stiff, forced, and then she gives up and lets it fade. “I wasn’t lying. You have to be born into it,” she says. “It’s genetic.”
I shake my head. No. This is our way out. Allie might be stubborn and impulsive, but she does what she believes in. I need to get her to believe in me. That’s the key. That’s what’s going to save us.
Jamison said we needed to move things forward. He won’t give up until he gets what he wants. I don’t know what I’m going to do if what he wants isn’t even possible. I try it from a different angle. “I mean, you must have been exaggerating about me building up immunity to the blood. What if you brought me back again? Could you keep doing that?”
“Why do you think I’m lying to you?” she says and then her head starts a slow shake. She looks nauseous.
But I can’t drop the idea as we head down to the car to wait for the others. We both climb into the back seat. “Allie, I want to do this,” I say after a quiet moment. “Be like you. Save people. We could do it together. We could figure out a way. If I could do it too, I could help you with rent. All that. I promise I would.”
Allie falls silent.
At first I think she’s considering it.
When she finally speaks, the words grate out of her. “My parents were slaughtered because someone couldn’t pay what they said they would and they got scared. My aunt was slaughtered because someone thinks the blood is going to fix their life or make them immortal. It isn’t a cool way to get rent money, Ploy. There’s more to it than that!” She finally lifts her head to meet my eyes. “You don’t realize how cutthroat they are. If it’d been up to any other resurrectionist to bring you back, they’d have let you die.”
Stunned, my arguments fall way. I’m not sure what to say.
“You know why?” she spits. “Because they don’t see you. You’re not worth anything to them. But you...” She twists to the window, away from me, whispers a curse to the black night beyond. “You were worth it to me.”
I’m not.
Worth it. I want to tell her why. Tell her what I’ve done. Why I had to do it. This is the moment, I think furiously. If you don’t speak now, this is the moment you’ll lose her.
But how can I tell the only person who sees me as anything good that I’m not. That I made mistakes. That she’s wrong, and she should get as far away from me as she can before I mess up everything even worse.
Allie sighs hard and leans against me. Without even realizing, my arm goes around her shoulders. “How’s this going to end?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I manage.
In my head, in a perfect world, it would end just like this, with my arm around her. But I don’t think either of us is stupid enough to think we’ll make it that far, to some happy ending.
At least not together.
Allie
When Talia shows up a few minutes later, I lean out of Ploy’s arms and move to the front seat. On the way back, I convince Talia to stop off at my apartment. Ploy’s not into it. “I need clothes,” I argue. “And my phone charger.”
“What if those people are there?” he says. “Jamison and whoever he was with?”
It’s a legitimate argument but it’s also four-thirty in the morning. “There are three of us,” I say. Two, I want to correct. Talia and I. Saving the baby seems to have swayed Ploy onto our team, but I don’t dare count on him against Jamison. Not after he pushed for more blood. I’d almost confronted him there in the car, his arm around me, my heart hammering in my chest.
“I have an arsenal hidden around that apartment,” I argue. Though honestly, I’m starting to think we need Jamison alive. Ploy hadn’t known the man at the cabin. Jamison could have a whole crew he doesn’t know about, each of them a threat. And if Ploy gets in the way, I promise myself, he goes down, too. “So were you able to make any phone calls?” I ask Talia.
“Yeah,” she says, stopping at a red light. The intersection is deserted. The windows are down, the night quiet and still. Humidity collects on my skin as we drive, my shoulder damp from the pre-dawn air.