She gave him a watery laugh. “What if I got free? Then what?”
“Woman, don’t you understand yet that the only reason I came was for you? I don’t give a flying damn about the rest of the world. They can all rot.”
“No, Adam. They can’t.” She shook her head. “My friend Margie… her son is going to be four on Saturday. Would leave him to this?” She motioned at the carnage before them.
“Don’t ask me to leave you.”
“I’m going to ask you, because it’s what I need you to do. Help me get the rest of the way to the lab to initiate the failsafe. Then you have to leave. If Bureau 7 finds you here, you won’t go home, and you won’t be able to stop them from putting me down.”
“I’ll kill them all,” he snarled.
“I don’t want you to. I’m part of the contagion now.” She shivered as her body temperature began to drop. “It’s happening. We have to move.”
“Wait!”
“Adam—”
“No, that one.”
He pointed to where Margie’s body lay. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see the aftermath of what she’d done.
“You have to look.”
Slowly, she turned her eyes toward Margie’s body. It was so much worse than she thought. Margie’s eyes had returned to normal, except for the empty stare of death. Her hair was still white, and patchy. But her face… oh god, her face. It was all too human and the bullet hole in the center of her forehead much too surreal and bright.
“She’s the one that bit you, isn’t she?” Adam asked.
“I think so.”
“You might not turn. We need to get to the lab. Which way?”
Elizabeth gave him directions as a certain numbness spread through her. It was highly unlikely that she wouldn’t turn with her symptoms. But she didn’t tell him that. She had to get to the lab, no matter the cost.
Even if it meant letting Adam have false hope.
The revenants didn’t bother them now, they could smell death on her and could sense that Adam would be no easy meal, even if they were turning on themselves. That didn’t stop him though, didn’t crush his hope like it should’ve. No, he kept moving so fast—she couldn’t keep up.
When she was sure she was going to fall, Adam caught her and carried her the rest of the way.
“I’m turning, Adam. You have to go,” she murmured.
“Shh. Rest. Just rest. We’re almost there.”
“If they find you here—” Elizabeth didn’t get to finish her sentence. Darkness filled all the noisy places in her brain, that need for survival screaming in her head was silenced as it drowned in shadow.
All she could do was surrender.
Chapter Eight
Adam refused to believe this was the end for them.
When Elizabeth’s eyes closed and her heart stopped, a roar was torn from him the likes of which no creature had ever heard before. It rattled the very foundations of the walls around them. Walls that he would tear down with his bare fucking hands if his Elizabeth had been taken from him.
The electricity crackled around his fingertips, and he didn’t try to hold it back. He let it flow from his body, into hers. He’d give her everything he had.
He’d give her the gift she hadn’t asked for when her mother died.
Her body spasmed in his arms and the current was like alchemy, binding them in a way that curse never could.
Two long, white streaks appeared at her temples and the wound stitched itself back together, but left a scar, much like his own where his body had been cobbled together from spare parts of dead men.
When the lightning storm passed, she lay limp in his arms and he sank to the floor, holding her close.
Without her, nothing mattered. Not humanity. Not the infection. Not the new pack of revenants that seemed to sense his surrender that were coming for them. He’d let them tear him apart—anything so he didn’t have to face the long, endless eternity without her.
Only, when they crept close to them, they didn’t attack. They slavered their venomous drool, and snapped their teeth, but they didn’t bite. It was as if they were waiting for something. One reached out a skeletal hand, and he slapped it away.
The thing howled.
Adam bared his teeth. “Mine.”
“Ours,” one hissed. Then another and still another until it was a chorus. “Ours.”
A loud thump startled them all. Then another. And still another.
It was her heart! It had found the rhythm! Her eyelashes fluttered, and she opened her eyes slowly—so slowly.
He waited to see if this world had earned its apocalypse or its redemption.
If she’d become one of those things that now reached for her, that tried to claim her as their own, the world had signed its own death warrant.
Her eyes were brown, not the pale white of the undead.
Yet in them, he still saw the yawning stretch of eternity. In them, he saw the same Wollstonecraft eyes that had witnessed his beginning, and in what about them that made them uniquely hers, he saw those that would witness his end.