Deadrise (Book 3): Savage Blood

by Brandt, Siara

  “Do you really want me to say it out loud?”

  Desah had no trouble telling him another lie. Dani was dead now, and the truth had died with her.

  “She was willing to think the worst of you. I’d never do that, Hunter.”

  His gaze was unwavering as he searched her face. He had the hopeless look of a man who had lost everything. But he had to lose. The past had to be wiped out. It was the only way they could have a future together. Though they had never shared much beyond a friendship, still, Desah thought about Hunter all the time. She imagined them together every single day. She dreamt about him at night. Even knowing that he belonged to Dani. Maybe in part because he belonged to Dani.

  But Desah was struggling with her own feeling of hopelessness. Because instead of finally getting what she wanted, she felt like she was losing him. Because right now, at least, she felt like she couldn’t reach him. She burst into tears then because she didn’t know what else to do. “Do you know how hard this has been on me? Taking care of her until the end? And then trying to survive on my own? I couldn’t have made it here without Jordan and Crede.” She wanted him to know how much danger she had been in. She wanted him to focus on her.

  “I’m asking you one more time, Desah,” he began in a quiet voice. “Where did you bury her?”

  He still couldn’t let her go. The tears suddenly vanished as comprehension dawned. “You’re not seriously thinking about going back there?”

  He didn’t try to deny it. What she had heard in his voice, and what she now saw in his face sent a chill straight through her. The ugly part of her nature rose to the surface and it found expression in her face. Fine. If he needed to pay homage to Dani’s dead corpse before he could finally let her go, who was she to stop him? So she told him.

  “Our backyard,” she said. “By the big oak tree. Under there.”

  “Is there a marker?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  He nodded. That was all he needed from her. He turned to go.

  At the door Desah’s voice stopped him. “There’s just death waiting for you back there, Hunter. She’s at peace now.”

  Yeah, but he wasn’t.

  “I can’t go forward until I go back.”

  “She’s in the ground, Hunter. She’s gone.”

  Hunter got in Deklin’s face and jabbed a finger in midair. “Don’t say that again,” he warned through clenched teeth.

  Dek saw that Hunter’s hand was shaking and he knew he had to defuse the situation as quickly as possible.

  “We were lucky to find this place,” Dek said, still trying to convince him to stay. “You go out there, and you don’t know what you’ll find.”

  Hunter made a scoffing sound in his throat. “Lucky? Not so’s you’d notice.” The muscles jumped in his jaw as he fought for control. “Anyway, I thought you decided you want to move to the airport,” he went on. “Do you even know what you’ll find there? Besides the fact that the place is too big and too wide open to defend. Did you even think it through? Do you ever?” He shook his head. “If you want to find something worth fighting for, you’re going about it the wrong way. Which is the way you usually do things.”

  Deklin ignored the insult. On the surface at least. “Think of the group, Hunter. We can’t split up now.”

  “Yeah, about that. Have you taken a good look at the group lately? Everyone’s pissed off or hopeless. Everyone’s feeling lost. That’s not what I had with- with Dani,” he said, his voice ravaged by grief. Only now did Hunter realize how difficult it was for him to even say her name. He stalked across the small space of the school office, stopped and then turned back abruptly.

  “All this time and we’re still arguing about the basics of survival, like food, water and shelter. There’s got to be something better than this. Better than turning our backs on everyone else just to save ourselves. Better than turning into thieves and stealing it from other people.”

  Seated on a counter nearby, Axton Krell stopped sharpening his knife and glanced coldly up at Hunter. Not a shred of emotion showed on his face, but he obviously suspected that Hunter was talking about him.

  After a deep sigh, Hunter said wearily, “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into staying around this long. I am going back. You can’t stop me.”

  “You can’t change things.”

  Hunter had heard the same thing from Desah and he gave way to his frustration. “Look, I get it. You want me to accept the lies, shut up and pretend that she never existed. I can’t do that.”

  Dek gave a little start, wondering just how much Hunter had figured out. But he only said, “That’s not what I want you to do.”

  “Like hell it isn’t. Even now, you’re trying to keep me from her.”

  “Look, I know how you- ”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Hunter spat.

  “If anyone knows, it would be me,” Dek said in a tight, suppressed voice. “I’ve lost plenty of people close to me, too. And I cared about Dani. The same as you. You think about that.”

  “You never had with Dani what I had with her. It wasn’t anywhere near the same. You knew that the only way you could take her away from me was by lying to her.”

  So Hunter had figured something out, Dek realized.

  “If she had known the truth,” Hunter went on. “She wouldn’t even have been out there by herself. You think about that.”

  Hunter had rattled Dek by putting it all out there in the open. He could see the change in Dek’s eyes. But facing things squarely and honestly had never been one of Deklin’s strong points. And Hunter didn’t want to waste any more time arguing.

  “Desah said they didn’t hang around long enough to even put a marker,” Hunter began quietly. “I at least owe her that.”

  “They didn’t have time,” Dek said in defense. “There were rotters coming.”

