“Stop that,” I ordered, crouching beside him, setting the items on the floor. “You’re going to make it worse. Let me do it.”
He eyed me warily, but exhaustion and pain won out in the end, and he lay back down. I set to work on his leg again, cleaning the blood with the towel, then pouring the disinfectant liberally over the wound. Zeke hissed through his teeth as the clear liquid touched the gash, bubbling into white foam.
“Sorry,” I muttered, and he blew out a short breath. Cleaning away the last of the blood, I pressed the bandage to his leg and started wrapping the gauze around it.
“Allison.”
I didn’t look up from my task, and my voice came out stiff and flat. “What?”
Zeke hesitated, perhaps sensing my mood, then asked, very quietly, “The others? Did you…did anyone…?”
I set my jaw, wishing he hadn’t brought it up just yet. “No,” I told him. “They’re gone. Jackal’s men took them all.”
“Everyone?”
I considered lying, or at least glossing over the truth, but Zeke had always been honest with me. I had to tell him, even if I hated it. “Not everyone,” I admitted. “Dorothy is dead.”
He didn’t say anything to that. I finished wrapping his leg and looked up to find him with his head bowed and one hand over his eyes. I gathered the first-aid supplies and stood, watching uncomfortably as he struggled with his grief. But he didn’t make any noise: no words, no short sobbing breaths, nothing. And when he dropped his hand, his eyes were clear, his voice hard.
“I’m going after them.”
“Not alone, you’re not,” I said, putting the peroxide and bandages on a rotting table. “Unless you think you can take on forty raiders by yourself, wounded as you are. I’m coming with you.”
He glared at me, blue eyes flashing in the darkness and shadows, the cross glimmering on his chest. I could see the struggle within; I was a vampire, still the enemy and something that couldn’t be trusted—but at the same time, I’d just saved his life, and I was his best hope of rescuing the others. I remembered the scars across his back and shoulders, the beliefs that had, quite literally, been beaten into him and wondered how deep Jeb’s indoctrination ran.
Finally, he nodded, a reluctant, painful gesture that seemed to take all his resolve. “All right,” he muttered at last. “I’ll take all the help I can get. But…” He sat up straighter, eyes narrowed into those cold blue slits I’d seen at the Archer compound. “If you try to bite me, or feed off any of the group, I swear I’ll kill you.”
I resisted the urge to bare my fangs. “So nice to know where we stand, especially after I just saved your life.”
A shadow of guilt crossed his face, and his shoulders slumped. “Sorry,” he muttered, raking a hand through his hair. “I just… Never mind. I’m grateful that you showed up when you did. Thank you.”
The words were stiff, uncomfortable, and I shrugged them off. “It’s fine.” Not much of an apology, but at least he wasn’t trying to put a machete through my neck. “On to the raiders, then. Do you know where they went?”
Zeke leaned back against the couch. “No,” he said, his voice cracking just a tiny bit. It was clear he was trying to hold back his emotions. “I don’t know where they are. Or where they took them. Or even why they took them. Jeb never said much about it, only that Jackal and his men were looking for him, and we had to find Eden before they caught up.”
“So we don’t even know what direction they’ve gone,” I muttered, looking out the door. Zeke shook his head and slammed a fist into the armrest with a hollow thump. I looked out the door at the faint red glow over the rooftops, the remains of the church burning to the ground. The streets were silent now. Except for the dying flames, there was nothing left to show they had come at all. Jackal’s men had known what they were doing. The attack had been quick, efficient and deadly, with the marauders fading into the night without a trace.
Or, most of them had.
“Wait here,” I told Zeke. “I’ll be right back.”
Chapter 20
“Well, it’s a good thing you were wearing a helmet, isn’t it?”
Pinned under his bike, the raider looked up at me, eyes wide with pain and fear. I heard his heart racing in his chest, smelled the blood that dripped somewhere beneath the motorcycle. He was tough for a human, I’d give him that. Given how hard he’d slammed into the wall that evening, I’d half expected to find a corpse with a broken neck lying here. Which would’ve put a rather large dent in my plans.
I smiled at him, showing fangs. “Too bad your leg is broken, though. That’s going to make things difficult for you, isn’t it? I must admit, I’m a little sad it ended this way. The chase can be just as thrilling as the kill.”