The Wilds: The Wilds Book One (14 page)

He might be rejecting me but I didn’t need his pity. Without even thinking, I stood a little straighter and kicked into defensive mode. “I am not a child. I’m eighteen, two years past legal adulthood in most countries. I’m a little old for crushes.” Shit, that hadn’t come out like I planned. Now it sounded like I was begging him.

I tried to find the quickest way out of the room, because I knew my skin was on fire, while simultaneously trying to avoid looking at him. I never got like this. Years of being called a dirty Plaguer rolled off my back and now I was laid low by a rejection from this man.

His hand gripped my wrist as I moved forward. “Dal—”

“It doesn't matter. You’re right. It didn’t mean anything. I just thought, you know… Actually, I wasn’t even thinking.” I yanked my wrist free. “Really, I’m fine.”

“It can’t happen. Not with us, not in this world. You don’t understand.”

He looked like he regretted it but it didn’t matter. He was like everyone else and I was a Plaguer. “I might not have experienced what goes on between a man and a woman and I might have misjudged this situation. Sometimes I might not use the right words or know every intricacy about the Wilds, but don’t tell me I don’t know how the world works. I learned that very well a long time ago. I know plenty.”

We stood, not even a foot away from each other, and I saw some sort of emotion flicker across his face. The woman in me, and she was in there whether he acknowledged it or not, liked to think maybe he was regretting a hasty rejection. Or maybe it was uncertainty, that he’d misjudged me and the depth of who I was. Of that I was sure. I’d spent years in a man-made hell but those devils had forged me into someone special, whether he saw it or not, whether he wanted me or not. If he couldn’t see past the Plaguer label, I didn’t need him.

I lifted my chin and walked out of his room.

“Dal, it’s not—”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I always am.”

Chapter 17

I was humiliated. Why had I thought he’d wanted me? In all those years at the compound, not once had a single guard tried anything with me. They hadn’t ever even flirted, and it wasn’t just because I was a Plaguer. Most had known me long enough to know I wasn’t contagious.

It was after dusk but rules or not, I needed out of the house. The beasts roamed at night, they said. Bunch of made-up bullshit in my opinion. If these so-called beasts were so rampant, how come I’d never seen one or heard one in all the distance we’d covered? Miles and miles we’d traveled and not a single hint? I’d lived by other people’s rules for way too long to abide by a new set.

I popped in my room but only for a second to change, and then left it again. I made one stop in the kitchen to find the knife I liked and tucked that into the waistband of my pants. Then I grabbed a couple pieces of jerky and shoved them in my back pocket, just because you never knew when the urge to snack might hit.

I approached the guard on duty and lucked out that it was sister-lover. He didn’t bother arguing with me. He simply opened the gate.

“I hope they eat you,” he said as I was walking by him.

I didn’t bother to call him a wuss but I couldn’t let it go completely. “Care to join me? No?” I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Make sure you lock up nice and tight so the boogeyman can’t get you.” I turned back around and marched straight into the forest. Beasts or not, I wasn’t willing to give up my freedom again that easily.

The sounds of the crickets were loud and the coolness of the air filtered through the trees and leaves.

My assassin was standing right where I’d left him, dead bark and all. Ever since the other day I’d wanted to see if I could hit the target again.

I stood about eight feet from the tree and damn if the knife didn’t widely miss its mark and then bounce to the ground. I tried it a few times before stepping back far enough that I could barely see the tree anymore through the darkness.

I could tell by the sound it had stuck this time. It was like I could make the expert shots but not the easy ones. I walked up to the tree and found the knife lodged just where I’d expected it. It was almost like if I tried, it would miss. If I let it just flow from my hand without a care, like I did when I’d assume I’d miss, I struck right where I wanted.

I yanked the knife out of the bark and took a step away before turning back and doing a little handiwork. A couple of eyes and a mouth and my assassin was looking much more respectable.

I tossed the knife a another twenty or thirty times before I worked enough of the humiliation from my system that thought I’d be able to sleep when I hit the bed.

I went up to retrieve my knife but stopped short of it. I was starving again. It was as if once I’d opened the floodgates to eating I couldn’t stop. I reached in my back pocket for the jerky I’d snagged from the kitchen. Leaning a shoulder on my assassin, I listened to the crickets as I chewed on the beef and tried to forget how I’d flopped down on Dax’s bed and told him to take me.

