Deadrise (Book 3): Savage Blood

by Brandt, Siara

  “I won’t be gone long.”

  “And what if you don’t come back? What am I supposed to do then? What if you run into a bunch of those things and you can’t get away?”

  It was a possibility, but he accepted that it was a chance he was going to have to take.

  “Just stay up here in the attic and keep the doors locked. You have enough food and water to last for a while.”

  She glanced over at Dani. “And what do I do if she- ”

  “I’ll tie her up before I go if that makes you feel better. And if I have to, I’ll- take care of her when I get back. I have to do this. I’ve put it off long enough.”

  Finally Desah nodded, but she wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy at all. “Fine. If you’ve already decided to do this, then I guess I have no choice but to wait here for you. Just don’t forget about me.”

  Like that could happen.

  Chapter 9

  Still breathing hard, Aili exhaled an audible stream of air. With a trembling hand she pushed back a lock of sweat-dampened hair and sat down numbly, staring blindly out the window at a sunset she didn’t see. Her fingers tightened around the bloody knife she still held in her hand, convulsively squeezing the handle as she tried to get her tumultuous feelings under control. But it wasn’t easy to turn things off just like that.

  That had been close. Far too close. They’d run a gauntlet of deads more vicious and more aggressive than any she had ever seen. They’d grabbed her. They’d pushed her down into the mud, but thankfully she hadn’t been bitten or scratched. Though if that even mattered she didn’t know. This was real life, not a movie. Who knew how you could contract this disease if that’s what it really was. Nobody had given them a set of rules or guidelines to go by.

  At least they were safe at the moment, finally, but her body refused to obey her repeated orders to relax. She was still on high alert, watching for any sign of further attacks, while Bresh-

  Bresh was already back to being Mr. Macho Lone Wolf with his frankly-my-dear-I-never-did-give-a-damn attitude.

  She looked around at the cabin. She’d finally gotten over her aversion to breaking and entering any place they happened to end up at. She’d gotten over a lot of things.

  As she watched Bresh cross the room, Aili’s eyes slowly raked him. So much for clean clothes. They’d changed only hours ago, but Bresh’s grey T-shirt, sticking damply to the sweat on his skin, was already torn and blood-stained, as was hers. His boots and faded jeans were mud-splattered from another desperate flight through the woods. A grueling flight that had about done her in, but he’d been relentless in putting distance between them and- And something back there. Something that had made him feel like he was justified in taking some desperate risks. Even more desperate than the risks they usually took.

  He stood there now in the open doorway in his muddied jeans and T-shirt, his face unshaven and his sweat-dampened black hair in disarray. By the way his jaw and his mouth were set, she would bet he had seen something back there and was keeping it from her. But there wasn’t anything new about that. Still watching his face she saw a muscle at the side of his jaw tense. He was definitely hiding something.

  Aili closed her eyes, still struggling to slow her heavy breathing and gather what little strength she had left. Precious little of that remained, she knew. Her body had reached its limit. Her lungs hurt with every breath she took in and the muscles in her legs felt used up. They must have traveled miles. And every one of those grueling miles had been through some of the roughest terrain she had ever been dragged through. The worst of it was that none of this was getting her any closer to Elan. As if it wasn’t enough that they’d had to fight deads every step of the way, now it appeared that now there was another threat out there, perhaps an even deadlier one. But only Bresh knew what it was.

  He suddenly spun around and faced her. “What the hell were you thinking back there?”

  When she finally found her voice, she asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “The barn. You didn’t have any idea what was inside there. But you ignored everything I’ve ever told you and didn’t wait for me. I’ll bet you didn’t even bother to reconnoiter first. Why would you take a risk like that?”

  Reconnoiter? What did he think she had been in her past life? A Navy Seal?

  “No, I didn’t reconnoiter first. But I had to look. What if Elan was inside there?”

  He stared at her as if she was some strange kind of newly-discovered bug squashed in glass under a microscope.

  “There’s a smart way of doing things. And then there’s the dumb way. You, lady,” Here he paused to stab a finger in her direction. “Almost made the dumbest move of your life. And if I hadn’t stopped you when I did, you wouldn’t even be here.”

  “I knew it,” she accused as she jumped up from her seat. “What aren’t you telling me? What did you see inside that barn?”

  At first he ignored her question. No surprise there. He did that all the time. He didn’t even look at her as he started searching the cabin for food and drink and whatever other useful items he thought they might need. It was his usual habit. For a moment she herself was distracted by the thought of something to quench her thirst. She had probably sweated out a gallon of fluids in the past few hours and she felt as dry as a desert, like even her blood was drying up in her veins.

  But she was nothing if not relentless. She tried again. “What did you see out there?” She had a right to know what they were up against. He wasn’t doing her any favors by keeping her in the dark.

  “Nothing,” he muttered, evading any kind of direct answer. He had finished searching all the kitchen cabinets and did, thank goodness, find several bottles of water. He handed one to her and she immediately drank most of it down. But when he turned to go back outside, her voice halted him at the door.

