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WE’RE BUILDING A raft. Practically with our bare hands.
I want to laugh—giggle hysterically—every time I think the words.
Kane insisted we get started before the light fades. He’s absolutely paranoid about the bloodsuckers, doesn’t want to spend a day longer on the mainland than we absolutely have to.
The Marina Fish Grill sits on top of a small port town and the guys went off to search through the stores and homes.
Georga and I have been assigned bulrush duty, gathering lakeside rushes for the lashings. I don’t actually mind the work. I’m standing barefoot in the shallows and the cool water is a balm to my aching feet and tender skin.
“This is ridiculous,” I say, hacking away at a tall leaf with the long-bladed knife. “If this raft floats, I’ll eat my hat.”
“You don’t have a hat,” Georga points out dryly.
I grimace at her. “I’ll eat my shoe.”
“I’ll eat anything but another damn apple,” she mutters, tossing a floppy leaf onto our growing pile on the bank. “That’s enough for the day.”
“Kane wants this raft built by noon tomorrow.”
“And while he’s chopping and stripping logs, we’ll cut the rest of the rushes.”
“I have no argument with that,” I say, stepping out of the water, one eye on the rippling surface. “Hey, there’s a town down the road, right? Let’s go do some shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“Sure, not everything can be ruined. Besides, once we’re on the island, we’re stuck with what we bring.”
“Shopping,” Georga repeats again, her eyes alight with sudden mischief. “Why the hell not!”
We collect our stash of rushes and deposit them on the restaurant’s battered deck. The only bad thing about my shopping idea is slipping my feet back into my running shoes. Maybe I’ll find a pair of flops.
It’s a short walk from the Fish Grill to the top of the main street. The buildings are mostly stone with partial plasterwork. Signage letters decorate the storefront windows where they’re still intact. Weeds shoot through the pavement and any plasterwork is peeled and gray, some rooves sag at awkward angles with rebar jutting out, but for the most part, the town has retained the shape of its charm.
As the quaint street draws us in, though, we see remains of the chaotic world I’ve been expecting all along.
The door to the Tipsy Teapot stands politely ajar. Inside, tables and chairs are overturned. The floor is littered with broken porcelain and human bones. Unmistakable long femurs of the thigh, parts of ribcages, skulls...
I don’t get queasy this time. I peer in from the threshold and look, try to understand what happened here.
These humans weren’t drained and left to rot.
They were torn from limb to limb, pieces of them scattered from wall to wall. By the bloodsuckers or wild animals?
Is there a difference?
Hunters. Bloodsuckers. Vampires. Whatever name you call them by, they’re savage beasts.
As we move on along the street, witnessing similar carnage through the windows of coffee shops and Delis and restaurants, I tell Georga everything that Kane told me about the dark days. About the bloodthirst, how the infected took to the streets, how quickly it spread and how that virus is the origin of bloodsuckers like Grigore.
When I’m done, she doesn’t say anything for the longest while.
There’s a stone memorial in a square with shops built around it. I can see the shops were once stone and timber, now they’re mostly stone tossed with stained planks like a shipwreck beached on a rocky shore. With everything open to the elements for so many years, I doubt there’ll be anything worth scavenging.
We walk on by.
“Kane seems to confide in you an awful lot,” Georga muses. “What’s going on there?”
“Nothing,” I say emphatically.
“Do you want anything to be going on?”
I glare at her. “No!”
“He’s very protective.”
“He’s protective over all of us.”
She snorts. “If I refused to go to this island of his, he’d wave me goodbye and wish me luck. If you refused, he’d tie you to the raft.”
She’s right, of course.
It’s not like I haven’t noticed.
I give her parts of the truth. “He feels responsible, that’s all. I told you he lodged my pairing without Gabe’s consent. If he hadn’t agreed to do that, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Huh.”
She doesn’t sound particularly convinced.
I don’t particularly care.
