“Pay attention!” she grunts. Her right eye is swollen into a wince.
“I am,” I say before my cough sprays a fine mist of red to contradict me. My lack of attention allowed her to draw blood.
I dab at the leaking split in my lip with the back of my wrist. Resisting the urge to check the wound in the wall mirror that runs the length of the mat, I get back into fighting stance.
“You’re distracted,” Talia chides. “Stop thinking about your stray puppy and focus!”
“Don’t call him that,” I say, the words more breath than bite. I haven’t stepped foot in this gym in months and it shows. Even if my muscles know the moves, I’m horrifically out of shape.
I am also completely distracted. My brain snags on the press of Christopher’s mouth on my neck. The heat of his skin against my skin. And then the static chaos of realizing I might love him. Possibly. Maybe.
“What do you want me to call him?” she asks, all contempt. “Junior hunter? A liability to get you killed? Some random guy we know next to nothing about aside from the fact that he buddied around with the psychopath who wanted to harvest our blood?”
He is all those things, no matter how much I want to deny it.
“Be fair,” I say as I force her backward with a volley of ineffective punches. We’re long past warmups. I’ve taken a couple hits, but at the sacrifice of a bit of pain, I’ve got her exactly where I want her. Her moves are catalogued in my brain. Talia and I learned to fight before we learned to resurrect. I anticipate which attacks she favors in which scenario and why.
“He was best friends with Jamison for a good chunk of years, and it’s like they say. You are who you hang with.”
I duck Talia’s swing. “What’s that make me then? If you are who you hang with?”
“Well, you hang with me,” she says. “Which makes you a femme fatale with a love of caffeine.” Despite her swelling eye, Talia’s features have no trouble drifting from amusement to agitation. “Catch me up. It’s been awhile. Ploy weasel himself into a title yet? Roommate? Cuddle buddy? Murder fling?”
I don’t answer. She’s barely out of breath and I’m afraid more than a handful of sentences will have me passing out. “You been working on cardio?”
She ignores me. “Are you two friends? More than friends?”
“Does it matter?” I ask. I’m not sure how much information I want to give her. I’m intent on her hips, the subtle weight shift that’ll reveal her next move.
“Don’t tell me you’re falling deeper for the street urchin,” Talia says.
The urge to defend him swallows me. “Name calling? What are you, five?”
My fists ache. Mostly, it’s my wrists where I tried to chew through the joints and free myself from the handcuffs Jamison used. Resurrectionist healing powers have their perks, but it had hurt too much, and the plan had been faulty. Since then, the scarring has faded to a starburst of white lines, but they ache sometimes. I swing anyway.
Talia bounds out of reach, ready when I counter with a lunge forward. “So he is staying with you,” she says.
And why not? I think. I’m an adult. I choose who I do and don’t let into my life. Currently, Talia’s on a lot thinner ice than Christopher.
“Yes. He’s staying with me.” I don’t ask if it bothers her or if I’m crazy. It’s none of her business.
“And you’re peachy keen?” she says. She’s watching me intensely but whether it’s because she’s gauging my reaction or planning a move, I don’t know. “Whole life is all fairy tales and happily ever afters?”
I can’t place the emotion curled cocoon-tight between her words. Despite our tiff, she mentioned a color in her question. I’m supposed to answer with a flower. It’s a stupid code she and her cousin used when they were younger to make sure the other was okay. Talia taught me, and I taught Christopher. It’s how he let her know he was still on our side at the farmhouse. Is she telling me she’s on my side now?
“Everything’s coming up daisies so far.” The bite to my answer is obvious.
“Are you both planning on staying in your apartment?”
Her question catches me off guard. “Why wouldn’t we be staying there?” I ask.
“Money,” she says simply. In anticipation of a physical response I don’t give her, Talia raises her fists to protect herself.
“He and I are fine.” I’m not certain why I bother with the lie. Talia’s plenty aware of how far up shit creek I am without Aunt Sarah’s help. “We’re job hunting,” I add.
