by Pam Godwin
It cried with me, and the charge of its wail punched me in the chest. I needed to help the poor creature.
There was no holding back. Urgency heated my muscles as I twisted my arm from Jesse’s grasp and ran toward the window. “Go upstairs. Wait there.”
They would be safe upstairs. I’d be able to focus.
I slammed into a massive chest and bit my lip from the impact, tasting blood.
“You’re out your fecking mind.” Roark lifted me, his arms like metal bars at my back.
My feet lost purchase on the floor as he hauled me against his chest. I pushed and writhed, availing zero wiggle room in the iron cage of his arms.
“Goddammit, let go.” I kicked at his legs and twisted my arms, the balls-out effort producing a massive ache in my head.
He dragged me to the rear of the house, and with each step away from the window, my struggle become more crazed, desperate, and fucking painful. I gouged skin with my fingernails, lifted my knees to hit and slow him down, and my teeth found the fleshy part of his shoulder.
“Jesus suffering fuck!” Roark pinned my hands at my back, his size and strength overpowering me. “I’ll give ye a clatter in the hole if ye bite me again, ye disagreeable woman.”
“You don’t understand.” I strained my neck, trying and failing to see the face in the window. Was the nymph still there? It was too dark, and the agonizing imperative to let the creature in was fucking with my head.
But I could sense it. Not just the nymph. My insides caught fire, thrashing with electrical impulses. More nymphs? Aphids?
“I have to help it.” My stomach roiled, activating my gag reflex with the sudden urge to throw up my guts.
I swallowed repeatedly, breathing through it, and managed to hold down the stomach acid, all while trying to free my hands and reach my toes to the floor.
Trapped. Confined. My pulse went ballistic, and my breaths wheezed in my chest. “Put me down. Put me down. Please, Roark. Fucking let go!”
A hand gripped my chin, and the dark outline of Jesse’s messy hair filled my view.
“What’s wrong with her?” His voice chafed across my face, pissing me off.
Somewhere around Jesse’s feet, Darwin was circling, scratching his nails across the floor as he shuffled, trying to get to me.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” I bucked my hips, going nowhere, pinned between two walls of muscle. “I just need…I need to—”
“To do what?” Jesse released my chin, only to grab my hair and yank my head back. “You gonna run out there and what? Let the nymph bite you? Is that your plan?”
I didn’t have a plan, but that was a great idea. It would take too long to draw my blood and load the tranquilizer gun. If it bit me, it would consume the cure, and the godawful ache bludgeoning my organs would stop.
Fuck, the pressure inside me was more than I could bear. Endless, stabbing, unbearable torture.
“It can bite me. I’m immune.” I kicked out a bare foot and collided with Roark’s shin, causing both of us to grunt. “You’re not immune. Take your asses upstairs.”
A low growl rumbled deep in Roark’s throat. “Ye gonna tell her to fuck off or should I?”
Jesse released his grip on my hair. “You might be immune, Evie, but you’re not immortal. Can you survive the bloody hole it will leave in your chest?”
Good point, but amid the agony, I felt this…this strange intuition, this certainty. “The nymph won’t hurt me.”
Except it was hurting me now, piercing me with telepathic shrapnel and shredding my insides.
“You guys? Shea called from the recliner. “What’s going on?”
“Keep your arse in that chair, Shea.” Roark jostled me, adjusting his hands to more securely lock my arms at my back.
Jesse squeezed Roark’s arm. “Just hold her there while I get the kit to draw her blood.”
But before he took a step, a battle of white-hot vibrations exploded in my gut, coming from everywhere and nowhere. An ungodly scream tore from my chest.
Roark hugged me tightly, his hand stroking my back and his mouth pressed to my temple. “Bloody hell, love. What’s happening?”
“Evie?” Jesse pushed the hair from my face. “What is it?”
Everything ached, from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. I panted, certain the next anguished breath would be my last. “Aphids? Don’t know. Doesn’t feel…right.”
