Page 86

Eden

Be careful what you wish for.

Screams wake me. Bloodcurdling, raw male fear. Banging on doors. Women shouting.

By the time I sit up, panic punching through my fatigue, Dom has already rolled out of bed beside me, and Jayk is storming across the room to wrench the bedroom door open, his rifle in hand, and his makeshift bed of blankets abandoned on the floor.

By the couch, Jasper quickly tosses Lucky his shirt.

A bleary Beau starts pushing me out of bed, and I barely have time to register the fact that I’m somehow in Dom’s bed—that I was sleeping between Dom and Beau and I didn’t even get to appreciate it—when Jayk’s face turns rigid.

“Get up. We’re under attack.” Jayk’s eyes find me briefly, dark with exhaustion. “You stay here.”

He disappears into the shadows.

Footsteps thunder through the halls. There’s some kind of pattering, fast and distant like rainfall... only we’re too deep in the rock for rain.

Jasper pulls on his loafers hurriedly, his brow in knots. “Reapers? I don’t understand. Why on earth would they attack now?”

Heart hammering, I swing my legs out of bed and pull my hair back, only to realize I don’t have a hair band.

Lucky whistles, and I look up to see him holding one, then rush over.

Beau curses, tugging on his pants, right as Dom pushes open the door behind Jayk, snagging up a rifle.

Gun. Guns are by the door.

“ Attack !” someone shouts.

“Does it matter?” Lucky grabs up a rifle, too, and tosses it to Jasper.

By the time he’s grabbed the next one, I’m there, and he passes it off. I’ve only used a rifle once, but having a weapon—any weapon—in my hand steadies me.

At the next distant scream, Lucky bolts, and I dart into the hall behind him, fear throbbing in my throat.

There are women everywhere, armed and running down the stairs.

Bristlebrook is noxiously dark, but as we head down the stairs, sounds come into focus, sharpening like knives against the stony night.

There’s shouting. Bullets. Someone’s calling something, but I just can’t make it out, and?—

The man’s scream cuts off, and pure dread blanks my mind. It throws me violently back into the Sinners’ camp, the bleak emptiness that swallowed me when I thought my brutes were dead.

Lucky. Jaykob. Dom. Bea ? —

No .

We’re not there. It’s not one of mine. I can see my brutes, all of them. Dom and Jayk disappear outside, identically armed, and Jasper, Beau, and Lucky are storming down the stairs beside me.

They’re here. They’re alive.

Deanna catches Beau’s arm as he reaches the bottom of the stairs. She’s still wearing her bonnet, but she has Beau’s medic bag in hand, and he takes it with a hurried thanks. Leanne and Clare are behind her, their clothes sleepy and slapped together.

“Send any injured in to us.” Deanna pauses at the next scream, then adds, “Any that can be saved.”

Grim, Beau nods as he catches back up to Lucky, Jasper, and me in the doorway, and his arrival is heralded by a chorus of agonized screams from outside. Worry flashes through Lucky’s eyes, and all three of them check their rifles.

My mouth turns dry as I look down at mine.

I’m not even sure what to check.

Silently, Beau reaches over and flicks off my safety.

Lucky nudges me, offering a weak smile. “Don’t shoot the good guys, okay?”

Fear freezes my throat.

My glasses slip as I follow them outside, narrowly avoiding being taken out by Ida as she rushes past me. It’s all too fast. Too chaotic. I can’t even hear myself think. If it’s not my men dying, then it has to be the Reapers. Are the civilians attacking them ? Did something happen?

This makes no sense .

We spill out onto the lawn, though Jasper’s cautioning hand on my back warns me not to go too far into the suffocating darkness.

There’s no bonfire tonight. No moon or stars escaping from the threatening clouds.

The light from the house is pushed back by the night’s oppressive weight, and I stand in the tiny crescent of defiant gold.

Still, I can’t see.

There are flashes of light from firing gun muzzles. They flare through the trees like fireflies.

“Bridge is down ! Moat secure,” Sloane shouts.

Tearfully, Mary Beth begs, “Sloane, what is happening ?”

“It’s the fucking Reapers. Bethy, get down!” Ava snaps back.

“Keep to the platforms,” Jayk roars from somewhere ahead of me. “Hold your fire!”

“Stay back!” Dom is farther to the left, by the apple tree. “We hold!”

“No, please!”

“Help! Help !”

More and more men’s voices rise, and I realize it’s not us. We’re not doing this.

“Someone’s attacking the Reapers,” Jasper says, grave and cold.

“Let us cross, please !”

That one sounded like Pete, but the voice is lost to the black. To the deafening roar of bullets and bloody screams.

