Authors: Melissa Marr
“He’s trying not to say that he’s our fearless leader or that he has a crippling need to meddle,” Kitty interjected.
“Katherine,” Jack warned in a voice that held no real threat. Chloe could see that he was clenching his jaw. In his hand was a mostly empty bottle of some sort of wine.
Chloe stared at it. Until she’d seen it, she’d been wondering if maybe through some act of god or magic or science, she’d come to their world without the alcoholism that had hovered at the edge of her life for so many years. Clearly, she hadn’t. She fisted her hands and backed away as he lifted the bottle.
“Before I hit the bunk, I wanted to bring this by.” He walked farther into the tent, and Chloe had the stray thought that he was moving slowly and deliberately like a hunter expecting his prey to bolt.
Kitty was staring at the bottle suspiciously. “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t drink,” Chloe forced herself to say. “Please take it away.”
“It’ll help.” Jack pulled the stopper out of the bottle. “It’s medicinal.”
Kitty stepped between them. “What is that?”
Chloe started shaking.
One drink wouldn’t hurt.
Things were already a mess. She held out her hand.
Jack pushed past his sister, grabbed a cup that had been left beside the bed where Chloe had been sleeping, and poured the port-colored liquid into it. He didn’t look at Kitty as he said, “You know what it is, Katherine. Verrot. Ajani’s coming around soon, and we don’t have time for a slow recovery
.
”
“Jackson!” Kitty grabbed his arm. “I don’t care. You can’t give her—”
“Drink it,” he interrupted as he handed Chloe the cup.
Shakily, Chloe lifted it to her lips. She wasn’t sure what Verrot was, but the moment the liquid hit her tongue she knew it wasn’t wine or any other type of booze she’d tried over the years. She’d consumed some truly horrible rotgut during the worst of her drunken spells, but this made everything she’d ever had seem delicious in comparison—and yet, she swallowed it greedily. She couldn’t bring herself to lower the cup from her mouth.
“It’ll help,” he murmured.
Kitty was yelling at him, but Chloe couldn’t concentrate on a word she said. Fortunately, Jack stood between her and his sister, and Chloe had a strange burst of relief that he did so, because even though the Verrot was vile, she wasn’t sure she could willingly let Kitty take the cup.
Chloe was licking the last drops from the cup like a child with a bowl of ice cream when she realized what Kitty was saying: “You gave her fucking
vampire
blood on her first day?” She shoved Jack toward the door of the tent. “Get out. Now.”
It was all Chloe could do to lower the now empty cup. Very carefully, she said, “Excuse me? Is that a brand or—”
“No.” Kitty came back over to her, took the cup, and led her to a chair. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.” Gently, she stroked a hand over Chloe’s hair. “It’s not always so weird here, and as much as it pains me to say it, I’m certain he thinks he had a good reason to give it to you.”
“To give me
vampire
blood
?” Chloe clarified. A part of her was oddly relieved that it was vampire blood because if alcohol was that good here, she’d be so far into the bottle that she’d never crawl out again. “Like
blood
from a . . .”
“They’re called bloedzuigers. They’re not like in the stories at home; they’re not dead or anything. They just live a long time, and their blood is restorative.” Kitty paused as if she was determining what to say. “You’ll be fine, though. It’s a shitty way to start your first day here, but you can handle it.”
“Okay,” Chloe said. She repeated the word, more firmly this time. “It’s
okay
.” She leaned back, trying not to push past Kitty and run. She felt like her entire body was on fast-forward, like she could do anything—and she would do anything to get another taste of the Verrot. “I feel very good right now. Thank you. Is there more?”
B
efore Jack could land himself in more trouble, he walked away from his sister’s tent. He was awake enough to patrol, but as Katherine had pointed out, he’d been awake well over a day and a half. He wasn’t even sure if he
could
sleep. Verrot didn’t result in a collapse after days awake; it simply alleviated the need for as much rest.
He knew Katherine had an objection to Verrot. After her first encounter with it, she’d avoided it every chance she could, and if he tried to argue, she raised hell the likes of which he hadn’t ever seen from her over anything else. Even Edgar couldn’t reason with her on the subject. If she
did
drink it, she was as likely to barricade herself in a room as to take off on her own.
