by Joss Ware
“And you’ll want to do the same,” Quent said, stepping into view, the barrel of his gun aimed at Ian.
The man didn’t move, barely leveled a glance in his direction as his lips formed a silent, but very obvious, fuck. “What happened to traveling alone?” This comment was still directed at Zoë.
“More the fool if you believe everything that comes out of a woman’s mouth,” Quent said icily. At least I never fuck and run. Right, that was going to need some pointed discussion later. “You going to put that down, or am I going to have to get serious?” He could mention the fact that he’d been a champ sharpshooter at the Guesting Country Club, but it wouldn’t mean dick to this guy.
“What are you going to do? Shoot me?”
“Not a bad idea.”
Ian didn’t waver, still pointing his gun at Zoë. “Well, I’m not going to shoot her.”
“Pardon me if I express my disbelief,” Quent said, tightening his fingers on the grip. He’d never shot, let alone aimed, a firearm at another person…but he knew that if he had to, he could squeeze one off without remorse.
“I’ve had ample opportunity to shoot if I wanted to,” Ian replied. “I just want her to put the damned bow down.”
“You’re more worried about the bow than the bullet I’m threatening to put into your head?”
Ian sent him a quick, humorless smile. “Yeah, because she’s such—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Zoë said. And she lowered her bow, dropping the arrow over her shoulder, back into the quiver. “Put the damned thing away, Ian. Your father’s dead, and you didn’t have to do it yourself. You should be kissing my ass instead of pointing a fucking gun at me.”
“Not as if you haven’t tried to get me there, Zoë darling,” Ian replied dryly. But then he lowered his weapon as Zoë gave a disgusted snort. “Perhaps I do owe you a bit of gratitude.” He looked at Zoë, continuing to ignore Quent. “He’s really gone.”
“And so’s your bounty,” Zoë said. Quent noticed that her eyes seemed wide. Was she in shock that Raul was dead? If she was, nevertheless she still copped an attitude. “Bounty stabbed him and ran off into the night.”
Ian shrugged.
“You’re not going after the bounty?”
He gave a derisive snort. “That’s not my game.”
“All right, then. I promise not to shoot you when you walk away. This time.”
Ian nodded and a flicker of a smile pulled his lips. “Same here.” And without a glance at Quent, who still, by the way, had a gun pointed at the man, he turned and melted into the shadows.
Quent eyed him as he disappeared. “You trust him not to come back and blow us away?”
“Ian? He’s pretty fucked-up about now. His father’s dead, after all. He just wished he had the balls to do it himself.”
Some of us wouldn’t have any regrets about destroying our fathers. Yet, Quent had had more than one chance in the past…and he’d never taken it. Maybe he and Ian had more in common than one would expect.
“He doesn’t have any reason to hurt me—or you—anyway. Now that Raul’s dead.”
When she started off, he put a hand out to stop her. “What about that other person—the Stranger. The bounty?”
“Not coming back. Trust me. You get away from the Marcks, you don’t fucking test your luck and come back.” She’d already started to walk toward the unmoving body of Raul Marck, and tossed these last words over her shoulder as if they were gospel.
Not quite as trusting, Quent kept his gun out and his eyes open as he followed her.
But by the time he reached where she crouched next to Raul, he felt a bit more relaxed. Just as he approached, she pulled the arrow from the man’s chest with an efficient little twist. It struck him as a bit callous, but then again, he supposed leaving it there was just as bad.
Having no desire to dig through the man’s belongings or get close and personal with the dead body, Quent watched as she set the arrow aside and then began to feel through the man’s pockets. “Looking for something?” he asked, still scanning the shadows for any orange eyes or any other newcomers.
“He had this purple glowy thing that seemed to control the gangas,” she said, settling back on her haunches. “Thought I’d try and find it. Or anything else valuable. A gun.”
