Thicker than Blood (39 page)

Like a wild animal sprung free from its
confines, Misty attacked. No dancing around, no dodging, just
another hard-core assault that I wasn’t quick enough to dodge. Her
fists slammed into me yet again, splitting open my lip, and my
mouth filled instantly with blood. Yelping, I dropped to my knees
and spun around, missing her second swing.

Grabbing my arms, Misty wrenched me upright
and threw me against the ropes. As I hit them, I bounced back,
falling into her arms where she promptly kicked my legs out from
under me, causing my entire body to slam painfully to the ground.
As I lay there, trying to catch my breath, her foot shot out,
connecting with my ribs, and what little breath I had all left me
in one painful whoosh.

She kicked me again and again, until I could
no longer breathe. I was wishing she would end it once and for all,
just send that boot of hers straight into my head and end this, but
then suddenly she stopped. As I pried open my swollen lids, I found
that she was walking away from me.

With a grunt, I rolled onto my stomach,
attempting to drag myself across the ground and back to my stool.
I’d only managed a few inches when Alex was suddenly there, lifting
me off the ground and setting me back down on my stool.

“Eve!” he shouted as he grabbed my chin,
forcing me to look at him. I stared at him, though everything was
fuzzy and it hurt just to keep my eyes open.

“She’s going to kill you! You need to fight
back!” he yelled, his features contorting in anger.

“I don’t even care,” I mumbled, letting my
head hang to one side, where I was greeted with Leisel’s face. Her
beautiful, heartbroken, tear-stained face.

“You promised!” she yelled.

“I can’t do this!” I cried out, pushing her
hand away as she reached for me. I looked away from her, not
wanting to see her pain, her frustration, or her damn pity.

My gaze snagged on E to find him still
watching me. His entire face was creased with a frustrated frown,
his body taut and rippling with anger. His anger probably stemmed
from the fact that I was losing—that he’d bet on me and was going
to lose.

“
FINAL ROUND!” Jeffers roared. “Ding, ding,
motherfucking-
DING
!”

I didn’t know how I did it, how I managed to
drag my broken body up off that stool and back into the ring. But
somehow I did, found some remaining shred of will left inside me,
forcing me onward, pushing me to see this thing to the end, even if
it meant the end of me.

Gritting my teeth, my guard raised, I waited
as Misty came for me, waiting for her fists to once again begin
their relentless assault. And as I was waiting, somewhere beneath
the roar of the crowd and the humming in my ears, I heard a scream,
a loud and shrill ear-piercing scream that splintered my heart. It
was Leisel screaming, and my stomach heaved with fear and worry—not
for me, but for her.

You promised!

Spitting out a mouthful of blood, I wiped a
hand across my eyes and readied my fists. Expressionless,
beautiful, her slender body built to inflict pain, Misty ran past
me, her small fists curled like solid rocks, waiting to strike. As
she circled me, I turned with her, my eyes following her movements
when I noticed a flash of light, a glint of something shiny in her
fist as the sun touched down on it. I swallowed hard, tasting the
metallic tang of my own blood, and realized that Alex was right.
She was going to kill me; not beat me to a pulp, but actually end
my life.

You promised!

Leisel’s words took on a life of their own,
imbuing me with the knowledge that she did in fact still need me,
despite her having Alex. More than anything, she still wanted me,
and I was still worth something. That despite it all, everything
that had been done to me, everything I’d allowed to be done to me,
I was still worth something to someone. And I refused to let her
down again.

My only advantage at this point was knowing
how battered I already was and probably looked. As Misty stepped
closer, I purposefully made a big show of struggling to catch my
breath, staggering as I tried to remain standing upright. And then,
as she stepped even closer, readying to swing, I attacked, catching
her completely unaware as my fist connected with her face. My
knuckles hurt from the impact, but God, it felt good to lash out
like this. Despite my blurry eyes and ringing ears, the pain in my
stomach and ribs, and the taste of blood in my mouth, it felt good
to defend myself.

Surprised, her eyes wide, she stumbled
backward, but before she could right herself, I sent my right foot
straight into her knee and shoved as hard as I could, sending her
sprawling backward.

