And waited.
Finally, Sinna’s heart stuttered back to life, and she inhaled a deeper breath. Bryce pulled back her jacket and shirt and watched the skin around the bullet hole contract tighter and tighter, leaving behind a faint red webbing of veins, the only sign she was still healing on the inside. The veins would fade when she was whole again.
Bryce sagged on the floor, head thudding back against the glass. “That was close.” His voice sounded so hoarse, he winced.
“Yeah, too close,” Aiden agreed, facing forward to get the mule moving again. Under his breath, he added, “Asshole.”
As their truck lurched to life, Bryce grinned, patting Sinna’s hand. You’ll live, Wolfen girl. Don’t you worry none.
The rest they could sort out later.
6: Sinna
Pain drags me, kicking and screaming, out of the oubliette of nothing. It comes in waves, making me spasm in full-body cramps, but with each wave, the pain is less, and I feel better, more anchored in life.
I try to open my eyes, but though I feel my body is mended, breathing alone is still a chore. My heart feels bruised, and my head is pounding. I can’t move a finger, not even when the world tilts and I feel myself rolling sideways, falling…
Someone catches me.
Nate?
I hear a voice I’ve never heard before. A man. He says to someone, “We should let the little bit sleep it off.”
A grunt answers him.
The world moves again. My head lolls, and my eyes roll back in my head, so close to passing out again, but somehow, through the ringing in my ears and the bright red flashes of light behind my eyelids, I stay present.
“Home sweet home,” the man says dryly. “For a night, anyway. Pick a bed, bro, any bed.” Then, “Dude, just pick a bed. It’s not like—not that one!” He laughs. “I’m kidding, B.”
A rumble like a massive earthquake rolls through me, and the sharp spike of fear it brings makes my heart beat stronger, faster. With the support of a mattress beneath me, my head cushioned on clouds, I pry open my eyes to see a savage face inches from mine.
He is terrifying. None of the paleness I’m used to seeing. His skin is tanned, as if he has no fear walking out in the sun, a beast among his own. His eyes shine in the low light, but when they flicker, I make out their shade: a fierce golden brown with flecks of green. There’s nothing soft about that face; it seems to be chiseled out of raw power and fury. His hair is dark, falling over one eye and cheek, but it could never hope to hide the ugly, pale scars, claw marks marring him from left temple to chin.
I woke from one nightmare into another…
~
Sinna gasped, her throat tight and dry. Flight instinct took over, sending her crawling backwards from the stranger. She was slow, and didn’t get very far; the bed was flush to the wall in the corner, and she’d only managed to put a few more inches between them.
Air wheezed in and out of her: she was hyperventilating as much as her dehydrated body would allow. Her lip was split; she tasted blood. She’d pass out again, she knew it.
The stranger reached out, big, callused hands curled almost into claws. She flinched.
“D-don’t,” she whispered, “please…”
The stranger looked confused for a moment, then flushed and pulled back, ducking his head. When he stood, he towered over her and the bed. He was massive, layered with the kind of muscle she hadn’t seen since the turn of ages when the food supply ran out, but his movements were sleek and silent like a great cat on the prowl. With long steps, he distanced himself, and another stranger took his place.
This one was his polar opposite, with blond hair cut short, and strong, handsome features tempered by a wicked twinkle in his eyes. He was weighed down with dozens of chains around his neck and a half-dozen rings on each hand. “Welcome back, little bit,” he said, and she recognized the voice from before. “How are you feeling?”
He gave her no chance to answer before he produced a metal canteen and brought it to her face. “Here, have a sip. Don’t worry, it’s just water.”
Sinna glanced at the other one, now watching her balefully from a dark corner across the room. He gave a curt nod, which she supposed was meant to be reassuring.
“Go on,” the blond urged. “You lost a lot of blood. Need to replenish your fluids.”
