House Of Dragons Page 22

  "The rabbit you cooked was pretty good."

  In response, he just grunted, and I continued.

  "I shouldn't have flipped out how I did. I think I was just hungrier than I realized, and it was making me not think very clearly."

  Again, Blaine just grunted, but several seconds later, he actually communicated with words. "Just let me take you on my back. You've been walking all day, and you probably want to get off your feet."

  Both those things were true. In fact, currently my feet were aching, protesting the fact that I'd made them move again after propping them up on a stone during dinner.

  "All right. I guess I'll take a ride on your back. Thanks."

  A short while later, Blaine was in tiger form, and I was riding on his back as if he were a horse. Still carrying my heavy duffel bag over one shoulder, Nick walked alongside us.

  Although riding on the back of a wild animal was definitely a new experience for me, I found it was one I didn't exactly dislike. In fact, even though he wasn't padding along very fast, I found riding atop Blaine's gold-and-brown striped back to be kind of an exhilarating experience in some way, even though I kind of didn't want it to be.

  Maybe it was just something about feeling so much power and muscle beneath my hands, which I'd put on his back for balance. With each step he took, I could feel muscles rippling beneath his fur.

  For maybe a mile or so, Nick, beside us, didn't speak, but then he asked if I'd mind sleeping in a tent that night. "We have proper homes in Helena, of course, but I expect that the others we'll soon be meeting up with aren't going to want to continue on the additional several miles tonight. They've been out for a couple days, scouting around for new members to add to our community, and I imagine they're all pretty tired and ready to sleep, like I'm guessing you are, too."

  I briefly wondered if "scouting around for new members to add to our community" really meant "kidnapping women to hold against their will." I also wondered if I'd be offered a tent of my own to sleep in, or if someone else would be in it.

  "I don't mind sleeping in a tent...because that sounds a lot better to me than just sleeping out under the stars in the woods, like I usually do every night...but I'd prefer to sleep in a tent by myself."

  I'd expected Nick to protest, saying that wouldn't be possible or something, but to my surprise, he just nodded.

  "That's perfectly fine. I think there are enough tents for you to have your own with no problem."

  Quietly, I said good, and we both fell silent.

  Not too much further up the road, I began smelling the scent of cooking food and a campfire, and Nick said we were almost to the spot where he and Blaine had arranged to meet up with the others. "Won't be too much longer now."

  It wasn't, and a few minutes later, I found myself dismounting Blaine's back not far from where a group of maybe a dozen people were sitting on logs around a campfire, most of them eating from tin plates similar to the ones Nick, Blaine, and I had used.

  Once Blaine had shifted, he and Nick led me over to the group, who'd all whipped their heads around to look upon hearing our approach. Two of the men present had moved their free hands to their hips, as if reaching for weapons of some kind. Now, however, seeing who it was that had approached, these two men returned their free hands to their plates of food.

  After greeting the group and seeming to do a mental head count to make sure everyone was accounted for, Nick introduced me as Evangeline Blake. "Evangeline tells me she likes friends to call her Eva, though she's not too sure who her friends are right now, so please make her feel welcome, everyone."

  Most everyone in the group piped up, saying hellos and welcomes, although I noticed that one of the few women, a middle-aged lady with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair didn't say anything. In fact, she was just staring at me, eyes slightly narrowed, biting her lip.

  However, with her eyes almost appearing to become suddenly shiny in the firelight, she abruptly stood, saying that she needed to head into the woods for a minute. "I'll be right back.”

  Not knowing her, I wasn't entirely sure if she really had been narrowing her eyes at me, or if a narrow-eyed sort of look was her natural expression. For all I knew, I figured she could have even been experiencing a stomach pain or something right then, and might have just been wincing before dashing off into the woods.

  At any rate, I didn't care if this woman was happy about my presence in the encampment or not. I certainly didn't plan on staying with the group long. Hopefully, I would be able to plan some sort of an escape once we reached Helena.

  Once the woman had left, several members of the group told me their names, saying that it was nice to meet me, and I politely said the same back, though without really feeling the sentiment.

  The last person to tell me their name was a young woman about my age, maybe just a few years older. "I'm Tracy, and I'm new, too. You can sit by me if you want."

  Smiling, she patted an open spot beside her on the log she was sitting on, and I took my backpack off and had a seat, smiling a little in return in spite of myself, having a sense that us recently-abducted women should stick together.

  No matter that Tracy seemed a heck of a lot happier to have been abducted than I was. Although, I figured, maybe she hadn't yet even figured out that she'd been abducted. Maybe the group had told her that if she came with them, she could leave whenever she liked or something.

  Having shifted back into his human form, Blaine had a seat on one of the several logs around the fire, and Nick came over and extended a hand to Tracy.

  "I'm Nick Hardwick."

