Dying Light Read Free Page A

temple.
    “ Uh, therapy dog. I died . You can’t deny me
some pug love.”
    Jeremiah stands, scrapping his chair
back from the bed. He doesn’t say goodbye or another word to us. He
just disappears out the door.
    Ally sits on the only part of the bed
that isn’t lumpy with legs or pug. “Are you bickering
again?”
    “ He’s riding my ass about
not killing Jason.”
    Ally frowns.
    “ Brinkley never asked me
to kill anyone,” I say. “And here Jeremiah comes in trying to tell
me what to do, and acting like offing people is totally normal.
It’s so not
normal.”
    Ally’s eyebrows scrunch up and her
mouth flattens into a grim line. “I understand his argument.
Killing Jason would make you stronger.”
    “ Yes,” Gabriel adds. He
stands at the foot of the bed, arms crossed over his chest and
pouting. A wing draped over each shoulder.
    “ You stay out of this,
Gabriel.” There is a momentary hitch where I’m worried someone has
heard me say his name. But it’s only Ally here, so I relax. My
shoulder blades ease away from my ears.
    “ What did he say?” Ally
asks, her brown eyes searching mine. I suppose I could be worried
that anyone, even Ally, knows that I have conversations with my
hallucination. My ex-mentor Rachel spent years in a mental hospital
for this very reason. But I wasn’t afraid around Ally.
    “ I prefer you don’t hide
it. In fact, please don’t hide anything from me,” Ally had told me
once. “We promised, no more secrets.”
    I am doing my best to keep that
promise.
    “ Three votes for offing
Jason,” I say. “It seems I’m outnumbered.”
    I scratch Winston’s belly.
    “ Again, I’m not saying
it’s a good idea, but just think about it, Jess. If you had Jason’s
power, you could heal without dying. Doesn’t that sound so much
better?”
    Buttloads
better , I think, shifting my weight to
relieve the deep, throbbing ache in my pelvis.
    “ You’re the ultimate
pacifist.” I lean back into the pillows. “I can’t believe you want
me to off a guy.”
    “ I don’t.” She tucks her
straight blonde hair behind her ears. “Every time I think of you
fighting, it makes me sick. But I also don’t want Caldwell to have
any more power.”
    “ I agree,” Gabriel adds,
folding his arms over his pristine suit jacket. The black lapel
lies exactly where it should without a fleck of dust on it. The tie
changes from an emerald green to a fire engine red.
    “ Shut up, Gabriel. You’re
sadists. Both of you.”
    Ally smiles. “Says the person who
pushed me out of a 34-story window.”
    She has a point.
    I reach out and squeeze her hand.
“How’s your work going? Was the laptop helpful?”
    “ I don’t know what
Jeremiah is going to do with the laptop, but yes, we were able to
place two girls, sisters, last night.”
    “ You get so much done
while I’m dead.” I try to get comfortable on the pillows but it
isn’t happening.
    She smiles. “You grew an entire pelvis
cradle. You’re hardly lazy.”
    “ So tell me about these
sisters.” I want to keep her talking. Ally’s voice is calming and
it’s a pleasant thing to focus on when really I want to mash the
morphine drip button a hundred times. Maybe Jeremiah turned it off
on his way out, the spiteful bastard.
    “ Caldwell has a
four-person team that’s been working the Louisiana death
replacement circuit pretty hard. Nikki thinks they’re looking for
someone down there. Anyway, these girls had a mother with NRD. She
was killed and the girls didn’t have any other family. God, Jess,
they were so poor. They barely had a chance to rebuild after
Hurricane Katrina and then their mom is killed.”
    Tears well up in her eyes and I want
to look away. I hate to see Ally cry. I squeeze her hand a little
tighter as my gaze slides down to her shoulder, hopefully giving me
a thoughtful look.
    “ We were able to find a
wonderful couple in Philadelphia that wanted to take them in—both
of them, which is great. I was so worried we’d