Chapter Twenty
M ason springs into action. “Emma, you’ve been with her all day. See if you can trace anything of her. Anything at all. Callum, stay with her.”
Callum looks worried, too, but nods and follows Emma further down the street. They stop and Callum stands tall as Emma closes her eyes, hands stretched out.
“What about me?” Sal asks.
Mason frowns, looking between me, Rae, and Blake. “You need to take them back up to the church and bring the others down to help.”
“What?” I snap. “Mason—”
“No. We need to take care of this. Someone is hunting in our town. I won’t let them take any of the rest of you.”
“And what, we’re going to be safe in that church?” Blake says. “Anyone could just walk in!”
Mason shakes his head. “No, they can’t. You’ll be safe up there. But you have to stay in the church or the graveyard.”
“We need to help search,” Rae says. She’s got control of herself now, no tremble at all in her voice.
“You need to be somewhere safe. If we’re keeping an eye on you, then we’re not looking for your friends.”
Sal’s expression darkens when I grab Mason’s arm and pull him aside. He goes easily, and the look on his face tells me he doesn’t understand why we’d argue about this.
“You have to let us search,” I hiss.
“I told you I would keep you safe, little lamb,” Mason replies, not bothering to keep his voice as low as mine is. “And I mean what I say. We’ll be able to search faster without the three of you. We know where we’re going. We can all use our magic to seek them out.”
“And if they’re in the woods?”
He shakes his head. “Then we’ve already lost them.”
“Mason—”
“No more discussion. I need you to go to the church. I need you safe.”
“I need to find my team.”
Mason scowls. What choice do we have, I suppose. If they refuse to search with us, we’re pretty fucked, but they’ll move faster with us, not without.
Still, I waver. Mason’s not the only one to see it.
“We’ll go back,” Rae says before I can give in.
Blake gapes at her, incredulous. “We will not !”
“We’re going,” she growls. “They’ll find them for us.”
Blake looks at me then, for once as though he wants my opinion, though I know he just wants me to agree.
“We should go up there,” I say, and Blake growls, turning away.
“It’s going to be your fault if Dane or Autumn end up dead,” he growls and storms off in the direction of the church.
Mason squeezes my arm. “We’ll be back tonight. Sal will go with you now. Stay downstairs, where it’s safest.”
I flatten my lips into a line but nod. “Okay.”
“I promise you’ll be safe, little lamb.”
“It’s not me that I’m worried about.”
He smiles—he likes when I worry, he said that—and squeezes my arm one more time before he lets go. “Go on,” Mason says, voice gentle. “I’ll be back with them before you know it.”
I trail Blake, Sal, and Rae back up to the church. Rae drops back after a while, walking alongside me. We’re all alert even through our frustration; whoever took them could be anywhere, and this is when we’re at our most vulnerable.
“Do you think they’ll find them?” Rae whispers.
I swallow. “I think they’ll try.”
She’s silent for a moment before she nods. “Yeah, me too.”
Nia is already waiting when we arrive. Sal pulls her aside to explain. Blake paces before the altar and I watch him walk back and forth, trying to work things out.
It makes no sense that anyone would take them like that. No, it makes sense that someone in this town would, but I can’t pick out a suspect among the handful of people here, and I trust Mason when he says it wasn’t one of them.
That leaves… who? Dane went missing first. Even if he left, even if for some reason he was picking us off one by one, how would he do that without us noticing?
Otto was bitten and healed. And killed. He can’t be responsible for any of this, and Dane might dislike Autumn, but I think he hardly cares about her at all, except to believe she’s beneath him. Why would he take her over the rest of us?
I sigh. Blake’s too broken up about Dane, and he was right there when Otto was taken. Same for Rae. Same for me.
“You’re to go below,” Nia says. “We’ll be back in a few hours.”
“You’re all leaving us here?” Rae asks, incredulous.
“You’ll be safe in the church. Just stick to the areas you were in last night, and everything should be fine.” She’s short, dismissive. She doesn’t have the time to baby us. “Go now.”
Blake opens his mouth, presumably to argue, but Rae shakes her head and ushers him over to the door. I linger only for a moment before I follow.
My boots sound heavy on the stone stairs as we descend beneath the church. It’s silent with no one else here, oppressively so. I debate for a second heading directly to Mason’s room and spending time alone, but one look at Rae’s face dissuades me from that notion.
