by Pam Godwin
Copyright © 2015 by Pam Godwin
All rights reserved.
Interior Designer: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review or article, without written permission from the author.
Visit my website at pamgodwin.com
This is book 2 in the Trilogy of Eve series. It is recommended that you read DEAD OF EVE (book 1) before BLOOD OF EVE.
This is a continuation of the first book.
Part One
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part Two
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Part Three
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Pam Godwin
There’s one difference between reality and the spirit world.
In reality, I think there is a spirit world.
In the spirit world, I know it exists, for it becomes my reality.
~ Jesse Beckett
Jesse
Three Months Post-Apocalypse
I chased the unthinkable, running mindless in my pursuit. Dry leaves crunched beneath my leather boots, and branches tore at my arms. My bow and quiver swung against my back. The tomahawk's handle warmed my palm. My legs heated with exertion, propelling me forward with urgency, following the invisible tracks of a dead child.
Fear of failure spurred me faster, harder. I couldn’t fail. Couldn’t fail her. Drawing in a silent breath, I squinted through the dark hush of the forest.
The silhouettes of skeletal trunks haunted the landscape, threatening trespassers from going deeper. Vines crawled all over the damned place, covered in a thick mist. Where did she go? I couldn’t see shit.
Hell, why had she approached me in the first place? Why did I believe her…believe in her? Things like ghosts and human-turned-insects belonged in folklore. Fucking bedtime stories. The outbreak had really fucked the boundaries between reality and nightmares.
As I slid down a mossy embankment, her melodious giggle tiptoed across my skin, pebbling goosebumps in its wake. The echo retreated to the black sky and the dense foliage, awakening an unexplainable yet familiar feeling in my chest. I held that feeling responsible for why I was there, deep in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, my entire being aching in anticipation of our next conversation.
I couldn’t abandon her. Not now. I needed this untarnished, mystical connection with another being. Loss and love, purpose and potential, all concentrated in an ethereal realm of what if? She was the only connection I had to a promise beyond this miserable life.
Twenty yards away, an unnatural gathering of vapor shifted the fog, dissipating and solidifying into the moonlit shape of the little girl I’d pursued for three long months. Golden hair levitated around her tiny shoulders, every inch of her transparent…yet not.
“Jesse!” She waved, smiling and swinging the hem of her dress, as if she weren’t haunting a world where children no longer existed.
Now that I captured her attention, I locked down the urge to run toward her, afraid she’d vanish like so many times before. “Annie, can we talk for a minute?”
She shook her head, smile faltering, and dug the toe of her red-buckled shoe in the soil. The dirt didn’t move. The silence was deafening. I’d cleared the woods of snarling threats. It was just her and me and this game she played, the rules created by her. The power to end it lay in her unearthly hands. Please, don’t end it.
She was the first ghost I’d ever seen. The elders told stories of such things, but I never believed. Then she appeared.
The first time was the day after the outbreak. The day she died. Her diaphanous form had hovered on the balcony of my Paris hotel room. Once I’d finally recovered from the shock, she told me her name was Annie, speaking in a soundless voice, words I could feel but didn’t understand. Find your people. Follow my brother. Protect my mother.
During the first few weeks of the outbreak, a shocking ninety percent of humanity, billions, perished or mutated. No children survived. No women. But there was something about her that made me believe. Not just her unearthliness. Something about her determination dialed me in, filling my chest with purpose. What that purpose was I didn’t know. It was powerful enough, however, to guide me across the Atlantic Ocean, around the husks of U.S. cities, and now through the dangerous shadows of the forest.
My heart raced for answers as my mind tried to link her intentions to the death and misery that closed in around me, day after day. The imminent extinction of mankind. Concepts she seemed oblivious to.
Movement stirred in the nearby bramble, only feet from Annie. Leaf litter rustled, cautiously, quietly, then silenced with frozen steps. Too smart to be a forest critter. Too controlled to be a mutated monster. Human?
My heart rate elevated, every muscle in my body on high alert as I tightened my fingers around the handle of the tomahawk. The only humans in these mountains were my three Lakota brethren, and they knew better than to sneak up on me.
Annie’s silhouette flickered, her hands waving around her grinning face, not a hint of surprise in her eyes as they locked on the location of the unknown intruder. She didn’t appear worried. Were she and the stranger linked in some way?
Soundlessly, I evened my breathing and lowered in a crouch, waiting, despite the urgent thump in my chest.
The thing was, I’d found my people, the last of the Lakota, just like she foretold. I led them from North Dakota to West Virginia, following another ghost—her brother, Aaron—just like she foretold. But her final prediction was my greatest ache.
Protect my mother.
I hadn’t seen a woman since the virus exterminated every last one of them three months earlier. Annie's entreaty to protect her mother made no sense. How could I protect a woman when none survived? She had led me to the States, to these mountains, yet not once had she taken me to meet a female survivor or a female spirit.
