I blink slowly. “Sore.”
“You will be for awhile.”
“I’ve had worse.” I’m pretty sure it’s a lie. I nod to the phone clutched in her hand. “Are they on their way? The paramedics,” I clarify when she gives me a blank look. I swallow hard. My throat clicks, parched, and Allie leaps to her feet.
“I can give you a little water if you want. You can’t have more than a few sips at a time. Not for twelve hours. Like after a surgery. You’ve already slept through three of them though,” she says, the words streaming out of her in a babble.
She let me sleep for three hours? I think as she hurries to the kitchen. The sink turns on, then off, but a long minute ticks past before Allie returns.
“You’re going to be okay,” she says. She holds the glass to my lips. The water barely wets them before she pulls it away and sets it on the floor beside us. “Tell me what happened.”
I need a story, something convincing. I reach for the glass to buy time but before I can grab it, my fingers curl, claw-like. “Damn it,” I whisper. To my surprise, she takes the hand and massages it straight with expert fingers.
“Better?” she asks, her blue eyes wide, nervous.
“Yeah, just a cramp.” I start the story slowly. “I was on my way back. Halfway here, I noticed a guy behind me.”
“And then what?” she prods.
The key to a good lie is sticking close to the truth. Getting the details right. “I turned the corner, kept walking. When I looked back he was there, so I waited.” She’s still holding my hand. I stare at our fingers, not sure if I should twist mine between hers. In the end, I settle for her touch. “He gives me this big grin like we’re old friends, just at the point I’m realizing something’s not right with him. He’s smiling but his eyes...he’s looking at me like he hates me.”
Remembering the scene now, I twist the look on Jamison’s face to match. Make it sinister. Cruel. It’s easier than I hoped. I wince, sit up and go for the glass again.
“Not too much,” she cautions as I fight down a few swallows.
My side throbs. I press a hand there when I set the glass on the floor. “So I start to get a little nervous about him. I mean, my friend was just hacked apart.” It’s a good detail. I can tell by the way she leans slightly forward, absorbing the story. “For all I know, this is the guy. I’m thinking maybe he’s got a hatred for street kids or something and I’m pretty sure I’m right because he asks me if I knew Brandon.” I meet her eyes. I think about what Jamison said. We need her afraid. “But then he asked me if I knew you.”
The color leaches from her cheeks.
“I hadn’t even answered when he hit me in the side. I didn’t know what happened until I saw the blade in his hand,” I add.
She’d figured Brandon was killed because he was like her. I want her to make a connection between what happened to him and what happened with me. I want her to be terrified enough to trust me. I’ve gotta get some sort of info from her. Because once Jamison hears she didn’t fix me, he’s going to take it personal. The same way he did when we were younger and he figured out the bruises were coming from my dad. I push away the memory. That life’s over. Gone. I’m someone new now.
“Allie,” I whisper. “What the hell are you mixed up in?”
She gives her head the slightest shake, presses the back of her hand against her mouth, and I know I did the right thing. A sudden burning sears my side and I have to take four deep breaths before I can talk. “I think I need a doctor. This...it was deep.”
Her brow wrinkles in concern. “It was.” The sheet she’d put over me is bunched in my lap. For the first time I see my shirt, the tear straight up the middle. Before I can pull the fabric aside, her hand touches mine. “Don’t,” she says quietly.
A small laugh chuffs from me. “You think it’s gonna gross me out? I need to see how bad it is.”
She licks her lips. She’s threading the bottom of her tank top through her fingers, up, over, twisting. “What’d he look like, this guy?” she says suddenly.
“Shaved head, no tats that I could see,” I say. “A little built. Jeans and t-shirt.” It’s a description for a hundred people, a thousand. But it also matches Jamison. I glance up at her. There’s a quiver to her chin. She bites her lip and her face crumples, a slow tear tracing down her cheek. I freeze. “You’re crying.”
