“I’m sorry,” he said. But it wasn’t the right kind of sorry. It wasn’tI’m sorry for biting you and turning you into a ghoul for eternity. It wasI’m sorry; I don’t know you. It figured. He’d probably bitten lots of girls and left them for dead without a single look back.
“Will you tell me?” he asked. “What I’m missing? I mean, besides my body from the neck down.”
She clenched her jaw.
“Six months ago I was in a cemetery saying goodbye to my grandmother. I saw you by a grave and thought you were crying. But you weren’t crying.”
“But I wasn’t crying,” he said as the memory dawned on his face. “I was feeding. Oh god. That was you.”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your apologies. And I don’t want your excuses.” Her leg twitched. If he tried to explain, she would punt him straight into the nearest tree trunk. Maybe it’d be hard enough to brain him. Maybe not, and the jackass would keep right on talking. But he didn’t try to explain. He just sat there, looking haunted. Though she supposed he didn’t have much choice about the sitting part.
Maria crossed her arms. Three months she’d searched for him. Hunted him. Taken her anger out on six other ghouls, and who knew if they really deserved it? Ghouls weren’t killers, after all, or at least they weren’t supposed to be. They were scavengers who fed on the dead. Except he had killed her. He’d turned her into the undead equivalent of a vulture. That’s what she would be after this was over and her anger was spent. She’d still be dead. Still be alone. And she would still need to feed.
“Six months ago,” Maria whispered. “You said that’s when you died.”
“Yeah. I was... well, I’d gone off-grid, like that kid fromInto the Wild. Seems foolish now. Because we all saw how well it turned out for him.”
“I never saw that movie.”
“It’s about this guy who goes into the wilderness to live by himself—never mind. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is I was squatting under one of the bridges downtown when I first got here and something attacked me.”
“Another ghoul.”
“Right. I didn’t know him then but now I know his name is Kyle. Or was Kyle. Maybe you got him and he’s stuffed into one of these rows. I guess he’d gone a little off. He wasn’t trying to turn me. He was trying to kill me so he could eat me when I started to rot. It was a mess. He’d been trying to go ghoul-vegan—”
“Ghoul-vegan?”
“It’s where you don’t eat dead humans. Just dead animals. Like roadkill, or steaks bought at the grocery store and left out in the sun a few days.”
Maria made a face. “That’s the opposite of vegan.”
“I know, but it’s the best we can do. The thing is, if you get too into it, start substituting too many alternative meat sources, like dead bugs and the like, you kind of go feral.”
“Feral?”
“You know, like Sasquatch.”
“Sasquatch is a ghoul?”
“That’s the way I heard it.”
“You’re an idiot.”
He grinned. “I guess I am.”
“How did you ‘hear’ all this stuff anyway?”
“You know,” he said, and his head bobbled slightly—she got the impression it was supposed to be a shrug. “Ghouls talk.”
“No, I don’t know,” she said. “I was too busy hunting you down and killing you.” And now she had, and to be honest she was starting to regret it. She didn’t need to ask why he’d bitten her. She remembered what it had been like whenshe first woke up dead. How hungry she’d been. How wild. Those first days and first meals had been a blur of delicious skin and muscle tissue. She must have left so many graves rudely open. And if someone had interrupted her, she might have bitten them, just like he had.
But she also remembered the days of fever, hiding out in her grandma’s house sweating and dying, too scared to go to the hospital because they’d find out she had no living guardian and turn her over to the state.
So screw Ethan and his soft blue eyes. She had every right to be pissed.