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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MADS

Uncertain of what else to do, I wait until it’s been a good hour since I heard anyone and slip along the rocks to stay dry as I leave. My legs still feel leaden and the shackles on my wrists feel like they’re weighing me down, but I head out into the trees looking for a road or something to eat.

Where are we? We came from inside a building…

so was it some facility set off in a remote location that’s hidden in the forest so dense we can see no way out?

I hear an animal and stop to listen to determine whether it’s large enough to take some blood from.

I’d prefer another deer, something I can drink from and refrain from killing without it bloodying me in return.

I find one and grab it, drinking enough that the animal weakens but not enough to kill it before letting it free. And that’s when I hear someone.

Quickly, I slip against a tree and press my bare backside into the bark as I listen. They seem to be alone as they move through the trees at almost a leisurely pace. I wonder if they’re lagging behind with the hope of not finding Ender, who seems more than willing to murder anyone on the spot.

I’m far enough from the waterfall that interacting with them won’t lead them to our location.

Quietly, I move closer to them, unsure if I could take them in a fight at this point in time—especially when I can’t take most people in a fight on a good day.

When I get close enough to see the person clearly, I notice that he’s staring at his phone…

which I could very much use. He’s so fixated that he’s slowing until he stops and then sits down right there in the trees.

Whatever he’s doing is apparently the most interesting thing he’s ever seen because he doesn’t see a thing as I slip out from behind the trees and slam him to the ground.

He screams, which isn’t helpful, so I dig my nails into the back of his head. “Keep screaming and I’ll tear your scalp off,” I hiss.

He immediately shuts up and I feel like a badass. A rather naked badass… hell, maybe it’s been my clothes limiting me all this time?

“Where is the nearest road?” I demand, just rolling with my new bad guy routine.

“F-Fuck if I know! I was just told to find you and the other guy. And I don’t want to die so I thought if I just hung back I’d be okay.

But you still found me, and I really don’t want to die.

Please? I will do anything you ask. I will give you my life savings.

It’s really not much, but I’ll give it to you. I have a car! You can have the car!”

“How the hell do we get out of here?”

He glances this way and that like there might be an out that I hadn’t noticed myself. “Well, uh… I mean, I know the way back to the compound. Then from there, there’s a dirt road leading out which we take to get back to the city.”

“Which direction?”

“Let me think… the sun is always in my eyes as I drive in. So… whatever way the sun rises… east? Is it east? West? Fuck if I know. I just know I don’t want to die.”

“Why does he want Ender?”

“I really don’t know. That fucker is crazed. He just rushed through and slaughtered a bunch of vampires with ease. It was like he was playing with humans. He fucking ate them.”

“Give me your clothes,” I demand. I’m honestly getting pretty good at this. Maybe I just needed to be pushed to my limits to learn my badassness.

“You can have them all!” he says as he starts stripping his shirt off with speed. When he lifts it, I see he has a gun.

“Hands up!”

“O-Of course! I don’t even know how to use the thing! Ha. Save me.” He lets me take the gun, but when I do, I see that his phone is in his hand.

“And your phone.”

“It doesn’t work out here.”

“What were you doing on it?”

“J-Just reading a book.”

“Open it.”

He does and as he continues stripping for me, I open the map. While it’s not registering much, it does show me the area we’re in. The issue comes in when I zoom out, and it shows me that only a small area was loaded in and none of that area shows me a road of any kind.

“Where are we?”

“A national park in Canada.”

“Excuse me? At what fucking point did we end up in Canada ?”

“I don’t know. I just like… drove into work and you were there. You were the talk of the compound. I didn’t think I’d actually get to meet you.”

“You need a different job,” I say. “Clothes.”

“Oh right, right.” He hands me his hoodie, shirt, and trousers, all of which he’s removed. “Can I please keep my underwear? If someone sees me with no underwear…”

“Are you going to tell anyone you saw me?”

“No, of course not.”

“Are you lying?”

“I promise. I really didn’t want to be involved in any of this.”

“Because if you tell someone, I’m going to kill you.”

“I won’t!”

A part of me wonders if I should take him back to Ender, but I know Ender would likely kill him and then what? I’d have the dead body of some foolish young man to deal with.