Yes, that much she knew. Sinna licked her dry lips, but her tongue was just as dry and sticky. She took hold of the canteen and sniffed cautiously. Water. She sipped and shivered as the cool, clean liquid slid down her throat. Her next breath came easier and, snatching the canteen from the blond, Sinna gulped down three huge mouthfuls before it was ripped away.
“Nice and easy now, okay? You don’t want it to come back up again. Take a breath.”
Sinna wanted to take the water back instead, but it would have been a wasted effort. With her gaze glued to the canteen, she panted and waited for the blond to deem it safe enough to drink more. He made her wait forever until he finally relinquished it. Sinna latched on and drank quickly, not caring when some spilled all over her chin; she had to get as much as she could before he took it away again.
He didn’t. He let her finish the whole thing. “Better?” he asked, when she handed it back.
Sinna nodded. The motion made her head throb painfully. She was so tired, she could sleep for a week. “Where’s Nate and the others?” she asked. For that matter, where was she? This wasn’t the parking garage. It looked like a house, with open windows and translucent drapes billowing in the night breeze. No barricades, no crammed little basement hidey-hole.
“Now which one was he? The geek, or the pretty boy who liked to play with guns?”
Sinna gaped. Was that how he saw them? Then she flushed. Compared to him, Nate wouldn’t have amounted to much. Actually, an army of Nates wouldn’t have amounted to much.
“Ah, the pretty boy, then.”
The scary one in the corner scoffed.
“Hey now, don’t judge,” the blond said over his shoulder. “For all we know, she’s never seen an actual man in her life.” He winked at her. “Ain’t that right, little bit?”
Sinna didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, she was so confused. And that could mean a heap of trouble. How was she still alive, and why wasn’t she hurting?
She looked down at her brand new clothes, now filthy and drenched in blood. She pulled up her shirt. Nothing but smooth skin where a bullet hole should have been. “Whuh…?”
“Right!” the blond said. “Intros. I’m Aiden. That handsome fella hiding in the corner there is my brother, Bryce. And the people who almost killed you back in ‘Frisco said your name was Sinna. That right?”
With her mind struggling to catch up with the fact she was unharmed, Sinna frowned. “What?”
The blond patiently pointed to himself. “Ai-den,” he enunciated, then pointed behind him. “Bryce.” Then he pointed to her and raised an eyebrow in question.
Sinna shook her head. “Uh, I don’t…umm…Sinna?”
His other eyebrow went up. “Are you asking me, or telling me?”
The one named Bryce came to his feet and shoved at the blond to crouch in front of her. Without a word, he offered a metal spoon and a can with the label torn off. He wore a cuff on his wrist just like she did, only his was wider, almost like a piece of armor, and blackened, its shine dulled until it was nearly invisible in the darkness. Sinna’s gaze traced up the length of his massive arm to his neck, noting the thick torc he wore. Silver again. Just like the blond, only more subtle.
He tensed, face flushed and mouth pressed into a thin, disgruntled line. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he rattled the spoon in the can to break her stare.
Sinna accepted the offering with a hesitant smile in thanks, and he grunted, returning to his corner. Beans. She sighed in disappointment. Food was food, of course, but Sinna remembered, way back in the day, when meals actually consisted of varieties. She used to like apples and strawberries, and
that year they’d had turkey legs for Thanksgiving… She still salivated over that when times got tough.
Stop it. You’re alive, you’re safe…relatively…and you have food and water. That’s more than you had yesterday, so shut up and say thank you.“Thank you,” she said, risking a glance at this Aiden and Bryce, “for helping me.”
Aiden grinned, preening. “Nothing to it, little bit. It’s what we do.”
In the corner, Bryce rolled his eyes.
Sinna ducked her head to hide a smile. She ought to have been wary of them, but her brain was too tired to put up a fight, and the longer she sat there, stirring a can of cold beans while they hung back totally relaxed, the less she worried.