I didn’t hear anything coming up from behind until there was a low-pitched growl not even a foot behind me. Whatever it was, it was large and tall and that sound came from right behind my head. My entire being froze, even my hair if that was possible.

The knife was stuck in the bark behind me, right in the eye I’d carved out. I didn’t have a weapon. Stupid. I should’ve brought another knife or not left this one stuck in the bark out of reach. I’d left myself vulnerable and now look at me. Maybe I
was
a goddamn gatherer, because any good hunter would’ve had a knife in their hand.

While I was deciding my best course of action, it came closer. It hadn’t attacked yet. Maybe kicking it in the balls—hopefully it was a male—wasn’t the best idea. Maybe I should just wait it out and play dead, albeit standing up, which if it had any kind of higher intelligence might be a non-dead giveaway.

My heart felt like it was going to burst and I had a hard time keeping my breathing under control, another thing that screamed
I’m alive
. I could feel it sniffing at my hair. Its fur grazed the back of my bare arms.

This was the beast, the one I didn’t believe existed. But what was it?

Its nose or mouth, I wasn’t sure which, made its way down and was breathing on my neck now. It was definitely big and I was fairly certain whatever the beast was, its teeth were going to be huge to match the rest of it. It could kill me in a second.

I wasn’t going to go down like this. Fighting it without even a knife was suicidal. I had to make a run for it. Decision made, I took a deep breath and got ready to make a mad dash until a wet tongue darted out and ran along the back of my skin. And then it did it again.

Was the thing licking me? The big tough beast everyone ran from? Or was it tasting me? Trying to see if I’d make a good dinner? I didn’t know if I should run or turn around and give it a scratch behind the ears. Maybe movement wasn’t such a good idea. What if it jarred the creature into action and it remembered that it ate people, not licked them?

The decision was taken out of my hands as I heard it move behind me. It was growling again. Oh shit, did it like how my skin tasted? The massive amount of body heat it threw was diminishing and I heard the sound of movement.

I whipped around, trying to get a glance of it before it was completely out of sight. All that was left of it was a flash of grayish fur disappearing into the trees. A
big
flash of gray though. Like, real big.

I grabbed the knife from my assassin’s eye. “Until tomorrow, my admirable foe.” I did a little bow but stopped short to add some final words in the tree’s direction: “Just a heads-up. We’ll probably be back to daylight hours from here on out.”

My pace back to the house was a bit faster than my pace coming here had been, whether I wanted to fess to it or not.

I felt like my whole body let out a groan as I got closer to the gate. Sister-lover was gone, replaced by Dax. Yay, just who I was looking to see. I almost turned back to the forest. Dax or beast? It was a tough call but I moved forward. I didn’t think Dax would eat me if he was in a bad mood, seeing as he already had plenty of food.

He opened the gate well in advance of my approach.

“It’s three in the morning,” he said as I walked through.

“I was thinking closer to two, but okay, I won’t fight you over the hour.” I walked past him toward the house.

He was right on my tail and I really would’ve preferred a bit more space after tonight’s earlier encounter.

“You were told not to leave the grounds at night.” He gripped my shoulder, jolting me to a halt and then spinning me around.

I looked at the offending hand on my shoulder. “You aren’t my keeper.”

As much as I couldn’t get a read on him so often, I seemed to be getting under his skin almost effortlessly right now.

“You need a keeper. Anybody with any fucking sense wouldn’t have gone out there alone.”

“Did you break me out just to put me in a new jail? I said I’d do what you needed. I didn’t agree to follow your every command.”

We were standing nose to nose on the front lawn and if it weren’t for an errant sneeze, neither of us might have realized that we had an audience. I looked back to the house and saw a sudden movement in not one but several of the windows.

“Brilliant,” I said to him before I started walking back to the house.

“This conversation is not over.”

“Yep, it is,” I said as I kept walking to the house, knowing just how badly I was infuriating him. No, I was relishing in how pissed off he was.

I took a step on the porch and paused. I was almost in the house and I knew instinctively that I’d pushed Dax to his limit.

He was letting me go though, and instead of walking in the house, I stopped and turned back to look at him.

He was standing on the grass still and I could actually see the tiny little thread holding his temper in check, and part of me wanted to clip that last little bit. I realized I hated how much control he had. I wanted to know the real man, not the cardboard cutout that he showed the world, feeding little tidbits here and there when he felt like it.

