Fractured (16 page)

“I’m afraid I’m going to end up stabbing myself.”

He held up a thick blue-and-yellow flannel shirt, holding it for me like a jacket while I put it on. For a moment, I felt the brush of his chest against my shoulder blades. He was that close.
So
close. I took a step forward to keep myself from whirling around and wrapping my arms around him.

“Now,” he said, “to avoid the self-stabbing issue.” His hand skimmed up under my flannel shirt, and I gasped. He briskly unsheathed one of my knives and dragged it along his palm. No blood welled on his skin. “These are for practice,” he explained, handing it back to me.

He made me draw the knives from the sheaths and strike out. Standing. Sitting. Squatting. Lying down. On my hands and knees. With my eyes closed. After spinning me around in circles to make me dizzy. With all the lights turned off. He made me erect the tent and lie inside while he attacked from the outside.

An hour later, the tent was destroyed. My flannel shirt was ripped. I had a swollen red spot on my cheekbone, courtesy of his elbow, and Malachi had a bump on his forehead, courtesy of my knee.

“One more time?” he invited. A drop of sweat fell from his chin.

“I have to go in a few minutes, but what the hell.”

“Do you have a position you’d like to try?” he asked politely.

“From behind, maybe? I need more practice with that.”

We stared at each other. Heat suffused my cheeks as I considered the double meaning of our conversation. Was Malachi aware of it, too? Did he care?

He didn’t give me any hints. “Good choice,” he finally said. “Remember, keep your arms close to your body. If they’re out to your sides, that’s an invitation for me to strip you of the weapon.”

“I know,” I said, turning my back to him. “But thanks for the reminder.”

The space behind me filled with predatory silence. I closed my eyes, focusing on my hands, my aching muscles, the hairs on the back of my neck, which would warn me of his movement. I strained to hear him breathing, to picture his body behind mine, closing in. I wondered if he was watching me now, and what he was thinking.

And then I heard it, the tiniest
plop
of a drop of sweat on the mat that told me where he was—and that he was moving. I didn’t wait for him to attack me. I attacked
him
. I whirled around, dropping low, and plowed into his legs, drawing a knife and sliding it along the backs of his knees, hard enough to have sliced his tendons if my blade had been sharpened. And he knew it, because he let himself fall backward, but he caught me by the shoulders and dragged me down with him.

My head bounced off the wall of his chest as he crashed into the floor, nearly making me bite my tongue in half. I ripped my arm back and jammed the knife against his side, satisfied by the whoosh of his breath at the impact. He elbowed me hard in the shoulder, numbing my arm and hand. The knife fell from my grip, and he reached for it, but I elbowed him in the upper thigh. He twisted instinctively to protect his soft spots, which put the knife momentarily out of his reach. With my still-tingling right hand, I knocked that knife away from his scrabbling fingers and braced myself as I arched over him and drove my knee into the back of his raised leg, keeping him off balance.

My free left hand yanked a second knife from under my shirt as I threw myself on top of him. He grabbed my wrist with an iron grip and rolled with me, trying to pin me down. All I felt were his hard edges and my desperation to win. To prove to him that I could do this. That he didn’t have to worry about protecting me, that we could be together even though—I pushed that stupid thought out of my head and kicked my legs out and over. There was no way I was going to allow him to get on top of me again.

As we twisted, I let him control my left hand and managed to draw a third knife with my right. The moment I felt gravity working for me, I shoved off with my foot and burst upward with all my strength.

Malachi’s eyes were bright as his gaze darted down to my hand, which now held a blade against his throat. “You’ve killed me,” he whispered.

The deep rise and fall of his chest carried me like a wave. I stared into his eyes, completely caught, storm-tossed and disoriented. Before I could think about it, the knife had fallen from my hand and my fingers were sliding greedily along his neck, up to his jaw. His hands tightened around my elbows while his eyes fluttered shut. His chin lifted, exposing his throat, where his pulse beat heavy and hard, where his skin was soft and smooth and
waiting
. I wanted to close my mouth around that pulse. I wanted to feel it tick against my tongue. I wanted to taste his skin and hear him moan. But … what if that tilt of his chin was to avoid my touch? What if the
waiting
was for me to get the hell away from him and stop invading his space?

