“Stick to the back roads?” I offer.
She makes a move to help her partner to his feet. As she does, she nods at us. “Where’s your car?”
“We walked,” I say. Hopefully, her alternative plan didn’t entail stealing my non-existent ride. If so, she’s screwed.
She drags her dude toward the passenger side of the Lincoln. He’s wobbling on Bambi legs, about to lose consciousness again. “Yeah, well, you can’t go anywhere like that,” she says.
I’m a Pollock painting of gore. Christopher isn’t much better. We wouldn’t make it to the end of the driveway without someone calling the cops, let alone the five-minute jog home. Wearing my clothes inside out won’t help. I’m in a tank top and jean shorts, and every bit of skin showing is sticky with blood.
The utilities in the house might still be on, but I’m not eager to add breaking and entering to today’s list of activities, especially since her gun discharged. A could-be-a-firework type noise, a strange car pulling into the garage, a scream. With nosy neighbors, one of those draws attention. Two mean a phone call to authorities. We just gave them a trifecta.
If the cops show up here and find Christopher and I covered in blood, me with a bag full of syringes, needles, and knives? Our Wednesday will be more interesting than either of us prepared for.
“Any chance you two were planning an epic getaway?” I ask, sizing up the guy, then Christopher. “Suitcases packed?”
To my surprise, she nods.
“Perfect,” I manage. Our luck is turning. She’s taller than me, but yoga pants make the world go round. “I’ll take a hundred bucks off your fee for the resurrection. You’re going to sell us some clothes.”
Ploy
The gore-covered strands of Allie’s hair leave red lines on my borrowed shirt as we hurry toward the apartment. The sweatpants and T-shirt I’m wearing smell like stale cigarette smoke and mildew. A persistent ring in my ears dulls the traffic noise.
We clear the last crosswalk and, together, breach the gate onto the path splitting the rose garden and go up the stairs, down the hall, through the door she opens. I close it behind her, lock it, slide the chain, and then I lean, my forehead balanced on the warm wood.
“I need to tell you some—” I start before the words strangle in my throat.
I look at my pack, still in the corner. I keep acting like Allie’s the one who’s going to bail, but I’m the one who didn’t take the drawer she offered, the space she made for me in the closet. I’m the one packed. I’m the one with a foot out the door.
The only place I’ve ever felt safe is in this apartment, here, with Allie. I tap my palm against the door, struggle against the urge to punch it. I’m not losing this life.
Allie wraps herself around me, her cheek resting against my spine. I spin. I inhale, hoping for the comforting scent of apples, but there’s only the same metallic odor of the boxcars in the rain, the rust and damp saturating everything. “I don’t want to be Ploy anymore,” I murmur against her skin.
“You’re not,” she says, as if it’s simple. “You’re Christopher.”
I shift slightly, drag the tip of my nose across the line of her jaw. What if it’s Ploy who holds all the betrayals, all the ways I failed, the secrets, even now, I keep from her about the hunters? Could I do it? Split myself in two and leave the past. Or am I a monster, bent on surviving, hiding behind a proper name and excuses? What if I’m just like Jamison after all?
“Hey,” she says as my arms swallow her in an embrace. “You did good today. You did everything perfect.”
“I panicked when he came to in the car,” I say. “I swear I’ll do better next time.”
“Injured people get violent when they’re afraid.” Her squeeze tightens. “I don’t expect you to protect me. I can protect myself.”
“Not always.” The words plop between us, hard and heavy. Once she knows about Nico and the rest of them, she’ll see I can cover her in other ways.
When I don’t say anything else, she sighs. A wide line of maroon crusts her cheekbone. There’s another dried and flaking on her neck as she leans to study me.
“I’m not scared to shed blood,” she says, watching me for my reaction. “My life is measured in syringes of it.” She untangles herself from me. Her voice pitches up, almost a question. “But then there’s you. I didn’t count on you.”
She swallows and her throat moves against my palm. I stroke her thumping pulse, slide to her collarbone. Her fists rise to her closed eyes until my fingers catch her chin, tilt it, and she unwraps herself.
