Page 4 of Hunted By Them

Dash looked up at me. “You want to keep her?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she will choose to keep us, but either way…there is something different about her,” I confessed, and Dash snorted.

“As long as her pussy is hot, ass is tight, and she screams like a wildcat, I don’t give a fuck what you call her,” he declared with a chuckle.

We slipped down from the ridge, boots sinking deep into the damp ground. These trails had carried us through more hunts than I could count. Hikers vanished in these woods every year. Some the forest took, some the rivers swallowed. And some…well…some learned that legends weren’t just stories told around campfires.

We gave them shape.

At the edge of the clearing, I raised my hand once, and we spread out. The cabin, broken and abused but still standing…barely. It was a false sanctuary.

Dash went first. He darted across the open grass and dragged his heel hard against the old porch, loud enough to carry. A deliberate scrape.

I watched the window. And there…movement. Her silhouette whipped toward the sound, but Dash had already rounded the side of the cabin. Lightning cracked loud, fracturing a tree in the distance. For a second, I saw her peer out and smirked, just like a scared little mouse peeking its head out of its hole.

Good. She knew we were here.

Jaxon broke a large branch next. It snapped clean and sharp, the echo loud enough to reach inside the small structure. She ducked back down, the light beam shaking against the wall.

The storm hid our laughter from her ears, and our bodies just out of her sight. We circled slow, boots heavy on the rocks, pieces sliding and shifting.

I slipped closer and heard her moving around. The wood groaned when I pressed my palm against the cabin wall. Inside, she stilled.

I let my fingers drum once…just once…then pulled back.

Dash growled as the thunder rolled, and I knew he was restless. “She’s going to lose her mind in there,” he whispered.

“That’s the point.” I smiled beneath the bone. “We’ll twist her fear, and when she realizes there is no escape. That’s when she opens the door.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Dash pressed, eyes glinting in the dark.

“She’ll break. Everyone breaks.” I tilted my head toward the trees. “This place eats people. They just don’t put that part in the park brochures.”

He laughed. “Think she’s heard the stories? Death Gulch, boiling pools, hunters in the woods?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I adjusted the weight of the antlers and felt them shift like a crown of bone. “Tonight, she’ll experience the one about the cryptid that stalks women in storms. The one where she either loses herself or finds herself.”

Jaxon jogged over. “What next?”

I looked back at the cabin, at the silhouette trembling against the window as our Sweet Daisy stared out into the dark.

“Depends on how loud she screams,” I drawled.

We circled once more, letting her catch glimpses of us in the lightning. Bone masks white in the dark, muscled bodies, and painted skin that looked like the work of a demon’s paintbrush. Pieces of monsters, stitched by her fear.

Then we pulled back into the forest and waited. I wanted her to sit in it. Let her feel alone even when she wasn’t…because she wasn’t.

The storm howled, and I whispered into it, knowing the wind would carry the words to her walls. Even if she couldn’t hear them…she would feel them.

“Sweet Daisy…come out, come out wherever you are,” I teased, and then stepped back out of sight.

SAGE

The storm picked up, unrelenting. Fear nipped at the back of my brain and made me crazy.

It roared and clawed at the cabin, hammering the roof and rattling the boards. I swore the whole place might crack in two. Every gust shoved at the door, and the weak, bent nail trembled in its hole. That nail was the only latch between me and whatever was outside.

I told myself it was safe, that walls and wood meant something, but my skin crawled like it knew better.