We should stick together. What if Mason’s wrong about the church being safe? What if someone comes and takes them when I’m not looking?
What if they take me?
The rest of the team’s packs are in a small room that I think is fairly close to Nia’s office. We leave the door open, and I lean back against the wall as Rae rummages through her things, then Autumn’s.
“I promised myself she’d make it back,” she mutters.
Blake stills where he’s taken his hammers out. He’s cleaning them, something of a compulsion, I think, considering he hasn’t had to use them yet.
“There’s danger on every job,” I say, and Rae looks at me sharply.
“Not like this.”
I sigh. She isn’t wrong. The worst part is that even Autumn was aware of that. The first time leaving the Citadel in her entire life, and she knew that something was… off here.
“We should be out there,” Blake snarls. He wipes down the pick end of one hammer, then the other. “We can’t trust them to protect our team.”
I let go of my bat, leaning it against the wall next to me. “They’ll be better at finding them than we are.”
Blake shakes his head. “They’ve been lying to us this entire time! Fucking… magic. A necromancer. You really believe all that shit?”
“I’ve seen the magic.”
“Sure, fine. Just because they’ve tricked you—”
“Blake,” Rae snaps. She pushes her hands through her hair and gets to her feet. “Enough. I’m going to go find something to eat.”
She walks off before either of us can stop her and I know better than to follow. She might be hungry, but what she’s after is space.
I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose. Blake pushes into a standing position too and puts his hammers back where they belong. “They’re hiding something.”
“What? Blake…”
“They have to be. Think about it. They knew about our guns. They know about the Citadel, that we’re sent out here.”
“Other survivors—”
“There aren’t any other survivors. You know that better than I do. Everyone in this town has been here since the outbreak. Or whatever.” He shakes his head when I fall silent. “You saw that fucking bag, Isaac. You know it’s not one of ours.”
I scowl. I want to argue—this is Blake, after all, and this might be the most civil conversation we’ve ever had, which certainly speaks to him attempting to manipulate me, but…
He’s not wrong. Otto’s head was in a bag from the Citadel. I know that.
“Who else could have taken them?” Blake asks.
“We might not have seen Dane go, but Otto was with us. Autumn, too. There aren’t any other survivors here—and if they’re not lying about their magic and they can, I don’t know, stop people coming into the town, then why wouldn’t they know if someone was here? ”
“We got in,” I say, but my voice sounds distant. The train did get in. We got in.
And zombies attacked us that night.
Mason was watching, and then zombies attacked.
“If there’s any evidence, it’ll be wherever Nia or Mason stay,” Blake says. His upper lip curls, but he keeps his voice steady when he asks, “Did you notice anything in his room when you were there?”
Not like I did a thorough exploration, but— “No. Nothing.”
“And Nia?”
I swallow. “She has an office. There’s a… cabinet. Cupboard. Could be stuff inside.”
“You know how to get there?”
“Blake, we can’t—”
“I can pick the lock. We’ll be quick. Careful. Back here before they know it.”
I shake my head, but it’s too late. The doubts are there. I want to believe Mason, so maybe he doesn’t know who took them, but Blake’s right. There’s plenty here that doesn’t add up.
“Fuck, okay. In and out. We’re not getting caught.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
It takes too long to navigate the twisting corridors, but just when I’m about to give up, I spot a door I recognise. Blake isn’t bitching behind me, which tells me just how much he believes what he’s told me. He really thinks that the people here have something to do with it all.
What if they do? We’ve still got another full day before the train arrives, which means we’re trapped here until then. Zombies are in the woods, according to Mason, though maybe that’s not true, either.
And we have to meet the train at the station. We can’t exactly flag it down further down the tracks.
“Here,” I say, gesturing at the door. Blake slips past me and crouches, leaving me to watch the narrow corridor. We really will have to be fast. There’s only one way in or out of this room, so even if anyone appears in this hallway, we’re fucked.
It takes a few minutes, but then the lock clicks and the door swings smoothly open. I hold my bat tightly, though I know no one can be inside.
Sure enough, the room is empty. Dark, too, so we use torches to light the room and avoid walking into anything.
“Remember,” I murmur. “Not a thing out of place.”
“Got it,” Blake says and heads directly for the cupboard in the corner.
It seems to be locked, too, so he focuses on that while I round Nia’s desk.
I examine the ledger on top carefully—it seems to just be an overall inventory of the town, which makes sense.
