“That’s a start,” Edgar murmured.
And at that, they both lapsed into silence. They did fine when they didn’t talk. Conversation led to arguments. When they fought whatever monster they hunted, when they patrolled, when they did most anything but talk, they were fine.
Edgar had been on the shady side of the law before he came to the Wasteland, a truth she would’ve known even if he hadn’t told her about his life. He’d been employed by an organization that made its money from gambling, clubs, and alcohol. When he’d told her that the U.S. government had outlawed alcohol in his time, she wondered if he and she were really from the same world, but other Arrivals verified that there was a brief, odd period when the transportation and distribution of alcohol was illegal.
With Edgar, there were no illusions. He had no qualms about who he was or what he’d done—in Chicago or in the Wasteland. He had been a hired gun there, and he’d transferred his loyalty to Jack when he’d woken up here. The only times he ever ran into trouble were because of her.
A few hours later, when Jack relieved them, they were together in their usual comfortable silence—a detail Jack acknowledged with a relieved smile. “I can finish guard.”
Edgar nodded and divested himself of a few of the weapons that stayed with the guard post. “Post’s all yours.”
Kitty offered, “I’ll stay here with—”
“No,” they both said.
Jack softened the refusal by adding, “I’d like a little quiet. I need to think.”
Edgar, on the other hand, simply looked at her in that way of his that made her feel like she wasn’t wearing anything at all. The ease they’d shared when he was on duty evaporated when he zeroed in on her.
She turned away, but she’d only made it a few steps before he was at her side.
“Kit.” He stopped her with both hands on her waist, holding her steady but not forcing her to turn to him or pulling her against him.
She could move away if she wanted to, but she really didn’t want to.
“It wasn’t your fault Mary died.” Edgar didn’t force her to turn around. “Sometimes people just die. We’re alive; she’s not, and it’s horrible, and it hurts, and you want to do something reckless because of it.”
She turned around then. “I don’t want her to be dead.”
“Being careless isn’t going to change that. Pushing me further away isn’t either.” Edgar had kept his hands on her waist, and even though it seemed foolish that such a small touch could comfort her, it did. It did other things too; it sparked needs that she wasn’t going to admit to having.
“You’re alive, Kit.” Edgar stayed motionless, waiting for her. “The rest of us are too. I’m sorry that Mary’s gone. I’m sorry you’re hurting, but we are still alive. Don’t forget that.”
What he didn’t say—or force Kitty to say—was that they were more alive together than either of them was alone. She was standing in the shadows with the man she loved. It didn’t undo the hurt she felt at Mary’s passing, but for a moment the pure joy she also felt with Edgar was enough to chase all the bad away. She wasn’t going to let herself slip into the depression that threatened to engulf her every time one of the Arrivals died for good. Edgar gave her the strength to handle that. The nagging reminder that she counted on him, that he was the only one who could keep that depression at bay, was followed by the chilling memory of when he had died. He was vulnerable too.
She stared into his eyes and admitted, “You always know what to say.”
“I try.” He brushed her hair back on both sides so he was cupping her face.
Before he could do the next logical thing—the very thing she wanted too damn much—Kitty pulled away from him. He frowned as she moved away, but she’d seen that frown on his face so often the past year that it didn’t hurt her quite as much as it once had.
She folded her arms across her chest to keep from reaching out to him. “Chloe will die too. How do I help her learn how to live in this world? How do I keep doing this?”
“You just do.” He wasn’t being cruel. It was simply the way Edgar’s mind worked: he dealt with what was, played the hand he had, and didn’t see any other way to live.
Kitty felt tears trickle from her eyes.
“They come, they stay, and sometimes they don’t survive,” Edgar told her. “I don’t know why some of us do, but I do know it’s not your fault—or Jack’s.”