The civilians removed the bridge to protect Bristlebrook.

The Reapers have nowhere to go.

“We have to help them, right? Should we take the side tunnel? Pincer?” Lucky shifts between his feet, his eyes searching as sightlessly as mine. “Shit, they’re pinned.”

Beau gives him a grim look. “Are we sure the Reapers aren’t the ones doing this?”

But he pauses as another scream cuts off, and Lucky lifts his brows skeptically.

“Why would the Reapers attack after today?” Jasper’s lips are a thin, unhappy line. “No. This doesn’t feel right. It has to be someone else.”

Nausea swirls in my gut. My tired brain can’t reconcile those screams with bodies. With death . They’re night terrors, leftovers from my restless dreams, because the Reapers were laughing just hours ago. Sawyer was tossing apples to Kasey with a moustached grin.

He could be splattered in the grass right now.

“It could be a hundred things. Even if they are being attacked, we can’t risk the civilians until we know what we’re up against,” Beau grinds out, but he sounds uncertain. He glances down at me, his eyes lingering on my face. “We have too much to lose here.”

Jasper’s brow creases. “Could it be marauders? Strangers making their way through the woods?”

Marauders, like the hunters who chased me. Only my hunters weren’t any strange, rogue group, they were...

“I... I don’t think it’s marauders.” My lips are numb, and goosebumps ripple down my spine with frigid, fateful dread.

Please.

Please don’t be them.

Another Reaper screams, and my stomach dips.

“This is wrong. We have to help them,” I whisper, clutching at Jasper’s arm, but my throat closes around the words—so tightly I’m not sure they were audible at all.

But we . . . we do have to help the Reapers . . .

Don’t we?

Jasper rests a hand on top of mine, silently reassuring.

Cold wind whips us, cutting through my sheer nightdress. Overhead, the churning clouds rumble, choking out every star.

I’m not stupid. I know the risk of stepping out of safety to save someone else. But there aren’t enough people left in the world to be casual about death.

I am not a selfless person, nor a brave one. When I need to choose between my own skin or helping someone else, I know what I should do—and yet, it’s still a choice I’ve failed so, so often in the past.

But . . . we already made this choice.

Last night, as we made ourselves a family, we chose to defend the Reapers.

And right now, we’re letting them die.

Mary Beth’s anxious face hovers a few paces away, searching the dark. I can’t hear Jayk or Dom anymore, and it sends frissons of fear through me. Those men are far too reckless to be out of sight.

The gunfire stops.

My fingers dig into Jasper’s arm, and I’m suspended, breathless. Waiting.

A fiery plume lights up in the forest to my left. Then another. On and on, in a half circle surrounding Bristlebrook, fiery torches spring to life in the deep, ravenous darkness of the distant trees.

The civilians fall quiet around us. Only whimpers and dying gurgles break the expectant silence.

In unison, the flaming torches move forward.

Inexorable, portentous, the firelight begins to extend its claws, illuminating the carnage on Bristlebrook’s doorstep. It’s a horrific, frozen tableau. Shredded tents and exploded earth, Reapers’ bodies rent open and glistening wetly in the orange glow.

“Oh my God,” I breathe.

Over a dozen Reapers lie dead. The remainder are huddled at the edge of the dry moat that is too wide and lethally piked for them to leap across, even if barbed wire weren’t gating in the majority of our side.

Some are hunkered down behind trees at the forest’s edge, or worse, beside the paper-thin tents that will only cast their silhouettes into deadly relief.

Some are firing back from whatever meagre cover they’ve been able to find.

Some groan, wounded, where they lie, tangled in their sleeping bags or where they were gunned down as they ran.

Our people are motionless, guarded and armed as they line our defensive platforms. These are built up high enough to have an overhead angle on anyone encroaching, and the thick metal mantlets give them some protection against any weapons that can make the distance.

The men and women from Red Zone stand beside ours, white-faced and grim.

Dom is atop one towering platform, looking over the battlefield, Arthur beside him, and Jayk is on the ground in front of all of them.

Waiting.

Everyone waiting, watching, as the torches close in.

I step forward, squinting through my glasses, trying to make out the shadowy figures, but either it’s far too dark, or I’m far too blind.

“Stop, Eden,” Beau mutters, snagging the back of my nightdress.

The blazing torches stop at the edge of the trees.

All except one.

From the center of the tree line, a man strides out of the smoky haze, dressed all in black, and an icy finger touches my spine.

His cobwebbed, cavernous voice carries over Bristlebrook. “You’ve all disappointed me.”

My heart seizes.

Alastair .

Damn it. I was right.