Free Wicked After Midnight (Blud) by Delilah S. Dawson Page B

me without missing a beat. As if I didn’t even exist, he started moving again, this time with more purpose and anger. I scurried behind him, boots slipping on bits of rock and bone.
    “Vale, what?”
    “If I knew what I wanted to do, if there was some secret calling in my soul, then I could walk away from Ruin and my father’s tears with a light heart. If there was meaning, if there was passion, if there was anything I was good at besides thievery and sarcasm, he would understand. As it is, I have no plans. No future. No wish. I am merely a rebellious bastard and a well-trained brigand who no longer cares to brig.”
    “I used to be that way, too.”
    The words were tiny, swallowed up by the huge weight of an entire city overhead, but I know he heard them, because he stopped moving.
    “And what happened then, Demi? What did you do?”
    “I got depressed and almost died.” I paused, not sure how much to tell, how many secrets the darkness and his desperation could coax out of me. “And then I woke up hungry.”
    “And then?”
    I giggled at a line from a movie he’d never seen because there are no movies in Sang, and for just a moment, I felt infinitely far away from anything resembling home or comfort, the weight of an entire country pressing down on me with the feather touch of a girl’s hairbob clutched in one hand. He turned to stare at me, Chardonnay-green eyes glowing, and something in my chest shifted.
    “And then I ran away,” I said finally.
    He reached for me, his fingers stretched out toward my face, and I closed my eyes and parted my lips slightly, needing to feel something, anything, other than crushing defeat. Instead, I heard a blood-curdling scream, and Vale’s arm flung me into the stone wall before drawing away suddenly.
    I opened my eyes, heart beating an insane cadence, and found only darkness.



6
    I reached for him, but he was gone. “Vale? What the hell!”
    He was breathing heavily—that meant he was alive, at least, his boots scuffling on stone. There was another creature with us, something that smelled as stale and deep as the catacombs. And underneath that mildewy reek, there was pumping blood.
    No. Wait.
    Blud.
    “Is it a bludrat? Can I help? God, it’s so dark. I can’t see anything. I frigging hate the dark!”
    He growled and shuffled, and I wasn’t sure whether to run or fight or scream for his dad to come back. I was just about to start feeling around with my toe for something useful to kick when I heard the solid thump of stone hitting flesh.
    “Mangy. Little. Bastard!” Each word was punctuated by a thump, the last one accented with a gushy splat that peppered the air with the reek of hot blud.
    “Vale?”
    He grunted with effort, and something dropped into the water. After a few moments of fiddling and cursing, his green light flickered back on, showing black splattersup his arms, a few on his cheeks. “Remember what I said about bludrats getting underground and going bad?” He pointed down, and the twitching thing I saw smashed at his feet looked more like a shaved capybara than a rat, its pale skin sprinkled with wiry pink hairs and its sunken eyes white and unseeing.
    “Are you okay? Did it bite you?”
    With a laugh that echoed through the tunnel, he kicked the scrawny carcass into the water, where it bobbed and floated sluggishly with the flow, webbed feet up. “It tried. And failed. Let this be a lesson to you: don’t try to kiss anybody in the catacombs.”
    I was blushing before he’d turned around and started walking. I’m pretty sure he knew.
    *   *   *
    Time went as thick and slow as the water beside us as we trudged through the underground tunnels. We chatted of silly things to keep our minds off reality and flirted as much as a giant graveyard allowed. But we never got close enough to attempt another foolish, desperate kiss. Then, all at once, the air congealed, and I knew the tunnel was about to end.
    Although slogging through sewers and