The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) (3 page)

Cade flopped back against her pillows. The
movement jostled Olivia, and a thin wail began to emanate from the
blanket-wrapped bundle. She made a shushing noise and started to
jiggle the baby like she’d seen mothers do before the Michaluk
outbreak. The baby girl didn’t seem to like it much, and her wails
grew louder.

“One week,” Cade said, loud enough to be
heard over the baby’s cries. “No more, no less. Come hell or high
water, I’m leaving in one week to find my husband.”

Remy had a
headache from Hell. It was all she could focus on since they’d
gotten to their temporary shelter outside of Charleston. She’d
dosed herself with aspirin she’d found in one of the ambulance’s
cabinets, but it didn’t make much of a dent in the pain. She sat
secluded in one of the upstairs bedrooms, blankets hung over the
windows to block the light, curled up in the darkest corner of the
room with her eyes closed.

She was trying to find some hidden well of
peace and solitude and painlessness inside herself. The faces of
all of Woodside’s dead kept floating to the forefront of her mind,
which made her feel like throwing up.

All those people were dead because of
her
. Because Dominic had taken
her
out to make
her
happy, and she and Dominic had found Sadie and Jude, and
trying to save them had led those damned things back to their safe
place.

Sure, they’d saved Sadie and Jude. But were
the lives of two people worth the loss of fifty?

“No, of course not,” Remy said out loud.

“No, of course not what?” Dominic asked from
the doorway.

Remy didn’t bother to open her eyes.
“Nothing,” she answered. “Just thinking out loud.”

The door clicked shut, and footsteps crossed
the room. Dominic had a slight limp she’d never noticed before,
judging by the sound of his feet against the floor. There was a
scuff on the floorboards, and she opened her eyes to find him
crouching in front of her, his forearms resting against his knees.
His balance on the balls of his feet was perfect, not a wobble to
be seen. His steadiness made her jealous.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice low like
he was afraid that someone was listening in.

“Other than the fact I’ve got a splitting
headache?” Remy asked. “I wish I could say it was nothing outside
of the usual parade of bullshit, but it doesn’t appear that I can
tell you that.”

Dominic brushed a hand through her tangled
hair, pushing it back from her face, and traced his fingers along
her jaw. “Have you taken anything for your headache?”

“Yeah, about an hour ago. I don’t think it’s
working.”

“Okay then, since we can’t get you anything
else for it yet, let’s address the other problem,” Dominic said.
“What’s bothering you?”

“What makes you think something is bothering
me?”

He traced his thumb over her cheeks, first
the left and then the right. “Because you’ve been crying,” he
said.

Surprised, she reached up to touch her face;
her fingertips came back wet. “Oh,” she murmured. “I didn’t
realize…”

“It’s okay,” he said. He squeezed her
shoulder in reassurance and pressed his hand against the side of
her neck. “There’s no need to apologize. I want you to talk about
it. Tell me what’s going on in that pretty head of yours.”

Remy almost said, “Nothing,” again, though
she knew that Dominic would call her out on such an obvious lie.
Besides which, she couldn’t think of any good reason to
not
tell him. Of all people, Dominic knew what she’d been through over
the past few days, and if there was anyone she could talk to about
how she felt, it was him. She cleared her throat, closed her eyes,
and murmured, “Is this all my fault?”

“Is what all your fault?” Dominic asked.

“All of this,” Remy said, waving her hand
around. “All those people who died in Woodside. Did they die
because of me?”

There was a shuffling sound, and she opened
her eyes. Dominic slid around to sit against the wall beside her.
He drew a knee up, resting an arm on top of it, and stared at her,
assessing her. She tried to not squirm in discomfort at his
intense, steady gaze, barely able to hold her eyes onto his face.
“Why would you think that was your fault?”

“Because…because those infected followed me
to Woodside. If they hadn’t done that…”

“Then they would have found Woodside anyway,
and we would have ended up in the exact same situation,” Dominic
said. “The good thing is that, in the process, we were there to
help Sadie and Jude. They might not be here today if we hadn’t gone
out. And we wouldn’t have had any warning at all. We wouldn’t have
gotten the cure out of Woodside before the infected got in.”