Just then, they heard the low rumble of a vehicle—not from the direction they’d left theirs, but closer. As one, Zoë and Quent ducked into the shadows, shoulders bumping. But as they waited, flat against the cool brick wall of a house, the rumble became fainter…as if being driven off into the distance. Quent thought he saw the faintest glimmer of light bouncing beyond the buildings around them.
“Damn,” Zoë said. “That was Ian. I was hoping we’d get a chance to search Raul’s truck too, but now he’s gone.”
“Obviously.”
She stood and looked down at Raul Marck. “I suppose we shouldn’t just leave the body here.” So she did have a heart. “Although it might be sort of fitting if he ended up being zombie food. After all the other people he’s fed to the gangas.”
She stood for a moment, looking down at the gaunt face and skeletal limbs. “Hard to believe it’s finally over. He’s finally gone,” she whispered. She scrubbed both hands through her hair, making it even more spiky and disheveled, then let them drop heavily to her sides. “I can’t believe it.” She closed her eyes and her lips moved silently. When she opened her lids again, Quent saw that her eyes glistened a bit.
He helped her move the body, and in the end, they decided to put it in the Dumpster.
“Now what?” he asked, realizing that he wouldn’t be adverse to some zees. It had been a long day, and an even longer—and more active—night before.
“Marck’s dead. Ian’s gone. Gangas are nuked. I don’t know about you, but since we can’t have a pizza, I’m all for a bit of sleep.” She turned and started away, leaving Quent to wonder if she meant to disappear again. Or try to.
He wouldn’t put it past her to melt into the night once more.
But if that was her eventual plan, at least she wasn’t ready to implement it yet. Instead, he saw her stoop to pluck an arrow from the mess of ganga remains, and then another and another. Even from a distance, and in the half-light, he saw irregular clumps of zombie brains clinging to the tips.
Zoë flung them away as she gathered up her arrows, and as he approached, he saw her swish the arrow ends in water that had gathered in the veed-in roof of a car. “All right,” she said, turning to look at him. “Let’s find a place to camp for the night.”
“Right,” he replied, letting his voice mellow. Totally forgetting—allowing himself to forget—his bereft anger at her for trying to trick him early this morning.
After a brief discussion, they decided to drive their humvee somewhere else nearby in case Ian Marck doubled back to find them. “I know a place,” Zoë told him, and directed him about five miles east to an old church with broken stained glass windows.
The choir loft would give them a place to settle out of reach of the gangas, and he had found a hiding place for the humvee among a cluster of thick lilac bushes. Inside, the space echoed with their voices and the scuffle of footsteps, the skitter of tiny claws. Even faint slithering among the leaves. A few bats darted about, entering and exiting through the bell tower. Stained glass windows lined the sides of the small church, dirty and occasionally intact, allowing blue, red, green, and yellow light to spill inside.
The steps to the choir loft had been destroyed, either by nature or by design, but Zoë had a rope ladder and soon they were both in the dusty, empty loft.
A large circular stained glass window looked down on them from the back wall of the balcony. Light filtered through an image of Jesus tending his flock of sheep. Somehow the idea of being in a church—no matter how old it was, and in what condition—and thinking the thoughts he couldn’t help but think as a shadowy Zoë stripped off her tank top and shucked her trousers, made him feel a bit awkward. Espe
cially with the faint outline of Jesus’s kind eyes gazing down at him.
Quent wished for a basin of water to dunk his hands, face, and, hell, all of him into. Between the heat of the day and the dust and grime of climbing through old buildings, he felt a little rough. As if reading his mind, Zoë walked over, dressed only in a long (fresh) tank top, and offered him a skin of water. “It’s no hot shower, but it’s wet,” she told him.
By the time he finished his limited ablutions and stripped down to a pair of shorts, Quent noticed that she’d walked over to the edge of the choir loft. She stood at the railing, looking down into the semi-darkness where sagging and splintered rows of pews made irregular shapes.
