When I pick up the towel to dry off, I notice it’s damp. The image of her using it sometime earlier in the day jackknifes my brain. Jesus, why can’t she make the first move? If she kissed me, I could justify going along with it. Tell myself I was doing it to get in with her, get closer. And what’re you going to do when it all blows up in your face? I think furiously.
The girl is glue. If I touch her once, I’m not going to be able to stop.
I think about tucking that long blond hair behind her ear. I think about draping an arm over her shoulder when we end up on the couch watching one of those terrible comedies that I would sit through every night for the chance to hear her laughing. See a smile on her lips that isn’t tinged in sarcasm. The ones I put there never seem quite genuine. But I could...
Stop.
There are rules in place for a reason. Don’t get caught up in her. Don’t pretend it’s real. The hope that it could be only makes it hurt more. I need distance to get a clear head, but I can’t leave now. Not after what happened to Brand.
It’d been different with him than it is with Allie. Brandon and I had both known where we stood. We watch each other’s backs. Watched, I correct myself.
Even with what happened to him, I can’t bring myself to feel as guilty as I should. He hadn’t trusted me. If he had, he’d be alive right now.
Frustration twists through me, balls up inside until my fist explodes toward the fogged mirror. I pull the punch at the last second, but my knuckles strike hard enough to send pain shooting through the bones of my hand. I swipe through the fog on the glass, stare into the brown eyes blinking quickly back at me.
“You can do this,” I whisper to the reflection. I only ever meant to use her. I’ve gone through our hangouts a dozen times in my mind, searching for the moment I messed up. The moment I started to like her. “You don’t,” I argue.
I step into the sweatpants she keeps for me. They’re old, stretched out on her but a perfect fit for me. It’s weird how the simple act of putting them on relaxes my body, leaches the tension from my neck and shoulders in a way even the hot water couldn’t. They’re a stupid pair of sweatpants but they mean I get to sleep tonight without waking up to look over my shoulder every few minutes. That I’m safe.
My fingers grip the counter of the sink until they turn white.
“She’s just another girl,” I tell myself.
I’m so screwed.
Allie
The scent of coffee yanks me out of inky dreams. From the kitchen, I hear the last few gurgles of the machine and the loud beep as it finishes brewing. I stretch and roll my neck. The smile’s on my lips before my feet even hit the floor; I can’t remember the last time someone made me coffee in the morning. I wonder if it’s some sort of bribe, buttering me up for whatever he’d wanted to talk about last night. From the smell alone, I’d accept.
When I get to the kitchen, Ploy’s bent over the table, his back to me.
“Hey,” I say, my voice gravelly with sleep. I tuck my hair behind my ears. “Thanks for coffee.”
“There’s more,” he says, stepping aside to reveal two wrapped bundles on the table. “Borrowed your keys.” He gestures at the set. “Figured you didn’t want me to leave you sleeping with the door unlocked.”
“Thanks,” I say as I unwrap the paper from my breakfast. It’s a sandwich, eggs and sausage and melted cheese on homemade bread. It smells glorious. Too good to be true. I glance up at him, let my eyes skip over his, trying to get a read. “You didn’t have to buy me this.”
A corner of his mouth quirks up. “Didn’t.”
I want to frown, give him some speech on the wrongs of stealing, but for him it’s a matter of survival. I take the first bite and every condemnation abandons me. I force myself to set the food down. Ploy’s stayed at my apartment twice a week or so for the last two months. I’ve woken up to him doing dishes, contributing little things. Never anything this elaborate. “All right, spill it,” I say, gesturing to the sandwich, the coffee pot.
His arms cross over his chest. He maneuvers toward the table as I go for the two mugs in the drying rack, the tiny kitchen only offering space for one person.
“It wouldn’t be for long,” he says suddenly. The tone of his voice catches me enough that I turn to him. “Just a week, maybe. Until I can find someplace else.”
“What are you asking?”