  Tracy all but leaped up to take his hand and shake it. "I thought you must be. I've already heard so much about you from the others. I'm so grateful to your group for finding me. I've been holed up in a falling-down farmhouse for months...hiding out from men and Huskers...so, so lonely for other people...I didn't think I'd ever be rescued."

  Oh, good Lord, I thought. She saw her abduction as "being rescued." Although, I figured, maybe it had really felt that way to her, considering the circumstances she'd been in. And who the hell was I to judge. I figured that if I hadn't had a one-track mind for making it to Nashville, maybe I would have considered being taken in by a group with food and supplies and homes to be "being rescued," too.

  Nick told Tracy that it was wonderful to meet her and that she was very welcome as a new member of the community, then introduced Blaine as his second-in-command, which Blaine acknowledged with a grunt, already enjoying his second plate of dinner for the night, which someone had handed him.

  Nick soon had a seat next to him, and a tall, slender woman named Elisa handed Tracy and me mugs of warm mint-scented herbal tea she'd poured from a kettle hanging above the campfire. Still not entirely trusting Nick, Blaine, or the other members of the group, I might have wondered if the brew contained some sort of a sedative or something, if I hadn't seen Elisa pour a mug for herself and already take a large drink of it.

  Actually grateful for the warm tea, since the night was getting kind of chilly, I cradled the ceramic mug with both hands while different conversations started up around Tracy and me.

  After a sip of her tea, she turned and spoke to me in a very quiet, low voice, though one kind of crackling with obvious excitement. "Isn't all this just...so great? They say they have a community called Helena not too far from here...with houses, electricity from generators, a good supply of food, running water, and the water is even heated, too, and they even have some kind of a fence around the community to keep Huskers and bad people out. We'll be completely safe there."

  Realizing that Tracy and I were seeing things in a way that couldn't be more different, I just gave her a polite little smile and spoke in a voice as equally quiet and low as her own. "All that sounds nice, but...you know we can't leave, right? Nick and Blaine wouldn't let me go, anyway...wouldn't let me go on my way even when I demanded to be released."

  Drawing her light brown brows together, Tracy frowned. "Well...why would you wa
nt to go on your own way? This community means safety, and protection...and a whole new semi-normal kind of life, from what it sounds like. Elisa and Kathy seem nice, and as far as the men...well, I can already tell that they're not the kind of men who just take what they want from women, if you get me.

  “Kathy even told me they're not, when she was trying to get me to come out of the farmhouse, and for some reason, I believed her. She just has really honest eyes. She's the lady who went off into the woods, by the way."

  Kathy, I thought. The woman with honest, possibly-glaring eyes.

  After another sip of her tea, Tracy continued in a quiet voice while the conversations around us grew louder. "You know what else Kathy told me when we were walking to this camp? She said that a lot of the men in Helena are still single and really desperately wanting wives. You and I will be two out of only eighteen women, and there are at least a hundred men. So, basically, we'll have our total pick.

  “Kathy said most of the men would be so glad to have a wife that they're not even hung up on looks. Kathy says the vast majority of them are just wanting a woman with a good heart, which...well, I think I have a pretty good heart. Which will hopefully make up for my looks...or, the lack of them, rather."

  Tracy definitely wasn't the supermodel type of woman, not that I was, either. She was also decidedly on the heavier side, and her physique, which was thick around the middle, might have been considered fifty or so pounds overweight.

  In response to what she'd said, though, I offered her a little smile. "Don't sell yourself short. You have a very pretty smile and beautiful eyes."

  Both those things were absolutely true. She did have a very pretty smile, which revealed straight, white teeth, and though I couldn't tell for certain in the firelight, her dark eyes appeared to be a rich chocolate brown and were fringed with long, curling lashes.

  What I'd said made her smile, and she even appeared to flush a little. "Well, thanks. Let's hope the men of Helena like my smile and eyes, too. I already kind of have my eyes on two of the men in the group here, though. Which...well, I haven't even told you the craziest and possibly-best part of everything Kathy told me yet. See, since women have become so ultra-rare and hard to find, and since most of the men in Helena are just really eager to get married, because a lot of them just want to move on with starting families to help repopulate the world...well, in Helena, most people are into what Kathy calls 'plural marriages.'

  “Which, before the apocalypse, she said usually meant multiple wives with one husband, but now it means multiple husbands with only one wife. Like, for example, Kathy is married to those two buff men across from us. She told me that these two men were two of the rare ones in Helena not particularly interested in becoming fathers, and since Kathy is past the age of being able to make them fathers, a marriage with the three of them seemed like a good fit.

  “Elise's husband is the blond guy to their left, but she also has another husband in Helena. It's all perfectly normal to them. Some women even have three husbands...and all the arrangements are permanent, just like regular marriages.

  “No matter how many new women come to live in Helena, even though that number will probably never be very many, the existing marriages will never add new members. The new women will just be married to all the new men who periodically join the community."

