Free The Novice Prey & the Daring Prey by S. J. Lewis

from, and which way she should go, it seemed wisest to remain still.
    “Sure she went this way?” she heard a male voice ask.
    “Not anymore,” another man replied. “Even if she was headed in this direction, I don’t think she’d’ve come this far.”
    “Damn. So now what?”
    The voices were coming from the other side of the tree. Alexa kept very still, listening, trying to control her breathing. Were they talking about her?
    “Guess we go back and try and figure out which way she really went. Lemme have a look at the map over here.”
    The two men stepped into view barely ten feet away. They were both dressed in rough clothes, both sporting a few days’ growth of beard, both wearing backpacks. They had their backs to Alexa, who slowly, slowly, slowly crept further back behind the tree even as she kept a wary eye on them. One of the men pulled a folded map from his backpack and opened it. His companion moved alongside him so that both of them could read it.
    “There’s no doubt she was here at Jackson’s yesterday.” One of the men pointed to a spot on the map. “And Jackson was definite about which way she went.”
    Alexa felt a tiny bit of relief. She didn’t even know where ‘Jackson’s’ was, so they couldn’t be after her.
    “Yeah,” his companion nodded. “Looks like she was headed this way, but there’s really nothin’ out this way until you get to the main road, and nobody’s allowed to cross that. So she must’ve changed direction somewhere between there and here, but what would make her do that?”
    “Maybe she saw somethin’, heard somethin’. I dunno. Maybe she just lost direction. I think we passed her somehow.”
    “Wanna go back and try to pick up her trail again?”
    “Might as well. But that area’s been walked over so much that pickin’ up a trail ain’t the problem. Pickin’ up the right trail is.”
    “Let’s go, then.”
    “Hold on a minute. I gotta take a leak. Fold this back up, would’ja?”
    Peering warily around the tree, Alexa saw one of the men hand the map over to the other and then shrug off his backpack. She had one brief moment of near panic when he started carrying it over towards her tree, but all he did was prop it up against the trunk and then move away to relieve himself. As close as he’d come to her, he’d never even suspected that she was right there, close enough to reach out and touch. She was about to let out a silent sigh of relief when the other man abruptly stuffed the map into the backpack, right in front of her. All she ever saw were his hands, but she saw them closely enough to see the dirt under his nails. He hadn’t folded the map very well, so most of it was sticking out of the pack.
    “Gonna wait for ya over here,” Dirty Nails called out to his companion. Alexa heard him moving off. The other man was standing ten or twelve feet away, apparently taking aim at a sapling, his back to her. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d reached out and stealthily pulled the crumpled map from the backpack. The next few minutes she sweated out in a state of delicious suspense: Would they even notice that the map was missing? Dirty Nails hadn’t said where he was putting the map, and his companion hadn’t seen him stick it in the backpack. With any luck, each would think that the other had it until they were some ways away from here.
    It seemed that her luck was in. The one taking a leak finished his business, came back and got his pack, and set off with Dirty Nails back the way they’d come. Alexa peeked around the tree, watching until they were lost to sight. She waited for a minute or two after that before daring to get to her feet and creep off quietly in a different direction, still clutching the map. She felt an incredible high at having pulled it off, and wondered if the legendary Elf-Girl had felt the same way after some of her exploits. She wanted to laugh out loud, but settled for sitting on a fallen log and