Page 13 of Rule the Night

“You know, now that you mention it, Idosmell strawberries.”

I silently cursed my body wash.

“Me too,” the third voice said. “Do you want to do the honors or should I?”

“Nah, I’ve got this one.”

I barely had time to register the words before the cabinet doors were flung open.

Rough hands were grabbing my arms, pulling me from the cabinet.

I should have been scared. Who knew what these men would do to me now?

But all I could think about was June. I’d failed her.

And now I belonged to these bird men for the next three months.

8

POE

“You hear that?”Remy asked as the war cry echoed through the tunnels.

We’d split from Bram at the last set of intersecting tunnels. There was nothing in the rules of the Hunt that prohibited splitting up, and it was a tactic we often used to corner our prey.

I couldn’t explain how we knew where to reconvene after we’d split up, but we always did.

“I hear it,” I grumbled.

The Hawks did a lot of things during hunts that got on my fucking nerves, but the biggest was their fucking war cry.

First of all, it was stupid.

Second of all, it gave away their position. More fucking stupid.

Third of all, it hit me in some primitive place in my psyche. It was the place that remembered my ancestors making those cries when they’d fought other tribes, or later, when they’d fought the encroachers stealing their land.

It didn’t belong to the fucking Hawks.

And also, it was stupid.

We stopped moving, listened for the next cry, then abruptly switched positions. It happened without words, synchronized, like we were a marching band.

Minus the embarrassing hats.

“You told them, right?” Remy asked.

“More or less,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not her,” Remy said, trying to give the Hawks the benefit of the doubt.

Remy was always trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, probably because he’d grown up in a normal family where nothing bad had ever happened.

Remy hadn’t lost both of his parents in a car accident when he was barely nineteen, hadn’t been looking out for his younger sister ever since, the way Bram had been looking out for Cassie.

Remy also didn’t have a little brother in prison like I did. He hadn’t seen his little brother morph from a sweet, good-natured kid into a tweaker who would lie, cheat, and steal for drugs.

Remy was “emotionally healthy” or some shit.