  “You’re lying.”

  Hell, Bresh thought, blowing out a sudden, frustrated breath. She wasn’t going to let this go. No surprise there. She had to be the stubbornest female he’d ever met.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  Six foot plus of brawn and muscle straightened and turned back to the room. Bresh sighed deeply again, as if half surrendering to her. But it wasn’t a complete surrender. Not when she had scared the hell out of him back there.

  With both hands dragging through the long, dark strands of his hair, he pushed it back from his face and tried to give her the coldest look he knew how, even while he knew he probably wasn’t fooling her any. She had an annoying habit of being able to see right through him.

  He stared straight into those mutinous green eyes for the space of several heartbeats while he got it all back under control. And then he ordered her to sit. He still hadn’t answered her question.

  He shoved some magazines over with his boot to make room for her on the sofa, then repeated his order. “Sit.”

  “I am not a dog,” she informed him haughtily as she perched herself on the edge of the sofa.

  Silent still, but with a challenging glare, he sat down on the coffee table across from her, digging deep for patience. But patience was slow in coming and he still struggled silently for a while.

  Aili watched the man from beneath her lashes. And then, in a low voice she repeated the same advice he’d given her at least half a dozen times. “As hard as it is, you have got to keep your emotions under control.”

  His gaze was dark and penetrating as he looked back at her. Hard to do? Hell, at the moment it seemed damned near impossible.

  Still holding her gaze, he tossed some bandages onto the table beside him. Without saying a word, he grabbed her foot and swung it up onto his hard thigh. She immediately started squirming.

  ”Hold still,” he ordered her with one of his usual no-nonsense commands.

  When she doubled her efforts, he merely arched a dark brow in her direction and held onto her wiggling foot even tighter. “If this is a struggle to see who can outlast who, I’m pretty sure who the winner is going t
o be. And it won’t be you.”

  He waited patiently for her to get it all out of her system. He knew by now, knew very well, that she didn’t like being ordered around.

  It didn’t take her long to stop fighting him, because by now, she knew when she was wasting her efforts. She tossed her hair behind her shoulders and glared back at him. The sunlight was streaming through the window behind her and glints of gold were gleaming in the auburn curls. The spontaneous thought occurred to Bresh that she really was something when she was defying him and full of fire like that. But that was all irrelevant in this world, he reminded himself.

  “You finished now?”

  She didn’t answer him. She just looked around the room, doing her best to ignore him, giving in, he knew, only because she didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  He suppressed a smile, and said, “Look, I’ve already figured out that you have a hard time trusting people. But we’ll have a better chance of surviving if you can get past that. I’m not your enemy.”

  He saw her lips thin in a brief display of temper. He knew it annoyed her to no end that he had the ability to see right through her, and that he could usually correctly interpret her unspoken thoughts and emotions. But he had been studying her for a while now and reading body language was one of the skills he had picked up over the years, both in the military and in the corporate world.

  As for Aili, she watched him covertly when he wasn’t looking at her. If the man wasn’t so- so . . . She couldn’t think of any adequate words to describe him. Breshan Southwell could be so overbearing, so maddeningly male at times, and if he wasn’t so good-looking-

  She stopped herself short. Where had that thought come from? She knew very well that it had come from honest observation. To herself she admitted that in another world, she might have secretly, from a safe distance of course, responded to his blatant sexuality and his devastatingly good looks. Tall, dark, handsome and powerfully built, Breshan Southwell was beyond sexy. But for Aili those things just set off alarms. Good looks didn’t mean anything. Good looks practically guaranteed that a man was going to be even more arrogant, self-centered and full of himself. Except that Bresh didn’t apparently know the rules. So far, he had proven to be anything but self-centered and full of himself. Okay, so maybe he was a little arrogant at times. A lot arrogant.

  She ground her teeth and reminded herself that he had kept her alive so far. That was what mattered.

  He must have felt her eyes on him. He looked up.

  Still seething, she brushed her hair back from her face.

  He looked down at her stomach when he heard the low rumble. “You need to eat something. I’m hungry, too.”

  Bresh had learned one thing about the woman. Aili could change moods at a moment’s notice. One minute she was up in arms, waging a battle of wills with him. The next she had shifted to an entirely different subject. The one subject that was always uppermost in her mind. “My son is out there somewhere. How can I even think about food when I have no idea what he’s going through or if he has enough to eat?”

  “You have to keep yourself alive if you’re going to be any use to him at all,” he reminded her.

  “If you cared about someone, wouldn’t you do anything you could to find them? Wouldn’t you make that a priority? It’s not enough that I don’t know if he’s got enough food to eat. I don’t know if he’s in danger right at this very moment. Or if he’s even alive or- ”

  She closed her eyes, willing herself not to think about it, let alone say the words. They both knew what she left unsaid. If he was like one of those things, or he might have become a victim of one of them.

  She’d done everything she could to find him. Everywhere they went, she had seen messages scrawled on walls by other people looking for loved ones, so she started leaving messages, too. Of course, you couldn’t tell someone to meet you somewhere. You could send them right into a lion’s den. There was no way of knowing what place was safe or not. From the living or the dead.