“But…
fifty people,
Dominic,” Remy
said. “They’re all dead, and I can’t help thinking it’s my
fault.”

“It’s as much my fault as it is yours,”
Dominic said. He grasped her hand and laced his fingers between
hers. “I took you out there, remember? I was with you when they
followed us to Woodside.
Us
, Remy. Not you,
us
. It
wasn’t just you who was out where you shouldn’t have been.” He
sighed and added, with the faintest twinge of despair, “Some of
them might have survived—we might have gotten some of them out—if
it hadn’t been for the fucking military.”

Remy’s shoulders tensed and her jaw clenched
at the mention of the soldiers who had invaded Woodside, at the
memory of the excitement she’d felt when she’d thought they were
there to rescue them—and the horror and fear she’d experienced when
they’d opened fire, on both the infected and on the survivors, like
they’d been one and the same. A stab of pain darted through her jaw
from the force of the tension she exerted on it, and she struggled
to loosen it before she did damage to her teeth.

“Fuck ‘em,” she muttered. “Fuck all of
‘em.”

“They were just following orders,” Dominic
said. “There are quarantine protocols for that sort of thi—”

“
Fuck their protocols!
” Remy shouted,
her anger surging. She sat up straighter, ignoring the pain spiking
in her head. “Their
protocols
killed a lot of good, innocent
people! Why would they be following
quarantine
protocols,
anyway? The whole fucking world is a quarantine zone! They might as
well shoot
themselves
if they’re killing everybody in a
so-called quarantine zone!”

Dominic’s hand tightened around hers, and he
shook his head, pulling her back and over against him. “Calm down,”
he murmured, threading his hand through her hair soothingly. “I’m
angry too. But there’s no way being as mad as you are is helping
with your headache.”

“It’s not,” Remy said. “But fuck, Dominic,
can you blame me? All those people. The
children
. Sasha and
Shae. They’re all gone.” Her emotions hardening, she glared at the
wall across from her, a substitute for those at whom she wished she
could direct her fury. “Those sons of bitches should pay for what
they did to them, and to us.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Dominic
said. “But how are you proposing making them pay? God only knows
where they are now.”

“I guess we’ll have to track down where they
took Brandt then,” Remy said, clenching her fist with her
determination. “That will bring us the added bonus of finding
him
, and then we could slaughter the motherfuckers that took
him and killed our people in one fell swoop.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious.”

“Remy, you’re talking about premeditated mass
murder,” Dominic said. He sounded like he was struggling to be
patient. At this point, though, Remy didn’t care if she pushed his
buttons. Maybe they
needed
to be pushed. “That doesn’t sound
like the Remy I know. I’m all for teaching them a lesson. I just
don’t know if I can condone setting out exclusively to kill people
who aren’t infected.”

“You helped us do that with Alicia,” Remy
pointed out.

“Alicia was a psychotic megalomaniac,”
Dominic said. “She was an immediate danger to us all, and something
had to be done about her.”

“So, what, it’s okay to kill someone in cold
blood if they happen to be crazier than a road lizard, but if
they’re of sound mind, suddenly it’s immoral?”

“Remy, that isn’t what I meant, and you know
it,” Dominic snapped. “Jesus, where do you even get these
ideas?”

“Maybe, oh, I don’t know, out of your mouth?”
Remy shot back. “That’s clearly how you operate, and don’t say it
isn’t, because you’ve already proven it. What happens if I go crazy
like Alicia did? You going to have somebody put a bullet in my head
too?”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” Dominic
twisted toward her. She moved away, sliding along the hardwood
floor to put some distance between them. “You think this is going
to be an Old Yeller situation? That I’m going to shoot you because
you might go crazy?”

“Of course not,” Remy retorted. “You’ll get
someone else to do it for you. You know, like you conned Brandt and
Cade into killing Alicia.”

“I didn’t
con
them into killing her,”
Dominic said. “Both of them had a history with her and her
insanity, and if I recall correctly,
so did you
. Or do I
have to remind you of what she almost did to you back in Hollywood
when she and her thugs—and yes, I’m including myself in that—took
Cade?”

“No, you don’t,” Remy muttered.

