by Bec McMaster
Scary, in a way.
"Do you ever think about how easy it would have been back then?" he asked. "They created wargs and shadow-cats in their labs, but they weren't a widespread affliction. There were no revenants—they came with the virus the meteor brought with it. So they had no predators, not really. Just cars, and huge buildings...."
"And planes," she said, getting into the swing of things. "My mom's grandfather once flew a plane. Said it could take him anywhere in the world. That would be amazing."
"My sister used to complain that she'd kill to get her hands on some of the medicines they used," McClain said, with a faint smile. "She's a doctor. She's really smart, and she's saved a lot of lives. But she always wishes she could save more."
"You love her," Mia said. "I see it on your face every time you mention her."
He nodded.
"When was the last time you saw her? Does she know where you are?" It struck her then, just how little she knew about him. "Why did you leave her behind?"
Suddenly reluctance filled him. She could see it in every line of his body. "Mia, it's kind of complicated. I didn't want to leave. I promised my father that I'd protect Eden with my dying breath. But... I did something bad and the people in my town—the people I trusted—they didn't want me around anymore. I left because I didn't want to drag Eden down with me."
She couldn't imagine this man doing anything bad. But it was clear he didn't want to talk about it. And that rankled a little, for she'd thought that he trusted her. She trusted him.
"Then they're fools," she said, and bumped shoulders with him. "You're actually quite handy. You're practically a superhero."
"Thanks," he muttered.
"For?"
"The distraction," he replied.
She was wise enough not to comment on that. Maybe he saw right through her, but they both needed this right now.
In the distance something gave a coughing roar.
Both of them turned.
"What the hell is that thing?" she asked, with a frown. The moon shone bright enough to make out a few things in the streets below. "Do you think it's the white tiger?"
"It's out there somewhere." McClain peered into the distance, moonlight gilding his jaw. "But it's not my main concern. There's something moving down there in the street." He frowned. "Two somethings. They've come for the bodies."
Mia lifted onto her tiptoes, but all she could see were shadows and glimmers of moonlight reflecting back off broken glass and metal. She shuddered. "Ac’tun ahili?"
"They look like people," McClain finally said. "Deformed people. They're all hunched over, and I'm pretty certain I can see tumors on one of them."
The earth wasn't the only thing that the meteor had torn apart. Nuclear reactors went haywire, and radiation was still the number-one threat to people in this land.
One of the reasons most of the people stayed in such an inhospitable place as the Badlands was precisely because there were no Dead Zones nearby.
The wind slid straight through her, and she shivered. "Why do they want the reiver bodies?"
"Let's not go there," McClain replied, his lips firming.
Good decision.
Footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Jake stepped through, rapping his knuckles on the wall all polite-like, as if to interrupt the pair of them.
"Jake," she said. "What's wrong?"
He had his funeral face on, and he fanned himself lightly with his hat. "Mia, you mind if I have a minute with McClain?"
"Sure." She stared at him for a long moment. The two men looked at each other like a pair of wolves sizing each other up. Something was wrong. But she could find out later. So she shot McClain a faint, tired smile. "Thanks for the company. I'll go let Thwaites know what's out there, and get the guys to set up a watch. Then I think I desperately need some sleep."
"I know what you are," Jake told him, the second Mia was out of hearing distance.
The words took him by surprise. Adam looked up sharply, still hearing Mia's footsteps fading down the stairwell.
"What?" he asked, but ice was sliding down his spine. Surely he hadn't heard that right. Surely Jake was speaking about something else? But one glance at Jake's face, and the floor dropped out from under him.
"Open your shirt," Jake said, striding toward him.
Adam stilled. Of all the things to happen to him, this, right now, was the worst. "No."
A hand caught his collar and Jake was in his face. "Open it," Jake insisted, reaching for the buttons. "You show me what you fucking are. I know you're wearing one of them—"
Adam didn't think. Just reacted. He shoved a hand into Jake's chest and the man slammed back into the concrete wall, the breath rushing out of him. Jake stayed pinned there, as if sensing the sudden violence in the air, his face showing echoes of it.
