I growled and grabbed a branch, tearing it away from the trunk. He wouldn’t do that to me, I told myself angrily. It couldn’t have been him. We looked out for each other, watched each other’s backs. I had saved his life countless times. He wouldn’t just throw all that away, as if all those years meant nothing to him, as if I was dead to him now. The enemy. A vampire.
Stop kidding yourself, Allie. Who else could it have been? I sighed and kicked a rock, sending it flying into the undergrowth. The way Stick had looked at me that night in the warehouse, that was true terror. I’d seen it in his eyes: Allison Sekemoto, the girl who looked after him for years and years, was dead. My emotions still held a stubborn hope that humans could be loyal, that they could hold out against the promise of an easy life. But I knew better. Unregistered or not, if offered a way out of being hungry and cold and dumped on, Stick would take it in a heartbeat. It was just human nature.
The wilderness went on, and I wandered for several nights, not knowing or caring where I was going. When dawn tinted the skies pink, I burrowed into the earth, only to awake the following night with no sense of where I was or where I should go next. I met no one in my travels, human or vampire, though the woods were teeming with wildlife, most of which I had never seen before and knew their names only through stories. Fox and skunk, rabbit and squirrel, snakes, raccoons and endless herds of deer. I saw larger predators, too: a wolf pack loping silently through the trees one evening, the tawny form of a huge cat, its eyes glowing in the darkness. They never bothered me, and I gave them a wide berth as well, one predator to another.
On the sixth night, I climbed out of my shallow grave with a sense of purpose, feeling my fangs pressing against my bottom lip. I was hungry. I needed to hunt.
The small herd of deer feeding in the meadow scattered when they saw me, but I was faster, pouncing on a stag and bringing it, kicking and bleating, to the ground. The blood that flowed into my mouth was hot and gamey, but though I felt it spread through my stomach, the gnawing ache was still there. I ran down another deer and gorged myself on its blood, to the same effect. I was still hungry.
Other animals couldn’t fill the Hunger, either. I went to sleep famished, and each night, rising from the earth, I went hunting, chasing down and draining anything I came across. Nothing helped. My stomach was full, sometimes overly so; I could feel it pressing against my ribs. But the Hunger only got stronger.
Until, one night, starving and desperate, I chased a doe out of the briars, lunged forward to grab it, and landed on a stretch of pavement.
Blinking, I stood, letting the deer bound away into the trees. I was in the middle of a road, or what had been a road. Most of it was covered in weeds and brush, and grass was pushing up through numerous cracks in the pavement. Forest was closing in on either side, threatening to swallow it whole, but it was still there, a narrow strip cutting through the trees, vanishing into the darkness in both directions.
I stifled a flare of excitement. There was no guarantee the road led anywhere now. But following it was a lot more promising than wandering aimlessly through the wilderness, and right now, I’d take what I could get.
Picking a direction, I began walking.
*
I SLEPT ONE MORE DAY, burrowing into the earth on the side of the road and waking the next night completely starved. My fangs kept slipping out on their own, and I found myself perking at every rustle, every movement in the darkness around me. The urge to hunt was almost overwhelming, but I’d only be wasting time and energy, and it wouldn’t stop the awful Hunger gnawing at my insides. So I kept walking, following the road, my mouth as dry as grit and my stomach threatening to eat its own lining.
A few hours from dawn, the woods finally began to thin out. Not long after that, they turned into rolling grasslands, with barely a tree to be seen. I was relieved, for I had seriously started to think the woods went on forever.
The road widened as it cut across the plains. It was quiet out here, unlike the forest, with its constant rustle of small creatures in the brush, the hiss of wind moving through the leaves. Except for my soft footsteps against the pavement, the world was silent and still, and the stars blazed overhead, stretching on forever.
So I heard the rumble of engines a very long ways off, probably several miles in the distance. At first, I thought I was hearing things. Coming to a stop in the middle of the road, I watched, fascinated, as headlights appeared and the rumbles grew louder.