“Pissed about your double-crossing boy toy or that I was right about him?” she asks.
“Little of column a, little of column b,” I admit.
Talia softens. “Hey, you were right about him, too. You knew he was hiding something.” There’s a pause. “How did you get him to admit it without things blowing up?”
“I didn’t. I confronted him with what you saw. He spilled everything, told me about how they sold a resurrectionist, how CJ was next, how his lies to me were worth it. He insisted he infiltrated them all for me,” I add in a garish singsong.
“So what’s Ploy’s next move?” Talia asks as she strips off her gloves.
For a moment, I’m sure I misheard her. “There is no next move. He’s not our problem anymore.”
She bolts upright, staring at me. “You killed him.” What should be a question is a statement laced with too much hope. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Because I wanted to get him clear of you, I think, but don’t say. I cut him loose in the cruelest way I could and then gave him well over a twelve-hour head start. Except he left his damn pack behind, which means he hasn’t left town yet, isn’t safe. Like everything else, I screwed this up.
My palm presses into the mat as I force myself to stand. With every word, it’s getting harder to hold on to the anger. Instead, a dull ache settles inside me. I want to punch things until my knuckles bleed, until my muscles quiver, until I’m as empty as my apartment will be without him when I go back there.
“When did this happen?”
“Last night,” I say. “Half an hour after you left.”
She’s still sitting on the mat, her dark arms glistening with sweat and locked around her knees as she stretches her spine, studying me.
“You were the one who said I had to make big moves.” Rolling my neck, I hear a sharp crack, and the stiffness that’s been there since Talia landed a kick to the side of my cheekbone dissipates. “I started by taking out the garbage.” It’s cruel enough to feel wrong in my mouth. I have to blink to clear the sudden sheen of tears glossing my vision. “He’s gone.”
His look when I told him I wished Talia had shot him is going to haunt me forever, but I had to make sure he’d never forgive me. It’s the only way to save him.
When Talia doesn’t comment, I offer her a hand. She clamps her fingers around my wrist and gets to her feet. She rotates slightly, a subtle tell to get into position.
I’m so concentrated on the move I know is coming that I miss the shift in her hips. One second, I’m ready for her jab, the next, she sweeps my legs. I land hard. The hit steals the air I have in my lungs. Her heel slams into my gut.
Instead of getting in a worse blow, Talia staggers a step. “You’re saying he’s gone like he’s dead. But you didn’t kill him, did you?”
Twisting over, I punch the ground in frustration as I fight in sufficient air to speak. “Jesus, Talia, what do you want from me?”
“I want you to think about the cluster first,” she says. “I want you to realize you could have used him the way we talked about. I want you to do what’s best for the rest of us instead of what you want. You have no right to risk the resurrectionists in Fissure’s Whipp over your love life.”
Stunned, I stare at her open-mouthed. My abdomen clenches as I wait for the pain from her kick to subside, trying not to heave.
“I want you to realize,” she goes on. “That you pissed off someone with a direct link to people who want our blood and gave him half a damn day to decide on his revenge. He knows things, Allie! Get those walls up! Protect yourself!” Talia spits, and I know she’s not talking about our vicious sparring match.
This time when she drives her heel into the mat, I’m not there to catch it in the chest. I roll and spring. My shoulder catches her upper thighs and I knock her to the mat. She squirms, grappling to swap our positions and end up on top of me. I shove my fingers under her armpit and through the space there, use my leverage to yank her arm hard enough that I hear the pop of her socket as it dislocates. Talia screams. With her free hand, she reels and drives the heel of her palm into my nose. It explodes in dual streams of blood. This time, my tears have nothing to do with Christopher.
I cough, spattering red, but I don’t release Talia. Instead, I double down, crawl a knee onto her spine as I drive her into the mat face first. “Tap out.”
Her hips thrust, one leg jerking as she attempts to free herself and turn this fight around. We both know I won. Talia’s palm hits the mat and I untangle myself.
“I know how to protect myself,” I snarl. “I’m not weak. He doesn’t make me weak.”