“Yeah.” Her voice cracks on the single word. She swipes a palm against her cheek and rolls her eyes, embarrassed. “I’m kind of in a heap of shit right now. And I brought you into it. We’ve got to call my aunt. I’m going to have to move away from here.” She drops her face into her palms, shudders once and then scrubs the palms across her closed eyes. “Damn it,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I was trying to get clear of it.”
I give her a minute to get herself together. Granted, we haven’t exactly known each other long, but I’ve never seen her look so completely wrecked. I can’t take it anymore. “Allie?” I say softly.
She sniffs hard and brushes a few stray strands of hair away from her cheek. “Forget it. I’m fine,” she says with a laugh that tells me she’s not.
Everything inside me itches, the same way it did at the camp before I found Brandon. I want to run, get away, but I’m not even sure I can stand.
My eye catches on a needle on the armrest of the couch. The thing’s huge; nothing like the used sharps dropped around the worst parts of the boxcars. Allie follows my line of vision. “Did you stick that in me?” I ask in shock.
“I...No. It’s…” She presses her lips together and then she starts again. “Fine. I did. I had to.”
“Why?” The question comes out shaky. It’s what anyone would ask, what she’d expect me to ask, but anticipation knots my stomach.
She gives me an uncertain look. “We need to talk.”
My fingers catch the sheet and move it aside to reveal the rest of my torn, bloodstained shirt. I can see the angry scarred edges of the wound, puckered and barely healed around the stitches. Healed. My fingers brush over it as my jaw drops.
“You told me you didn’t want to die,” she whispers.
She did it. I can’t believe she actually did it.
“You healed me,” I say in disbelief. I have enough sense to twist the end into a question.
“I can heal people.” There’s hesitation in her voice. “But you needed more than that.” My head snaps up. “Left side, right under your ribs is your spleen,” she says, laying a hand on the spot she’s talking about, the place Jamison got me. “I think that’s what the knife hit. By the time you got to my door, you’d lost too much blood.” She scoots away a bit as if to give me space, almost like she’s afraid of how I’ll react to what’s coming. “You were dead when I found you.” she says.
“You—” brought me back I start but I have the sense to swallow the words. A tremor starts in my fingers.
“It’s not a joke and it’s not a trick.” She keeps her voice steady, projecting a calm I can’t grasp as my heart hammers. “You’re alive now only because I got to you before the death became permanent.”
The bubble of fear and excitement and disbelief building inside of me bursts. My breathing ratchets up, pulse skyrocketing and suddenly the pain is back, throbbing and awful. Dead. I was dead. “What did you do to me?”
She winces as if I’ve accused her of something terrible, when really I need to know how, what. How did she bring me back? What’d she put in the syringe?
“I’m human, okay? Don’t look at me like I’m a monster!” she spits. “You’re human, too. Nothing’s different. You’re not a zombie or anything.” When I don’t react, she drops her eyes. “Do you think you can stand?”
The question throws me off. I nod distractedly as I flex my fingers. I don’t feel anything except for the ache low on my side. No power. No sense of being something more. She grabs the hand hovering in the air between us and I shift my legs under me, rise to my knees. If anything, as I stand I’m weaker, drained. My k
nees wobble. She catches my elbow and steadies me before I can fall.
“We need to get you to the couch,” she says, grunting under my weight as I struggle to keep balanced. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
I take tentative steps, sure any second I’ll drag us to the floor. I have to focus. Now’s the time to ask questions. She seems shaken. She might answer them. “I don’t understand how you can do this,” I start.
“What, drag your ass to the couch?” she says and I roll my eyes. It earns me half a laugh from her before she goes serious again. “It’s a genetic thing. My mom had it. So does my aunt.”
“And now me?” It comes out breathless. I can’t hide my anticipation.
To my disappointment, she shakes her head. “Don’t worry. It just gets you up and moving again.”
“Oh,” I say quietly. Jamison is not going to take this news well. She lowers me onto the couch. For a long moment, she only stares at me, biting her lip. I should be pumping for information but the odd mix of heartbreak and terror in her eyes is like cotton in my mouth.
