in a low voice. “I can’t say I feel great about killing them in front of her.”
I prepared myself to get off the horse and comfort the girl, considering these two men likely had no practice with sensitive matters, but Wolf beat me to it. He took a slow, tentative step toward her. He even hunched his shoulders inward, like he was trying to make himself appear smaller to keep from frightening her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The girl’s eyes widened, gluing themselves to Wolf. “Abigail.”
“Abigail,” Wolf repeated. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear that he was smiling. “Your family is very sick, do you understand?”
The girl nodded.
“Good. And this type of sickness, it doesn’t have a cure. Your family is going to become dangerous, and if you don’t leave them now, they might hurt you.”
Abigail sniffled but kept her eyes on Wolf. Brave, brave girl. My heart twisted in my chest at someone so young having to go through this. I never thought about the hungry ones like this—as real people with families and loved ones, as monsters who eventually turn on their own children.
“They won’t hurt me,” she said. “Mother would never do something like that.”
Mother crept a little too close to my leg and I had to kick her shoulder to keep her back. Her eyes were already sunken voids in her skull. Any remaining pieces of her soul were quickly dwindling as she morphed into one of them.
We learned in Moira that vampyres turned into hungry ones after losing control of their blood lust, but this was particularly strange. Why would three family members all lose control at the same time?
“Abigail,” Wolf continued, “you need to come with us if you want to stay alive.”
The three hungry ones grew impatient. They could clearly smell the blood pumping in our veins, and although they might have been holding onto the smallest amount of restraint, they were quickly losing it.
“We need to go.” The horse beneath me took a step away from the monsters as if it, too, knew we were running out of time. “Now.”
“Agreed,” Jessiah added. “Let’s take the girl and go.”
“No,” the girl cried. “I can’t leave them. I can’t leave them!”
“I’m sorry,” Wolf said, stepping closer to her like he was willing to kidnap her to keep her alive. “But you have to.”
Instead of staying put and letting Wolf pick her up, she darted past him, catapulting herself and wrapping her arms around her mother’s waist.
Fuck.
The hungry ones were losing control. She may have survived this long, but she had about five seconds before they ripped her flesh from her bones.
“Abigail!” Wolf yelled.
The mother stilled, void eyes turning to her daughter. The other two stopped moving as well. One sniffed the air.
Jessiah and Wolf were unmoving. There was little we could do as we watched the horror play out in front of us.
My power reacted before I could even comprehend the situation. One second, the mother was looking at her daughter with an open jaw and teeth lowering to Abigail’s flesh.
The next second, my magic catapulted around them.
The three hungry ones froze. Not metaphorically, either, but actually froze , like their corpses were now statues.
“Huntyr,” Jessiah called out from his horse, “are you doing this right now?”
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.
“Nobody move,” Wolf said. “Huntyr, don’t you dare fucking stop whatever you’re doing right now.”
So I didn’t. I still had no idea what was actually happening. I mean, was I controlling this? Did my magic make the hungry ones stop?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting Abigail out of there alive.
Wolf crept forward, into the danger of the frozen hungry ones, and grabbed Abigail’s hand, pulling her to him. He guided her to Jessiah’s horse and lifted her onto the saddle in front of him. She wasn’t objecting anymore. She was smart enough to understand that her mother had been seconds from tearing into her flesh.
Once Wolf was settled back onto the horse behind me, he said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here before we have to kill them in front of her.”
So we did. I didn’t lessen the flow of power leaving my body as our two horses ran away from the hungry ones, from the girl’s parents, from the atrocity she almost witnessed.
It wasn’t until I was sure we were far, far away from them that I pulled my magic back to myself, taking a deep breath as my body adjusted to the expended energy.
Jessiah rode in front, but he glanced over his shoulder every few seconds, almost waiting to see if I would admit what just happened.
“That really was me, wasn’t it? My magic did that?”
“You are the blood queen, Huntress. I have no doubt in my mind that your power could be capable of such things.”
“I don’t even know how that happened. I just—I just wanted to save her.” Abigail was shockingly quiet for the next few hours of the trip. She did not cry. She did not ask to turn around, to be reunited with her family again. I even forgot she was there until we took breaks and I saw her climbing off Jessiah’s horse.
But she remained quiet. Calm.
I was glad, because I was silently freaking the fuck out.
Even the next day, as we rode through the forest in silence, my thoughts trailed back to the way my magic made those hungry ones freeze. My magic controlled them. This was what Asmodeus wanted, right? He wanted me to control them. He wanted me to build him an army of blood-hungry monsters who would stop at nothing to destroy, destroy, destroy.
Wolf’s breath fell on the back of my neck, making me shiver, finally distracting me from my dark spiral of thoughts. “You’re panicking,” he whispered. “I can feel it.” He pulled our horse back far enough that Jessiah and Abigail couldn’t hear us.
“I wouldn’t say panicking,” I replied. “Just realizing I actually might be capable of everything your father wants from me.”
“I always knew you were capable,” he replied. “But that doesn’t mean we’re going to play into his plans. You’re safe with us, Huntress. Jessiah won’t say anything, you have my word.”
“How do you know? You two are brothers, but he doesn’t seem to hate your father as much as you do. He could be more loyal.”
Wolf laughed quietly, the shaking in his chest vibrating through my back. “I just know,” he answered. “Very few people truly want to see my father with even more power than he already has. If you trust anything, trust that.”
Fair enough. Jessiah was a good man, even though he was the child of the evil archangel. That wasn’t his fault, though, was it? We had no control over who our parents decided to become. I had a hard time believing Jessiah had a single evil bone in his body. To sit by while his father took over kingdom after kingdom?
It wasn’t right. Jessiah wouldn’t stand for it.
But I also knew that trusting others got me into trouble on more than one occasion. Now, they knew I ultimately had more power than I was showing.
I would have to be very, very careful moving forward.
Trust no one, and I might make it out of this alive.