Kitty closed her eyes. She didn’t know if she agreed, but she didn’t know if she could argue either. As much as she wanted him to comfort her, to tell her whatever lies he could, she’d watched people die before and after Edgar arrived. She couldn’t let herself count on him to help her through her grief now because all she could think every time one of the Arrivals died permanently was please don’t let it be Jack or Edgar next time.
She opened her eyes and stepped farther away. “I’m going to check on Chloe.”
“Melody can watch her, so we can go to my—”
“No.”
“So you were going to spend the night with someone else, considered fucking Daniel, but you’ll reject me?” His voice had an angry edge to it, and Kitty couldn’t even deny that she deserved his anger.
“I’m sorry.”
“My patience will run out too,” Edgar added.
A foolish part of her wanted to ask him how much longer that would take, but he’d hear the words as the invitation they were. If she wasn’t going to warm Daniel’s sheets out of awareness that it would hurt him, she certainly wasn’t going to use the man she actually loved. If she did, they’d be right back where they’d started when she’d realized she needed to step away.
Finally, he said only, “Sleep well, Kit.”
“You too,” she said. She wasn’t about to admit that she never slept well when he wasn’t beside her. Everything felt wrong without him, but she hadn’t slept next to him since the last time he recovered from dying. When he died a little over a year ago, she’d spent six terrifying days praying to every god, monster, and devil she could think of. When he woke up, they’d locked themselves away for six more days. On the seventh day, she’d returned to her own bed alone and tried her damnedest to exorcise him from her heart.
Like every other night when she’d left him, she felt him watching her as she walked back to her tent. She told herself it was better this way, but that didn’t make it any easier—or true.
Chapter 11
Chloe wasn’t quite as confused when she woke this time. She remembered stretching out on the cot in an oversize tent filled with boxes and bins. Before that, she remembered a walk through the desert after waking up half paralyzed under a strange sky with an extra moon. She remembered being carried by a cowboy, and she had a hazy memory of being cared for by a woman who acted like a nurse but looked like a burlesque dancer. What Chloe couldn’t recall was anything between being at the bar and that first moment waking up on the ground. More important, she had begun to suspect that this wasn’t a hallucination. She had no logical explanation for the weird sky, the large lizard that looked suspiciously like a dragon, or the Wild West characters who’d brought her to this strange campsite. If they weren’t a hallucination and this wasn’t a coma dream of some sort, she was in a new world—which was scientifically improbable and, quite bluntly, scary as hell.
She took a deep breath. Breathing means not dead. Just to be sure, she checked her pulse.
“It’s real. You’re awake.” Kitty stood in the doorway of the tent. She still looked like a dancer, and the soft voice was still more soothing than any nurse’s Chloe had ever met.
“Thank you,” Chloe said. “You were here. I remember . . . some.”
“Good.” Kitty let the heavy material fall shut behind her. In her hand, she clutched a long swath of fabric. “You’ll adjust, but it’ll take a few more days to get your strength back.”
“How long did I sleep? Strength back from what?” Chloe swung her feet to the ground. When she didn’t feel dizzy or queasy, she stood.
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Kitty watched her. “Almost forty hours, but you sort of woke to drink and use the necessary. The fever makes it a little hazy for most folks.” Her voice grew even more comforting. “You’re adjusting from the trip here, but the worst is passed.”
“Right. The trip . . . here,” Chloe echoed.
She walked over to a curtained area that she vaguely remembered Kitty showing her at some point. It was a small victory to not have to ask for the strange woman’s support to go to the toilet and washing area.
When she returned, Kitty gave her an approving look. “You’re not dreaming. Not dead. Not in a coma.” She ticked each item off on her fingers. The cloth in her hand fluttered with each motion. “You’re in the Wasteland. Why? No one seems to know. I’ve been here twenty-six years. Same as Jack.”
“But . . . you don’t look”—Chloe did quick math—“like someone from the 1980s . . . or like you’re old enough to have been anywhere that long.”
