Free The Hunting by Sam Hawksmoor Page B

huh.’
    Genie just sighed, crammed down the last of her scone and went to join Renée. She passed an old grandfather clock in the hallway and what looked like a stuffed penguin. She wondered how the hell that got there.
    Renée was in the cubicle already.
    ‘You OK?’ Genie asked.
    ‘I’m bleeding.’
    ‘You on?’
    ‘No. I’m bleeding. I got pretty cut up on the river and it’s not healing.’
    ‘Can I look?’
    ‘Wait.’ Genie waited. She heard Renée flush and then opened the door that she hadn’t locked anyway.
    ‘My God, Renée. Why didn’t you say?’
    Genie was looking at a jagged cut right from the back of her thigh to her ass. It was a good fifteen centimetres long and quite deep.
    ‘You didn’t notice?’
    Renée was looking at her and shrugged. ‘The water was cold. My jeans are still wet and I guess the blood sort of soaked into the denim. It didn’t hurt until I pulled them down and the scab peeled away with it.’
    ‘Ouch.’ Genie sucked in her breath. It would leave a nasty scar unless it was fixed real fast.
    ‘We have to get something, Renée. You can’t just leave it. It might get infected.’
    ‘What will get infected?’ Betty asked, entering the bathroom. ‘We have to go.’
    She saw Renée’s cut and her face blanched. ‘My goodness, girl, we have to get that treated right away. What happened?’
    Renée tried to pull up her jeans, but it was sore and they were damp; she was embarrassed.
    ‘Stay there. I’ll get Francis. He used to be a nurse. He’s got everything here.’
    ‘Nooo,’ Renée protested, but to an empty room as Genie and Betty had already left to find Francis.
    Five minutes later she was bent over a chair, bright red in the face as Francis, who took her injuries very seriously, sewed her up, ignoring her protests and her ouches. He cleaned it, stitched it, and rubbed an antibiotic cream on it and tut-tutted a lot, but Renée appreciated his care and, much to her surprise, it didn’t hurt too much at all.
    Francis even found her a pair of jeans, only one size bigger than Renée and, most importantly, dry and warm.
    ‘I have seen some asses in my time,’ Francis said in all seriousness, ‘but yours is a pretty derrière, my dear. You should be proud.’
    Renée laughed, but accepted the compliment. It was good to know.
    ‘White-water rafting is dangerous,’ Francis was saying. ‘I mean, look at Rian’s head. You are supposed to stay in the raft.’
    Rian sat on a chair in a guest bedroom as Francis worked his magic. He patiently read the Vancouver paper The Province , left by a visitor. Francis had already rubbed some magic anti-swelling cream on to his wounds, which helped reduced the bump, and Betty was fussing over Genie, wanting to buy her a dress in the next town. Good luck to that, he thought. As far as he knew Genie had never actually worn a dress since she was about six. He tried to imagine what she’d look like and just couldn’t. He’d only ever seen her in jeans.
    Genie had returned from feeding Moucher out in the car and was looking at her head in a mirror. She noticed her hair was starting to grow again but there was something odd about it. If she looked carefully she thought she saw some white hair growing, like a streak across her head. No way. She’d be a freak. She was about to investigate further when Betty distracted her with some task or other.
    ‘Anything in the paper about us?’ Renée asked, walking stiffly out of the bathroom, Francis smiling behind her, proud of his handiwork.
    Rian shook his head. ‘A nuclear bomb could fall on Spurlake and we’d probably still not make the news. Anything outside the city doesn’t exist, Renée.’
    ‘Good,’ Genie said, returning to the room. ‘We don’t want anyone to know about us.’
    ‘Bear attacked a Korean man who chopped all the trees down behind his house in the Kootenays,’ he read out.
    ‘Bear was probably pissed off. You’d feel the same way if someone chopped your