There were a lot of things in the world Jack didn’t understand, but his sister’s issue with Verrot—with bloedzuigers as a species—was pretty damn high on his list. Garuda was the closest thing they had to a friend among the Wastelanders. He had offered his support more times than Jack could count for almost twenty years. Maybe it was the agelessness that they all had, which Garuda’s kind shared; maybe it was some shared ideal that the old bloedzuiger valued; maybe it was simply because Garuda liked the way Jack opposed Ajani. What mattered, though, was that Garuda had offered his aid to Jack in times of need, and every time he’d done so without requesting payment. Despite all of that, Katherine always overreacted to anything concerning bloedzuigers.
Still, Jack could allow that his walking in and offering Verrot to Chloe without any conversation with Katherine on the subject hadn’t been the most graceful way to handle things. The truth was that Chloe was a liability—and that Jack wasn’t thinking anywhere near as clearly as he should. If he’d had time to ride out the initial rush of the Verrot, he’d have handled things better, but for reasons he wasn’t grasping just yet, this particular high was clouding his mind a little more than usual.
He took a calming breath. His mind was speeding. The challenge now was to harness the speed.
Maybe another patrol.
Killing something sounded very relaxing.
First, though, he needed to drop off the Verrot in his tent, but he couldn’t stay there. He had to check in on Hector—or maybe that was just the excuse he clung to in order to keep from facing the reality that sleep wouldn’t be coming soon or fast.
Or at all.
If Mary were still alive, it would have been less of an issue.
Since she’d died, he’d felt like he should mourn her more than he was because they’d had an understanding, but that would be a lie of the sort that he and Mary had agreed not to indulge in at the beginning of their arrangement. Neither one of them had any illusions about what they were. He wished they had sometimes. He hadn’t felt anything more than physical needs for anyone in far too long. He cared for his baby sister, and he respected Edgar to the degree that he’d call it affection of a sort. Lately, it didn’t seem enough. He wanted to feel, to care about something beyond the job, and if he were honest with himself, he’d admit that he sometimes suspected that he only cared about the job out of habit.
The cause, the ideal that had once driven him, was the slight thread of belief that they could improve their situation by doing the right thing. Unfortunately, he hadn’t believed that in years. Nothing that he did or said mattered. He was pretty sure that this was where they were until they died; he just couldn’t confess to the others. Even if he had no faith, he pretended to because it gave the others something to cling to. The only thing Jack truly believed anymore was that he would do his level best to look after the small band of people who’d ended up in the Wasteland.
Some days Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to know why they’d all ended up in the Wasteland; on other days he wanted that answer the way a drunkard wanted one more drink. The bits of truth that he’d parsed together weren’t comforting, but he couldn’t stop trying to make the Arrivals’ peculiar lot in life make sense. Back in California, he hadn’t been a particularly God-fearing man. If he were a confessing man, he might even admit that he’d broken most of the commandments.
Repeatedly.
He wasn’t exactly a good example either. It was his fault that Katherine had taken up gambling and ended up working in a saloon. Such habits wouldn’t have been her way if not for his own failings. He hadn’t protected her, hadn’t made sure she was tucked away in a good position or wed like a lady should be. Instead, when his parents passed on, he’d brought Katherine with him like baggage. Worse yet, he’d brought her here to the Wasteland. She’d been holding on to his arm when he last stood in a sodden alleyway in California, and the next thing they knew, they were in a strange new world. More than a few times he’d wondered if his failings had caught the attention of some god or devil who’d cast them out of their home into this world where monstrosities roamed. And, after more than two decades in the place, he still had no idea how to improve their future.
When Jack returned to the guard post, Hector barely hid his look of surprise. He was one of the least subtle of their group, quick to anger and quick to laughter. Hector attracted a different sort of attention in the Wasteland than the rest of the team, mostly because his wiry muscles were liberally decorated with tattoos. The art of body decoration wasn’t something Jack had seen back home, but in the Wasteland it was common. Here, every bloedzuiger had a pack brand, and many members of the monastic order had their own inked symbols. Other Wastelanders had tribe affiliations or achievement decorations on their flesh. Among the Arrivals, though, it was rare—but Hector was happy to use his art as a way to ease the discomfort the native Wastelanders felt with the Arrivals.
