She had suffered the loss of her mother and father and it seemed like she could not get over it. She never spoke of it, but it was there in the back of her mind. Always. Guilt was a part of her agony, just like she had never had time to mourn the loss properly. The pain was so devastating that she shrank from even looking it in the face. It remained a presence in the shadows, a monstrous thing that threatened to consume her.
The clock stopped ticking and Lathan muttered an oath as he looked back down at it.
“We need to move on,” he said abstractedly as he turned the clock over in his hands.
Addy turned from the window. “Do we?” she asked. He heard the strain in her voice now.
“We can’t stay here,” he said almost gently.
“What about Beck?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I think that something else is driving Beck. But we need to move on, no matter what Beck decides to do.”
“You mean split up the group?”
“I don’t want to do that. But we may have no choice. Some will stay with Beck no matter what happens.”
She nodded slightly while a sigh escaped her. “I know that.”
Frustrated by the clock that refused to cooperate, Lathan glared down at it as if he could fix it by sheer will power alone. Then he set the clock down and impatiently brushed the dark strands of hair back from his face.
“If we want to stay alive, we might have to make some hard decisions,” he said, watching her across the room.
She knew that he was only telling her the truth. There was a lack of trust in the group. People weren’t working together anymore. Too much was changing. And maybe- most importantly, the dark shadow of sin threatened to pull the group apart at the seams.
“How soon do you think . . . ” her words trailed off.
“I don’t know. For now we’ll just watch where things go. You seem to have a lot on your mind this morning.”
“I was thinking.” She paused, listening to the deep silence. “About how thoughts and hopes and dreams generate a kind of life of their own. I mean, our thoughts are real, so . . . ”
He smiled at her as her voice trailed off. “You’ve been thinking pretty deeply lately.”
“So have you,” she said, softly accusing, realizing she probably knew his thoughts more than anyone on the face of the earth.
“No,” he replied. “Not if I can help it.” His lips curved into a faint smile. Then he looked at her more intently. “I can’t help but see that you’re connecting things more. You’re trying to reason everything out.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” she said, making a confession of sorts.
He looked at her, maybe a little sadly this time. “You know we can’t stay this way forever, Addy. Stuck between two places, not moving on in either direction. We’ll never find something better in that case.”
She merely nodded. Somewhere inside herself, she knew the truth.
The cold dampness felt heavy in his lungs. It gave Beck a strange, breathless sensation as the air moved in and out of his body with an almost conscious rhythm. Dust and mildew mingled with the decay of a century or more, coating everything around him. Cobwebs festooned the odd assortment of discarded, forgotten items, relics of by-gone eras that would probably never again be unearthed by human hands. The light was murky as it filtered weakly through the small, grime-coated windows. The thick stone walls muffled all sound, save for the rafters creaking slightly, momentarily as someone walked through the rooms above him.
He was alone here. Utterly alone. He was afraid, too, but he was drawn at the same time. He knew he had to be alone for her to appear to him, so he had sought out the solitude of the basement. Now that he was here, the silence pressed in on him almost like a living entity.
He hung his head, yielding for a moment to the despair that tugged at his insides like a black hole, too close for a moment to the hopelessness of reality. Or perhaps the reality of hopelessness.
He heard a noise from the far end of the basement. Every nerve in his body reacted as if to an electric shock. Fear clawed at his belly. But only for a brief space of time. He was already lured in. His thoughts were already evolving.
You can do anything you set your mind to doing. He had heard her say that a hundred times. Well, this was what his mind wanted.
She was a wavering apparition, a vision in translucent blue. But still beyond his reach.
“I need you,” he croaked weakly, his voice half breaking.
“I needed you, too,” she said, softly accusing.
“I tried.” He heard the pleading in his own voice.
“Did you?” her eyes seemed to say.
He heard the scraping of one of his boots against the rough concrete floor and was afraid that the abrupt sound might make her disappear. But she floated there before him like a thing of the shadows. Or, perhaps, a manifestation of his nightmares. But hadn’t he been living a nightmare all this time?
“Why are you torturing me like this?” he asked.
“I’m not torturing you. You’re doing that to yourself.”
He nodded. “You’re right. It was all my fault.” His confession was hoarse, barely a whisper. “I’m not ready to let go of you.”
She opened her mouth and he felt a stream of cold air brush against him. He shivered. His thoughts blurred for a moment from the whiskey, and more. He shook his head to clear it. It suddenly all became too much for him and he wept. For the past. For all he had lost. For the hopelessness of the future.
“I’m . . . sorry,” he sobbed, his voice quavering. “For all of it. If I could change things, I would.”
As if she could read his mind, he heard, “We can be close again. You want that, don’t you?” Her eyes were unnaturally bright in the dim light as her head tilted slightly and she watched him intently. It was as if her very existence depended upon his answer.
“How?” he rasped, not sure he wanted to hear her answer.
“You just have to want it badly enough.”
