AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The same confusion twisted through me, seeking answers I didn’t have. “I felt that pull, too.” I met her eyes. “Did it hurt? Are you in pain?”
She shook her head, her lips pinched in a line.
The room held its breath. This was uncharted territory. Were cured women immune to a nymph’s bite?
If she mutated, the signs would appear immediately. Her eyes would glass over. Her throat would convulse with bubbling noises. Her face would contort as bones shifted and pressed against the underside of her skin.
I couldn’t sense the nymph anymore and assumed it had passed out, but we moved as one farther away from the window. No one spoke. No one breathed.
A minute was more than enough time to be certain. As that minute ticked by, I clung to Roark’s shoulders and divided my attention between the window and Shea. Darwin sniffed around the crack under the door then sat on his haunches, his tongue flopping out of the side of his panting mouth.
Neither the nymph nor the signs of mutation appeared. When Roark’s chest relaxed against me and Darwin lowered to the floor to rest on his belly, I finally released a ragged exhale.
The nymph hadn’t maimed or eaten Shea.
It hadn’t given her the infection.
I might’ve shouted with joy if I thought the night was over. But it wasn’t. I felt it…something…pacing around the perimeter of my senses.
If the nymph was still out there, we needed to capture it, cure it, and protect it.
I wriggled to get out of Roark’s arms, and he finally let me down.
When my feet hit the floor, I dove toward the window. But Roark beat me to it, holding me back with a stiff arm. He shined the flashlight through the toothy frame, tipping the light down, down, down, and paused.
“Well?” I put my hand over his on my chest, seconds from bending his fingers back and skating around him.
He aimed the light on the door, releasing me as he strode toward it on bare feet. “It’s on the ground.”
I followed him and began working my fingers beneath the tabletop barrier. “It’s on the ground because they pass out as soon as the cure hits their bloodstream.”
Shea was still staring at her arm when her voice came out on a gasp. “Do you know what this means?”
It meant Michio had been right. I could feel myself standing taller, lighter, because Shea’s crazy fucking stunt proved that cured women could cure nymphs and the survival of the human race no longer rested on my shoulders.
I yanked on the wooden edge, my hands straining to free a nail. “You can heal them.”
Not only that, the nymph had sensed us. How far away had it traveled? Could other nymphs locate us as well? Would they seek us out, searching for us as we searched for them?
My insides fizzed with excitement at the thought of how many more women this would allow us to save.
Roark helped me tear off the tabletop and shoved on his boots. “I den’ care if nymphs are coming down two by fecking two, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” He grabbed his sword and looked between Shea and me. “The pair of ye will not be throwing yourselves a’ them like a bloody free-for-all buffet.”
I hadn’t exactly envisioned a buffet, but maybe the nymphs weren’t as vicious as I’d always thought. Maybe the ones that had lived this long were innately passive, and only bit when the cure was hanging within arm’s reach. Maybe we didn’t need to bother with the tranquilizer gun anymore.
“We continue as usual.” Boots on and bow in hand, Jesse reached for the doorknob, hip-checking me out of the way. “Taking as few risks as humanly possible.”
For Jesse, that meant putting my survival before his own.
I wrapped my fingers around his wrist and looked up at the shadows cast across his face. “If the cure didn’t take, if there’s a nymph lying in wait on that porch…”
Horrifying images played behind my eyes, of Jesse’s hands curling into claws, of Roark’s jaw elongating to accommodate suckers, of Jesse’s gorgeous copper irises receding beneath pools of all-white. My chest squeezed painfully.
I needed to convince them to hang back while I checked the nymph’s vitals. “If it bites you, how are you going to protect me?”
Jesse raked a hand through his hair and stared at the doorknob.
I shoved on my boots, grabbed the flashlight from Roark, and reached for the door.
Faint buzzing fluttered through my stomach. It was so subtle I had to concentrate to feel it. Was something else on the property? Aphids? Another nymph? My imagination?
We were about a half mile off Route 220 on an isolated lot of treed land. There were no tracks, no human or animal remains, no indication of life whatsoever when we found this house the prior day. No one had lived here or in the vicinity for a long time, possibly not since the outbreak.
