1
MAEVE
I didn’t scare easily— not anymore — but the Orpheum at night terrified me. It wasn’t just the way it looked, which okay,waspretty unsettling: abandoned movie theater, old neon sign, and an array of inked, leather-clad guys congregating outside.
It was what was waiting inside that made me feel like my heart was going to beat out of my chest.
My leather jacket was too heavy for the August night, but it was worth it for the comforting weight of my Sig P365XL Rose edition, a handgun I’d named Rose for obvious reasons. My shoulder holster kept it tight against my left tit, well hidden under the jacket, but I knew it was there and that was what mattered.
June would have thought it was ridiculous, me carrying a weapon. I could almost hear her laughing, could almost hear her telling me to stick to baking cookies and leave the protecting to her.
She’d been the oldest after all.
Then came the voice of my parents: my mom disapproving, my dad horrified.
Once upon a time, we hadn’t been the kind of people, the kind of family, who carried guns. But that was then and this was now and if anyone knew how dramatically life had changed since my sister’s murder, it was my parents.
Which was why I was here, walking through the doors of the Orpheum on the south side of Blackwell Falls, the side my dad had been telling June and me — and our two younger siblings Simon and Olivia — to avoid since we were old enough to go into town alone.
We weren’t the kind of people who hung out in Southside either.
It was a rough crowd, full of men and women in leather, tattoos signifying their membership in the local MCs or street gangs, piercings, and lots of long, hard stares. I’d dressed for the occasion in tight black jeans and a cropped black T-shirt, plus the leather jacket. I’d pulled my long black hair into a ponytail worn with my flat lug-soled boots — both of which seemed like wise choices considering my reason for being here — but I wasn’t sure I was fooling anybody.
This was definitely not my scene.
I walked past the crowd with my head held high (fake it ’til you make it and all that) and stepped into the lobby of the Orpheum.
It was noisy inside, with the air of a club or bar, music beating from the shadowed hall to the left of the defunct concession stand, the popcorn machine as empty and lifeless as one of the cars that were routinely stripped on the streets outside.
I wasn’t worried about that myself. I was driving June’s old Honda, a reliable if boring hunk of black metal that had over a hundred thousand miles and still smelled like her perfume.
The only value the car had was sentimental.
I stood in the center of the lobby and tried to get the lay of the land. Most of the crowd was funneling toward a bouncer on the left, but I looked right in time to see three large men disappear down another hall.
It didn’t take me long to get a handle on the layout of the place: the concession stand in the middle, the hallways on either side that had once led to movie theaters.
The problem? Which way to go.
“Looking for Fight Night?”
I looked up and found a tall, wiry guy with platinum hair looking down at me. He was wearing a leather vest with the Blades’ logo, gauges as big as quarters stretching his earlobes, his skin covered in ink.
“Um… no.” I didn’t know exactly where I was going, what it was called, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Fight Night because I’d heard about Fight Night and it had been described exactly like it sounded: a no-holds-barred street fight in one of the abandoned auditoriums.
Not why I was here.
The guy lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re looking for the Hunt.” He pointed to the right. “That way.”
The Hunt.
The words dried out my mouth. I’d known what I was getting into — kind of — but Hannah, my coworker at Lushberry, had told me it was a game. A high-stakes game, but a game nonetheless.
Calling it the Hunt made it sound like something completely different, and I wondered for the thousandth time if I’d completely lost my mind, if June’s murder had untethered me from reality.
“Thanks.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.
“Good luck.”
