Blood of the Dead, page 16
I frowned at him. “I don’t know if it’ll work if you’re not alive—and if Jack’s not alive, for that matter.” His head whipped over and he glared at me. “I’m not saying he’s dead-dead,” I quickly corrected. “I’m saying who the fuck knows what that stone will do during the daytime when you die?”
“It’s worth a shot,” Zach said, not taking his eyes off the gem.
“Fine. Take his side,” I muttered quietly. “See if I care.”
And then the phone in my lap rang and I about jumped out of my skin. Paco reached over with his free hand, and I passed it over, but after he answered he snorted. “It’s for you,” he said, and handed it back.
I blinked and took it from him. “Hello?”
“Hello, can you confirm I’m speaking to an exceptionally attractive goth girl right now?” asked a warm voice on the far end of the line.
Nilesh.
I stood up and paced away from the boys, into the kitchen. “Speaking,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Told you I could find you.”
“Yeah you did—but you’re kind of riding the line between sexy and stalking here.” He chuckled as I went on. “What’s up?”
“We’ve been doing a deep dive on Rojo activity the other night, and one of my techs back traced their truck’s path with traffic cameras, and realized they were driving in the shape of a sigil. Probably part of their ceremony with you.”
“Huh,” I said, glancing back to the living room. “Speaking of—”
I turned back just in time to witness Sugar bolting out from underneath the couch, springing up to the coffee table, and hiss and bat at the green gem several times, sending it wildly swinging, before running off as both the boys shouted her name.
“We’ve got a little ceremony thing here happening of our own,” I said, pacing further away. “What kind of sigil was it?”
“One for rebirth.”
I cringed. “Oh, well, that’s not worrisome.”
“Yeah,” Nilesh confirmed. “We’re not giving up yet, but we might have more luck preparing to fight this thing in its next form—”
“Paco?” Zach asked, his voice pitched an octave up.
“I see it,” the other man agreed.
I whirled, to see what they were looking at.
The green gemstone was a little off-center . . . and holding.
“What if I told you I had a line on their location?”
“How?” Nilesh demanded.
“Trade secret. I might tell you though, if you come pick us up.”
“You still at Jack’s apartment?”
I snorted. “Yeah. You’re lucky I have enough childhood trauma to find being stalked hot.”
I heard him hold back a laugh. “Be right there,” he said, and hung up.
Zach’s eyes caught mine as I walked over. “Is this going to work?”
“Not sure, but I called in reinforcements,” I said, sitting back down.
Paco clamped his free hand down on Zach’s knee without taking his eyes off the stone. “It will.”
Nilesh was at our door approximately fifteen minutes later.
Both the boys had already gotten ready to leave in the meantime—Zach had on hiking boots and a heavy jacket, and Paco looked like some kind of terrorist, all dressed in black, with a balaclava pulled up around his head and heavily tinted ski goggles on.
“You realize you can’t outlast the day, right?” I asked him. “It’s not an, ‘if you can’t see it, it can’t see you-type situation.’”
He gave a dismissive grunt. “This is worth it, even if I just buy us an extra few seconds.”
Nilesh took him in, and gave him a kindly look. “I brought the light-proof transport vehicle,” he said, stepping away from the door—I could hear it idling outside, the Faithful had backed it up directly in front of Jack’s apartment. “Usually we use it for prisoners, but today it can be dual purpose.”
We filed out and I locked the door behind us, as Nilesh spotted Zach. “Hold on—who’re you?” he said.
“He’s an interested party.”
“He’s coming,” Paco said, taking Zach’s forearm to help pull him into the back of the waiting van.
Nilesh gave me a concerned look, and I shrugged. “Look, Paco needs to feed, and I’m not Paco’s type—but he can find Jack, and if we find Jack, we find your person.”
“He’s human . . .” Nilesh said, with a frown.
“Don’t worry so much,” I said, hopping into the van, after clapping Nilesh’s shoulder and giving him a grin. “He’s already halfway through the introductory videos.”
Nilesh groaned, but got into the back of the van with us regardless.
Jack:
* * *
I had never once taken yoga when I was alive, but I knew from watching enough late night romcoms what savasana was—the time at the end of class, when you were supposed to be resting, when you usually wound up whispering about your love life with friends.
I imagined that putting myself to sleep was a little like that—minus the talking.
Just lying there, breathing like breath actually mattered to you, trying to let things go so that you could survive.
I felt death take me at dawn, and then I felt it when the sun receded, bringing me back into my body just enough to know that I was there, without feeling the need to come to “life.”
Sam hadn’t killed me yet.
That was nice.
I wasn’t as hungry as I had been, now that I was like this.
That was nice too.
I just needed to keep breathing.
Slower and slower.
Letting myself be calm and relaxed.
Not ignoring my hunger, but acknowledging that it was a part of me, and learning how to coexist with it, without letting it control me.