He leaned back on his stool and glanced over at Jack. “Did you forget something?”
“No.” With effort, Jack kept himself from speaking too quickly or too much. “I’ll finish shift.”
“Sure.” Hector grabbed his personal knives and headed out. He was a decent enough man, never asking questions that Jack didn’t know how to answer—or if he had such questions, he didn’t belabor the point by pressing them when Jack ignored them. All told, Hector was an asset that Jack would miss when he eventually didn’t wake up.
It was nice to have at least one or two relatively uncomplicated people in his life.
Like Mary.
Francis often bordered on uncomplicated, but right now he was second only to Katherine on Jack’s needing-a-smack-in-the-head list. Admittedly, though, that list changed often. Depending on how Edgar was handling Katherine’s behavior and how Chloe handled the Verrot, any of them could easily knock Francis back to the bottom of Jack’s list of problem children.
Jack spent the next few hours scanning the desert, wishing he was out in it rather than trying to stand in one place. Forcing himself to do so, testing his own discipline, was a better theory than reality. He paced while he watched animals run, fly, and scuttle. He loaded, unloaded, and reloaded guns. He sharpened blades. By the time Francis arrived to take the midnight shift, Jack was ready to forgive him for letting Katherine leave camp simply because he showed up on time. Standing guard while he was humming with this much energy was far more trying than it had ever been.
“She’s not helpless, and she was upset, and she wasn’t going in the dark, and I told you not too long after.” Francis’s words were one long rambling stream, followed by a gulp of breath.
“I know.” Jack stood and stretched as if he were as tired as he should be.
“Edgar’s going to kill me, isn’t he?” Francis pushed his floppy hair back.
“I suspect that all depends on Katherine. Just don’t be stupid again.”
Francis rocked back on his heels, pushed his thin brown ponytail over his shoulder, and stared at Jack like a dog that had lived on the edge of town too long.
Jack shifted the rifle from his lap to the table beside him. It was still in reach, but now that the darkness had receded, he didn’t need to be as alert. “Starting tomorrow, you’re on early daylight guard. I’ll give Edgar the early night shifts the next few days. That should buy you time for him to calm down before you have to cross paths.” He concentrated on speaking at a normal pace as he detailed the plan he’d used far too many times already. “Don’t do anything else stupid, Francis.”
Francis nodded and turned his attention to the desert, and Jack walked toward the tents.
Katherine stood outside her tent with her arms folded over her chest, her boot-clad foot tapping in the sand and a look on her face that reminded him almost painfully of their mother.
“You simple fucking idjit.” Katherine stomped toward him. If there’d been boards under their feet, her footsteps would’ve resounded like warning alarms. As it was, her stomping toward him merely set dust to swirl around her, creating the illusion of steam radiating from her. Jack couldn’t stop grinning even as she reached up and poked a finger into his chest.
“Where did you get it? Never mind. It was that bony bastard, wasn’t it? You know better. Seriously!” She was now shaking her finger at him. “I know you drank it too. Are you a . . . never mind, we both know you are.” She finished her diatribe with a little half-muffled scream and then added, “Say something!”
“You look like Mam right now.”
All of the steam left her in a whoosh of a sigh. “That’s not fair.”
Jack knew he should take advantage of her moment of softness, so he said, “Ajani is involved in the monk situation. I need you to drink it too.”
“Jack—”
“Don’t make me resort to something barbaric to make you drink it,” he half begged. “We’re down one fighter, and if Ajani is coming around again, you and Edgar are the biggest targets.”
“And you. And Hector, and Francis, and Melody because he’ll see them as expendable. And Chloe because she’s new.” Katherine ticked off their names on her fingers. “Oh God, he’s going to know about Chloe before she has a chance to adjust, isn’t he?”
“That’s why I gave her the Verrot,” Jack pointed out as mildly as he could.
Katherine shivered a little. “There’s no way he could’ve known Mary wouldn’t wake, right? I mean, that’s imposs—”