“Fifteen point three five kilograms of essential items,” Bryce told him, settling into the passenger seat.
Aiden got behind the wheel and slammed his door shut. “What about nonessentials?”
Bryce shrugged a careless shoulder. “Roughly two hundred and seventy pounds of spindly-stool-crushing ass.”
Sinna snorted and coughed, trying to disguise her laughter. It didn’t work.
Aiden glared at him, and Bryce’s mouth twitched. He schooled himself and sent Sinna a not-so-covert wink, making Aiden growl. Shaking his head and muttering under his breath, Aiden got them back onto the road. He held a grudge and his silence for about two miles—an impressive feat for someone with a soul-deep aversion to silence. But seeing Bryce and Sinna weren’t about to engage in intellectually stimulating discourse any time soon, Aiden finally cracked and started talking to them again.
Bryce was used to his ramblings. He tuned them out to watch the world pass by at a lazy forty miles per hour, settling into the calmest state of mind he was capable of. It wasn’t meditative by any stretch of imagination, but at least for a few moments he stopped thinking and just coasted in languorous peace.
Every once in a while, Sinna responded to Aiden, and his mind tuned in to her voice. When she was done, however, he went back to ignoring the conversation. It was because she was an anomaly. Bryce had never traveled with a female in the truck; it was always only the two brothers on the road, so anything other automatically got his attention. He liked it. Sinna’s presence, even nervous or hesitant, was welcome to his senses. It gave him purpose. He had someone to protect.
After a while, Sinna sat forward, leaning her elbows on the front seats so she could see better. She watched the road, asked Aiden some questions about how the mule worked, and then fell silent, sitting a few inches from Bryce’s scarred side, the closest anyone, except for his brother, had ever dared to come.
Bryce tensed with uncertainty. He wasn’t used to this; didn’t know what to do with it. Should he move to make room for her, turn to face her better? When they stopped next time, Bryce would take over the drive. Yes, that side of the truck was much better. And Aiden wouldn’t mind; the man needed to rest after all—
Sinna was looking at him.
Bryce’s face heated, and his gaze darted sideways, but he didn’t trust himself to face her fully. If she thought she could make him uncomfortable by staring like he was some sort of freak show…she was right.
Aiden glanced his way, then turned back to the road, while a growl built in Bryce’s throat.
Before he could let it loose, Sinna pecked a kiss on his scarred cheek.
Bryce turned to her, thunderous scowl giving way to the blankness of utter surprise.
Sinna smiled, cheeks turning rosy. “Thank you,” she said, then turned to Aiden, kissed him, too. “And thank you.”
When she settled back in her seat, Aiden and Bryce looked at each other. Bryce must have looked as lost as he felt, because Aiden shrugged helplessly in answer. “Welcome?” he said.
It was as good as any reply Bryce could have come up with. He nodded with a wordless grunt and turned to look out the side window so he wouldn’t have to say anything more.
11: Sinna
We chat until even Aiden runs out of words, and a pleasant, tired silence falls over us. For days and miles, I watch the world change around me, from forests to hills, to forests again.
We stop for food and water, to wash and sleep when we can. We play Spot The Prius and sing naughty songs. Aiden is the master of those. Every time he starts up, I laugh so hard my stomach hurts and I can’t breathe. We fill the days with jokes and laughter, but when the evenings grow long, we sit around a fire and tell stories. He talks a lot about Montana, and from the way his voice grows softer, his eyes a little brighter, I know he loves his home and its people more than anything.
The mule’s rocking doesn’t make me sick anymore, and I find myself drifting whenever the silence stretches too long on the drive. My eyelids grow heavy with weariness, and for the first time since I can remember, I’m not afraid to let them close.
In the brief moments between waking and sleep, when the world is quiet within and without, conscious thought is silenced, and I stand on the precipice of dreams to look out at a world I thought I knew. It’s different now; a landscape filled with mysteries and unknowns. I stare at the shapeless, oozing pools of darkness and name them Grays. No—converts. I see them slither across the world to bright metallic boxes that reflect the sun. Houses and settlements. Inside them, I know, are brittle stick figures dried out by the heat. They move on creaking joints, leaving splinters in their wake. Humans.