  During my travels, I'd heard about and had witnessed "plural" relationships, though never formal, permanent marriages. Once I'd run into a group that had struck me as bizarrely boisterous and friendly for the post-apocalyptic times we were living in, and this group had consisted of one middle-aged woman and no fewer than five muscular young men, all appearing to be in their early-to-mid twenties.

  The woman had invited me to come travel along with her and her "boyfriends," saying "the more the merrier, as long as you're not too greedy," but I'd declined, not least of all because I'd needed to keep heading south, and the group had been continuing west, having come from some decimated city of very few survivors in the east.

  In response to all Tracy had said, I just gave her the tiniest of polite smiles. "I see."

  "So, the two men that I have my eyes on are Trent and Donovan, those two very attractive guys to the right of Kathy's husbands. She told me that they're both single, and I think they both already have their eyes on me, too, because after we all left the farmhouse, they both offered to carry my couple bags of things, and they both kept saying how I was safe, and how neither of them were going to let anything happen to me.

  “Which...I'll just say that I had a few little moments where my heart went pitter-patter with each of them. Then Trent let me wear his jacket for a while when I got cold, and he put it around my shoulders in a way that made me feel warm in and of itself. The three of us are not sitting together because Elisa and I were having a little girl talk while we ate dinner, and then you soon showed up, and...I guess I'm just telling you all this so that you know that I've kind of already taken dibs on Trent and Donovan, at least dibs on getting to know the both of them a little better."

  Pausing briefly, Tracy glanced over at Blaine and Nick before returning her gaze to my face. "Maybe you've already taken dibs of your own, though...or other people have already taken dibs on you."

  I hoped to God this wasn't the case. If Blaine and Nick had already gotten it into their heads that they wanted to make me their wife, and something told me that they already might have, I figured it would make it a lot more difficult for me to plan and execute an escape once we all got to Helena. I guessed that they'd want me to live in a house with them or something, which I knew would make it a lot more difficult for me to fly under their radar and be miles away before anyone ever realized I was gone.

  Tracy continued chattering on, saying different things about Trent and Donovan, including the fact that they were both shifters, as were all men in Helena. Soon after saying this, Tracy abruptly stopped short in saying something else, then apologized for being so chatty. "It's just that I'm kind of a people-person, and I haven't talked to other people in so, so long. I almost felt like I was starting to go crazy in that farmhouse. I was actually making friends with mice and talking to them like they were people."

  Soon switching gears, she asked me to tell her about myself, saying that I somehow looked familiar. "You wouldn't happen to be that girl who won 'America's Next New Actress' right before the apocalypse, would you? I could never remember her name, but you look so-"

  "No, she's not the girl who won the acting show."

  It had been Kathy who'd spoken. Though I hadn't heard so much as the snap of a twig, she'd apparently emerged from the woods behind Tracy and me, and she now made her way across the circle to sit between her two husbands. Conversation around the fire had hushed now, and she spoke again once she was seated.

  "She's not the actress. She's the little girl who won the Olympic bronze medal in ice skating."

  What was strange to me about Kathy right then wasn't the fact that she'd recognized me or my name. It was that even in the firelight, I could clearly see that her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if she'd spent her time in the woods crying.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As curious as I was about why Kathy might have been crying, and as bad as I felt for her that something had obviously recently upset or saddened her, the last comment she'd made had upset me a little, just plain rubbing me the wrong way.

  After setting my nearly-empty mug of tea aside, I looked at her across the campfire circle. "You're right, that was me who won the Olympic bronze medal. But I wasn't a 'little girl' then."

  She lifted her slender shoulders in a shrug. "Well, you looked like a little girl."

  Truthfully, I was sure that I had. At the time of my bronze medal Olympics, I'd had a physique similar to a very slender pre-teen girl, with what I'd thought of as "bug bites" on my chest instead of breasts. I'd also been a few inches shorter than I was currently, having had a post-Olympic growth spurt when I'd begun allowing myself to eat a bit more.


  The fact that all of this was true didn't make me bristle any less about Kathy's second "little girl" comment.

  Again, I looked her right in the eyes, fighting to keep a clear note of hostility out of my voice. "I was actually seventeen at those Olympics...with the responsibilities and pressures of some people twice my age. No matter how I may have looked, I definitely wasn't a 'little girl.'"

  Before Kathy could respond, Tracy piped up beside me. "Oh my gosh...I can't believe that was you! That's why you looked so familiar to me. You were the little girl who battled her way to win the bronze even with that horrible, horrible injury...and after you'd just lost your parents the year before, which I'm so, so sorry about. You sure did them proud, though. You just didn't quit. How many stitches did you even get before you went out on the ice anyway? Please tell us all the details if you don't mind, because I'm sure we all want to know. I know I do."