The Headhunters Race (Headhunters #1) (3 page)

Zita comes in all bubbly with a smile plastered on her face. “I know you’re going to get your wish and run the race this year,” she says.

I shrug, wishing I could believe her. King’s denied me the past two years and chances are he’ll deny me again. “We’ll see.”

McCoy peeks his nosy face into our room. I give him my evil eye and he gives it right back. The one good thing I might have going for me is that he’s not interested in running the race either. According to Zita anyway. Good thing, because I’m sure he’d beat me at that too, since his mission in life is to be better than me, and then rub it in.

“You should check,” Zita says, pulling my attention from McCoy. “I heard they’ve taken down the signup sheet and posted the runners list.”

She’s right. I won’t be able to do anything until I check. I get to my feet, my muscles tight and twitching and my heart pumping hard beneath my chest. My belly constricts in agony—tight then crushing, followed by an aching hollowness. The slop wasn’t enough and I’m already exhausted. But thinking about my name on the candidate list gets me moving to the main center.

There’s a lot of buzz as I near it. The excitement gives me a second wind. Prisoners that didn’t sign up gather round to cheer the prisoners that did. The ones that will run wait around to study their competition.

Everyone that signs up is always on the list. I’m the exception. I’m praying King has changed his mind this year. Zita seems confident. I hope she’s right. As I move closer, whoops and hollers overwhelm the room with a roar as one of the prisoners is cheered. I see him standing in front of the list with arms raised, pumping the air with triumph. The crowd gathers round him, fawning over him, beating his arms, slapping his back and his head with congratulations.

He’s one of the six-footers, tall and lean with well-toned muscles and a grin that makes him look like the devil. I don’t know his name. What I do know is that he looks like he’ll be deadly. The crowd automatically parts for me when I reach them. The upbeat roar shifts to murmurs. Everyone stares at me, insulting me with their eyes, whispering. They already know whether I’m on the list. I can tell by their sudden shift in posture, by the way some people smile with satisfaction that I’m not.

I swallow my disappointment and stride forward anyway. I need to see for myself. The six-footer doesn’t move out of the way when I reach the wall where the names are tacked up. Instead, he crosses his arms and glowers at me. “You won’t last a bloody hour,” he snarls.

I shrug. He’s British. Brit Devil moves out of the way. I guess he doesn’t know the chances of my being in the race are slim, but I take it as a compliment that he’d even consider me competition. You wouldn’t say that to a scrawny five-foot-six girl if you didn’t think she was.

I draw in a deep breath and step up to the list. At first glance I see fifty-one names. A little zing of hope spreads through my body. There were only forty-nine, counting me, earlier. I read through the candidates, starting with number one. I don’t want to miss my name if they’re not in the same order as we signed up. The prison thugs, Kurt and Squint, are running. They’re numbers twenty and twenty-one respectively.

By the time I reach number forty-nine I’m losing faith. At fifty, I catch my breath when I see McCoy’s name listed.

At fifty-one, I stop breathing altogether.

It’s Zita.

At first I’m shocked senseless. The murmurs, the shuffling of bodies—they all fade away as my mind processes these two names. And as it all starts to make sense, it’s as if the energy from every atom in my body migrates to my face, lighting me on fire. Sweat erupts from my skin. The room closes in on me. I feel myself being suffocated, like the crowd is smothering me and waiting for me to explode.

I tuck stray strands of hair behind my ears and take a few deep breaths. I need only enough focus to get out of this room to confront Zita. I breathe slow and calm-like, my mind centering on the task at hand. That’s when I start to hear the prisoners’ voices again. They are no longer murmuring. They’re taunting me.

“I can do her if she wants to die,” says some guy.

“Do it!” a woman says.

“Do it!” they all start chanting.

“Do it!”

“Do it!”

“Do it!”

I can’t show panic. It doesn’t take much to whip a crowd of prisoners into a beating frenzy and if they sense fear, they’ll be relentless. I slip my hand over the hilt of my knife and walk toward the hall that leads to the West wing. Everyone’s eyes are on me, hoping I’ll crumble and fall.