At least they didn’t leer the way Nate used to. That helped matters some. And when she started eating, it almost seemed like an unspoken signal to them, saying everything was cool. Aiden dropped onto the mattress opposite hers, ridiculously huge on the pink princess bed, and threw an arm over his eyes as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Bryce moved to sit at the foot of her bed with his back to both her and the window, fiddling with something she couldn’t see. Neither he nor Aiden seemed overly concerned that they were basically out in the open for all the Grays to scent.
Sinna finished half of the beans, and couldn’t fit another spoonful into her stomach. It was the most food she’d eaten in one go in days. With a satisfied sigh, she rested the can in her lap and licked the spoon clean. “Umm,” she ventured when the silence had stretched to uncomfortable lengths. “Where are we?”
“Sign said Modesto, if that means anything to you,” Aiden answered.
“What happened to the others I was with?”
“Most of them were still breathing when we left.”
She frowned. “Most of them?”
An ugly sneer crept into Aiden’s voice when he said, “The knife guy kind of lost his head after he almost killed you.”
Sinna shuddered, spoon clattering against the can. Connor was dead?
The sound brought Bryce’s head around, and he frowned at her.
She swallowed and handed the can back to him. “Thank you.”
He looked inside it, scowled, and shoved it right back at her.
“No, I’m full. Really. You should have it.”
“Take a break, then. You can eat more later.” Aiden hadn’t moved since he lay down, and Sinna kept thinking he’d fallen asleep. But he was still very much awake and alert. Something told her he’d never really let his guard down. For all his laid-back attitude, she got the sense he was just as dangerous as Bryce. Maybe more so. With him, she might never see a blow-up coming.
She put the can onto the little yellow nightstand. Despite her exhaustion, Sinna couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes. She’d never slept this exposed before and didn’t relish the thought of starting now.
Aiden had grown quiet again, and Bryce hadn’t said a word yet.
She sighed.
“Ask,” Aiden said.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Ask.”
“Okay… Where did you come from?”
“Montana,” he answered. “Before that, Ukraine.”
“How did you get to San Francisco? Were you looking for survivors? How did you find us?”
“You called,” Bryce said. His voice was low and gruff, rasping, as if his vocal chords were damaged, or he wasn’t used to talking.
“What do you mean, we called?” Had Nate somehow gotten word out? The last radio had stopped working a decade ago.
“Not them.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You.”
“What?”
Aiden sighed. “We’re not humanitarians.” The bed frame groaned precariously as he turned onto his side, one massive arm under his head, chains pooling around his neck. He faced her, his eyes closed as if he were trying to sleep, yet he kept talking. “We were in the neighborhood looking for something else. Bryce heard you howl.”
“Oh.” She remembered now. Her last act of defiance. She’d been so sure she’d die, so angry that her life had been cut short, so hurt by Connor’s betrayal—and Nate’s. He’d just stood there and let it happen.
She’d screamed, knowing the Grays were close enough to hear. What did that make her?
“What will happen to the others?”
Aiden shrugged a shoulder. “They had about a gallon of your blood to cloak themselves with, a fighting chance of getting out of the city. After that, who knows?” He cracked open one eye to look at her. “Why do you care?”
Half of what he said didn’t make any sense. Blood attracted Grays.
But then she remembered the way they’d sniffed her, as if she was spoiled meat. They’d left her unharmed.
“Nate and Connor protected the rest of us,” she said. “They put themselves in danger every day to hunt for food so we could eat.” Except they’d had a strange habit of whispering to each other a lot, and they’d never brought back all that much, if anything.
And then Nate had killed Tam.
Sinna hugged herself, squeezing her eyes shut against that memory. “Okay, so maybe they weren’t the best people, but the rest of them were my friends.” Poor Isaac. He shouldn’t have died the way he did. And what would happen to Amy and Matt now? And David! She remembered he’d tried to help her, even though he had to have known it was useless. In the end, the weak, vision-impaired “geek” had done more for her than the “pretty boy” who’d played at being her hero.
“No offense, little bit, but your definition of friendship scares the shit out of me.”
