Page 31 of Unnatural (Men and Monsters #2)

She looked up, her hands stilling as her gaze washed over his face. Sunshine. Her eyes on him felt like sunshine, and each time she cast it upon him, something inside seemed to grow. Something that, without her light, had lain dormant in the dark. Waiting.

“How often did you chase us?” she asked.

“Once a month, during the full moon.”

“Why the full moon?”

He gave a slight shrug. “I don’t know. To make it more exciting maybe? To provide more light? They didn’t say. You weren’t always there. Sometimes it was others. Most of them never woke up.”

“What did you do with them, Sam?” He saw that she was suddenly holding herself very still, waiting for his answer.

“I hid them. You were the first one that ran from me. You were stronger than the others.”

She was quiet again for several long moments as she secured the tape. “They told us we were dreaming,” she said. “About being in the woods. They told us the medication brought on dreams so vivid they seemed real. And sometimes hallucinations. They told us we were imagining things.”

“You weren’t.”

She tossed the roll of gauze down. “Yes, I know. I know.” She covered her face for a moment, her shoulders rising and falling as though she was attempting to rein in her emotions.

“I know,” she said again, and this time it sounded more like a sigh.

She dropped her hands and stood. The scissors she’d used fell from her lap and clattered to the floor.

“They were supposed to care for us, and they used us. They threw us to the wolves.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“But they were supposed to care for you too, Sam. And I know you say they did, but…” She shook her head.

She turned away and then turned back. “The ADHM, the medication…is that why your ribs were replaced, Sam? I thought the bullet would have shattered them, but it didn’t.

Because they’re made of steel. You have other steel parts too.

” Her gaze moved to his bandaged legs and then back to his eyes.

“Your kneecaps. Your femurs. They were hit, but the bullets were deflected. The wounds on your legs were direct hits, but they’re merely flesh wounds. ”

Sam looked away even as he nodded. He felt shame creep through him, casting a shadow over the sunshine.

He felt exposed in a way he hadn’t before.

Much of him was made of various metals. His ribs, his knees, his thigh bones, his shoulders, and his temples.

Any person on the street could see what had been done to his hair and his face and the scars that might show beyond his clothes, but no one had ever looked inside him.

No one knew the ways in which he’d been carved out and replaced.

He’d been a mere shell, and Dr. Heathrow had created a human where one had not existed before. Yet human felt like a misnomer to Sam. Monster felt more accurate. So it was how he defined himself.

“The man who… The shooter, he was one of the kids in the hospital with you? In the same program?”

“Yes.”

“That day…when you said they wouldn’t help you, that they’d hurt you, you meant the heads of the program you were in?”

That day. In the schoolyard. “I wasn’t supposed to be there,” he murmured. He felt her gaze on his face but didn’t look her way.

“Did you have any idea what he was going to do?” She seemed afraid to ask the question, her words soft and hesitant.

Kill children. “No,” Sam said, meeting her eyes.

“I visited him an hour before. He seemed off. Something was wrong. I saw an address at his apartment. I went there. It was the school. It was too late. I tried…” He closed his eyes briefly.

If he’d only been ten minutes earlier. Just ten measly minutes, and everything would have been different.

“Why did he do it? Do you know why? Did he…go rogue? Or…go crazy ?”

“Maybe. I don’t know the why.”

She looked away worriedly. “They obviously will have recovered his body. They’ll begin an investigation.”

“They won’t trace him back to the program,” Sam said. They’d do whatever necessary to avoid that.

Autumn bit at her lip for a minute. “I called my job and took a leave of absence. But that only gives me about four weeks. You have to tell someone what happened to us, Sam. Not just with the shooting but with the hospital. The training. The woods. It wasn’t right , Sam, no matter how they justified it. ”

“I can’t tell anyone about the program, Autumn.

I meant it when I said they won’t help me, they’ll hurt me.

And as far as the training, they’ll say we were both sick and delusional.

No one will believe us. No one will back us up.

” He caught her eye. “You’ve tried, haven’t you?

” Because she was not one to let that go.

She’d told him she was in New York City looking for answers about her past. But more than that, he’d read her journal—he knew her, or at least he knew she was a fighter.

She would have fought. It would have gotten her nowhere.

Her frustrated groan was confirmation. “Finding answers is more important than ever now though, Sam, because this program, it’s obviously capable of great evil.