Adam slowly withdrew his hand. He knew now. Jake didn't just suspect him, he was certain of the truth. It gleamed all over him. Wariness. And something else Adam could remember seeing, back at Absolution.
Fear.
He held up his hands, backing away. Jesus fucking Christ. It was too late. The game was up. Jake wouldn't back down from this, and from the amount of white in his eyes, Adam would be lucky if Jake didn't shoot him.
"You son of a bitch," Jake hissed. "Why are you here? Did you think it would be fun to ride along? Or were you just waiting until we were someplace out in the open. Or...." Thought raced in his eyes. "Were you luring us somewhere? Who's out there? Who's out there waiting for us?"
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, like soothing a man down off a ledge. "If I were really a monster, do you think you'd still be walking around without your throat torn out? I could have done it several nights now. And I'm alone. Use your head. You're a bounty hunter. You think this is a trap?"
"I think you were awfully insistent upon riding along with us." The anger was back.
And suddenly he was angry too. He was sick and tired of people looking at him like he was a monster.
"Christ, the reivers stole fucking women and kids! What type of man lets that slide? I could help. I knew I could help," he yelled back. Then his mind caught up with him. He couldn't afford to let anyone else hear this conversation. The warg was already aroused; it didn't need the anger either. His voice dropped. "Do you think that this curse changes who a man was before? Do you think—for one fucking second—that there's no part of me that merely wants to be just a fucking man? Because I still am. That's the worst of it. I'm still a man, even with that thing lurking inside me. I still care. I still... hope. And I still give a damn about the innocents of the world. All this means"—he tapped his chest—"is that I have to fight even harder to keep the warg inside me. Where it can't do any harm to anyone."
Jake's eyes narrowed, but the anger melted out of him. He too was thinking now.
Adam turned, crossing toward the edge of the balcony. Dry leaves crumpled beneath his touch. Adam stared blindly out at the city, his chest heaving. Jake might have a gun and he might be behind him, but just as he could have ripped Jake's throat out several times over by now, Jake had had just as many chances to put a bullet in his heart.
A silver one.
After all, he'd been watching Adam for days now. Clearly putting together the pieces. At first he'd thought Jake had been keeping an eye on Mia and him, but now.... There'd been something else in the man's eyes. Suspicion.
"I'm not a monster," he said, wondering who he was trying to convince. All of the calm that being with Mia brought him evaporated. "I just wanted to help."
"Okay. I believe you."
Didn't sound like Jake liked it though.
All of the weariness came crashing down upon Adam. He'd been going for days, forcing his body to the edge, running high on adrenaline. This moment wiped him.
"How?" he asked gruffly.
Jake audibly swallowed. Fabric rustled as he pushed away from the wall. "You hear things I can't hear, McClain. And see things I can't see. That first night when
the revenants attacked you could see the lights from the reivers' camp, out there in the blackness. I couldn't make out shit and I'm good at what I do." Jake cleared his throat. "You didn't torture that reiver down there. I checked the body out. So how'd you make him talk, huh?"
With a sigh, Adam glanced down at his quivering hands. In his mind's eye, they looked like claws for a second. "You know how. Reivers aren't normal men. I've seen bands of them who've cut off their own fingers or hands even, to prove their loyalty to their crews. Torture wasn't going to break him. I needed him to be afraid of me."
"You threatened him." Jake's voice strengthened. "You threatened to make him one of the monsters."
McClain flinched. "Yeah. What's the one thing every man fears, whether he's a Wastelander or a reiver?"
"I've been putting the pieces together. And you heard me in that bar, back in Salvation Creek, talking about wargs who didn't change, wargs who hid in the towns. Looking back now, you couldn't have gotten out of there any quicker." Jake tipped his chin up. "Who are you?"
