Sacrifice

Hunter wasn’t ready for a question. He was ready for lecturing. “Most of them.”

“Good.” He looked at Jay. “Thanks for coming over. You have time to stay for dinner?”

That was it?

“You’re not mad?” said Hunter.

His dad glanced at him. “Not yet.”

Hunter frowned. “Yet?”

“You’re about to teach yourself a lesson a lot more effectively than I ever could. I’ll be mad if you don’t learn it the first time around.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.” His father looked back at Jay. “The file for this weekend is upstairs if you want to take a look.”

His uncle straightened. “Sure. I have time.”

“File?” Hunter’s ears perked up. If Uncle Jay was involved, that meant it was Elemental business. His father worked private security jobs on his own. “You have a job this weekend?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” said his father.

“Let him listen,” said Jay. “You said it’s just surveillance for now, right? He’ll be doing it himself soon enough.”

Hunter’s dad smiled and smacked his brother on the back of the head good-naturedly—but his eyes were serious. “I said, it’s nothing he needs to worry about.”

“You know I can keep a secret,” said Hunter.

Hunter’s dad lost the smile. “It’s not about keeping secrets. I don’t want you in on this stuff any sooner than you need to be.”

“But why? You tell me about your private-duty stuff all the time. But this is the stuff I should be learning—”

“No,” said his dad, and his eyes were fierce. “It’s not a game, Hunter. You’re not ready.”

Hunter gritted his teeth. He took every lesson seriously. He followed every rule his father laid out. His skills with a rifle could rival real sharpshooters. Any challenge his father set, he could do it. He had done it.

“I know it’s not a game,” he said.

“Good. Then forget we mentioned it.”

“Is this because I brought a girl home?” Hunter wanted to punch the wall, but he was well practiced in maintaining control, especially when his father was around. He kept his voice even. “You said you weren’t mad.”

“I’m not. And this isn’t a punishment.”

“What good is all this training if you’re never going to let me use it?”

“Hunter.”

“Maybe if you would let me have the chance—”

“Hunter. I said no.”

That tone was final, like throwing up a wall. A point of no return. For a bare instant, Hunter wanted to knock it down, to rebel and throw a fit.

But that would just make his father throw up a new wall, a stronger one.

His father wasn’t waiting around for him to make a choice, anyway. He turned and started through the door, saying, “Lock up when you’re done in here.”

Like Hunter would sit down here and sulk.

Actually, he would have if his dad hadn’t said something.

Now he stood back and waited for his uncle to go through the doorway, then flipped the light switch and locked the door.

But he stopped Jay at the bottom of the stairs.

“Hey,” he said, his voice low, “what did Dad tell you about girls?”

His uncle laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, and Hunter thought he was going to brush off the question.

But Jay leaned in and lost the smile. “Use them before they use you.”

Hunter thought about his father’s and uncle’s warnings all night.

He couldn’t line it all up in his head.

If Clare was using him, it was just for information, and that seemed kind of weak. She could learn practically anything about guns from Wikipedia. It didn’t seem worthwhile to follow him home from school for something she could find in zero-point-six seconds on Google.

And regardless of whether she was using him, he sure didn’t want to use her.

Clare’s apprehension about guns was real—his abilities were strong enough to sense that. Her concern for her brother felt real, too. Maybe she just craved some kind of experience, some way to understand what her brother would be handling.

And she’d hung close to him in the gun locker. She hadn’t minded when his arms went around her, when he’d placed his hands over hers and showed her how to grip the weapon.

But still, his father’s lessons were never something to be treated lightly. Hunter could feel the seeds of future disappointment taking root already.

I’ll be mad if you don’t learn it the first time around.

What did that mean? Did his father expect him to cut Clare off now, before anything else happened?

He could do that. It would be easy enough. They hardly knew each other, and this was the last week of school.

But it felt . . . wrong. He was sixteen years old, not six. He didn’t have to brush off some girl just because his daddy didn’t think they should play together.

Maybe he didn’t have to worry about it at all. The way they’d been caught had been plenty embarrassing. Today was his alternate schedule, too, so he didn’t have Government. Maybe he’d walk into school and find her giggling about him with her girlfriends. Even better, maybe he’d make it through the whole day without seeing her at all.

No. He found her waiting at his locker after last period.

Sleeveless sundress, brown hair shining, a splash of freckles across her shoulders.

He tried not to think of what it would be like to show her how to hold a weapon while she was wearing that.

She smiled at him. “I’ve been worried about you all day. Did you get in trouble because of me?”

He shrugged a little and worked the combination lock. She smelled like mangoes again, and it took effort to keep his eyes on the spinning numbers. “Nah. My dad was actually cool with it.”

“Really? So I can come back?”

