Page 46 of Heart of the Hunted
"Really?” he asked in disbelief. “So, you don't hunt your own food?"
"Nope."
"Where do you scavenge your food from then?" he asked.
Natalia wasn't sure how much to tell him. She didn't want it getting out to the monsters that they stole their food from them. If they found out the truth, then it wouldn't be so easy for her kind to steal from them anymore. Not that it was easy anyway.
"We just find what we can, wherever we can,,” she told him instead of going into too much detail.
"I'm impressed you've made it this long then," he told her.
"Why?"
"Because that can't be an easy way to live," he said, shaking his head. "Not knowing where or when your next meal is coming? It must be hard."
"Life is hard," she said.
"But it doesn't have to be."
"For you, maybe. But have you forgotten who you're talking to?" she asked. "Since the day I was born life has been hard, it's nothing new to me. You may have had a better life, but not all of us are born with the same privileges as you. Some of us are born into a world that wants to ruthlessly hunt you down and kill you."
"I'm sorry," he said, surprising her.
"For what?" she asked, confused by his empathy.
"I'm sorry you had such a hard life."
"You say 'had' as if it's all in the past,” she pointed out. "Nothing is in the past, it's still very much the present for me."
Thankfully, Taredd didn't say anything more about it after that. Instead, he set about making a trap, staying to the side out of her way so she could watch what he was doing. He was teaching her how to catch her own food, and she appreciated him doing that for her.
Natalia didn't ask him any questions, she just watched silently, taking in every detail she could. If she made it through… whatever this was they were doing together… alive and then managed to find Amberly, Donovan, and the rest of the group, she swore she was going to teach all of them how to do this as well.
Then they wouldn't need to reply on stealing from the monsters so much. They wouldn't have to risk their lives every time they needed to find food by getting so close to the monsters that were hunting them. It would mean that children wouldn't have their parents taken from them too soon, and parents wouldn't have their children taken from them either.
Once the trap was set, Taredd moved her away, saying it was better to leave it for a few hours before returning to see what they had caught.
"This will do," he told her when they came to a small clearing among the trees.
"This will do for what?" she asked, concerned she wasn’t going to like the answer.
But he surprised her again by saying: "You said you needed a lot of sleep, so we'll camp here for tonight. Is that okay?"
Natalia looked around at the small clearing. It was already pitch-black outside when they had left the bunker, so she couldn't see the area very well, but it appeared to be okay. She still didn't know why they couldn't have just stayed in the bunker. They hadn't even travelled that far away from it either, so what gives?
"I thought you wanted to travel all night, wasn't that why we left the bunker?" she asked, confused.
"That was going to be the plan, until you said about sleeping every night and zombies," he said, with that irresistible smile of his on his face.
"Okay, so why did we leave the bunker then?" she asked. "There was plenty of beds there that we could have slept on."
"It was a hole in the ground," he stated as if that was a good enough answer.
"Yeah, with comfy beds," she countered.
"But it was still a hole in the ground."
"Yeah, I know," she agreed. "But it doesn't matter how many times you say that, it still has beds."
