Hunted Dreams Read Online Free

talk with obscenities. He and Shane knew they were trouble but never regarded them as a serious threat until one day, when the four boys and one girl followed Reed and Shane on their walk home. Amid hoots, hollers, and taunts, Reed and his friend plodded forward in grim, determined silence.
    Not far from the school, the group finally approached the duo. Both boys remained silent in the face of the threats and the enthusiastic waving of illegal knives. Maybe if they’d begged or screamed, the group would have left them alone. Probably not.
    The battle was brief and intense. Reed and Shane both fought well and with a silent desperation, but they were outnumbered and their bare fists and arms met the sharp kiss of knife blades. Ten minutes after the fighting began, the amateur gang backed away, a couple, including the wild-eyed girl, giggling. Only one was pale and silent. They fled from the alleyway where they’d herded the boys.
    Reed and his friend lay bleeding, bruised, both nursing one or more broken bones. He lay in silence for a while, until the reality of his friend’s moaning reached his ears.
    “You okay?” Reed gasped, and Shane continued moaning. Reed crawled to his friend and grabbed his bloody arm.
    “I’m okay,” his friend rasped with some difficulty. “You all right?”
    Reed clutched his arm for a long time, shivering. Several seconds later, he jerked away, eyes glassy. He lurched to his feet. “I’ll get help,” he rasped, and fled the alleyway.
    That was over half a lifetime ago. He lapsed into silence now, staring down at the light brown, stone floor.
    “His fear, his pain fed you,” Maricruz said softly, and her hand, the color of well-creamed coffee, smoothed over his. “Once you connected with him, you felt yourself getting stronger, finally easing that hunger you always feel gnashing at your insides.”
    Reed looked up sharply, his teeth clenched, his nostrils flared. He couldn’t find it in himself to show politeness right now.
    “And let me guess. You healed from your wounds in a day, while it took your friend weeks, right?” Alberto asked. He patted the bandage around his own forearm.
    “I heal fast.”
    “You probably got into lots of fights after that,” Quina said quietly. She poured more coffee from a fancy china carafe and into his delicate cup.
    Reed stared at her a moment. “I found opportunities to get each one of the boys alone. Later, I spent some time in the military.”
    Quina was nodding and smiling, the picture of the gracious hostess. “A lot of us spend time fighting wars,” she said. “We seem uniquely suited to it.”
    He squirmed, just a little, at her use of “we.” He didn’t feel like a “we.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to feel like a “we.”
    “Why didn’t you hurt the fifth gang member, the girl?” Mari asked softly.
    He looked at her. She was sitting near him on the enormous beige couch while her family members occupied large chairs tossed artfully throughout the rest of the room.
    “It’s wrong,” he said.
    She smiled at him, her cheeks aglow with muted lamplight. “You have a lot to learn,” she said.
    The Broschi, Quina had told him twenty minutes ago, smiling tightly, had been around for hundreds of years at least. Based on various historical accounts, some of their scholars speculated thousands of years. However, it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that one of their kind had begun organizing them into Families. Her name was Josephina Progress (appropriate last name, Quina commented, inviting him into her tiny joke with a professorial smile), and she was the wife of a White Southern plantation owner. Her husband had been far too busy selling tobacco and raping slave women to pay much attention to his spouse. She used his money to establish “schools” for gifted children, all White, a very thin cover for bringing together as many of their kind as possible.
    (“It’s not all White anymore, of course,” Paul interrupted,