Each burning pinch resonated like the familiar hunger of bugs, but it was indirect. I couldn’t separate the threads. Couldn’t trace them. It was as if I were sensing the aphids secondhand.
I clenched my stomach against the cramps. “Feeling aphids…through the nymph? Could be too far away?”
Roark shushed me with his lips on my forehead. “Aphids den’ harm nymphs. If one bit the other, they both perish.”
In theory. A theory we’d never tested.
Jesse stood beside us, invisible in the dark, and silent except for the scrape of his breaths. He must’ve been torn between staying at my side and going to get the supplies to draw my blood. We were wasting precious time.
As I opened my mouth to hurry him, another jolt of pain iced through me. My back bowed in Roark’s arms, and the scent of blood tickled my nose. That smell…it was more of an out-of-body perception, arousing my stomach, but not my stomach. The nymph’s stomach. And it wasn’t my blood I smelled this time. The intoxicating scent was coming from…
No. I twisted my neck to see the window, squinting through the pitch-black. “Wait!”
Glass shattered across the room.
Something or someone broke the window. The dark room wrapped around me as I sucked in a breath. Then everything happened at once.
The incapacitating pain in my stomach burst a blinding light behind my eyes, wrenching a scream from my throat. Roark’s arms tightened around me, lifting me into a cradle hold. And Jesse’s feet pounded across the floor as he ran toward the broken window.
Before I took the next breath, an implosion of warmth released in my chest. I gasped, trembling all over, as the worst of the pain vanished. Darwin whimpered somewhere beneath me, and electric currents flickered at the edge of my senses. But all of it faded the moment Jesse turned on the flashlight.
Shea stood at the window, blinking against the stark light with a hammer dangling from one hand. Her other arm was poked between the nailed table legs and through a foot-wide hole in the glass, hanging out of sight on the other side. With the nymph.
She stared at the jagged hole without moving a muscle to pull her arm back, her dark complexion paling with…shock? Unthinkable pain? Was the nymph eating her arm off?
“Shit!” Jesse tucked the flashlight under his arm and grabbed her shoulder, slowly easing her free of the broken shards.
Would she pull back a bloody stump? Would the nymph try to crawl through and attack Jesse? Why couldn’t I feel the nymph anymore?
The moment her arm was free, Jesse dragged her away from the window.
I pushed against Roark’s chest, my body shaking in terror. “Put me down.”
Instead of releasing me, he carried me to them with the clickity-clack of Darwin’s claws at his heels and took the flashlight from Jesse. Then he redirected the beam on the mocha-skinned arm held in Jesse’s hands.
Cuts from the glass left bloody grooves across her skin, but none of the gashes looked deep. What curdled my stomach was the puncture on the inside of her wrist.
It was the size of a nail-head, perfectly round, and welling with dark red blood. The kind of puncture made by the tip of a speared mouth.
Shea’s eyebrows dug together, the whites of her eyes stark in the light still illuminated on her arm.
Jesse moved the beam to the empty window and returned it to her arm. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
A grunt rumbled in Roark’s chest. “Were ye dipping into me whiskey, woman, and blowing out your mental capacities?”
“No! I had to…” She shook her hea
d, confusion drawing down the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. I didn’t think. I…I just had to go to the nymph.”
The same confusion twisted through me, seeking answers I didn’t have. “I felt that pull, too.” I met her eyes. “Did it hurt? Are you in pain?”
She shook her head, her lips pinched in a line.
The room held its breath. This was uncharted territory. Were cured women immune to a nymph’s bite?
If she mutated, the signs would appear immediately. Her eyes would glass over. Her throat would convulse with bubbling noises. Her face would contort as bones shifted and pressed against the underside of her skin.
I couldn’t sense the nymph anymore and assumed it had passed out, but we moved as one farther away from the window. No one spoke. No one breathed.
A minute was more than enough time to be certain. As that minute ticked by, I clung to Roark’s shoulders and divided my attention between the window and Shea. Darwin sniffed around the crack under the door then sat on his haunches, his tongue flopping out of the side of his panting mouth.
