Free Vial Things (A Resurrectionist Novel Book 1) by Leah Clifford

take this news well. She lowers me onto the couch. For a long moment, she only stares at me, biting her lip. I should be pumping for information but the odd mix of heartbreak and terror in her eyes is like cotton in my mouth.
    “Ploy,” she says finally. “You can’t tell anyone what I can do. Geneticists would give anything to study us if they knew we exist. Test blood. Dissect our bodies. What government wouldn’t kill to have a soldier like me in their arsenal?” I feel like she’s reciting a speech she’s heard a dozen times. She sits down beside me and hugs her knees to her chest. “Other kids had nightmares about monsters under the bed. My monsters were always dressed in white lab coats, after bad little girls who couldn’t keep secrets.” Her eyes meet mine. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about me, okay? People are killed for this ability. My parents. They were gutted to make sure they stayed dead. My dad wasn’t even a resurrectionist.”
    “Gutted?” When I speak, my voice is small. “Like Brand was in the boxcar.” It kept them dead, scraping their insides away. I knew that much.
    “My aunt knew Brandon. He was one of us. In hiding. The only way to kill us is to remove organs. That or poisoning the blood itself. Otherwise our blood heals everything.”
    “Your parents weren’t the same as Brandon.” The words are out before I can stop them. I swallow hard and look up at her. “Whoever killed Brandon, I mean. It wasn’t the same person as your parents?” I say quickly, twisting it into a question, because to me, it’s a statement. Jamison couldn’t have had anything to do with them dying. Brandon had been a slip up, a mistake.
    She gives her head a quick shake, her eyes downcast. “Someone broke in while I was gone and... That was a long time ago, though. Isolated incident.” The bitterness to her voice makes me suspect she’s not quite as over it as she’s pretending to be. “There have been others missing lately. Sarah...that’s my aunt...she doesn’t know what’s happening.”
    “So you knew when I told you what happened to him. You knew what Brandon was.” Of course she did, but she needs to see me making the connections. “And you were scared.” Even before Jamison used Brandon’s death to shake her up, her parents’ deaths had ingrained the paranoia I see in her sometimes. And then something else occurs to me. I look up at Allie, everything I know about her suddenly shifting. Someone broke in. “Oh my God, you...”
    “Ploy?” She must see the hurt on my face.
    “You weren’t worried about me sleeping in the camp,” I say slowly. “You weren’t being a friend. You’re afraid. That’s why you let me start sleeping on your couch.”
    She blinks rapidly. “We have tight time constraints. There’s no real way to vet out the people we bring back. We take the chance that some of them will come after the blood, want more of it even once we explain it doesn’t work like that. Hazard of the job.” She says the words flippantly but her tone’s all off.
    So there are others after her.
    “You used me to protect you?” Oh, the irony.
    Her hands fist in her lap, an angry blush on her cheeks. “I don’t need you to protect me. I can protect myself.”
    I lean back against the cushion. “Then why did you want me here?”
    “I...” As quickly as it came, her anger fades. “If someone came through the door, you’d stop them. You’d fight. Slow them up. I figured it would give me...” She winces her eyes shut. Shame radiates from her, but doesn’t soften the blow. “Give me time to get myself away.”
    I stare at her in stunned silence.
    I have underestimated this girl.
    She’s clever, and what she’s just admitted means she’s not afraid to be cruel. She reminds me of Jamison. Something inside me twists hard. I’m not sure if it’s because of the stab wound or not. The muscles in my arms cord and uncord as I clench my hands into fists,