I rolled off him and stood up. “I think that’s a first,” I said, driving the tremble out of my voice with sheer volume.

Malachi didn’t get up, nor did he open his eyes.

I chuckled and nudged his hip with my toe, desperate to wrench this moment back from the abyss of awkward into which it had fallen. But also, wanting him to
notice
. I’d beaten him. I wasn’t helpless. He didn’t have to worry about me or protect me. “Are you playing dead?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I’m recovering.” His body was sprawled out, one leg straight, one bent, his arms out to his sides, palms upward, fingers curled. His chin was still raised, his throat vulnerable.

I took a few steps back to keep myself from touching him again. “Not bad, right? You didn’t let me win, did you?”

“No.”

“So …” I bit my lip, hoping for some response. But he just lay there, completely still. “You gonna be okay down there?”

“Eventually.” His lips were barely moving.

I shuffled my feet as the moment stretched, leaving me more confused with every passing second. “Want me to help you up?”

“Lela, just go. Please. I need you to leave now.”

Every word hit me like a bullet. I’d done something right, but it was
still
wrong. I wanted to scream
Just punch me already!
I wanted to rewind, to be a different girl, one he would love, one he would reach for. But I couldn’t fix it. I didn’t even know what was
wrong
, not really. So I bit the inside of my cheek as my chest throbbed, stripped off the dull knives that decorated my body, and left my victim lying where he’d fallen.

FIFTEEN

HENRY AND I TROMPED
into the camp around ten, after dropping off Malachi and Jim near one of the winter homeless shelters. We’d said our terse good-byes and good huntings, and I drove away, silently determined to prove myself to all of them—especially my Lieutenant. Now my head buzzed with a heavily caffeinated and highly explosive mixture of anticipation and anxiety.

Our boots crunched in the stiff, overgrown grass as we hiked off the sidewalk. We swung our stuff over a useless chain-link fence and wiggled through the ragged man-sized hole that had been cut through it. The traffic of I-95 roared above us, even at this time of night. It echoed in the chill, punctuated by gusts of wind that knifed right through my three layers of clothes. I’d straightened my hair and knotted it tight, and then pulled that thick woolen hat over it. Henry had a bright-red ski mask shoved up on his forehead, which made him look a little like a demented garden gnome. In addition to his own backpack, he’d insisted on carrying our tent, which Raphael had had to bring at the last minute to replace the one Malachi and I had killed.

“Heyheyhey,” called a rough voice gouged away by what sounded like decades of heavy smoking, “get the fuck out.” A head popped out of one of the bedraggled tents nestled behind a crumbling rock wall at the base of the overpass. The person climbed out of the tent, holding a baseball bat.

I held my hands up in the air, and Henry dropped the tent and did the same. “Looking for a safe place to bed down,” Henry called. “My girl and I won’t cause no trouble. We just need a place to sleep.”

The individual with the baseball bat stepped into the light from a highway lamp far above us. He looked like an Eskimo, completely bundled up except for his eyes, nose, and mouth. He put the bat to his shoulder, his gloved fists tight around its base.

I stepped forward. This guy would back down easily; I could tell by the twitch of his eyes between me and Henry. He was scared. “Dude, we’re not going to hurt you,” I said as Henry edged up close next to me. He’d probably sensed the same fear in the guy. “And this isn’t private property. We can be here same as you.”

The guy let out a harsh, hoarse laugh. “Guess that’s true, as long as you keep yourselves to yourselves. You heard about the attacks?”

“Yeah,” said Henry. “We were at another camp when they came through the other night. Tried the shelters, but they won’t let us stay together, so we came here.” He put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned against his wiry frame, trying to look romantically inclined.

The bundled guy pointed with the tip of his bat. “There’s a good space over there by the water if you want it. Don’t make too much noise, though. Harriet won’t like it. She likes folks to keep it clean.”

I muscled down a shudder. “Harriet?”

Bundled Guy grunted. “Ex-nun. She’s got a bat, too.”

Henry laughed. “We’ll try not to offend Sister Harriet. And we got supplies we’ll share.” He pointed to our discarded backpack.

