The Lair Read Free

fence. Suddenly, this all made sense.
    I nodded and slipped my knife back into its sheath. “Sounds like a plan.”
    **
    After that, I shut down my emotions. As I listened to Merc’s story, my mind whirled, trying to fill in the missing gaps, to formulate a plan. Find a solution. All my anger, my fear, my panic—I just shut it all down.
    Sebastian—my “mentor”—would have been so proud. When you’re fighting for survival, there’s no room for emotion; only strategy, action, and reaction.
    Then again, Sebastian had been a bloodsucking monster for the past two thousand years and he wouldn’t know a human emotion if it threw him to the ground and beat the crap out of him. So maybe he wasn’t the best role model, but in this situation, he was all I had. I listened dispassionately. I planned. And when Merc was done talking, I gave him a nod that probably looked like agreement, and I walked back to the Hummer.
    By the time I reached the driver’s-side door, I was done keeping the anger in check. I wanted to rip the Hummer apart. I wanted to peel the damn thing like an orange and leave it in pieces. I might have actually done it, too, but we’d need it to drive away in.
    Lily slid over as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
    “What’s going on? What happened?”
    I immediately reached for the ignition, but realized she still held the keys. “Give me the keys. We’re getting out of here.”
    She looked down like she was surprised to see them in her hand. She hesitated, and I could feel her looking from Merc—who had followed me up to the gate and was now opening it—to my hand gripping the steering wheel so tightly I was surprised it didn’t crack.
    She was too damn smart not to figure out something was very wrong. “Can you first tell me what’s going on?”
    I didn’t want to tell her, but figured she had the right to know how badly I’d screwed this up. “Right after I left for Texas to find you, a group went out on a food raid and got attacked by a Tick. There were four survivors. No one realized that one of them had been exposed to the virus. He disappeared into the catacombs deep inside the mountain. Thank God someone figured out what had happened before he killed anyone else. . . .”
    “Damn.” She muttered the word on a soft exhale.
    “That’s why Base Camp is all shut down. They’re hiding in there. They’re too terrified to come out and risk infection again. Merc said he’ll let us in, but only if we spend time in quarantine.”
    I looked over at Lily to see her staring straight out the front windshield. Her chin had that stubborn jut to it and I could tell her mind was racing through the story she’d just heard. She twisted in her seat to look at me, but she kept the keys clutched in her hand. “Okay. So what’s the problem? Why are we leaving?”
    “Lily, when I got you and Mel out of that Farm, I promised to keep you safe. But I didn’t. Our trip here was one screw-up after another. But I thought that at least once we got here, everything would work out. But now—” My throat closed over the word as I imagined Lily trapped there in that mountain with a killer. Panic hit me again and all I could do was curse.
    I looked over at Lily, expecting to see horror on her face. Or fear. Panic, like mine. But she was frowning, head tipped a little to the side.
    “So you think we should go?”
    “Yes. Hell, yes.”
    “Just drive off and leave them? I don’t understand. Why would we—”
    “Because I thought it was safe here and it’s not. If Base Camp isn’t safe, if we can’t even go out looking for food without getting attacked by Ticks, then we’re all screwed. We can’t survive like this. I can’t protect you—”
    “Maybe it’s not your job to protect me. No, wait. Hear me out, okay?” She waited until I nodded before she continued. “When you rescued me, you thought I was an abductura , you thought I had this amazing power to lead the human resistance and sway