Someone grabs my arm and wrenches it behind my back. Instantly I send the back of my fist into the prisoner’s face. A woman screams while I thank goodness for hard knuckles and free myself from the barrage of hands reaching, scratching, and tugging at me from every direction.

McCoy is leaning against the wall in the back, watching me, no expression on his face, but all the same he must wish they’d have done me in. He must know how angry I am. How much I wanted this, and yet he and Zita still conspired to enter the race together knowing I’d never be selected.

He strides off in a hurry down the hall, toward our alcove. I’m sure he’ll warn Zita that I’m coming. Something Verla said to me once about being double-crossed comes to mind. She said if anyone ever double-crosses you, especially if it’s a friend, you have every right to stomp their guts and leave them with little breath. Zita has definitely betrayed me, and she’ll need McCoy’s warning because what I have to say to her is going to hurt. It isn’t right for her to tell me a million times she’ll never run the race and then sign up behind my back.

A small heavy object, a rock, connects with my shoulder as I round the corner. I grunt and reach for the pain, but the assault only fuels my anger. The prisoners despise me just by the mere fact that I’m the Governor’s stepdaughter. They give me no credit for being a prisoner myself, for being in the same position. I’m hated by everyone in this prison, except Zita. But I must have crossed her somehow.

When I reach Boom and McCoy’s cell, McCoy is standing at the doorway. Zita is hovering near Boom in the corner. Beautiful, delicate, Zita, who can talk anyone into anything, even a death race. She knows she’s in for it.

“Move out of my way,” I growl at McCoy. I brush past him, in no mood for explanations.

I don’t get far before he slams his hand in the middle of my chest and thrusts me against the wall. “Let go of me!” I scream.

“Now watch yourself,” he says, sliding his hand to my shoulder. His strength is commanding, with just enough pressure to let me know I better not make a sudden move. “You need to hear what Zita has to say. She’s only looking out for your best interests.”

“I don’t think Zita has my best interests in mind,” I say, glaring her way. Why they’re doing this to me is beyond my comprehension. “But go ahead, Zita. Tell me why you entered the race when you’re so scared of dying? What possible reason could you have for running and leaving me behind that has my best interests in your lying little heart?”

Zita’s mouth drops. She looks like she might cry. A sting of guilt pierces the inside of my belly like a hot blade as I wait for her to speak up. I fight back the tears forming in my eyes.

It’s Boom who finally breaks the icy chill that separates us. “Look here, Avene. Zita and I came up with the idea for her to sign up. But you, my dear, will run the race.”

Now my bottom lip hits the floor. I’m stunned speechless. This was the last thing I expected to hear. I think back to Zita’s little visits with Boom and McCoy lately, their sudden show of silence whenever I came around. Zita scurrying from their quarters.

Boom continues. “McCoy signed up in case things don’t go as planned and Zita still has to run it. He’ll protect her. He’ll protect you too.”

Protect me? I’ve heard that before. Gavin used to say this to me, how he’d protect me from his father. King said it to me after my mother died.

I look up at McCoy, who’s still in my face. He moves his hand away. “I don’t need protection,” I say, stepping off toward our alcove.

Time is closing in on me. The race is the day after tomorrow. It’s not much time to devise a strategy, practice my throwing skills, and hunt for Zita. Speaking of her, I’m ashamed of myself. I should’ve known Zita would never do anything so vile behind my back. I grab her hand and pull her into our alcove.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t know. I thought you were—”

She presses her fingers against my lips to stop me. “I probably should have told you what we were planning. I wanted to surprise you.”

A surprise? Somehow I should have figured this out. Tears well up in both our eyes. We embrace each other for a long minute. It’s me who pushes back first. “We’re really getting out of here, Zita,” I say. “Do you think you can hold on?”

She smiles with a wink. “Piece of cake, sweetie. I know you’ll come back and bust me out. Now let’s talk about the rest of the plan.”

