Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning

by Brandt, Siara

  The truth was that deep down Cayla could be fiercely independent if she had to be, and she wasn’t bluffing about it. He knew with a certainty that if he stepped over the line, she’d leave him in a heartbeat and go off on her own for good. Some things had to be on her terms. Which was fine with him. He did a lot of demanding himself.

  “Same plan as always,” he answered her as he ate. “We do things smart and do things right. We expect the worst and hope it doesn’t happen. Which also means,” he reminded her. “That if we get in a bad situation, you do what I tell you to do without any hesitation and with no questions asked.”

  She nodded slightly, without even a syllable of protest.

  He lifted one dark brow as he stared at her across the table. “That easy?”

  She looked up from her plate. “What?”

  “I’m wondering why it was so easy to convince you to listen to me.”

  “It’s no big deal.” She shrugged blue-clad shoulders. “It’s better than listening to Beck. You at least know what you’re doing.”

  It was a complement of sorts, he guessed. He knew that she had to make a monumental effort to put so much faith in him. She had to sacrifice her natural inclinations. Inclinations that had been taught to her in a harsh and unforgiving world. But conflicting thoughts were warring within him. A part of him still fought against being responsible for her. The burden, at times, seemed too much for him to bear. In the past, perhaps, he would have turned his back on her without a second thought. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Something had changed him. She had risked her life for him and he couldn’t forget that.

  She recovered her light-hearted mood with a speed that astounded him. She even smiled at him. Once again, that smile wove its magic around him. It got inside him, threatened to thaw something that had been frozen for an eternity. He should get up and walk away from her now. That would be the smart thing to do. But he stayed. Trapped just like that struggling moth she had been so concerned with earlier, until she had safely freed it from the spider web. If only there was such a simple way to free him.

  But he was caught just like that moth in her goodness. In her innocence. Those things still remained intact. Amazingly. She believed in more than she had a right to believe in after all she had been through. She still held onto that elusive concept of right and wrong. She continued to worry that she would take something that belonged to someone else. Worried that there were children out there and elderly people who might not have someone to take care of them. Worried that the living, as well as the dead, died without dignity and a proper burial, without anyone to mourn over them.

  She’d seen a dog once at a distance. It had been a scrawny, half-starved looking thing. She had tried to coax the dog into coming closer so she could feed it even though he had told her very firmly that there was no way they could keep a dog. But before the dog could come any closer, it had been run off by hunters and they’d had to move on, but not without her breaking down into a torrent of tears over having to leave the dog behind.

  “Cutting you loose like that- ” he began. “Whoever did it knew you didn’t stand much of a chance of surviving out here on your own.”

  “It was hard,” she admitted, “Realizing that it was so deliberate.” The insufficient words sounded hollow even to herself.

  “I’m sorry for that,” he said.

  “Why should you be sorry?” she asked him.

  Because he would have protected her from that if he had been able to.

  “Because someone decided to put you through hell.” Dalin looked to the side as a muscle ticked in his jaw. “And you didn’t deserve that. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy time for you.”

  Cayla felt something rise up inside her despite her best efforts to keep it tamped down. Her hands closed into tight fists alongside her plate as she tried hard to fight the relentless wave of memory that threatened to wash over her like a black tide. In spite of her efforts, the memory of the brutal rape shortly after her abandonment came over her with a suddenness that almost took her breath away. She bowed her head and uttered a sound like a sob, then covered her face with her hands as all the trauma of that day came back to her.

  “Someone hurt you,” Dalin said thickly as he watched her struggle. Her pain was so raw he could almost feel it himself.

  She nodded, unable to voice it all in mere words. “I don’t want to think about it,” she whispered raggedly.

  As she briefly told him what had happened, Dalin’s jaw hardened. Only now did he realize just how much the fragile of her was mixed in with the strength. “I can’t change all that,” he finally said, and then vowed, “But I’ll do my damndest to make sure no one ever hurts you again.”

  Hours later, Dalin was standing in the open doorway of a diner. “We’re almost out of daylight,” he said absently as a hunter emerged from behind the chain link fence at the far end of the street and immediately headed straight towards them.

  “Looks like they found their way out of the baseball field.” He sighed heavily. They had seen the hunters earlier, but they had been trapped in the enclosed ball field. They had searched most of the town earlier and found no one alive, only hunters. “The rest will follow,” he said. “We’ll have to find a safe place to spend the night.”

  Running had become a way of life. It became second nature. You could never just stay put in one place, never stop being vigilant. So putting down roots became the desired thing. The thing hoped for more than anything else. They’d pushed hard today, gone as far as they could physically go. Now it was a matter of finding temporary shelter and waiting out the night, and the rain if it did come, before heading out again.

  Two more hunters came out of the baseball field.

  “Stay behind me,” Dalin said to Cayla as he started walking.

  The hunters were in the street now, their ravaged bodies making their way slowly, inexorably towards them.

  “That big house at the end of the street,” Dalin told her as he picked up his pace. “We’ll have to make a run for it.”