“He does,” she says, barely able to form the words through the pain chiseled into her features. “I never should have been able to sweep you. Now you’re bleeding. You’re hurt.”
She’s right. I’m clutching my middle where her kick landed. A soft pattering fills the gym. I paw at my nose and then give up, pinching the bridge to stanch the flow there.
She taps a finger against her temple as she scowls at me. “You fuck up. Anytime he’s mentioned, any time he’s around, any time you think that asshole is in danger, you spiral.”
I’m shaking my head, but she goes on.
“If you can’t see why that’s wrong, why what you did by letting him live is an insult to every resurrectionist who ever died protecting our blood, our secrets, then you shouldn’t be in charge of the cluster at all.”
Talia’s infuriatingly calm as she works her shoulder to see if it’ll pop into the socket on its own. Something tells me she’s not quite ready to accept my help. I glare at her, willing myself to come up with an argument, something, anything to defend myself, to defend him.
When I don’t, her head starts a slow shake.
“If you won’t protect our resurrectionists,” she says. “Then I will.”
I’m moving before my brain catches up, already fisting her shirt collar. She doesn’t have time to hide her surprise as I rip her toward me. “You threaten him again, and I will bleed you dry myself.”
“Try it,” Talia snarls.
“This isn’t your decision,” I say.
Her laughter stops me short. She grabs my wrist and slings my grip from her collar. “Because you’re the leader here?” She says the word like it’s an insult. She starts to throw her hands up and then clutches her arm with an exhausted sigh. “I’m done listening to you pop off wishes about how things are going to go and wind up dumbfounded when reality bites you in the ass.”
I stare down at my blood-streaked hands, silent as her tirade continues.
“I’m tired of backing down from what I know is right to spare your feelings,” Talia goes on. “I’m tired of asking you for permission.” There’s a pause. “I’m going to take over the—”
“No,” I say. “You’re going to stand down and do what you’re told.” The determination in my voice startles me, but I don’t let it show. “This is my cluster. I’ll protect us.”
Talia’s brows knit together as if she can’t quite believe I’m holding my ground. “How?”
“We’ve got a nest of hunters in Fissure’s Whipp, don’t we?”
“Oh, now that you’re personally inconvenienced, you’re ready to act?” she asks.
“Without those hunters, Christopher and I would have been fine.” I break off at Talia’s noise of disbelief. “What?”
“Christ,” she mumbles. “It’s always about you, Allie. When are you going to grow the hell up?”
My voice brims with snark. “Okay, Talia. Say you are the leader. What’s your move? What do you do first?”
She doesn’t hesitate. “I go after your hunter boyfriend.”
“Glass houses, you hypocrite,” I say. “You hate him. Without him, we’d probably be dead or worse, and he’s a living reminder. He doesn’t make me weak, he reminds you of when you were weak and you want him dead for it!”
I brace myself for her argument. It doesn’t come.
“Well?”
I demand.
“He’s not…” She trails off, then pauses, frustrated. “You’re wrong,” she says, but the words hold no conviction. “And anyway, I said I’d go after him. First, I’ll find out everything he knows about the hunters.” She gives me a solid once over that clearly finds me wanting. “Then I’ll kill him. He betrayed you. Twice now. Don’t forget that.”
Talia pivots and I watch as she grabs her bag and stomps toward the door of the gym. Her hand slams against the metal guard on the door, and I hear the pneumatic springs as it closes to latch behind her. The air-conditioned chill sends goosebumps racing across my skin. I hurt. Every part of me is in pain, but it doesn’t matter.
Talia’s going to kill Christopher. My insight might have bought a few hours of hesitation from her at most, but once she gets over the sting, she’ll come down on him hard.
I limp to my gym bag and rustle through the side pocket until I come out with my phone. What the hell am I supposed to text him? “We need to talk” is too vague. “You’re in danger” is too dramatic or not dramatic enough. “I think I just signed your death warrant.”
Then I remember I deleted him from my contacts last night. Erased our message history and took his number off the call list, leaving no temptation to contact him. It was a childish move. The exact sort of thing Talia’s accusing me of.