“Sorry, what was that?” Dominic asked
sarcastically. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“
No, you don’t!
” Remy yelled.
Somewhere in the next room, a baby started crying. She felt a pang
of guilt for waking Cade’s baby, but she ignored it, burying it
where it wouldn’t bother her again. She didn’t have the space to
add any more guilt onto the guilt she was already carrying.

“Jesus, would you keep it down?” Dominic
admonished. “You woke the baby up.”

“She’ll live.” Remy pushed off the floor,
staggering sideways a few steps as her aching head swam and her
stomach churned. She braced a hand against the bedpost and drew in
a deep breath, trying to steady herself. Her nerves were vibrating
under her skin, and she had the irrational urge to grab the nearest
warm body and dig her fingernails into its face. She shook it off,
grinding her nails into the bedpost instead, and straightened,
squaring her shoulders. She stiffened when Dominic’s hands pressed
against her back.

“Talk to me, Remy, please,” Dominic said. His
hands slid up her back, barely skimming her shirt. “You’re lashing
out, and I’ve never seen you do that unless something or someone
has you upset. Talk to me, okay? You know I’m not going to judge
you, no matter what’s going on, even if it involves me.”

Remy closed her eyes. The temptation to go
limp, to sag backwards into Dominic’s arms, was so great she almost
gave in. She fought it, though. She was scared that it wouldn’t be
well received and that she’d like it too much. She was still trying
to tell herself that she didn’t
really
like him—though both
of them knew that was far from the truth.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?” Dominic asked,
sparing her the admission. She didn’t respond. His hands moved up
to her hair, scraping through the strands to pull them back from
her face. “It’s okay,” he whispered in her ear. “I am too.”

Remy raised her eyebrows and turned to look
at him. “You, scared?” she said. “You can’t be scared. You’re not
allowed.”

“It happens occasionally,” Dominic said. He
pulled her closer, hooking an arm around her waist and holding her
against him. He took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together
and extending their connected hands like they were dancing at a
ball. Remy smiled and slipped her hand up his chest to settle it on
his shoulder in the appropriate position. He returned her smile.
“I’ve been scared plenty of times in my life. I’ve been in so many
situations that I almost didn’t make it out of that I had to learn
very quickly how to live with that fear.”

“How did you learn to live with it?” Remy
asked.

He spun her around and pulled her close
again. “That is one of the things I wish I could teach you,” he
murmured, brushing his lips against her cheek with a smile.

The group that
gathered in Cade’s bedroom later that day was dreadfully small.
Dominic did a headcount of the people in the room with him, and his
heart sank. They were down to eight people. Eight people out of
over fifty. The low number was disheartening, and he fervently
hoped that some of the others had managed to slip out of their
houses and get out of Woodside before the military bombed the
community.

Dominic did a sweep of those present, and
despite his disappointment over them being so few in number, he was
pleased with what they
did
have. In the center of the room,
as if she were the showpiece, Cade sat on the bed, reclining
against the pillows, her newborn baby cradled in her lap. Her thin
fingers brushed against the sleeping infant’s forehead,
rhythmically and soothingly, though Cade appeared unaware that she
was doing it. Her sniper rifle, always within arm’s reach, rested
against the wall by the bed, close enough that she could lean over
and grab it if need be.

Remy sat at the foot of the bed, leaning
against one of the bedposts with her legs crossed. She had a
short-bladed knife in her right hand, twirling it between her
fingers. Her dark hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, and
she looked relaxed. Dominic wondered if the aspirin she’d taken had
finally helped her headache ease off. She caught him looking at her
and smiled, then twirled the knife and tossed it into the air,
catching it by the hilt. He returned her smile.

Jude and Sadie sat against the edge of the
dresser, side by side. Jude had his arms folded over his chest,
staring at the floor as if he were deep in thought, an unhappy
expression on his face. Sadie had her hands braced against the
dresser, and she stared at Cade with a look of determination almost
equal to the other woman’s. Her expression surprised Dominic. He
hadn’t known she felt so passionately about Cade’s cause—she barely
knew any of them. Still, the look was there, and it was undeniable.
Both of the twins were outfitted as if they were ready to go to
war, their Kevlar vests Velcroed on and their weapons holstered and
sheathed and strapped in place.