Nate’s hand clamps over my mouth just in time to catch my scream. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to hold it back. I wail into his palm. He presses me into the wall hard as I shake and I feel him shuddering against me and know that he’s coming too.
His arms find their way around me. He pulls me tight against him.
And this time, when it occurs to me that I’m not even thinking about Victor anymore, I know that it’s the truth. Because I am completely and utterly lost in the perfection that is Nate.
I don’t know how he’s managed to make everything feel all right. But I’m not questioning it.
Chapter 29
NATE
“Ilostallmystuff,” she murmurs after a while.
“What?” To be honest, my mind is still on the sex, which was amazing. I’m not even sure what she’s talking about.
“My stuff,” she says. “My clothes. My backpack. I left everything back on the beach.”
“Oh,” I say, taking a minute to be grateful for the fact that I knotted my pants around my torso when we were leaving. My pants that are now in a heap on the ground at my feet.
“That’s okay,” I say to Emlyn. “We’ll find more.”
“Backpacks don’t grow on trees.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “I know backpacks don’t grow on trees. They’re backpacks.”
“My mom used to say it,” Emlyn says. “I asked her once. She told me it was an old-fashioned way of saying that something was hard to find. If it grew on trees, you could just go out and gather as much of it as you wanted. But things that don’t grow on trees have to be found in other ways.”
I shake my head, even though I know she can’t see it in the dark. “People had some dumb expressions before the Reversal,” I say. “Lots of things that are perfectly easy to get don’t grow on trees. Fish don’t grow on trees.”
She giggles. “Fish trees.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’ll get out of here and find some clothes.”
“But how are we going to get out of here? Victor said they were guarding every exit.”
“No,” I remind her. “They’re not guarding every exit. Just every exit surrounding the one where we came in. All we have to do is move a few exits farther along, and we should be fine.”
She lets out a shuddering breath. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Because of Ravagers, you mean?”
“We don’t know where they are. We just know they’re not here. If we travel too far down these tunnels, we could be walking right into a horde of them.”
“We can fight Ravagers.”
“We can’t fight a whole hive of them, though, Nate. You know that. That’s the reason they haven’t died out.”
She’s right about that. I’ve killed a Ravager before. If you get them on their own, they’re no big deal. The problem with Ravagers is that they have such massive numbers.
Ravagers aren’t logical—they’re humans gone mad—but it would be a mistake to think of them as stupid. They still have human intellect. It’s just twisted and warped by years of cannibalism and trying to survive.
And there were always more humans—countlessmore—than there were shifters or Moon Casters. Even now that most of them have died out, the surviving Ravagers still outnumber us. They’re like locusts now, swarming and feeding on whatever they can find. They’re sickening.
“We’ll just have to outrun them, then,” I say.
“It’s too risky.”
“It’s not as risky as going up one of the staircases where weknowthere’s an enemy waiting at the top.”