“What about Wesh?” he asked. He had no choice there. He had to ask.
“I’m close to him, too,” she said after a pause. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“How could you even think about sleeping with him when we were still together?” he asked her, misery stabbing a hole through his heart.
He thought she would be angry, but instead she released a slow sigh. He could see her breath on the air. “Deep inside you already know the answer.” And then she added, “But we belong together. Still. It isn’t too late.”
“Tell me how.”
“You already know.”
He pressed his hand to his forehead as if his thoughts pained him, and closed his eyes.
“You can make it all go away,” he heard her say. “We can be together.”
His hand dropped heavily to his side. He leaned slightly forward and looked closer. He strained his eyes through the shadowy dimness and saw how the flesh of her face and throat was sunken close to the bone. She had been painfully thin at the end, practically gaunt. Now she looked almost skeletal. She made a low sound like a laugh. It became a sibilant whisper though he could not make out the words that frosted on the stale air. The laugh turned into a taunting sound, one that might have beckoned him to darkness and to hell if he let it. But that couldn’t be. He was already there.
He could see the paleness of her face now, like the subdued, luminous glow of the last of daylight beyond the windows. And the ghoulish look of her. He hadn’t noticed that before. And he could see, too, the maggots crawling around at the corner of her frozen, smiling mouth. He dropped to his knees, moaning like a lost soul. Or perhaps he was mourning for his lost soul.
“You want to take a bath?” Lathan asked, echoing Addy’s words.
Addy looked around. “Yes, but I- ” she began. She had some towels, soap and clean clothes ready.
He knew why she hesitated. She didn’t feel comfortable with the oth
ers around. She especially didn’t trust Mader. She said she didn’t like the way he looked at her. To be honest, Lathan didn’t like the way Mader looked at her, either. She had confided to him that Mader reminded her of an uncle that had touched her inappropriately when she was younger.
She glanced up at the windows of the house, particularly the attic window. It was high enough to overlook the pool. There were plenty of holes in the fence, too.
“I’ll check out the house and then patrol the fence for you.”
She smiled her gratitude. Part of the job he had taken on was to make her feel safe. That’s what he would do.
“I had a dream that I was swimming farther and farther out to sea,” she said to his back when she was in the water.
“I think I was in that dream watching you,” he teased.
She laughed outright at that. “You probably were.”
“So what happened,” he asked without turning around. He heard her getting out of the pool and drying off.
“Nothing. The dream didn’t have an ending,” she said, closer to him now.
“Maybe you’re just waiting for someone to wake you up with a kiss.”
“You mean like a handsome prince?” she asked, flirting openly. He could hear her getting dressed.
“I mean like- ”
“Ahh,” she interrupted him, crying out when she moved her hand and a sharp pain shot through it. She saw that there was a huge splinter stuck in the back of her hand.
“It’s in so deep,” she murmured, moaning a little as Lathan pulled the splinter out. Quick, with no warning at all. But she was glad it was gone.
Parisa stopped the brush mid-stroke. “What happened to your hand?” she asked.
“A splinter,” Addy replied looking down at her badly-bruised, discolored hand.
Parisa resumed her gentle brushing of Addy’s hair. “Good,” she said with obvious relief. “Because I was afraid that maybe you had been bitten in that last fight.”
“No, it was just a splinter. Lathan pulled it out for me.”
There was a long silence, and then Addy heard, “You’re so young, Addy. Doesn’t Lathan seem a little old for you?”
Addy answered automatically and without thought. “He looks older than he really is.”
Didn’t they all?
“A zombie apocalypse does seem to age you,” Parisa said as if she could read Addy’s thoughts. “But I was wondering if you were thinking clearly.”
“I’m thinking clearly where it counts.”
After a pause, Addy said, “I’ve heard you cry. You think I don’t know that I can hear you, but I do.”
“There’s a lot to cry about,” Parisa said with a shrug as she dragged the brush through Addy’s curls. “I’ve tried to be like a sister to you. I’ve tried to take care of you, but look how I’ve failed.”
Addy heard new tears in Parisa’s voice now.
“You don’t have to feel responsible for me, Parisa.”
“I can’t help it. You should be thinking about things like makeup and doing your hair. Or what you’re going to wear on your next date. Not- this.”
“I think about what I will wear.”
“You know what I mean. You should be going to parties, or going out for pizza with your friends.”
“It’s hard to think of those things when you’re wondering what’s around the next corner or where your next meal is coming from.”
Parisa made a slight sound of agreement, then asked, “Do you really think you can handle a man like Lathan?”
“A man like what?” Addy asked.
Parisa sighed. “Lathan’s just not the kind of man I pictured you ending up with. He obviously has lived a very different kind of life than you have, Addy. I think he’s led a very dangerous life. Do you think your parents would have approved?”
“That isn’t fair.” She couldn’t bear to think about her parents right now.
“You still expect things to be fair?” Parisa asked. “In this world?”