And there, in the distance, is a copse of trees casting long shadows from which glowing eyes blink at me. I sense the creatures they belong to; massive power and ferocity tightly leashed like lightning caught in an earthen bottle. They lie in wait, like a terrible storm just over the horizon about to cut a swath across the land.
I should be terrified of them. I’m not. I feel their energy crackling just beneath my skin like a message seared into my soul.
I howled once, and they answered.
I know they will again.
~
The mule lurched to a stop and Sinna rolled off the back seat as Aiden blistered the air with a long string of colorful obscenities. Sinna struggled out of the tight wedge on the floor to see what happened.
After days of lush countryside covered with trees and filled with game, they’d now stopped in the middle of a bridge over some sort of natural divide. Underneath, a small creek trickled at the bottom of a riverbed, marking a sharp change in the scenery. Behind them, a sparse green forest covered the landscape. In front, a wide swath of trees had been cut down, exposing the underbrush to unrelenting sun. The result was a vast field of stumps and dried grass, leafless bushes and not much else. Nothing moved. This was a dead land, and it hadn’t happened by accident.
“What do you think?” Aiden asked, squinting into the distance. He didn’t seem very happy about whatever he saw out there.
“We need to go around,” Bryce answered. “Far around.”
Sinna sat forward between them, looking for what had put them on edge. “What’s going on?”
Aiden and Bryce shared a look. “Nothing,” Aiden said. “Just debating our course. We’ve been heading east for too long. I think we need to turn north.”
Sinna’s grasp of geography was weak at best. She could visualize a map of the former United States, but they’d been driving for five days, keeping away from large cities and towns where Aiden claimed most of the converts were still hiding out. Humans, he said, had a hard time letting go of the past. Most of the city dwellers had been so dependent on creature comforts, they’d never learned how to survive without them. Rather than abandon a dying stronghold, they hid out in cavernous, empty buildings, still hoping for a rescue a decade after no one was left to save them.
Sinna had lived like that. She knew the truth of it all too well, and she was grateful Aiden was giving cities a wide berth, but that didn’t help her confusion any. She hadn’t seen a proper sign since that last one, two days ago, where someone had spray-painted DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND in blood red over the city’s name.
Like it or not, she had to trust the brothers to know where they were going and if east wasn’t an option, north was perfectly all right with her. Except…“I don’t see any roads north.”
Aiden chewed his lower lip, busy with some internal debate. The longer he stayed silent, the more tension she felt radiating off Bryce. He had his hand on a bowie knife strapped to his thigh, as if he expected something to jump out at them from behind a tree stump.
“I would think this is a great road to be on,” she said. “You can see for miles in every direction, and the cement looks pretty solid.” They could make it across in record time, compared to the broken, potholed, car-riddled mess they’d been driving over so far.
“That’s what worries me,” Bryce sa
id.
Aiden ignored her. “You smell anything?” he asked Bryce.
“I can go out and scout ahead.”
Aiden shook his head at once. “Not an option. We don’t separate.”
“You guys are scaring me. What’s going on?”
Aiden drummed his hands on the steering wheel for a few beats, then shifted into reverse. “I saw an exit north a few miles back. We’ll take that.”
“That was a service road!” Sinna cried. “For all you know, it dead ends in the middle of nowhere—and then what?”
“Then we four-by-four until we find another road.”
“I may not know much about cars, but even I can tell that is insane. What if you blow a tire on a sharp root or something?”
“We can blow a tire just as easily on a pothole.”
Sinna almost fell out of her seat a second time when Aiden stepped on the gas in reverse. The tires squealed in a hard right, and the mule skidded around. When he put it into gear again, Sinna wished she had a seat belt. “So I guess we’re in a hurry now?”
“Yep,” Aiden said.
