Sienna grabbed her coat and handbag and left, her steps brisk.She didn’t see another soul until she reached the main road to the marketplace.An elderly woman pushed a shopping trolley along the footpath—Mrs.Watson, the retired librarian.Human.
A few people were setting up market stalls as Sienna passed, heading for the council offices.They were also human.Had all the shifters left town?It certainly looked that way.The scent of baking bread curled from the nearby coffee shop and bakery—heady, warm, deceptively normal.
A squawk of radio static made her slow.Male voices followed.Sienna pressed against the bakery’s stone wall, heart pounding, just as boots clomped past on the cobblestones.Three hunters talking in low, clipped tones.She caught fragments: “…blood trail…vet’s place…lock down the whole bloody village.”
Her breath caught.
The jump toward a gunshot injury wasn’t a massive leap.
Her feet were moving before the thought fully formed.
If she cut across the road and down the lane behind the council offices, she could beat them to the vet, but she’d have to move fast.As she passed her workplace, a pang of regret twisted in her gut.No time to mourn a job.
She sprinted down the lane, startling a blackbird from the gutter.By the time she skidded to a stop opposite the vet’s surgery, her chest was heaving.His vehicle was gone.No patients waited outside.
A notice in the window caught her eye.She glanced over her shoulder, then darted closer for a better look.
The vet was away indefinitely due to a family emergency.His receptionist, another human, had signed the note.Every shifter who could leave Stoneford had already left.
“Hey, you!”a man shouted, skidding around the corner.
Sienna jerked left, evading his grasping hands, and bolted, her footsteps echoing off the narrow stone walls.
“Grab her!”he yelled.
Hunters in heavy boots bore down on her, their steps uneven on the unforgiving cobblestones.Sienna’s lungs burned as she pushed harder, darting through an open gate into Mrs.Henderson’s prized garden.The elderly woman would have a fit, but desperate times.
A curse rang out behind her as the hunter crashed through the rose bushes she’d nimbly avoided.Her muscles coiled, and she vaulted the six-foot fence in one smooth motion, landing on the balls of her feet.
“Did you see that?”one man panted.“No human jumps like that.”
Shit.Her blood chilled even as sweat stung her eyes.She’d blown her cover.
She couldn’t keep up this pace.Her chest burned with every gasp, and her legs shook like a newborn foal’s.
Think, Sienna.
Where could a local go that strangers wouldn’t?
The old mine shaft.
Dangerous, yes.Every parent had warned them to keep away as kids, but she knew the safe path.Jago and Calan had shown her years ago, swearing her to secrecy.
She veered left down a narrow alley most people didn’t even notice, squeezing between two cottages so close together she had to turn sideways.Rough stone scraped her shoulders through her coat.Behind her, she heard a man try to follow and get stuck.
“Where the hell did she go?”
“There’s a gap here, but I can’t fit through.”
“Go around.Cut her off at the other end!”
Sienna burst onto the moor, her feet sinking into boggy ground.Out here, local knowledge meant everything.One wrong step could leave her waist-deep in marsh water.She stuck to the hidden path only locals knew, stepping where generations of Teagues had walked.
A gunshot cracked.
She dropped instinctively, heart hammering like it might tear free.Were they shooting at her?
Another shot.Then shouting from a different direction.