I kiss her, slow, lingering before I draw a breath and gather my courage. My mouth finds her ear. “Always count on me.”
I wait, sure she’ll kiss me back, that I can stretch this moment into an hour and I won’t have to tell her what I did and everything I found. Instead, she’s intent on me.
“I’m in this,” she says. My heart kicks up a notch. Her words lose their hesitancy. “You are, too.” Her fingers knot at the nape of my neck. “In order for us to—”
“Allie, I—”
“No! Me first, okay?”
Swallowing, I nod. She takes my hand and leads me to the couch.
“There are things I need to tell you,” she says, the words staggered and slow as she sinks onto the cushion. “I thought I left this life behind. I can’t.”
I shake my head while I move to sit beside her, but she ignores me.
“I have to resurrect again. I’m going to lead the cluster in Fissure’s Whipp.” The sentences are rote, dead things plummeting from her lips.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You didn’t want—”
She whispers my name, a plea for silence, and I swallow my protest as I watch her blue eyes fill with tears. “You are all I want,” she says.
My thumb brushes the wet track on her cheek. It smears the dried blood streak when she leans into my palm and catches my hand with her own. “You have me,” I promise, but it only makes her wince.
For an impossibly long moment, she’s quiet, and the little wisp of Jamison haunting me perks up, but I’m finished believing I’m not good enough or strong enough to exist in her world. I have important information she needs and can use. I’ll prove the extent I’d go to for her. “You have me, Allie. Today, I—”
“They’re going to kill us,” she says.
I freeze. “What?”
She knows. She saw me somehow, getting out of the cab or followed me when I took off this morning. Except Allie isn’t furious. She’s scared.
“That’s why Talia wants you gone.” The tremble in her voice unnerves me.
“Talia?” I repeat.
“You keep saying you want me to let you in, that you want…” Her mouth purses before she forces herself to continue. “If we’re staying together, there’s more at stake than I let on.”
Her fingers flutter across a threadbare patch on the couch cushion as I struggle with the sharp left this conversation has taken.
She grinds her palms against her thighs. “Okay, so,” she starts. “At the farmhouse, we needed to cover our tracks and be sure the situation with Jamison remained contained. We had to go on record with what happened. I got Talia to leave you out of the paperwork. You’re not mentioned.”
I know this already. The three of us agreed. “Is she backing out or something?” I ask. Talia’s been hostile toward me since day one, and I can take it, but she’s not using me to force Allie into anything. “Is she blackmailing you into resurrecting because of me?”
She moves to drag a hand through her hair, but it catches in the crusted blood and she gives up, instead picking at the ends of the clump. “We’re a paranoid bunch,” she says with a sad laugh. “The more things here stray from the norm, the closer the other clusters will watch us. They’ll dig into Jamison, the hunters, me.” She pauses and glances up meaningfully. “You.”
“Let them,” I insist, and the scoff that escapes her is so scathing I give her hand a sharp jerk. “Alli
e. What’ll they find? That I was friends with him?” I lean over and kiss her once, a hard peck on her mouth. “It’s obvious I switched sides.”
Her voice falls quiet. “I wish that counted for something.”
“I am not a hunter,” I say, and then my neck blazes with the utter hypocrisy in it. I was with them this morning. If I am under scrutiny, I made everything worse. Allie doesn’t even know yet.
“They’ll take your heart.” Her certainty ripples goosebumps over my skin. “If they find out Talia and I lied about your involvement, that we covered for you in any way, they’ll deal with us as well.” She stands, frustrated, and starts to pace the space between the couch and the television. “I explained it to you, how much it matters to protect the blood at any cost.”
“Yeah, but…” I trail off, dumbfounded. We had to keep my past secret on paperwork. It made sense. I didn’t understand what Allie and Talia were risking, what they’re still risking. “If I’m gone, none of this is a problem.”
“Me resurrecting, leading? It’s a Band-Aid as long as we’re together. Talia knows it. I know it. Now you know it, too.”