Sinna glared. He hit a nasty wave in the concrete at about sixty miles an hour, and she went airborne, slamming her head against the mule’s roof. In the next instant, her ass met the seat with teeth-jarring force, and Aiden stomped on the brakes. If not for Bryce bracing a hand on Aiden’s seat to create a barrier, Sinna would have gone flying out the front windshield. As it was, the impact with his arm knocked the breath out of her.
She coughed and looked up. What the hell was Aiden’s problem this time?
A neat row of five men armed with very big guns blocked the road ahead of them.
Aiden swore, words barely audible past Bryce’s feral growl. He tried to turn the mule around again, but as Sinna shifted to the side so he could see the road, six more guys hemmed them in from the back. They did not look friendly.
“Turn the engine off!” one of them shouted, pointing his gun straight at Aiden. The others were aiming lower, at the tires, Sinna guessed.
“Drive,” Bryce growled.
“The mule ain’t bulletproof, B,” Aiden retorted.
Snarling, Bryce shifted sideways and stomped on the gas pedal. The mule squealed, tires spinning in place before the truck peeled off. Sinna covered her ears and ducked down, as the brothers fought over control of the vehicle and gunshots rent the air. Three cracked the windshield and ripped through the back seat where she’d been sitting. The mule veered left, careening off into the forest. Another hard turn and they spun, skidding sideways. The truck bed slammed into a tree with enough force to make the wood groan and split. From her vantage point, Sinna saw the trunk start to tip over.
Bryce launched back toward her, Aiden right behind him, and they fell on top of her just as the tree slammed down onto the truck bed, pinning the mule in place. Sinna couldn’t move. She was squeezed between the back bench and the front seat, with five hundred pounds of Wolfen male on top of her. They weren’t moving, but through ringing ears, she could hear two sets of strong, steady heartbeats. They were alive.
Holy shit, they were alive!
Her jubilation was short-lived. Someone wrenched the door open and bodily dragged the brothers away, then forced her out after them. By her wild count, there were fifteen people, mostly men, armed to the teeth and looking like they wouldn’t hesitate to blow the three of them to kingdom come. The one who held her down on her knees had a gun pressed to her temple. Across from her, four held Bryce face-down on the ground. He was roaring, fighting, and had almost managed to throw them off, before a fifth joined in and pressed the side of Bryce’s face into the dirt with his boot heel.
Aiden knew better. He looked around, saw all of the ammo, and raised his hands in surrender. But if looks could kill, there wouldn’t be a single human left standing. A muscle ticked in his jaw when he looked at Bryce, then he met eyes with Sinna, communicating a silent message. He’d warned her about Bryce before; violence like this could set him off on a rampage again. If he lost it, Sinna was supposed to run. No matter who was around, or how many guns they had, or how safe she thought she was—run. Aiden held her gaze, demanding some sort of acknowledgment that she knew how precarious the situation was and wouldn’t do something stupid like try to help.
“Take their weapons,” the apparent leader ordered.
Two eager volunteers descended on Aiden and stripped him of all of his blades and guns. He snapped his teeth at the one who tried to take his silver chains, which earned him a hard crack with the butt of a gun. He staggered, but didn’t go down. It was still enough of a distraction that, by the time he shook it off, his chains and rings had been removed.
Sinna didn’t fare much better; both the ferro rod and the handgun were taken. They left her bracelet, only because it couldn’t be removed without tools to pry it open. The hard-faced Latina woman who tried anyway looked very put out to be denied such a prize. Sinna smiled prettily at her.
The woman backhanded Sinna hard enough to send her sprawling. Bitch.
“Alexis!” the leader snapped.
Sinna’s vision darkened around the edges and her cheek burned and stung. She wiped her mouth, and her hand came away with blood. Even as she stared at it, the burning eased, and when she opened her mouth wide, the wound she’d bitten open inside her cheek pulled and knitted together. Sinna huffed, baffled by this, and blinked up at Aiden.
He was staring hard at the woman who’d struck her. “Alexis,” he echoed. “Got that, B?”
