Chapter 27
Alpha save you
I take a step, and my boot slips. With a smothered hiss, I windmill my arms and manage to keep my balance, but in the dark on the floor is a deep and dark, sticky pool of liquid that smells like blood.
I turn my head and find an omega I’d seen once or twice.
Her throat has been cut and the omega brand burned into her dead flesh.
I wish I could say something or do something, but the living have to come first, so I walk away, trying to keep my steps light.
I get to a double door and find that they have chained it shut.
On the other side are a whole heap of bodies, like they died where they fell.
I push the door, wincing when an alpha falls sideways, his head hitting the ground with a dull thump.
I squeeze through the gap, contorting myself until I’m on the other side, standing on an omega’s hair.
As quickly as I can, I move away from them.
The first door on my left is the place where I hid the alpha.
A voice inside of me tells me to leave it, but I need to know.
I push open the door and almost throw up.
The stench is horrendous. I don’t have to go into the room.
The alpha has been eviscerated, his insides pulled out and smeared around him like he’s an art piece.
I back out of the room, pulling it closed.
Room after room, all I find are the dead. Pale, lifeless corpses lying in their own blood and filth. The air is heavy, like the weight of all their ghosts lingers still.
They never stood a chance. The room that Mia had appropriated for her kitchen looks like they came in with swords and just cut everyone to pieces.
There are too many people among the dead and dying, too many that I know.
I walk through, checking everyone, looking for familiar faces. I find an omega named Emma on the ground. Her beautiful, silky black hair is tangled and hard with dried blood. She’s lying on Waylan. They almost look peaceful but for her missing arms and legs.
Towards the back of the room, I find a whole heap of bodies lying on top of each other. I move them off, and underneath, I see Marshall.
I crouch down and reach out to touch his hand. His eyes spring open, staring at me, wide with shock, horror, the nightmares that will live in him forever.
“Marshall, oh, gods, you’re alive!”
He lets out a moan and coughs, spraying me with blood. I reach out, sliding more of the bodies off him.
“Come on, we need to get you…” I trail off, looking down at the massive wound on his stomach. His insides are outside. I can’t help him. No one can help him.
“Keres,” he breathes.
“I’m here, Marshall.”
“They got out. Not everyone, but enough. Your warning, we should have listened, by the time we did, we only got half of everyone out.”
I close my eyes, letting that wave of relief roll over me.
“Bear? Taryn?”
“Gone,” he whispers, and his eyes roll.
“I don’t want to go into the darkness. I want to walk beside the Night Alpha,” Marshall whispers. “Why did the gods forsake us?”
I take his hand, holding it and trying to ignore the cold of his fingers. His life is leaving him.
“My Kendric, don’t tell him what happened. Tell him it was quick. He always worries too much.”
“I’ll tell him,” I say, tearing up and swallowing the guilt. I don’t think Kendric made it.
“Good. Tell him I love him, and he’s got to carry the rest now.”
I hold his hand as he coughs again. The sound is wet but weaker. His breathing gets slower and slower until he finally doesn’t inhale again.
“Alpha save you, brother. May you walk in strength, wisdom, and heart and return to us soon.” I say the traditional goodbye the way my mother taught me, the way I’m sure he would have wanted to have been sent off.
I hold a fist to my chest with my pinky pointed straight out. The symbol of the alpha.
I let go of his hand and search more thoroughly, but no one is left alive, and as I wander, I count, and I realise that there is less than a quarter of the Resistance here. Hope beats in my chest the longer I go, not finding anyone else I know.
Taryn might have survived.
I climb up into the ceiling and grab one of the maps, leaving the others up there. Only people sworn into the Resistance can read them; to me, they are more useful as fuel for a fire.
I climb down but still when I see something outside.
What is that?
I creep to the window, but it’s too far away, so I climb through, landing lightly on the ground on the other side.
With every foot I take, I’m checking, waiting, listening, but no one bursts out to capture or kill me. Nothing happens whatsoever.
I stare at the two shapes and cock my head to the side, trying to make out what they are. It takes me a long time to get close to them, but when I do, I realise they look weird because they are covered in crows.
There’s a stick to my left, so I grab it and wave it around. The crows explode into the air in a cloud of feathers, leaving behind two rotting corpses that have been impaled.
I recognise both alphas.
Hernan I didn’t know very well, but his warm and infectious smile was always spreading joy. His face is tortured, an agonised scream of pain frozen like a monument to that single moment.
The other is a person I’d already thought was dead. Alex. Willow lied. Why would he do that?
I stare up at them and feel myself go numb, down to my bones. This is what is going to happen.
They will ruin us, destroy us. Maybe I should join the Resistance. Maybe it’s better to die fighting than to live in fear.
My head is clouded with the images I’ve seen when I get back to the room. I go and sit down, ignoring everyone.