Neither the nymph nor the signs of mutation appeared. When Roark’s chest relaxed against me and Darwin lowered to the floor to rest on his belly, I finally released a ragged exhale.
The nymph hadn’t maimed or eaten Shea.
It hadn’t given her the infection.
I might’ve shouted with joy if I thought the night was over. But it wasn’t. I felt it…something…pacing around the perimeter of my senses.
If the nymph was still out there, we needed to capture it, cure it, and protect it.
I wriggled to get out of Roark’s arms, and he finally let me down.
When my feet hit the floor, I dove toward the window. But Roark beat me to it, holding me back with a stiff arm. He shined the flashlight through the toothy frame, tipping the light down, down, down, and paused.
“Well?” I put my hand over his on my chest, seconds from bending his fingers back and skating around him.
He aimed the light on the door, releasing me as he strode toward it on bare feet. “It’s on the ground.”
I followed him and began working my fingers beneath the tabletop barrier. “It’s on the ground because they pass out as soon as the cure hits their bloodstream.”
Shea was still staring at her arm when her voice came out on a gasp. “Do you know what this means?”
It meant Michio had been right. I could feel myself standing taller, lighter, because Shea’s crazy fucking stunt proved that cured women could cure nymphs and the survival of the human race no longer rested on my shoulders.
I yanked on the wooden edge, my hands straining to free a nail. “You can heal them.”
Not only that, the nymph had sensed us. How far away had it traveled? Could other nymphs locate us as well? Would they seek us out, searching for us as we searched for them?
My insides fizzed with excitement at the thought of how many more women this would allow us to save.
Roark helped me tear off the tabletop and shoved on his boots. “I den’ care if nymphs are coming down two by fecking two, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” He grabbed his sword and looked between Shea and me. “The pair of ye will not be throwing yourselves a’ them like a bloody free-for-all buffet.”
I hadn’t exactly envisioned a buffet, but maybe the nymphs weren’t as vicious as I’d always thought. Maybe the ones that had lived this long were innately passive, and only bit when the cure was hanging within arm’s reach. Maybe we didn’t need to bother with the tranquilizer gun anymore.
“We continue as usual.” Boots on and bow in hand, Jesse reached for the doorknob, hip-checking me out of the way. “Taking as few risks as humanly possible.”
For Jesse, that meant putting my survival before his own.
I wrapped my fingers around his wrist and looked up at the shadows cast across his face. “If the cure didn’t take, if there’s a nymph lying in wait on that porch…”
Horrifying images played behind my eyes, of Jesse’s hands curling into claws, of Roark’s jaw elongating to accommodate suckers, of Jesse’s gorgeous copper irises receding beneath pools of all-white. My chest squeezed painfully.
I needed to convince them to hang back while I checked the nymph’s vitals. “If it bites you, how are you going to protect me?”
Jesse raked a hand through his hair and stared at the doorknob.
I shoved on my boots, grabbed the flashlight from Roark, and reached for the door.
Faint buzzing fluttered through my stomach. It was so subtle I had to concentrate to feel it. Was something else on the property? Aphids? Another nymph? My imagination?
We were about a half mile off Route 220 on an isolated lot of treed land. There were no tracks, no human or animal remains, no indication of life whatsoever when we found this house the prior day. No one had lived here or in the vicinity for a long time, possibly not since the outbreak.
I dragged in a steady breath. “Shea?”
“I’ll be right here, girl,” she whispered from the couch. “Just get it in here, and I’ll take care of its health.” The springs creaked beneath her shifting weight. “There’re more out there, aren’t there?”
Goosebumps shimmied down my spine. “You feel it, too?”
She couldn’t feel aphids like I could, but nymphs?
“Pinpricks woke me,” she whispered. “In my gut, you know? I’m still feeling that a little.”
Pinpricks? She must’ve experienced a watered-down version of what I’d felt. Lucky her.
Jesse shoved his face in mine. “What are you not telling me?”