Ploy taps the edge of the countertop, a nervous habit of his I’d picked up on the first night he stayed here. “I can’t go back to the boxcars. A friend of mine, in the camp.” A frown creases his mouth, his brow furrowed. “He uh… He died.”
Paranoia bubbles up before I can stop it. He’s going to ask me to save his friend. He knows what I do. I can’t. Even if he’d asked in time, I can’t. I swallow hard and push the idea away. Ploy’s upset. He came here because he needed a friend.
I don’t have much practice in comforting others. I’m searching for something to say when he quietly adds, “I found him.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. He shrugs a shoulder, as if not sure what to do with the sympathy. Maybe we both suck at this.
“He was in the boxcar when I went there last night.” Ploy stares at the kitchen wall. With each word, his voice deadens. “I didn’t see him at first. He was tucked against the wall. Right where I lay my sleeping bag.”
“Ploy,” I whisper. Hesitating, I reach a hand to touch his shoulder.
Just before I make contact he breaks out of the trance. “I can’t sleep there, okay?” he snaps. Nudging me aside, he grabs the mugs off the counter. “Do you have sugar?”
The words are a snarl. We’ve grown accustom to shoulder shrugs and subject changes. Neither of us are an open book. Still, the edge to his voice stings. I swing the cabinet door wide and dump a dozen sugar packets on the counter beside him as he fills our coffee mugs.
He gives his head a little shake. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s…Someone cut him.”
The camps have their share of violence. Most days the papers don’t even report on the stabbings and fights there anymore. It’s bad press for the tourism. From the scars I’ve glimpsed on Ploy’s shirtless torso, he’s seen his share. I wonder if he knows how to handle a knife. I’m going through my arsenal in my head, choosing one I can spare when it occurs to me that the dead kid probably had a knife, too. It hadn’t helped him.
It could have been Ploy.
The thought splits through me in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with. You’re just covering your own ass, I remind myself. Otherwise you wouldn’t be okay with leaving him on the couch as some sort of human tripwire. “Was it a fight, then?”
He sits down in one of the chairs and picks at his sandwich. “He was laid open.”
“Did he have defensive wounds?” I ask and then realize how callous the question is. I’m used to bodies, death, clinical descriptions.
“No, you don’t understand,” he says as I hand him his cup of coffee and lean against the counter with my own, blowing over the steam. “Laid open. Like how frogs get dissected.” He’s fiddling, not paying me any attention. “And his insides were gone.”
My mug slides through my hand. I catch it, my reflexes kicking in before it even leaves my fingers. Hot coffee sloshes over the rim. Trembling, I set it on the counter. “What?” I manage, wondering if the shake in my voice is pronounced enough for him to hear.
“They were gone, Allie. Stomach, intestines, liver, all that stuff. Scraped clean. Gone.”
My body numbs except for a tingle of nerves, anticipation, fight or flight. “How long had you known him?” I ask, trying to mask the panic in my voice, make it comforting, but this time it doesn’t work. Maybe he picks up something in the tone or maybe it’s the wrong question to ask after a bombshell like that. Either way, he looks up at me. I force a sad smile and hope he’ll think I’m just uncomfortable. Luckily, he seems to take the bait.
“Couple months. He came from up North.” Up North is code for not from here. Everywhere
is North from Fissure’s Whipp.
“Was he on the run?” I swallow hard. I shouldn’t ask, but I have to know. Have to be sure. “From the police…or something?”
The last two words hang in the air between us. I watch him weighing the pause I hadn’t meant to include, my awkward silence. But the missing organs, they can only mean one thing. He was like me. My head spins. He was a resurrectionist like me. Someone killed him. Someone had known his own blood would heal his organs, even damaged. Someone had known the body can’t heal what isn’t there.
Someone is hunting us.
“Allie?”
I want to tell Ploy that it’s okay. Not to panic. That this isn’t like my parents. That it must be a mistake. Flashes come to me. Going in the door. Two bodies on the floor. And I’d left them there. Just left them and taken off running, not stopping until I’d gotten to my aunt’s house the next town over, my sneakers bloody and my parents dead and…
“Allie?”
