THE ROGUE: HUNTED BY THE ALPHA

Ghosts in the Green (cont 2)

By mid-morning she had made her decision about the camp, which was to stay but to reinforce the outer perimeter's concealment and relocate three of the secondary traps to positions that would give her earlier warning of approach from the south. She spent three hours on this task, moving methodically, resetting her mental map as she worked.

She was halfway through repositioning the third trap when the feral came at her from the left.

She heard it a second before it moved; a small, involuntary sound in the throat that ferals made when they were about to charge, something between a growl and a breath-catch that their human mind was too diminished to suppress. She was already turning when the thing hit her, a male in partial shift, maybe six foot two at full human height but reduced now to something hunched and pale and wrong, eyes the flat yellow of an animal with nothing left behind them.

She let him take her to the ground because fighting a full-weight tackle in a standing position against something with no pain response was a losing proposition. She tucked her chin, protected her throat, let her back absorb the impact against the forest floor, and used the momentum of the fall to get her right knee between them. When they hit the ground she drove the knee upward into the feral's solar plexus and felt the air go out of him in a single sharp burst. He scrambled back on instinct. She came up.

Three seconds from first contact to her standing over him with a knife in her right hand.

He snarled at her from the ground, trying to gather himself for a second charge. His eyes moved over her face with the animal calculation of something that had forgotten everything except hunger and threat. She recognized this particular feral; she had driven him off twice before from the eastern edge of the territory. He was getting bolder. Or more desperate. In her experience, with ferals, those two things were usually the same.

She did not give him time to decide. She moved in fast, used the flat of the blade against the side of his skull with a controlled, measured force, and lowered him to the ground unconscious. He would wake up with a headache and no memory of the interaction. She would give him a wider berth for the next two weeks and hope he found easier hunting elsewhere. It was the most humane option available, and she took it not because the world had been kind to her but because she understood, somewhere in the complicated machinery of her conscience, that this was not the feral's fault. Whatever he had been before the madness took him, he had not chosen this.

She resheathed the knife and finished repositioning the trap.

* * *

~ ~ ~

That afternoon, she did something she rarely permitted herself: she sat by the Fen River and let herself think about her family.

She usually managed these thoughts on a strict budget. Grief was not something she could afford to run freely; it was a resource that needed to be rationed, like food, like sleep, like hope. She had learned this the hard way in the first year, when she had let it run unchecked and had spent three days unable to do anything useful while the memories played in a loop that she could not interrupt. After that she had instituted the budget. Fifteen minutes, once a week, in a place where she could sit still without scanning for threats.

Today she was exceeding the budget. The boot prints had done something to her. Not frightened her, exactly; she had been afraid so many times and for so long that fear had become something like a baseline state, unremarkable, simply the climate she lived in. What the boot prints had done was remind her that the world she was hiding from was still out there, still looking, still operating on the logic that had destroyed her family. That it had not forgotten her.

She thought about her mother, Sera Voss, who had been beautiful in the brisk, unsentimental way of a woman who had never considered her appearance beyond its practical utility. Who had braided Elara's hair every morning until Elara was twelve and declared herself too old for it, and who had continued offering for three more years after that and never once looked hurt when Elara said no. She thought about her father and the book sitting in the camp and the handwriting in the margins and all the things she should have asked him and had not gotten around to. She thought about her brother Daren, who had been killed in the attack at twenty-three; two years older than her, ten years funnier than anyone else she had ever met, a terrible cook and a gifted fighter and the person she had expected to spend the rest of her life arguing with at family dinners.