Nightfall (15 page)

Tru's hesitation didn't last long. He dug in. Practically inhaling his food, he was almost done by the time Jenna got the bowl back.

“This is good.” Chris sounded surprised. “I like how you made the meat a little crunchy on the outside.”

Jenna grinned. “Yeah, I could teach a class on survival cuisine.”

Mason ate in silence beneath a thundercloud scowl. She tried to ignore him, but when a man his size brooded, everyone else had to take notice. In a moment of weakness, she'd tried to get closer to him. She'd tried to make a connection that obviously could never be. Mason had no give, no flex. He was all iron, and that had to hurt. She hated that she wanted to check his bandages and draw his head into her lap. She hated that she was dumb enough to want to take care of him, even though he saw her as a promise to be kept—an obligation, not a person in her own right.

Determined not to feed his ego with her attention, she focused elsewhere. “So, Chris, what do you do for fun around here, other than play with tissue samples?”

“What's wrong with tissue samples?” he asked, grinning.

Tru grunted. “Sick, Harvard.”

“Cornell, remember? Not Harvard.” He swallowed a forkful of pasta. “I've been experimenting with what works and what doesn't. Thought a definition would serve us well.”

“What did you find out?” Ange asked. She passed her gaze between Chris and Penny. Always back to Penny. This woman would do anything—and Jenna did believe
anything
—for her child.

“Nothing with computer technology. Mason told us that much and it bears out. Cell phones, car electronics, the display panel on that stupid microwave—anything with a chip is toast. My guess is that it's simply too complex to survive radical environmental changes. Simple machines work fine—those that run on electricity or combustible fuels. The change isn't affecting basic rules of chemistry or physics. For now, gears still turn and fire still burns. Hey, that rhymes.”

Tru made a wanking motion. “Lame.”

“But it all depends on fuel,” Jenna said tightly. “Or a power source, like the hydroelectric setup.”

“Exactly.” Chris pushed his empty plate away. “Now, how about table trivia? Not to be confused with table tennis, of course, although we might have paddles somewhere.”

“Paddles? Way pervy, dude,” Tru said.

Mason made a sound Jenna took for disgust. He didn't appear to like their host much. No real surprise there.

But Ange didn't let Mason's antipathy discourage her shine. “How do we play?”

“Well, we're stuck together for a long winter, so we may as well get to know each other better, right?” He fiddled with the earpiece of his glasses. “So we go around the table and offer two facts—one true, the other a lie. The person on the left has to guess which is true, and the one with the most right answers wins.”

“Wins what?” Tru muttered. “A Bunsen burner?”

“Dessert.” He stood and rummaged in the cabinets until he drew forth a chocolate bar. “Someone must've been saving this for ages, so I can't say how fresh it is. But this seems like a special occasion, what with the snow and all.”

Jenna shrugged. “I'll have a go.”

“I'm in,” Angela said.

Tru leaned back in his seat, looking every inch the insolent teenager. “What about you, Pops?”

Mason raised a brow. “Do I look like somebody who competes for a candy bar?”

“No,” Jenna said softly. “You look like a grouchy son of a”—she slanted a pointed look at Penny, who looked slightly less scared than usual—“witch. Shut up and play.”

They locked eyes, struggling for ... something, lost in their fight until it felt like the room had emptied. Pure heat lanced through her. She might have done something embarrassing, if Tru hadn't snared her attention by thumping the legs of his chair.

Mason stood. “Play games if you want.”

But the kids split the chocolate.
Satisfied he'd gotten the last word with her, even if it went unspoken, he strode away without looking back.

The slow dusk marked the snow with streaks of blue shadow. Grinning at the fierce wind blowing up a third blizzard, Mason took a deep breath. Food would be tight, not to mention mind-numbingly monotonous, but they were snuggled tight as ticks. The demon dog packs would fall back under the icy cold, doing whatever they did when winter came. Hibernate? Starve? It didn't matter. After Mitch died, he hadn't stuck around back east long enough to find out. He'd gone west, as promised, to learn things, become a man, and wait to keep his promise.

Mason imagined that pit covered by snow. The rot still existed, waiting beneath the bleached layer of white. The greater battle for survival still awaited them.

Come spring, he would be ready.

In the meantime, he had other problems—ones he felt completely incapable of handling. Penny hadn't spoken since the night of the first snowfall three weeks before, and Tru's crisis-time cooperation had disintegrated into bored teenaged whining. The food. The chores. The lack of anything to do. And the good doctor was a pain in the ass, the way he was always looking at Jenna.

Jenna.

The thought of her snapped his body to full alert. His skin prickled, heart beating a hectic rhythm, and his cock went hard as an iron pipe. Standing there alone, he let need trigger his sexual launch sequence. He remembered those few scant days they'd been trapped together in the cabin, imagining long winter nights of openmouthed kisses and animal sex.

They'd stolen one taste, after Bob was killed. But that was the problem. Every thought, from mundane to erotic, raced back to the threat they faced.

Still, no matter the wall between them, she changed the bandages on his back each morning. They hardly spoke, but she touched him. He held still and lost a piece of himself each time, knowing she needed something. From him. In that strange place at the base of his skull, her interference coalesced into blurry road signs he could never quite read. But mostly he felt her anger.

No matter how fucked up that was, he didn't want to lose it.

He shivered. Turning, he found Jenna in the doorway.

She'd gotten better at hiding behind a passive expression, but he still sensed her restlessness. Her bangs had grown so long as to hang over her eyes. Highlights colored halfway down her hair, but the roots were nearly as brown as her brows. Her cheekbones were sharper, her lips thin.

“Snow's falling again. So as long as we still have heat, we'll be good.”

