The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Ava Bientrut, pt. 1

The structures ranged in size from a shoddy lean-to that only two people could sleep under to a two-story sage-green-sided modern block townhouse that looked like it had been plucked from a between two other condos, with no one the wiser.

"Do you think we can go in them?" I asked, unsure of the protocol.

"I don't think we should be here at all!" Parker blurted out. We all turned to look at her — I, for one, was surprised that she even had an opinion. "I just think... they're not... Why here? What will this tell us?"

"We just spent a lot of time and energy to reveal a hidden city—"

Mark cut me off. "I'd say more a mixed-era neighborhood."

"Fine, hidden neighborhood—and you don't understand why we want to see what's here?" I asked.

"Maybe we shouldn't disturb anything," she added. She was speaking in English now, I realized, so that everyone could understand her. The cadence of her voice was unnatural and sounded forced. Was it simply that her English was not as good as her Romanian? Though I remembered making a mental note that her Romanian had had a strange accent to it, too.

"I don't think anyone's coming back to them," Everett said, rattled like I was by Parker's strange sentiment. "Let's look."

I stepped forward to the first doorway, a rotted, wood-plank door barely serving as an entrance to an adobe shack.

We'd found the death. Beyond a little table and shoddy chairs and a firepit that acted as a stove, was a fabric and straw palette on the ground. Two dead bodies laid on the aging bed, obviously ancient and yet preserved. One appeared to be male, the other female. Their skin looked dried but remained intact. Their eyes were open, milky-grey irises perpetually staring at the rough ceiling above. Thick white cobwebs clung to their bodies as if chaining them to the bed.

We all edged inside the small room. The Winters seemed unfazed by death, but the nosferatu—Narcisa, Valentin, and Sam— were shaken and uncomfortable. Odd since they had once seemed so calm about mortality.

"I smell old blood," Mark said. "Good news for us."

"How's that?" Narcisa said, her nerves wearing thin.

"If there's old blood, that means they were both human and have decomposed, even if they don't appear to have decayed all that much. One of us," he said, gesturing to himself and to his siblings, "could lay still and cover ourselves in cobwebs, and we'd look and feel dead too," he explained. The thought sent shivers down my spine. If these creatures hadn't been entirely alive in the first place, like the Winters weren't, how could I know they wouldn't wake? That they weren't a threat?

"I wonder why they haven't decomposed," I said.

"Who knows? Why were they left here inside a shack, hidden by magic— a couple hundred years and a couple thousand miles from wherever it was they began?" Mark asked.

"She's not convinced they're dead," Ginny said, rolling her eyes. She was right. I wasn't.

"They might be listening to every word we say, waiting to attack," I reasoned.

"Let's settle this." Narcisa closed her eyes. "Valentin," she called, tilting her head toward the bodies.

Valentin took a deep breath to overcome his fear, knelt by the bodies, and laid his palm on the man's forehead.

"What's he doing?" Mark asked.

"Reading them," Narcisa said.

"He's a reader?" Patrick asked in disbelief. "You couldn't have mentioned that?" he asked, looking at me.