Page 30 of Hollow Valley

“She’s safe with Edie at the creek,” I asked.“Are you okay?What happened?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he assured me, and he glanced back over his shoulder at the others.

Fergus and Dougal were up in the loft with a crossbow, and Alphie was standing in the corner still wielding a hearth shovel.Leandro knelt on the floor next to Ryder, checking out a scrape he had on his arm.

Behind them, the bedroom door was open and covered in bloody handprints – both human red and zombie green – and I could hear Juniper crying.

I breathed in deeply, and I realized that I could still smell it.The pungent odor I had initially assigned to my daughter lingered long after she was gone.Nauseatingly rotten meat and too sweet, fermented fruit finished with a sharp greenness, like fresh cut grass.

It hadn’t been Fae that I smelled but my own chemical communications.In my dreams, I’d been so overcome by longing that my body had released pheromones to summon zombies.

I had accidentally called them here.

“But everyone’s okay?”I asked weakly, and my gaze was fixed on the bedroom door with the bloody handprints.Some of them looked so small.Toosmall.

“No,” Boden replied sadly.

And then because I needed to see for myself, I brushed past him and stepped over the zombie corpses.Before I even reached the doorway, I could see Oakley on the floor.His hand outreaching toward nothing, his throat torn out, his eyes vacantly staring at the ceiling.Another zombie lay on top of him, the back of its head bashed into a mushy green mess.

Juniper was still crying, but she wasn’t the only one alive in the room.Sienna sat in the corner of the bedroom, her young daughter on her lap, holding her tightly.

Juniper’s leg was bare beneath her sleepshirt, and the bright red crescent shape of a bite wound almost seemed to glow against her golden tan skin.

Sienna saw me noticing the wound, and her eyes welled with tears, but she didn’t say anything.She just rocked Juniper and held her close.

“Is it awful altogether?”Fergus asked from the loft.

I nodded.“Yeah, it is awful altogether.”

“The little lass is still with us, yeah?”Dougal asked.“I can hear her.”

“She’s been bitten,” Boden said, his voice behind my shoulder.

Juniper didn’t look up, though her sobs had faded into thin, shuddering breaths.Upstairs, Fergus released a string of expletives in his dismay, and Leandro asked if there was anything that we could do.

“I am so sorry,” I said in a voice so thick, I thought I would suffocate under it.

“I know,” Sienna said, but she didn’t, because she didn’t understand what I was apologizing for.She thought I was only saying it, because that’s what you say to someone who just brutally lost her husband and will very quickly lose her daughter.

But what I meant was thatI am so sorry for summoning the monsters that tore apart your family and destroyed your life in a matter of seconds.

“What do you want me to do?”Boden asked her.

“Close the door and leave me with my family,” she answered.

Boden’s eyes went to the breeze ruffling the tarp over the window, where the zombies had broken in.This room wasn’t safe, and it held more than one corpse.

“Sienna, you weren’t bitten, were you?”he asked.

“It doesn’t matter!”Sienna snapped, her gaze fierce and determined.“I want to be alone with my family!”She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, she sounded much calmer but far more beseeching, “Just leave me be.”

Boden tentatively put his hand on the door.“If you… if you live, you know where we’re going.You can meet us in Glacier Valley.”

She didn’t respond and instead turned her attention back on comforting her daughter.

“Goodbye, Sienna and Juniper,” I said as Boden closed the door, but neither of them replied.

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