Panic set in when I couldn’t sense the lion anymore. I held my breath, listening for the sound of its heavy paws trampling across the forest leaves. I searched the ground blindly for paw prints. There were too many dead leaves, and my Vampire eyes weren’t helpful with the moon hiding behind clouds. After turning in a short circle, I kept following my inner compass in the direction that he’d been heading.
After five minutes, I finally accepted that I’d lost him.
One-way train to panic town, all aboard!
I thought about wild packs, but maybe they weren’t half as threatening as the idea of a real animal. The kind whose sole purpose was to stalk its prey and eat them.
One minute I was jogging through a break in the trees, following what looked like a trail. The next, I was falling into an abyss when the ground disappeared. I slammed facedown into a dark pit, the air whooshing out of my lungs.
Disoriented, I lay there for a minute, doing a mental check on what bones I might have broken. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at a metal spike just inches in front of my face.
I sat up and swayed. A pinch of moonlight revealed two more spikes protruding from the ground, and luckily I’d missed those too.
I rubbed my sore elbow and assessed the situation. Long sticks and slender branches that must have concealed the trap were scattered about. Is this what hunters built to catch animals? After wiping dirt out of my eye, I stood up and measured the distance with my arms. The edge of the hole was too high for me to reach even when jumping, and the walls were too far apart for other creative ways of escape. Climbing was impossible and only brought down chunks of cold mud. I found a root and pawed the earth to dig a little more of it out, but when I tried to use it to hoist myself up, it broke. I flew backward, and my life flashed before my eyes as I came inches from impaling myself on a spike.
I scooted against the wall. Climbing out was a game of roulette that I wasn’t willing to play. But what exactly were my options? To die in a pit, that’s what.
“This wasn’t in the brochure.”
After taking off my bag, I pulled out my phone and cursed. No signal bars.
“Great. This is just great.”
The hole must have been twelve feet deep. I stood up and kicked one of the spikes, but it didn’t budge.
Dying in a hole wasn’t an option. If I couldn’t climb my way out, maybe I could slowly dig my way up at a slant. I took out my push dagger, suddenly wishing I hadn’t given Willie the big knife.
“Now I know what it feels like to dig my way to China,” I muttered, cutting at the wall and pulling away the dirt.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I froze at the sound of a voice that clung to my spine and made me shudder. After releasing a breath, I steered my gaze up at a formidable man standing at the edge of the hole. I couldn’t see much, only that he appeared as tall as the trees and full of shadows.
Had General caught me?
The figure knelt down and clucked his tongue. “What have we here?”
That wasn’t General’s voice. I tightened the push dagger in my palm, the three-inch blade protruding between my fingers. If he was a Shifter planning to jump in for a meal, he was in for a surprise.
The moon glinted off a metal object in his hand, and I braced myself. A piercing light suddenly blinded me from an LED flashlight switching on, and I shielded my eyes. His light shone on the spikes behind me.
I kicked one of them. “Is this your trap? You missed.”
“Yes,” he said, as if contemplating his mistakes. “Perhaps I need to arrange them differently or add another. Which way did you fall?” He swung the light upward and tapped his chin with it. “Never mind.”
This guy looked like he’d been living in the wilderness for a thousand years. His dark brown hair was unkempt and touched the ground where he knelt. His beard was long, and his eyes were light. One problem? This guy was definitely Breed. Humans had weak energy in comparison. At least he wasn’t a Vamp.
“Is this your hole?” I asked him.
A chuckle rolled around in his throat before he threw back his head and laughed.
“Look, I need to get out of here.”
The laugh died. “Why? So you can catch up with your lion friend?”
“Who?”
“I don’t like trespassers in my territory.”