“Ploy,” she says finally. “You can’t tell anyone what I can do. Geneticists would give anything to study us if they knew we exist. Test blood. Dissect our bodies. What government wouldn’t kill to have a soldier like me in their arsenal?” I feel like she’s reciting a speech she’s heard a dozen times. She sits down beside me and hugs her knees to her chest. “Other kids had nightmares about monsters under the bed. My monsters were always dressed in white lab coats, after bad little girls who couldn’t keep secrets.” Her eyes meet mine. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about me, okay? People are killed for this ability. My parents. They were gutted to make sure they stayed dead. My dad wasn’t even a resurrectionist.”
“Gutted?” When I speak, my voice is small. “Like Brand was in the boxcar.” It kept them dead, scraping their insides away. I knew that much.
“My aunt knew Brandon. He was one of us. In hiding. The only way to kill us is to remove organs. That or poisoning the blood itself. Otherwise our blood heals everything.”
“Your parents weren’t the same as Brandon.” The words are out before I can stop them. I swallow hard and look up at her. “Whoever killed Brandon, I mean. It wasn’t the same person as your parents?” I say quickly, twisting it into a question, because to me, it’s a statement. Jamison couldn’t have had anything to do with them dying. Brandon had been a slip up, a mistake.
She gives her head a quick shake, her eyes downcast. “Someone broke in while I was gone and... That was a long time ago, though. Isolated incident.” The bitterness to her voice makes me suspect she’s not quite as over it as she’s pretending to be. “There have been others missing lately. Sarah...that’s my aunt...she doesn’t know what’s happening.”
“So you knew when I told you what happened to him. You knew what Brandon was.” Of course she did, but she needs to see me making the connections. “And you were scared.” Even before Jamison used Brandon’s death to shake her up, her parents’ deaths had ingrained the paranoia I see in her sometimes. And then something else occurs to me. I look up at Allie, everything I know about her suddenly shifting. Someone broke in. “Oh my God, you...”
“Ploy?” She must see the hurt on my face.
“You weren’t worried about me sleeping in the camp,” I say slowly. “You weren’t being a friend. You’re afraid. That’s why you let me start sleeping on your couch.”
She blinks rapidly. “We have tight time constraints. There’s no real way to vet out the people we bring back. We take the chance that some of them will come after the blood, want more of it even once we explain it doesn’t work like that. Hazard of the job.” She says the words flippantly but her tone’s all off.
So there are others after her.
“You used me to protect you?” Oh, the irony.
Her hands fist in her lap, an angry blush on her cheeks. “I don’t need you to protect me. I can protect myself.”
I lean back against the cushion. “Then why did you want me here?”
“I...” As quickly as it came, her anger fades. “If someone came through the door, you’d stop them. You’d fight. Slow them up. I figured it would give me...” She winces her eyes shut. Shame radiates from her, but doesn’t soften the blow. “Give me time to get myself away.”
I stare at her in stunned silence.
I have underestimated this girl.
She’s clever, and what she’s just admitted means she’s not afraid to be cruel. She reminds me of Jamison. Something inside me twists hard. I’m not sure if it’s because of the stab wound or not. The muscles in my arms cord and uncord as I clench my hands into fists, thinking. When I look up her attention is locked on them, her knees shifted, ready to move, fight. Her arm sits at her side, disarmingly still, her fingers hovering over the knife she carries. I wonder if she’d use it on me, how quickly I’d heal if she did. I relax my hands and she, too, relaxes.
Another pain shoots through me. How long is this going to last? I wonder. Jamison never said anything about how much it hurts. Maybe he doesn’t know.
“I called my aunt as soon as you left today,” she says. “She’s looking into Brandon’s murder.” At the mention of her aunt, her brow furrows. “But if someone definitely attacked you to get to me, this changes everything. We can go to Sarah’s tonight and—”
“Why we?” I ask. “You don’t need me.”
I’ve been fighting my feelings for her—hell, even got Jamison to give me more time to work her—and the whole time I was utterly dispensable to her. I wonder if it was all a waste, if we should have done it Jamison’s way. Stop it, I think furiously. You stick with her and get information on the aunt, too. It’s what Jamison would want. “Unless you want me to come,” I say lightly.