“Dahlia, come inside. It’s late.”

Shit, where the hell had Fudge shown up from? That old lady was the nemesis of my free will. There she was, all ready to ruin my fun. Thwarted again.

“Dahlia,” she repeated.

I mumbled under my breath all sorts of bad words and then turned toward her. What was this power this old woman wielded over me? “I’m coming.”

Chapter 18

I woke up at the first light of day feeling as if I’d never gone to sleep. It was hard to determine what had kept me awake—images of throwing myself at Dax, almost becoming dinner for a beast or the aftermath on the lawn. I’d sensed a crack in Dax’s cement wall last night, and for no reason I could fathom, I’d wanted to take a sledgehammer to it, split it open and leave it crumbled on the ground around him.

The opportunity had passed; the cement wall was probably intact again. I wasn’t sure when or if I’d get another opportunity. I didn’t know what had set him off so bad to begin with.

I got out of bed and dressed to go downstairs, pushing it all from my mind. There were too many other things to worry about, namely three friends still locked away in hell who I needed to break out.

Breakfast wasn’t ready when I got there but Fudge had it in the works. Standing in front of the oven, she gave me a look that warned of what was to come even before she spoke. I wasn’t overly concerned. Nothing was too horrible when there was Fudge’s breakfast on the horizon.

She started waving the spatula in her hand around in between using it for the eggs in the pan. “I should make you cook your own breakfast. He’s in a mighty bad mood. Up and out of here before dawn. And don’t plead innocent on me either. I saw you about to dig your heels in last night when you two woke the whole house up.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize we were so loud.” It was true. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I’d forgotten everyone and everything when I was standing on the front lawn with Dax. He did that to me somehow, made everything else sort of fade to the distance when he was around, and it seemed to be getting worse.

Fudge’s disapproving expression slowly broke into something a bit closer to neutral. “It’s all right.”

“Okay, well, I’ve got some stuff to do so I’ll get out of your hair.” That
stuff
was hanging in my room until more people were around. Once the place was crawling with hungry stomachs, I’d sneak back down and eat in peace.

“Not so quick,” she said, stopping me before I could make it out of the kitchen.

I’d had a bad feeling there would be more. I hopped up and took a seat on the counter but not before I snagged a piece of bacon. I’d been informed recently that was what those tasty brown striped meats were called. If I was going to have to listen to how I shouldn’t go out at night, I was going to be fed for my troubles.

“You and Dax are a lot alike,” Fudge said as she shoveled eggs into a large bowl.

This didn’t sound like the lecture I’d expected about running around late at night. She was heading into uncharted waters and I wasn’t a good swimmer. This might not be worth bacon, or not one piece, anyway. It might be worth a plate, though. “We’re not even a little alike.”

“Stubborn with a hell of a temper when it lets loose,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard my denial.

“He doesn't have emotions. He’s a glacier except he doesn’t melt seasonally, just the same cold frontier day after day. The only time he bothers with facial expressions is when he’s not in the mood to talk and prefers to make you
guess
what he wants.” I crammed another piece of bacon in my mouth.

“If that’s what you think, then why were you poking at him?” she asked as she pretended to be more interested in eggs.

“I had the situation under control.”

“I’m warning you now, he’s not someone to press. Watch your step, Dal. I know Dax. You might think you’ve got a handle on him but you’re biting off more than you can chew. Don’t be nibbling unless you’re sure you really want a taste.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I had other issues to worry about instead of nibbling or some such nonsense. “Fudge, the only thing I want to eat is your cooking.”

She tsked but then told me to take a plate and go. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I wasn’t looking to go back in the waters she was splashing around in today.

I made my way to my spot on the back porch and was sitting quite comfortably when Lucy strolled out with her plate and took her spot, the bench on the other side of the porch. Her spot was a little too close for comfort to my spot, especially after last night. One of us was going to need to get a new spot. If she’d be quiet, though, I’d let her keep her spot until I finished my food.

When she didn’t speak for a few minutes, I was lulled into a false optimism.

Then she started eyeing me up over a bite of sausage before she started in. “So yeah, I might have called that one wrong. I can’t believe I didn’t know he was doing Becca.”

My bacon lost a little of its flavor, but before I had to stoop to ask how she knew this, she began talking again.