“Him, sure,” Talia says, her response light and leading. “Did you forget you have a job?”
Resurrecting.
“I’m not—” I miss the subtle pivot of Talia’s heel. Her foot rises in a vicious arc. The kick whips my jaw sideways. My vision blurs.
“Look, I get it,” she says while I struggle to focus. “After Sarah, after everything, you needed to feel safe and for some reason, he gave you that. But time’s up, Allie.”
A droplet tickles my nostril when I shake my head, the taste of iron at the back of my throat. My hold on consciousness is onion skin thin.
“I’m done handling you with kid gloves. It’s been two weeks. Step up. Run this cluster,” Talia says.
She bounces on the balls of her feet and I ready for her next bombardment but she takes pity on me enough to hesitate. I hate her for it.
And then she speaks. “Sarah would have had this handled day one. Do something about the hunters in our city instead of cowering with that traitor.”
“Sarah never even—” I start.
“Sarah’s dead.” At my wince, Talia softens. “Allie. Handle it. The resurrectionists here depend on you now.” I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or anger, but her words shake. “I covered when you didn’t return their calls. I’m taking their reports, approving their resurrections, collecting their payments.”
The last part is a challenge. Talia knows I’m against charging for our skills.
“This is your job, not mine,” she says.
“But you’re so fantastic at it,” I say, the sarcasm a saccharine whine. “Why don’t you claim the cluster and leave me and Christopher the hell alone?”
“Because!” she yells. “You’re better than this! You’re better than him!”
I’ve known Talia long enough to understand this isn’t strategy. Right now, she’s cocky. Feeling superior. The gym mat squishes under my bare feet, the air moist with our exhalations as I fake a backward stumble, an exhausted gasp. Talia lunges.
My hips swivel, curled spine rocking me to a soft landing on my back as I tuck. Knowing dawns in her eyes, but it’s too late to stop her forward momentum. My feet piston upward into her breastbone. Underneath my heel, I feel a crack.
Balanced awkwardly, Talia croaks once before she drops off my feet and to the cushioned floor with a strangled noise. Her palm smacks. She grabs her throat then whacks the mat again, furious. I can’t tell if she’s tapping out or if the rib I broke punctured her lung.
“Let me guess how you think this plays out without me resurrecting,” I say from my spot beside her on the floor. “I spend my life working some crap retail job, barely scraping by. Since you hate him so much, no doubt you’re positive Christopher will leave me. Maybe steal the rent money and anything not nailed down on his way out?”
She contorts, breathless and cringing on the mat, but if she’s done treating me with kid gloves, I’m more than happy to return the favor.
“I’ll end up a shell of what my parents wanted for me, what Sarah wanted for me? Good thing they’re all dead, so I don’t have to live with the shame of their disappointment!”
Talia gurgles and then sucks a wheeze of air.
I roll myself into a sitting position. Talia loves nothing more than a movie monster scare, a finale flinch, a flash of blade between unsuspecting ribs and the seesaw of loss to win. This time, though, she appears well and truly done.
I give her a second to see what she does. “You okay
?” I ask, wary.
Pain lances her expression. One of her hands is shoved against her ribs to ease the agony of her inhale. “Same trainers,” she gasps. “Same workout regimen. Same damn leggings bought on sale.” She shoots a glare in my direction. “And you hand me my ass every time.”
Despite everything, my grin flares, exhaustion and pride battling inside me. “Don’t forget, I haven’t so much as lifted a dumbbell in at least three months.”
Talia oofs as she sits. She’s reeling from my kick, but she’ll live. “Really thought I had you that time,” she says shaking her head.
My lip tingles, the split healing. She stares at me and then sighs.
“Allie,” she breathes, my name a warning of what’s coming. “Everyone knows what happened to Sarah. To Brandon. To Jason.”