  “How many?”

  “Two,” Dek answered and then immediately changed his answer. “How the hell do I know?”

  “And they couldn’t have handled two of them?”

  “Maybe they could have. But we’re learning when it’s time to move on.”

  Hunter knew that Dek expected him to do the same.

  “I’ll decide when it’s right for me to move on. You have no right to make that decision for me.” Hunter leaned slightly forward. His voice was husky with emotion. “No right. Because your decisions are always about what’s right for you.”

  There was a brief flicker of emotion in Dek’s eyes. He quickly veiled it, and said, “We’ll be here for a few more days. And then we’re heading north towards the airport. You can still change your mind and go with us now. If you wait too long . . . ” he left the rest of it unsaid.

  “Then it’s every man for himself,” Hunter finished. “But isn’t it like that already?”

  Hunter walked away, pounded the door jamb with his fist, doing damage, both to the wall and to his hand, but he welcomed the pain. It was easier to handle outside than it was inside.

  He paused for a moment. He didn’t turn around, but he said, “We’re not a damned pack of wild animals. We’re still human and we can’t pretend that we’re not. We can’t forget everything that we were. But you were right about one thing when you said we could become like those things out there. If we let everything good die inside of us, then we are the walking dead.”

  Chapter 13

  Hunter stripped down and stepped off the porch into the pouring rain. He lathered his body and hair and let the rain rinse the soap away along with the layers of dirt and blood. He repeated the lathering. And when the soap was gone, he repeated it again. And again.

  He tilted his head far back and stared up at the rain-slashed darkness. There were no stars. No moon. There was nothing to relieve the empty darkness. The rain was bone-chilling cold. But he wanted to feel the cold. As much as he wanted to be clean. He wanted to wash away all the bad things of the past. Of course he couldn’t do that. There was no way to undo it all. It sta
yed a part of who he was, reminding him every minute of every day that there was no forgetting.

  He knew that Desah had been lying. He knew because Dani would never have said those things. She would never have gone back to Dek. But Desah was who she was and he doubted there was anything he could do to drag the truth out of her. And Dani? She couldn’t speak for herself anymore, though she still lived on in his memory. She always would.

  He stepped back up onto the porch, shoved his wet hair back from his face and started to dry off. There was no hurry to put the clean change of clothes on. He’d gone off from the rest of the group, seeking solitude, so there was no one to see his nakedness.

  When his body was dry enough, he pulled on the new pair of jeans. He zipped up the front but left the button undone and stood there bare-chested. Suddenly he bowed his head and pounded his fist repeatedly against one of the porch posts and ground out an oath. “Dammit.” He should have been there for her. Tormented by what she must have endured, he wondered if he was ever going to find a way to live with it.

  He heard a slight noise, the unexpected whisper of a footstep on a floorboard. He whirled around to see Desah standing in the doorway. It both startled and annoyed him because she hadn’t said a word to let him know she was there. He wondered how long she had been watching him.

  For the briefest of moments he saw something glittering in her eyes that took him aback. He could not completely define it. It was something hard, something almost malevolent. If so, he wondered if it was directed at him.

  “What do you want, Desah?” he asked, frowning as he fastened the button on his jeans. He picked up his shirt.

  Her intense, fixed gaze finally slid away from him. “I want you to know,” she began without looking at him. “That I’m here for you, Hunter. That I’ll always be here for you.”

  God, was she really doing this? Desah’s infatuation with him had never been a subtle thing. But it was the last thing he wanted to deal with right now.

  She came closer and laid her hand on his arm. “You know that, don’t you?

  He resisted the urge to throw her arm off as he wanted to do and turned his face aside. He didn’t see the change in her eyes as she continued to stare up at him. She had been secretly watching him for a long time. The sexual attraction was nothing new. The force of Hunter, the dominance of him, those were things she had never been able to resist. She had even thought about taking her own clothes off and throwing herself shamelessly at him. Right there on the porch. He might have been shocked. He might have even tried to resist her. But she believed she could make him forget Dani, if she could just turn his grief into passion.

  In the end, she had let her cooler emotions prevail. “We can help each other through this,” she told him.

  He didn’t reply. That’s when she saw the items on the chair.

  “You’re still thinking about going back there? Now? Tonight?”

  “I’ve already made up my mind, Desah,”

  “I was hoping that you had changed it.” There was no mistaking the frustration or the disappointment in her voice. “Were you even going to say goodbye to me?”

  “Probably not.”

  Did he even care how much he hurt her?

  “Let’s not make this more difficult than it has to be,” he said as he began to button up his shirt.

  Desah felt like she was losing him to Dani all over again. That even in death, Dani had more power over him than she could ever hope to have. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. And to add to her sense of panic, there was no guarantee that he would ever come back to her again. Something could happen to him out there. And she would never have closure. She would spend the rest of her life wondering if he was dead or alive.

  “It’s getting more and more dangerous out there,” she told him as if he didn’t know that already.

