Fuck fear, she decided. She slowed her pace. She stopped and sucked in a lungful of air. She held it in to listen. Not a sound but the cry of gulls far away over the water. Her visibility was less than twenty feet around her through the dense evergreen foliage. Nothing moved between the branches.
Dwayne told her the secret to hunting was movement. You didn’t strain to look at detail. You relaxed your eyes, took it all in, and looked for changes. A shadow. The quiver of a branch. A subtle difference in light. Predator or prey, the rules were the same.
There it was. The space between two tree boles was darkened for a half-second by a passing shadow. Her ears picked up a mutter. A foot crunched on the floor of needles away to her right.
She stooped low and parted the branches before her. She moved on downslope to the southern side of the island. The voices and sounds of passage stayed behind her. Whispers and hisses. The creak of leather.
The trees became mature and the undergrowth thinner as she reached the center of the island. She followed along a brow of rock, keeping it between her and the thinning tree line. The angle of decline increased. It was harder to keep her footing on the loose shale here. A snatch of voice rose behind her. They weren’t being quiet now. They’d seen her. She broke into a run. Shouts rose. She slid now, volcanic rock tearing the tough cloth of her BDU pants.
A boy stood on a ledge of black rock and raised his head to howl like a dog. Howls and yelps answered him. It was a game to them. They were children enjoying a chase.
She regretted abandoning her deck shoes. The soles of her feet were bleeding. Each step brought new pain. The rock turned to sand as the ground leveled toward the far beach. She ignored the pain in her soles and bolted for the shelter of the high dunes.
The gullies between the dunes were choked with brambles. She struggled to make progress. She stumbled to a halt. Standing in her path on the floor of the gully was a child. The boy was naked and perhaps eight years old or younger. He regarded her calmly with eyes shaded by a thick bush of jet-black, hair. The little brat threw his head back and let out a wolf’s call. Answering calls came from somewhere over the top of the gully.
Branches snapped as she pulled herself up a wall of sand to put the next rank of dune between her and the calls of the men and boys growing closer behind her. As she reached the peak of the dune, a shadow fell across her. Caroline clutched at the sliding sand and looked up to see the man with the ax staring down at her.
He was panting, his breath whistled through the gaps in black teeth clenched in a feral grin. His beard was black and matted. His hands looked outsized as they were covered in thick layers of horny callus. His nut-brown skin was covered in a complex network of black tattoos in stripes and diamonds and circles.
Caroline let herself slip down the dune wall. The ax man followed her with a wide gait to keep his footing on the shifting surface. He was moving deliberately, using the long haft of the ax to steady himself. His prey was trapped. There was no need for hurry now. He barked out words that Caroline realized were not for her.
From atop the dune on the opposite side of the gully, more men and boys appeared. Each one had a dagger in a brass or leather sheath. Even the naked ones wore a blade suspended from a thong about their waist. All the men were bearded with braided hair worn loose or tied up atop their heads. They spoke to one another. One of them laughed as he pointed at Caroline. Her appearance was both amusing and confounding them.
The ax man reached for her, and she stepped away from him, deeper into the brambles. He growled in frustration and shook the head of his ax at her. She locked her eyes on his. They were black orbs without an ounce of anything in them that Caroline could recognize as pity or compassion. She was once again at the mercy of cruel fate and cruel men, and it was pissing her off.
She aimed a string of irritated Greek at him. She knew her pronunciation was probably wretched, but this bearded bastard might be able to pick out a few words. Caroline told him that her father was a wealthy merchant and would pay for her freedom. She warned him and his motherless companions not to harm her, or they would not see any silver for her return. They would hang and have their guts pulled out as food for birds and rats.
The ax man’s brows knitted. He glanced up at his crewmates, and they only squatted and dumbly regarded Caroline. The one who laughed played fingers over his lips. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she was getting through to them.
With a grunt, the ax man lifted the haft of his weapon over his head, and Caroline stumbled back in the crackling brambles until she came to the steep wall of the dune. The man stepped forward, ax raised. She lowered her head and closed her eyes tight for the blow.
A pair of popping sounds from
