The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Addiction, pt. 1

WE GOT ON A TRAIN IN YORK AND RODE TO A PLACE CALLED LEEDS. Sadie didn't say a word the whole way there, silent for hours. Where once she'd stared into space, now she stared into Lizzie's marked up copy of The Cider House Rules, her ancient handwriting reading Reveal me. We hadn't gotten anywhere with the code. If Sadie had figured anything out, I don't know that she would have told me. Not until she wanted to.

At some point she pulled out her battered Moleskine notebook and a mechanical pencil and flipped to a page of questions. The first one was:

Vampiric inbreed. What did he mean?
What could be more powerful than he is?

The last one a question about a finale. Her questions about Raven, I assumed.

I also noticed a small note scribbled in the margin. It read

"Monarch pendant."

Sam's monarch pendant. I remembered that. She hadn't taken it off when we had sex in New York before she disappeared, before Salem when we'd figured out who she really was. I remembered it laying against her smooth stomach thinking how weird it was.

Sadie drew a line beneath the last question and started adding others to her list. I read over her shoulder, obviously.

Survivors in the mausoleum town? Not humans?
Why do they read & smell like humans?

What else does Sam know?
What can she do that's keeping her alive?

What did Tituba know that got her killed? 
And why kill her now after all this time?

Where's the "other.' Who else was lost like Tituba?

Why does he keep preserving these people and homes?
Why do they matter?

Why protect Tituba's body? What does a body matter?

She made an angry noise and snapped the book shut.

Once we got off the train, she pulled up a hotel app on her phone and flicked through it. And though I had grown used to the distance she could put between herself and the next living thing, even when standing six inches from them, Ben and Noah had not. I don't know what Sadie was like when they all grew up together, but I knew they didn't know how to handle her now.

Ben asked, "Why are we here? Is this place important?"

"No," Sadie said and continued her work on the phone.

Noah was agitated. Tense. Hungry already, which was disconcerting. As much as I was game to let Sadie forget what we did and why our eyes turned this vibrant shade of red, I wished we'd planned a stop in somewhere in the country between here and there. Now we were in a city, a bad place for a kid like Noah. Just starting out, isolation helped. It minimized the damage.

But I couldn't say this to our aloof and alluring leader. Noah was my problem. And Ben was too, in a way. And Sadie was too . . . in every way.

I knew my place. That's why I was on this trip and not Everett, not my sister, not any of my other family or Sadie's family. I was here because I would play along.

"Got it," she said. "A hotel right near here. Let's walk." She started on without us.

"Is she always going to be like this?" Ben asked.