Amber eyes shrouded in thick lashes stared at Ada from across the cold, grimy bedroom. It shouldn’t be possible for a man to look like both angel and devil at the same time, but there he was, caught in limbo somewhere between sin and a miracle. Such striking features. Tall and muscular with statuesque bone structure, yet soft, sensuous lips. Even his brown hair was extraordinary. Each tip of the medium length appeared to be dipped in black ink, like an artist’s paintbrush. On the outside, he was a masterpiece. He should have been perfect. But the closer Ada looked, the more she noticed cracks in his canvas. All was not well with him.
It started with his unblinking eyes.
Work long enough with wounded, wild animals and the familiar signs of mistreatment were easy to recognize. The old pain. The soul crushing emptiness of surrender. The fresh scars upon old scars at his neck. This man had suffered. He had been tortured. He had given up hope.
Whether his mind was still intact was another story.
He hadn’t said a word, nor moved an inch, yet Ada sensed he was once as wild and carefree as the animals she’d rehabilitated. Now, he was at the end of his rope. She hoped she wasn’t in the way when he snapped.
His blistering intent stayed locked solely on her, as it had done so for the past five minutes since her groggy awakening that ended with the vomit of something dark and viscous on the floor next to the old bed.
He didn’t get up to help her. He never murmured a note of sympathy. He just kept staring.
He’s cuckoo. Surely.
His linen clothing was as strange as hers which looked more suited to a cult that worshipped natural materials than her usual khakis and worn T-shirt. Someone must have dressed her because she hadn’t been wearing the simple outfit when she’d... her brow puckered. What had she been doing before coming here? She couldn’t remember a thing beyond going outside Clarke’s apartment and lifting her awestruck face to the snow falling in Vegas.
The small miracle, or curse, depending on how you looked at it, had taken their minds off the bombs that had dropped around the world, devastating humankind. The cities that survived, like Vegas, were scrambling to find normalcy in the fallout, when the nuclear winter fell like a freezing blanket with a speed that baffled the TV weatherman. The drop in temperature had been so fast that the Bellagio fountains froze mid-flight. And then it had snowed... and then...
Ada struggled to grasp what had come next.
Had she been drugged? Panic sparked, tightening her chest, quickening her breath. Was that why she’d been sick? Where were her friends, Clarke and Laurel? They had been with her in the yard, looking at the snow.
The silent man stared at her as though she had a list of algebra equations written on her face.
“Are you going to stare at me all day, or will you tell me how we got here?” she asked.
Dark lashes blinked, and then he resumed staring as though he could see into her mind. She shivered.
Christ. This was insane.
She cringed, disgusted that her head had rested on the decayed bed. Thank goodness she’d moved and now sat in the corner, hands wrapped around her knees, bare feet on the dusty floor.
While she had been asleep, someone had tattooed glow-in-the-dark ink in a strange glowing blue pattern around her right arm—his too. She rubbed her marks for the tenth time. Definitely tattooed on there. Definitely twinkling, as though the undercurrent of the summer sea ran beneath it. If only it gave her the summer heat. A shiver wracked her body as cold air seeped into her bones.
“Right.” She stood and rubbed herself briskly. “If you’re not going to help, then I’ll find my own way out of here.”
Just like she always did. No use waiting for a hero to turn up. A familiar pang in her chest reminded her of the first time she’d learned this truth—the first time her mother failed to come home with food—but forced the memory aside before it took root. She had no time for that.
The instant she stood, he echoed by unfolding his long body, and straightening to a height that crowded her and sucked the air from the room.
Creepy.
She looked for a weapon, but... she cocked her head and studied him. She didn’t feel animosity coming from him, strange as that sounded. Her instincts had never taken a wrong turn, and they were the only thing that had kept her alive on more than one occasion. Whether it was hiking in the wilderness, hunting for food, or navigating unfamiliar terrain, she’d learned to trust her intuition. And right now, it was telling her this man wasn’t a threat.