  “The side door,” he pointed when they reached the yard. “It’s closer.”

  They reached the gate of the picket fence that enclosed the yard, and cautiously checked everything out for as long as they dared. You had to be on guard against the living and the dead at all times.

  They quick-stepped up onto the porch and Dalin jerked the door open, grateful at finding it unlocked. Sometimes they got lucky. He looked around briefly, heard nothing, saw nothing, so he shoved Cayla inside. Following her in, he closed the door and locked it behind them. Then they started opening doors. There was no way of knowing, of course, which door would offer a brief period of freedom. Or death. Or worse.

  Chapter 7

  They didn’t follow a straight line through the forest. They avoided the deeper depressions where flesh hunters had gotten themselves trapped and then couldn’t climb out again. They couldn’t see the hunters down in the hollows, but they could hear them in the darkness. Eventually the landscape flattened out and they began to make better time.

  “Stop.” Gage yelled out suddenly, coming to an abrupt halt. Addy had heard his deep groan and saw that he had run straight into a wire fence. “Careful, that’s a strand of barbed wire along the top.”

  Even in the darkness, Addy saw the blood darkening his shirt and his palm. She moved closer. “Let me help you.”

  As she dabbed at the blood, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he answered her. “But we’re going to have to get over this fence.”

  They carefully climbed the fence and stood gazing out across an open field that must have been a cornfield at one time.

  “We’ll keep to the edge of this field,” Gage said. “I don’t want to be out in the open even if we would make better time.”

  Skirting the field and keeping to the deeper shadows at the edge of the trees, Gage was going over their options. He felt exposed and vulnerable in the darkness. They needed to find a pl
ace to shelter for the night. They needed to find food and drink and some warmer clothes for Addy. The temperature was dropping and despite a light coat, she was shivering, She didn’t complain but he knew the cold was wearing her down as much as their relentless pace.

  In the distance before them they could see two buildings. One to the left and one to the right. They couldn’t see what the buildings were but the roofs were gilded in the moonlight.

  “Kind of like the story,” Gage said when they paused a moment to rest. “What do you think? The lady or the tiger?”

  Addy stared at the two buildings. Wrong decisions were costly in this world. Usually there were no second chances, no making it right again. But even a tiger seemed preferable to where they had been. She pointed to one of the buildings. “How about that one?”

  The building turned out to be a house trailer. When they drew closer, they heard someone yelling. “Help me. Help me, dammit, or I swear I’m going to kill you.”

  The cries had already stopped by the time they reached the yard of the trailer. The door was wide open. There were hunters inside thumping around and snarling viciously. Obviously with a kill. Two more hunters were staggering around in the yard, trying to find their way inside, but not having much success. There were two sheds in the yard. Neither looked inviting. And almost on top of them, in the branches of a huge sycamore, was a tree house.

  The hunters in the yard spotted them almost immediately. Gage was gripping the knife in his hand when a ladder dropped down from the tree house. He had no way of knowing what was in the tree house, but at the moment it looked a lot safer than the yard so he urged Addy to climb the ladder. Then he followed her up.

  There were two people in the tree house. A woman and a child. The child looked to be about eight. The woman was young and painfully thin and she looked like she’d been through hell. She had a split lip and numerous dark bruises on her face. She peered at Gage closely through the darkness for a few moments, then slumped down wearily on a wooden chest and began to tell them her story.

  “I met him on the road,” she said as she turned her face briefly in the direction of the trailer. “He said he was going to take care of us.” She paused and closed her eyes for a moment before she went on. “It didn’t take long for him to start showing what he really was, and I soon realized we were nothing more than his prisoners.” She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly before she continued. “Someone hid water and food up here. He didn’t bother to climb up here so he didn’t know about it. He went to look for food in the trailer . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she left the rest unsaid.

  She stood up and opened the wooden box and showed them bottles of water, canned foods and a can opener. There were even a couple of blankets. Gage drew a relieved breath for the first time in days. They’d be safe from hunters up here. They would be able to eat and drink and get a good night’s sleep. Addy looked like she desperately needed both. So did the woman and the child.

  He pulled the ladder back up and, without saying more, there in the darkness, with the snarls of hunters in the background, the small group prepared a humble meal that seemed like a feast. Addy looked up, startled, but deeply touched, to hear something from her past as Gage led them all in prayer before they ate.

  “Shut the goddamned door,” a voice growled irritably, waking Gage from a deep sleep. A string of vile profanities followed the slamming of a door. “We just had to take care of two more of ‘em. The last thing I need this early is to have to deal with a whole fucking pack of those things. They’ve killed someone in there. For all we know it was the ones we’re looking for.”

  “It’s all right with me if we’re done here,” another voice spoke up. “I’ve tramped around these damned woods for as long as I’m going to on an empty stomach.

  “What about that tree house?” the same voice asked.

