Chapter Twenty-Three
I never let go of my bat as I follow Dane out of the church and into the town below. We skirt around the town centre, and Dane doesn’t have to tell me that it won’t end well if I alert anyone else to what he’s planning.
I’d ignore him. I’d kill him.
But he’s the only person who knows where Mason and Autumn are, and considering they’ve been fucking impossible to find up until now, I really can’t risk it.
“Why’d you kill Otto?” I mutter. We’re heading far away from the church, wandering down narrow streets.
Dane shrugs. “Pissed me off,” he says. “Besides, he couldn’t go back. You know that.”
I do. I’d been optimistic, far more hopeful than I should ever be. “You didn’t have to kill him. Not like that.”
“He was bitten , Isaac.”
“They healed him.”
Dane scoffs. “Doesn’t matter. He still failed. He was too weak to survive.”
I scowl, tapping my bat against my leg to fight the urge to swing it at Dane’s skull. When he looks at me, his eyes glitter.
“Do it if you want. You’ll never find them.”
I don’t, of course. And I duck into an alley with him when we see Sal further down a street, waiting in silence until he turns the corner and walks away.
“You can be so good when you have an incentive, Isaac,” Dane purrs. I shove past him and out onto the street.
“You have something to show me?”
Dane shrugs like he doesn’t care. He slips past me and keeps walking.
It takes the better part of half an hour to get where he wants to go. At the back of my mind, a clock is ticking. The train is coming. We still have a few hours. I can’t let Dane go back there.
Did they know this about him, back at the Citadel? Did they know he’d do this?
Why would he do this?
He takes me to the primary school, the building Mason and I searched the other day. I come to a stop.
“We searched here. I was here last night.”
Dane comes up close. “I know,” he says. “I was here, too.”
“You can’t have been. No one was here. Mason didn’t—”
Dane snorts. “You think the Citadel sent us all here defenceless?”
“What?”
“I was waiting to tell you…” He reaches out and runs his thumb along my jaw. It takes everything in me not to hit him. “But they knew. They’ve always known.”
“About what?”
“The necromancer. The magic. They knew it wasn’t a virus, Isaac. It was pretty fucking obvious if you just looked.”
“ You knew.”
“They told me. They want the necromancer. And they already had a little witch another team had stolen, so I had a leg up on all the teams they sent before.” He tugs up the hem of his T-shirt, revealing a familiar swirling symbol on his hip. It’s red, not blue, and I feel sick looking at it.
I close my eyes, thinking of the weapons in Nia’s office. The gun feels heavy in my pocket.
“They were protecting themselves.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t—I don’t understand. The necromancer is gone.”
Dane leans in, breath hot against my ear. “No, he isn’t.” He steps back and waits for me to look at him. “Come on. Let’s go see them.”
Numbly, I follow him into the school. We enter one of the classrooms—the one Mason and I searched the other day, where I thought I heard a noise—and Dane shoves the teacher’s desk aside, revealing a trap door I definitely didn’t see before. He grins at the frown on my face.
“Once they realised the teams were just getting fucking slaughtered, they sent them up here with specific instructions,” Dane says. “One had to set this all up. Then he hid here for five days until the train came. They killed the rest of them.”
“Why not destroy the train?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Dane asks. He grunts as he drags the door open and I frown at what I see on the underside—the same kind of swirling shapes I’ve seen all over this town, except these aren’t blue either.
They’re dark.
They look like they were painted with blood.
“Even they don’t want the full might of the Citadel rained upon them, I suppose.”
The space beneath the trap door is dark and empty. I wrinkle my nose at the smell of damp earth. Someone must have dug that out, too. A lot of work for a few hours, but Dane managed to hide from all that magic, so maybe whoever created this did, too.
“Out you get,” Dane says.
Autumn emerges first, blinking up at us. She’s gagged, hands tightly bound behind her back. Dane helps her up, but he’s not gentle about it. She groans when he shoves her to the floor, tears welling in her eyes. One is swollen shut, bruised around the edges.
“Fucking hell, Dane,” I snap, but when I move toward her, he points his knife at me.
“You’ll want the rest of the story, Isaac,” he says. “Come on, now. Out you get.”
Mason is gagged and tied the same way as Autumn, but fury blazes in his eyes and his posture is entirely defiant. He doesn’t flinch when Dane drags him out and then holds Mason before him, knife at his throat.
I’ve never felt anger the way I do right now. I’m going to kill him. I know it, can already picture it in my mind.
“Where’s Otto?”
“Dead, I told you.”
“His body , you fuck.”
Dane shrugs, and the knife moves against Mason’s pale skin but doesn’t cut through. “Down there.”
I grimace. He left them down there, tied up, with Otto’s body? After he—I eye Dane warily for another moment, then crouch next to the trapdoor.
Now it’s not just the smell of damp earth that hits me. The stench of death is just behind it, and I spot Otto’s corpse a few feet away. I stare at the jagged stump of his neck for a second too long and then jerk back, almost falling in my haste to get away.
“Fucking hell,” I mutter. Bile rises in my throat.
“Don’t give up now, Isaac,” Dane taunts. “I never would have caught him without you.”
He doesn’t mean Otto. He presses the knife more firmly against Mason’s throat. Autumn has squirmed around into a sitting position, but her uninjured eye is too wide, all the white showing, and she’s breathing too fast. No one else will think to come here.
“Why did you kill Blake?”
Mason’s brow furrows like he’s surprised. Dane huffs a laugh.
“You know why. Neither of you was supposed to come back.”
“What’s the point in that? We’re all good hunters.”
“You’re all fucking questioning things, is what you’re doing,” Dane snaps. “Looking for things you shouldn’t.”
