The Host (The Host #1)(144)

The bubbling stream was too discordant to remind me of our songs. I could grieve beside its harmony-free clatter.

I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and mourned for the child and the other soul who had died with it. My siblings. My family. If I had found a way free of this place, if I had warned the Seekers, their remains would not be so casually mangled and mixed together in that blood-steeped room.

I wanted to cry, to keen in misery. But that was the human way. So I locked my lips and hunched in the darkness, holding the pain inside.

My silence, my mourning, was stolen from me.

It took them a few hours. I heard them looking, heard their voices echo and warp in the long tubes of air. They were calling for me, expecting an answer. When they received no answer, they brought lights. Not the dim blue lanterns that might never have revealed my hiding place here, buried under all this blackness, but the sharp yellow lances of flashlights. They swept back and forth, pendulums of light. Even with the flashlights, they didn’t find me until the third search of the room. Why couldn’t they leave me alone?

When the flashlight’s beam finally disinterred me, there was a gasp of relief.

“I found her! Tell the others to get back inside! She’s in here after all!”

I knew the voice, but I didn’t put a name to it. Just another monster.

“Wanda? Wanda? Are you all right?”

I didn’t raise my head or open my eyes. I was in mourning.

“Where’s Ian?”

“Should we get Jamie, do you think?”

“He shouldn’t be on that leg.”

Jamie. I shuddered at his name. My Jamie. He was a monster, too. He was just like the rest of them. My Jamie. It was a physical pain to think of him.

“Where is she?”

“Over here, Jared. She’s not… responding.”

“We didn’t touch her.”

“Here, give me the light,” Jared said. “Now, the rest of you, get out of here. Emergency over. Give her some air, okay?”

There was a shuffling noise that didn’t travel far.

“Seriously, people. You’re not helping. Leave. All the way out.”

The shuffling was slow at first, but then became more productive. I could hear many footsteps fading away in the room and then disappearing out of it.

Jared waited until it was silent again.

“Okay, Wanda, it’s just you and me.”

He waited for some kind of answer.

“Look, I guess that must have been pretty… bad. We never wanted you to see that. I’m sorry.”

Sorry? Geoffrey’d said it was Jared’s idea. He wanted to cut me out, slice me into little pieces, fling my blood on the wall. He’d slowly mangle a million of me if he could find a way to keep his favorite monster alive with him. Slash us all to slivers.

He was quiet for a long time, still waiting for me to react.

“You look like you want to be alone. That’s okay. I can keep them away, if that’s what you want.”

I didn’t move.

Something touched my shoulder. I cringed away from it, into the sharp stones.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

I heard him stand, and the light—red behind my closed eyes—began to fade as he walked away.

He met someone in the mouth of the cave.

“Where is she?”

“She wants to be alone. Let her be.”

“Don’t get in my way again, Howe.”

“Do you think she wants comfort from you? From a human?”

“I wasn’t party to this —”

Jared answered in a lower voice, but I could still hear the echoes. “Not this time. You’re one of us, Ian. Her enemy. Did you hear what she said in there? She was screaming monsters. That’s how she sees us now. She doesn’t want your comfort.”

“Give me the light.”

They didn’t speak again. A minute passed, and I heard one set of slow footsteps moving around the edge of the room. Eventually, the light swept across me, turning my lids red again.

I huddled myself more tightly together, expecting him to touch me.

There was a quiet sigh, and then the sound of him sitting on the stone, not as close beside me as I would have expected.

With a click, the light disappeared.

I waited in the silence for a long time for him to speak, but he was just as silent as I was.

Finally, I stopped waiting and returned to my mourning. Ian did not interrupt. I sat in the blackness of the big hole in the ground and grieved for lost souls with a human at my side.

CHAPTER 41

Vanished

Ian sat with me for three days in the darkness.

He left for only a few short minutes at a time, to get us food and water. At first, Ian ate, though I did not. Then, as he realized that it wasn’t a loss of appetite that left my tray full, he stopped eating, too.

I used his brief absences to deal with the physical needs that I could not ignore, thankful for the proximity of the odorous stream. As my fast lengthened, those needs vanished.

I couldn’t keep from sleeping, but I did not make myself comfortable. The first day, I woke to find my head and shoulders cradled on his lap. I recoiled from him, shuddering so violently that he did not repeat the gesture. After that, I slumped against the stones where I was, and when I woke, I would curl back up into my silent ball at once.