” She gazed upward. “Yet I have no internet out here, no way to look into…anything. Even if I knew what that anything might be.” She brought her gaze to him. “What are we going to do?”

We. No one had ever used that word with Sam before, and it brought him a measure of joy, but it also brought fear. We weren’t going to do anything. He had to ensure she wasn’t permanently caught up in his mess. “I’m going to get better,” he said. “And then I’ll go.”

She stared at him. “Where will you go?”

Sam shrugged. He wondered if the old man would take him back.

If he took his truck to him and made up a story about…

What, Sam? Will you tell him you got abducted by aliens who finally returned you to Earth?

There was no place in the world for him.

Once he left here, he’d have to follow through with the final mission. He really had no other choice.

Sam watched her as she set her supplies down, his gaze following the line of her profile…her body, attempting to commit her physical self to memory, the way he’d catalogued her thoughts and her dreams. Her body was as beautiful as her mind and as mesmerizing.

Finally, she turned, releasing a sigh. “Do you have any questions for me?”

He studied her. He had a million questions for her. He wanted to talk about all the things she’d written, the questions she had. He wanted to know if all the dreams she’d dreamt had come true. But he couldn’t do that. And he didn’t know how to anyway. But he did have a request.

“Is there paper here?”

“Paper? Um, yes.” She headed to the kitchen area where she removed a pad of white paper from a drawer. She took it over to him and set it next to the bed, along with a pen.

“Thank you.”

“What do you need it for?”

“I owe someone something,” he said. “It’s going to take a while, but…how do you eat an elephant?”

One brow went up and one brow went down, and she gave a soft laugh. “What?”

“One bite at a time.”

She kept looking at him like he was partially crazy.

“You wrote that in your journal,” he reminded her.

She stepped back to the bed and sat down again, and without her medical supplies in her hand, her closeness felt more intimate. His body tensed, and he didn’t know if he liked it or not. She cast her eyes away for a moment. “Yes,” she said as if just remembering. “How do you eat an elephant.”

He’d looked up the confusing phrase many years before, one of the few times he’d opened the internet for purely personal use.

“It’s a parable,” he told her, though she probably knew that.

There was a princess in it and a king. He’d laughed when he read it, something he thought had no answer, suddenly making sense through the use of a story.

“Yes,” she said, smiling.

Her teeth were so pretty. And there was a very small dimple at the corner of her mouth that was pretty too. Her top lip looked like a bow. He wished he could stop time and stare at her for as long as he wanted to. Which might be forever, and he couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.

Her eyes lit up as if with memory. “A parable that means even seemingly impossible tasks become doable if you break them down into small bites.”

He laughed softly, and her smile expanded, gaze moving over his face.

Something came into her eyes, and for a moment, they simply stared at each other, both of their mouths curved into smiles.

She glanced away first, her hand fluttering to her throat where her finger ran along the delicate silver necklace she wore.

“I couldn’t find the answers to the other questions though,” he said.

She looked back at him, her hand dropping. “Other questions?”

“How do you build a temple that takes a hundred years to build? How do you conquer time? How do you overcome death?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed, and her shoulders dropped slightly. “Well. Those are deeper questions that I still haven’t found the answers to.”

She glanced at him through her lashes, and he got the odd sense that she felt shy. He didn’t think anyone had ever felt shy around him before. Scared, yes. Horrified, probably. But shy? This is new. It made him feel strange. But not bad strange.

“Thank you for reminding me that I once asked those meaningful yet perhaps unanswerable questions,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to ponder them again and see what I can come up with.” She patted his knee and then looked alarmed, her face blanching. “Sorry. Did that hurt?”

“Not anymore,” he said.

“Not anymore,” she repeated, and her voice was slightly breathless. She stood. “I should…get dinner started,” she said, her finger moving over that chain again. Their eyes met again, held, before she turned away and then scurried to the kitchen.

He lay back on the pillows, grimacing as his body adjusted and his wounds pulled.

But despite his physical aches and all the reasons he had to feel worried and upset, his lips tipped into a small smile.

He was here , under the same roof with his precious Autumn, and he had no idea how it had happened, but it was real, and it was true.

And he found he was thankful he’d put off the final mission.

Because although he hadn’t been able to save those teachers, he’d been given some time with her— however long it lasted — some time in heaven before the lights blinked out.