  There was silence for the space of half a dozen heart beats. And then one of the men grunted shortly. “There’s no ladder and no way to get up there. I’m sure as hell not going to build one. Let’s get back. They better have a hot meal waiting for us after all this.”

  Malise’s fake smile fooled everyone else, but it didn’t fool Parisa. Parisa had seen what the woman was capable of. She would stop at nothing to get what she wanted, whether it was theft, lying or outright seduction. Malise had already proven that she was a master of manipulation. Maybe it was how she had learned to survive. Or maybe she had always been like that. Malise wore her own brand of camouflage in the very midst of these people. She had quickly became one of them, blending in so well now that they were blithely unaware of the deception that was moving around right in their midst. It reminded Parisa of a hunter wearing an animal skin while she walked among the herd before singling out a victim. And everyone, every male at least, was a potential victim.

  Parisa understood full well that you had to wall yourself off to a certain degree to survive in the current world. That you had to shield your emotions. Vulnerability, like hesitation or uncertainty, could get you killed in an instant. Just as mercy was oftentimes scorned and looked upon as being a weakness. By some members of the group at least. Some of them even seemed proud of having left those things behind them and sometimes, Parisa admitted to herself, she was more than a little troubled by that.

  Parisa knew that Malise had been hoarding food. She had caught her several times in the very act of theft. Beck either didn’t know or he didn’t care. Watching Beck with Malise now, she wondered if it was the latter.

  As she watched Malise smile at Beck, Parisa told herself that she was glad she hadn’t lost all her honesty and innocence the way that some of these people had. It seemed to her to be a very great loss. She looked down at the baby in her arms as thoughts about her own daughter washed over her again. For a long time she had not been able to grieve for Annalea. She had walled herself off from her own pain because it had seemed unbearable. But she eventually realized that she hadn’t escaped the pain. She had only hidden from it.

  But healing, she thought as she looked down at Sisha, comes in spite of ourselves. In spite of the pain.

  It had been a long, difficult journey. A brutal, agonizing one. In the end, she realized she was the only one who could keep Annalea's memory alive. That memory was still alive inside of her. As long as she had breath, it always would be a part of her. Like Annalea’s memory, the baby gave her life meaning, too. It gave her a reason to go on.

  Matthew Newlin walked over and joined her. He was a great bear of a man, but he was the gentlest man Parisa had ever known. And the most thoughtful. Mattew sometimes made runs outside and he would always come back with something that somebody needed. He often brought back things for her and Sisha, too. Maybe it was a toy or some clothing because Sisha was always outgrowing things. Just yesterday he had brought a backpack crammed with diapers, sleepers and fresh berries he’d collected from the woods.

  Matthew had been captured along with Addy and they had been confined by members of the death cult for a time before both had managed to escape. Unfortunately, they’d been separated, so only Matthew had made his way back. But Parisa suspected that Matthew went out not only to look for provisions, but to look for Addy and Macayla as well, that he never gave up searching.

  She smiled at Matthew who was playing with Sisha. He seemed to be having as much fun as she was as she laughed at the faces he was making.

  “I’m going to make a run tomorrow,” Matthew told Parisa. “I’ll bring back something for you.”

  “Be careful, Matthew.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m always careful.”

  “Beck said just yesterday that he doesn’t want anyone to go outside the walls.”

  “There’s no reason for that,” Matthew said. “Don’t I always come back with something someone can use?”

  “I still worry about you.” And then she added in a lower voice, “Is it just me, or is Beck becoming more and more restrictive?”

  “It isn’t just you. He’s been rati
oning food more and more.”

  “Do you think we’re running that low?”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said with a shake of his head.

  No one knew what the food situation was. No one was allowed into the food storage building any more. Beck kept it locked at all times. But Parisa knew that Malise, at least, was getting more than her fair share.

  “You hunt, Matthew. You fish. You bring back food all the time and you share it all. Does Beck even appreciate what you do?”

  “I don’t care if Beck appreciates it or not.”

  “Well, I do. It isn’t right that some people get special treatment, while others have to go hungry. Please, please be careful out there, Matthew.”

  Beck walked over to Parisa later.

  “You and Matthew looked pretty cozy earlier.”

  “What?”

  “You two looked like you were sharing secrets.”

  “What secrets would we have to share?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Matthew risks his life for you and everyone else. How can you accuse him of keeping secrets? He’s the most honest man I know.”

  Beck made a jeering snort under his breath. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he had been drinking again. But when wasn’t he?

  “Why are you being like this?” she asked him.

  But deep down, she did know. Beck had always been jealous of the time she spent with other men. No matter how innocent it might be. Not that he had any right to that emotion where she was concerned. He had no claim on her.

  Still, he shocked her with his next question. “You sleeping with him?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t think I don’t know that he brings you things all the time. And I know you’re not sleeping with me.”

  While Parisa was trying to recover from that, she heard Mader laugh out loud at something Malise had said. She glared back at Beck and said, “Look somewhere else if you want to be throwing accusations like that around. You think I’m exchanging sex for food? I resent you insulting me like that.”