My gaze flashes across both sides of the street and hits a promising store. Sinderella. A gift store with trinkets and jewelry and more. The door is closed, but not locked. A metallic sound scratches above my head when I push the door open—a rusty bell that’s lost its voice.
The place hasn’t been ravaged and isn’t littered with bones.
I think I might move in.
A short while later, Georga’s sporting a solid copper bangle inset with turquoise stones on her wrist and we’re each wearing a pair of leather thong sandals. My feet have died and gone to Heaven. I’m also in possession of a precious laminated map titled Lakes of Upstate New York, rolled like a canvas and tucked into a strongly woven canvas messenger bag—my passport home.
I wouldn’t mind a spare set of clothes, but we can’t find anything that’s withstood the test of time.
We’re about to turn back when the guys appear at the other end of the street, rolling what looks to be giant barrels.
“Heavy duty plastic barrels,” Gabe says with a grin as they approach. “There’s a tackle shop down there. I found hooks and more line as well. Anyone up for coal-roasted fish tonight?”
“Catch it first, then we’ll talk,” I shoot back flippantly, although my stomach’s already rumbling in anticipation. “What are the barrels for?”
“Our raft,” Kane says. “There’s more where these came from. We’ll only need a couple of cross beams now.”
Georga nudges me. “What was that about eating your shoe? Just as well you’ve got the thongs now.”
My laugh is full-hearted, high in spirit. We’re all feeling it after today’s wins.
The front of the Fish Grill is completely open onto the deck we use as our entrance. There might have been glass or wooden shutters once upon a time. Now leaves and twigs and dried bulrushes blown in from the lake form a continuous floor from the deck to the stone counter with a barbeque grill sunk into the top. We haven’t explored any deeper and after what we’ve seen in town, no one feels the inclination. It seems the eateries were hit hard and this is a restaurant, after all.
We stack all our new finds against the counter. The guys return to fetch more barrels while Georga and I get busy making fishing poles from thin, flexible branches.
By the sunset hour, the four of us are sitting along the bank of the lake, casting off our lines with tasty worms hooked to tempt the fish. The lake in Ironcross is out of bounds for personal fishing, so none of us have practical experience, but how hard can it be?
I lose two worms before I get a nibble. I whip the pole out of the water excitably and send a tiny fish hurling across the surface.
“Here, let me show you,” Kane says.
He sets down his pole and shuffles in behind me, his arms coming around my back, crowding my senses as his hand folds over my grasp on the pole before I realize his intentions.
“What makes you the expert?” I joke lamely, my pulse hitching, my face warming.
I’m aware of nothing but my hand wrapped within his palm, his arm grazing mine, his breath brushing my cheek, his ripped chest pressed to my spine...so intensely aware, the rest of the world is being sucked away, leaving just the two of us behind.
“Don’t tell a soul,” he murmurs near my ear, “but I’ve done my share of clandestine fishing.”
He moves my arm into an arc, and flips the pole forward. The wormless hook flies across the water and hits the surface with a tiny splash.
“Now,” he says, “once you feel a nibble, wait a little longer, and a little longer, just to be sure...patience is key. Make sure the fish has time to get greedy.”
He smells of smoke from our faulty manor house fireplace and sweat from the road. My nostrils should be offended, but I’m breathing him in like I’m suffocating and he’s the only oxygen around... No!
I stiffen against the effect of Kane. He cannot consume my senses unless I allow him.
He flips my wrist up with an abrupt, firm jerk. “That’s how you hook him. Got it?”
“Got it.”
His warm breaths and bristled jaw grazes my skin, skittering flames across my entire body.
I bite down on my back teeth, putting out those little fires before they settle in. My grimace slowly turns into a smile. This feels powerful, taking charge of my body and desires.
This feels good.
I’m not a puppet pulled by Kane’s strings.
I can’t help my body stirring when he strums, but I can control what I do with it.
Kane moves back into his own space and I bring my eyes back in from the water. Gabe is staring at me with such pain and anger, it cuts into my soul.
