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“Still,” I say. “Hey—we should really pull over here and just take a look at what you might be able to offload. I don’t want to get stuck in the city with a whole backpack full of stuff, and wouldn’t you rather leavesomeof it behind than have to ditch it all?”
She bites her lip, the movement drawing my gaze.
“You keeplookingat me like that,” she says quietly.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to eat me,” she scowls. “You people don’t do that, right?”
“Calm down, Little Red,” I tease. “Now let’s take a look at what you can get rid of.”
“Fine,” she says, then a smile flickers over her lips. “But what bigteethyou have.”
?
It turns out the girllovesromance novels.
She’s got about a dozen of them, each with dog-eared pages and tattered covers. I chance a look at the pages that are flagged, and she bats it out of my hand before I can get a good glance.
Definitely sex scenes, if I had to guess.
I’m able to convince her to leave about half of them behind, but she tucks her favorites—mostly westerns—back into the bag with care. She keeps the sweater, too, but I at least get her to offload at least ten mason jars of preserved fruit and pickled okra. Thathadto have been most of the weight, and she ends up setting off with a bit more pep in her step.
And then we’re at the bridge.
The last time I was here, I was with the Dallas pack. We crossed the Twin Bridges in the dead of night, and we…
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” Charlotte asks, interrupting my memories.
“Hush,” I say. “We need to stay quiet; Angels could be anywhere, even if they’re less likely to show up during the day.”
“But their troops could be here,” she says.
“Right,” I nod. She’s talking about people like me—lycanthropes, and maybe even ‘borgs, though the latter are usually used for purposes other than security. “But to answer your question, Ihavebeen here before. A long time ago.”
“You don’t look that old,” Charlotte says.
I roll my eyes. “Well, thanks. I’m not. Just did a lot of traveling in my teens.”
We have to cross in daylight to avoid Angels, but I don’t like it. The Heavenly Host prefers darkness, meaning it’s safer to travel during the day if we don’t want to run into any flying, otherworldly beings. Still, we keep close to the cars broken down on the bridge, which have all rusted out at this point in the apocalypse.
“Where have you—” she starts, but I whip around, raising a finger to my lips.
Because Ihearsomething.
It’s soft at first: the vaguest sound of people screaming. I jerk my head to the south, where a white monolith rises over the city, clearly Angelic in origin.
The prison.
There’s something going on at the prison.
“Is that what I think it is?” Charlotte says breathlessly.
“Yeah,” I say. “And before you ask, we can’t go. There’s nothing we can do for the people there.”
“But my grandparents—”
I put a finger to my lips once again. Becausefuck, I get it. I get it more than she even understands. But security at that prison is too strong. We couldn’t even make a dent in the exterior, not with all the firepower in the world.
