Free The Hunter's Pet by Loki Renard

gotten away with it! Quite thrilled with herself, Sarah bounded from rooftop to rooftop, taking the path of least resistance and letting gravity do most of the work. If there was one thing she was good at, it was moving through uneven terrain with alacrity. After several dozen such jumps, she found herself overlooking the very heart of the city. People were everywhere, going to and fro in the brightly colored robes that they seemed to so admire. There were ornate garments with flowing trains and large shoulders and more fabric than Sarah had seen in her life. If they had needed to flee a predator, they would have become instant meals. But the city people did not dress to survive, they dressed to impress one another.
    There were a few people wearing leggings, but they seemed to be of lower rank. The well-dressed ladies and gentlemen moved past them as if they did not exist. Sarah felt a pang of sympathy for those who wore leggings. They seemed closer to nature than their better dressed counterparts, but that seemed to make them mere objects.
    This city, so obsessed by its technology, so dependent on a thousand systems of delicate control liked to pretend that it was separate from the world it had walled itself off from. But it was not. The people looked the same to Sarah’s eyes as hogs about a watering hole, or flies on a choice bit of carcass. Swarming beasts were swarming beasts, no matter how you dressed them.
    Having judged those who considered her a mere pet, Sarah sat quite proudly on the rooftop and looked down her nose at the citizens. Not a single one of them looked up. They had forgotten about the sky, too busy living in the stink of their own flatulence to remember that predators liked high places.
    She knew she would have to keep out of sight. It was not certain how the citizens would react to her presence if they were to become aware of it, but it was too great a risk to test. William must not know she had disobeyed him.
    Turning homeward, Sarah realized that her journey back up the tiered houses would not be as simple as her journey down. There were plenty of pillars and ledges to climb on of course, but it was a slower process. It was also less easy to see where she had come from when all she could see were towering walls, which led to yet more towering walls. The houses were slightly staggered back and forth, which made navigating all the more difficult. To eyes attuned to plants and rocks, the plethora of stone facades and pillars looked like a great desert, every inch of it the same as every other inch.
    After a good hour climbing here and there, Sarah had to admit to herself that she was well and truly lost. Worse than that, the light was beginning to go. William would surely have missed her by now. He would be angry. He would be looking for her, leather in hand, of that she was certain.
    Crouching between an ornate stone flower and a wall, Sarah tried to work out where William’s house was. It couldn’t be over there, for over there was where she had just come from… or was it? There were so very many houses, a multitude of dwellings that looked the same when viewed from the exterior.
    She was about to make a decision to go in a new direction when sharp twin prongs lodged in her buttocks and a jolt of electricity shot through them. Screaming with rage and pain, she fell to the ground, her muscles contracting uselessly as a strange citizen stood over her with a set of manacles. Cuffs were attached to her wrists and ankles, then she was picked up, still shivering with the discharged current, and tossed into a crate that was much smaller and much dirtier than the one William had used.
    Whimpering to herself as her every muscle ached, Sarah cowered in the back of the crate. It was transported without any kind of care to a place much lower in the city, a place that was barely lit and that smelled of heavy cleaning agents. Worse than sterile, the air smelled lethal, so completely removed from nature that