Gregor watches me for a moment, his mind working somewhere inside that hard skull. Finally, he settles back onto his heels, unfolding his arms. “No.”
“Figures,” I say, something like relief washing over me that he isn’t already biting into me. I’ll take the small win. “It would be nice to dine on a human heartbeat again someday.”
Though my stomach twists and turns, my heart begins to settle. The hardest part of this rouse was always the beginning. The noctis are smarter than ghouls, but still in many ways as dumb as humans can be. All it ever takes is a little blood, and maybe a fresh corpse for added effect, and they’re almost eager to believe I’m one of them. After all, what human would ever dare face them instead of run?
Boris inches forward then. “It’s a pity, isn’t it? Eating scraps like a bunch of dogs.”
“Worse than dogs,” I say, and this appears to appeal to him, as if we’re now bonded over our hardships. He has no idea what hardship truly is. He thinks that being forced to eat animals instead of killing humans is such a plight? The only reason there are so few humans for noctis like him to eat is because they’ve already feasted their way through the country. The ones they left for dead but didn’t quite finish the job turned into ghouls that ravaged the remaining cities and cut mankind off at the knees.
My knife calls to me, the metal blade practically a siren serenading me to make the kill. But I remain strong. I can survive this, if only I keep myself in check.
“So, uh,” Boris says, pulling me back into the conversation. “You haven’t seen any live ones around these parts, have you?”
“None,” I reply, maybe too quickly judging by the glance exchanged by the both of them. “I’m just passing through, really. What about you? You must track them down pretty easily between the two of you?”
“If only.” Boris laughs. “It seems Gravenburg is just as dead as Neveridge, and every sad city between.”
“Is that where you came from? Neveridge?” I’m mostly just trying to be casual, but I had already guessed that’s where they were from since they are working directly for the king.
“Yep,” he says proudly. “Home sweet home.”
Under the guise of interest, I try milking him for information. “You traveled all this way? Just for food? Are we really so fucked?”
Why has the king lead them here is what I really want to ask them. Why are they so far away from the noctis castle?
Humor lights him up. “Oh, no. Not exactly. We’re with the Prince’s envoy. Scouting ahead to collect donations for the Hunt.”
My heart skitters to a halt. The wordsthe Huntare almost too foreign for my mind to comprehend. I remember hearing tales of it when I was a child. But as I grew older, I just assumed the Hunt was a legend spread around towns to scare children into obeying their curfews and the rules about staying within the compound walls, safely tucked away from the noctis who might snatch them out of the shadows.
The Hunt, as I recall, was said to be an annual game of barbaric delight. In the months leading up to it, humans were captured, imprisoned, and then released. But not back to the safety of their homes. No, they were released into a field of death, one where noctis from every corner of the realm were said to indulge their most primal and carnal desires in a race to kill as many humans as they could.
When I was a little girl, the idea of the Hunt had filled me with such soul-quenching dread that the night Rowland told me about it, I refused to sleep anywhere but in my mother’s arms.
Hearing Boris mention it now makes me feel much the same.
Of all the ways to die in this world, being hunted for sport as a source of entertainment for the very monsters who have already made our lives miserable, ranks up there for the worst possible way to die.
I shouldn’t be surprised it’s real. Many legends are born from fact.
Besides, the job board has been more cluttered than usual lately with missing persons reports. All this time, I just presumed them dead. Or worse, that they’d been turned into ghouls by the hundreds still scattered about Gravenburg. Little did I know that perhaps some of them—if not most—were being rounded up by King Tor’s Crimson Guard to be stored for the Hunt.
It’s possible I never knew the truth because they’ve never had to come this far for recruitment before. The human population dwindles more each year, especially with the ghouls’ numbers rising.
“Oh well.” Boris shrugs. “We won’t be in this graveyard for long. We’ll be heading north to Nigh by week’s end.” Noticing my lingering confusion, he adds, “That’s where the Hunt’ll be this year. Taking us back to our roots into the Shadowthorn.”
He’s right to assume my ignorance. Practically everything he’s shared with me has been a new piece of the puzzle that I didn’t have until today. And valuable information at that. To think of what kind of price it would fetch back at the compound sends a trill of excitement fluttering into my stomach. If I mistakenly believed the Hunt was just a fairytale, it’s likely I’m not the only one. More than that, the knowledge that this year’s Hunt will practically be held in our backyard will be invaluable to every human nearby, especially the compound leaders.
I need to make it out of this alive and pay them a visit. If not for my sake, then for the boneheaded leader ofBarretsville—or whatever they’re calling it—whom I call friend.
And maybe that visit needs to come sooner rather than later. After all, now that I’m close-ranged, I can’t take on two noctis. I’m not even sure I could handle one. Especially not when one is the size of an ox, and the other is slimy enough that I imagine he’d slip out of my grasp the moment I tried anything funny.
There are sentries outside of the secret town though. Sharpshooters with aims almost as true as mine. Almost.
If I could get Gregor and Boris to the outskirts of the commune, they wouldn’t be a threat to anyone anymore. And they certainly wouldn’t have any more opportunity of snatching away some of the locals.
“It’s morbid if you ask me,” Gregor says abruptly, upper lip peeled back and accentuating his bloodstained teeth. “Five years I spent trapped there. No need to go back.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s saying, but eventually the history of demonkind that had been taught ad nauseum finally catches up to me. The demons who lived in the Shadowthorn were venomous. One bite would kill a human. But for the druids, the bite was merely the start of a transformation.
