Blood Moon (26 page)

Strangely enough, the guards, she
discovered when she’d reached her original position and could see
the gate again, had disappeared. Her heart seemed to trip over
itself. More than half expecting one or both to come up behind her,
she searched the area more closely and finally spotted both men
sitting in the shadows near the gate. They looked like they were
asleep.

She frowned. That was odd. Really,
really peculiar.

She didn’t know what to make of
it—whether that was going to make it easier to get in or if she
should go in at all.

She’d already accepted that she didn’t
really have a choice, though.

Cautiously, she retreated a short
distance to assess the new situation and decide what to
do.

She had to disguise herself. That was
a given.

She couldn’t
look
like a man. She was
too short and too slight—especially since she’d had so little to
eat in so long. It sure as hell wasn’t safe to look like a woman,
though, and especially not a young girl. That was just
asking
to become a
victim.

Besides which the guards
were certain to suspect that she’d been sent in by a gang to scope
the place out ... in which case they’d probably kill her on the
spot …
after
they’d raped her and tortured her to try to get information
out of her that she didn’t have.

Moving off a little further, Lexa
found the cover of a medium sized boulder and some scrubby plant
growth. When she’d managed to untangle the knotted rope around her
waist that she used to secure her supply bundle, she dropped it to
the ground and peeled her tunic off. The chill wind of dusk made
her skin pebble all over, but she gritted her teeth and dug out a
strip of cloth, wrapped it around her chest and used it to flatten
her breasts. Not that they were particularly large to start with,
but they jiggled when she moved and that was enough, she’d
discovered, to catch a man’s eye since they always seemed to be on
the lookout for a female to fuck.

She was filthy and she didn’t exactly
smell lovely since she hadn’t been near enough water to even make a
stab at cleaning herself in weeks—a circumstance that she found
extremely repugnant—but she’d discovered men didn’t allow that to
put them off.

Actually, in her personal experience,
they generally smelled far worse—which might account for that. They
probably couldn’t smell her unwashed body over their
own.

There wasn’t much, as matter of fact,
that would distract them once they set their sights on rutting—even
the discovery that they were rutting another male—except maybe a
knife between the shoulder blades ….

She’d fashioned herself some facial
hair that she liked to think gave her more of the look of a young
man—hopefully too old to appeal to the men that liked boys, or at
least were more than willing to rape them. She struggled for a few
moments and finally gathered enough spit to moisten the sap she
used to glue the hair to her face and patted it in place. Finally,
she tied her hair back, tucked the ends into the back of her shirt,
and wedged her battered hat back on her head, tipping it forward to
shadow her face.

Everyone had long hair and any male
old enough to have hair on his face had a beard. The problem was
that she knew her hair was longer than it should have been for a
boy the age she was trying to portray.

Because she was many years past
puberty.

When she’d done the best she could
with her disguise, she studied her ‘treasures’, trying to decide
which would make the best trade items. It had to be desirable or
she wouldn’t be able to get what she needed but if it was too
valuable she could have the same problem. Or worse, they might
decide to just take what she had.

Of course, there was always that
risk.

When she’d made her choices, she
buried the items she didn’t want to trade and what remained of her
food, tied her pack to her waist once more, and tried to calm her
racing heartbeat.

She discovered the guards were still
sitting in the shadows near the gate when she returned. Girding
herself, she stepped out into the open and approached the gate.
Neither of the men moved.

She stopped when she was within a few
yards of them and the gate, straining to see if she could tell if
they really were sleeping or if they were dead.

They weren’t snoring. She thought they
should be if they were asleep and not dead, but she didn’t see
anything to indicate that they’d been attacked. She hadn’t heard
anything and if anyone else had, she would’ve heard an alarm go up.
There weren’t any signs of a struggle—no churned up dirt or
anything knocked over and no blood.

After a brief debate, she finally
decided to risk slipping past them. That seemed dangerous, but
waking them also seemed perilous and, of the two choices, she liked
trying to sneak in much better.

A cold sweat was trickling between her
shoulder blades by the time she’d slipped through the narrow
opening.

She was definitely going to take
another route out, she decided.

To Be Continued.....