  “This is something I have to do.” He drew a deep breath, hesitating before he asked, “Just tell me one thing more. Did she suffer much?” He wasn’t sure he could even bear to hear about the details, but he couldn’t hide from them, either.

  Desah heard the grief in his voice, but she was not moved by it as she realized that Dani was still the only thing on his mind, that he preferred a cold corpse to a warm body. Right now, she wished Danielle had suffered. Really suffered.

  The words were out of her mouth before she could censor them. “What do you think?”

  She saw the flicker of pain in his eyes. But surprisingly, she felt no pleasure or satisfaction in hurting him. Let him get this out of his system, she told herself. Let him mourn. Let him grieve. When he realized he was trying to hold onto a ghost, he would come back to her. What other choice would he have? Where else would he go? There was nothing but death out there. When he realized that, only then could he begin a new life. With her. So it was best he remembered her in a favorable light. Remembered that she could give him what Dani could not.

  “I’ll be waiting for you, Hunter. Remember that. I won’t stop waiting for you.”

  Once there had been confining restraints, rules and regulations. On life. On society. On her. Now? Now she was finding it easier and easier to throw those restraints off and break the old rules. Long ago she had learned how to twist the truth to get her way. She had become very adept at manipulating people. She had even surprised herself when she realized just how easily and how thoroughly she could fool people. She was that good at it.

  But one thing Desah could not be was patient. As hard as she tried, she could not sit patiently by while Hunter walked away from her. She was still seething with emotions. Frustration, jealousy, and rage among the most toxic of them. She didn’t know what to do with those things. She felt like she had lost complete control. Over everything.

  It made her realize that she didn’t want to be a helpless victim in this world. She didn’t want to be one of the sheep. She blew out a sharp breath and decided she wanted to be one of the wolves. She wanted to take what she wanted.

  As she walked through the wet darkness, lost in the anonymity of the deserted playground, she suddenly stopped short. There, sprawled on a bench before her, was Deklin. Alone and unexpected. An unmoving, silent extension of the shadows.

  She approached him and halted close enough to stand within his shadow. Without saying a word, she tilted her head as she stared down at him. It wasn’t necessary for them to immediately speak their thoughts. They seemed to instinctively understand each other. They always had.

  “Hunter’s gone,” she informed him in a flat voice.

  “He left without telling me?”

  She shrugged. “You know Hunter.”

  “He’s chasing a ghost. He’ll eventually see that.”

  As she stared down at Dek, there was one truth that Desah could not escape from. While Hunter practically went out of his way to ignore her, Dek listened to everything she had to say. With an intensity that, at times, seemed hawk-like, he devoured every word she said. With some people she had to play a role. But this was Deklin. She could act however she wanted to with him. He accepted her the way she was.

  “Has he figured anything out yet?” Dek wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t admit to anything.”

  “He knows something,” Dek said almost to himself. “But he’s gone now.”

  That thought hardly comforted her.

  “As if he hasn’t seen enough death all around him,” Dek said thoughtfully. “He has to go chasing it down, too.”

  She was still smarting from the sting of rejection and Dek must have suddenly realized it. “Don’t think about him,” he told her. “We’ve got other, more important things to think about.”

  She didn’t reply as she sat down on the bench beside him.

  “He was trouble anyway,” Dek went on. “He made people question me. He put doubt in their minds.”

  He was silent for a while before he added, “Hunter leaving might turn out to be the best thing for the group. They’ll have no choice but to follow me now.�
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  And then Dek said, almost contemptuously, although there was a kind of ominous quality running through his words, “Truth is, they’re all living in some kind of vacuum here. Sooner or later reality is going to set in.”

  “What reality is that?”

  “That with so much death all around us, sometimes it’s the only solution.”

  She stared at him, wondering what he was talking about.

  “These people are sheep,” he informed her. “Do you know that?”

  “Sheep can be easily led,” Desah commented. She wasn’t sure why she had said that, except that she had been developing a slightly-adjusted way of seeing at things, a more cold-blooded way of looking at the world. Of course you had to adjust your thinking. If you wanted to survive.

  “To slaughter?” he said, and then laughed at his own joke.

  He made more room for her and stretched his legs out further as he made himself comfortable. He folded his arms across his chest and said without looking at her, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You know that. Same as I do.”

  Secretly, she reveled in the thought that he confided in her this way as he confided in no one else. They shared something deep. They even shared a lie. They had to have a special bond for that. They’d had sex a few times in the past, and, sure, they had gone their separate ways afterwards. But here they were together again as if none of that mattered. Dek wasn’t Hunter, but he was the alpha dog right now.

  “And you intend to lead the pack?” she asked with a slight lift of her pierced brow.

  “I do,” he said, slurring his words slightly.

  She knew that he had been drinking. She had seen the half-empty bottle beside him. But didn’t that give her an edge? Of course Dek intended to lead, she thought as she watched him more openly. What other choice would a man like Deklin Kullvein make?

  “I heard some of the others say they might consider going with Hunter when he gets back,” she informed him. She thought he should know that. She thought that telling him would strengthen their bond.