“Alright, I’ll let you go, just… don’t fuck me over,” I say as I debate keeping the phone. It really serves little purpose now and they could use it to track us. I drop it on the ground and cock an eyebrow at the man now standing in his socks and underpants.

“I won’t, I won’t,” he promises me.

I begin moving away from the waterfall, planning to circle around when I’m no longer in his sight, before I hear something whizzing right at me. I barely miss the tree branch that was sent with such force that it’s embedded itself in the trunk of another tree.

Just as I turn, that lying asshole rushes me.

There’s this little part in the back of my mind going, “Remember how you weren’t going to mess with him because you are in shit health?

Remember how you are atrocious at fighting, so you choose to use your brain and avoid fights?

” and another part that’s like, “But I already plowed him to the ground with such finesse; I was so badass! I was so confident that I robbed him with expertise!” and then there’s the biggest part that’s like, “If you’d just killed him like Ender would have, he wouldn’t currently be slamming you to the ground. ”

So down I go, brawling this asshole who is almost as naked as I am.

The clothes and gun go flying from my hands because I can’t even manage to hold on to any of that as I face-plant.

He knows I’m weak and tries going for my eyes, but I very much like my eyes and would honestly prefer them to stay right where they are.

“I thought you were nice ,” I cry. “We had a moment where you were all, ‘I won’t stab you in the back,’ and I was all, ‘I’ll let you live because of it.’”

“Nah, you were just extremely na?ve,” he says with a chuckle as he slams my head into the dirt. This is really quite embarrassing.

“Because I try to see the best in people?” I ask before clawing at his side, my bound wrists hampering me.

I really need to take some fighting classes and stop relying on my charm to get me out of things alive.

Being a vampire doesn’t really miraculously make you a phenomenal fighter like people seem to think it does.

All I’m doing over here is flailing, kicking, and going for the balls since that sounds like a decent idea.

None of which he seems to overly enjoy, but he’s trying to go for my eyes while claiming that I “don’t need eyeballs to tell Abel what he wants to hear.”

“Well you don’t need your fucking nuts either,” I snap as I try my hardest to knee them up into his body.

He groans but it’s not enough and I end up with a slice in my side.

I would very much rather not bleed out again when I just managed to get some blood back into my body, but he’s weirdly unconcerned.

“You are being very mean!”

“Does it look like I care?” he asks.

At this point it’s evident he plans to maim me enough to drag me back to the others where they’ll try beating out of me where Ender is and then stab me some more until I tell them everything I know.

I flip to the side, hoping to get to my feet and try my hand at running. If Ender were feeling a bit better, I’d run to him in a “Hey buddy, I brought you a snack!” way but at this point, I’m not even quite sure he’s alive enough to help me with his snack! We might end up being the snack!

“I fucked up, I fucked up,” I cry as he grabs my leg before I can get to my feet and jerks it back so I slam down onto my face.

The nice thing about this is I hit extremely close to a rather sharp rock.

I grab it and just as he’s trying to crush my throat, I twist, having this grand plan of slamming the rock into his head in this badass fight.

What happens instead is that he runs into the rock.

It’s really a joint effort. The sound it makes is quite icky and I quickly scuttle away as he hits the ground, rock embedded in his head.

Obviously, he’s not quite dead. But to kill him, I would have to remove his head, bleed him dry, or go for the heart, none of which sounds easy to do when I’m still over here pleased that I’ve got two eyes.

“I am alive!” I realize. “Ha! Did you see that badass move? I am a proper badass, thank you very much!”

Hurriedly, I retrieve the clothes and gun that I’d dropped. Since he had a gun, why didn’t he go for it earlier? Unless the ammunition would kill someone like me and he very much knew Abel wouldn’t approve of it.

I hear a noise that is still quite far away, but has someone heard what’s happening?

Shit, shit, shit .

I tuck the clothes under my arm and run as quietly as I can in the opposite direction of the waterfall. I’ll make my way back when I feel like it’s safe. Sadly, besides replenishing a bit of blood, I’ve accomplished a whole lot of nothing.

Thankfully, Ender is still asleep when I get back and I don’t have to recount that embarrassing experience.

I see that he’s shaking, though, so I take the new clothes and drape them over him, hoping that warms him up. Then I close my eyes and think about how the fuck we’re getting out of here.