Night Whispers: ShadowLands, Book 1 (21 page)

She wasn’t about to argue with that. She entered and collapsed on the ground, uncaring that the wood floor was layered with animal droppings and dirt.

Erik placed the bundled-up, still-comatose Carrie carefully next to Jules, adjusting the teen so her head was on the knapsack. “Stay here. I’ll check the other buildings quickly.”

She nodded and leaned back against the wall, watching as he left through the yawning mouth of the open door.

Her hand stole inside her sweatshirt pocket, taking advantage of his absence to roll up some more of her dwindling stash of breadcrumbs. The crumpling paper sounded so loud to her, she’d been trying to drop back and do it surreptitiously, but it was tough. Luckily, Erik walked far enough ahead of her she didn’t think he’d noticed.

Jules pulled out a handful, the elegant lettering and jagged edges chastising her for her rough treatment. She glanced at the writing, and then went back and read it, the beauty of the words tugging her in. Melancholy settled upon her when she realized this was the bottom half of the page, and she’d probably never learn how the first part of the poem went.

Not important. She crumpled it into a ball, doing the same with a few more, and stuffed them into her pocket, patting them down so they didn’t create such an obvious lump.

She was trying to coax water past Carrie’s lips when Erik came back in. “Any luck?”

He grunted and sat on her other side, removing his sunglasses. The whites around his silver pupils were bloodshot, and she noticed for the first time that tears streamed down his face.

“Are you okay?”

He swiped at his eyes with the back of his dirty arm. “Yes.”

It probably burned like hell, the macho guy. She put the water bottle on the ground and leaned forward to pull open her knapsack, drawing out her first-aid kit. She took aspirin and a bottle of water for herself and handed him a packet of wipes and another bottle of water. “It’ll be cleaner if you wipe your eyes with these.”

He shook his head and returned the packet to her. “We may need these later. Keep them.” He accepted the bottle and motioned for her to keep feeding Carrie.

Carrie’s eyes fluttered open, but she appeared completely unaware of her surroundings, her gaze unfocused and staring. With some coaxing, Jules was able to get more water down Carrie’s throat.

Only after she had drunk what Jules judged to be a sufficient quantity did she take a few gulps of the precious water.

“Finish it,” Erik said, when she tried to recap it with shaking hands. “There is a water well behind one of the buildings, and it does not appear to be dry.”

In that case…she drained the bottle, heaven to her parched throat. Foil crinkled, and she glanced over without interest at the energy bar he held out to her. “Eat. You need energy.”

The granola tasted like cardboard, but the taste didn’t make her want to throw up, which she took as a good sign.
Another small sign you won’t turn into a slavering blood-hungry beast! Hooray.
“When did your eyes lose color?”

“Within a few hours after becoming ill.” He mirrored her pose, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. “Once, they were darker than yours.”

“I remember.” There was a trace of sadness and loss in his words, but pure self-interest wouldn’t let her change her line of questioning. “Mine haven’t, have they? I’m not noticing any greater sensitivity to the light.”

“No. As I said, you are also not as sick as I was immediately after. There was no way I could have walked for hours the way you did this morning, even taking into account your tremendous strength of will.”

“You think I have a tremendous strength of will?”

The corner of his mouth kicked up. If she was being wild and crazy, she might call it a smile. “Don’t fish for compliments.”

“I’m not. I’m serious.”

“I knew you had a tremendous strength of will when I first met you.”

“You remember that?”

“Vividly.”

“God, I musta looked like a dirty street rat.”

“You were rather…malodorous.”

“That translated to a strength of will?”

“Well, you got very angry when I refused to let you die.” He stopped.

She glanced at him knowingly. “Because sometimes it’s easier to die than it is to live with everything you’ve gone through. With everything you’ve seen.”

“I assure you, I wish to live, or I never would have come this far.”

“A life on the run? Forever?” She shook her head. “Please.”

“What would you have me do? Take you back to your precious Compound people on either coast? I thought we agreed that they wouldn’t welcome you home.”

“I’ve rethought that,” she shot back. “Besides, you mostly decided, and I was scared and traumatized and ill. You yourself said I’m not as sick as you were. I could get through this fine.”

“Regardless, we can’t trek back right now. Have you forgotten our lack of transport?”

She sighed. “No. I’m just saying, after a few days, when we determine how Carrie and I are doing, and we secure other transport—keep your mind open is all.”
Especially keep your mind open to the possibility of my James tracking us down. Please don’t punch him before I can get in between you two.

He changed the subject. “We will stay here for a few hours and rest. Then we will continue.”

“Continue to where? Do you even know what direction we’re going in next?”

“Any direction. We must find better shelter than this.”

“How do you know we’ll find anything at all?”

“I don’t. But we’ll die for certain if we have no protection. Carrie needs to be within a secure place.” He glanced down at the teen. “Her body is growing warmer.” Jules was surprised when he touched her cheek. “Your cheeks are flushed now as well, and you are hot.”

She laid her hand upon Carrie’s puckered brow, but her own fever made it difficult to tell if the girl really was warmer. “We’ll have to find that shelter before night.”

“Rest, then. We’ll leave in a couple of minutes.” He closed his eyes, looking for all the world like he was going to command his body to sleep for the short period of time they had.

Jules continued to stroke Carrie’s hair, thinking, worrying. James had said he would be at the van by evening. Would he even see her trail in the dusk? How would he know where she was? What if they were dead by then? What if he was injured or died before he could get to her?

