“Sing for the Prophetess,” Nerezza ordered.
“What song should I sing?”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” Nerezza asked.
So, the Siren sang:
Sunny days…
And Orsay stopped thinking of anything but sunny, sunny days.
TWELVE
45 HOURS, 36 MINUTES
HUNTER HAD BECOME a creature of the night. It was the only way. Animals hid during the day and came out at night. Opossums, rabbits, raccoons, mice, and the biggest prize of all: deer. The coyotes hunted at night, and Hunter had learned from them.
Squirrels and birds you had to go after in the daytime. But night was the time for Hunter to truly live up to his name.
Hunter’s range was wide, from the edge of town, where raccoons and deer came to look for ways into people’s backyard gardens, to the dry lands, where snakes and mice and other rodents were to be found. Along the shoreline he could kill birds, gulls, and terns. And once, he had bagged a lost sea lion.
He had responsibilities, Hunter did. He wasn’t just Hunter, he was the hunter.
He knew the two words were the same, although he could no longer spell the word.
Hunter’s head didn’t work the way it used to. He knew that. He could feel it. He had murky memories of himself living a very different life. He had memories of himself raising his hand in a classroom to answer a hard question.
Hunter would not have those answers now. The answers he did have, he couldn’t really explain with words. There were things he knew, things about the way you could tell if a rabbit was going to run or stand still. Whether a deer could smell you or hear you or not.
But if he tried to explain…words didn’t come out right.
One side of his face wasn’t right. It kind of didn’t have any feeling in it. Like one side of his face wasn’t anything but a slab of dead meat. And sometimes it felt as if that same dead-meat thing spread into his brain. But the strange mutant power, the ability to direct killing heat wherever he wanted, that remained.
He couldn’t talk very well, or think very well, or form a real smile, but he could hunt. He had learned to walk quiet. He had learned to keep the breeze in his face. And he knew that in the night, in the darkest hours, the deer would head toward the cabbage field, drawn there despite the killer worms, the zekes that would kill anything that stepped foot in one of their home fields without permission.
The deer, they weren’t that smart. Not even as smart as Hunter.
He walked carefully, treading on the balls of his feet, feeling through his worn boots for the twig or loose rock that would give him away. He moved as quietly as a coyote.
The doe was ahead, moving through the scrub brush, indifferent to the thorns, intent on leading her baby toward the smell of green ahead.
Close. Closer. The breeze blowing from the deer to Hunter, so that they didn’t smell him.
A few more feet and he’d be close enough. First the doe. He’d kill her first. The baby wouldn’t know how to react. She would hesitate. And he’d take her.
S
o much meat. Albert would be very excited. There hadn’t been many deer lately.
Hunter heard the noise and saw the deer bolt.
They were gone before he could so much as raise his hands, let alone send the invisible killing heat.
Gone. The whole night stalking and tracking and just seconds away from a good kill, and now they were bounding away through the brush.
The noise was people, Hunter knew that right away. Talking and jostling and rattling and tripping and complaining.
Hunter was angry but also philosophical. Hunting was like that: a lot of the time you ended up wasting your time. But…