Vial Things (The Resurrectionists Book 1)

by Leah Clifford

  “That’s a good sign, right?” I ask. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to ask questions. When she doesn’t answer immediately, Allie’s the gauge I use to know if I’ve screwed up or not. She gives me a quick nod.

  Talia continues her examination. “No lividity,” she notes. “Though the body was moved so it’s no longer an accurate gauge.”

  “Blood settling,” Allie says for my benefit. “It starts about half an hour after death. It takes six hours before it’s fixed in place though, and because she moved the baby around we can’t use it to pinpoint a time of death. Talia, what do you think?”

  Her back is to me, tension in her shoulders. She taps her finger gently against the baby’s cheek and then reaches for the syringe. “I’m going for it,” she says and beside me, Beckett puffs a sigh of relief.

  My fascination appalls me, but I can’t make myself look away. I lean against the white dresser, careful to stay out of the way unless I’m called. Talia bites down on the syringe as she ties the rubber strap around her arm and pumps her fist. She only fills the syringe halfway. “That much, Allie?” she says, an imperceptible shake to her voice. “Give it to her in stages? I’m worried about shocking her system.”

  “I’m pretty sure shocking her system’s the point. I’d give it all at once.”

  Talia’s shoulders rise as she takes a deep breath. She gently undoes the snaps on the baby’s onesie. Her fingers trace the side of the infant’s chest, and then again. “I can’t feel her ribs well enough to get a count,” she says. When she glances at Allie, there’s fear in her eyes.

  Without a word, Allie drops down beside her. She presses hard against the baby’s ribs, her lips moving as she counts silently. “Here,” she says. Her fingernail digs a shallow indent. Talia sticks the needle in below it, jostling until the tip passes between the ribs. She presses the plunger.

  No one moves. No one breathes, the baby included. Minutes inch past. I want to ask how long. How long before we give up and go home. How long before I’ll sleep again without nightmares of that small blue-gray arm.

  “Please,” Talia whispers. “Come on, kiddo.” She presses the baby’s breastbone in quick thrusts.

  “Stop!” I yell. “Look!” The toes on her right foot curl and then relax.

  “Can I get Steve and Kaitlyn?” Beckett asks, but Talia holds up a hand. All at once, a plaintive cry breaks through the room. A laugh bursts from Allie, but I can only stare in shock. It’s alive. The baby’s alive. Beckett goes for the door.

  “I said to wait!” Talia demands. “That happened really quickly.” She scoops up the baby, supporting its head as she holds it against her chest. She struggles to her feet as she bounces the child. “Give it a minute. Let’s be sure she’s gonna make it, okay? I don’t want to give them false hope.”

  The baby fusses, her skin slowly pinking up. Talia shifts her. “She looks okay,” she says finally. “I think she’s going to be okay!” Her smile is contagious, spreads through us. “You’re a strong little girl, aren’t you?” Talia coos.

  I’m distantly aware of the door opening, the parents bursting in, happy sobs. I can’t take my eyes off the baby. My disbelief battles against the joy in the room. The happiness is all around me, but I can’t make myself feel anything other than confused. I’m sure any moment the baby’s head is going to roll back, the gray color bubbling onto her skin. I shiver.

  Allie saddles up to me.

  “She’s going to be okay? Normal?” I ask.

  “It looks that way.”

  “And I...” I give my head the slightest shake. “I helped do that?”

  Allie’s grin could power a city it’s so bright. “How do you feel?” she asks, her eyes dancing.

  Those parents are going to be putting their kid in a crib instead of a coffin. Visiting grandparents instead of a gravesite. She’s wailing and I want to tell the tiny little thing that I totally know how she feels but the pain is worth it to be alive. She’s alive. I helped and now she’s alive. I know it’s stupid. I only handed Talia a needle and laid a blanket on the floor but I feel like a goddamned gladiator. “I feel...good,” I say to Allie, gathering her up in a hug. “I feel great!” Jesus, I could climb a mountain. I could do anything right now. What I do is kiss Allie and when I pull away, I’ve caught her grin. My words come breathless. “I didn’t know you guys did things like that. I thought it was all...”

  “Violence?” she guesses.

