Page 24 of Such a Feral Little Lamb
“You hate it when he touches you. But you don’t want to have him think you’re weak. Or that other one. So you endure it, but your skin crawls, doesn’t it?”
He’s silent for too long. My tongue feels clumsy when I answer. “Yes.”
“And he pushes. He wants to control you. Even with everything that he wants…” His eyes roam over me slowly, but—and I know he knows it—it doesn’t feel the same as when Dane does it. “He wants control more than pleasure. More than yours anyway.”
“That’s one thing I’m never going to find out.”
Mason’s answering smile is startled and genuine for it. “Good. Come on. No zombies here. Let’s look in town again.”
I follow him at a more sedate pace, and we leave the playground behind. He’s right. I don’t know how he can read me so well, but he can, and that’s dangerous, too.
And my reaction to him is just as dangerous. I glance at him as we walk. He might not be classically handsome in the way Dane is, but what does that matter? I’m drawn to him all the same.
It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. In seven days, I’m done.
I have to be on that train.
We’re walking past a narrow alley when I hear a familiar sound, albeit one I shouldn’t hear. A gurgling, rattling groan. A zombie with half its throat rotted away, if I had to guess. Mason hears it as well; his head turns, but he doesn’t rush to intervene.
I tighten my grip on my bat. The zombie lurches out of the shadows, rags hanging from its broken, emaciated frame. Mason clutches at my coat and I push him back.
“We need to follow it,” he says.
“We need to—” It lunges.
Not for me.
For him.
I swing without thought. My bat is an extension of my arm, and I hear a satisfying crack when the metal meets bone. The zombie snarls and turns its attention to me.
“Isaac,” Mason hisses, but I shake my head. The zombie is, like a lot of the ones I saw last night, less rotted than it should be, but I don’t have time for dissecting clues. I catch its knees on my next swing, shattering one kneecap entirely, and then when it jerks forward again, arms outstretched, I hit those, too.
Mason leans back against the wall, apparently content to watch. He makes a quiet sound when I bring the zombie to its knees, but I hear nothing from him when I hit it in the head once, twice, three times.
Bone and brain coat my bat, but the zombie is silent. Gone.
It’s over.
Mason pushes off the wall. My heart races, chest heaving with each breath. I’m keyed up for another fight and he sees it; he stops a few feet away and takes me in.
“You destroyed it.”
“Yeah, sorry. I know we should follow it, but it’s too cramped here. We’ll have to try to find another.”
“You saved me.”
“I—” Of course I did. We’re out here searching, aren’t we? I can’t do any of that if Mason is dead. “Yeah. You don’t have—Why don’t you have a weapon?”
Mason gives me a smile that is equal parts dangerous and devastating. “Oh, who says I don’t?”
Chapter Nine
WesearchGravesenduntilthe sun goes down. I see no more signs of other zombies, but Mason seems not at all surprised by that. For a while after we leave the zombie I destroyed behind, he’s quiet.
He seems to sense the moment my heart returns to baseline because that’s when he begins to pepper me with questions, a behaviour that continues for the rest of the day.
They’re surprisingly… mundane. All the questions I get in the Citadel are about being a hunter. Not even about the places we visit, but about the fighting, the killing.
