Page 2 of Uncontrolled

“I’m—” I start to apologize again and bite my lip instead. I know how it played out. Christopher woke up to the sound of my screaming. He burst into my room, semi-coherent, ready to save me from some unknown hunter who made it past him on the couch. Instead, he found me caught in a nightmare and tried to wake me. They happen every night now. Sometimes I jolt awake, grateful the sob in my throat is silent. Other times…

You destroy anyone who gets close to you, my head whispers. The truth of my waking trauma creeps in. Dead parents. Dead aunt. A whole heap of hunters after what runs through my veins.

I stare at Christopher where he’s settled at the end of my bed. For the second time, he came to comfort me and wound up hurt. Not to mention the times he’s shaken me conscious before I went for the knife.

Blood squeezes between his fingers.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Sitting on the edge of the bare mattress where my thrashing tore loose the fitted sheet, Christopher waits a long minute, then another before he sighs, frustrated. “At this rate, I’m going to bleed to death before it scabs over.”

My blood resurrected him two weeks ago, but the bonus of healing that comes with each resurrection has obviously begun to run its course. Cuts and scrapes are about all it can quickly fix. The wound I gouged into him is much worse. It’ll take time to heal.

Just as I reach for him, he stands.

“I’ve got to get this bleeding stopped.” He makes it to his feet and stumbles toward the door. “Christ,” he mumbles as he crosses the threshold into the hall, heading for the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “I’m safer on the damn couch.”

His voice is low enough that I’m sure he didn’t mean for me to hear it. Still, I sit on the bed, silent and gutted.

He didn’t even need a knife to cut me back.

Ploy

I lean against the kitchen counter, brewing coffee for the both of us. In the last two weeks, Allie and I settled into a routine. She starts coffee, I pop four pieces of bread into the toaster, leaning in so she can slide past me to grab the butter from the refrigerator. It’s a dance we never needed to choreograph. Now, she bumps my hip for the second time with a quiet, “Sorry”, as if she’s reluctant to speak at all.

Earlier, as I cleaned and taped closed my stab wound, Allie stripped her bedroom of weapons. We pretend nothing happened.

From the dark circles under our eyes, it’s like we’re in some sort of competition to see who can get the least sleep. Allie’s afraid. Then again, so am I. Jamison had been talking to another group of hunters stalking the resurrectionists of Fissure’s Whipp. Even if he’s dead, they’re still out there. I want to ask her if she needs to do something about them, if she should, if she wants my help, but it’s resurrection business which makes it her business, not mine.

I take the cup of coffee Allie hands me and lean forward to kiss her cheek. I refuse to notice that she tenses when I move too quickly and she refuses to acknowledge my backpack is still full, though she cleared me a drawer days ago. I can’t shake the feeling she’ll change her mind about everything.

I screwed up. I trusted Jamison. I infiltrated Allie’s apartment, her life, her secrets. When Talia leveled a gun on me, Allie blocked her shot and protected me. The only reason I emerged from that cellar instead of joining Jamison’s dead body on the dirt floor was Allie.

The toast pops and she butters each slice. As she sits catty-corner from me at the little table, she slides a paper towel with two pieces my way.

“Thanks,” I say, and then force myself to brighten. “Hey, let’s do something today.”

She glances up, confused, before the lines in her brow soften with curiosity. A smile curls her lips, fleeting, there then gone. “What, like a date?” she asks, a teasing edge to her voice.

We’ve never been on a proper date. We’re not together, together.

But we’re something.

“Yeah,” I say. I blow across my coffee and sip. “A date.”

“Okay,” Allie says quietly.

She grins against the rim of her mug. We’ve spent so much of our time together pretending, I don’t know which of her smiles to trust. This one is real. I have to believe it’s real.

There’s a place I want to show her down near the Boxcar Camp, a wider slice of the creek not even the townies seem to find and a bit of beach littered with driftwood.

You don’t think you actually have a chance at this working for you? The cut down is some awful combination of Jamison and my father in stereo.

The morning she and Talia confronted me to uncover how I knew Jamison, before he himself burst through the door of Talia’s place, I’d hinted the truth to Allie about how I felt, but I hadn’t dared come clean. I couldn’t have the first time I admitted to myself—to her—that I loved her be with her best friend’s knife at my spine, Allie’s aunt’s death on my conscience if not my hands, and the lies of the past months crumbling around me.

Since we escaped the cellar, I promised myself that the ugly part of me, the coward, died with Jamison.

That horrible little whisper starts in again. Then why can’t you tell her you love her?

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