  She’s wrong, but I can see how she’d think that. I’ve been stabbed. Allie’s been shot. Brandon and her aunt were murdered. “Well that and being able to heal yourself. I thought it was about making yourself invincible. Bringing back your friends.” Power, I almost add.

  Her expression shifts to something close to hurt. “No, we help people, Ploy,” she says. “We give them a second chance.” The baby lets loose a sudden bawl of a cry and the room erupts in strained laughter. “This is the side I wanted you to see.”

  “Thank you,” her mom repeats, clutching onto Talia. “You’re one of God’s angels!”

  Allie tugs on my arm and gestures toward the door. I follow her into the hall.

  “The weeping and gratitude part always makes me uncomfortable,” she says.

  But that’s the whole reason you do it, isn’t it? I want to ask. I can’t understand how come she wouldn’t want to be acknowledged. Instead I blurt, “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. For me, bringing someone back is never about getting anything, rewards.” Her brow furrows in thought. “It’s...kind of an issue that I don’t want to make them pay some crazy fee, owe me favors.”

  “Why would you not charge?” The look of wonder I must be wearing seems to make her just as uncomfortable as the gratitude.

  She shrugs.

  “I don’t think you understand, Allie!” I’m practically yelling, but I can’t help it. “Talia took away their grief before they even had a chance to feel it. They’ll never know that loss.” She glances up at me as if she suspects I know loss too well and I’m suddenly aware the words had hit the exact tone to get the answers Jamison needs. I hate myself. Shame sours my stomach, coats my insides. But it doesn’t stop me. “I want to do this,” I say quickly. “How can I do this all the time? Is there a way to make it permanent in me?”

  However wrong the reasons are that I came into this, they’ve changed. I’ve changed. I would help people if I was like Allie.

  The smile on her face goes stiff, forced, and then she gives up and lets it fade. “I wasn’t lying. You have to be born into it,” she says. “It’s genetic.”

  I shake my head. No. This is our way out. Allie might be stubborn and impulsive, but she does what she believes in. I need to get her to believe in me. That’s the key. That’s what’s going to save us.

  Jamison said we needed to move things forward. He won’t give up until he gets what he wants. I don’t know what I’m going to do if what he wants isn’t even possible. I try it from a different angle. “I mean, you must have been exaggerating about me building up immunity to the blood. What if you brought me back again? Could you keep doing that?”

  “Why do you think I’m lying to you?” she says and then her head starts a slow shake. She looks nauseous.

  But I can’t drop the idea as we head down to the car to wait for the others. We both climb into the back seat. “Allie, I want to do this,” I say after a quiet moment. “Be like you. Save people. We could do it together. We could figure out a way. If I could do it too, I could help you with rent. All that. I promise I would.”

  Allie falls silent.

  At first I think she’s considering it.

  When she finally speaks, the words grate out of her. “My parents were slaughtered because someone couldn’t pay what they said they would and they got scared. My aunt was slaughtered because someone thinks the blood is going to fix their life or make them immortal. It isn’t a cool way to get rent money, Ploy. There’s more to it than that!” She finally lifts her head to meet my eyes. “You
don’t realize how cutthroat they are. If it’d been up to any other resurrectionist to bring you back, they’d have let you die.”

  Stunned, my arguments fall way. I’m not sure what to say.

  “You know why?” she spits. “Because they don’t see you. You’re not worth anything to them. But you...” She twists to the window, away from me, whispers a curse to the black night beyond. “You were worth it to me.”

  I’m not.

  Worth it. I want to tell her why. Tell her what I’ve done. Why I had to do it. This is the moment, I think furiously. If you don’t speak now, this is the moment you’ll lose her.

  But how can I tell the only person who sees me as anything good that I’m not. That I made mistakes. That she’s wrong, and she should get as far away from me as she can before I mess up everything even worse.

  Allie sighs hard and leans against me. Without even realizing, my arm goes around her shoulders. “How’s this going to end?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I manage.

  In my head, in a perfect world, it would end just like this, with my arm around her. But I don’t think either of us is stupid enough to think we’ll make it that far, to some happy ending.

  At least not together.