I want to fight for her, but not if it gets her killed. Does she expect me to walk away to save us both? Could I give her up if it keeps her alive? I should know the answer, the decision should be easy. “What do you need me to do?”
“Tell me you’re staying anyway?” she says before she draws away from me. “But that’s all wrong. You didn’t sign up for this.”
“I’m with you.” Hope and promise war in the three words. They’re the wrong three. Still, I can’t tell her I love her now, when it would sound like manipulation. “Can you hold them off to buy us time?”
She makes a nervous noise. “If you’re staying in the picture, even if we say we’re roommates, friends, they’ll tear your life apart the second they know you’re in mine and they will find everything.”
The last word is heavy with implication.
“Who does the background check?” I ask. “If we could get Talia, then—”
Allie shakes her head. “She made it more than clear she’s not willing, and anyway, it’s done independently. I should have told Sarah about you weeks ago, but I pretended I was doing great on my own. You were only staying here sporadically. The night I did that weird resurrection at the pool, when you found out Brandon died, I was on the phone with her. I found you asleep outside my door.” Allie swallows hard. “She knew you were here. She was distracted. She’d caught on that things were going bad here in Fissure’s Whipp. I said you were a friend, but Jesus, if she’d followed the rules, you’d be dead.”
Every moment I’ve been with this girl has had me a hairsbreadth from extermination. I don’t care. “I could…we could come clean? Tell them everything?”
Allie’s shaking her head long before I finish. “Talia said it first. On paper, you look like a straight-up hunter. If I admit knowing the danger you posed to the blood and not speaking up immediately…”
We’re both silent, deep in thought.
“Are we doomed?” she asks suddenly.
I fake a smile. “If I were a normal guy, most likely. But it takes a lot to get rid of a scrappy weed like me.”
Relief taunts me as she throws her arms around my neck.
I can fix this. There’s got to be a way. The information I gained on the hunters being dangerous, that’s small, obvious, now that I’m thinking about it. I need something to convince any other resurrectionist I’m loyal, once and for all. I need bigger.
“Your turn,” Allie says, and I hum in confusion, distracted. “You wanted to tell me something?” Her forehead wrinkles as her arms move to balance on my shoulders. She traces the fine hairs at the nape of my neck. “Did I steal your thunder?”
“With your whole ‘they’re going to kill us’ intro? Yeah, a bit.” It takes work to be sure my laugh is light and believable. Nerves rattle through me. This is where I come clean. This is where I tell her everything. Except my brain’s stuck on the idea of bigger. If I can prove myself beyond a reasonable doubt, it’ll clear all three of us. Talia will back off. Allie won’t have to lead Fissure’s Whipp if she doesn’t want. I’ll get to live. “You called me your boyfriend in the garage,” I say.
The most adorable blush rises to her cheeks and I know the topic change worked. “Noticed that, huh?”
“I get that you were like, under duress, and if you didn’t mean it, that’s okay, too.”
Her tongue darts to wet her lips. “I meant it,” she says. I can’t stop myself from leaning forward to kiss the trepidation from her. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted—”
“I wanted,” I whisper. “I wanted very much.” Under my mouth, tiny goosebumps flare across her skin. I smooth the place with a thumb. “If I’m going to be your boyfriend though, I need you to do one thing for me, okay?”
“What would that be?” she asks in a voice fighting to sound nonchalant.
“Go take the fastest shower of your life,” I say. She pauses for a second before a startled laugh breaks from her and I grin. “Because I’m next in line and if I don’t get these moldy ass clothes off me in the next ten minutes, I might suffer permanent damage.”
She fakes a wince. “I didn’t want to ruin our romantic scene or anything, but you do kind of stink.”
“Speak for yourself, Prom Scene Carrie,” I shoot back and this time her throaty chuckle sends a tingle through me.
She kisses the tip of my nose and then mock jogs to her room, emerging a moment later clutching an armful of clean clothes. Lifting them in a salute, she heads into the bathroom and closes the door. The shower starts.