She crashed to the ground, the back of her
head slamming against the dirt. The crowd was suddenly silent as I
leaped on top of her, going immediately for the small knife still
held tight in her grip. Whereas her hands were battered from our
fight, mine were not, and only because of this was I able to
wrestle it away from her.

As she continued to struggle beneath me, I
kept her pinned tightly between my thighs. I raised the blade high
in the air and slammed it down straight into her chest. The crowd
was silent now, so quiet that I could hear the tearing of her
flesh, the crunching of her bones as the small but deadly knife
broke through her chest cavity and slid easily into her heart.
Blood gushed around the wound as her eyes rolled back in her head,
showing white.

Leaving the knife in her chest, I pushed
myself off her, panting hard, and stood to my full height, my
entire body trembling with fear and fatigue. The crowd was still
silent, their expressions ranging from shock to anger as the
onlookers began to realize they’d just lost their golden girl, and
with her, whatever bets they’d placed.

Liv was furious. Marching out of the ring,
she headed straight for Jeffers, her pink hair whipping around her
face like a ball of cotton candy caught in the wind. Immediately,
she began yelling at him, though I had no idea what she was saying
since my ears were still ringing. But he only shrugged in response,
looking helpless in the face of her rage, which led me to think
that it wasn’t really Jeffers who ran this place, but Liv, the rage
behind the muscle.

Their fight ended nearly as soon as it had
begun, with Liv slapping Jeffers hard across the face and whirling
around to face me. She was glowering, fury and hate pouring from
her in thick heavy waves that I could practically feel emanating
from across the ring.

Lifting my hand in a halfhearted attempt at a
wave, I tried to smile back, but I was far too tired, my features’
response as sluggish as my body’s. My right knee gave out, and just
as my left one was following suit, strong arms hooked around my
waist and scooped me off the ground entirely, cradling me against a
hard chest. Through blurry eyes, I found Alex’s face only inches
from my own, his features wrinkled with concern.

“You’re all messed up, Eve,” he said,
frowning down at me. “But you did good out there.”

“Lei?” I whispered, my voice hoarse and
cracking.

“Right here, Eve,” I heard her say, and felt
her hand slip into mine. “Right here. Always.”

Leisel

“Please don’t do this,” I pleaded, refusing to
release Alex’s arm. “Please, you saw what almost happened to Eve,
and you’ll be fighting two men. Two men, Alex! Two!”

Poor Evelyn had half a dozen stitches in her
face, courtesy of a man I hoped had been an actual doctor at one
point. Although, when I asked him for his credentials, he’d given
me a sardonic smile and a loud snort.

Thankfully, legitimate doctor or not, he had
an abundance of medication kept under lock and key, along with a
dozen armed guards. Two mystery pills and five minutes later,
Evelyn was unconscious. Alex had carried her to our room where I’d
tried to clean her as best I could using a small bucket of water
and a rag, at least managing to get most of the blood off her.
After that, I’d simply crawled into bed beside her, and hummed to
her while she slept.

Now the sun was setting, the bonfires had
been lit, and an even larger crowd had gathered for Alex’s fight
than had for Evelyn’s. Murmurs rippled among the bystanders about
the wildcat who had taken down the most fearsome female fighter in
Purgatory. If Alex’s pending fight wasn’t worrisome enough, the
thought of Evelyn becoming this place’s new source of entertainment
was even more so.

If Jeffers and Liv wanted her here to take
Misty’s place as the reigning champion, then how would we ever
leave? And we most definitely wanted to leave. After seeing what
had been done to Evelyn, something she still refused to talk about,
and after her fight today, no electrical fence, no amount of armed
guards could ever convince me to stay here. It was no better than
Fredericksville, and these brands on our wrists meant nothing. No
one was safe anymore, anywhere. The best we could hope for was to
continue heading south, and pray we found someplace safe enough,
someplace isolated where we could finally live in peace.