Addy let the remark go and said recklessly, “Maybe I like Lathan just the way he is.”
Parisa sighed again. “I don’t expect you to know what a normal relationship is supposed to be like.”
“And you do? We both live in the same world, you know.”
Parisa made a slight, exasperated wave of her hand. “This has all changed you.”
“Of course it has changed me. It has changed everyone. How could any of us be who we used to be?”
Parisa ignored her question and surprised her by asking straight out, “Are you having sex with him?”
Parisa took her non-answer as a yes.
“Are you at least using protection?” Parisa wanted to know. “Because a baby right now would be a disaster. This is not a safe world anymore.”
After Addy’s assurances about using protection, the brush paused again. “So,” Parisa began again, lowering her voice this time. “You haven’t told me. Is he good in bed?”
“I can’t believe we’re actually having this conversation,” Addy said with mock seriousness. Then, with a light laugh, she said, “Good doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
Parisa leaned forward and said very quietly. “That gash in your forehead, Addy, is going to leave a scar.”
But Addy was already drifting away from Parisa’s voice, lost in her own thoughts.
Mader thought about sex a lot. When he was bored, he thought about it. When he was frustrated or angry, it was a way to release some of the tension. It was about the one good thing there was left in the world that made him feel alive, at least temporarily, so he made the most of his opportunities. It wasn’t just about the physical gratification. The truth was that the control that came along with sex gave him a kind of high, too. He felt powerful. He felt- hell, dominant. Like an alpha male.
Malise had been more than willing to see to his needs so far. Since the usual restraints of society had been all but wiped away, he planned to make the most of his newly-found freedom. He was confident that Farran would be his next conquest. He considered her too weak to say no. As for Macayla, he’d like to show her what a real man was like. Parisa? He suspected she’d be a handful, like a tiger suddenly unleashed.
And then there was Addy. Addy, now. He’d really like to try some of that. He considered her the ultimate prize. Lathan would be a problem, but that wasn’t something he felt he couldn’t handle.
Why Beck wasn’t already tapping this particular harem, he didn’t know. Then again, maybe he was. Maybe he just kept it to himself. He did know one thing. When Beck was around, he felt more confrontational, but more excited, more aggressive. Maybe it was the age-old clash between two dominant males that got him so worked up. Whatever it was, it seemed to keep him in a constant state of arousal.
Where the hell was Beck hiding anyway? he wondered. He hadn’t seen him for days.
Preston stopped for a moment when he came across Farran. She was sitting by herself in one of the backyards. Long ago they had cleared the small subdivision of hunters, but he didn’t like her being alone like this. Anything could happen. Anything could breach the walls at any time.
She sat motionless on a bench with her head buried in her hands. “I trusted him,” she whispered. He knew she was talking about Beck. “How could he betray me like this?” she asked, though he didn’t know if she even realized that he was standing there.
Preston tried to comfort her by laying his hand on her shoulder. Almost. He couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her. She still seemed beyond his reach. Many times he had watched her and he had wanted to approach her and ask her why she would spend so much time with that selfish, insensitive bastard that didn’t care if he hurt her.
“He made you cry.”
Farran looked up. It was the first words that Preston had ever spoken to her.
Chapter 15
Addy was wearing new clothes. The clothes were a little big for her but Lathan couldn’t help thinking she looked sweet. And damned near irresis
tible. Her hair was soft and shining in the sunshine that had finally broken through the clouds. Right now she was pulling it back into a sensible braid, but loose tendrils were spilling all around her face.
He watched her for a while, then went to help her with the braid. She closed her eyes at the touch of his hands and sighed. After a silence, he said close to her ear, “They’re curious. They’ve been watching us to see what we’re going to do next.”
She heard the humor in his husky voice and maybe a hint of heat as he stood behind her.
“I know. So what are we going to do?”
“This,” he murmured. She felt his breath feather against the side of her throat as his lips pressed slow, sensuous kisses along her sensitive flesh.
“And this.” His throaty whisper sent chills straight to her core as his hands fitted themselves to her slender waist. He turned her around and brought his mouth down on hers while her arms found their way around his neck.
“What else?” she asked, melting against him. They had not been alone together in a very long time.
“The rest,” he said. “Is nobody’s business.”
He gave her a sexy smile.
“You’ve been a lot more patient than I have been,” she said coyly.
“Mmm mm,” he replied as he pulled her tighter against him. “Does that feel like I’m being patient?”
She caught her breath, almost dizzy with desire herself when she felt the proof of his arousal.
“You’ve got no idea how hard it’s been keeping a respectful distance from you,” he informed her with a frown and a shake of his head.
Hard was the opportune word here. She traced the sculpted muscles of his chest beneath the T-shirt he was wearing.
“No. But maybe you can show me . . . ”
Why had he thought she was such an innocent? She could drive him over the edge with a look. Or a single word.
With a slight lift of his chin, he said, “I checked this house out myself from top to bottom.”
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 15