Bryce grunted in agreement. Sinna was beginning to understand how he carried his meaning across by the different sounds and gestures he made.
Aiden frowned. “Question for you now. Something that’s been bugging me since we got you out. Do you know what you are?”
Sinna shook her head in confusion. “What do you mean?” The food and water had eased some of her headache, but the weariness remained and impaired her judgment. She was in a wide-open house in the middle of God-knew-where with two muscle-bound behemoths who’d apparently saved her life, but couldn’t extend the same courtesy to the rest of her group. Logic insisted there was a reason for that, and not a particularly good one. Still, she was more afraid of the open window than the two in the room with her.
Aiden groaned and sat up, rubbing his face. “I can see this is going to take a while.”
Bryce, too, came around to face her, suddenly very interested in the topic of discussion.
“Okay!” Aiden said, psyching himself up. “You remember when the con—the, uh, Grays took over?”
She nodded.
“Good. Where were you?”
Sinna glanced from Aiden to Bryce and back. What did that matter? “I was in San Francisco. At home.”
“With who?”
“Gerry, my den mother. That’s what I always called her. She wasn’t my biological mother, though.”
Aiden and Bryce shared a look. “What about before that?”
Sinna’s face grew cold. Darkness. A hole in the ground, thirteen stories deep. Climbing up one rung at a time. The cut on her arm burning, tearing open, soaking her bandage with blood. She couldn’t see it; she smelled it, though. Keep always looking up. See the light, your guiding star. The dark at the bottom is where the monsters are.
“Sinna?” This time his voice was softer.
“It was a long time ago.”
“I know,” he said, “but try to remember.”
She didn’t want to! The shivers came back, and she hugged her knees to her chest, feeling tears sting at her eyes.
Bryce curled his hands over her shoulders, and she was so out of it, she forgot to be afraid of him. “Calm.” He looked straight into her eyes. “Calm.”
Sinna swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. “Ch-Chernobyl,” she said.
His eyebrows twitched in a quicksilver frown, but he smoothed it out and looked back at Aiden.
“She must hav
e been very young,” Aiden said. “I don’t remember her either.”
“You were there?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Aiden’s mouth twisted. “We were created there.”
Created. Not born. Gerry had used the same word whenever Sinna had asked about her parents. She’d always said something vague about them being the best of the strongest and the smartest. She’d called Sinna her “little treasure.”
Bryce ascertained her state of mind, then removed himself to sit next to Aiden, who motioned for her to continue.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “We had to climb up this dark shaft, and when we came out, everything was dead and destroyed. We saw a chopper taking off, and Gerry cursed at it and cried.”
“Was she the only one with you?”
Sinna flinched. “No, umm, th-there was someone else. He didn’t make it.”
“This Gerry raised you.” It was a statement, not a question. Sinna nodded to confirm. “Did she tell you anything about your origins?”
Sinna tried to remember what Gerry had told her. It’d always seemed so cryptic and secretive; she’d never answered a question straight, as if she worried about telling her too much. “No, all she would say was that I was special, untainted. And I had to stay hidden, or the Grays could corrupt me.”
Another shared look between the two of them. “She must have thought you were inert.”
Sinna frowned. “I heard that word before. What does it mean?”
Aiden scoffed. “Oh, this’ll be interesting.” And he made himself comfortable for what she could only guess would be a very long story.
7: Aiden
I feel like I’m the punch line of a bad joke.
A Wolfen girl walks into a bar. “What will you have?”
“A clue, please.”
I’m looking at this girl, cute as a button with her curly brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing her own blood like a badge of honor, and she has no idea. None!
I don’t know whether I want to punch this Gerry person or shake her hand. For all I know, she’s done the only thing she could to make sure Sinna survived, given the information she had. Hell, if what Sinna’s saying is true, then she’s the only Wolfen left in ‘Frisco, or anywhere nearby. But the woman has done the girl no favors.
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