He wanted to warn her away from the waist-high wall, for fear that she might tumble through a weak spot, but he didn’t. If there was one thing he’d come to accept about Zoë, it was that she could take care of herself. She needed no one. She allowed herself to rely on no one.
And she was a stubborn prat.
Oddly enough, he could understand that, because in all the years he lived under his father’s roof, he’d learned the same.
“You okay?” he asked, walking up next to her.
She turned to look up at him, her high cheekbones and tousled hair gilded with moonlight, her eyes sober. “I can’t believe he’s dead. He’s really dead,” she added in a whisper.
Quent nodded, knowing it wasn’t the time to speak.
“Now what?” she said, staring back out into the darkness. “Now what the hell do I do?” She tipped her head back a bit, exposing her long, graceful neck as she squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve been looking for the bastard for so long…and now he’s gone. Finally.” She swiped roughly at her eyes with a forearm. “I can’t believe I did it.”
Quent wanted to ask if she regretted her decision, but again he held his tongue. Instead, he reached over and closed his large hand over her smaller one where it rested on the rough railing. So delicate and slender, her fingers. Yet, they were rough and capable.
“Maybe I should have waited. Asked him why,” she said bitterly. “Why the hell he chose my family. Why he chose to do it all. But what if I never had another damned chance? And every day that went by meant that more people died because of him. Every day.”
She drew in an unsteady breath and he knew she was off on a bloody roll now. He’d just let her go, let her work through it. And listen.
How often did she have someone to listen?
“I can keep hunting gangas, of course I can keep hunting them,” she continued in a voice that had become rougher, lower. “That’s what I’ll do. Every night. Even though that fucker’s gone, they aren’t. There are still so many of them. Damn, I wanted that purple glowing thing.” She drew in another breath, then sank into silence.
Quent stood next to her for a long moment, his hand covering hers, waiting. But she seemed to be finished. “Want to get some sleep?” he asked, trying to make the suggestion sound as innocent as he meant it. Which was to say, very innocent.
Because he was a bit shaken inside. She’s lost.
Just like me.
The second thought, his mental response, stopped him cold. Lost didn’t begin to describe the way he felt, knowing that he was the progeny of a man who’d helped destroy the world…an ugly, frightening world in which Quent was unable to find a foothold. A place to be.
A way to belong.
“I am tired,” she said, turning at last from her contemplation of the dark church.
Their eyes met and something shifted deep inside him, like the inner gears of an old watch. Clicked, clunked, settled.
Mouth dry, heart beating radically, Quent reached, sliding his hand along her jaw to curl around the back of her head. Then he eased closer and gathered her mouth gently under his. Her lips, soft and parted, tasted like Zoë. Just like Zoë, like spice and sweetness, comfort and passion and reality. He closed his eyes, savored her taste and warmth, the tender sensation of an unhurried moment. Their lips melded gently, shifted, then again, as if relearning the mouth of the other. Then he pulled away, gently, from the kiss that simply said I’m here. I care.
She had placed her hands flat on his bare chest during the kiss, and now she removed them as she stepped away and turned to where they’d left their packs on the dusty floor. He watched her straighten and recognized the way she pulled back inside her crusty shell, behind the rough shield.
He wondered how long it would be before he could coax her out again. And if she would be different now—more brittle. Or would she be softer?
Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine a kinder, gentler Zoë.
And, a short time later as Quent lay next to her on a slender, thin pallet, he looked up at the rafters as they became more distinct with the sunrise, and realized he and Zoë had been together for more than twenty-four hours with nothing more happening between them than a kiss.
Zoë shifted next to him, her breathing steady and deep. Clearly sleeping, somehow able to put aside all that had happened and slip into restfulness while he could not. But despite the low throb of desire he felt, lying next to her slender curves and feeling the brush of her hair, Quent realized he was…content.
Yes, that was the word. Content. Settled.
As if the gears that had shifted inside him now worked properly.