“Sure—”

Then a hand smacked him on the back of the head, hard enough to slam his face into the locker.

Stars blossomed in his vision, but Hunter was already spinning automatically, an arm coming up to block, the other swinging a fist.

The other guy barely got out of his way. Garrett Watts, a heavyset junior who usually trailed after Jeremy Rasmussen. His brown eyes were small and beady above doughy cheeks, and the only thing about him that gave Hunter pause was the fact that this guy had to have seventy pounds on him.

But at least he couldn’t run fast. It was probably a lucky miracle he’d missed Hunter’s first swing.

Hunter was about to remedy that when a teacher appeared in the hallway. Miss Janney, the first-year Spanish teacher. She had guts getting between them. “Boys. Take a walk. In opposite directions.”

Hunter didn’t move. Clare had shrunk back against the lockers. Garrett looked like he was ready to come around the teacher—or through her. If Hunter turned around and started walking, Garrett wouldn’t follow his lead. He’d strike again.

Hunter could feel the promise of violence in the air. He wondered what he’d done to draw Garrett’s attention today.

Once he had the attention of Jeremy’s crowd, it was insanely hard to lose it.

He started planning how he could minimize the damage.

“Walk,” Miss Janney said. “There are two more days of school. I’m sure you don’t want to spend them on suspension.”

Garrett didn’t move. “He started it.”

Hunter opened his mouth, but Miss Janney held up a hand. “I don’t care who started it. Walk or I’m calling security.”

“Whatever.” Garrett shrugged his backpack higher on his arm as he turned to walk. “I know where to find him later.”

New way home. Check.

Once Garrett was walking, Miss Janney disappeared back into her classroom, muttering something about forty-eight more hours until peace.

Clare left the safety of the lockers and touched Hunter’s arm. Her eyes were full of concern. “Are you okay?”

He would let Garrett punch him again if this was the result.

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice sounded slightly thick. His cheek had taken the brunt of the hit, but his nose felt sore, too. “I think you’re bleeding,” she said. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”

Bleeding? He touched a hand to his nose and felt wetness. Crimson drops clung to his fingers.

Clare was fishing through her backpack. “Here.”

Tissues. He held one to his face. This was just great. Maybe he could pee his pants next.

“You were going to fight him,” said Clare, her voice soft.

“I wasn’t going to let him kill me.”

“Aren’t you afraid of him?”

“I used to be,” he said honestly.

“Did your dad teach you to fight, too?”

“Yeah.” He checked the tissues. Ugh. “God, I look like a total wuss.”

“No way,” said Clare with a smile. “I think you look totally fearless.”

CHAPTER 3

The early summer air was soft on Hunter’s face as he trudged through the woods to the edge of the cornfield. He’d shoved some apples and two cans of soda in his backpack, along with a box of ammunition and two unloaded handguns.

Clare was walking by his side.

He was going to teach her to shoot.

His father’s lack of anger left him feeling more worried instead of less. The warning still rang in his ears, and he told his brain to knock it off. What could she be using him for? Shooting lessons?

Stupid.

She’d been mostly quiet on the walk to his house, and he’d been walking a cord of tension himself, ready for Jeremy or Garrett or one of those morons to come flying out of the trees.

But nothing had happened.

“You could take them, couldn’t you?” she said out of the blue.

He didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. After that display in the hallway, he wasn’t surprised those thugs were on her mind, too. He smiled. “Take them,” he mimicked. “I don’t really want to fight them.”

“Why not? Don’t you think they’d leave you alone?”

Hunter stopped at the edge of the tree line. There was a long stretch of grass here before the cornfield started, and his dad had set steel targets of varying heights into the ground. He set his backpack gently on the ground.

“That’s not how it works,” he said, dropping to sit in the grass. He unzipped the nylon. “If it were that easy, I’d have done it at the beginning of the year.”

She hesitated, then dropped to sit beside him, pulling her skirt over her knees. The grass was warm here, the sun beating down. “I don’t understand.”

“People don’t really leave me alone,” he said. “Kind of an occupational hazard.”

She frowned. “I still don’t understand.”

Hunter smiled and shook his head. “Sorry. I just mean, when I fight them, it seems to inspire them to fight more. You know how sometimes when you put up resistance, it just makes people push harder?”

She was staring at him, and he couldn’t figure out the tension in her expression.

“What?” he said.

She shook her head quickly. “Nothing. So they keep coming after you?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged and started snapping bullets into an empty magazine. “It’s like they keep coming up with more creative ways to try to kick my ass. And if I fight them at school, it just gets me in trouble. Getting in trouble pisses off my dad. I mostly try to avoid them. Want an apple?”

“Sure.”

He snapped the last bullet, then slid the clip into a 9mm Beretta. He’d chosen this one because it was smaller and might not make her so uneasy.