“You do realize how close my room is to Dax’s room, right?” She didn’t bother waiting for a response. “First, I heard noises and I figured, fuck, there goes my good night’s sleep. I think to myself he must be in there banging Dal, and pretty good from the sounds of it. I’ll admit to you now since it wasn’t you in there, I might have been
trying
to listen. I mean, there’s only so much to do after lights out.” She stopped speaking just long enough to get a couple of bites in before she started back up. “Then I heard you calling his name from the hall, which made no sense since I thought you were already inside. Of course I’m confused, and then I heard Becca in the hallway. Then you went in and weren’t in there more than a few minutes before I heard the door again. It was all quite a fiasco if you ask me.”

I hadn’t asked, but that didn’t seem to matter much as I tried to ignore her.

A couple of more bites and she was raring to go again. “I just can’t believe I called that one so wrong. He must have had sex with her the night of the feast after he brought you inside. I could’ve sworn the way he was looking at you that he wanted to bang you. And how hadn’t I heard them before? They must have been doing it at her place.” She pointed to a smaller cabin on the property. “Her and her sister live there. My point of all this is, I really called that one wrong.”

I looked at her and finally understood she was trying to apologize in the most convoluted and roundabout manner I’d ever experienced. She was stuffing her mouth full of food again but I knew she was waiting for me to say something. It took a minute before I saw the one good thing that could come from this. “Lucy, you know that shit I said to you when we were traveling?”

“Yeah.”

I knew she’d remember. I’d done a bit of a head job on her. “We’re even.”

“I can see that.”

I stood, hoping to not have to hear about how wrong she’d been about Dax and Becca anymore. I was ready to move on anyway. There were bigger fish out in the world to fry and I knew just the person who might be able to help. “You know where Bookie is?” I asked.

“Why? He’s not going to be a very good protector if you’re thinking of moving in that direction.”

She just wouldn’t leave it alone. “I don’t want a protector.”

“I’d rethink that. You could use one.”

There was zero malice in those words. Lucy truly thought she was helping me. I couldn’t even get mad.

“Do you know where Bookie is?”

“I think he’s in the barn,” she said. I was already walking away as she kept speaking. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you when the shit hits the fan and he gets knocked out by one of the paddles.”

The barn door was open and I could see the top of Bookie’s head a few stalls down beside a horse.

“Bookie?” I called as I walked toward where he was.

“Hey, Dal,” he said, sounding genuinely happy that I was there.

He was running his hands over the brown mare’s pregnant belly when I got to her stall. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I help out Carter. He’s our resident doctor. Two legs or four, he’s got you covered. She’s due soon so I’m just checking on her.” Bookie moved from her belly to run a hand down the horse’s muzzle. The mare turned into him, bumping her nose into his hand when he petting her. “I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to talk to you about last night. I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression at dinner. I didn’t mean that I thought the Plaguers should be killed.”

“Not a bit,” I said. I knew what haters looked and sounded like and I’d never put Bookie in that category. There was something really easy about being around him and it was probably his antithesis of hate. “I had a question for you. Where do you get all your books?”

“All over. I’ve been collecting for a while. Just found a huge stash recently that I’ve been going through. It’s got a ton of books but it’s a little dangerous.” His head seemed to perk up a little as he warned me.

“Dangerous how?” I asked. If it wasn’t swarming with Dark Walkers I was there, like, yesterday.

He tilted his head as he mentally assessed the dangers. “Old city, crumbling building, sinkholes, the usual problems.”

Crumbling buildings were all I had to worry about? “Could you take me there?”

“I could lend you some books instead. What are you looking for?” he asked as he moved out of the stall where I was standing by the opening.

I hadn’t realized how awkward it might be to explain to someone I needed to blow shit up. “I just want to browse.”

His eyebrows rose, making it obvious that sounded a bit suspicious when he’d just offered the use of his own library. He didn’t say anything about it, though. “Dax might get pissed if I take you to a ruins. I know you’re helping him with stuff.”

Dax was becoming a damn thorn in my side. “So you won’t take me?”

He shook his head quickly. “No, of course I’ll take you. I’m in full support of your stance on the lawn last night and a strong believer in personal autonomy.” He glanced back through the open barn doors. “We just need to figure out when he isn’t going to be around, is all.”

“Bookie, I think we are going to be good friends.”