But he also wasn’t helping.
“I’m Ada,” she ventured.
His brow furrowed, but he said nothing.
“Can you speak?”
A slow nod.
“What’s your name?”
Amber eyes darted around the room. He flinched and scratched blue arcane markings around the thick column of his neck. Red welts meant he’d been itching for a while. Whatever those blue markings were, they didn’t agree with him. Not like the ones down their arms.
“Your name?” she prompted again.
“I don’t know.”
His voice was deep and smooth like honey. It matched his gorgeous face and perfect body. If he ever lost this creepy hesitancy, she imagined no woman would be safe from his charms.
“How can you not know?”
“Because I don’t,” he snapped, a faint snarl deepening his tone.
Ada startled.
Injured animal. Proceed with caution.
She held up her palms. “Was just asking.”
He looked away. Not that there was much to look at in this room. Just a high, small window too tiny to climb through. She could break through the thin, stained ceiling, though. Debris littered the ground, but nothing she could use. Broken bits of wood, a few branches and some feathers as though a bird had nested inside. Damp puddles collected from leaking rain.
“Maybe this is one of those locked room scenarios,” she murmured to herself. “I’ve seen Saw. Some Mad Max sicko has put us in here, drugged me, taken your memories, and painted weird cultist shit on us.” She shot him a side-eye. “If you try to saw off my leg, I will kill you. Fair warning.”
Perhaps the tall man was drugged too, because he just stared at her in confusion. Part of her didn’t believe herself either. A locked room? No way. And she didn’t feel drugged. But then again, she didn’t believe the nuclear holocaust would actually happen. She didn’t believe her precious wilderness would either be destroyed or covered in snow.
Maybe Vegas was gone too, and this dingy room was all that was left.
Maybe they were the last two people on earth and this was some rare pocket that had survived the fallout.
A new sense of urgency skated up her spine. This room was too small. She had to get out. She made an awkward face when he didn’t move, so sidestepped and went to the door where she rattled the porcelain lock. It didn’t budge. She peeked through the old keyhole. The lock probably worked from both sides. Light shone through, but all she could see was a wall.
“We need to get out of here,” she mumbled. “I’m starving. And thirsty. And...”
And forget about sawing her leg off. The man in the room with her might try to eat her from the way he kept staring.
He moved. She flinched. A tiny twitch lifted one side of his lips, and she could have sworn she caught amusement dancing in his eyes before he shouldered her to the side and took hold of the doorknob. One wrench and it came off in his powerful grip. Ada’s lips parted.
He uncurled his fingers, and the knob teetered in the dip of his palm. She reached for it, but he snapped his fingers around the knob and evaded her. Frowning, she looked up, expecting anger, but amusement flickered in his eyes again.
“You think this is a game?” she said.
Her irritation only made his lips purse as though he tried to hide a smile and then picked out the rest of the half-crumbled knob from the hole in the door. In moments, the entire contraption was gone. He jammed his fingers into the gap and yanked.
“Are you telling me you could have done that five minutes ago?”
Big shoulders bunched and lowered.
Joking one minute, brooding the next. Maybe he wasn’t all there in the head—a few bricks short of a load. Maybe that tragedy in his eyes had taken more of a toll than she realized. Nobody deserved to lose their mind. She stepped into the hallway, but a big hand landed on her shoulder and tugged her back.
“I go first,” he grunted and placed her behind his large frame.
“Oh-kay.”
His bulk refused argument.
The corridor was as decrepit as the bedroom. Water trickled down the stone walls, peeling wallpaper and creating mold deposits in the hardwood floor that gifted her nostrils with tingling pungency. Ivy trailed down the wall, invading from holes in the terracotta tiled roof. Glimpses of cloudy sky flashed as she walked by. Small cameo oil paintings lined the wall, but the decay had eroded much of the canvas. Glimpses of faces watched Ada and her companion as they walked cautiously through the hallway. He snuffled, as though trying to get the scent out of his nose.
