Delilah
Claudio was tranquilized on a live camera feed, in spite of the very active interest of Mr. Miles, who seemed unconcerned with his own injury and thrilled by the unexpected excitement. While handlers fitted the wolf with a muzzle and a paramedic bandaged Miles’s arm, Willem Vandekamp came into the viewing room and whispered something to Olive Burnette, who left with her orders. Then Vandekamp marched to the front of the room and took the microphone from Fischer.
Over the mic, he effusively congratulated Mr. Brewer on his quick and virtually effortless mastery of a vicious cheetah shifter and apologized for the “technical difficulties.” To make it up to such a valued customer, Vandekamp offered him a makeup hunt, on the house.
That must have been quite a generous financial offer, because Brewer, who’d been vocally disappointed in the reaction to his victory, suddenly seemed quite satisfied with his hunting experience.
The screens went blank while they reset the game field for the second round, and the handlers gave us a signal to start refilling drinks and plates.
After a fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights went down again, and this time Vandekamp ran the show himself. He announced that the second-round hunters would be chasing a feral adolescent werewolf named Genevieve who would as soon tear their throats out as look at them. Which was why the hunters had been outfitted with bite-proof sleeves and collars, and why they’d be hunting this vicious creature not with stun guns, but with the lethal longbow.
For one long, terrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe.
That’s why Genni was in the stables, rather than the dormitory. The very night her father had broken into the Spectacle to save her, Vandekamp had scheduled her to die.
“Oh, shit,” Zyanya whispered from my right.
“What?” Simra’s gaze roamed the screens, looking for the source of our distress.
“We know her,” I said softly. “She’s only thirteen years old.”
“I’ve seen her hunted twice, both times in the first round,” Simra said. “She’s very hard to catch, because she can fit into very small spaces, and she doesn’t go down easy.”
I swallowed a bitter taste at the back of my mouth. “How often do they die in this round?”
“About half the time,” Simra said, and my hand clenched around the edge of my tray.
“Hunters, are you ready?” Vandekamp asked.
My attention narrowed on his face, then slid to the wall of screens behind him.
“Ready.” A gloved hand appeared on one of the right-hand screens, and about half
the audience cheered.
“Good to go!” A second hand, also gloved, appeared on one of the left-hand screens, and the other half of the audience cheered.
“Mr. Wheeler, is the prey ready?” Vandekamp stepped to one side of the room, while Charles Wheeler pressed a series of buttons on the keyboard in front of him. The center overhead screen changed to show a small, slim humanoid shape, too dark to reveal much detail. But I would have recognized Genevieve’s silhouette anywhere.
Charles punched a few more buttons then twisted a small dial, and the image lightened to reveal Genni in full detail, painted in a monochromatic scheme of green.
As Payat had, she wore nothing but her collar and a small video camera mounted on a headband.
Vandekamp lifted his hands, then dropped them with a flourish. “Let the hunt begin!”
Charles’s hand hovered over his keyboard for a single dramatic second. Then he punched the space bar with one finger, and a gate slid open on-screen. For a five count, Genni pressed herself against the bars at her back, and in the greenish view, I could see her focus shift back and forth as she assessed her surroundings. She knew where she was; I could see that in her calm assessment. She was afraid, but not panicked, because she’d been through it all before. But she probably had no idea that this time the hunters were wielding arrows, rather than stun guns.
“Let’s get her moving, Mr. Wheeler,” Vandekamp said from his position against the right-hand wall, and Charles pressed another series of buttons.
A second later, the front of Genni’s collar blinked bright red, and she jumped, startled by an obvious jolt of pain. Then she ran.
I watched, my heart pounding as she nimbly ducked below branches, dodged vines and leapt over roots I wouldn’t have been able to see with my human eyes. At times she was little more than a green-tinged blur, moving virtually silently through the underbrush, effortlessly avoiding twigs and dead leaves which would make noise and give away her position.
I’d never seen a shifter let loose in her natural environment before, and where Payat had been terrified and timid, Genni was breathtaking.
She’s done this before. And not just in her two previous hunts. Like Payat, Genevieve had grown up in a cage, with no experience in the wild. At some point after All American sold her, Genni must have logged serious hours in the woods.
The odds were actually in her favor, and that fact left me both happy and terrified for her. If she survived this round, next time they’d put her up against hunting rifles, and even if she recovered from being shot once, she couldn’t recover over and over.
The ending would ultimately be the same for everyone sentenced to the hunt: they may survive the round, but they could not survive the game itself.
Still, for nearly an hour, Genni evaded not just capture, but detection, and when one of the men chasing her finally got a glimpse, he lost it a second later.
From her viewpoint camera, the audience could see that she had climbed a tree, but the hunter was completely unaware until she leapt from one branch to the next, and the limb she landed on held her slight weight but creaked beneath the burden.
I gasped when the hunter looked up, and Genevieve appeared in the center of his viewpoint screen.
The woman I was serving a meatball slider to shoved me out of her field of vision. I tripped over the edge of the tier and would have crashed into other guests if Simra hadn’t grabbed my arm with her spare hand.
We rushed toward the side of the room and turned back to the screens just in time to see an arrow fly.
Genni leapt for another branch. The arrow hit her thigh in midair with a barely perceptible thunk.
The audience burst into applause. Genevieve crashed to the ground, already growling, and when the hunter approached, she swiped at him with fingers tipped with canine claws, even in human form.
“Mr. Perry, hold your fire,” Charles said into his microphone, when the hunter on-screen pulled a second arrow from his quiver. “You’ve already taken your shot.” He pressed another button, and the red light on Genni’s collar flashed. She froze in the hunter’s viewpoint screen, immobilized, and the hunter lowered his weapon.
“I won?”
“Yes, sir, you are tonight’s round-two victor.” Vandekamp took center stage again, then he covered his mic and gave Charles instructions to set up for round three. But Charles was already tapping away at his keyboard and speaking softly into his microphone. “Unfortunately, Mr. Perry, it looks like your quarry will survive.”
Simra, Zyanya and I were the only ones in the room who didn’t boo.