Alpha Omega 02 - Hunting Ground

that stupid game . . . not D&D, which was cool . . . something with vampires.
    This girl wore a ponytail and looked more like Britney Spears than Vampirella. Her shoes were hot pink, and there wasn’t a piece of her clothing that was black.
    He didn’t like it that his throat tightened in fear because she was wearing acrylic fangs.
    â€œThere’s a place a few blocks away,” he told her, twisting his wrist gently to get her to let go. “Serves Italian food. They have a great red sauce.”
    She licked her lips and didn’t let go of his wrist. “I love red sauce.”
    â€œLook,” he said, jerking his wrist free, “cut it out. That’s not funny.”
    â€œNo,” breathed the man, who had somehow gotten behind him while Jody had been talking to the girl. “Not funny at all.” And there was a sharp pain in his neck.
    â€œWhere is someplace private?” the old man asked after a little while. “Someplace we might play together for a while without anyone seeing us?”
    And Jody led his new friends a few miles away to a place on the Sound where he knew no one would come.
    â€œGood,” said the man. “Very good.”
    The girl closed her eyes and smiled. “The traffic will drown out the screams.”
    The man leaned over and put his mouth to Jody’s ear. “You can be scared now.”
    Jody was scared for a very, very long time before they threw him into the water for the fish.

    â€œTHE rocks will keep him underwater until they won’t be able to tell how he died,” said Ivan.
    â€œI still think we should have left him naked hanging from a tree like that girl in Syracuse.”
    Ivan rubbed the top of her head. “Dear child,” he said, and sighed. “That was a special case; she was a message to her father. This one was just play, and if we let the silly humans know we killed him, it would interfere with business.”
    She looked at the bloody drumsticks and sighed, tossing them in after the body. “And nothing interferes with business.”
    â€œBusiness keeps a roof over our heads and lets us travel when we want to,” Ivan told her. “You need to wash your face, princess, and put your clothes back on.”
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    A great mountain peak broke through the white mist and ruled in awesome splendor over the soft sky and Anna held her breath. Mount Rainier, she thought, though her geography of the Cascades was shaky. There were mountains spread out below them, but this one was orders of magnitude larger than the lowly ripples in the land below it. Gradually, other great peaks revealed themselves in the distance, drowning in clouds.
    â€œHey, Charles?”
    The mountains were on Charles’s side of the plane. Anna leaned as far toward him as she could without touching him—he was flying the plane, and she didn’t want to distract him.
    â€œYes?”
    They were wearing headsets that protected their sensitive ears from the noise of the engine and miked their voices to each other. In her headphone, his voice was low enough to make the speaker in her ear buzz even though it was turned to the lowest setting.
    â€œJust how many planes does the pack have?”
    This was the second she’d been in.
    â€œJust the Learjet,” he told her. “If you lean any farther, you’re going to strangle yourself. This Cessna is mine.”
    He owned a plane? Just when she was starting to think she knew him, something else would come up. She knew that he handled the pack finances—and that their pack was not in any danger of being penniless anytime soon. She knew that he himself was financially stable, though they hadn’t really talked about it much. Owning a plane was a whole different category of financially stable, like Mount Rainier was a whole different category of mountain from the hills she’d known in Illinois.
    â€œAren’t we on pack business?” she asked. “Why did we take this one?”
    â€œThe jet needs five thousand feet to land,” he said. “That means Boeing Field or Sea-Tac, and I don’t want the government to be following us around all week.”
    â€œThe government follows you?” She had a sudden picture of Charles strolling along with dark-suited men creeping behind him, trying to stay out of sight and failing, with cartoonish exaggeration.
    He nodded. “We may be a secret from the rest of the world—but