hand them off to Ploy.
“Put those in your pack,” I tell him. I smash half a dozen extra syringes into my backpack on top of the clothes. Riffling through the rest, I snag gauze, a needle and thread, extra tubing. They won’t help Sarah now, though. Nothing will. At the rear of the chest, where it’s always kept, is an envelope with my name on it. I don’t need to open it to know it’s filled with a few hundred dollars of emergency cash, a spare key to her missing Jeep and an ID. The picture on the ID will be of me, though the name won’t match. “Okay,” I say, emerging from the closet. “We can go now.”
Ploy’s back is to me. He’s hunched over, his hands working at something I can’t see. He drops an empty frame onto the bed and holds out the picture he’s taken from it. “This is you, right? I thought you might want it.”
In it, my five-year-old self smiles so wide my eyes are crinkled shut, hands above my head clutching onto a set of monkey bars. Sarah’s below, ready to catch me if I fall. In the background, slightly out of focus, my parents sit at a picnic table. I glance up at Ploy, surprised. “Thank you,” I whisper.
He nods, his eyes on the floor. “I don’t...I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Part of me wants to hide the picture. Instead, I sit on the bed. I stay there, knees pulled up, the picture balanced on them.
Slowly, he joins me. “How long ago did you lose them?” he asks. “Your parents.”
“Three years.” I want him to stop. I want to stop talking about this.
“They died like this? Like her?” he asks.
I stare at the picture. I don’t remember the day the snapshot is from. I don’t remember the park or the picnic we’re obviously all having. But I do remember every detail about what he’s asking. “The night they died, I went out. To the movies,” I start. The words come as Ploy gets to his feet and I think he’s leaving. Instead, he moves off the end of the bed and sits closer to me.
“The door was open …” I say finally. I know I’m not making sense. In my head it plays out perfectly. The concrete stairs with the crack in them leading up to the front door. Looking down as I fumbled the keys. The odd second of brain disconnect as I studied the two inch gap between the open door and the frame as if it would explain itself. My stomach, sinking just like it had when I’d seen the sandwich, the coffee cup with its spoiled cream, knowing already that something was very, very wrong. “I went in.”
Ploy rests a hand on my knee. “You were the one who found them,” he says.
“They were on the floor.” My voice is a quiet breath. Everything inside me feels deadened, numb. “They were cut open the same way Sarah was cut open.”
For a long time, Ploy says nothing. “There’s no chance this could be related?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Sarah said there were others she couldn’t reach. And Brandon’s only connection was through her. It had to be a hunter.” The empty blue vial told me what they were really after. What she’d stopped them from taking. Brandon, too, must have taken his before they could get his blood. Otherwise, why would they go after Sarah?
“Did Sarah give you names of the ones she couldn’t reach?”
“No,” I say, holding up the address book. “But every resurrectionist she’s worked with will be in here. We need to warn them. And I can go to them for help.” A trickle of doubt finds its way into me. I know so few of them, even those who live local. We all kept to ourselves, and aside from training growing up, my parents kept me pretty insulated. What if Sarah told the others about the fight. Told them I didn’t want to resurrect anymore, that I hated how we acted like some kind of mafia enforcers to these people who only wanted so desperately to live. That the threat of collecting blood money had cost my parents their lives. That I wished I’d never inherited the gene. “I think they’ll know what to do.”
“I’ll help you find them,” Ploy says. Ploy, who would be dead because of me if I’d gotten my wish. He gives the door a nervous glance. “Should