Hunted

love her,” I said. “Maybe if you spent some time with Stevie Rae and the rest of the red fledglings you could, I don’t know, find yourself again. They have.” I said this with way more confidence than I felt. After all, I had glimpsed fragments of the darkness surrounding Stark down in those tunnels, around those red fledglings, but I couldn’t help believing it would be best to get him away from here, where evil seemed to come and go so easily.
    “Sure,” he said too quickly. “Why don’t you take me to this Stevie Rae vamp and I’ll see what happens?”
    “Sure,” I said just as quickly. “Why don’t you leave your bow and arrows here and show me how to get off campus without the bird freaks knowing and I’ll do just that?”
    His expression hardened and he was a mean stranger again. “I don’t go anywhere without my bow, and no one leaves campus without them knowing.”
    “Then it looks like I won’t be taking you to Stevie Rae,” I said.
    “I don’t need you to show me where Stevie Rae is. She knows all about their little hideout. When she wants your friend, she’ll have her. If I were you, I’d expect to see Stevie Rae a lot sooner than you thought you would.”
    Warning bells were ringing like a fire alarm in my mind, and I definitely didn’t have to ask who the “she” was Stark was talking about. But instead of showing just how upset Stark’s admission made me, I smiled calmly and said, “No one’s hiding out. I’m right here, and Stevie Rae is right where she’s been since she Changed. No big deal. Plus, it’s always great to see her, so if she shows up here, that’s cool.”
    “Yeah, whatever. No big deal. And I’m cool staying right where I am.” He looked away from me, out into the icy fog that was drifting lazily around us. “I don’t get why you care anyway.”
    And suddenly I knew exactly what to say. “I’m just keeping my promises to you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You asked me to promise you two things before you died. One was not to forget you, and I haven’t. The other was to look after Duchess, and I’m letting you know that I’ve made sure she’s okay.”
    “You can tell that Jack kid that Duchess is his dog now. Tell him . . . ” Still not looking at me, he paused and drew a shaky breath. “Tell him she’s a good dog and to take care of her.”
    Continuing to follow my intuition, I crossed the few feet between us and put my hand on his shoulder, almost exactly as I’d done the night he died. “You know it doesn’t matter what you say or who you give her to, Duchess will always belong to you. When you died, she cried. I was there. I saw it. I didn’t forget. I won’t ever forget.”
    He didn’t look at me, but slowly he dropped his bow to the ground and put his hand over mine. We just stood there like that. Touching but not saying anything. I was watching his face carefully, so I saw the entire transformation. As he pressed his hand over mine, he let out a long, slow breath, and his face relaxed. The last hint of red left his eyes, and the strange, shadowy darkness evaporated. When he finally looked at me, he was the kid I’d been so drawn to and who had died while I held him in my arms, listening to him tell me that he’d come back.
    “What if there’s nothing left in me worth loving?” He asked it in a voice so low that if I hadn’t been standing close I wouldn’t have heard him.
    “I think you can still choose what you are, or at least what you are becoming. Stevie Rae chose her humanity over the monster. I think it’s up to you.”
    I know what I did next was stupid. I’m not even sure why I did it. I mean, I already had unresolved issues with Erik and Heath. The last thing I needed was another boy complicating my life, but at that moment there was only Stark and me, and he was himself again—the guy who had agonized over the gift Nyx had given him because he had accidentally caused the death of his mentor; the guy who had been horrified at the thought of hurting anyone again. The guy I’d felt such an immediate and deep connection to I’d thought that just maybe there really were such thing as soul mates, and had considered, at least for a few brief moments, that he might be mine. That’s all I was thinking about as I stepped into his arms. When he bent and hesitatingly pressed his lips to mine, I closed my eyes and kissed him softly and sweetly. He kissed me back, holding me so gently it was as if he thought I