  Allie

  When Talia shows up a few minutes later, I lean out of Ploy’s arms and move to the front seat. On the way back, I convince Talia to stop off at my apartment. Ploy’s not into it. “I need clothes,” I argue. “And my phone charger.”

  “What if those people are there?” he says. “Jamison and whoever he was with?”

  It’s a legitimate argument but it’s also four-thirty in the morning. “There are three of us,” I say. Two, I want to correct. Talia and I. Saving the baby seems to have swayed Ploy onto our team, but I don’t dare count on him against Jamison. Not after he pushed for more blood. I’d almost confronted him there in the car, his arm around me, my heart hammering in my chest.

  “I have an arsenal hidden around that apartment,” I argue. Though honestly, I’m starting to think we need Jamison alive. Ploy hadn’t known the man at the cabin. Jamison could have a whole crew he doesn’t know about, each of them a threat. And if Ploy gets in the way, I promise myself, he goes down, too. “So were you able to make any phone calls?” I ask Talia.

  “Yeah,” she says, stopping at a red light. The intersection is deserted. The windows are down, the night quiet and still. Humidity collects on my skin as we drive, my shoulder damp from the pre-dawn air. “I got a hold of three and left five messages. It was late.” There aren’t many more than that left. We’ve already lost my aunt, Brandon and now apparently Jason Jourdain.

  I bite my lip. It doesn’t mean anything that they didn’t answer, I tell myself. But it could. “What did they say? The ones who did answer.”

  “They’re spreading the word. They also...” The hesitation can’t be good. “Allie, when they heard about Sarah they wanted to know who to call now, who to run cases through.” There’s a long pause. “I told them you were ready.”

  “Yeah,” I say quietly. It’s part of the reason I need to get my phone. The others won’t break the rules. If I’m missing calls, innocent people are dying. Regardless of the feelings I have about what I am, the moral issues I can’t seem to get around, I can’t get away from the fact that those deaths are on me.

  “I gave them your number but I told them that if they need to reach you, they should use my mine for backup. Nothing yet.”

  I sigh in relief. “Thanks, Talia. When you looked through the notebook, did you see any mention of a Jamison? That’s the name of the guy the old man said would be coming.” She knows this of course, but it’ll keep Ploy off our scent.

  She scrunches up her lips as she bites the inside of her cheek. “I don’t think so,” she says after a minute. “But honestly, I was only going for the names of the resurrectionists. I didn’t read the cases or anything.” When I glance at her, her attention’s on Ploy as she gauges his reaction. “Well,” she says slowly. “If it’s the blood he’s after, why didn’t he just take it from Sarah?”

  My eyes flick to Ploy in the rearview. He’s watching the passing scenery as if lost in his own thoughts. I can’t be sure he’s not listening. “I think,” I say quietly, remembering the vial I crushed underfoot at Sarah’s house, “her blood was a bit blue for his tastes.”

  Talia blinks quickly and I turn away. If I see her start to cry, I’m going to lose it myself. “We don’t know who he is, so we can’t know what he wants with it. That makes him even more dangerous.”

  Come on, Ploy, I think. Tell us what you know before this all goes bad. If he doesn’t come clean, there’ll be no way I can convince Talia to spare him. I can’t shake the feeling I’m sitting in front of a doomed boy.

  A second later, as Talia parks at the curb in front of my place, I hear a hard sniff. “She was brave, Allie,” Talia says. “To do that. To keep him from getting anything from her he could use.”

  I stare at the closed gate. “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Talia asks. “You can always borrow clothes from me, you know.”

  My hand pauses on the door handle. “I know.”

  I wonder if I’m being stupid. I’m half-hoping when I open the door we’ll find Jamison and his goons sprawled and sleeping. I imagine my knife sinking into skin. They deserve to die for what they’ve done. But to ambush and kill them without getting any answer as to why—it wouldn’t solve the aching in my chest. I have to be patient. I need to know what we’ve done to deserve this. I need to know why I don’t have a family anymore. “Let’s go,” I say, opening my door.

  Ploy hovers near the car as if he’s not sure he wants to come. Only when Talia makes her way past him does he move to follow us.

  “Allie,” he says once we’re through the gate. He stops me before I reach the footpath to get to the stairs. “We don’t need to be here. It’s risky.”

  Talia waits a few steps ahead.