“Kaida,” Mordecai asks. “Please.”
I lift my eyes. “Most people got out; there were roughly forty-five dead. I found…” I stop choking on the words. “I found someone alive, but they were too injured. They died with me there.”
“Who?”
“They said that Bear and Taryn got out. Most people did.”
I’m breathing hard and fast, struggling to calm down. Mordecai pulls me into his arms and squeezes tight.
“Tell me the rest; let us help you carry the pain.”
“It was Marshall. And then,” I let out a hysterical sound that’s half-laugh and half-sob, “Hernan and Alex, they have been impaled.”
Mordecai stills, but then his hands resume stroking. A sound comes from the side, and I see Jarek, Legion, and Mia staring at me in horror.
Legion struggles up, but Cadel shoves him back down.
“No, I have to—”
“Lie down and get stronger so you don’t get us killed.”
Legion sits back, his eyes wide. “Hernan and Alex?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“We have to go and move the bodies,” Mia says. “We have to; we owe them that.”
“We can’t,” Jarek barks.
Everyone looks at him. They want to protest, but Jarek’s right.
“We have to!” Mia shouts.
“Mia!” Cadel snaps. “Quiet, or I will gag you.”
She shrinks under his deadly gaze. “We have to bury them.”
“No,” Jarek says and gets up on his knees, swaying slightly. “They come back to see if the bodies are disturbed. It’s a trap. Someone will be watching, with eyes everywhere. Right?”
He’s looking at me. I nod my head in silent agreement.
“So, what? We just leave them? It’s inhuman; it's cruel. It’s disrespectful.”
“We’re living in a time of extinction; they are murdering us in ways that are far too gleeful. We don’t have the time or energy to be respectful of the dead. They are dead. We need to worry about us.”
“What happens when they run out of alphas and omegas to murder? Will they start murdering the undesirable betas?”
We all turn to stare at Cadel because I don’t think any of us have thought that through.
Jarek lets out a bark of laughter. “They already do that. Sick? Dead. Disabled? Dead. Have a connection with an alpha or omega, hide one, help one, hoard one? Dead. There was a kid who was an omega. They killed her, her mother, her father, and all her adult beta siblings. I heard them say that it was to make sure the infection of the Ravage Virus was taken out of the bloodline.”
I pull away from Mordecai, crawl to a corner of the room, and throw up.
No one speaks for a long time. Jarek comes over with a cloth and bathes my face, wiping the blood off, and then he sits with me, just holding my hand.
It goes a long way in calming me.
“Do you think it’s better to fight than live?”
Jarek heaves a sigh. “I’m not sure; I think it’s more complicated than that.”
“How?”
“I think you can pick fights and lose them so completely they damage people that are still alive. Fights can inspire others to live, to fight, to be smarter, or die faster. Living means you can fight another day. Survival in and of itself is a fight.”
“So, you think we all have to wait for the right moment? How do we know it’s the right moment?”
“What does your heart tell you? Can you put up with it for a moment longer? Can you live with yourself if you walk away?”
I ponder it and lean my head on his shoulder. I think it’s the first time I’ve instigated touch with him, and it startles me as much as it startles him.
“You said you saw me and knew? How?”
Jarek clears his throat. “Because when I saw you, it was like I’ve known you forever, like I had this moment where I knew your likes and dislikes, the sound of your voice, laugh, moan, sobs. Everything that you are was there in front of me, but we’d never met.”
“Maybe we knew each other in past lives?”
Jarek flinches. “Yeah, maybe. That would be something, if we kept finding each other over and over.”
“A cruel joke of the gods?” I whisper with a chuckle.
“A gift. I walk through the world, and I feel alone. I’m strange, and I don’t fit in anywhere. But when I saw you, I felt like I wasn’t alone. I had someone and that someone had me.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” Jarek says.
“This is all very strange. It’s happening so quickly, and we still don’t know how to get out of Foreen.” I can see my protests are falling on deaf ears. He’s shaking his head, denying it already.
“I know, but going anywhere without you is impossible for me now. Kaida Keres, I don’t know if we were lovers in a past life or a thousand, but, in this life, I will walk by your side until the day my last breath leaves my body.”
I squeeze his hand, barely choking out my response. “And I you.”
From across the room, Cadel’s dark eyes shine at me, and I get a feeling of such intense longing and grief that it steals my air from my lungs. And then it’s gone, and he’s looking away.
My gaze finds Legion, and the grief that drowned us is contained as if it was just a figment of my imagination. If Jarek dies, I will mourn him like Legion mourns his alpha. We just met. How can I be so entwined with these alphas?
“Get some sleep; tomorrow, we’re going to go out and find the Resistance,” Mordecai says as he rolls up the map. “I know where they are.”