“Why not?” I ask with a shrug. “I could.”
He laughs, dropping his head hard against the wood floor. “Touché.”
“You’re not really a girl, though,” Trent tells me.
Ryan laughs again.
“Wow, Trent, thanks for that,” I say sarcastically.
“I mean, you look like one right now, for sure,” he says, his eyes falling down my body exposed by the drooping blanket. I snatch it up closer around myself, glaring at him as he grins. “But your average girl couldn’t survive like you have.”
“Is that a compliment?”
He shakes his head, stepping closer and forcing me away from the door. “Nope. Not everything is a compliment or an insult, Joss. Sometimes things just are what they are.” He steps outside into the hall. “Take care of our boy. I’ll see you two in the morning.”
“That guy is…” I begin, dropping the board across the door yet again. I don’t know what else to say. He’s not annoying, but he’s not fun either.
“He’s Trent,” Ryan mumbles, still flexing his leg.
“Exactly.”
And suddenly Trent’s parting philosophy lesson makes a world of sense. I decide he’s annoying after all.
“So what happened?” I ask Ryan, plopping down on the floor beside him.
He lowers his arm, giving me a good look at his face in the moonlight. It’s covered in small cuts and tiny abrasions. He’s bleeding a little everywhere. Walking through the streets like this, casting out that living, bleeding scent, was insanely dangerous. It makes me grateful for the dark undead blood splattered over his shirt and coat. At least he had some camouflage.
“I fought in the Underground tonight.”
“You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“How often?”
He looks away, staring straight up at the ceiling. He looks exhausted, beaten. I have a hard time believing that this is what winning looks like, but he’s still alive so it must be.
“Not as often as my brother. He did it a lot. He was kind of a legend.”
“Is that how people know you there?”
“Partly. I haven’t fought since just before he died. He didn’t want me to. He fought for our gang as a way of making money. To earn favors from other gangs. It’s dangerous though.”
“Yeah, I imagine. You’re fighting Risen for fun. What if you’d been bitten?” I look over his body, finding more black tar blood as I search. “What if some of this has gotten inside you?”
“That’s not why it’s dangerous.”
“Ryan, you could die. It’s a big, big part of it.”
I feel panic begin to well inside of me as I look down at him, busted and bleeding. There’s Risen gore all over him, more of it by the minute it seems like, and I’m flashing back to all the times I’ve had to put a gun to someone’s head and lay them down just before the fever took over. Just before they stopped being them and started eating me.
I reach for his shirt, tugging it up toward his face. “We have to get you out of these clothes and cleaned up. You can’t sit in them acting like the blood isn’t seeping into you.”
“Whoa, Joss, slow down,” he says, trying to stop my hands.
I won’t have it. I slap his hands away and yank on the collar of his shirt, pulling him up into a sitting position. His face is close to mine, his breath on my skin and the sheen of his blood is reflecting bright in the moonlight. In my watery eyes. I yank on the hem of the shirt, pulling it up forcefully. This time he lets me. He puts his arms over his head and lets me carefully peel it over his face, taking extreme care not to let the outside of the saturated shirt touch his vulnerable, open skin.
When I toss it aside, already dreaming of the fire I’ll burn it in, I feel his eyes on me. Watching. Worrying. I refuse to meet them. Instead, I look over his now exposed chest, arms, stomach and shoulders, searching for any kind of cut that could have left him exposed. But there’s nothing. He’s perfect. He’s safe.
He’s an idiot.
I sit back hard on my heels. My eyes are still burning, but I let him see.
“Never again,” I tell him firmly.
“I’m fine. You can see it, I’m fine,” he says calmly, smiling and reaching for my hand.
I jerk it away. “This time. This time you’re fine. But what about next time? People die doing this, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” he admits quietly, his smile gone. “They do all the time.”
“Never again,” I repeat.
He sighs as he runs his hand over his hair. “I have to. It’s what you need to get to The Hive.”
“We’ll find another way.”
“There is no other way.”
“You’re not worth it, Ryan,” I snap. He looks at me, surprised by my tone. “No matter what I need, you’re not worth it. You can’t come bursting in here, scribbling your gibberish all over everything, making me give a crap, then go out there and die. You can’t.”
“Hey,” he breathes, reaching for my hand again.
And again, I jerk it back.
“Hey,” he repeats, this time forcefully. Like a scolding. “Give me your hand, Joss.”
I let out a rough breath, then try to smile at him weakly. “Just because I don’t want you to die doesn’t mean I want you to touch me.”
“You’re a massive pain, do you know that?”
I reach out, taking his one hand in both of mine. It feels less claustrophobic this way, having him pressed between my palms instead of being clenched inside his. I can handle this.
“I know that,” I agree, staring at his long, beaten fingers. “We need to clean you up.”
He stands, then tugs on my hands, trying to pull me up as well. I stay stubbornly seated, looking up at him.
“Who’s the whore?”
“What?” he laughs.
“Freedom. You guys didn’t make her up, did you? She’s real.”
He sighs, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah, she’s real.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a girl my brother was… friendly with.”
“She was his girl?”
Ryan shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Not really. But he never paid her. I told you, he was a legend in the Underground. This girl really liked him. Her and a lot of other girls.”
“Ugh,” I groan, finally standing.
“Hey, it’s one of the perks. You get good at it, the women start flocking to you.”
I point my finger at his mangled face. “Never again!”
He laughs all the way to the bathroom.
I sit on the closed toilet and watch him get cleaned up. I offer to help but he waves me away, claiming he’s done it plenty on his own. I believe him.
“How is becoming a Risen not the dangerous part of fighting?”
Ryan hesitates, the alcohol soaked rag hovering over a particularly nasty cut on his face.
“The dangerous part is being good at it,” he says quietly. He presses the rag to his skin, flinching slightly. “I got in the ring a few times, but it was never anything official.”
“By ‘official’ do you mean being owned by the gang?” I ask, thinking of Nats and Breanne.
“Yeah. They wanted me to fight for them too, but Kev wouldn’t let me. I still got noticed, though. I got offers from other gangs to join up with them.”
“To fight for them.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I just realized?”
Ryan smirks as he dabs at another spot of blood on his face. “That being a fighter is close to being a prostitute?”
I frown at him, worrying he’s a mind reader. “No. I just realized I don’t know the name of your gang.”
“Do you want to?”
“Is it bad if I do?”
“No,” he chuckles. “It’s the Hyperions. It’s Greek for one of the Titans. He was the father of the sun, the moon and the dawn.”
I snort. “So you’re a humble bunch?”