  “And?” I say to him. I don’t understand what he’s getting at besides the obvious. “I couldn’t do anything at Sarah’s house. If they’re here, we’re close to evenly matched if you’re coming up. If they’re not, I get my charger and we go to Talia’s.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” His thumb strokes mine as he meets my eyes. “What if we left.” I try to turn away but he goes on. “You and me. We could take off. Another state. Somewhere he’ll never find you.” He already knows my answer, the defeat written onto his features. “We could figure it out as we go,” Ploy adds weakly.

  “You want me to run away?” I shake my head. “He killed my family, Ploy. He slaughtered a teenage boy and an old man. You saw what our genes do! Is there anything that makes you think a person capable of those murders deserves what we have? These people are leaving us slashed open for our friends and family to find. What would they use our ability for?”

  I should have killed them, I think bitterly, but you stopped me. He drops his eyes as if I’ve said it out loud.

  “If I wanted to run, I would have done it already,” I say, heat behind the words.

  “But you haven’t even considered—”

  “And I won’t. I’m not a coward.” I pull away from him and charge up the path, the stairs. Only when I get to the small hallway do I slow my steps. There’s one other door, to an apartment I’m pretty sure has been empty since I moved here. I’ve never seen anyone come in or out. The blood Ploy trailed on his way to my doorway is there, the red gone rusty-brown. When I look over my shoulder, he’s just behind me, the anger on his face fading to curiosity as he passes the streaks. I wonder if he remembers dragging himself here. I wonder what was going through his mind when I didn’t answer the door, if he really thought it was just a flesh wound. The towel outside the door hiding the massive bloodstain proves it wasn’t. A wound like that couldn’t have been self-inflicted. Did Jamison really do that to him? I think and then a darker option rears in my mind. Did Ploy let him? If so, just days
ago, the boy standing behind me was willing to be stabbed to get what he and Jamison wanted from me. Bringing Ploy back, giving him the blood, could have all been part of a master plan.

  Stepping over the towel, I fish my keys from my pocket and clutch them tight so they don’t jingle.

  Talia stands to my side, her back against the wall. A blade is in her fist, ready in case anyone attacks me. My own knife is in its sheath at my waist. I can’t have it drawn and open the door at the same time. I glance over at her and Ploy and hold up my hand. I lift three fingers and count down one at a time. In a streamlined motion, I unlock and twist, throwing the door open. For the space of a breath, I listen in the doorway.

  Nothing’s different. There’s nothing out of place that I can see. As I’m about to take my first step, Ploy plows past me and into the apartment. “Show yourself!” he yells. “Come out and fight us!” The words echo. We freeze, waiting, before Ploy raises a self-satisfied eyebrow. “Looks like no one’s here.”

  I click on the light switch. “Asshole,” I hiss as I pass him, slamming into his shoulder hard enough that he stumbles. It seems like he’s right though. Talia checks the bathroom while I storm into my bedroom. The charger is where I left it plugged into the wall. I gather a few shirts and tank tops and a fresh pair of jeans before I make my way to the kitchen for a plastic bag. Ploy’s sitting at the table.

  “Be mad all you want,” he says. “What if he’d already heard us coming? What if we were walking into an ambush?”

  “It wasn’t your decision to make,” I snap, furious.

  He stands. “I’m not a coward. And I’m not letting you get yourself killed,” he yells and then adds, “again.” His face is inches from mine, cheeks flush with anger. “Yesterday you rushed that guy in the cabin without even thinking. You didn’t tell me anything about what I could do. What if he’d gotten off a better shot? One to the heart? The head? What then?”

  “I would have healed myself eventually.” It’s a lie. There’s only so much damage the blood can fix. If it’d been a head wound, I probably wouldn’t have been able to heal myself at all. “Don’t fool yourself. You’re not some knight in shining armor that’s shown up to save the day.” I want to throw it in his face that I was protecting him. That I thought I could get the gun away. But all I keep coming back to is that I was dead and helpless. Jamison could have done anything to me. Ploy stopped that from happening. And though he may sign his own death warrant, I’ll be damned if he’ll do it without a fair shot at saving himself. But I won’t coddle him any more than he’ll coddle me. “This was different,” I say.