The first and second drawer on the desk reveal nothing but more papers, all of them mundane, and assortments of odds and ends that I suppose she drops in there from time to time.
When I open the third drawer, my eyes go wide. Blake opens the cupboard finally, then stuffs his lockpicks away, and he’s silent too.
“Blake.”
“Isaac.”
“What do you have?”
He takes a step back from the cupboard and then looks at me. “You?”
“Remember they took our guns?”
“Yes.”
I glance down again. There are a lot more than six guns in this drawer. And I wouldn’t worry about that—or I’d explain it away—except that the ones we’re given, the ones that contain just the single bullet, are also stamped with the symbol of the Citadel, plain to see.
“There must be twenty guns in here,” I whisper.
“Fuck. Come here.”
His eyes are on the cupboard, so I slip one gun from the top of the heap and shove it into my pocket before I close the drawer. It’s more an impulse than anything else.
I round the desk again and come to a sudden stop as I look inside the cupboard. There’s a safe on a shelf at one side and more papers above that.
But on the left… There are photos of all of us. A map of the Citadel, crudely drawn beneath, but then refined with details that no survivors should know.
Belongings, too. Weapons that I’ve never seen the people here use. A bat like mine. A knife that I know came from a hunter, just like us.
And bags. Three or four of them, all empty, piled neatly on another shelf.
“The fuck?” I mutter.
Blake shakes his head. “Other teams have been here,” he says. “They killed them.”
“That’s not the worst part.”
“How is that—”
“We were told before we came here that no other team had been sent this far north,” I say slowly, and Blake snaps his mouth shut. “But look at this. The guns. Must have been at least two or three of them.”
It’s not just that the people here have been killing teams of hunters. It’s that we were sent here at all .
The would-be sacrificial lamb…
My stomach drops. Mason knows something. Far more than he should.
Blake is silent for too long, so I keep those thoughts to myself, as well as what Rae said about the conversation she had before she came here.
I don’t think Mason’s behind Otto’s death and Dane’s and Autumn’s disappearances. Truthfully, I don’t think any of the townspeople are. And to take out an entire team—which I think is what they’ve been doing, until now—they’d have to strike quickly. Not reveal themselves and let us stay here.
What’s different about us?
“We need to go back,” Blake says. His face is pale, and his hands tremble a little when he closes the cupboard door. “We need to tell Rae.”
I nod. I open the door and keep my eyes fixed on the corridor as he locks the cupboard again, then the door behind us. It only takes us half as long to find our way back, and Rae scowls when she sees us, axe in hand.
“I didn’t know where the fuck you two went. What—”
“We’re not safe here,” Blake says, and I nod quickly. There’s no sign anyone’s come back, but they could at any time, and we don’t need them to work out what we know. Even if they let us live so far, there’s nothing to say they won’t turn on us if they find out what we know.
My stomach twists painfully. Mason said he wouldn’t lie to me. He was lying when he said that, wasn’t he?
“What do you—”
Voices drift towards us and I shake my head sharply, cutting Rae off. She gets to her feet and wanders over to the hall that leads towards the stairs.
Nia comes to us first. “No sign of them,” she says. “We’ll send some more teams out in a bit. We need to coordinate what we’re doing.”
Callum and Emma are behind her, and I try to read their faces. Are they going to kill us all now? And, for that matter, why are we still alive?
I’ve no doubt that they killed the other hunters. Or that they’re dead, at least, however it happened. No hunter would willingly give up their weapon.
Others enter the room, and soon it’s all of us, with the obvious exceptions of Otto, Autumn, Dane, and…
“Where’s Mason?” I ask.
Sal frowns. Nia glances around the room.
“He was just…” she begins, then trails off.
“He was with me,” Sal says. “We left the school and he was next to me.”
“And then?”
Sal opens his mouth and closes it again. “I—” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
The room descends into quiet chaos. I struggle to catch my breath. There’s an edge of panic to the air that makes things worse because Mason is missing, and that seems not to be part of anyone’s plan at all.
“Enough!” Nia shouts. “Sal, go upstairs. Check if you can see him.”
Sal leaves. I drag air into my lungs and push it out again. He’ll be fine. He has to be. He destroyed all those zombies and barely broke a sweat. He said he’d kill Dane for me.
Sal returns a few minutes later. “He’s not there,” he says, face bleached of all colour. “Mason’s gone.”