She must have slept during the midst of her fretting, because she felt herself getting shaken awake by a hard hand. Instinct had her coming up swinging, but Erik pulled back to avoid her fist connecting with his nose. He already had his sunglasses on, obscuring his eyes. “Come. I think I can manage to go outside now.”

Groggy and tired, she came to her feet and gave a cursory inspection to make sure everything had been packed up, before swinging the smaller knapsack on her back. She followed him outside, unobtrusively dropping her energy bar wrapper on the ground in front of the building.
This littering is justified.

They walked down Main Street but stopped when the road split at a fork.

“Which way?”

Erik looked back and forth between the two roads. “Do you have a preference?”

He was asking her opinion now? Shocker. She studied their options for a long moment. “
Two words diverged in a wood/and I, I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference,
” she murmured, recalling the end of the poem she’d read while resting inside.

“What does that mean? These roads look the same.”

She shook her head, hoping that her increasing sense of lightheadedness was due to exhaustion and not sickness. “One is more worn. Look, see how the pavement is cracked and falling apart? How there are less plants and weeds growing along it?” She walked a few feet onto that road. A tree root had popped part of the pavement up, and she stumbled upon it, tripping. He caught her by her arm before she fell, though her knapsack tumbled. “Thanks,” she said, and picked up the bag.

“So you propose we take the one that looks less traveled upon?”

She gave him a dark look. “What are you, crazy? We take the one that looks like it was traveled the longest. Hopefully that means someone actually took it every now and again, though why you’d come to this ghost town is beyond me. Come on.”

“Then why…?”

“You asked for my preference. Come on.”

He only followed her for a second before his longer strides brought him ahead of her.

Another crumpled piece of paper fell to the ground.

Chapter Thirteen

James was so damn tired, even watching the tracker, he almost ran into Jules’s van before he saw it. He slammed his brakes on and jerked the wheel to the side, his heart pounding as his front bumper barely missed the back of the battered vehicle.

He came to a stop side by side with the white van, his hands clenched on the wheel.
No more dings, or Gabriel may kill you.
Their ramped-up vehicles weren’t infinite.

The hope he had had that Jules had simply stopped her vehicle in front of some shelter died a rapid death. There weren’t any structures around here.

He wouldn’t realize until later that he felt only a trace of his usual anxiety when he got out of his car. He was too focused on Jules and the fact that her van was most definitely abandoned.

He rounded the vehicle. The driver’s side door opened easily, the slight wind setting the key in the ignition switch swinging.

He slid inside the driver’s seat and tried the key. The engine didn’t turn over at all.
Dead battery.

Raven had acquired only a few of the special batteries, since they’d never entered mass production, and so far the things were remarkably reliable and allowed the car to function without the precious commodity of gas. They ran for a long time, but all batteries pooped out sooner or later. He might have been able to fix this with a jump of his car, but as usual, he had been too far away to help.

She must have been stranded. Sweat popped out on his brow. It was going to be dark soon, and she was off somewhere, in the middle of nowhere.

Shaking off his despair, he jumped out of the car and studied the ground. No one would ever call him a tracker, but he knew what footprints looked like. The tall grass on the side of the road had been flattened here and there. By feet?

Yes. Right there, where the soil hit the road, was a clear patch of dirt with four impressions.

Two were small. Two were large.

A man’s print.

A growl ripped from his throat, low and primal. Up until now he had known that it was likely, given this crazy road trip, that Jules wasn’t alone. But this—this was confirmation.

She had been traveling with some strange man for days, possibly under duress, possibly hurt and vulnerable. And now she was out there, without even the dubious protection of her van. Goddamn it.

He wheeled around and took his frustration out on the closest thing, slamming his fisted hand into her dead, useless van. He stalked back to his own vehicle and got inside, pulling up the GPS and trying to clear his brain of worry long enough to study the map.

She had broken down in the morning. She could literally be anywhere. “How am I supposed to find you now, kiddo? Why did you have to leave the van?”

When James spoke, Jules fell to her knees, uncaring that the asphalt on the shoulder of the road was digging into her knees.

He had found the van but hadn’t discovered her trail, and she couldn’t even tell him. There was no way he would be able to find her. Her fever was raging, her entire arm felt infected, her leg muscles burned, and all she wanted to do was sleep.

She’d always taken pride in being the plucky girl from the wrong side of the tracks. But her pluckiness had just run out.

Stop it. What about James and your worries over him?

All she could do was pray that he’d give up quickly. Maybe she could leave some sort of message for him, scrawled on a tree nearby. In her blood.

You melodramatic little
—

She hadn’t been keeping pace with Erik and Carrie for a while now, so he was a good ten feet away before he finally realized she was no longer walking. He turned to look at her and loped back. The fading sun caught in the silver of his hair.

“Get up,” he said, his tone hard and brooking no nonsense.

She shook her head. “I’m slowing you down too much. You should have ditched me back in Bounty.”

He glanced up at the sky. “We don’t have much time to find a decent shelter before it becomes full dark.”

Before the monsters came out. “I know. Take the girl and go, before it’s too late.”

His jaw set. “No. I will not leave you here like some sort of martyr. I can carry you both.” He shifted Carrie to his other arm.

Yeah, he was freakishly, inhumanly strong, but he would still get seriously slowed down if he took the time to carry her weight in addition to Carrie’s. “It’s fine, Erik. I absolve you of all guilt in leaving me here, really. I don’t think I can make it. Get the girl to some sort of shelter. Hell, go back to Bounty, if need be.”