Blood of the Wicked by Karina Cooper Page A

between them all. Across the room, picked out by the powerful sweep of her borrowed light, the remnants of wooden stairs decayed beneath a door set a foot up into the wall. She climbed over piles of ruined garbage toward it.
    One part eerie, one part awe-inspiring, Jessie realized she trespassed through time. That she stepped over the sad remains of someone’s life, someone’s home or business.
    Broken, abandoned, destroyed. Like so many since the earthquake and after.
    Old wood crunched under her boots. She bent, rifled through the disintegrating remains of something long past recognition, and couldn’t help her low, regretful sigh. “Whoever you were,” she murmured, “I hope you lived.”
    The odds were slim at best. By all accounts, fire and flooding took care of whatever survivors could have held on long enough to be rescued.
    She stood, unable to do more than hope, and dusted off her hands. The door the steps had once led to was solid, protected from the elements and mottled by mold. She braced her hands against it and pushed.
    Nothing. It creaked, but it stayed put.
    Behind her, a second, thinner beam of light caused her shadow to dance wildly across the moldy panels. “Stay close,” Silas said, anger edging every word, “means letting me know when you wander off.”
    “Sorry,” Jessie said, and didn’t mean it. “We need to get through here.”
    “Have you tried the doorknob?”
    Jessie shot him a scathing look over her shoulder, eyes narrowed. Her gaze caught on his wet, disheveled hair. His face was set in hard, angry lines, sheened with water. His own smoky eyes raked over the door in front of her, and that little surge of heat licked through her blood again. “Y-yeah,” she said, and had to stop to clear her throat. Damn. She needed to stop that. “It’s stuck or something.”
    “Move.” Silas put the penlight between his teeth and pushed her away from the frame. He set his shoulder to the door, one hand on the panel for balance, and shoved.
    Wood groaned.
    “Damn,” he grunted, and shifted his weight onto his back foot. He withdrew the metal flashlight from his mouth and ordered, “Protect your face.”
    “What?”
    Jessie rolled her eyes and covered her face with one arm when he only glowered at her. She heard him move, feet hard on the floor, and then wood splintered beneath a heavy thud. Another one, and the door cracked, slammed inward.
    “ Fuck ,” he said suddenly. “Jessie, don’t—”
    She ignored him, dodged his warning grasp with ease. “I’m sure we’re almost—”
    The words, her thoughts, shriveled on her tongue.
    Black and brown. Blood and bone. The smell rolled over her like a physical push, putrid and sharp. She gagged. “Oh, God.” She staggered back toward the wall, her flashlight clattering to the ground at her feet. “Oh, God. Silas .”
    She felt his hands clamp on her shoulders, knew she’d been turned around, but all she could see was the corpse in the center of the tiny room. Half gone. Half liquefied. Half—Oh, God, was she standing in it?
    Was she standing in Caleb ?
    Every hair on her body prickled in a wave of cold sweat as her stomach lurched. “I have to—Let me go!”
    He didn’t. Silas caught her against him, pulled her close and tucked her face against his shoulder. His arms wrapped tightly around her, pulled her back out of the room. Back into the dusty storage space, into the gloom that didn’t have the same colors.
    The same corpse.
    She struggled, he only held her tighter. “Jessie,” he said, as unyielding as the arms he wrapped solidly around her, as the hard muscle of his chest beneath her seeking hands. She caught fistfuls of his jacket and didn’t know whether to push him away or hang on for dear life.
    The smell was terrible. Now she knew why.
    “Oh, God,” she whispered again. “Who is it? Why?”
    Silas slid one large hand around the back of her head, cradled her head. The small of her back. “Breathe,” he demanded.