The Hunt Ends
823 Words
Evelyn POV
Finally, it is the day of the hunt.
The word in itself is tightening my stomach.
I have never done this before--as you see. Not among crooks who go like ghosts and threaten you to follow or lose your way. I say to myself Breath, we are all here at the end of the camp, arming, cloaking, wolves under the skin.
I don’t belong here.
I know it. They know it.
Still, I’m here.
We depart toward dusk, creeping: into the wood as the light dims into something indeterminate and unsound. The trees surrounding us swiftly close round, the branches gulp down the sound, the ground soft and treacherous underfoot. Each c***k of a branch startles my heart.
I keep my head down. Stay quiet. Stay small.
That’s how I’ve survived so far.
I feel it before I see it—eyes sighted on me.
I glance sideways and catch the Alpha’s sister watching me. Nyx, her mouth curves into a slow smile, sharp and knowing, as though she had already read the denouement of this story and had liked it.
My fingers curl into my palms.
Don’t react.
We pass further, alert, deliberate. It is not some kind of hunting, it is robbery. Stealing food from predators that are stronger than us, faster than us. We all know the risk. Everyone does.
I find out too late that we are not alone.
The air shifts.
There is a low rolling sound in the woods, neither a growl nor a call--but like a growl, and like a call--and it makes me freeze to hear it.
They’ve seen us.
Shouts erupt behind us.
“Thieves!”
The ugly word echoes and cuts through the silence. Footsteps are heard coming nearer and nearer, the snapping of branches, and bodies ploughing through the undergrowth.
Run.
Someone yells it but then my legs are already moving. My throat trembles with panic and the forest is seen to merge. Now I can hear them--voices, which are keen with rage, predators, and more familiar with this land than our own.
“You stole from us!”
“Wolfless thief!”
The words stick, burning.
I fall on a root and just save myself, heart racing out of my chest. In my turn I swing to the Alpha, groping, in despair, for direction, for something solid--
His face is twisted with fury.
Not fear.
Not concerned.
Anger.
At me.
We do not give up running until the lights of the camp finally crash through the woods, flashing torches as we pour back onto safe soil. My lungs burn. My legs shake. I can feel the blood where I broke my lip.
We made it.
Barely.
The relief doesn’t last.
As soon as we stop, the Alpha rogue switches on me.
“What did you do?” he roars.
The camp falls silent.
I flinch. “I—I didn’t—”
You robbed them, you bastard, he says, moving up. We would have been almost caught because of you. Nearly killed.”
“That’s not—”
“Enough!” His voice cracks like a whip. “You are good for nothing. Do you hear me?”
Every eye is on me now.
You nearly killed us all through stale food, you know, I mean through stolen food, he goes on, every word is calculated, vile. “Taking you in was a mistake. I ought to have left you where I made you, half dead in the wood.
Words are more striking than a stroke.
“I tried to help,” I whisper.
You are a wolfless w***e b***h, he growls. And you will not take your curse to my pack once more.
I shake my head. “Please—this wasn’t me, I didn’t—”
“Leave,” he says.
The term is weighty and conclusive.
“Now. And never put thy foot in my rogue pack more.
Everything is absorbed in silence.
I wait too long, I wait a heartbeat again, foolishly waiting to have someone say something. For anyone to stop him.
No one does.
So I turn.
I walk.
No supplies. No food. No direction.
Dark falls soon enough and I abandon the camp with torches diminishing to tiny pinpoints and vanishing altogether. I am received as usuAll in the forest, cold, dark, indifferent.
I can stop only when my legs cannot keep me up any longer.
I don’t know where to go.
I don’t have a family.
Not anymore.
This reality weighs slowly and heavily in my chest, though it does not weigh me down the way I think it should. I’ve felt worse. I’ve survived worse.
I face into the further woods.
Back to where it all began.
I can do it again, I mumble to the darkness, where I once was a living creature in that place.
The forest doesn’t answer.
But it opens.
And I step into it alone.
- Writer
