Page 144 of Hunted By Fae

I almost trace her gaze.

I almost look down the dark abyss where the torchlight doesn’t reach.

The thought just touches my mind—before the eruption of gunfire.

My heart bolts in place.

A breath cuts through me before my legs give out from under me. I flatten myself to the road just as a cry rips overhead.

The blasts of the rifle cease as suddenly as they started—and the sound to replace it is Bee’s shout, “Emily!”

Flattened to the road, I lift my wild gaze.

Emily isn’t where I last saw her, at the front, flashlight aimed down the road. But that light is shiningdownon the road…

I lift my gaze higher and find a swaying black net above—and Emily is in it.

Rifle tangled around her limbs, she’s a human pretzel caught in a net.

I blink, in that moment, I understand the chaos that erupted from nothing.

A net must have been flattened to the black ice, camouflaged, and the moment she stepped on it and it swept up to snare her, her finger on the trigger tightened in a panic—

And that explains the bullet holes running up the side of a car, the door hit at least thrice. The rest of the bullets struck a brick building.

But I don’t give a shit about that.

The echo of the rapid shots pulses in my ears, as if printed into my actual eardrums.

That gunfire might as well have been a foghorn to anyone and anything within earshot, a announcement that, ‘hey, just your average ragtag group of human survivors over here!’

The glare that hardens me is bitter.

Bee is crouched some paces ahead of me, her locked arms falling away from their protective hold over her head.

She gawks up at Emily swaying in the net.

“Jesus, fuck,” Emily grunts, breathless, like her knee pressing into her chest is cutting off her air supply.

Bee bolts into action.

I watch her push into a slipping run, then barrel into the car’s bullet-ridden door before clambering onto the hood. She drops the shotgun. It hits the hood of the car, right at her boots, before she’s fishing out a hunting knife and bringing it to the net.

She grabs a fistful of the net and starts to saw.

Still, I haven’t moved.

Not more than a lift of my chin from the icy road. I am flattened.

Roadkill.

It’s not the fright of the gunfire that keeps me pinned down—but that the net is here at all.

Someone put it there.

Laid it out perfectly, blended it into the darkness of the ice over black asphalt.

“It’s a trap,” I echo my thoughts, my voice pitched with the fright. “It’s a trap.”