I can’t catch my breath to answer him.
He’s off the chair and at my side in the space of a blink. “I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking and it freaked me out so bad to find him like that and—”
“Stay,” I say suddenly, cutting him off. His concern turns to confusion. “That’s what you’re asking, right? If you can?” I grip his wrist. His eyes meet mine, shoot down to the hold I have on him and back up. I swallow hard and unwind my fingers. “You can stay with me,” I say.
Allie
He doesn’t tell me where he plans on hanging out and I don’t ask. From my month of scheduled run-ins, I know Ploy’s patterns well enough to find him if the need arises.
I’m not crazy about him sticking to his normal routine, begging change and whatever else his crew gets up to but if Ploy doesn’t know what the organ removal means then he’s not a resurrectionist. Not a target. He’s a million times safer when he’s not around me.
“You know how to use that?” I ask as he tucks a closed knife into his pocket.
He snorts. “I don’t carry it around for fun.”
No, I want to say. Do you know how to block when someone comes at you with their own blade, how to observe your opponent for weaknesses in technique, how to cut where it’ll count? Do you know how to use it, not how to flash it around to scare off a gutter punk after a couple dollars? I have half a mind to show him just how effortlessly I can disarm him and have his own blade at his throat. It’d wipe the patronizing smirk off his face pretty damn quick.
“Of course you don’t carry it for fun,” I grind out through clenched teeth and a pinched grin. That’s weapon training one oh one: Never carry a weapon unless you intend, and know how, to use it.
“I’ll be back around dark, cool?” Ploy says as he opens the door. I nod. I only need him here when I’m asleep. Otherwise, he’d probably just get in the way. “Listen…” His fingers brush down the edge of the frame and tap twice against the knob. He clears his throat and looks up at me, his voice lower than it was before. “Thanks for, you know, letting me stay and stuff.”
I can barely get the corners of my mouth to lift. “No problem,” I say. “See you later.” The probability of someone coming after me at the apartment is slim to nil. He has a much better chance of getting shanked under a bridge or something.
But he also has a right to know what he’s signing up for.
The second he closes the door, I twist the deadbolt and slide the chain into place. Even as I move, I’m pulling my phone from my pocket.
“It’s happening,” I say when Sarah answers. I pace the floor, worrying the hem of my shirt. “Just like it did with my parents.”
Sarah doesn’t ask what. There’s no need. “Tell me everything.”
I blast through the story Ploy told me in a single breath.
A deep sigh echoes through the phone line. I don’t realize until I hear it how much I wanted her to laugh off my concern, tell me I’m wrong, that it’s nothing. “The boy who told you this story,” she says slowly. “He doesn’t have his own place, does he? He stays at the old railway station?”
My breath catches. “How could you know that?”
“His friend’s name was Brandon. He came from Colorado some months ago under bad circumstances. He was attacked. Beaten. Because of that, he felt it was safer for him to stay off the grid. I didn’t argue as long as he was reachable.”
I’m stunned into silence.
“Allie, the house I sent you to last night? That was supposed to be Brandon’s job. He was the closest geographically only I couldn’t get hold of him. When you told me about the job last night…that the boy had been dead for hours… She wasn’t my friend’s daughter.” When we do a resurrection, we have to work quickly. There’s no time for background checks and vetting. It’s a loose system of knowing someone that knows someone who heard a rumor once about who to call for help. My God, I think. What would have happened to me if I’d stayed to do the job? “This boy, Brandon’s friend,” she goes on. “Do you trust him? There’s no chance he was the one who—”
“No,” I answer instantly. I stare at Ploy’s pack, leaning against the couch where he’d left it. “He’s had plenty of chances to kill me already.” The second the words leave my lips, I realize what they imply. Time together alone. Ties. Connections.
