Page 186 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Peter was cunning, inventing one clever tactic after another, knowing just the right buttons to push to cause the exact right amount of pain to steer us into doing what he wanted.

He knew everything about us, thanks to the rat hiding in plain sight.

“What about the trucks?” I asked, my thoughts straying, summoning a visual of another funeral to host, where I would have to stand stoically near the blazing fires, where the cloying stench of burning flesh would drench me in heaviness together with the wails of families and friends of everyone we lost tonight.

“Most got away. We managed to hit the tires of three. Eli is checking to see if we can fix them up and use them ourselves.” Grimacing, Ava warily stretched her arms up. “I think my ribs got bruised.”

Ezra waved at the makeshift bandage secured around her right thigh. “Your leg has been shot and you’re worried about your ribs?”

“It’s just a graze. The bullet didn’t even gointomy leg. And Eislyn stitched me up.” She tapped the half-soaked cloth, likely a strip of someone’s pink t-shirt. “There’s no time for rest, so I figured this might help to keep the stitches from tearing.”

“I still don’t understand how you’re standing.” Ezra squatted to check the pulse of a curvy figure lying face down in their own puddle of blood—obviously dead. But you always checked nevertheless.

“If you had to live with cramps and headaches every month since your first period, you’d understand.”

“Eislyn gave you some painkillers?” I asked, navigating around the three bodies of our neighborhood schoolteachers lying on top of each other on the crumbling sidewalk. Their ashen faces and empty eyes called me back into the void that had kept me its lone prisoner for years, each tattoo on my back another brick in its impenetrable walls. “How many soldiers have we taken alive?”

“Nope. She didn’t have any to spare. Lack of meds in general. But either way, I wasn’t lying in bed. Too much work has to be done,” Ava said, rolling her eyes at Ezra waving her off and hurrying to help Amari lug a corpse himself. They pulled it away from the middle of the road, clearing it for the others who would come to pick up the dead for incineration.

“We have six soldiers restrained,” Ezra told me, wiping his palms on his dark purple sweater stained in dirt and bodily liquids.

“That’s it?”

“You can’t say no to people killing them. It’s like saying hey, you’ve shot my family, but I’m going to let you go,” Ava grumbled. “Eli has taken all the six to the underground. Noone has the balls to go there. If you need us, shout,” she said, nudging Ezra to join Jayla in helping our med team at the end of the street.

“We have to go! I have to get her back!”

I spun around to find Zion and Amari holding a writhing and yelling man, barely younger than me, one of the workers behind the bar at Vice.

“Why don’t you listen?” Ryn shouted, thrashing in their grasp. He ceased resisting as I strode to them. “Please, you have tolisten,” he pleaded.

These things never became easier. “Ryn, who did they take?”

“My wife,” he cried out, desperation etched in each syllable.

A wife, a loved one, a sister. There was no difference. The incessant call for revenge could churn anyone’s insides. It could spin your senses into a whirlpool, creating an endless cycle of torment and agony. A loop with no exit, no light, no end.

“I’m sorry.” I repeated what I had said more than a decade ago to the others. “But we cannot go after her.”

His face went slack. “I have to,” he whispered.

“We will not repeat the mistakes of the past,” I said, my voice level, calm. I could not display a sole sign that this conversation had stirred up the memories I would have given anything to create anew. “Whoever we would send, they would not return.”

“You don’t understand!” Ryn tried to break free, and Amari reluctantly called for the med team. Eislyn cast one look at the man, ordered her assistant, and Jayce hurried over.

If Ryn didn’t calm down, we were going to have to physically restrain him. Shortage in meds meant sedation was not a viable option.

Zion took a deep breath. “I’ll talk to him.” Roughly scratching his chest, the flakes of caked-up blood flew off his skin, only to be replaced by the red paths his nails had left, as he motioned with his head. “Go. Find a way to sort this mess out.”

Leaving him to handle the distressed husband, I rolled up my sleeves and gritted my teeth at the tattoo curling around my forearm—a mark of a person whose main responsibility was to make calculated decisions without second guessing, without thinking about who you had to sacrifice.

Allowing myself one last look at our people swarming the streets, working tirelessly to restore them to a peaceful state or consoling the falling apart men and women kneeling near those they had cherished, I invited their sorrow into my muscles, using it as fuel to get through the night. Together with the clean-up teams, we hauled Ilasall’s soldiers into piles and lined up our own dead on the sidewalk for their families and friends to find and identify before they began to rot.

But while my fingers dug into the clammy flesh, my body ached from the blows it had sustained, and my muscles burned from carrying the heavy corpses, my mind whirled.

You could not call this night the start of our war with Ilasall. It was an attack we had provoked ourselves, and one they used to take payment for our audacity to meddle in their business and to set a bait for me, a push for retaliatory action.

But rushed decisions and recklessness brought deaths, not victory. Not freedom.