Sucking in desperate, heaving gulps of air, she coughed and pedaled in the water to stay upright. And as soon as the sparks faded from her vision, her two-part search began. Where was the nearest safe spot to leave the water? And where the hells was Max?
The bridge was too high, obviously. She’d have to swim to one of the banks of the moat, but she had no idea which one mighthave a ladder or some other means of leaving the water. Also which one might still have part of the zombie pack circling and lying in wait, because those classified government reports had mentioned over a hundred creatures living in the compound, so not all of them had attacked the SUV. The rest wouldn’t be far.
Didn’t matter. Max would help her decide. Once she found him.
From the water, she could only see the top half of the SUV, but it appeared abandoned. At the very least, any living being in the vicinity was no longer standing. There was a good chance Max wasn’t actually a living being anymore, though, after the way he—
No. He’d survived. He’d jumped into the water as they’d planned. If she let herself believe anything else, she wasn’t certain she’d have the strength to swim to shore.
Was he still fighting the zombies who’d pursued him into the water? Had the weight of the backpack dragged him to the bottom of the moat? Had they ripped off his head because he’d waited too long to jump?
Had he died in defense of her?
Her raw lungs expanded with one painfully deep breath, and another, and another. Then she ducked under the glittering surface again, eyes straining against the darkness beneath her, searching for movement.
When she ran out of air, she surfaced, then lowered her head to search again.
There. A fleeting glint of gold and silver far below.
It could be a fish. It could be a shiny fallen item from Max’s backpack. But it could be Max himself, his hair and sword catching a faint flicker of light, so she had to check.
Another handful of deep breaths. Every instinct screamed ather to save herself, to swim to safety, to remain in light. Instead, she arrowed down into the murky depths of the moat once more, kicking and using a sort of clumsy breaststroke. Over and over, her hands dragged through the water in the shape of an upside-down heart, then shot through the middle, breaking the shape in two before beginning anew.
How deep was the fucking moat, anyway? Twenty feet? More?
Her ears popped, and her lungs burned.
Just as she was tempted to turn back, he appeared before her, floating face down above the bottom of the moat, decapitated zombie bodies and severed zombie heads forming a gruesome circle around him. To keep her lips closed, she bit them so hard she drew blood.
He still had his own head. Maybe she could resuscitate him. She needed to get him to the surface.
The shreds of his backpack floated like seaweed, rippling slightly in the dark water, and his hands were caught in the current too. They drifted along the craggy surface below him in little sweeps, moving…quite a lot, actually.
If she didn’t know better, she’d say they were moving withpurpose. Like maybe he wasn’t drowned after all, but rather—
Without warning, just as she reached to grab hold of his jacket or his jeans or something,anything, she could use to drag him upward, he jerked, turned his head, and spotted her just above him. She gasped. In joy. In relief. In shock.
In a major, major mistake, because she was at the bottom of a fucking moat.
The rest of her time in the water, she didn’t remember clearly, probably because she wasn’t breathing much anymore. The next thing she knew, she was lying on her side, racked by shivers andshudders as she retched and gasped and coughed foul-tasting water onto a patch of brittle crabgrass while Max alternately rubbed her back, thumped it to help her expel more of the moat’s contents, and cursed at her.
“—fuckingtoldyou not to look for me, fuckingtold youto concentrate on your own survival, not to mention all those other times Ifucking told younot to risk your own life to save anyone else’s, including mine, and what’sthe first thing you fucking do, huh?” His chilly fingers stroked her wet hair back from her cheek. “Wait, you can’t tell me, can you, Edie? Becauseyou fucking drowned yourself doing exactly what I told you not to do.”
“You”—she finally managed to suck back a thimbleful of air between coughs—“tried to”—hack hack—“save me first”—hack hack hack—“you utter hypocrite. What”—she dry-heaved—“the fuck?”
His hand briefly paused in its circles on her back, but he ignored her aggrieved accusation in favor of more profane muttering.
Fine. She’d try a different question, then. “Why were you at the bottom of”—hack hack—“the freaking moat if you weren’t drowning,Chad?”
The tightness in her chest had begun to ease, breath by breath, that discomfort replaced by her growing awareness of just how cold she’d become. Another few minutes out here and she could pursue a side hustle as a freelance ice sculpture.
His sigh gusted against her ear as he bent over her, and she shivered convulsively. “Those fuckers’ claws ripped open my backpack, and everything fell into the water. Vampires don’t need to breathe as often as humans, so once I saw you’d reachedthe surface safely, I went down to find my blood packs and all the other supplies.Dude.”
Dammit. This made two dangerous, unnecessary attempts to rescue him in less than twenty-four hours. But in her defense, her neighbor really sucked at communication.
“You could have”—hack wheeze—“said something,” she pointed out, with what she considered laudable calm. “Told me you were all right and what you were doing.”
As he helped lever her to a sitting position, he scanned the length of the bridge. “The rest of the pack might appear at any moment. I was trying to hurry.”