Her footfalls muffled by socks, she crossed the room and stood beside him along the wide bank of windows. “Chris says the hydroelectric is powered off a hot spring. He's come here four winters in a row and it's never frozen.”

“Chris.”

Green eyes met his. “That
is
his name.”

Mason looked up, tracing the line of sealant along the window casing. The spinal bones along the back of his neck felt rusted and sore. “Mine's John.”

She inhaled, butterfly quiet. Her surprise was worth that bit of honesty. “John Mason?”

“That's right.”

There had to be an easier way of doing this, the talking but not talking. He squelched a flicker of envy when he remembered an old silent movie clip, where a caveman dragged his woman by her hair. He didn't need the hair-pulling part, but a little brute force would feel pretty damn good.

“You never thought this far, did you?”

“Didn't think I needed to,” he said. “We should've wintered at the cabin.”

“Figured.” Jenna turned to lean against the window, arms crossed and facing him. “I saw this show once about soldiers coming home from war. Everything they'd done and seen stayed with them, so they were traumatized. Clueless about what to do with themselves. Most couldn't adapt to civilian life.”

Mason didn't want her to stop talking—this was the longest she'd spoken to him in three weeks—but he sure as hell didn't want to talk about useless soldiers. “This isn't some war, Jenna. There won't be a peace treaty.”

“I know.”

“And extermination takes time. Neither side will go quietly.”

Her mouth worked around some words she couldn't say. Or wouldn't. “There are other people out there, right? People like us, hiding?”

He studied the graceful line of her neck. She had a mole on her left collarbone, peeking out from her sweatshirt. The knife edge of his desire sharpened, but a frightening protectiveness pushed forward. Sometimes she played so tough—and she was. More than he'd given her credit for.

But right then, she looked about as vulnerable as Penny.

“I don't know,” he said quietly. “But it doesn't matter. Not really. We just need to survive the initial upheaval of the change. The longer it takes to adapt, the more vulnerable we'll be.”

“And this is how things will be? That's ...” She shook her head, the ends of her ponytail fanning across her shoulder. “That's shitty. God, I hate this. I don't
want
to be a survivor.” She laughed bitterly. “Pathetic, huh?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“Mitch would've thought so. ‘Suck it up, Barclay.'” Her voice broke.

Mason's breath came in agitated gulps, the kind that shredded a man's pride.

He needed this woman.

He'd known for weeks now that she was tangled up in his future—well beyond the promise he'd made. That promise was an excuse, a reminder of how they'd met, and a reason for claiming her when the time came. But she was stronger than maybe even Mitch had known. Or maybe the old bastard had deserted her for precisely that reason, to teach her the lessons she needed now.

While Mason had been dwelling in a dark place—where he was the kind of man who leveled a gun at a little girl and let his friends die—she led the others. Preparing the food. Organizing chores and rations. She kept Ange busy and made sure Tru and Penny had something to do. The day before, she'd given them books to study, learning about the natural world.

In all likelihood, Mitch had known that she could do this.
Be
this.

Without Jenna, they'd be lost. He knew how to fight, and that was all. The military had taught him. Oh, his excuses were sound. They needed vigilance, information, and patrols. But he'd spent more time in the wild, crisscrossing the country with those damn creatures, than with real people. Nothing new there. So he didn't know what to do when he came inside.

Fingers numb, Mason reached out and traced her jaw to her collarbone. She shivered and pushed his hand away. His throat tensed.

“There wasn't any ‘this' to ruin,” she answered roughly.

He flinched. “Damn it, how are you
doing
that?”

“Me? You do it too. You tell me!”

“I'm not doing a damn thing. My thoughts are mine,
mine
, but you—”

“I get inside.” Her hard laugh scraped across his nerves. “That's ironic. Is that all I get, then? Some stray signals every once in a while?”

“You shouldn't be getting that much. Why is this happening?”

“Magic?”

Magic.
That sounded like something Mitch would say.
There's no reason for it, son. It just is, like the wind or the rain. It's up to you to make the best use of it that you can.

She shrugged, but the tension at the corners of her eyes didn't ease. “Hell if I know,” she said. “We could ask Chris. He'd try to reason the magic out of it.”

“Fuck him.” The idea of Jenna getting into Chris's mind, and vice versa, sizzled through him like a lightning bolt. “Do you ... can you hear anyone else?”

She moved away from the window, mocking with her faint swagger. “Like ... who?”

“Anyone.”

“Would it bother you?” She laid her hand on his chest, the first time she'd touched him in weeks without medicine as an excuse. “I'm right here, John. Don't lie to me.”

His fight-or-flight reflex was just about to choke him. The muscles of his thighs burned like live wires. His heart thrashed under his ribs. Sweat itched beneath the bandages on his back. She'd be able to smell it on him. And through it all, his cock hadn't forgotten how close she stood, near enough to grab and bend her body to his.

Sex and violence, yes. But sex and fear?

Mason answered her dare. He let his id off the chain and opened his mind. Flashes of that long-ago day, watching the monsters chew through his friends. Pushing deeper, he showed her the shame of standing over Penny with a loaded gun and the lonely fear of outliving his usefulness—a hollowed-out soldier stuck among regular folks. Memories of Jenna, when she'd crossed shivering arms over her chest. He'd wanted to strip her worn cotton T-shirt and warm her pebbled nipples with his tongue.

Jenna gasped. She pushed against his chest and stumbled back, catching her balance against the bank of windows. Green eyes flared wide. Her breath came in the same erratic hiccups as his.

“What the hell was that?”

He tried to speak, then cleared his throat. “You wanted me to show you.”

“I—”

“You didn't know what you asked for, huh?” Mason straightened and inhaled. “Well, now you've seen inside, Jenna. Some of it at least.”

“That was ... way more than we did before. How was that possible?”