Damn it, I think. I have no way to warn Christopher.
I’m still too angry to consider maybe there was a little truth to what he said last night. Without him, there’s zero chance I would have been able to keep CJ safe or known what the hunters were planning. If I’d trusted him from the start, given him my blessing, how differently would this have gone?
He crossed me, I think. He crossed me. He crossed me. It’s a mantra that makes my stomach churn.
I open a side pocket on my bag and find a couple of wet wipes near the bottom. It’s disturbing how often I find myself prepared to clean up blood. What’s more disturbing is, with every second that passes, I’m drawing closer to my other pressing problem. I have a cluster to prove myself to before they’ll trust me, and that means exterminating the nest of hunters here in Fissure’s Whipp.
I need to act. Focusing on the cluster will cost me a chance at saving Christopher. Choosing him might cost me everything.
He makes you weak, Talia’s voice repeats in my head. As I clean up the used wet wipes and wrappers and get ready to start toward the bus, though, I can’t deny my mind is on Christopher.
For the first time, I wonder if she might be right.
Ploy
I walk all night, dimly aware of the rising sun, the morning cracking over the city, infecting the shadows until they shrink into nothing. I walk until my calves ache and then go numb, until the burn in my feet subsides and the hollow ball inside me swells, until it fills my chest and there’s no room for anything else.
I tighten the hold I have on shoulders empty without the straps of my pack, keep my gaze lowered, fade. My foot sloshes into a puddle.
I stop, staring at it. The gray water soaks into the white fabric of my shoe and suddenly I’m aware, here, awake. My brain’s on overload as a strange déjà vu crawls over me.
The dew on my skin chills to clammy. It’s nearing seven in the morning. I’ve been up twenty-four hours, a little longer. I’m spent. I shake what water I can from my shoe and squelch forward, heading for the rusted run of tracks in front of me.
Suspicion follows me as I pass a small group gathered around a pile of smoldering sticks. I nod to one of the ancient bums. The coffee he’s heating smells stale, the grounds likely dried and rebrewed until they’re nearly useless.
This side of the boxcars is mostly older veterans. Just after come the junkers, blitzed on anything they can shoot into their veins, huff, smoke. I cross through, hopeful no one will be moving around yet.
A certain gloom sulks through the air. I drop my hand to my hip, the knife under my shirt at my waist. When I bolted I was smart enough to have it on me, even if the rest of my brain went to shit.
“Hey,” someone calls. The bark echoes through the quiet as the drone of insects falls silent. A bullfrog booms a croak. I startle and then keep walking. “Talkin’ to you!”
I raise a hand in a wave of acknowledgement and speed my steps, hoping whoever it is yelling will lose interest. I only make it a few yards before I stumble on loose gravel, catching myself at the last moment.
A harsh laugh rolls through the camp.
Three cars later and I’m in more comfortable territory. Still, I don’t move my hand from my weapon, just in case. I skirt the boxcars, most of their doors rusted open.
I haven’t been here since the night Brandon was murdered. I stare at my old car, near the end of the line on the unused tracks. A streamer of yellow sways in the slight breeze kicking up through the swamp, through the trees, and for a second, I’m confused before I realize it’s a plastic length of crime scene tape.
I can’t be here.
I can’t go to Allie’s.
I don’t know what to do.
A hand clamps onto my shoulder and I almost jump out of my skin. My fingers are going for the knife when a familiar laugh reaches my ears.
“Damn,” I manage, shaking my head as LowLow’s chuckle trails off. Lucky for him, my brain’s fuzzy with lack of sleep, my reflexes dull. “You about got a smile across your stomach not worth sewing shut.” I roll my shoulders, trying to oust the kink in the muscle from his squeeze. “I thought pacifists aren’t supposed to cause pain?”
“Not on purpose.” He gives me a once over and then leans to the side as if the picture of me isn’t quite making sense. “Shouldn’t you be with your girl?”
