Page 58 of Death's Daughter
Fuck.
Before I can respond, he edges around me and off the bed, heading for the door. “You should feed to regain your strength.”
I open my mouth to protest.
“Not because you want to, but because you need to,” he says, preempting my objection. “And if you’re not going to do that, you should at least rest.” He opens the door. “I’ll take first watch.”
The door closes behind him with a final click that sounds a little like quiet condemnation.
Or maybe that’s just my conscience.
16
I can’t sleep. After eating as much food as I can stomach, which does nothing to touch thehunger, I toss and turn on sheets that smell of equal parts bleach and mildew.
I keep catching myself right as I drift off, alert to any unusual sound, which—at the Just Fuck It, with its wafer-thin walls and ice machine that seems to be loudly grinding up bones—is every thirty seconds or so.
When I do manage to doze off, my dreams are filled with replays of Izzy’s jump and that suffocating pressure from outside the sorority house. In every case, I can’t stop her plummet but sometimes Devon isn’t there to save me.
That power, so intense that I couldn’t even run from it. I’m supposed to do something aboutthat?
Other times, I see faces—Chessa, Daan, Carter, the ones I’m putting at risk with all of this—and I don’t know how to keep them safe, beyond staying away.
And then there’s everything that Devon told me. These elders,faceless beings in my mind, who seem too determined to use and control.
Poor Amelia, waiting and weighted at the bottom of her parents’ pool for someone to find her.
I’m never going to sleep again.
So, it’s a shock when a hand shakes me awake.
Breath explodes out of me and I scramble backward, clunking my head against the headboard, hard.
“Someone’s outside, Jo,” a voice says to my left.
It takes me a second to identify it, to remember where I am.Devon. The motel.
“You didn’t get me for my shift,” I say, my head muzzy with sleep or lack thereof. The room is dark now, despite the fact that the lights and television were on when my eyes were last open.
“Someone’s outside,” he repeats, sounding tense. The air around him smells crisp and cold, as if he’s just come back inside. His profile is a shadow over me, gray predawn light peeking through a crack in the curtains. “I don’t know… they’re just standing there in the parking lot. Staring at our room.”
Adrenaline floods my system, and suddenly I’m awake.
I sit up. “Is it anyone you recognize?” In other words, someone from that merciless little cult chasing after him?
Devon shakes his head. “I’ve never seen either of them before. It’s a woman and a kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen.”
Her.A bad feeling starts to coalesce in my gut.
“Did you see what she’s wearing?” I ask. “Is it a dark blue trench coat kind of a thing?”
Now that my eyes have adjusted to the dim light, I can see him staring at me. “Yes, I believe so. How did you—”
“And the kid? Hoodie, baggy jeans, and black and white Vans?” I press.
Devon hesitates. “I couldn’t see his shoes, but that otherwise sounds accurate.”
That cannot be a coincidence. I saw that woman at the police station, then outside the Theta Iota house with that same kid in the checkered shoes. And now here.