“I’ve never—”
“Well, I suppose that’s not your issue. They don’t want a fucking queer climbing the ranks.”
“But you can?” I ask dryly.
“I don’t go around announcing who I’m fucking,” Dane says. His eyes slide to Mason’s throat, and he digs the knife in a little. Mason never moves; never flinches. “I don’t whore myself out for the first survivor I find.”
I swallow down impotent fury. This anger isn’t a surprise, though he’s never before stooped to speaking the way Blake always did. And subtle—he’s not that.
He won’t have long once he goes back. He’ll never make it out of the debrief, if I have to guess.
If he goes back. I don’t intend to let him.
“Fine. Whatever. But Blake wasn’t questioning shit until you mentioned the virus might not be real. He would’ve believed anything you told him.”
“I was bored of him,” Dane says. “And he insisted on joining me on every fucking job . It was a given, in the end.”
“So you… You had to kill us. You had to get the necromancer, even though everyone’s saying he’s gone. Why?”
Dane eyes me for a moment. He looks as though he’s trying to work out my strategy, but the truth is that I don’t have one except to stall him.
If I see an opening, I’ll take it, but beyond that, all I have to do is hope we’re here long enough that Rae gets worried about the train arriving and discovers Blake’s body.
She’ll know I didn’t kill him.
Well, I hope she will.
“Fine, Isaac,” Dane says. He drags Mason back, making him stumble, and this time, the tip of the knife does prick his skin. A thin rivulet of blood trails down to his collarbone, then under his shirt, and I track it with my eyes the entire way.
When I meet Mason’s gaze, his eyes blaze again. They crinkle at the corners like he’s trying to smile.
Dane shoves Mason to one side, then drags Autumn to her feet. She whimpers when he sits her on a chair. They’re a few feet from me now, but when I take a step forward, Dane grabs Mason again and holds the knife to his throat.
“No, no, no,” he says. “We’re having a conversation, Isaac. Stay there.”
I turn my bat slowly in my hand.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know the whole truth,” Dane says.
He shoves Mason into another chair, next to Autumn’s.
She’s closer to me, and he’s keeping Mason at knifepoint, so I’ll have to find some other way.
The gun is in my pocket, but there’s not a chance I’ll reach it in time, and I can’t risk missing.
Other than that, I have my bat and a knife at my ankle. Fuck.
“What do you know?”
“The necromancer caused the outbreak. Gave the Citadel power, though I bet he didn’t realise that at the time. Recently, they’ve realised that they’re having to give some of that power back.”
“How so?”
“The more towns we clear, the more people who leave. They can’t really stop them. That’s the point, isn’t it? But the people in charge now don’t want that, so they need to drive them back.”
“They want more zombies? Why not just stop sending us out?”
Dane scoffs. “They can’t be fucking obvious about it, Isaac,” he says like I’m a child. “Do you know how tenuous everything is right now? There are survivors out there, too. They made it through the initial couple of decades; they’re in it to last. We don’t need them, either.”
“This won’t work. It’ll just kill people.”
“I don’t think they care about that. All they—all we need—is just enough to keep everything running. Enough to keep luxury where it’s meant to be.”
“They’ve offered you something.”
“Oh, Isaac. They’ve offered me everything .”
I swallow hard. He’s lost it. There’s no bringing him back from this, but then I think I knew that when he shoved that knife into Blake’s throat.
“Everything?”
“I’ll be one of them. Among them. I won’t have to traipse outside those walls every few weeks and risk my life—and for what ?!” He shouts the last word, and Autumn flinches and lets out a whimper.
Mason never moves. The entire time, his eyes burn into me, feet planted, shoulders square. He’s not scared of Dane, not even with a blade against his skin.
How can I be as brave as him? My hands are steady, but inside I’m terrified. What if Dane does kill him? What do I do then?
“We do it because we have to,” I say quietly and, eyes fixed on Dane’s, I take a step forward.
He says nothing.
“We do it because someone has to, and we can, and we’re rewarded for it.”
“You’re so na?ve,” Dane scoffs. “They were never going to give you what you wanted.”
I shake my head. What I wanted? All I wanted was a space of my own. Something small and safe.
I can’t even have that? Dane might be out of his mind, but I don’t doubt that part of it—I don’t doubt that we were hand-picked to die out here. Blake was too aggressive. Rae is too strong. Otto was too observant. My eyes flick to Autumn. Too timid, despite her training.
And me? Too defiant. Too queer. Even if I tried not to be.
“The necromancer,” I say, and Dane perks up again, anger sliding off him like it was nothing. “You have him? They said he was gone.”
Dane stares at me for a second, then tosses back his head and roars with laughter. I bare my teeth, cheeks heating. I don’t like this. I don’t like that I’m missing something because that means he might have the upper hand, and I can’t let him have that, not for a second.
“Fucking hell , Isaac,” Dane says, then drops his smile all at once. “You’re such a fucking disappointment.”
“I—What?”
“I really thought you’d figured it out. It’s partly why I didn’t kill you. The other part, well—” He sweeps his gaze over me, and for the first time, something shifts in Mason’s expression. He was angry before. Now he’s murderous.
“What do you mean?”
“You were standing next to the grave. Think! It was all laid out for you, and you can’t even put the fucking dots together.”
I shake my head. I was looking at that grave, the one that clearly had been the first to burst open, the one—
Mason said the necromancer raised someone from the dead.
And the name…
Hoar.
“Wright and Hoar.” Nia’s voice rings in my mind. I didn’t connect the name at the time, but…
“No,” I say, but I’m not looking at Dane anymore.
I’m looking at Mason.
“Now you’re getting it,” Dane says, not even attempting to hide the glee in his voice. “He’s right here. He’s been here all along.”
Of course he has.
Mason is the necromancer.