“We don’t age once we get here. This is it.” Kitty held her arms out in a look-at-that gesture. “I’ll never get any older on the outside—or have kids, as far as we can tell.”
Chloe stared at her, trying to digest the idea of not aging. That part didn’t sound awful. The idea of never having kids, on the other hand, sounded less appealing. It wasn’t that she’d planned to have them anytime soon, but the idea of not having the choice to ever have them was sobering.
Kitty walked past her and picked up a torn skirt. “And it wasn’t the 1980s when I came to the Wasteland. Time’s off between here and home. It was 1870 at home when I came here. Sometimes there are big gaps in the times people are from. No one’s come through who’s later than 1989 or earlier than me and Jack.”
“I’m later.” Chloe tried to concentrate on the details, the words Kitty was saying. If not, if she thought about the big picture, the sheer impossibility of it all, she might fall apart. “It’s 2013 at home. I walked into a bar. Then I was here.”
Kitty looked at her for a moment, shrugged, and said, “It was bound to happen.”
When Chloe didn’t reply, Kitty carried the skirt and her needle and thread to a spot on the ground. She sat on the floor with the skirt and ruffle in her lap. Somehow, that seemed more absurd than anything else so far, or maybe Chloe had simply reached her threshold for absurdity. She began laughing, but after a few moments the laughs began to sound suspiciously like sobs.
“You’re doing fine, all things considered,” Kitty said, not unkindly. Then she looked down at her sewing as if she couldn’t tell that Chloe was crying.
Chloe stared at the 1800s woman who was calmly sewing in the middle of a tent in the desert, and Kitty very obviously pretended not to be waiting for her to pull it together—or maybe she didn’t care if Chloe pulled it together. There was no way to know short of asking, and Chloe didn’t feel much like doing that. They stayed that way for a few minutes until Chloe broke the silence by asking, “Why me?”
Kitty lifted her gaze from the skirt, met Chloe’s eyes. “No one knows.”
“How? How can you say you’ve been here that long and don’t know?” Her voice grew a bit shrill as panic edged back closer to the surface.
The smile Kitty offered veered closer to sardonic than anything else. She pulled the thread through another stitch and then another before saying, “Depends on who you ask. My brother thinks we’re here as a punishment for some sort of sins, and we need to atone for our failings.”
“I had a drink,” Chloe objected. “Lots of people drink. I was an ass for years when I was a lush, but I’ve been sober the past five years. What in the hell am I being punished for?” She swiped at her cheeks. “One drink shouldn’t mean I wake up in wherever this is.”
“There’s a washbasin with cool water.” Kitty pointed at a stoneware basin with tiny little flowers painted all over it.
Chloe was splashing water on her face when she heard Kitty say, “She’s fine, Jack. Get to bed. You patrolled and then stood guard. When did you sleep last?”
“Hector offered to finish out the last hour of my shift,” Jack said.
Chloe didn’t want to turn around and face the cowboy who had carried her out of the desert last night. As she patted her face dry, she forced herself to picture her fiancé screwing her boss instead of thinking about how kind Jack had been. She might not be in the world she knew, but there were constants she suspected were the same no matter what world she lived in. And he can’t look as good as I thought he did. I was half out of it.
Appropriately fortified, she turned to see baby blues, perfect cheekbones, and lean muscles. She’d never been a cowboy fan, but one look at him had her revising that stance. Realizing she was staring, she tried to speak but only managed to say, “Damn . . . I mean . . . Hi. I . . . Thank you. For carrying me, I mean.”
Kitty laughed. Whether at the look of wide-eyed confusion on her brother’s face or at Chloe’s mortified stuttering, Chloe couldn’t say.
Jack clearly didn’t know what to say either. He looked at his sister and then at Chloe. “No need to thank me.” He cleared his throat. “I just stopped here because . . . you’re new. It takes time to adjust and . . .” His words trailed off, and he bounced a little as if he was having trouble standing still.
“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?”
Chapter 12
Before 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.