Was I holding out hope that such a place
existed? Not really. It seemed too fantastical, a ridiculous fairy
tale, but at the very least I had to believe that something better
than Purgatory, better than Covey, better than Fredericksville
existed. There had to be others like us, people who just wished to
live out the rest of their lives in some semblance of normalcy.

Or had everything and everyone actually died
alongside the world? If that was the case, maybe this was actually
Purgatory, where we were all just waiting to be judged. And if we
were killed in the meantime, well then…no skin off God’s back if
there was one less sinner in a long line of awaited judgments to be
doled out.

I almost wished we’d never left the tree
stand.

“I’ll be fine, Lei,” Alex said, sounding
exasperated. “Look at them, one’s short and fat and the other one
just barely hit puberty. He’s nothing but skin and bones.”

He was right, Mike was tall and skinny and
Bryce was carrying around quite the paunch. But it wasn’t their
sizes I was worried about, it was what weapons they might have
concealed on them.

“He’ll be right as rain, my dear!” Grannie
said, giving Alex a firm slap on his bicep. “And I’ll be here to
see you through it.” She glanced at me, her round, wrinkled face
lit up with excitement. “You look stunning, by the way. I knew that
color would look wonderful with your fair skin.”

Glancing down at my latest Grannie ensemble,
stunning wasn’t a word I would have used to describe myself. I was
wearing a handmade pale pink, short-sleeved shift that barely
reached mid-thigh, the material light and flimsy like a bed sheet,
which was probably exactly what it had been made from. I’d paired
it with a pair of black leggings with holes in the knees, so worn
they appeared a faded charcoal gray. Also new were a pair of men’s
military-issued army boots, a size and a half too big for me.
Alex’s weapons belt was slung low on my hips, my blade seated
firmly at my side.

I looked mismatched at best, like a young
girl trying to rebel against societal norms while still attempting
to appear cute and feminine. Worse were the looks I’d been getting
from the men. Though they said nothing, their expressions suggested
I looked like a pretty pink Popsicle they wanted a nice long lick
from.

It was an awful feeling, a hundred pairs of
eyes on you as if you were nothing more than prize to be won. Back
in Fredericksville, no one had so much as glanced my way without
purpose, and never to ogle me. But back in Fredericksville, women
weren’t whores, at least not for the masses. We were simply the
whores of the men who’d forced us into marriage.

I didn’t know which was worse.

“Stay with her,” Alex muttered in Grannie’s
direction while prying my fingers from his arm. One of Grannie’s
thick arms wrapped around my waist, a surprisingly strong grip for
an older woman.

“I’ll be fine!” Alex shouted over the noisy
din of the crowd.

Grabbing my face, he pulled me up on my
tiptoes and pressed his mouth to mine. His tongue slid between my
lips and mine between his, tangling together in a messy, desperate
kiss that I didn’t want to end. I’d never been a proponent for
public displays of affection, yet I couldn’t help but worry that
Alex was going to fare even worse than Evelyn had. And if that were
the case, I wanted him to know how much he meant to me. I wanted to
show him.

Too soon, he broke away from me, Grannie
still holding tight to my waist as I reached for him. He gave me
one last look before shoving through the people in front of us and
disappearing into the crowd.

“Let me go!” I shouted, twisting in earnest,
trying to free myself. Eventually she did, but it was already too
late. As I pushed and shoved through the crush of people who were
shoving me right back, by the time I managed to reach the ring,
Alex was already inside it, along with Mike and Bryce.

Misty’s body had been taken away but her
blood still remained, wet and thick as it pooled on the smooth
dirt, glinting an ominous red in the flickering firelight. The
infected, trapped in their metal cages, were still going wild for
the blood and flesh so close to them, yet so far out of their
reach.

“Alex!” I shouted, gripping the rope as I was
continuously shoved against it. “Alex!”

Either he didn’t hear me over the growing
noise, or he was refusing to look at me in fear of distraction from
the coming fight. Pulling his T-shirt off over his head, he gripped
the collar and tore it down the center, continuing to rip the
material until he had several strips of cloth that he began
wrapping around his hands and knuckles. Neither Mike nor Bryce had
done this; they were fully clothed and without protection for their
hands, and both were glaring at Alex.