Heart pounding with the possibility a hunter would come upon us at any moment, I took a deep breath, aimed, and threw one more.Smash.It connected with the bulb in a satisfying spray of glass.
Landon snuffed at my hand, and I instinctively turned my palm toward him to nuzzle. “Yeah,” I breathed. “We need to move.”
Picking up the last two rocks off the ground, I climbed onto his back. He took off like a shot, making me hold on tighter, and aimed toward the bright light across the arena.
Something must have alerted him to slow, because after a minute, he moved into the shadows of a thick collection of bushes, then stopped. Rocks in hand, I slid off and crouched where he’d hunkered down. I shivered, blew on my hands to warm them, and he pressed his body closer.
Nodding my thanks, I scanned the area for cameras, but didn’t see any glowing red lights pointed in our direction.
I tensed at the sound of rustling leaves followed by the crunch of footsteps. Without making a sound, I adjusted my position to see better. Two hunters walked by, not twenty feet away, their focus ahead. One wore tactical gear, the other had his hat on backwards.
A radio crackled. “They should be close by.”
The one in tactical gear lifted his radio to his mouth. “What do you mean ‘should’?”
“They’ve taken out a few of the cameras but missed more. Lost them for a moment, but they were headed in that direction. Over.”
“I don’t like working with generalities, Dicky,” the guy said into his radio. They trudged forward, snapping twigs beneath their booted feet.
“That’s the best I’ve got.” There was a pause on the other end of the radio. “If you guys can’t find them in the next hour, I’m leaving this fucking room. Boring as shit staring at these TVs.”
The guy with the backwards hat cursed. “If he’s going to run around half-cocked by himself, then we need to…” The voices trailed off as they continued toward the light we’d taken out.
When they were far enough away, Landon ambled to his feet. A rock in each of my hands, I straddled him and wrapped my arms around his neck as best I could. He shot off, taking a more direct route toward the starting bunkers. We stopped outside the circle of brightness given off by the four floodlights around the main building. The interior was visible, the window translucent.
After watching for a beat, noticing how the man clicked through the camera feeds looking for us, Landon rounded the outer edge of the clearing until we could see the door on the one side. There was no knob, only a keypad. And the glass in the window itself was probably bulletproof. My rocks would have very little effect.
How could we get inside? There were probably motion detectors hidden around the bunkers. I didn’t think we’d tripped one, though, because Dicky hadn’t come running out. Keeping an eye out for something similar to the ones Alina and I had found at that warehouse, I slid off Landon’s back. The rocks felt heavy in my hands as I weighed our options.
“If he’s as eager as he sounds,” I said quietly, “then maybe he’d come out without signaling the others if you looked weak.”
Landon turned his head to me, a skeptical expression on his face. I don’t know how I understood it to be skeptical, but if he’d been in his human form, I was sure his eyebrow would have been raised. But I knew what he was thinking. It would be absolutely idiotic for Dicky to come rushing out here on his own.
I shrugged. “It’s all I’ve got.” Hopefully we could count on Dicky being an idiot.
With a jerk of his head, Landon indicated the door on the side of the building. “I’ll wait out of sight, you do your thing, and I’ll come up behind him?”
The grizzly bear in front of me nodded.
“It’s a plan.” Rocks tight in my hands and keeping to the shadows, I skulked toward the door. When I reached the pine tree closest to the building, I tucked out of sight.
Landon burst through the tree line on his hind legs, his paw over top of his heart. He weaved side to side like he was drunk, or been stabbed in one of those movies where it took the villain an hour to die. With an exhausted breath, he fell to the hard ground in the middle of a beam of light, the grass bowing away from him at the force of it.
A bit much.
But it worked! Dicky ran out of bunker, a shotgun at his shoulder.
My chest squeezed at the thought of him firing, but I ran toward the door, stuck one of my rocks in before it could close, then followed behind him as silently as possible.
Focused over the barrel of his weapon, he aimed at Landon’s head. My heart beat loudly in my ears as I crept closer. Landon lay silent and still on the ground, not even the rise and fall of his chest to indicate life. “Hiya, Dicky,” I said, stopping behind him.
He spun around. Rock in hand, I whacked him across the temple before he could aim at me, then followed through with an uppercut.Thud.He fell to his side, blood trickling down his cheek, eyes closed.
Landon stirred and rolled to his feet. He sniffed at Dicky as I pushed him enough to pull the shotgun from where it landed beneath his prone form. The soft rise and fall to his chest indicated he was alive. It meant he could wake and cause trouble. Better to put a bullet in him now and be done with it.
Except I’d never killed a person, and he was unconscious. My brother might not think twice about it, but I still had a soul.
“Help me get him inside,” I said to Landon, then moved to grab Dicky’s feet.
