“Wyatt was in so much pain, Gretchen was—” Evie shakes her head. “And the vampires were all around us.”
“But then he came.” Wyatt seems almost confused. “The Specter. I saw him through the busted windshield. Walking up with those cat eyes in the dark. And I knew it was over, that we were never going to make it to Atlanta, never going to find a cure.” He falls silent, a contemplative look on his face.
“What happened?”
“He killed them all,” Evie murmurs. “The vampires. I don’t know how he did it. He moved so fast, so impossibly fast. Even faster than the ones who were there to kill us. One moment he was in front of the vehicle with at least a dozen other vampires, and then?—”
“They were gone. Dead. Dismembered or cut in half. Blood everywhere.” Wyatt shivers, then rolls his shoulders as if he can ward it off. “He killed his own kind. I can still hear their screams—unnatural, the most piercing thing.” He puts a hand up to his ear absently, then drops it. “I was in shock, and I couldn’t really cope with any of it, I guess. Probably still can’t cope. It’s not like they have a therapist on the payroll here, and worse than that,” he lowers his voice to a solemn note, “—nowhere to get weed.”
“The venom ate down to his bone and then through it. It would’ve kept going, would’ve killed him if we hadn’t amputated, if we hadn’t gotten away. I drove us. I didn’t know what else to do. Just kept going down the road with Wyatt in the backseat and Gretchen beside me.” Tears roll down Evie’s cheeks. “I, I had to. And no more vampires came. Or if they did, the Specter took care of them. The Saints found us maybe anhour later. The Specter did that, too, I think. Told them where we were. They brought us here.”
My heart is thundering as I digest it all. The terror of it, the loss. And the fact that Valen was there. Hesavedthem, saved the people I loved most.
Evie clears her throat and wipes at her cheeks. “We amputated the arm as soon as we got here. The sample we were able to keep from it didn’t last. Acid. Some sort of viscous compound we’ve never seen before. Organic. Tantun, we found out later.” Evie meets my eyes. “We know so much more now, Georgia.”
“Ever since the vampires’ emergence—that’s what they call it, the day when ‘Juno’s Miracle’ happened, Emergence Day—the Saints have had a small group of researchers compiling information. Now, it’s not much, nothing groundbreaking, but it’s more than we had in the DC lab. Everything they know, we have at our fingertips.” Wyatt chuckles ruefully. “Though I suppose I’m down to only five of those.”
Evie bumps her shoulder into his. “Your guitar playing wasn’t that great, anyway.”
I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh, no, Wyatt.” I hadn’t even thought of that.
“It’s all right.” He shakes his head, his shaggy hair falling into his eyes. “She’s just mad that I also know how to play the theremin.”
Evie laughs a little. “It’s so bad, Georgia. Like, the worst. I can’t believe they found one for him.”
“I’m getting better.” Wyatt smiles, though there’s a sadness in his eyes that’s new.
“What about the virus? No one here is wearing masks. Have you made progress?”
“No. Pretty much everything in the convoy was destroyed. We had nothing. No samples. Any new samples we’ve gottensince we’ve been here have been no help. We have some materials from the CDC before it was destroyed, but they aren’t organized. It’s needle in a haystack territory for the most part. We’ve been running in the same circles—decaying cells and no answers.”
“But why no masks or protocols?”
“They don’t let anyone in here without a virus screening plus a two-week quarantine,” Evie explains. “If anyone assigned to this base comes into contact with survivors, same rules apply. The military runs the protocol. We don’t even know where the quarantine area is or what else they’re doing. Communication isn’t a thing here, pretty much the same way it was in DC. Stonewalling. We only know what they tell us, and they don’t tell us anything. But I can say there is no plague down here.”
“No quarantine for me. I guess I get to skirt the rules. Then again, I guess Gage knows I haven’t been in contact with any humans since …” I don’t finish the thought aloud, not when it will take me back to the ball, to what happened to all the other humans there.
Evie turns toward me and takes my hands in hers. “Enough of us. Now you. We want to know everything. All we have are spotty details from Gage—well now it’sColonelHoward—and most of that doesn’t even make sense. Tell us.”
The enormity of what I’ve witnessed—I don’t know if I can put it into words, can begin to tell it from beginning to end.
I open my mouth, then close it. I can’t put them through it. I can’t putmethrough retelling it, not when I’ve worked so hard to push it all down, to stand on top of the dam and hope it won’t break.
“That bad, huh?” Evie asks softly.
“It was the Specter, right? Valen. He had you, didn’t he?”
“Not at first, no. I was captured at the Capitol.” Baby steps. The events told in a vacuum one by one, maybe that’s the only way I can tackle it.
“But then he got you, held you prisoner?” Wyatt presses. “Tortured you?”
“He’s not what you think.” But what is he? This is the same problem I’ve been wrestling with ever since I recovered my memories. “It’s complicated.”
“No shit.” Wyatt’s tone turns bitter. “He saved our lives, but then he massacres us. Humans. Kills every single one he can get his hands on.” Wyatt shakes his wavy brown hair from his eyes. “But notus. Why not us?”
I owe them an explanation. I owe them so much more, but that’s the only thing I can give. Even if it hurts. Even if I don’t want to give it to them, they deserve it. They need to know what happened to me, because it explains so much of what happened to them.
I sigh, long and heavy, then settle back in my chair. “You may as well eat up, because this is going to take a while.”
