Nearby, Chompers humphed, acknowledging the unlikelihood of anyone not being in the database. But his friends didn’t find the oldster’s gumption quite as amusing.
Gabriel kept his gaze trained on Stamp, wondering what would come next . . . if the oldster’s continued resistance would finally break the kid’s patience.
Were it possible to scan these assholes right back, he’d probably find reports of brain readouts classifying these guys as repressed psychopaths.
His blood surged through his veins, and Chaplin sensed it, pressing against his chest again in warning.
I know, boy,
Gabriel thought. Because after seeing that these men weren’t just thugs—they were carrying weapons in those pockets, some of which might kill a vampire within a second flat—he felt even more powerless.
Still, as Stamp put away his scanner, Gabriel caught a jitter of movement from Whale Hide, who still seemed up for playtime.
His thumb moved to press the electric-pulse button and—
That was all Gabriel was going to take.
With all his will, he pushed back his inner monster, rising to his feet as any decent human would do, and then avoiding Chaplin’s teeth again, he took a few long steps across the room. He took Whale Hide by the wrist with one hand, preventing him from pressing the button and, with the other, he denied his true strength and used street smarts instead, positioning his thumb against the jerk’s eye, feeling the curved, gelled softness beneath.
“Enough,” Gabriel said.
No one moved except for the oldster, who’d rolled to his back for a better view, panting, as if holding himself back from getting angrier.
Gabriel prepared himself for the feel of a shocking lash around his own neck, but it never came.
Only Stamp’s voice did.
“He’s right,” said the kid. “Undo your lash, Teddy.”
The thug did so, and Gabriel held up his hands, making a show of backing off, too.
The entertainment over, Stamp packed up his facial recognition gear and herded his men toward the door. But before he got there, he paused near Gabriel.
Their gazes snagged, and it was all Gabriel could do not to peer more deeply into Stamp’s eyes, parting the dark of them to get to what was beneath.
But more than the instinct to look, he remembered the images Chaplin had given to him about what might happen if he got caught.
Someday, Gabriel thought. Someday soon when he found Stamp alone, he was going to peer inside, and then he was going to leave before the chance of getting caught turned into a reality.
With a nod that could’ve denoted a warped respect for Gabriel, who’d finally shown what he was worth, Stamp followed his men through Annie’s door, then shut it behind them.
Gabriel kept his gaze on it. He wouldn’t look into any minds right now, but he was sure going to go through that door to see what was inside
it
when the time was right.
He didn’t turn around, even when he felt Chaplin’s tail curl around his leg. Even when the oldster clambered to his feet.
“Ain’t
you
the shit?” the man said gleefully.
As Gabriel mentally restored the visz lens to where Mariah would be able to see the common area again if she was watching, he realized that maybe he wasn’t a fraction of the hero Abby used to think he was. Maybe he never would be.
But when he finally turned back to the Badlanders, they were looking at him as if he just might be wrong.
A World Gone Mad
8
Mariah
W
hen the visz finally came back on, I stopped messing with the wall-bound control panel. The common-area connection had fritzed ou, leaving me hanging, although none of my other cameras had broken down. But the viszes weren’t perfect, and sometimes they failed me like this.
I pushed shut the panel’s door, then stepped back to get a better scope of the screen, which showed what was going on in the commons now. Unlike before, when the group had generally been conversing at the crate table, Gabriel was now standing by a door while facing my neighbors.
Annie’s door.
I backed away from the monitor, rubbing my hands over my arms, which carried a chill. Before the visz had gone out, Gabriel had been talking about a woman he’d come to the New Badlands to find. Abigail. Abby for short.
Or maybe even Annie.
At the echo of her name, a tide of violent despair edged its way over me, so I backed away from the visz to create distance. Annie and I . . . Well, we hadn’t gotten along.
On the visz, Gabriel walked away from Annie’s door, nodding to the other Badlanders as he made his way toward my own entrance. The sight of him made me come out of my momentary numbness as I waited for him to arrive.
I realized that the sight of him had the power to drag me a little ways out of my melancholy. Somehow, Gabriel piqued my interest. He piqued more, too, and now that I knew he wasn’t just here as the harmless wanderer he’d pretended to be, I went on double guard.
We didn’t need a stranger to get too close to us, especially if my suspicions proved correct and Gabriel was thinking that Abby and Annie were one and the same. We didn’t need the floodgates from outside to open into our hiding place.
I heard Gabriel saying a farewell to Zel, Sammy, and the oldster, and I muted the visz’s sound and headed toward the food prep area, intending to seem otherwise occupied when he returned.
It’d be bad form for him to know I’d been keeping tabs. Hell, it’d been awful enough that I’d accused him of being a vampire. Why did I even bring that up with him? Sure, I knew, contrary to what Gabriel had told me, that there
were
monsters, but to go round accusing people of it . . . ?
Dumb. Best to keep quiet. Best to keep safe by pretending I knew less than I did. Chaplin had been adamant about backing off the questioning, too, and I trusted my dog’s judgment more than anything in this world; he’d told me he would handle Gabriel. He’d also told that to Zel, who would spread it round to the rest. I’d let the dog do what he needed to with our guest, even if it included bringing him to the others, who’d no doubt blame me for his introduction, anyway.
But there was something even more that kept me from challenging the dog—I also kind of felt decent about having Gabriel round, monster or not. He’d chased off Chompers and made such a productive day out of work. Not that I really needed his help, of course.