I think of my aunt, taking poison meant to protect the blood even as Jamison and the hunter with him slaughtered her. And the others, Brandon, who was gutted at the Boxcar Camp, and Jason Jourdain, who is so far only missing from his cabin at the edge of the swamp since a body never materialized.
“Three of ours, dead,” Talia goes on. “The cluster here in Fissure’s Whipp might be isolated, but we’re not off the radar.” Her voice falters. “I’m being asked questions.”
Fear slicks through me. I plant a palm on the mat and scoot toward her. “What questions?”
“Why haven’t you reached out to the other leaders? Colorado,” she starts, listing them off on her fingers. “Texas, Montana, California? They want to get together and offer their condolences, make your leadership here official. They’re wondering why you haven’t neutralized the nest of hunters yet. If you need help.” Her voice rises an octave. “The last couple days? They’re mostly curious as to why, other than that stripped down story you made me write to keep Ploy in the clear, I’m no longer answering their questions.”
I think of what Talia said earlier. You are who you hang with…
“Currently, no one knows about you and Ploy. You cut him loose, chances are, the three of us will be golden. You keep him, and those leaders will deep dive your boyfriend. His background. His friends.” She waits to be sure I heard the threat. “They’ll tie him to Jamison, and us with him.”
Her dark eyes burn into mine. She sucks a staggered breath before she can continue. “You’re a sister to me. I’d move Heaven and Earth to protect you, Allie,” she says in a voice meant for confession. Then it hardens. “But I will not go down for Ploy.”
I cringe at his old name, Ploy, used against me in every way. That’s not who he is anymore. Except on paper, he looks like a hunter, and on paper I’m the stupid girl starry-eyed over a bad boy. A girl who isn’t resurrecting and hasn’t willingly in months, who has a single guilty degree of separation from hunters she hasn’t stepped up to thwart. And on paper, in official documents, I now realize Talia covered for him and me both.
She grips her ribs. The tightness of her inhales proves this conversation is costing her. She goes on anyway. “All three of us will wind up on the short list for heart removal if you don’t snap out of this fantasy world. You need to take over the cluster. The resurrectionists are bringing in money. I’ve already doled out the first payment. These people depend on that cash.”
Aunt Sarah used to be in charge of redistributing the wealth. I remember watching her at her kitchen table, the stack of white envelopes growing as she calculated and counted and divided, separating her own portion to help others of our kind.
When I don’t respond, Talia struggles to her feet. I watch her limp across the gym to the small changing area. She reappears with something in her hand.
“What is that?” I ask as I stand. When she gestures I hold out my hand.
“It’s your share.” She smears money I don’t want to acknowledge against my palm. Still, I can’t help but see the bundle is largely comprised of twenties and fifties. There’s got to be at least a thousand dollars. “Oh my God, would you take it, Allie!” she scolds, as if I’m a child refusing medicine.
“I don’t need it,” I say.
Talia clutches her side and forces a breath. “You had no problem accepting money from Sarah in the past.”
“That was different!” I move off the mat and onto solid ground. We’re done training for now. I tell myself Talia needs time to heal, but in truth, I’m spent.
“How so?” Talia presses.
I struggle for an argument against taking the payment as I cross the gym to the bench where my battered and fraying duffel sits beside Talia’s name brand bag. The beans for the coffee Christopher and I drank this morning were bought with resurrection funds. The secondhand couch I debated abandoning if I have to move. The sheets strangled around my body during my nightmare this morning and now stained with Christopher’s blood.
Everything I own was bought with blood money.
My hair has come loose but I can’t rebind it while I’m holding the cash. “Take this,” I say.
Talia snatches the cash. I yank the elastic free and my bun spills loose. She watches in silence as I put my hair up.
“I have your mother’s casebook in the car,” she says. I left it at her place when Jamison stole us from there. “Do you want it?”
It’s not a simple question. She’s asking me to take over.
“Not yet,” I say.
