Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
My composure cracks, the gun wavering at my side. “Lainey? You knew my sister? Where is she?” The questions burst out before I can stop them, desperate and raw.
“Knew?” he repeats. “I know her still.”
The revelation nearly makes my knees buckle.
“What do you mean you know her still? Where is she?” I repeat.
“With the others.” The boy, Nate, moves to the fire, holding his small hands toward the flames without any visible relief from the warmth. The movement causes me to raise the gun, automatically tracking his movement, finger still on the trigger, though some instinct tells me bullets won’t stop whatever he is.
Not to mention, now that he’s here and speaking to us, showing no signs of being one of them even though he must be, it feels terribly wrong and against all my principles to even think about shooting a child.
“I was the first, you know,” he says conversationally, as if discussing the weather. “They fed me the people meat, telling me it was a deer. They wanted to make sure I would survive. My mother was pregnant but even so, they wanted me to survive. The hunger came on slowly for me. When my father finally ate the flesh, it wasn’t long before he tried to eat me, but I was already changing, so…” He looks up at us, smiling again.
A chill runs through me as I stare at him wide-eyed. The implications of what he’s saying—what he’s claiming to be—are impossible. And yet, after what we’ve seen, can I really dismiss anything as impossible anymore?
“Nate,” Jensen muses, positioning himself closer to me, a gesture that might be protective. “You’re Nathaniel McAlister.”
“Father says I’m not supposed to use our name with strangers.” His voice shifts suddenly, deepening into a perfect adult male tone: “It makes them ask questions we don’t want to answer.”
I flinch at the sudden transformation, my weapon wavering before I force it steady again. My mind races, connecting dots, forming a hypothesis too terrible to contemplate. The Donner Party. The McAlister family. The stories from my childhood—not fairytales but history.
My history.
“But there’s…there’s no way,” I say, shaking my head. “The Donner Party…that was 1847…You can’t have been alive since 1847.”
“Oh, but I am,” Nate interrupts, his child’s voice returning. “The hunger preserves us. My mother says it’s a good thing. I’ll always be her little boy.” His eyes flick to Eli again, lingering on the bandaged wound. “Is your friend going to join us? He smells ripe for changing.”
“He’s going nowhere with you,” Jensen growls, moving to block Nathaniel’s view of Eli, though my heart sinks. If this child thinks Eli is changing, he probably is.
The boy—if he can be called that—sighs with the weary patience of an adult dealing with stubborn children. “He needs to eat soon, you know. The hunger is the worst at first for the bitten. When he wakes up, he’s going to try and eat you, even if he wouldn’t want to. At first.” He looks at me. “Elaine thought she could fight it too, at first.”
“So she’s…” I begin, too afraid to ask even though I know the answer. “So Lainey is alive?”
“She’s as alive as I am,” he says. “She’s not like the rest of them. She’s more like my family, probably because she is part of our family. She’s one of the originals. The new ones…” he shakes his head, looking at Eli. “My father says they’re just animals. Hungry animals that won’t die.” He glances at me. “You’re one of the originals too.”
Something cold slithers down my spine. “Original?”
“Bloodlines,” Nate continues, the word carried on a sigh. “Blood is special. It remembers, even after generations.” He studies me with clinical interest. “Elaine said she was always pulled to these mountains, to her history. Don’t you feel it too?”
Images flash through my mind—my mother’s deterioration, her ramblings about monsters. My own nightmares of snow and blood. Lainey’s obsession with the Donner Party, her feeling of connection to a tragedy that should have been merely historical.
“Don’t listen to him,” Jensen warns, eyeing me with concern. “He’s trying to manipulate you.”
“I don’t lie,” Nathaniel says, sounding genuinely offended. “Mother says lying is for the weak. For prey.” He looks at Jensen pointedly. “Like you.”
He turns back to me, expression softening to something almost sympathetic. “I know Elaine would want to see you. She’s been waiting so long for you to finally come.” His voice changes again, higher now, a young woman’s: “Aubrey, please come home. I need you.”
I freeze, the gun nearly slipping from my grasp. The voice is perfect—Lainey’s voice, with its slight rasp and the way she always emphasized the second syllable of my name. A voice I haven’t heard in three years, except in my dreams.
I nearly break down in tears.
“Stop it,” Jensen snaps at Nate, raising the axe in warning. “Shut your little fucking mouth and stop playing games.”