He saw blood on a woman who might’ve been her mom . . . then her brother . . .
Then there was a tearing wipe into a second, even more painfully vivid memory, blood . . .
The red of it clutched at him, and he dropped the connection. A tremor lined his veins, and he hungered. Yearned.
That
was why he couldn’t afford to look into people—because they might jigger his worst instincts with careless thoughts. That was why he should’ve been able to stop himself this time, too.
Chaplin winced, as if feeling his anguish, and Gabriel silently commanded the dog to keep this secret between them.
The dog quivered, as if the effort of separating secrets were too much.
Control. Gabriel needed to find it, to access it. Control was key to a monster’s survival. It was almost all they had.
He took the reins of the conversation, leading it to where he thought it’d be safer.
“Ask me anything,” he said to Mariah. “And I’ll tell you so I can ease your wonderings.”
He’d lie. He’d dodge. He’d hide.
“Okay then,” she said. “The crucifix. Your reaction to it . . .”
“Coincidence.” There—simple enough. “You know I hadn’t eaten properly after I was injured, and I overtaxed myself while working.” Gaining strength by the moment, he stood away from the wall, his tone lightening. “Besides, I’m an atheist. Always did have an aversion to crosses and the like.”
Another lie—he’d had religion in his day, and the symbols of his own church burned at him every time he witnessed one. In a cross or crucifix, all he saw was hopelessness.
“Healing,” she said, taking a step toward him. “You got rid of those injuries as if all you had to do was wish them away.”
“The unguent I had you put on my wounds,” he said. In truth, it was meaningless, slightly-tampered-with lard that he carried and used as part of his masquerade. “An old woman—an herbalist—made some for me before I struck out of the Southblock sanctuary.”
Mariah still didn’t seem won over. Steel, this one was.
“Your flask. What’s in it? Blood?”
He laughed, as if that were ludicrous, but he knew he’d have to bury the object outside before she could check it. Chaplin had vaguely revealed to Gabriel that Mariah didn’t leave the shelter unless necessary, and even then she didn’t stray far, so the odds of her discovering it out there were slim.
“A concoction,” he said, adding lie upon lie, “made from a nutrient powder and what water I manage to find. The old woman gave it to me, as well.”
“Sleeping all day . . .”
“It’s relatively cooler out here at night. Everyone knows that. Better to sleep when the weather is unkind.”
As Mariah stood there, he could see that she was stuck between wanting to believe this stranger who’d proven so helpful today and disbelieving him out of wise necessity.
She glanced around the room, her gaze resting on a crate with some sticks poking out of a metal cup, as if she or her dad used to char the ends to write on paper.
Walking over, she grabbed two of them, and Gabriel knew exactly what she was about to do: construct a makeshift cross to flash at him.
But Chaplin also must’ve sensed her intentions, because he sprang up on the crate, knocking it over, spilling the sticks to the ground, barking and making those strange yet patterned canine sounds at her.
He’d said something to her while blocking Gabriel, and he wondered what it was. Before he could mind-ask his familiar, the dog opened his thoughts.
Don’t worry—I won’t let her kick you out, Gabriel.
Mariah had already backed off, seemingly bothered by her companion’s defense of Gabriel.
Chaplin yipped and yapped, stringing together a sentence, and Gabriel could hear what the dog was saying to Mariah now, because Chaplin was allowing him to.
He chased off Stamp’s no-gooder. He can help. Monsters are serious business. Take it back.
“Just hush,” Mariah said, her voice ragged with the betrayal of her friend. “He could be dangerous to us, and you know it.”
The dog added a few more yaps.
We need him, Mariah. Trust me.
She stared at Chaplin, as if wanting further explanation, and the dog added more, though he blocked Gabriel from knowing what he said.
Mariah sent Gabriel a strange glance.
He hoped whatever Chaplin had said worked. He needed the dog on his side, needed all the Badlanders to confide in him so he could find out about Abby. And after a short time, after he got some answers about why there’d been rumors about his lover’s presence in the New Badlands, he’d leave Chaplin to Mariah, just as it should be.
She’d crossed her arms over her chest, as if she were trying her best to hold in the apology that came next.
“The dog . . .”
Her voice faded, but Chaplin barked at her.
Out with it.
Her flintiness returned with the spark to match. “The dog,” she said louder, “means for me to apologize. Monster talk is a serious thing, he says, and it isn’t supposed to be thrown about lightly.”
This was progress. “You had your reasons.”
She searched his gaze, then glanced at Chaplin, raising her brows as if to ask,
Is that a gooough sorry for you?
Meanwhile, Gabriel couldn’t help but feel the beats of her blood running, hot and passionate, notes crashing into each other to make that music he couldn’t resist. He imagined running his mouth over her, reveling in her heightened scent until he was drunk on the hunger that was consuming him even now. He could almost feel his fangs sinking into her flesh, popping it open to let the blood seep out so he could fill himself with the anger—or was there something else combined with it that drew him?—that made her seem so alive to him.
Near dizzy, he fisted his hands, wrestling the emergence of fangs, the reddening of his irises, which would betray him.
He turned around before that could happen, ducking out of the room just as Chaplin barked after him.
“I’m off to that common area,” Gabriel said, his voice low enough to barely disguise how garbled it was.
He could hear Mariah sucking in a breath to ask a question—probably
Why?
But he cut her off.
“Don’t wait up for me,” he said as Chaplin darted ahead of him, obviously intending to show his new master to the tunnel that connected Mariah’s home to the place where the Badlanders gathered.
