Reclamation (The Ravening #3)(2)
Author: Erica Stevens

They couldn’t see Cade like this, they simply couldn’t. Their breathing was labored and their hair was dripping with sweat as they skid to a stop in front of me. "Are you ok?" Aiden demanded as his mahogany eyes fixed upon me.

Unable to hold his gaze, my eyes flitted back toward the glass front of the building. Aiden had been scrutinizing me ever since Cade had been forced to kill Ian in order to save me. Cade had revealed what he truly was to me that night, but the others didn’t know and they could never find out. Aiden didn’t know the true depth of the secrets I was hiding from him, but he was my brother and in the past, he’d always known when I’d been keeping something from him. Right now was no different; he knew I was holding something back.

I jumped a little as Cade’s hands came down on my shoulders. Twisting to look up at him, I was relieved to see that the black had seeped away from his face to reveal his striking features. He had cleaned the blood from his mouth and hands though I could still see specks of it in his hair.

Knowing that it would help to calm him further, and needing the connection with him, I rested my hand on top of his. "I’m fine," I assured the others. "How is everyone else?"

"They’re fine." Bret’s clover colored eyes scanned me before settling upon Cade. He’d become a lot more accepting of our relationship, but like Aiden he’d never hid the fact that he didn’t entirely trust Cade. If they knew the truth, the looks on their faces would be a lot less friendly, and as it was, the looks they gave him now weren’t entirely welcoming.

Cade slid his arm around my waist as he stepped beside me and pulled me against his side. "Are you ok?" Lloyd asked.

I was uncertain what he was talking about until I realized that his focus wasn’t on me. My gaze slid to the four round patches of blood, each about the size of a quarter that stained Cade’s electric blue shirt. My mouth went dry and my mind went blank as I felt trapped beneath their inquisitive gazes.

"I’m fine. I must have rubbed against something." Cade pulled the shirt out from his body and looked down as if to study the spots of blood. He pulled off the lie and baffled look far better than I would have as he rubbed at the marks before shrugging and dropping the shirt back down.

"Looks like blood," Aiden pressed.

"It could be," Cade acknowledged. "There’s plenty of blood marking this city right now."

I shuddered at the reminder and slipped my hands into the sleeves of my sweater to fiddle with the edges of the tattered cuffs. "I suppose." Aiden slid his rifle onto his back, but he didn’t seem satisfied by Cade’s answer. "We better get back. Darnell plans to try and get out of the city before morning."

"Since when?" I inquired.

"Since it has become apparent that most survivors have either moved on or…"

His voice trailed off but we all knew what he was going to say; or they were dead. We hadn’t seen any living, breathing people since entering the city. Blood spattered the streets and buildings and I had seen far too many bodies and random body parts in the past few days. The worst were the children and babies. I tried not to think about them, but the images of the lost young would haunt me for as long as I lived.

Whereas the aliens had turned Cape Cod and Plymouth into a makeshift prison for those who hadn’t been frozen, or that had already been reawakened, Boston seemed to have been a zone used simply for slaughter, pleasure, and mayhem. The aliens had come in here and ruthlessly hunted and destroyed any person they’d found, frozen or moving. I assumed there had to be survivors somewhere, that some people must have escaped, but there was no way to know as we’d come across nothing but death and destruction.

I’d asked Cade why they had left one area alone and basically untouched, while completely destroying another. He’d assumed that it was because Boston’s population was far higher than the Cape’s so there had been more survivors in Boston and more of a chance of a rebellion amongst them. The people within the city had been decimated, and their bodies left behind, as a warning of what could happen to any other survivors that came here seeking refuge or retribution.

However, Cade hadn’t expected the complete massacre that had occurred in Boston, he never would have allowed us to come here if he had. He’d expected more aliens in the city, we all had, but the risks had seemed worth the food, medical supplies, and possible help we had hoped to find here. None of us had known that we were walking into Hell on earth, and that the rewards we had been hoping to find here were never going to materialize.

Even though we wouldn’t be able to get supplies, a part of me was glad that Bishop wouldn’t be able to get a hold of more equipment to test my blood with. I wasn’t like the others, my blood type wasn’t O, but there was no secret cure hidden within my blood like the one that Bishop hoped for. The secret lay within the fact that Cade wasn’t human, and in the hopes of saving me from The Freezing, he had given me some of his blood. His blood could have killed me, but if he hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have survived at all. I would have been like my mother, who had been lost soon after The Freezing occurred.

Although Cade’s blood had changed me and may still be changing me, I would forever be grateful for what he had done for me. Grateful for everything that he had risked for me, and for the pure love he so easily gave when his kind was incapable of such a thing. I couldn’t help but return that love as he’d had my heart since we were children.

I would have liked to have been able to get our hands on some more medicine and supplies though, even if it meant we had to come up with a viable excuse for Bishop not to poke and prod at me anymore. We were in need of antibiotics, antibacterial creams, bandages, painkillers, and any other thing that would help keep us alive. Which was just about everything, we didn’t have much left if an emergency arose.

However with most of the routes to the hospitals blocked off, and absolutely no guarantee that any of them actually still remained, that part of our mission had quickly been abandoned. Just as the mission of trying to find Jenna’s parents had become too hazardous to pursue. The decision had broken Jenna’s heart and she had cried a lot of tears, but she had never complained and she hadn’t argued with us about it.

Her parents had probably arrived in Boston a couple of weeks before us, when the alien occupation here had been at its highest and worst. Unwilling to not show some kind of an effort on Jenna’s behalf, Darnell had managed to get us to her grandparent’s house. It had still been standing, but there were no signs of life within the dusty recesses of the home. We’d tried to get to another of the meeting places that Jenna’s parents left in their note to her, the science museum, but the way had been blocked. The search was officially abandoned as our own survival became paramount, and the risks too high.