“Um, so there might be more nymphs, or I don’t know, aphids out there? But they’re not close enough to trace.” I turned the knob. “We’re losing time talking about it.”
I didn’t wait for a response and threw open the door, armed with a flashlight. As expected, Jesse and Roark flanked me. When I gave them a narrowed glare, they let me lead but held their weapons out and raised around me like a cage.
I wasn’t a doctor, and the only time I’d encountered a sleeping nymph was in the minutes and hours following an injection of the cure. Did nymphs need normal sleep like humans?
This one lay on its back, eyes closed, breaths even, its ghastly pale face slack with unconsciousness. I shone the light over the skeletal body. Not a stitch of clothing. Hair fell in clumps around its head. Her head. She looked as if she’d been living in the wild for two years. Probably not far from the truth.
I nudged her head a few times with my toes. When she didn’t respond, I handed the flashlight to Roark, hooked my fingers under her armpits, and dragged her hundred-pound body inside.
Roark locked the door and joined us on the rug, moving the light over her corpse-like frame. Her complexion glowed as white as the moon, and under all that dirt and grime, I bet her shoulder-length hair was blond. Blue and red veins forked beneath paper-thin skin, her organs and bones grotesquely visible where her body wasn’t caked with mud and blood.
No matter how many times I encountered a nymph, it was always horrifying. Her femininity was there, in the roundness of her small breasts, in the delicacy of her face, and in the dark patch of hair between her legs, which made the gruesome effects of the infection all the more apparent.
She just lay there, neglected and sick, withered away to bone and skin. Did she have a husband? Children? What were her dreams? Her hobbies? Where did she grow up? What was her name?
I wanted to cover her, to protect her modesty from our eyes. She was a woman, or would be again soon. A woman waking up in a nightmare.
Shea read my mind and pulled a blanket from the couch, tossing it over her and tucking the frayed edges beneath her chin. “I looked like that when you found me?”
I laced my fingers through hers and squeezed. “Without the pasty skin.” I shared a smile with her. “And way more attitude.”
She sighed. “Now what?”
“She won’t wake for hours. Maybe a day.” Roark paced to the b
roken window and peered outside, his brogue thickening. “When she does, we’ll fill in the gaps and make her whole again.”
The memory loss, the flu-like symptoms, the survival training, all while protecting her from aphids and men. A mountain of work for the four of us. My bones ached just thinking about the road ahead.
But tonight, we needed to focus on boarding up the window and door. And preparing, waiting, for whatever was still out there.
We didn’t have to wait long. As Jesse pounded the last nail into the cabinet door on the window, I dropped to my knees against an onslaught of tremors.
I could sense them clearly now, dozens of writhing links, the threads reaching from across the property, each one connecting to a charging aphid. Hungry, rabid, and heading this way.
“Aphids are coming.” Scrambling to my feet, I grabbed my bow and two quivers—mine and Shea’s, leaving a few arrows on the floor beside her bow.
Some of the vibrations were fading, but for each one that slipped away, more flickered into place.
Darwin brushed against my leg, nudging me with his nose. I gripped the fur around his neck and wrapped an arm around my middle. “Shit, there’s a lot of them, but I think some are dying.”
Jesse met me at the door, and the sound of his arrow sliding into place whispered past my ear. “Something is killing them?”
“Yeah. Maybe?” Could it be Michio? Human men? I couldn’t feel him or hear the boom of gunfire, but beneath the frenzy of aphid transmissions, I sensed something non-aphid. Like a cold breath. A hush of something human but not. “There might be another nymph out there, so watch what you’re aiming at.”
Roark gripped my arm and pulled me back. If I could see his face in the dark, I’d recognize the intent firing in his eyes. He wanted me to stay here.
I yanked my arm away. “Here’s a thought. I know this will eat at your overprotective soul, but how about you have a little confidence in me?” I stabbed a finger at the door even though he couldn’t see it. “Against them, I’m faster than you. Stronger than you.”
