It’s been three years and two months. Memories blend into each other as I stare at the grainy picture. Bent knees and dirty hands as my mother worked in the garden and the way her fingers had curled into her palm that night. The blur of my father’s shirt as he danced me around the living room and the pool of blood leeching into my sneakers when I found him. Hollowed out pumpkins and hollowed out chest cavities. My mother’s laugh.
I hadn’t been there to hear her screams. While she and my father had been dying, I’d been in a dark theatre, eating popcorn with Talia.
Sarah had given me the barest of details once she and the leaders of the other clusters had pieced together what had happened. My mother had done what she’d always been taught to do. Used the blood to take what we could from people too desperate to turn us down. They could have come up with a payment plan, or talked it through—Christ, we bring people back from the dead, we’re obviously not killers—but when the time had come to pay off whatever debt they’d owed her, they’d panicked. They’d gutted my father first, then my mother, and left them on the living room floor for me to find.
Because it wasn’t a hunter, Sarah had neutralized the threat and the rest of the resurrectionists in the area had breathed a sigh of relief and gone on with their lives.
I stare down at the paper. I’m not in the photo. There’s no mention of me in the article, no mention of any surviving relatives or family. I wonder who Sarah had to pay off to keep those details quiet. Favors, no doubt, had been promised.
A tap on my shoulder rips me out of the memory. I jerk hard, frantically closing the article while pawing at my damp cheeks with the other hand.
“I’m sorry,” the librarian says from behind me. “We try to limit patrons to an hour. You’ve been on for two.” There’s a teenager standing behind her, arms crossed and hip popped, glaring at me.
“Oh, my fault totally,” I say, stumbling up. “I lost track.”
The librarian gives me a polite nod.
I grab my messenger bag and head for the door, take the stairs down to the sidewalk and then stop, uncertain. Sarah had told me not to stay in the apartment by myself.
While the sun’s shining, the city’s spookiness fades until there’s nothing left but baking cobblestones and shops full of tchotchkes not remotely appealing enough to hold my attention. Standing on the sidewalk, I desperately try to think of somewhere else to go.
Ploy
I don’t bother trying to con spare change from tourists. I’ve got too much on my mind to do anything but walk the streets. Without my pack, I wind through the people, lost in thought. Brandon occupies a chunk of my brain. Allie more. She’d seemed almost relieved to have me ask to stay with her this morning. It unnerves me.
Ahead, I spot one of the kids from the camp as he raises a hand in my direction. It’s too late to pretend I didn’t see him. Giving in, I cross the street and head over. Jutting my chin at him as a hello, he nods back, his fingers tapping out a complicated rhythm on the edge of the bongo drum clenched in his lap. He doesn’t miss a beat when he glances up at me.
“Brand?” he says and I know he can tell by my face I’ve already heard. His frown deepens. “Sucks, man.”
There’s really nothing else to say about it.
“You need a place, I’m squatting down near the river. House no one bothers.”
“Thanks, but I’m good,” I say. We both watch as a small girl comes up to him with a handful of change given to her by a parent. He shoots her a toothy grin as she drops it in the cup and doubles his rhythm. Eyes widening, she flees to her dad. One of the faces in the crowd behind them jumps out at me.
Jamison.
I give a subtle nod and he returns it before stepping back into the throng of tourists. Anger twists through me, makes me want to forget it all and just start walking in the opposite direction. Get out of this while I still can. But it’s already too late. I know that. Jamison must too, because he’s not even waiting for me, so sure I’ll follow.
“Gotta go,” I mumble to the kid on the bongos.
Jamison’s a block down before I draw up to his side and pace him. When he speaks, his condolences come slow and syrupy, tinged with a Southern accent. “Sorry about Brandon.”
Vicious words rise up my throat, but I swallow them as I glance his way from the corner of my eye. He’s rubbing a hand across his shaved head. It’s a tick. He knows I’m mad. “Look,” he says. “You weren’t going to get anything out of him.”
“I was working on it,” I say. “I needed a little more time.”
He shrugs. “You ran out.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Another is you left chunks of him where I slept.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Yeah, well, he didn’t give up his secrets with a knife through his stomach, so a little extra time wouldn’t have gotten you any better.”
It would have kept Brandon alive, I think. We’d known going in that we might need to use a little muscle, but now someone’s dead.
I give Jamison an uncertain look, but he only clomps his open palm against my back, his tone jovial. “You’re not beating yourself up over this are you?”
He knows me well. He should. We’ve been best friends for six years now. So I don’t need to look at him to know the scowl he’ll be wearing. “Hey!” he says. His mouth hangs open a bit as he shakes his head. “It had to be done!”
“No, it didn’t.” I reach up to tighten backpack straps that aren’t there and end up with my fingers gripping my shoulders. “If Brandon didn’t tell us how to do it, I could have moved on to someone else.”
“You did,” Jamison says. “You moved on to Allie.”
“No one had to get hurt.”
“This sends a message,” he says, the words flat and cold. We stare at each other, him blank faced, me in a mix of horror and not-quite-acceptance he’s actually said what he just said. He sighs. “They’ll be afraid. Scared people talk. Eventually, one of those scared people will talk to you.”
I don’t like the way he talks as if the ones with the power we’re after aren’t people anymore. Because once we have it too, what will that make us? Uncertainty wriggles down my spine like a water droplet, easy to brush away and undeniable just the same. I want to tell myself it’s Jamison’s way, getting overexcited, taking things too far. It’s always been my job to make him see the line he’s crossed and scale him back.
“We’re not doing it that way,” I say carefully.
It’s as if a switch flips and he suddenly remembers he’s a person, with a moral compass and a sense of right and wrong. His face falls. “You’re right,” he says, tucking his hands behind him, into the waistband of his jeans. “I shouldn’t have done that to Brandon.”
I heave a breath, spare him the lecture on how it’s too late. Sorrys won’t help Brand. Jamison bumps into my shoulder as we walk. When I look up at him, he locks eyes with me. “I messed up bad on that one, okay?” he says. “But it wasn’t for nothing.”
Given time, Jamison has a habit of twisting even the worst things he’s done into sense.