  “I’ve spent these past sixteen years protecting and keeping him safe the best I could. Where do I put those feelings and those instincts now? I can’t just turn them off.”

  Her voice had softened till the plaintive note in her questions had him trapped just like a deer in headlights. He had no answers to give her. A mother’s instinct to protect her offspring, in his experience, was one of the most powerful forces on earth.

  But her next words were back to being an accusation. “And as for trusting you, I wouldn’t call keeping things from me trust on your part. Haven’t I let you order me around and manhandle me all this time? That takes a certain amount of trust whether you want to admit it or not. And for your information, I hurt my ankle back there. You practically tore the shirt off my body when you dragged me down into that ravine. See? The thorns tore me and my clothes all to pieces. I’m bleeding.” She held both arms out towards him to make sure he knew the damage he had done.

  “Every bit of that was necessary,” he said as he looked up from the scratches. “When I can’t persuade you, I have to drive you. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I was trying to save your ass back there.”

  She was still waiting for a better explanation, tilting her head in that way she had, silently challenging him as if he actually owed her some kind of explanation.

  “All right. You want to know what I saw in that barn?” He didn’t want to argue with her anymore and she had made some good points. He decided that the only thing to do here was to give her a minimum of information and shock her into letting it go at that. “I saw dead bodies. Not the undead kind, but people like us that had been bled out and hung up like something in a butcher shop.”

  “Like us?” she echoed in a ghost of a voice, the shock he had expected to see coming to life in those incredibly-expressive green eyes.

  “No one I recognized,” he said quickly. As he suddenly realized what else was in those eyes, he immediately tried to put her fears to rest.

  “Why- ” She began, trying to reason it through in her own mind, but maybe still too exhausted to string her thoughts coherently together. She suddenly looked more done in than he had ever seen her. Like a wilted flower drooping in the heat.

  “Why do you think?” he said more harshly than he intended. “With supply lines cut off and every food place cleaned out during the first couple of days, food’s become almost impossible to find. A long, cold winter is just around the corner. Everyone knows what that means. It means that people are going to be desperate to find a food source.”

  Her eyes widened even more with the comprehension she would rather not have faced as she gave him a horrified look. “You really think they killed normal- living people?”

  No one would take a chance eating what was likely diseased flesh from the undead. He knew it, and she was smart enough to figure it out for herself. So, yeah, there was a good chance they had killed living people. But he had worried her enough. There was no sense worrying her even more.

  He finally slipped off her boot. This time she didn’t resist. “I saw you hit that post that was sticking out of the ground. That had to hurt.”

  He was right. For a while the pain had been excruciating. And now, after he carefully rolled her sock down and slipped it off her foot, she saw that there was already a nasty-looking bruise showing. And the entire side of her foot had swelled some.

  “I saw you limping afterwards. With as much running as we do, this was bound to happen.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of worse things to worry about.”

  “Then let me worry about it,” he said. “I wish we had some ice to put on it,” he murmured as he bent his head forward and examined the foot, turning it this way and that and making sure that she could bend it. “You should probably stay off it for the night. At least keep your boot off until the swelling goes down. It’ll probably get worse.”

  There was no guarantee she would be able to stay off it for the night and they both kn
ew it. Aili sat there stiffly, saying nothing.

  Bresh had noticed a long time ago that she was squeamish about being touched and he had wondered all along if she was grieving for more than just her son.

  “You said you were attacked in your house that first night. The blood on the wall, was that your husband’s?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Everything happened so fast.”

  “Maybe he was able to survive and he’s looking for you right now?”

  She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You might be right. Mead was way too mean to die.”

  She didn’t say anything more, but that told him a lot. Like why she had a serious trust issue. It also brought up a lot of other questions, but he could tell she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so he let it go.

  “So-o-o, from now on,” he said in a dragged-out, deliberate tone. “We’re going to have to be even more vigilant. And- ” he added, his voice lowering to a deeper rasp, a no-nonsense, accusing one. “When I say stay put, I mean you stay put. You almost got both of us killed back there when you started second guessing me.”

  More vigilant? She thought. Was that even possible? They were in a continual state of high-alert as it was. They never let their guard down. Not even when they slept.

  Bresh knew he ought to cut her some slack. He knew very well he had been hard on her all along. Both physically and emotionally. Partly out of concern for her safety. Partly out of his own frustration. But she needed to learn to obey him without questioning him first, if they were going to have any chance of survival at all. Maybe it really did come down to trust. He knew she struggled with it. Same as he sometimes did. Trusting someone had its risks.

  “I wasn’t trying to second guess you,” he heard. “I had to look myself. You were gone so long, how could I know that you were even coming back?”

  For some unaccountable reason that bothered Bresh. Did she really think he would just abandon her? Of course, if she thought he had been killed and therefore couldn’t return to her, then that was a different story. But he didn’t know, of course, just what she had been thinking.