"I'm the warg from Absolution," he said, meeting the other man's eyes. "The one you were asking about."
"Then it's true." Jake looked stunned. "You've got some sort of medallion that keeps it at bay."
No point hiding it now. Adam grunted, and opened his shirt just wide enough for Jake to see the pewter.
"How's it work?"
"Don't know," he replied. "Just know it keeps the warg contained. If I lose this...."
"Yeah." Jake didn't quite shift his hand to the gun at his hip, but it was in his eyes. "I'll take care of it."
They stared at each other.
"What are you going to do now you know?"
Jake crossed his arms over his chest, leaning his back against the wall. The first hints of dawn began to lighten the sky. "Fuck. I don't know. I can't—I don't.... All I've ever known is that your kind are monsters. But then I remember how you saved all my friends at that tor, how you decided to ride along with us to save women and children you've never even met. How do I reconcile that?" He pinched the bridge of his nose. "And then there's the fact that we need you."
"To get your wife back."
"Thwaites is taking the rest of the men and women home. They're not cut out for this shit. And Jenny's injured, else she'd be at my back too."
"We're not a large enough group to attack a slave town," Adam replied in a weary voice. "Better off without them. Maybe a couple of us can blend in, pretend we're something we're not."
"And that's exactly why we need you. You think like I do. Fuck."
It set off another round of curses. Adam merely watched. Jake was no friend of his, that much was clear, but maybe, just maybe, he'd keep this secret.
For there was one person who wouldn't accept this.
"What are you going to tell her?" Adam asked.
He might as well have lit a match near a powder keg. Jake stabbed a finger in the air toward him. "You stay as far away from her as you can. Mia's not for you."
"Do you think I don't know that?" he growled, even though he couldn't help remembering the way she'd wrapped her arms around him. For a moment he could pretend that he was just a normal man with a chance at a normal life.
For a moment when she kissed him, he'd forgotten that he was anything else.
Now the truth reared its ugly head. He'd been wasting Mia's time. There was no future between them. Adam didn't have a future.
"Not from the way you're looking at her." This time, Jake's eyes narrowed. "You look at her like a man in the desert finding his first oasis in three days. And while I might be willing to... overlook certain things for the moment, you so much as breathe in her direction and I will—"
"What? Shoot me?"
Jake didn't have an answer to that, but his eyes remained narrow.
Adam scrubbed both hands through his hair, lacing them at the back of his skull. He stared at the faint rays of sunlight creeping over the horizon, watching the light begin to paint the desert a glorious pink. All this beauty in his life—the desert, Mia, the way Ethan Thwaites wrapped his arms around his daughter as if he'd just seen a glimpse of heaven—and he could only ever be a bystander. Of course he wanted to reach out and touch it, touch her. Even as he knew that he couldn't. "She's an amazing woman," he said, his voice raw and harsh. "And I know I can't have her. Do you think that stops me from wanting to? And hell, I'll stay away from her—because I'm not that much of a monster—but I won't pretend that there's not a single part of me that doesn't want to know her, just once."
"She'll never forgive you," Jake warned. "And if she knows you lied to her...."
"Yeah, I picked up on that. Woman doesn't like secrets." Just once he wanted to push back. "After all, she hasn't forgiven you yet."
That earned him a dirty look. "Probably never will either." "Bad lie?"
"The worst." Jake's voice came out hollow. He didn't bother asking how Adam guessed. It was written all over the two of them whenever they were in the same room together. That kind of hate didn't just happen. It was caused by bitter betrayal, or something else.
Like a broken heart.
"So you're not going to tell her?"
Again the man's lips thinned. "Not my secret to tell. And maybe that's another mistake, I don't know. I'm only human." He sighed. "I can't get Sage back without Mia. Or you. And right now, Mia's feelings don't matter half as much as my wife's safety." His voice broke on that last word.
Adam scrubbed at his stubbled jaw. "They haven't raped her yet."
Jake's head shot up.