There’s not a drop of warmth in his eyes, no softening in his clenched jaw as he looks and looks. He is a broken shell, all the usual emotions reserved for me leaked out, an imposter wearing the face and blue, blue eyes of a boy I used to know.
The pain belongs to both of us.
He has no right to the anger.
That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t soothe the ache inside me. And maybe because it felt so good taking back control of myself, maybe because our deaths no longer feel imminent, but there’s a subtle shift in my perspective.
Gabe is the reason I’m here, yet he is not to blame.
I’ve been in love with him for a while, but I’ve loved him most of my life. There is no reason, no circumstance, no matter how worthy or noble, that could have torn me from his side.
The day Gabe told me he was offering himself to the Tithe and not to me, that’s the day he shattered my heart.
That’s on him.
My refusal to accept, to let go, that’s on me.
There’s a sudden, urgent need to tell him, to make him understand, to put half of him back together again.
I toss my pole aside and jump to my feet, nudge my chin to indicate we need to talk, silently asking him to come aside with me.
His eyes snap from me to the lake.
He jerks his line from the water, checks the worm is still hooked, and re-casts it.
Georga raises a judgmental brow at me as I step around her, as if she somehow knows I’ve just forgiven one half of Gabe’s sins.
I give her a narrowing look—none of your business—and tap Gabe on the shoulder. “Can we talk?”
“Not now,” he says in a low, hard voice.
“Gabe, it’s important.” My hand curls over his shoulder, squeezes. “This won’t take—”
“Yes!” Georga shouts.
I look to see a silvery fish dangling from the end of Kane’s line. It’s quite impressive, about the length of my forearm. He flips it onto the grassy bank and deftly unhooks the fatty lip caught there.
Georga gives the fish a round of applause with a mocking, “This is from my stomach...thank you thank you thank you.”
Gabe drops his pole, slipping out from beneath my touch as he stands and walks off toward the Fish Grill.
I run after him.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he mutters gruffly as I catch up.
“You don’t know what I’ve got to say.”
“Senna.”
I tug on his arm, forcing him to stop and listen.
Gabe gets in first, his brow knotted with hurt. “I don’t have any right to care about what you do, I’ve got it. Anything else?”
He means me and Kane.
He saw what he saw and he’s drawn his own conclusions.
Does he think I’m encouraging Kane?
I’m not.
Even if my heart wasn’t too sore to contemplate a new relationship, Kane’s not offering what I want. He never will. He thinks love is irrelevant and weak. He believes love is a useless emotion for a society with too much time on their hands.
But that’s not the explanation I owe Gabe and I won’t discuss Kane with him.
“You broke my heart,” I say softly. “You chose your sisters and left me behind and that shattered my world. If I’d accepted...respected your decision, I wouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have made you choose your sisters all over again at the ceremony and I’m sorry for that. I hope you don’t blame yourself for me being Tithed, because I don’t blame you.”
His hands ball into fists. “That was the most selfish thing you’ve ever done, Senna. All I wanted was for you and the girls to be safe.”
“And I wanted you to be safe,” I say hotly. I’m not the only selfish one here. I may not blame Gabe for putting me here, but if he’d loved me enough, we’d both be safe in Ironcross. “Forcing you to honor our pairing wasn’t just about keeping you with me, Gabe, it was about keeping you alive.”
His hands relax.
He looks away from me, out to the horizon where the water meets the overcast twilight sky. “If I chose you at the Tithe ceremony, Josie and Maddie would have gone through this scared and alone if they were Tithed, vulnerable girls without any survival smarts. If I chose them, you would be scared but not alone. I’d be there—here—to take care of you as best I can. I never chose them over you. I chose them and you in the only way I could.”
Some of the scarring around my heart softens into his words. I gave him a brutal but simple choice, and he just made it complicated.
Our eyes meet, and I feel the emotion pouring from him into me. Hurt. Regret. Sorrow. Maybe a little forgiveness.
We’re not fixed.
I honestly don’t think we can be.
But at least I recognize my friend again.