“The rest of what plan?”

Zita grabs me and pulls me to the ground to sit beside her. “We’re going to muddy up your hair so it’s dark like mine and McCoy has a hoodie you can wear to cover up as much of your face as possible. Boom can give you an idea of what to expect on your journey. He came over from Millers Creek, you know, and he’s gone back and forth a few times.”

I’m already shaking my head. “No, I’ll be fine, really. I’ve been preparing for a long time.”

“You can trust them. Boom hates King. You know King is the one that disfigured him?”

I rise to my feet. “I’m sure he’s helping McCoy.”

I take my pouch from the table. I could use an afternoon nap, but my mind is gyrating out of control and I need to do something. Anything. I’ll bait and hunt.

I walk to the door, feeling a little guilty about stifling her efforts to help me. I pause at the doorway before I enter Boom and McCoy’s quarters. “Thank you, Zita,” I whisper.

She looks happy. I think she’s forgiven me. I tiptoe through Boom and McCoy’s quarters and into the hall. I’m still processing all Zita’s sneakiness when it dawns on me I finally get my chance to make everything right for me and my mother.

My mother.

The terrible images from the day she died overwhelm me all at once. The blood on the floor of the hall, trailing from Gavin’s room. Her arm spilling outside his door, bloodied. My screams. The new housemaid who’d only started a week earlier, dragging me away. King coming out of the room wailing, blood covering his hands, his shirt, his jeans, while I fought and kicked the woman to get to my mother.

The physician came in later to give me a sedative. I asked him what happened to her, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said they were still trying to determine the cause of her death. I overheard them later, the physician and King. She died from a knife wound to her brain, right through her right eye. I cried all night. Wishing she hadn’t died. Wishing my real father hadn’t died in the Kill Plague. Wishing it was all a dream.

But it wasn’t. And the next day when they said Gavin did it, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it, so I started asking around. I asked the staff, the cook, and the maid, even though she was new. It was King’s security guard who told me he saw Gavin’s journal. He said there was a sketch of me and my mother and Gavin and King all standing as a happy family in front of the gazebo behind the Governor’s mansion. Well, he said King and Gavin were happy. My mother and I were mutilated in despicable fashion, with knives sticking out of both our eyes.

I still had a hard time taking it all in. When the physician visited me later, I asked him again to tell me how my mother died. I wanted to hear it straight from his mouth. This time he answered. This time he said it was an argument and Gavin had gone mad and stabbed her with his knife.

By nightfall I found myself in prison, blamed as an accomplice. The maid told King I’d been in Gavin’s room minutes before they found my mother dead. I
had
been there—returning his dagger, the one they found in her eye, and I knew Gavin was angry at my mother for something, but he wouldn’t tell me what.

I never saw Gavin again. They said he bolted the second after he’d killed my mother. Before they sent me to prison, King brought Victor in, his good-for-nothing assistant, to grill me and slap me around and tell me how a team had chased Gavin up Bitter Mountain. King said he had a surprise for me. I thought he was going to tell me they caught Gavin. Instead, I got a concussion and woke up in Dead Man’s Pen. In shock, alone, and terrified.

I shake the memory away. I’m losing light, so I remind myself I’m supposed to be baiting and hunting for tomorrow’s chow, not reviving ire. I double time it down the halls and past the Greenies’ cell. It looks like they’re out, although I’m not sure where they’d be. Maybe scrounging on one of the upper levels, though that’s not exactly the best idea since the second floor is so unstable.

I’m thinking about sleep when I hear footsteps. No doubt it’s McCoy with a late afternoon attempt to annoy me. I sprint toward the stinky garden. I only turn one corner before the sound of footsteps almost at my back has my skin buzzing with a rush of panic. Instinctively, I flatten myself into a dark recess in the wall, listening to the click … click … click of McCoy’s boots. He doesn’t even bother to step silently like usual. As I sweep the hall to find a better place to conceal myself, I realize the rhythm of the stride is not right for McCoy.