“Lie down and get stronger so you don’t get us killed.”
Legion sits back, his eyes wide. “Hernan and Alex?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“We have to go and move the bodies,” Mia says. “We have to; we owe them that.”
“We can’t,” Jarek barks.
Everyone looks at him. They want to protest, but Jarek’s right.
“We have to!” Mia shouts.
“Mia!” Cadel snaps. “Quiet, or I will gag you.”
She shrinks under his deadly gaze. “We have to bury them.”
“No,” Jarek says and gets up on his knees, swaying slightly. “They come back to see if the bodies are disturbed. It’s a trap. Someone will be watching, with eyes everywhere. Right?”
He’s looking at me. I nod my head in silentagreement.
“So, what? We just leave them? It’s inhuman; it's cruel. It’s disrespectful.”
“We’re living in a time of extinction; they are murdering us in ways that are far too gleeful. We don’t have the time or energy to be respectful of the dead. They are dead. We need to worry about us.”
“What happens when they run out of alphas and omegas to murder? Will they start murdering the undesirable betas?”
We all turn to stare at Cadel because I don’t think any of us have thought that through.
Jarek lets out a bark of laughter. “They already do that. Sick? Dead. Disabled? Dead. Have a connection with an alpha or omega, hide one, help one, hoard one? Dead. There was a kid who was an omega. They killed her, her mother, her father, and all her adult beta siblings. I heard them say that it was to make sure the infection of the Ravage Virus was taken out of the bloodline.”
I pull away from Mordecai, crawl to a corner of the room, and throw up.
No one speaks for a long time. Jarek comes over with a cloth and bathes my face, wiping the blood off, and then he sits with me, just holding my hand.
It goes a long way in calming me.
“Do you think it’s better to fight than live?”
Jarek heaves a sigh. “I’m not sure; I think it’s more complicated than that.”
“How?”
“I think you can pick fights and lose them so completely they damage people that are still alive. Fights can inspire others to live, to fight, to be smarter, or die faster. Living means you can fight another day. Survival in and of itself is a fight.”
“So, you think we all have to wait for the right moment? How do we know it’s the right moment?”
“What does your heart tell you? Can you put up with it for a moment longer? Can you live with yourself if you walk away?”
I ponder it and lean my head on his shoulder. I think it’s the first time I’ve instigated touch with him, and it startles me as much as it startles him.
“You said you saw me and knew? How?”
Jarek clears his throat. “Because when I saw you, it was like I’ve known you forever, like I had this moment where I knew your likes and dislikes, the sound of your voice, laugh, moan, sobs. Everything that you are was there in front of me, but we’d never met.”
“Maybe we knew each other in past lives?”
Jarek flinches. “Yeah, maybe. That would be something, if we kept finding each other over and over.”
