Page 19 of Unnatural (Men and Monsters #2)

Who hurt you? The question confused Sam.

Especially because Adam couldn’t see all the scars that littered Sam’s skin.

Maybe someone had told him about those. Maybe someone had seen him washing himself off under the faucet behind the barn and noticed that the scars weren’t only on his face and his arms but on his back and the biggest one of all trailing from his throat to his stomach.

Still, those scars weren’t the reason he was alone.

Shamed. Discarded. That had been his doing.

“Me,” Sam answered. “I hurt myself.”

Adam seemed to stare at him for several moments, finally nodding. The old man looked sad but also understanding. “That’s the worst kind of hurt.” The old man paused. “Do you think I’m lucky, Sam?”

Again, Sam was confused. “Lucky?”

“Yes. Do you see me as a lucky man?”

Sam stared at him. He was old and blind and relatively ugly too—though who was Sam to talk?

—with bare, dirty feet and employees who regularly stole from him.

But he owned an apple farm and sat around the dinner table while people laughed and talked.

People who kissed him on his cheek when they stood up to leave.

“Yes,” Sam answered. “I think you’re a lucky man. ”

Adam nodded once. Then he unbuttoned his shirtsleeves, rolling them up slightly and holding the undersides of his wrists out to Sam.

There were two long scars up the middle of each arm.

“I agree,” Adam said solemnly. “I am a lucky man. But I didn’t always think so.

” He dropped his arms. “Things are always changing, Sam. Life is moving all around us, even when it seems to be standing still. Have faith.” Then he turned, tapping his stick on the dirt again and heading toward his house.

Sam stood there for a moment, watching him walk away.

Life is moving all around us. Sam had no idea what the old blind fool had meant.

Maybe he was foolish and crazy too. Have faith.

In what? That someday Sam might feel lucky too based on some circumstances he couldn’t picture or imagine?

He’d had faith once, faith in the missions.

But did you? Did you really?

Maybe not if his current situation was any indication.

Sam went inside the small room in the back of the barn where Adam let him sleep.

The other workers slept in a barracks-type room in a building closer to the orchard, but Adam, for some reason, had given him his own, with a door and a lock.

Maybe the other men had told Adam they were worried the giant with the scars, white hair, and strange eyes who barely talked would murder them in their sleep.

Or worse.

Who knew better than he did that there were worse things than dying?

Sam sighed as he looked at himself in the mirror.

He wondered what he might have looked like without all the surgeries, physically altering medications, and other procedures that hadn’t been explained to him.

He’d probably look normal. People probably wouldn’t stare at him with a mixture of fear and fascination.

But he wasn’t normal. And he never would be.

He picked up the razor on the small sink in the corner.

Maybe he should use it to cut his wrists.

He’d bleed out. It’d be a quick-ish death.

He turned the razor over, considering it.

It was pretty dull, but it’d still do the job if he pressed hard enough.

He pictured the long scars on Adam’s arms. He pictured the old man’s face.

He glanced down at the floor. If he did use the razor, then his blood would soak into the wood of the floorboards, and they’d probably have to be replaced, and what kind of way was that to thank Adam for giving him a job, a roof over his head, three meals a day, and all the apples he could eat?

Instead of killing himself with the dull razor, he retrieved the metal scissors from the toolbox he’d been given to make repairs on the farm.

They were large and rusty, but he used them to trim his beard into something more manageable and then shaved it off completely with the razor, the tufts of white falling to the floor.

Then he picked up the scissors again and used them to cut his hair, the silvery chunks mixing with the tufts of beard and contrasting with the dark stained wood.

In the end, his hair was very short and choppy, but Sam figured it was less alarming than the mass of white he’d been pulling into a ponytail at the nape of his neck for the last few months.

People would stare at him on the streets of New York City, where the crowds weren’t only made up of criminals and misfits but rather everyday, ordinary civilians.

Sam didn’t like to be stared at, but he’d also been trained to blend in as much as he was able, and apparently, he was still the creature they’d trained him to be. At least in some ways.

He felt his smooth chin with his fingers, turning his face left and right, noting how much sharper his jaw was than it’d been before, realizing how much weight he’d lost. If he’d had some hair dye, he might have colored his hair, but he didn’t, so Sam grabbed a ball cap on his way out the door.

He made the drive into New York City, the back roads becoming highways, the highways filling with congestion, the noise increasing along with the smell of exhaust and factory smoke.

The traffic slowed to a crawl, and Sam felt the eyes of people who pulled up in cars next to him, but he kept his gaze straight ahead.

Adam had left the name of the store where he’d bought the generator in the truck, including directions, and Sam drove there, pulling up to the dock out back, where a man loaded the item into the truck bed, barely sparing him a glance.

The errand was done in record time, and Sam headed toward the entrance to the highway that would take him back to the farm.

But just as he was about to take the turn, he veered the opposite way instead. “What are you doing, Sam?” he murmured to himself. Except he knew very well what he was doing. There was an apartment in the heart of the city that he and the others used between missions.

He knew it was a bad idea, the same way he’d known it was a bad idea to help the little girl. Save her.

What happened in Macau, Sam?

The same way he’d known, all those years ago, that it’d been a bad idea to protect the other girl. Autumn.

I made a boy of moonlight.

He didn’t feel quite as incapable of resisting this time, but he did feel pulled.

So Sam parked the truck, locking the covered flatbed where the generator was tied down, pulled on his ball cap, and headed toward the subway where he jogged down the stairs and was swallowed by the ground.