Page 101 of Mortdale

I bit down my smile. “Nowhere pretty.”

“More infected?”

Dropping my head against the wall, I said, “Might make a widow out of you one of these days.”

Her head snapped back in my direction, and then water flew at my face.

“That wasn’t nice,” I said, smiling behind the towel. “I might get the idea that you like having me around.”

“You should have taken me with you.”

“It’s not worth it.” Putting you in the line of danger.

“I am good at what I do.”

“I know you are.” I am fascinated by it as I am terrified of it.

Forcing myself to get to my feet, I put the towel on a hanger close to her. “Stay as long as you’d like.”

She grabbed hold of my hand, pulling me to her. “I didn’t know what Agnes was doing. Truthfully.”

“I know.”

She came out of the bath a while later, wearing my shirt that hit her only mid-thigh. Her wet hair had soaked the material, making it almost see-through. And after days of blood and gore, I decided to not resist. If she’d ask me to set the entire county of Darkheim on fire, I would have.

“What are you doing?” she asked, getting a few steps closer when I laid a blanket under the bed.

“You’ll stay where I can see you tonight.”

Still watching me, she crawled under the bed and laid on the makeshift bed I’d made for her. Her big brown eyes widened just a little when I crawled under there with her, laying on my back because the tight space wouldn’t allow for me to turn.

She hugged my arm and pressed her face to the side of my shoulder, inhaling deeply.

“Saints,” I muttered when her dirty, stinking rat crawled on top of my chest and hopped off somewhere behind her.

“You’ve never asked me why I do this,” she whispered softly. “It’s because you know, isn’t it?”

I’d assumed as much. She wasn’t difficult to understand. She’d never made it difficult to know her.

“When I was seventeen,” I told her, “I was captured by Farseers for six months. Dirty pirates from the Eastern Continent who’d only heard of my kind, never seen any of us. They took liberties to test my immortality. They dragged me near death and back a few times. They sold me to prizefights and illegal pugilism rings, and they’d feed me blood from whatever dead thing they could find just to see how desperate I was to live. And then they’d throw me into the next fight.” I felt her head raise from my shoulder. “For the first few months after Arthur and Henry found me, I couldn’t even drink blood without vomiting. The one thing that kept me alive repulsed me. I didn’t even want to think about feeding. I often still don’t. It’s been almost another lifetime since then, but I still feel sick drinking blood. The body has a way of remembering. Even if we try to forget. We’re not stronger than we think we are. Whoever says that knows how to talk some bullshit. Strength is just a consequence of things we’ve survived. We’ll not be stronger until we survive the next worst thing. But right now, you’re the strongest you’ve ever been.”

And the strongest you’ll have to be because nothing else will ever happen to you as long as I breathe, and even when I don’t.

Her voice was small, gentle, comforting as she said, “Both of us are.”

“Both of us are,” I agreed.

She touched my scars—scars I didn’t even remember how I’d gotten. The haze of those months was still severe. The people and creatures I’d killed, that was the only thing I could remember. Their faces were the only thing I could remember.

“How did you survive these?”

“Maybe I didn’t.” Whoever had come out of those months was not the same person I’d left behind.

“Do they hurt?”

“Sometimes. When I remember that I have them.”

A tear slid down her temple. “They can’t be hard to forget.”