Her head turned, and her gaze found my hiding place. Lifting her finger, she pointed to the movement beyond the thicket. “Mama.”
I flinched, hoping—always hoping—but definitely not prepared. My focus swung toward the approaching footsteps, breath stuck in my throat, my eyes straining to make out the blurry shape emerging from the shadows.
Moon
light washed over the slender form of a woman, and the startling sight of her skittered electricity through my body. I clutched my stomach, shocked, elated, goddamned fucking beside myself, even if it was for selfish reasons.
Her. Not a ghost but a living, noisily-breathing woman, in the flesh. My purpose. What I was looking for, what I needed. I felt it behind my ribs, fuzzy and restless and alive, more now than ever before. Fuck me, but I clung to that feeling, something to fight for, hope in a world full of nothing.
For a moment, the woman stood there, staring in my direction. She couldn’t see me hidden in the sedge, but I stared right back. It had been months since I’d seen a woman, left with only my memories of the female form to fuel my fantasies. She could’ve been butt ugly and my dick would’ve woken at the sight of her. But she wasn’t.
Her arms were toned, strong, the profile of her ass round and tight in denim. Glowing skin, graceful neck, and her tank top struggled to contain her full, perky tits. Very much alive and not just a woman. A fucking breathtaking woman. My reaction was violent, hardening my cock and laboring my breaths, my muscles heating and tightening with the primal impulse to overpower and fuck her.
“Annie?” She approached the giggling ghost, her lips curling up despite the sadness straining her face.
What was missing was shock. The woman could see dead people and didn’t seem surprised by it. Was it an all-the-time thing? Or was this a special connection?
Her huge eyes, the blond in her hair, and her bone structure were mirror images of Annie. Her daughter.
Annie danced toward me, singing something about ladybirds. But I couldn’t look away from the woman, devouring her beauty with greedy eyes and forgetting to breathe as more blood surged to my dick.
Then it hit me. A woman survived. One woman and God knew how many men. My shoulders tensed, and my thoughts turned wild, vicious.
Protective.
As surely as nature would reclaim paved roads and metal structures, man would return to his most primal instincts. She would be prized, hunted, fought over, claimed…and destroyed.
Protect my mother.
Annie skipped through the brush, stopping a foot before me. The woman trampled after her, too far behind, losing the trail.
Annie gestured at me to bend down, and as I did, she quickly spoke of places and events, guardians and demons, and things that didn’t make sense. I concentrated on the details, committing them to memory, but it was her final words, about the future, her mother’s future, and my part in it, that stole the oxygen from my lungs.
I stumbled back, my teeth clamped to the point of breaking. “No.”
She cocked her head. “You must.”
I dragged my hand through my hair, ripping at the ends. Don’t believe her. I could change it, goddammit. Nothing was absolute.
But as she darted away, leading her mother toward my camp, I knew that no matter how hard I tried, everything she’d told me would come to pass. The prophecy she’d spoken in my ear flooded me with strength and terrible pain and everything in between.
I cannot put my faith in one divinity.
Nor can one sun light my way.
I need three.
~ Evie Delina
Evie
Two Years Post-Apocalypse
Death surrounded me, infecting the mountain air, soaking my shirt and jeans, and snarling in the ravine beneath my dangling feet. I had a helluva lot of fight left, but bone-aching fatigue clawed at the edges of my will power. Sweat slicked my grip on the rope, the only thing preventing a fatal plunge.
The rope attached to the top of the cliff. A daring climb away. Too daring. Too fucking far. What a miserable thought to have as I twisted fifty feet above the ground. Above them. Gathered below, they hissed in drooling sibilants, spraying globs of aggression through insectile mouths.
Dozens of hard-shelled bodies filled the bottom of the ravine. Some had already begun the menacing crawl upwards, their sharp claws digging into the rock face and closing the distance. Worse was my internal connection with them, some kind of biological weirdness evolving inside me. I could feel them before I saw or heard them, like a thousand snapping rubber bands in my gut.
I pinched the end of the rope between my boots and stretched upward, the nylon fibers creaking with the sway of my weight. The sun’s glare pushed through the gap in the trees, blinding and unbearable. I licked cracked lips and wiped my forehead on my shoulder, realizing too late I’d just smeared my face in rotten blood.
What I wouldn’t give for an ice-cold beer and a clean shower, back in my boarded-up home in Missouri. My family…
All gone. Dead.
An ache splintered behind my eyes, spread through my jaw, and tightened my throat. Grief was the worst enemy¸ sneaky in its assault, smothering and crippling.
Shut it down, Evie.
I anchored my hands, curling them tighter around the rope. But the bugs on the wall below were gaining speed, aided by talons and driven by hunger. Only ten feet away now. I wouldn’t be able to out-climb them. Switching my weight to one hand, I reached for the rifle with the other, adjusting how it hung across my chest on the sling and hoping for an accurate aim.