It took Bryce a second to answer—he was fighting hard to maintain control—but Sinna knew the moment he had grasped onto the focus of Aiden’s words and pulled himself together. “Noted,” he growled with dark malice, and Sinna realized Aiden had done this on purpose; he’d given Bryce one target, one reason to get his head on straight. Like feeding a bloodhound a fresh scent. When Bryce got free—because sooner or later he would—Alexis would not have long to live.
One of Aiden’s guards drove his knee into Aiden’s midsection. “Shut up.”
“The vehicle’s useless,” a different woman reported. “The tree’s got it pinned pretty good, and it won’t start.”
Aiden smiled at that. The mule had all sorts of tricks to it, and only Aiden, Bryce, and now Sinna, knew how to operate it.
“Strip it,” the leader said. “Take anything that looks useful.”
Aiden scowled and Sinna winced as three people unceremoniously dragged every container out of the truck. Food, water, clothes, guns, tools, pots and bottles—everything she and Bryce had so meticulously collected and stowed was carried away on an efficient little ant line. Soon, all that was left were the seats. They didn’t have tools to remove them, so the leader sent a runner to bring some.
At least the tree had mangled the back pretty well. They couldn’t move the trunk, so they couldn’t open the compartments underneath. For now. A small relief, since most of their ammo and any scavenged, nonperishable loot were inside them.
Sinna’s nape prickled. She turned around to find one of the men staring at her. He couldn’t have been much taller than her, thin, in a lanky sort of way. His brown skin was sheened in sweat and oil, glistening in the sun, his hair dirty and slicked back. He had a smattering of facial hair that made him look forever frozen in that awkward stage between man and boy, but he stood with the arrogance of a guy who believed his equipment was God’s gift to mankind. He bit his lip while he leered, and Sinna shuddered with disgust.
“What do we do with them?” Alexis asked.
The gross one shrugged. “The goods were picked over, everyone else got their share of the take. I claim the female.”
“You don’t claim shit,” the leader told him. “She belongs to the boss.”
“Funny, I didn’t think a person could be owned,” Sinna snapped before she could stop herself.
Aiden looked like his head would explode. She couldn’t hear him from that distance but, from the way his throat worked, she figured behind his
gritted teeth he was forming the words, Shut the fuck up, Sinna!
The gross one grinned. “I’ll teach you.” He hefted his crotch in his free hand. “I’ma own your ass tonight.”
Sinna tilted her head. “What did you say your name was?”
The leader, a burly black man with a shaved scalp polished to a shine, crouched in front of her. “I’d much rather know yours,” he said.
Sinna flipped him off, two-handed.
The leader chuckled. “Feel free to ignore Igme. He has a bad habit of following our rules only when they suit him. I think he needs a reminder of who he works for when we get y’all back to Haven.”
“I don’t work for free, Frankie!” Igme protested.
The leader twisted to look over at him. “Then you should’ve got while the getting was good.”
Igme cocked his hip, lifted his chin, and said, “I did. Got me the girl, didn’t I?” and Sinna wasn’t sure whether he was that arrogant or that stupid.
The leader sighed as if wondering why he even bothered. He raised two fingers and made a swirling motion, which Sinna guessed to be a signal to move out. Alexis and another woman hauled Sinna to her feet, while Aiden, with three guns pointed at him from various distances and angles, got herded back to the road alongside her.
Bryce was more difficult. Sinna craned her neck as she was being dragged away to catch sight of him. Someone had bound his arms at his back and shackled his legs so tightly he could only take very small steps or fall on his face. Two strong men held onto his arms, and it maddened Bryce that he couldn’t shake them off. He thrashed, snarling like a wild beast, until one of them slammed the butt of his gun into the back of Bryce’s head and dropped him like a stone.
Sinna gasped when he hit the ground, silently willing him to Get up, get up, get up!
He roused enough to mumble unintelligibly, but they had to carry him out of the forest after the rest of them.
Sinna blinked back frightened tears and faced forward. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded.
“Told you,” Frankie said, watching over everything from atop a boulder. “Haven.”
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