The tunnel door opened, and I grabbed a cloth, starting to wipe down a cooler while trying not to feel the thud of Gabriel’s footsteps in my chest.
Chaplin trotted into the prep section, brushing against my leg, and I smiled at the dog, masking all my concerns about what I’d heard on the visz.
Shortly thereafter, I heard Gabriel stop just before he entered the room. Awareness trickled over my skin, a simultaneous warm and cold that came to settle in the center of me. The sensations were confusing, turbulent. I hadn’t ever enjoyed such a reaction before he’d come along, and I the heat separating itself from everything else, stretching through my limbs, enlivening every cell.
While my breathing upped its pace, I kept wiping the cloth over the cooler, telling myself not to turn round, to keep working.
Stop,
I told my body. It needed to stop what it was doing. . . .
Chaplin nudged my leg, because he knew that I was off balance. But then Gabriel spoke, his low voice only adding to my ever-growing aches.
“Mariah.”
Hearing him say my name . . .
I pushed back with the only thing that had ever saved me before—defiance meshed with the fear of what might come.
“Why didn’t you just tell me about this Abby before?” My voice was low and grating, but it sounded better than I’d thought it would. “You lied about why you were here. You could’ve asked me about her and I would’ve told you that she hasn’t been round. Then you could’ve gone on your way to find better solutions.”
“You wouldn’t have told me squat, and you know it.” Gabriel shifted, as if he’d come to lean against the doorframe. “I’m glad I visited with the others. Now I know the extent of your situation with Stamp . . . and I know that he very well might’ve had something to do with your Annie not being here any longer.”
My hand gripped the cooler.
“But you must’ve heard all of that on the visz,” Gabriel added.
There was something in his tone that sent up another red flag in me, just like the one I’d detected when he’d seen the crucifix on the back of the door. An out-of-place, what-doesn’t-belong-here? inflection in his words.
Could a vampire mess with a visz if he put enough mind to it? Was that what’d happened when the screen had gone on the blink? Had Gabriel wanted to keep me out of Stamp’s way, just as he had with Chompers?
I finally turned round, and the sight of Gabriel punched at me, made me twist inside with unsettling force and motion.
He was indeed leaning against the doorframe, head bandages and all, the length of him as casual as always. But there was a stiffness to him, too, although he was doing his best to cover it with the raising of his brows.
“I’m afraid I didn’t hear any such thing on the visz,” I said.
“I know you were tuned in. Let’s not fool each other about that.”
Okay, I was willing to give him this much, especially because I did want to know what I’d missed while the reception had been down. “The visz did blank for a short time.”
Now he frowned. “So you didn’t see when Stamp and some of his boys found one of the tunnels to the common area? That they paid us a greeting?”
Whether he was perniciously omitting that he’d interfered with the visz or not, I stood away from the cooler, my pulse coming faster, pushing under my skin now, but it wasn’t just because Gabriel was in my full sight.
Stamp. Here?
Everything else—Gabriel’s “differentness,” Gabriel’s search for Abby—went by the wayside as fear crowded me.
“You already know that Stamp lost one of his men recently,” Gabriel said, “and he wanted to inquire as to how it might’ve happened. If a member of your community had anything to do with it.”
I warded off the accusation. “He should’ve read up on the area before coming out here.”
“That’s pretty much what everyone told him.”
Gabriel was running his gaze up my body, then down, and even though I knew that he was reading my physical reactions for the truth, I couldn’t help feeling the skim of his attention, how it left scratches of sensation behind, inch by inch.
“And after everyone set him straight,” I said, “Stamp left you in peace?”
“After some play with us, yeah, he did. His men had taserwhips, and one of them—he wore a whale-hide hat—used the lash on the oldster because the guy couldn’t keep his dander down.”
A lash? On the oldster?
Anger licked at me, pushing my temper. But I’d just seen the old man on the visz, and he’d looked okay. . . .
“He’s fine,” Gabriel said. “Stamp meant to ring a warning bell, is all.”
“He’s going to stay away, then?”
“I think he realizes that he can’t force friendship, so maybe he will.”
“And you place stock in his word?”
Gabriel seemed surprised that I was actually asking his opinion, but it wasn’t long before his expression became a cocksure grin instead. A sign that he liked how I wasn’t fighting him right now.
I melted, just a little, but won myself back when I thought I heard Chaplin chuff.
Then Gabriel seemed to become reflective again. “I don’t trust his boys in the least, and that’s reason enough not to trust Stamp by extension.”
As I tossed the cleaning cloth onto a counter, I was still all too cognizant of Gabriel thinking that I’d gone and accepted him or something.
“Then I’ll take that into consideration after you’re gone,” I said.
He didn’t move from his spot against the doorframe, and that told me everything about how long our guest intended to stay.
But having him here was impossible. He’d bring too much damage. “You seem fit enough. How long do you think you’re going to be round?”
“Well, Miss Mariah,” he said in that mild tone of his, “I think it’ll be for a while.”
Chaplin gnawed on his words.
He’s fine here, Mariah.
I almost argued with that, but then I remembered that Chaplin had a handle on Gabriel. My dog probably wanted our guest round here as backup in case Stamp acted out. Sounded reasonable enough, I supposed.
Gabriel said, “I made a vow to Chaplin about staying on and giving a hand here, and I don’t break promises easily.”
I shouldn’t have been even slightly happy that he was persistent about this. Best that he went soon, after Stamp had calmed down and decided to back off. Best that he—