Hunted: A Claiming Novella (The Claiming) (13 page)

“Did she run away?”

King Hargrowe had sat back on his
throne, but upon realizing Penelope was not strolling out of the passageway as
she was supposed to, Lyle went back to the podium to repeat his message.
Perhaps thinking she hadn’t heard him?

“Bring out Penelope Farris for the
Claiming!”

All eyes went to the narrow, marble
tunnel that all female participants of the Claiming used. Not even a shadow
stirred.

Ryon didn’t even think. He was past the
point of intelligent thought. He ran straight to her dressing room past the two
bewildered guards standing outside her hallway.

“Where is she?” he growled, shouting at
them.

They shared a confused glance. “Lady
Farris?” one of them began. “She’s in her dressing room.”

Ryon might have relaxed under other
circumstances, but either way, something was wrong. He ran to her room, the
door flying open in his wake. His eyes devoured the room, studying every
miniscule detail he could in the span of seconds.

Moments later he heard Lyle and the
metal-grating steps of his armor-wearing guards shuffling close behind.

“What’s going on?” Lyle asked,
concerned.

“She’s gone.” Ryon announced. Already
his mind churning for possibilities.

Lyle peeked into the dressing room to
find exactly what Ryon had—a room flipped apart, torn asunder; couch cushions
on the floor, the glass table broken into crushed shards, and a shelf that had
held a tray of uneaten food lie smashed on the floor. The faintest imprint from
a footprint was smashed into an uneaten piece of bread.

Blood splattered on the ground in
droplets and smears. Not enough to hint at a murder, but possibly an injury.
Was it hers? The thought made his blood boil, and his lip curl. Anyone who
dared to lay a finger upon her would face ruthless retaliation.

And there would be much of blood to show
for it.

“Send out an alert!” Lyle shouted to his
guards. “Penelope Farris is missing. I want her found now!” They quickly
dispersed at his orders.

Ryon squatted down next the footprint.
Something odd about it caught his attention. He wasn’t sure what was strange
about it, but then Ryon slowly stood. “Lyle, what does this look like?”

Lyle, flustered with all the chaos, came
and looked. He peered only a moment. “Not quite a footprint. Maybe the attacker
wasn’t wearing shoes?”

Ah, so perhaps that was it.

Studying it some more, Ryon shook his
head. No, but that couldn’t be it. It wasn’t that the individual didn’t have a
shoe on, but that…it wasn’t a foot.

Ryon froze stiff.

A moment later the sound of pure terror
came.

Hard, banging rings sounded from across
the kingdom. Their booming rings were a dire warning: they were under attack.

Right now.

Only one creature had ever attacked the
Tarlèan kingdom. Now Ryon understood with certainty what he’d been staring at.
Not a foot print at all, but a
paw
print.

“The Avagarians are here,” Ryon said
with dead stillness.

Screams, the terrified shouts of mothers
and frightened, crying children sounded in the arena above them. Followed by
twenty-thousand panicked people trying to rush home to safety. Everyone knew
the sickening sound of the war bells. It’d been many years since they had to
hear their deafening blows.

An explosion blew in the distance. A
bomb, detonated.

How clever, he realized. The Avagarians
attacked them while the majority of their people were far away from the eastern
wall, while most of the guards were here and not there.

He had to focus, get his head and
thoughts together. And first, he had to find Penelope. King Lyle was already
issuing orders to deploy troops to the region and borders.

“It’s war time,” King Lyle said.

Indeed, it was.

Chapter 13

“What
the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Lysse wished she could scream those
words from the tops of her lungs. She actually shook with rage, but instead of
screaming, she issued her question in a harsh whisper. The last thing they
needed was to be overheard by one of the Tarlèans running around in chaos.

God, those ringing war bells. How
annoying. She wished someone would shut them up.

Her entourage hadn’t made it far enough
away from the arena to satisfy her. They’d taken shelter deep in the woods.
This had been part of her original plan. The other little thing, not so much.

Of course, it wasn’t a
little
thing
at all, but quite a
big
problem.

Penelope Farris, that stupid ballet
dancer, lie unconscious on the ground. Her dress was filthy from being dragged
through mud and grass and over sharp rocks
—
none too gently
either. She’d have a few bruises on top of the purple and black one already
forming below her right eye from where Lazgul had hit her.

Lazgul. Another idiot she had to deal
with. Her plan had been complex but simple enough. Yet, trust the Avagarians to
ruin things for her. The situation was risky enough as it was without this
added complication.

“All you had to do was knock her out
at
the arena
and leave her. Not bring her with you!” She seethed with
white-hot fury, breaths panting. Her hands were squeezed into sweaty fists,
aching to hit something and relieve the pent-up steam ready to burst inside
her. “This wasn’t the plan.”

Lazgul. Hovering at nearly 7’ tall, the
hairy creature was built of sinew, with leathery ebony skin covered in short,
crisp hairs which tickled to the touch. His black snout snorted at the air,
sweat droplets sliding off as he snarled and shook his head like a dog, his
long red tongue lolling out of his mouth from between sharp canine teeth.

An Avagarian in the flesh. The beastly
creature that made up half of what lie deep inside her. Lysse had never had an
easy life. She’d had to fight, steal, and sneak for every scrap of ground she’d
ever earned. And earned she did.

Her mother was the by-product of a rape
of an Avagarian beast with a human woman. It happened years before the stone
wall was erected to divide the Tarlèans and Avagarians. The woman, her mother,
a mere seamstress, gave birth to her in the decrepit shed she’d called a home.
Soon after the birth, her mother swiftly ended her own life with a gunshot
blast to the head. Lysse had been three hours old.

