Authors: Christine Cody
Bloodlands (37 page)
“I only wish,” the oldster said, “I’d had more to offer during the fight than what my abilities allow.”
And I wished I’d gone after her. I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
“All oyour abilities,” Gabriel said, “seemed to work just fine on Stamp’s men. You were fast, strong. Every one of you held your own, especially with the aid of the explosives. But . . .” He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe he’d seen us so altered.
Sammy said, “It’s just that we believed we could finally live as humans out here. There was no point in telling a stranger like you about us. We’d be endangering our safety, and believe me, we had enough to worry about besides that.”
Although none of them acknowledged it, I knew Sammy was talking about me. There was still so much Gabriel didn’t know. So much I’d have to tell him.
No more lies, though.
Pucci had taken a seat on a crate chair. “We were all drawn out here because the land gave us what we needed and, person by person, we found each other. Until about a year ago, the oldster would watch for preter activity, then invite us in. Eventually we formed a clan.” He laughed a bit. “Poor Sammy wasn’t a birth-were, so when he came to us, he took some coaching.”
Sammy said, “I’d left the hubs as a human, thinking I could make a go of it out here. A survivalist, they called me. But on the wall border one night, I came across a Gila—half-man, half-creature. It bit me and that’s the last I ever saw of him. I continued on here, thank-all. I’m not sure I would’ve known what to do without the clan.”
What he said was true for me, too. The community had helped. But help in and of itself hadn’t been enough.
Hana said, “We were not open to accepting new members when you came.”
“Probably a good thing, seeing as I don’t quite fit the mold,” Gabriel said lifelessly.
“Maybe not, but the Badlands actually treats us in particular better than most places,” the oldster added. “In were-form, our bodies acquire, conserve, then recycle water, just like all good desert animals. Actually, every were adapts out here.”
“And what about you, Mariah?” Gabriel asked.
I startled. He was talking to me in a civil manner.
“Are you a born were-creature or are you bitten?” he asked, but there was a coolness in his eyes.
“Bitten.” I locked gazes with Chaplin, letting him know that I wasn’t hiding behind half-truths this time. “When those men attacked my family in Dallas . . .”
I hadn’t told Gabriel everything before because it would’ve exposed me.
The oldster took pity on me, just as he usually did. “Those bad guys had a chained werewolf with them. They thought it’d be funny to threaten people with it. That was their big weapon of the night.”
“The werewolf is what got to Mom and Serg,” I said, the lining of my stomach starting to quiver. “After my dad got me to the panic room, he grabbed a silver letter opener from his desk. It was the only silver we had, but it took care of that wolf when he stabbed it and it went back to human form. Still, he . . .” I grabbed a fistful of my shirt. “My dad didn’t see what happened to me before he took me out of Dallas, out here.”
“The story you told was a lie, then,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t mention a wolf.”
“Again, Gabriel, you were going to leave. We didn’t want you to carry the knowledge of what we are with you.”
Hana spoke. “Mariah . . .”
No more lies. “Things are different now, so I’ll say it truthfully. Before the bad men brought the creature to Mom and Serg, half of them cornered my mother and brother with more conventional weapons while they let the werewolf loose to stalk me. The other half laughed and laughed as that . . . thing . . . bared its teeth, nudged my legs with its snout, nipped at my nightgown, tore at it. They taunted me while I tried not to scream. I . . . I couldn’t move, not even when it brought my gown up. They laughed and laughed more, goading it, and it nicked me on the thigh with what I thought was its claw. I had my eyes closed. I didn’t know. Then my dad came in with his guns, but he didn’t see what came before.”
I hunched into myself even more. “Dad killed some bad guys in my room, and the rest were wounded as they escaped, but not the werewolf, because he didn’t have any silver in him yet. So the thing ran to where my mom and Serg were. My dad got me to the panic room, and while he was fighting everyone off, I cleaned my wound, thinking that would be enough. Just a scratch, I kept thinking. That’s all it was. Chaplin was passed out, so he couldn’t do anything. My dad thought the wound wasn’t a real bite, either—nothing like what my mom and Serg had, and that’s why I think they probably begged him to end their lives, because they knew. They were torn up from the bites and their self-healing abilities hadn’t kicked in yet, but they still knew. Then, a couple weeks after we’d left Dallas, the first night of the full moon came.”
The room was quiet.
The oldster said, “By then it was too late. Dmitri wouldn’t kill her. He told me once it was because guilt was eating him about being unable to save his wife and son, and he was going to make it up to them by seeing that Mariah got better. He wasn’t going to give up on her. He tried to invent a bunch of were-creature cures, but none of them worked.”
I could testify to that, because I’d tried all of them—wolfsbane potion, feyweed smokes. “The thing is,” I said softly, “I didn’t want to die. Dad kept telling me we could overcome what I’d been infected with, and I thought our prospects were looking up when we found the New Badlands, with the others here. He even did his best to chain me and then fortify himself in his room during a full moon phase or trouble.”
“But,” the oldster said, “it was all too much for Dmitri.”
Everyone seemed to be waiting for me to tell Gabriel just why that was, but I wasn’t going to do it in a room full of onlookers.
“All your vital signs,” Gabriel said, oblivious to my dilemma. “I should’ve realized right off that you were different from humans. Especially . . .”
He glanced at me.
“Especially
my
signs?” I asked. “Do I sound different to you?”
my
signs?” I asked. “Do I sound different to you?”
He looked so bruised that I could barely stand it.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “It’s almost . . . a calling.” His light gray eyes cut through the swollen tissue round his eyes, which had been healing even since he’d gotten back here. But there were still the fading marks of the cross on his skin. “I have to wonder if I hear you that way because I’m connected to canines as a vampire. That’s why I was able to have Chaplin as a close familiar, not just an animal to summon. Not that it did me much good.”