I toe off my sneakers, checking them for blood. Unsurprisingly, there’s a streak of maroon going brown on the side. They’re only days old and already I’ve messed them up.
“I need something bigger,” I mumble to the empty room. In order to find that, I’m going to need more time, which means I have to give Nico what she wants. A body.
Thinking of Corbin dead makes me think of Jason Jourdain, the real owner of that cabin. Quinn had said the resurrectionist being alive was one of the terms of selling him to their buyer.
I straighten. Does that mean there’s a chance he’s still alive? I can find him, get him back safely. After that, Allie’s people will have to believe I’m not a threat.
It might be the move I need.
Allie
“Yeah, it’s all been a little much the past couple weeks. Still getting the hang of things, which is why it took me a bit to reach out,” I say into the phone.
I mark a line through Tennisen’s name on the scrap piece of paper in front of me on the counter. Tennisen is the leader of the cluster in Callatan, Montana and at only twenty-one years old, if anyone understands what I’m going through, it’s him. He’s also my final call.
“I can imagine,“ he says in a voice that lacks any trace of accent. I expected him to sound like a cowboy or a Canadian. “You weren’t exactly eased into things.”
My laugh is uncomfortable enough that I regret the attempt as it leaves my mouth. I’m not privy to why Tennisen assumed control over his cluster so early, but he definitely didn’t have someone running it for him the first two weeks like I had Talia. Yesterday’s resurrection of the bank robber wasn’t the tame job I expected. Christopher and I had watched the news last night, hoping for an update. After a high-speed chase, our Bonnie and Clyde had disappeared. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been rooting for them.
“Take things slow as much as you can,” Tennisen says, dragging my brain to the present. “It’ll come more naturally, I promise. If you need to vent or ask advice, I get we don’t know each other well, but I’m a phone call away.”
The gratitude in my voice is genuine. “I appreciate that.”
“Things safe again down your way?” He means the hunters anyone else would have made an immediate priority.
“They’re… I’m… For now,” I settle on. “How’s it going where you are
?”
I glance up as Christopher comes into the kitchen. On the phone, Tennisen’s rambling about splitting the scant resurrectionist payments combined with what he has to do in a day to run his ranch.
As I watch, Christopher lowers his shoes into the empty sink. Maroonish brown smudges one side and more stains the soles of both, souvenirs from the job I took him on yesterday. He reaches for the hot water knob. I flail my hand to stop him.
“Uh huh,” I say into the phone, distracted now. “I can imagine!”
While Tennisen babbles, I go into the bathroom to gather a wholesale-sized bottle of hydrogen peroxide and bring it into the kitchen. I swirl the cap and tip to pour the liquid onto the blood. As the chemical reaction bubbles and seethes, pink foam sloughs in a slow slide toward the drain.
“So when are we going to make you official?” Tennisen asks.
Everyone seemed sympathetic that after the massacre and mess here, I needed some time for mourning. Officially handing me the reins means the leaders of each cluster coming here, a traditional meet and greet and a rare excuse to mingle. It also means a spotlight on Fissure’s Whipp, on me, on Christopher. It’s exactly what I don’t want. Still, it needs done. “I imagine soon,” I tell Tennisen.
“All right,” Tennisen says. “Hang in there, and I suppose I’ll see you sooner rather than later.”
“Sure thing.”
“Allie, before I go,?” he says. “Real sorry about your aunt. Sarah was a damn force of nature.”
My throat goes thick and there’s an awkward pause. Everyone thought the world of Sarah. How am I supposed to fill her shoes? I stare at Christopher's sneakers in the basin, bloodied and dripping.
“Thanks. I appreciate that,” I manage and then I hang up.
For a moment I stand at the sink as I fight my emotions and then Christopher’s arms come around to hug me from behind, his chin resting on the top of my head. He doesn’t bother with condolences I don’t want. Instead, he gives me the comfort he knows I’ll take, the weight of him against me, the warmth of him at my back.
Something Grave: The Resurrectionists Series book two Page 14