Damn it. I can’t tell her that I only offered him a place to stay because I’m scared. I’d argued hard to be on my own. I’d told her I was ready.
“And he’s not one of us?” she asks after a shorter pause than I expected.
“No. And I haven’t told him anything,” I add. “He’s just a friend.”
“All right. Where are you now?” she asks. “Somewhere safe?”
“In my apartment.” I swallow hard. “Are we going to have to evacuate?”
Our little cluster hasn’t always been in Fissure’s Whipp. Until I was five, we’d lived in Ohio. I have vague memories of fishing on a pier, Lake Erie spread out wide as the sky. But three resurrectionists had been found dead on the banks of that same lake, and we, along with several other families, had moved as far South as we could. Years later I’d learned another group had come in after us, one specially trained to flush out those after our blood and stop them. It hadn’t been the first time we’d disappeared in the night. And now it looks like it won’t be the last. This is why we’re secretive, why we put up a front of being cold, calculating, demanding of both favors and money. Fear keeps people from acting against us.
Most times.
Just because I understand it, doesn’t mean I have to approve of it.
A long pause passes as she considers the evacuation. “It’s been over thirteen years since we had to relocate. These people have lives here. Careers. Homes,” she says, her voice low and distracted. “We’re established. I want to be sure there’s no other choice before I make that decision. We wait for now.”
“Do you think it was a retribution killing like with—”
“I don’t know, Allie,” she says, sparing me from the memories of the fall out after my parents were murdered. They swirl up anyway, dark and lonely. Justice had been swift, and our territory declared safe again. But if this is different, if this is hunters...
“Are you going to come get me?” I listen for the sound of her grabbing her keys, the slam of a car door, an engine. If I have to abandon the apartment, even for awhile, I can leave an envelope with the key in it for Ploy. The rent’s paid through the end of the month. Someone might as well use the place. “Aunt Sarah?”
“I’m still here,” she says. “I don’t want you to worry, but I think you’re safer there rather than here. I’m having trouble today reaching people I shouldn’t have any trouble reaching.” She’s being vague, but the words send a shockwave through me. Sarah’s the go-to, the one people call. A central figure in this area for those with our blood. Any requests for help have to go through her. Any approvals for resurrections are her call. Sarah’s the one to keep track of all o
f us, keep us safe. She’s the law. No one blows off a call from Sarah.
“How many?” I ask.
“Enough to be concerned.” There aren’t that many of us. Those born with the autosomal dominant disorder, as opposed to simply being carriers of the mutated gene, are rare, maybe once in a generation per family line. My mom, aunt and I all being afflicted is an anomaly. Technically though, it’s just Sarah and me now. “You haven’t brought anyone back since you’ve gotten to Fissure’s Whipp, Allie. No one could possibly know what you are.”
I don’t know if she’s trying to convince me or herself. Except last night. That girl knows what I am. I’m not sure if it’ll help to bring it up again. Sarah’s usually a dozen steps ahead by the time I think to mention things.
“What do you want me to do?” I want to say I’m smart enough to have a plan already in place. Instead, I’m reduced to defaulting to Sarah. I might have more training now, but part of me will always be the scared fifteen-year-old that showed up on her porch. She must have a plan, though.
I’d asked my mother once what happened to the hunters that came after us in Ohio. If we just let them go. I remember the darkness in her expression when she’d told me they would never trouble us again. I wonder if the missing resurrectionists are finally enough for Sarah to make the call for reinforcements, if that’s why she’s hesitating.
As I open my mouth to ask, there’s a click on the line, another call coming in on her end. “I’ve got to take this,” she says. “Don’t stay home. Keep your phone on you at all times. Do you understand me?”
“I will, I promise. You’ll call me when you know anything?”
“Absolutely. Stay safe. Remember, you’re trained to handle things when they go wrong. But be careful. You have your vial on you?” There’s a split second of dead air between us. “Of course you do. I love you, Allie.”
Vial Things (The Resurrectionists Book 1) Page 3