She stands and then bends to snag the syringe off the arm of the couch. The needle sends a shiver through me. She never said where she stuck it. “Right now you need to sleep. I’m surprised you’re conscious, to be honest,” she calls over her shoulder as she heads to the bedroom. “Sleep helps with the healing. Don’t move. I’ll make up my bed for you, just give me a sec.”
But I can’t sit still. Nervous energy rumbles through me. On shaking legs, I make my way to her bedroom. I’ve never been inside—at least not further than the doorway. She’s in the closet, reaching for fresh sheets. I watch in silence as she strips the mattress and puts on the new set. “I’m fine on the couch,” I say, leaning heavily against the doorframe. I can almost sense the strength running out of me. “You’re not going to leave for your aunt’s without me?”
“Your legs are shaking,” she says, distractedly. “Sit down before you collapse.”
Sweat breaks out on my forehead. A wave of nausea rolls over me. This time, it’s not going to pass. “Allie,” I say, suddenly. I touch the back of my hand to my lips. “I’m gonna be sick.”
She rushes toward me, brushes past. “Wait!” she yells behind her as she races to the kitchen. “Waitwaitwaitwait!”
I hook an arm across my stomach as if it’ll hold the inevitable flood of what’s coming. I can’t even open my mouth to tell her to hurry.
Doubling over, I heave just as she slides a giant plastic bowl under my face. Not much comes up but the few swallows of water, tinged yellow. Bubbles of spit float on the surface as I wait, sure there’s more. When I’m finished, I stay bent over, my hands on my knees. “Okay,” I finally manage.
She pulls the bowl away. “What part of don’t move, stay on the couch, wasn’t working for you?”
I nod grimly and wipe my mouth on the back of my shaking arm. “Point taken.” The vindication on her face falls away as she sighs.
“Stay here,” she tells me.
My eyes close as I clutch the doorframe, but the sound of her dumping the bowl into the toilet turns my stomach again and I have to open them.
Allie lays a hand on my arm as she passes. “We’ll keep this close, in case,” she says, setting the bowl on the
nightstand. She hands me a wet washcloth. “Clean yourself up. Before you sleep, I need to get the stitches out.”
“Already?” I hesitate for just a second and then pull the tattered t-shirt over my head. Avoiding the wound, I scrub at the blood with the wet rag.
“Can I...?” She slowly takes the washcloth from me. “Why don’t you lie down on the bed,” she says. Exhaustion floods my limbs as I release the door frame. She catches my wrist. “You okay?”
I drop onto the bed, too tired to form the words to answer.
“Lay back,” she instructs and I’m more than happy to comply.
My eyes drift closed in a long blink and when I open them I’m almost sure I catch her staring at my abs. Then she lifts a messenger bag onto the bed and takes out a tiny pair of scissors. Right. Stab wound. Not staring at my abs after all. Dispensable.
She glances up as if expecting a protest, fear maybe. I throw an arm up over my head to give her better access to the closed slice. “I know the drill.”
“Not quite baby’s first shanking?”
The laugh stings my side. “I’m not exactly a stranger to stitches.” Any trace of humor fades from my voice as I remember the trips to the hospital. The pitying looks from nurses when I told them I’d gotten in a fight, fallen down the stairs, wiped out on my bike. I remember the day he caught me packing my stuff and the sound of my rib breaking and the pinch of my eyes swelling shut and the crush of his hands around my throat.
I remember what Jamison did that day.
Because of that, what Allie said before can’t matter. I have to get in with her and make sure she doesn’t see me as some sort of throw away, a bone for the dogs after her. I have to work this right for Jamison. For both of us. I didn’t graduate. I’ve got no address, no job. Getting this power is my only chance at a good life. Without Jamison and this plan of his, I wouldn’t have a chance at a future. Hell, I wouldn’t have even gotten out of my dad’s house.
I swallow hard and remember the panic, no air, tightening hands.
“It’s not totally healed yet,” she says, breaking me out of the memory. “The longer the stitches are in, though, the harder they are to remove and you need to crash soon.”
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