With the barrel trained on the closest bug, I squeezed the trigger. The bullet plinked off the rock, a foot from the snapping creature. Shit. I squeezed again and again. Missed. Missed. Missed! My blood pressure skyrocketed.
I fucking survived the fall of civilization, the mutations, the anarchy, and the monster who started it all. Deep breath. I could do this.
“Evie.” Jesse’s voice rode in on the humid breeze. “Forget the gun and climb the way I taught you. Brake and squat.”
Easy for him to say. The bastard wasn’t hanging over a gorge crammed with mutated humans. Diseased slobber hung from misshaped jaws. Strings of the oily gunk flung side-to-side, striping bloated chests. And the smell… Rancid and decomposing, I could taste that shit in the back of my throat.
Bile simmered, choking my words. “Go to hell, Jesse.”
He crouched on the ledge a few yards above. “Already there, darlin’.”
His copper gaze caught me, punching me with a challenge that had nothing to do with my climbing technique. He wasn’t a man who showed affection easily. Instead, he watched me from afar, prowling like a hungry predator. A predator with bed-ruffled hair, kissable lips…and a pissed-off scowl.
Oh, he wanted to help me. Bow and arrow in hand, eyes sharp, and muscles flexed, he vibrated with the need to swoop in and save. All I had to do was say the word, and he’d yank me to safety. But that would defeat the purpose of this training session.
With the rope wrapped around one leg, I clamped a boot down on the other, trapping the knotted end. Brake and squat? Right. The effort shifted more weight to my hand and shoulder, straining and popping the joints. God, that burned.
I didn’t consider myself scrawny. More like the strong side of petite. Still, it hurt like a motherfucker to hang a hundred and ten pounds from one arm. But not enough to let the M4 carbine hang on its sling. The short-barreled rifle saved my hide countless times since the virus hit two years prior. Locked and cocked, it would save me again.
A crustaceous body moved into the carbine’s cross hairs and grappled the ridge below. Viridescent skin. Pincers for hands. Pinpricked pupils in eyes shadowed by traces of humanity. Hard to imagine this thing was once someone’s son, mother, or lover. One toxic bite changed that.
“The bugs are climbing.” Jesse’s drawl, honeyed with a cadence once affiliated with cattle ranchers and oil barons, suffocated my senses, irritating and arousing.
I gritted my teeth. “They need a distraction. How ‘bout you throw your ass down there?”
Six feet below my swinging boots, the aphid’s jaw flowered open in a macabre bloom of mouthparts. I tightened my grip around what was left of the rope bridge we’d constructed across the ravine. A rope bridge I’d secured my arm through moments before I cut the supports and followed its fall.
�
��Find the focus you had when you cut the bridge.” He was holding a black and red feathered arrow and pointed the sharp end at me, as if his glare wasn’t piercing enough. “This is the part you struggle with.”
Yeah, because the drop always left my stomach in my throat. And no matter when or where I practiced the stunt, aphids always came. Too many. Too fast.
Despite the tremble in my arms and the maddening beat of my pulse, I kept my tone even. “Jesse?”
He leaned down and arched a dark eyebrow. “Hmm?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
He bared his teeth, not a hint of humor in that gorgeous almost-smile.
The aphid on the wall crept close enough to throw a rock at. I steadied the carbine and squeezed the trigger, but my fingers slipped on the rope, wobbling the aim. Shit!
A spiny forearm ripped away. Missed the kill shot, the one that would pulverize the brain. The aphid leveraged its shredded stump on a handhold and gained another yard. Heart rate spiking, I adjusted my grip. Exhaled. Squeezed.
Meaty chunks exploded from the back of its head. The aphid fell, but relief was fleeting. Two more scaled the cliff and took its place.
Fuck this. I dropped the rifle on its sling and climbed with both hands, going nowhere fast. “Get me out of here.”
Pebbles rained on my head, and the rope jerked. Each hitch in the line tore at my fingers. With a final heave, Jesse pulled me over the edge.
Shaking with adrenaline, I scrambled from the cliff and ran through the dense brush, far away from that damned ravine. I must’ve run a half-mile. My insides burned with frustration. I didn't want help, didn’t want to be reliant on others, so asking Jesse to pull me up was a big blow to the ego. Not that I nurtured an inflated sense of pride. I just didn’t want to be a burden.
Already hours beyond exhaustion, my legs weighed a thousand pounds, and when they finally gave out, I fell to my back with a thunder of exhales.
I didn’t hear Jesse’s footfalls, but he told me once he’d never be farther than a heartbeat. My ever-loyal stalker. A moment later, his shadow fell across my chest. His knees landed beside my hip, and his head dipped, the short waves of his reddish-brown hair ablaze in the sunlight.