Talia’s thumb draws a line up the center of her forehead as she squints in frustration. “We both went through trauma together. It’s taking you a little longer to bounce back.” The words have a practiced cadence, and I wonder exactly how many times she’s told herself this lie. “I need your head in the game. I need you with me on this. You better make some serious moves here real damn soon before we’re in deeper than I can dig us out. I’m sure as hell not letting anyone else in this cluster die because you and your whatever-he-is needed a vacation.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I drag my sweat-stained T-shirt over my head and drop it into my bag where I root around for the clean one I brought. I should head to the tiny curtained-off shower to rinse off, but if I stay much longer, Talia and I are both going to end up saying things we regret.
I slip the clean T-shirt on and stretch the hem to straighten it over my leggings. “Is that all?” I ask.
“Before you cut Ploy loose,” Talia says. Her start almost gives me hope she’s reconsidering. “Did he really only know Jamison? Did he interact with the other hunters like Jamison did?” She pauses, as if unsure how much to push me. “Can he get ahold of them?”
“I’m pretty sure he never met them,” I say, managing to sound put out.
She stares at me. “You haven’t asked?”
I snort, thinking of how easily she made him seem dispensable until she decided he’d be useful to her. “It never came up.”
Talia flinches. “You have to be delusional to think they’re not planning retaliation against us for killing Jamison and Corbin.” When she looks at me, I can see traces of the old Talia, my best friend, struggling under the surface of this hard shell crushing against me. “Are you delusional?”
“No.”
She raises a hand to the back of my neck and uses the hold to yank me closer. The force of her hug stumbles me into the bench. I hear my bag rustle and hope it doesn’t tumble off to the floor. “I know you, Allie,” she says as she moves to cradle my jaw, giving my chin a rough shake. The bruise there from her kick aches. “You’re a ruthless damn warrior.”
I’m not that girl anymore. Maybe I never was. Pretending is only going to get me and the few people I have left killed. When I don’t mimic her grin, Talia frowns.
“Ditch the deadweight and get your shit together,” she says.
Stripping off my leggings, I drop onto the bench and stab my legs into my jean shorts. Christopher isn’t deadweight, but Talia’s right. His past complicates things. “I need to think,” I say finally.
She gives me a beat as if I shouldn’t need more time than that, and then grabs her bag, sliding the strap over her s
houlder. “Fine,” she grumbles. “Think on your long walk home.”
She snags her keys and pivots.
“Talia,” I sigh.
I wait for her to reconsider, breeze back ready to argue this out. Instead, she’s around the partition and crossing the gym. Shocked, I listen to the click of the front door and the snap of the lock engaging. She actually left me.
I don’t chase her.
Flopping against the wall, I reach beside me on the bench and tug the main zipper on my bag closed. It’s only then I notice one of the side pockets is gaping, open. I slide the tips of my fingers inside.
“Son of a bitch,” I whisper as I draw out the money Talia tucked there while she hugged me.
If I’m evicted and the landlord changes the locks, I’ll lose what little I own. That’s nothing compared to what’s coming from the resurrectionists if they discover Christopher’s past. And the hunters…
Talia’s right. Trouble’s edging in at me from every direction. She’s made it clear what she thinks I should do. Her words echo in my head. Snap out of this fantasy.
I’ve always known I wouldn’t be able to keep Christopher. I’ve always known for him to stay safe, I’d have to let him go.
I just didn’t think it’d come so soon.
Ploy
My backpack is off balance, yanking against my shoulders, digging in where the weight of it sits uncomfortably at the base of my spine. Allie never said what she and Talia’s workout regimen consisted of, whether it was inside or outside. It’s why I mentioned I’d be downtown. If I run into them, Talia will warp it into creepy stalker behavior. I’m not about to give her any extra ammunition to use against me. No doubt, she’s already chipping away at any ground I’ve gained with Allie.
No, I think furiously. This isn’t a competition. Allie’s not a prize for Talia and I to fight over. She can think for herself.
Something Grave: The Resurrectionists Series book two Page 3