The dog twitched, but there’d been no bitterness in Gabriel’s tone.
The oldster reached out to take Gabriel’s hand. “You did good, and we thank you for that. A million times, thank you.”
The others joined in, and even though it sounded as if that was that, I knew the night was far from over.
“I’d like to speak to him alone,” I said.
Hana offered me a sympathetic glance. But then again, when Pucci wasn’t round, she’d been one of the most relatively tolerant of my issues, besides Zel and the oldster. Hana had been like that with Annie, too, always going behind closed doors to talk with her, never telling anyone else a word of what was said.
As everyone but Hana and Pucci moved toward my door, I didn’t tell them to stay out of my domain. The viszes were the most varied there, and I suspected that Sammy and the oldster would want to listen in on the common-area link besides scanning the outdoors for any signs of Stamp’s premature return.
Pucci and Hana went to their own domain, where there would also be a common-area visz, but Chaplin went into my place, too. I watched him go, wishing things were better between us. Wishing I hadn’t hurt him in so many ways.
After they were all gone, I sat on a crate near Gabriel, sucking in a breath at my soreness. If only I could get nearer to him. But even though he seemed to accept what we were as a community, there was still an invisible wall between us.
A lack of trust. And I’d built it.
“They’ve put up with me for a long time,” I finally said. “I suppose it’s because of my dad and how much he did for the community before he poisoned himself with some calantria from outside. But before that, he made them all promise to protect me—just as Chaplin did—and teach me to forget all the anger and how to survive in calm like they have. And as much as I’ll always be grateful to them for doing that, sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have left months ago.”
Gabriel didn’t say a word, and it wasn’t because he was too tired. He looked better now that the silver had been chased away. It was just that he had nothing more to say to me.
I tried not to let that stop me from the inevitable. “Once, you told us that the passage of time wasn’t going to erase our problems, and it disturbed me more than you’ll ever understand, because, without you knowing it,
I
was the cause of those troubles.”
I
was the cause of those troubles.”
I allowed that to sink in for him. But his only reaction was the tensing of his jaw under those bruises.
“Maybe,” I added, “I even made matters worse by not telling you exactly how I work—how I’m like a spring that’s always being pressed down until it shoots up when the controlling force can’t hold anymore.”
“What’re you trying to tell me?”
I blew out the breath I’d been holding for . . . how long now? It felt like years.
“Just as I said,” I whispered. “I’m the cause of everything. It wasn’t a demon that was killing Stamp’s men, Gabriel.”
He sat up, and the horror on his features made me feel like I was a monster through and through, even in human form.
God-all, I couldn’t look at him, see that reflection glaring back at me—the self-hatred he’d carried along with him through all his travels. It was mine now, and I wished I could go back to a time when no one outside the community knew just what I was.
it
? That he’d taken some of such a creature—my blood—inside
him
?
But wasn’t he a monster, too? Hadn’t
he
wanted to bite
me
?
he
wanted to bite
me
?
“At first,” he said, “I thought I was the one killing those men.”
It was another stone on my chest, making it harder to breathe. “I’m sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am for everything.”
He struggled to his feet, and I stood, too, afraid he was going to leave. Explanations wouldn’t condone my actions, but maybe it would . . .
What? Pave the way for my rehabilitation?
Even though I doubted that, I said, “We don’t have heightened powers in our human forms—only when we’re changing. That naturally happens every twenty-eight days, when there’s a full moon phase, sometimes for three nights in a row as it waxes, gets to its peak, then wanes. When the night’s at its darkest, that’s when the full moon is at its worst for us, and we’re compelled to go out and hunt for whatever we need to soothe the wild were-creature side of us.”
Gabriel stalked away from me, but didn’t leave.
“We can’t stop ourselves from changing during a full moon,” I said, “although the more mature we get, the more control we have on other nights. We can also force a change to happen, just like some of the others did tonight when we needed to fight. But there’s a price for that, because it’s not organic.” If I’d forced a change during a less emotional time, my very bones would be groaning, my skin burning—although both elements had become more elastic since I’d been bitten. “It’s not a natural change, like when the moon calls or when we’re so angry or passionate that we have to battle for control. I’m a newer were, and I don’t have the restraint of the others in the community.”
“Anger,” Gabriel said, as if fitting everything together. “Passion?”
I could see that he was remembering all the times I’d been close to changing in front of him. “Like the night when Chaplin was captured . . .” I said, urging him along. “Or when we were . . . together.”
When he’d bitten me and entered me in a way that had made me think that I’d been missing so much by staying inside, secure, untouched.
“I had no idea how passion affected me until you got here,” I said. “Your peace was the only saving grace for me.”
He seemed beyond that right now, and it broke me.
“Your voice,” he said. “It would get rough. And your eyes . . .”
The fever. Unless I could summon every ounce of restraint, my disturbed state went livid in my eyes. “When you gave me the peace,” I said again, “it helped. Helped so much. That’s why I asked for more of it. To calm me, to keep me inside.”
He laughed without humor. “So your fear of venturing too far from your home—”
“Truly is about what’s out there—the bad guys like Stamp and the ones who attacked my family.” I held out my hands in an appeal. “I was honest about that. But staying inside is also about keeping myself together. Every time I’ve strayed too far from the domain, I’ve been a monster who’s brought pain to the community. Forcing myself to stay in kept me away from trouble. I hate what I do when I wander too far, and I’ve never been able to accept that about myself, mostly because it makes me a bad guy, too.”
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