Bundled Guy’s eyes shone softly. “We keep collective supplies over there. Thanks for that.”

He left us alone while we set up camp on a rocky patch of gravel near the slap and splash of the bay just a few yards and a thin strip of grass away. When we got it up, we added our cans and a loaf of bread to the strange collection of supplies on a dirty white table set up under one of the lights. As we did, a few more people came out to introduce themselves.

There was one couple, Mike and Liz, who said they were just passing through, trying to get to Georgia from Maine. There was a skinny unemployed waitress who’d lost her home, and a guy who seriously resembled a walrus and said he did drywall. He was the only one without a tent, and had built himself a lean-to from corrugated metal and cardboard. He also reeked of booze and kept giving the waitress hungry looks until she fled back to her tent and zipped it up tight.

Two of the camp residents were kids, lanky teenage boys with loose, stretched-out cuffs on their sleeves and a hollow look in their eyes, making me wonder how many tricks they’d turned today and how recently they’d shot up their earnings. I thought of Nick and wondered if they knew him, if he’d shared a mattress or a needle with them. These boys, these
people
, were perfect targets for the Mazikin. No one would know or care if they were missing. Hell, they were
already
missing and no one cared. When they died, people would cluck their tongues and say what a waste it was. They wouldn’t look too hard for a cause, for a killer. And if a Mazikin possessed them, no one would know the difference.

I sent Henry back to the tent and patrolled around the edge of the camp, getting a sense of its layout and where it would be most vulnerable to an attack. It would be difficult to hear the approach of footsteps because of the highway noise, and that was a major disadvantage. The tents nearest the water were likely to get hit first, seeing as the others were against a wall. The easiest escape was along the grass, which extended up into a park area, or back toward the neighborhood we’d just walked through. We’d parked about four blocks away in a neighborhood full of people who didn’t raise their eyes from the sidewalk as they passed, but I knew they were watching us all the same. Not the safest place to leave a vehicle. Our Guard car was a twelve-year-old Taurus, though, and I doubted anyone would want to jack it.

Around midnight, I joined Henry in the tent, keeping the flashlight aimed at his feet and not his face. He was sitting there in the dark, casually fitting iron-tipped bolts to the long, narrow crossbow he’d assembled from a jumble of components he’d carried in his backpack. “I can’t hear anything with this noise,” he complained. “I
hate
this noise.”

“I know. Me too. I need to go back out there to keep an eye out, but …” I hated to admit it, but I was freezing.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said. He pulled a pair of heavy black gloves from his pack, and then chuckled as he handed them to me. “‘Make sure you give these to the Captain,’ he said to me.” His imitation of Malachi’s accent was hilariously bad. “‘She will not remember them herself.’” He nodded at my bare, red-fingered hands clutching the flashlight. “Guess he was right.”

I sat down heavily, set the flashlight between us, and took the gloves from him. They were leather, lined with soft, thick fleece. I slid them over my hands and sighed. They fit perfectly. I wasn’t sure what made me feel warmer—the gloves themselves or the fact that Malachi had thought about me being out here in the cold. I just wished he’d given them to me in person.

“Captain, have you talked to him about what happened? At the nest, I mean.”

I peered at Henry, trying to read his expression in the mostly dark. “Not since the day it happened.”
Right before he tore my heart out.

Henry scratched at a spot on his neck. “Well … I think he took it kinda hard. I don’t think he’s sleeping well. He’s up all hours after we get home from patrols, training in the basement. And when he does sleep …” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

I kept my expression neutral, even though my chest was aching fiercely. “It’s my job to help him, Henry.”

He nodded and gave me a cautious look. “I think he’s been having nightmares, is all.”

I wrapped my arms around my knees, curling into a ball around the hurt caused by Malachi’s pain. “I’ll try to talk to him.”
Try
being the operative word.

Henry shrugged and pulled a musty blanket from his pack. “It’s my turn to patrol.”

“Where will you be?”

“Concealed spot with a clear shot at the path leading to this tent. How we used to do in the Wasteland.” His brow creased like a memory had hit him sideways. “It wasn’t ever safe, but we could protect each other.”