She’d been left there alone for days
before anyone noticed. Lysse liked to think that it was during those long hours
as a hungry, screaming infant, that she’d grown an iron wall around her heart.
She needed to in order to survive. She couldn’t afford empathy. Empathy, she
learned, got her nothing but pain in return for her sacrifices. It took
thinking differently, it meant being selfish, but Lysse enjoyed her risky life
and the rewards it reaped.

She was going to be queen one day.

The ultimate reward for her struggles.
For her years of hard work.

Except—Lysse stared down at the prone
female—and her jaw ground in irritation.

“Worthless, Ava.”

Lazgul growled, his great, muscular
chest heaving at the insult. With each breath the hulking monstrosity took, she
could see its incredible pectoral muscles bunching and flexing. So much
strength, so deadly.

“Do close your mouth when you’re
breathing,” she snapped. “I don’t need to smell your heinous breath from here.”

The beast, a greatly feared soldier for
the Avagarians, didn’t back down at her insults, but rather stepped close
enough to tower above her. Lysse looked quite petite compared to the beast. She
might not be as strong as they were, even in her Avagarian form, but she wasn’t
a weak human either.

She was a half-breed. Which placed her somewhere
special in between the two powers.

“Why on Earth did you bring her with
you? We don’t need her. If anything, you’ve made things worse. The general will
want to find her. He’s good at his job, you imbecile. You could lead him right
to us.”

With dark spiked hair sticking up from
his forehead, Lazgul shook his heavy head side to side, much as a dog did in
the rain. His mouth moved as he spoke at length. He struggled to form the words
while transformed as a beast. Avagarians were different from humans, though
they could transform into a human-like state. They may resemble humans, but
they clearly were very different.

And the sound Lazgul made was different
from a human’s voice, coming from the back of the throat; the words were
muffled, unclear.

“Want pretty female. I take,” Lazgul
said at length.

“Very succinct,” Lysse replied.

She pondered the situation as she liked
to do. She didn’t enjoy making rash decisions, instead preferring to take her
time thinking, planning. That’s how she outsmarted people; that’s how she
played the game, and thus, played people.

“And what of the duke?”

Two other Avagarians walking on all
fours, sniffed the ground near the dancer. The creatures were deadly strong
compared to their human counterparts. They could easily pick up a
two-hundred-pound man and throw him one-armed with little effort. It was one of
the reasons why they were so dangerous. Their venom, if bitten into a human,
would turn the human into one of them—if they survived at all. All the more
reason the human Tarlèans had built the great wall to separate them. Not that
it could keep them out completely.

“Did as ordered. Took him down.”

An imperceptible stiffening of her
shoulders almost went unnoticed. “Did you kill him?”

Lazgul might be a beast like this, but he
was also a man, older than her and wise enough. His eerie black pupils with
yellow irises watched her carefully. “Nay,” he growled.

She looked away, acting for all the
world like she was uncaring.

A moan brought their attention to the
dancer.

“Great, she’s waking up. You really
screwed up with this one,
Laz
. Kill her now and be
done with it.”

Lazgul snarled, growling in warning
before he squatted next to the dancer in a protective move. Lysse wanted to rip
his rotten head off. “You’re supposed to obey me. Rainer said---”

“
Kekekekekekekekekekek
.”

Lazgul’s menacing crackling snapped her
mouth shut. That was the sound an Ava made before attacking.

“Don’t you threaten
me!
”
Lysse snarled. “If it’s a fight you want, then forget about it. There’s no
time. The general, the king,
everyone
will be looking for this girl.
Don’t you see what you did?” This time she did scream the words.

Her voice seemed to be the catalyst that
shook Penelope awake.

Penelope’s eyes shot open. Disoriented,
she looked around, brows furrowed.

“Huh?” she mumbled, looking between the
creature
in front of her, to Lysse.

Lysse rolled her eyes. “Here we go. Shut
her up before she screams.”

Too late, Penelope’s eyes flashed with
recognition—

recalling
everything that had happened to her.

Great.

Except, she took Lysse completely by
surprise. Maybe under different circumstances she’d have more respect for the
girl. Penelope didn’t scream at all as Lysse had predicted.

Instead, she suddenly reached under her
dress, drawing forth shocked looks from the three Avagarians and Lysse.
Befuddled like a bunch of school children.

She used that to her advantage.

Penelope lunged forward, the glint of
silver flashing too quickly to react.

Lazgul never had a chance. With
surprising speed the dancer advanced—and sank the blade deep into his chest.

Lazgul howled, but Penelope, in another
surprising move, removed the blade and stabbed again. Blood oozed like black
liquid tar dripped from between his foaming lips as he twitched in agony.

This creature, this part-man, who was
older than Lysse’s thirty-one years, who’d endured wars and triumphs, collapsed
onto his back in violent seizures. He’d just been felled by a tiny ballet
dancer with a silver knife.

“Get the knife!” Lysse screeched.

Lazgul gave one last violent shiver,
then stopped moving at once. He lie still. His black eyes staring up at the
sky. The other Avagarians were stunned for far too long.

Lysse had to take care of this herself.
She had to stop relying on others to carry out her plans. Lazgul had messed up
her plans by bringing the girl here to begin with, and now she had to put an
end to it. She supposed that he received what was coming to him, and at least
she didn’t have to do it herself.

With an empowering breath, Lysse called
forth the beast inside her. Her other half. The bad half. Or maybe it was the
good half of her.