Feeding Opportunity

Day 36, night

I walked until I couldn't smell the bridge anymore.

That took almost a mile. The blood followed me the whole way, in my clothes and my hair and the back of my throat, and every step I wanted to turn around. Not to help. Not to bury anyone. Just to go back.

[Feeding opportunity detected.]

"No."

[Noted.]

I sent the four of them into the trees with orders to stay there. Then I sat down on the steps of a burned-out ranger station on the far side of the river and held onto the railing like it was the last rung of a pole.

Dante found me an hour later. He'd built a fire inside the ranger station's one standing room, and he didn't ask me to come in. He just came out and sat down on the step below mine with a first-aid kit in his lap.

"Jacket off," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You've got two bullets in you, Portia."

"One. The shotgun went through."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he opened the kit.

I took the jacket off.

The hole under my collarbone had closed down to the size of a dime. The edges were gray and puckered, like frostbite. He cleaned it anyway, slow and careful, with his big hands steadier than mine had ever been on a hot line. When he pressed the gauze down, his fingers stayed against my skin a second longer than they needed to.

"You're like ice," he said quietly.

"I know."

"Does it hurt?"

I thought about lying. I was so tired of lying to him.

"Not like it should."

He nodded and went to work on the thigh. The shotgun pellets had torn through my jeans and come out the other side. He had to cut the denim away, and I sat there with my leg across his knee and his warm hands working, and I watched his breath fog in the firelight. White, warm, alive.

"That kid," he said, not looking up. "In the red jacket."

"I told them not to."

"I know. I heard you." He tied off the bandage. "You said it out loud. Three times. I don't think you knew."

I hadn't.

"It felt good," I said. The words came out flat and terrible. "Not to me. To the thing in my head. I felt it get him, and the thing in my head liked it. And for a second, Dante, I couldn't tell where it stopped and I started."

He was quiet.

Then he set the kit down, turned on the step, and put both hands on either side of my face.

I stopped breathing. Out of habit, again.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked. Dark eyes. That jaw, rough with the shadow he never let grow out. Fourteen years of storms in the lines around his eyes, and every one of them had been a storm I'd walked away from.

"I watched you go up the side of that truck," he said. "Like a pole. Three points of contact. With a hole in your chest. To keep that man from shooting me." His thumbs moved along my cheekbones. "I don't know what you are now. But I know who you are. And you came back."

"I died," I whispered.

"And you came back. That's twice now. Most times I can't get you to come back once."

His heartbeat was so loud. It filled the night. It filled me. He leaned in, slow, giving me every chance to stop him, and I didn't. His forehead touched mine. His breath fogged between us, warm against my mouth, and mine didn't fog at all.

I wanted him.

I'd wanted him for years, on pole tops and in motel parking lots and in crew trucks at three in the morning, and I'd always found a reason to leave before it could matter. Now he was right here, and there was nowhere left to go, and his mouth was an inch from mine.

And I couldn't tell anymore what kind of wanting it was.

[Human. Pulse 96. Warm.]

[Feeding opportunity detected.]

The letters came up white across his face.

I pulled back so fast I hit the railing.

"Portia—"

"Don't." I had my hand up between us. It was shaking. "Don't. Not because I don't want to. Because I do, and I can't tell which part of me wants it."

He understood. I watched it land in his face. The hurt first, and then something worse. Patience. Like a man who'd been waiting fourteen years and had just decided he could wait a little longer.

"Okay," he said softly.

He didn't move away. He took my shaking hand out of the air between us and held it, warm and steady, in both of his.

[Anchor detected.]

[Humanity: 85% → 86%.]

One percent. One. After the bridge, after the boy in the red jacket, after everything I'd done today, it was nothing.

It was the first thing I'd gotten back since I died.

I looked down at our hands and started to laugh, or cry, I wasn't sure which.

That was when the four of them stirred.

I felt it through the cold place behind my ribs. Every one of them, out in the trees, lifting their heads at once. Not toward me.

Toward the river.

Then I heard it too. A heartbeat. Slow, controlled, the heartbeat of someone who'd been still for a long time, on purpose. Somewhere across the water. Somewhere high.

Dante's hand tightened on mine.

A red dot settled on the center of my chest.

"Don't move," a man's voice called across the river. Calm. Cold. "Either of you."

Dante started to rise. The dot didn't waver.

"I've tracked those things for three hundred miles," the voice said. "Watched them take my whole town apart. And tonight I watched them walk straight to you."

The safety came off. I heard it click, clean as a breaker.

"So tell me, lady," he said. "What the hell are you?"