The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey by S. J. Lewis Page A

uncertainly.
    “Go,” Lydia smiled. “Go on back out there and make them work for you.”
    Alexa left the shed and slowly shut and latched the door securely. She looked around once to see if anyone was watching her. No one was, at least not that she could see. She trotted away from Jackson’s, back out into the woods. Only then did she realize that Albert hadn’t charged her for her shower or her meal.

Chapter Seven
    Days went by. Armed with her stolen map, Alexa ranged as far as the next trading post to the east, called White’s. It was much like the others, but when she first saw it there were a number of men standing around outside it, talking and drinking what looked like beer, so she didn’t dare approach. Instead, she faded back into the sheltering woods, feeling angry and upset that no one had told her that beer was available at the trading posts. But then, Albert had told her that they weren’t obliged to offer information unless she specifically asked. Still, it felt like a raw deal to her. A nice, cold beer would be so good right now!
    Once she’d had an unnerving feeling that she was being shadowed. It had stuck with her for most of the day as she crept slowly and cautiously from one patch of cover to another, all the while with her head on a swivel, looking in every direction from which a hunter…or hunters…might come. It wasn’t until after sundown that the feeling passed. She felt more than a little let down when it did, because feeling as if she was in imminent danger of being taken had her incredibly pumped up and powerfully aroused. Her sleep that night kept getting interrupted by vivid dreams of faceless men coming upon her in the night and dragging her, too sleepy to resist effectively, out of her sleeping bag. She always woke up at that point, heart pounding, mouth dry, her hands shaking.
    This strange and new experience of being hunted was having an unexpected effect on her. On the one hand, she still desperately wanted to beat her competitors, and that drove her. On the other hand, the constant tension, while it had her feeling incredibly alive, was getting to the point where she could barely stand it. It was beginning to make her jumpy and nervous and, if she couldn’t get a handle on it, it could very likely cause her to make a mistake.
    She drifted back towards Jackson’s but only came close enough to it to see if the striped red and yellow flag was still flying over the shed she’d seen Lydia in. It wasn’t, but she saw two more men there, dressed for the outdoors. Since they were almost certainly hunters, she quietly slipped away, unseen.
    She’d gotten into the habit of moving her campsite daily. As much work as that entailed, it seemed much safer than trusting that a hiding spot would remain undiscovered. She was running low on food, and water, and clean clothes. She’d found a stream big enough to rinse her things out in, but that was a stopgap measure at best. She still had her third cache, if no one had discovered it by now, so one morning she packed up her gear and set out to find it.
    Everything felt strange, somehow. Sounds seemed either unusually sharp or strangely muffled, and there was no wind at all, not even a breeze to ruffle the trees overhead. She picked her way through the woods just as cautiously, but much more easily than she had on her first day out here. She felt as if something was coming, but she had no idea what it might be, or why she should feel this way. As the day wore on, the feeling neither grew nor faded away, so Alexa decided to put it down to how jumpy this whole thing was making her. It was nothing a good night’s sleep wouldn’t fix…she hoped. The problem was that she wasn’t getting any good night’s sleep lately. She rested for a while after she reached what she thought was the general area where she’d secreted away her last cache. Sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree, she surveyed the area, trying to spot anything that