Pulling a strange sort of peace over myself like a weighted blanket, and enjoying the sensation of rest.
Left to its own devices, my mind became a TV of sorts, with images resolving one after another.
Wholesome stuff.
Families, laughing around heavy meals at holidays. Parties where no one was up to no good. Weddings with several generations of people having fun. Churches and picnics and watching the snow from someplace warm. I saw each of them in intimate detail, as crisp as if they were my own memories, even though I knew that they were not.
It was like a play-by-play of someone else’s life, which was fascinating at first, but then started to disrupt my previously pervasive warm and content feeling.
Because that old maxim was right, albeit for the wrong reasons: hell was other people.
But not because you had to associate with them.
Because you were never like them—because of where and how you were raised, and all the shit that’d happened to you after, until you wound up like this here.
Like me, right now.
A human-sized mosquito trapped in the amber of eternity.
Knowing you would never have the chance to be normal again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Luna
“Still heading west,” Nilesh reported into the walkie talkie that was in his hand.
He and I were sitting on a bench across from Zach and Paco, who were sitting the same, only they were holding hands. It wasn’t necessarily romantic—it was more like they were on the same terrifying amusement park ride, and neither one of them wanted to be alone.
And the dowsing gemstone swung from Paco’s other hand. We’d started going off-road an hour ago, and had had to stop the van all the way several times now, even turning the engine off, to make sure what we all saw was real and not just road noise from jiggling.
Paco glanced up, giving me a worried look. I inhaled to tell him that he’d be fine, Zach and I wouldn’t let him burn, but I stopped myself, because I knew that wasn’t it—it was Jack.
“You feeling okay?” I asked him, wondering if he knew something that we did not.
“It’s just very quiet now. Inside,” he said, and Zach held his hand a little more tightly.
“Quiet’s not the same as dead though, right?”
He frowned rather than answer me and concentrated on the stone. “Stop the van.”
Nilesh radioed it forward, and the accommodating Faithful up in the cab stopped and turned the engine off.
“It’s just hanging,” Nilesh said, looking from the gemstone to each of us.
“Did it stop working?” Zach turned towards me, as the resident magic-ologist.
“I don’t think so,” I said—but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t Maya or Rosalie.
But the easiest answer for why it wouldn’t work anymore was the worst one—that there was nothing left for the stone to point to.
That we were too late.
“No,” Paco said, shaking his head in denial, like he’d just read my mind. “This isn’t over yet. It can’t be.”
“Paco,” I said, leaning over and reaching out.
“No!” Paco growled—and then Zach shook himself free of Paco’s grip.
“It’s still working!” he said, excitedly. “And it’s pointing the right direction!” He kicked a boot against the van’s metal bed. “They’re underground!”
Paco looked at him in awe, and then engulfed him in a hug so hard it almost made the van sway. Nilesh looked to me and I shrugged.
“It’s just like a puzzle in a videogame!” Zach said, the next time he could breathe.
“Works for me,” I said. “Where the fuck are we?”
“Near Desert Well Station,” Nilesh answered.
“Never heard of it.”
“Because it’s not on a fucking map,” he said, sitting up straight and hitting the roof over our head hard, twice. “It’ll take us until dawn to drag up a construction crew.”
“Fuck, man,” Paco said, standing after pocketing the stone, looming over all of us and taking up far too much space. “Just give me a shovel.”
A Faithful unlocked the door to our compartment from the outside, letting the moon shine in.
“No can do, don’t have one,” Nilesh said, jumping out to the ground. Paco made a frustrated sound, leaping down to probably start karate chopping rocks with his bare hands, as Nilesh meaningfully cleared his throat. “But what would you say to doing some pre-excavation work with directional explosives?”
Paco grinned at the man, his teeth white by the moonlight. “I’m in.”
“That seems really unsafe,” Zach said, hopping out of the van much more slowly.
Seeing as his personal level of safety had apparently allowed Paco to drink blood from his erect dick to make the stone’s ceremony work earlier, I found his statement fairly profound.
I stepped down carefully, and then hugged myself, wearing one of Jack’s hoodies. “Ignore them. They’re both functionally immortal,” I said, checking his shoulder with mine.
“What are you going to do while they blow shit up?” he asked me.
I jerked my head up toward the cab. “I would bet money these smug assholes have snacks.”
Chapter Thirty
Jack
I felt myself die.
I felt myself live.
And I got to feel what it was like watching someone I apparently loved give birth through a stranger’s eyes. I watched that same child grow up, grow old, and die, all the feelings of an entire lifetime, crammed down into a flurry of sharply painful memories that weren’t mine. It felt like someone was throwing weaponized Polaroids at me.
Each one of them was different, over and over again. An endless numbing cavalcade of blood and life and death, and because each one of them was similarly different, they all began to feel the same.
Like snowflakes.
Or maybe mayflies.