“Chaplin!” Mariah called, her voice rushed.
It’ll be okay,
the dog thought. Then he mumbled something else to Mariah that Gabriel didn’t catch since Chaplin had blocked him out again.
She didn’t say another word.
Gabriel followed Chaplin beyond a steel door that stood adjacent to the one that led to her own underground workshop. Shutting the barrier behind him, he leaned against the wall of the tunnel, not moving another inch as he yanked his flask out of his pocket. He gulped the last of the blood, trying to imagine Mariah’s own life liquid coating his throat, then bursting into every part of him.
Once, he’d wanted Abby’s blood like this, as well.
He lowered his empty flask, knowing that this appetite for Mariah would only end just as badly if he gave in to it.
6
Gabriel
B
y the time Gabriel reached the last door separating the tunnel from the common area, he was in as much control of his faculties as he could be.
He’d always needed to battle for any kind of handle on himself since Abby had gone. But even as his hunger had threatened to unleash itself whenever he was around her, there’d always been something about the rhythms of her heartbeat, her breathing, that kept him together. Even on that first night, when he’d found her running from a gang of bad guys through the streets and he’d saved her solely because the smell of her fear—and only
her
scent—she had gotten to him.
He’d needed to feed properly around Abby. Properly and frequently so her blood wouldn’t pull at him with such a lack of mercy. But the extra effort had been worth it because she’d lulled his system, and he hadn’t heard such rhythms in a person since he’d followed the low, stifling wind of the New Badlands and ended up finding Mariah.
Now that he even thought about it, Gabriel realized what Mariah’s and Abby’s vital sounds might have in . .
Fear, stronger and clearer than in most people?
Was that what made them stand out to him? He suspected that he liked to feed on that quality just as well as blood itself. . . .
Flushing himself of anything but the pressing desire to find answers about Abby, Gabriel rested his hand against the heavily locked common area’s wooden door, taking a listen to what was going on inside. There were three distinct, muffled voices—what sounded to be a mature woman and man, plus an even older guy whose speech wasn’t much more than a creaking of hooked-together words.
Gabriel’s blood seemed to spiral through his veins.
Resources. Answers.
But then his thoughts turned ruddy, soaking his memories with the useless answers he’d already come up with.
Abby, lying in her blanket-piled bed in her room—just one of many honeycomb-like nooks in the underground Southblock sanctuary. Mosquito netting was draped so that it barely allowed a peek of her undernourished body curled in slumber, her light hair loose and tumbled. Up until that point, Gabriel had refrained from ever drinking from her, drinking from
anyone
down there. It would’ve been a death wish, possibly setting off an alarm that there was a monster in their midst.
Yet there she was, on the edge of disappearing from life altogether—a woman he’d known for only a couple of weeks, but one who had already ensnared him. She’d lost so much weight since he’d met her, lost her appetite for the processed foods sanctuary smugglers were able to acquire since any natural resources were scarce in the area. Abby had even been shying away from Gabriel as well as all others, and they could only guess that she was exhausted from existing this way. That she was letting go so she might pass on to what they said would be a better place.
Up until then, he’d loved Abby from a near distance, assuming the part of her protector, and she had been his mainstay. Sometimes she even wondered aloud if he’d stuck by her because rescuing her had validated him in some way she would never fully understand.
Gabriel had wondered about all that, too. He even thought that she had become his own mission, much like the one his creator had been following when she had saved
him
.
Even after he’d rescued Abby, she hadn’t realized he was a monster. And he’d embraced the charade, sneaking off to the outside to hunt and then bury himself under the dirt just before dawn. He was determined to never let her see how he died a little every day, and knowing that she might be able to love him back, in spite of what he was, had made him that much less of a dreaded being. He’d loved her for that gift—for resurrecting him yet another time, even in this small way.
But that night, as he’d stood by her bed, seeing her slip away from him, seeing her chest rise and fall while he longed for the need to breathe right along with her, he’d been willing to do anything to keep her.
Anything.
So he’d gone closer. Closer.
Then, before he could register what was happening, he was at her neck, his sight red, his fangs sprung.
She’d awakened on the sharp inhalation of a coming scream, her eyes closing tightly when she saw his reddened gaze. But he’d registered the fear in her scent and thrashing pulse first, pushing his hand over her mouth to stop the sound, whispering that it was only him. And when she’d calmed, then openeher eyes, even without going into her mind, he saw that she knew what he’d been doing.
Then, by some miracle, as he’d taken his hand away from her lips, she invited him into the gift of her still-guarded, superficial thoughts.
He’d seen and felt wonder from her—at least as much as he
could
feel. She’d believed that he’d been rescuing her again, but this time with the bite and exchange of their blood, and she’d been grateful for his intentions.
My one, my only,
she had thought to him.
My savior.
But though he was inside her head, she had no idea how famished he was. How he’d wanted to gnaw and feed and condole something that could never really be assuaged.
“I won’t tell,” she’d nevertheless whispered to him, believing that he hadn’t meant to kill her or hurt her, that he never would. “I won’t tell any of them, Gabriel.”
Though he’d never bitten and then exchanged blood with her to turn her, he’d taken Abby at her us-against-the-world promise, because if not her, then who? And she’d repaid him by growing stronger during the following week, eating, getting out of bed, though he often caught a distance in her gaze when she thought she was alone. She’d even blocked him out whenever he tried to access what she was feeling. Actually, she blocked out
any
type of persuasion, telling Gabriel that she needed to get used to how things had changed between them. She needed to think about where they should go now, what they should do. . . .