"The reiver... he said they're not allowed to ruin the women. Not the ones they want to sell anyway. Cypher won't pay for damaged goods."
"Who the fuck is Cypher?"
"I don't know." Adam shrugged. "I guess we'll find out when we hit Rust City. But the reiver was scared shitless of the bastard. He was actually begging me to kill him at that point, so this Cypher wouldn't know he'd ratted him out."
A shudder ran through the other man. "Okay," Jake said, and his voice sounded rusty, like he'd been trying to hold himself together, but Adam's words about his wife only confronted his worst fears. "Okay." He took a slow, steady breath, then let it out. "I'm going to get a few hours’ sleep. If I can. You'd best get some too. As soon as the sun fully hits the skies we'll head south for Rust City and get my wife back."
Adam nodded gruffly.
"I'm not going to tell Mia and I won't shoot you in the back. Not until this is done. But I can't promise anything else," Jake said, still looking like a man caught between two demons as he turned for the stairs. But at least he wasn't looking like he might reach for that shotgun. "We're not friends, McClain—hell, I don't even know if I can trust you completely—but I need you. So I'll set all this aside until we get out of this mess."
He backed away with a sharp nod, man-to-man, and turned for the stairwell.
Leaving Adam alone. Again.
Forever, whispered that little dark voice in his head. Adam curled his hand into a fist. He'd beaten that voice a couple of times now, when it sought to take him to a dark place where it seemed like there was no light. The last time it had taken a couple of months to crawl out of there. To keep putting one foot in front of the other. And he wasn't going to listen to it this time, even as he knew that it could sink its hooks in him at any time.
You serve a purpose, he told himself. A mantra he'd used to protect himself far too often. The list of purposes ran through his head, only this time he'd added a couple of items: Find Mia's sister and the other girls. Kill the reivers. Find Johnny Colton, the warg who’d helped do this to him. Kill Colton. Make sure Eden was safe and loved, even if it had to be from a distance.
The warming desert wind stirred through his clothes. There was a nice bottle of hard liquor in his bags, but that was another demon he was starting to lean on just a little too much.
With a tired sigh, Adam raked his hand through his hair and started toward the stairwell.
That had
gone better than he'd expected.
At least Jake wasn't going to kill him.
He might be saving that honor for Mia, if she found out.
Eleven
THE HEAT STARTED to make people sweat as the sun gleamed far overhead. More than time to get going, but McClain wanted to talk to them first. Mia bustled about camp, seeing to the people they'd rescued and making sure the injured were drinking enough water. Jenny insisted upon following her around, despite her leg. Jenny's “just a scratch” turned out to be a nasty-looking cut from a machete. Mia didn't like the look of it. The heat and the lack of proper medical attention meant that Jenny was dead certain to be facing a fever, despite the fact she'd cauterized the wound herself.
In fact, taking stock of those in the camp revealed a newer problem. The fight with the reivers had been short, bloody, and brutal, and most of the rescuers weren't trained fighters like McClain, Jenny, and Jake. Mia couldn't stop seeing memories of her own brief experiences. She was damned lucky. That was the truth.
Others were not so lucky.
Mia paused by McClain's side. "There are only five people here who are still in good condition. Three are women who've barely lifted a shotgun in their life, one's a kid, and the other’s a ranch hand from Thwaites's. Most of those without serious injuries are the girls we rescued."
He stared down into the pot of water he'd set on the fire to boil. Sunlight gilded the golden hairs on his bronzed forearms. ”Will any of them come with us?"
There was no time to be optimistic. "No," Mia said bluntly. "That fight took a lot out of everyone. The fact that as many of them rode along with us as they did is surprise enough. I doubt they'll come any further." She swallowed a little. "What about you?"
McClain looked up sharply, then his face softened. "I'll ride with you until we get those girls back."
"This is not your fight."
"If I don't go you'll only get yourself killed," he replied, slowly though, as if he were editing his words carefully. "You and Jake. I can't live with that."