Chapter Thirty-One
Luna
“He’s still down there,” Paco said, as the edge of the world slowly grew brighter.
“I believe you.” True to his word, Nilesh’s crew had gotten here thirty minutes ago, and were hard at work scraping the earth away with backhoes. “But I still need you to go to sleep.”
He pouted at me, fighting it, and somehow in that moment he reminded me of all the little kids I’d had to cajole into bed while I was babysitting growing up—all of them worried something good would happen the second they weren’t there.
“I’ll be here all day, Paco. And so will Zach. We’ll keep an eye out for you,” I said, gently pushing him back toward the back of the van. “But do you know what’ll happen to me if we find Jack, and I’ve let something happen to you?” I asked, then didn’t wait for his answer, I just drew a thumb across my neck and made a strangled noise.
He snorted at that, then got back into the van’s rear cabin. “You’d better let me out of this stupid thing the second it gets dark.”
“I will.”
“Or I’ll rip a door off, so help me God.”
“I hear you. Loud and clear,” I said—and then I saw him spotting Zach over my shoulder and tensed.
I closed my eyes. I was an idiot. How long had it been since Paco had fed? Since that night with the gem—
“Yeah?” Zach said, trotting up and grinning.
“Yeah,” Paco agreed, in a much lower tone, pulling Zach into the back of the van with him like a trapdoor spider before closing the door.
Sounds that started like a scuffle, quickly turned to moans.
“When the van’s a-knocking,” Nilesh said, coming over to tease me.
“Look, your people carry around explosives, my people fuck. Same difference, really,” I said with a grin, as he handed me my third PowerBar of the night.
He grunted. “True,” he said, then grinned at me. “We’ve got some ground-penetrating radar machines coming in.”
“If I never go into an abandoned mine again, it’ll be too soon.” Rosalie had made me come on enough trips with her, to hers.
“Hopefully we can get all this solved before nightfall.”
I tilted my head at him coquettishly. “Because if you find what you want to find, I’ll be helpless and alone with you, in the middle of the Nevadan desert?”
“Mmm, well when you put it like that,” he said, his voice rich with amusement.
Another truck pulled up, hauling more machinery and people—I had no idea how much money the Faithful were committing to this project, but it had to be a lot.
And that was how I realized the truth—right before a busload of heavily armed men pulled up.
“It’s not about finding your girl or my guy, is it?” I said, sobering. “It’s about stopping that thing.”
Nilesh looked at me out of the corner of his eye and didn’t answer. “Top off your coffee?” he asked, reaching for my cup.
I held it tightly and pulled away from him. “No. I’m good.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Jack
Hello, Jack.
The voice was definitely coming from inside myself, which made it creepy.
“Go away,” I told it.
I can’t. I’m in you now.
“And that is the least sexy way anyone’s ever said that to me.”
I realized I was just thinking the words instead of saying them. That all of my body was separate from my mind and what was happening with it.
But I was awake, and this was happening.
I made myself open my eyes—my mind’s-eye, I guessed—and it looked like I was in an empty black space. I groaned.
“It’s been a really long time since I’ve done drugs—just tell me what you want already.”
What I want is what I already have.
“Nope. Fuck it. I am not dealing with this—”
You, Jack.
The words echoed, coming from both inside and outside of me, all at once, in all directions.
“Wow. Aren’t you shopping from the bargain bin. Look, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m about a kinked pube away from death out there . . . thing.” I took a step forward and looked around. All of the blackness stayed the same. “Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me your name?”
It does not matter—and you could not say it, besides.
“Which begs the question—what do you want from me?”
I want to become you.
From the inside out.
To align myself inside your body in such a way that your frail skin harbors my tough chitin.
“Your tough what?” I repeated.
But then a form started gathering in front of me, flickering just like all the memories I’d been forced to watch had, only this time what was being shown to me were like the world’s most hideous drawings animated on the corner of a quickly flipped book, a hideous carnival of too many legs and proboscis and beady, unblinking eyes, revealed over and over on each new page.
“Oh, fuck, no,” I said, stepping back, as a thing that would give my nightmares nightmares pressed near.
Yes.
You will let it happen.
I swallowed. “‘Let’ implies I have a choice.”
You do. But it is not much of one. You have nothing, Jack.
And now that I’d seen the thing’s true form, it was easy to hear the insectile nature of its voice, in undertones.
Surely, you realize that. All your friends have abandoned you—or they let you push them away.
“I am surprisingly used to being miserable, Mr. Bug-Thing.”
And what if I told you I could make anyone love you?
That once you and I were one, you need never be denied again?
Of course I was tempted.
Who wouldn’t be?
It just sucked that the fucking-cheating-thing was inside me and knew it—so I got to hear it laugh as it mocked me.
All I need from you is just one small moment of permission, Jack—and then the fierce woman’s blood, to seal our pact.
My dream-self stiffened with horror. “No way, no how.”