Time’s distorted in my head. I feel like I ran into LowLow with Allie a lifetime and seconds ago. Too much has happened. “We got in a fight.”
“There’ll be others,” he says with a shrug. When he notices my wounded expression, he clarifies. “Other fights, not other girls. Allie is the one you end up with.”
“Yeah,” I say, because it’s easier than sorting out the strangeness that is LowLow. He’s going to ask about my missing pack. He’s going to rib me about my vacation from the camp shacking up with Allie, and how clean my clothes are, and how I reek of laundry detergent. I’ve got one shoe gray with the sick water of the puddle, the other too white to blend in this place I used to call home. That’s me, I think. Half in, half out, fitting nowhere.
He angles toward the boxcar I was clearly navigating to before he casts a wary glance at the crime scene tape. “You don’t want to bother with that one. Got an extra sheet you can borrow,” he says. “Piece of floor, too.”
I open my mouth to say thanks but what comes out is, “How bad is it?”
I remember the blood when I clicked my headlamp on, congealed and sticky, the taste of it in the air, in my lungs, in the back of my throat, and I remember later at Allie’s place where I’d gargled shower water that had done nothing to help.
A drop of rain splatters against my temple, slides. I brush at it as another hits the nape of my neck, another, another.
“Bad?” LowLow says. “Not bad. Occupied.”
For a moment, I don’t understand.
“You left half a month ago, Ploy.” He hooks an arm over my shoulder and circles us toward the boxcar he’s staying in. “Can’t expect you weren’t evicted.”
But Brandon died in there, I want to say. Brandon had his guts stolen and none of you knew Jamison did it. It could have been anyone here.
Brandon’s murder barely made the paper the next day. I looked. And now, there’s no proof he existed. Two weeks and every trace of me in this place, a year of living, is scraped clear.
I’m a ghost.
“Roomie!” LowLow calls into the gaping maw of the boxcar door, and my attention roams from the crime scene tape to the metal car LowLow stands beside. “Told you I had a feeling we got company coming!”
I’m trying to remember the handle of the guy he shares wit
h. Something foresty. Oak maybe. Moss?
No one here has a real name. No one here has a real life.
The rusted metal creaks as LowLow vaults into the car. When he reaches to haul me up and in, his smile fades. I don’t know how, but somehow I get the feeling he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“Get up in here,” he says quietly. “I’ll give you something to take the edge off, okay?”
Already, I feel the claws of this place digging into me. How easy would it be swallow what LowLow offers and let Allie fade into memory? A dark future spirals through my head like a portent, one where whatever LowLow gives me fades me into a stupor. One where I sink into sleep without ever waking up. One where Allie’s all alone in her apartment and I’m not there when the hunters I helped come for her.
My brain’s mush, pushed well past the boundaries of exhaustion. “I’m so tired.”
“What?” LowLow asks before he disappears. When he comes back, a bright pop of color is squeezed between his fingers. “You in?”
“No,” I say. “I just need sleep.”
The pill disappears in a complicated sleight of hand trick and then LowLow offers me his palm. This time, I take it.
All around me is the sharp tink, tink, tink of rain splattering against metal roofs. At first rhythmic before growing into a cacophony, the patter of falling droplets deafening as the sky opens. Inside the boxcar is the same scent of old blood branded into my memory. I brush the rain from my arms and accept the sheet LowLow offers.
“Thanks.” I shuffle to a corner crowded with old cans and bottles, clear a patch of floor and curl up, my head on my damp arm. Outside, the storm rages as I finally give in to fitful dreams.
I come out of sleep struggling. One second, I’m under, the next, I’m clawing for consciousness, arms outstretched. Pain thrums through every joint. In the distance, birds chirp. Sometime while I was out, it stopped raining. I’m awake enough to know where I am, the why. Thirty seconds and already my anxiety is spiking.
My pack is still at Allie’s. I’ve got to get that pack. Everything I own is inside it. For a minute, I consider texting her. She could leave it outside or I could go pick it up and we could talk.
Something Grave: The Resurrectionists Series book two Page 18