CHAPTER 9
Zoë opened her eyes to find yellow and blue light filtering into the room. Quent slept close behind her, so near that she could feel the faint brush of the hair from his legs and the warmth of his torso.
She sat up, her tank clinging and sticky from the heat. If it was this warm, it must be getting close to noon. Hard to tell for sure through the grimy stained glass windows. She sat up, and realized that Raul Marck was dead.
He was dead. It was over.
She’d really done it.
The rush of relief, followed by the strangeness of knowing she no longer had to crave revenge on the bastard…and that she’d actually killed a man…made her feel ass-crap backwards. Weirdly empty. It was a hell of a lot different than scrambling the brains of a boulderheaded monster.
It really was.
She bit her lip, felt a trickle of cold prickle over her. She’d had to do it. One life in exchange for the safety of many. No one else was going to do it; and it wasn’t like in the books, where there was a legal system with judge, jury, and prison waiting for someone like Raul Marck.
But now what? The thought made her feel even more ass-crap.
She crawled from beneath the thin blanket, climbing off the flimsy pallet that she kept squashed up into a miniscule size, and stretched. Behind her, Quent breathed slowly and steadily, and she wondered if he was truly sleeping, or if he was waiting for her to make a break for it.
The thought did cross her mind, but one look at him gave her pause, because, holy crap, he was one gorgeous son-of-a-bitch. His whole golden, honeyish self, tinted a bit of bronze where his skin had been touched by the sun. Those shoulders too—they made her mouth go dry, just looking at the one jutting up from where he slept on his side. Wide and square, with the shadowy dip of his collarbone and a healthy dusting of hair below it. And the smooth bulge of a very capable bicep rising from beneath the blanket.
A shoulder. She was lusting after a freaking shoulder.
But that was because she knew exactly what went along with it.
Zoë was even warmer now. Time to find somewhere to wash up. In fact, she was fairly sure a creek ran nearby. She’d stayed in this church once about three years ago, and remembered the area.
A glance at Quent indicated that he was still sleeping, and not for the first time she wondered at how he slept so heavily. She woke at the slightest shift of the wind or sound of a ganga groan, but how many times had she risen, dressed, and left without him noticing?
Taking care not to disturb him, but leaving her belongings so that he knew she wasn’t leaving again—not that she cared what he thought, but she didn’t want the genius to hurt himself trying t
o chase after her down the rope ladder—Zoë pulled on shorts, grabbed her little pot of soap, and left the church. Her path led through a cemetery studded with overgrown gravestones and a rusted iron fence.
The creek was just where she’d remembered it. Whether it had been here when the church had a following and the homes nearby were occupied by humans, she didn’t know.
Cool and clear, the water felt like paradise. She stripped and used the soap to wash her clothes, then laid them over a bush to dry. Then she waded into the water, which, upon reflection, she decided was more of a small river than a creek. Though the current was gentle, the depth in the center reached to the underside of her breasts.
She dove under and allowed the flow to shuttle her along. Allowed the purity of the water to wash away her weariness and the lingering feeling of emptiness. When she opened her eyes, she was downstream from her clothing, and amid the tops of the trees she saw the bell tower of the church where she and Quent had slept. And in the other direction, even farther away, she identified just the tip of the other church’s spire, near which Quent had seen the truck headlights last night.
Zoë flipped onto her belly and swam easily upstream, enjoying the feel of her long muscles stretching against the gentle pull of the water. She passed the bush where her clothes rested and her heart skipped a little beat when she saw that Quent had arrived and was preparing to join her.
Smiling to herself, she pretended to ignore him and arced under. Swimming even farther upstream beneath the water, she imagined the feel of two slippery bodies twining sleekly under the warm sun. Not a bad way to start the first day of the rest of her life.
Not a bad way at all.
She emerged from the water and looked back in time to see the smooth arc as Quent dove shallowly into the river, his pale ass gleaming briefly in the sunlight. Zoë smiled to herself and went under again. He’d catch up with her. And that would be half the fun.