The next room was more jungle than living room. Plants and flowers climbed over old wooden furniture padded with patchy blue velvet. Arched windows let in light, but a flourish of thorny brambles blocked escape through the window.
The blue markings on their arms glowed and glanced off their surroundings as they passed. A flash drew her eye to a table toppled with a collection of junk. She strolled over and inspected the goods. They looked like something you’d see at a junkyard, or a hoarder’s house. Perhaps the state of Vegas was more dire than it had been when she’d… she frowned again, frustrated that she couldn’t remember how she got here.
Maybe she had amnesia too.
Rusted copper pennies lined the bottom of a shallow bowl overflowing with rain water still dripping from the ceiling in sporadic plops. Ada flicked a box-like rectangle that may have once been a cell phone. She touched a round smooth surface that was probably a squash ball and then flicked a thin garland that might have been Christmas tinsel in another life. She picked up a jar of rusty ball-point pens and jiggled them.
“Stop.” A hand knocked the jar from her fingers. It clattered loudly to the floor.
“Why did you do that?”
He scowled. “Metals and plastics are forbidden by the Well.”
She raised her brows and muttered under her breath, “Definitely a few screws loose.”
I’m done with this. Shaking her head, she left the weird shrine and searched for an exit. She just wanted to find her friends. They had been with her in Vegas. Chances were, they’d be around somewhere. She hoped.
Dripping water echoed as it landed in puddles. Leaves rustled and a whisper of sound flittered behind her, but when she looked, she found nothing except the plant life.
Searching beneath vines on the wall, she asked, “How do you know metal is banned, but you don’t know your name?”
When he gave no answer, she sent him a sidelong look. He seemed as perplexed as she was.
A beam of light filtered through a crack in the ceiling and landed on some ivy with a dark door shape behind it. Bingo.
“Help me get this off.” She hauled great curtains of vines and tried to pull it off.
No help came. Ada turned and found the man staring at his feet, a deep crease between his brow as he studied a tattered, patterned rug.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I know this.” He crouched and ran a finger over the pattern. His trail left a wake in the sodden rug. “I’ve been here before.”
Here, as in this cottage, or here as in the city woven into the tapestry of the rug? Either way, he was more familiar than she was.
“You have? Well, that’s great. You should know how to get out of here.”
He shook his head. “I don’t…”
The man was troubled. A stab of sympathy pushed Ada to meet him on the floor. Amber eyes clashed with hers. They were almost luminous in the dark. Coupled with his thick, dark lashes, she could get lost in his eyes. And that wasn’t a sentiment she was familiar with. It unnerved her more than the small blue teardrop tattoo twinkling beneath his right eye. She hadn’t noticed it before.
Fear stabbed through her. Was this her future? Would some nut job come and paint her and then take her memories too?
“We’ll figure it out,” she murmured, eyes darting to his sparkling blue tattoo collar. Welts scored his skin from all the scratching he’d been doing. Unable to help herself, she touched one of the blue lines on his neck. He hissed. A wave of hurt washed through her, as though she’d felt the pain herself. She lowered her hand. “Hurts, huh?”
He looked affronted, and a little defensive, but nodded.
“We’ll figure that out too,” she announced.
Drop Ada in the desert, and she’d survive. In high school, they voted her most likely to succeed in a zombie apocalypse. None of them knew she’d only attended school for the first time from her junior year. They were cruel enough without knowing she’d spent most of her childhood surviving on her own in the woods… well, there was Harold, the old-timer she would visit in exchange for hunting and reading lessons. But the point was, she would get through this.
Dusting off her hands, she straightened and went to the door. She lifted the last of the ivy, turned the doorknob, and used her foot to push the wooden length. It shifted an inch. Elation lifted her spirits. She turned to share her excitement, but almost bowled into a broad chest.
“Personal space, dude,” she mumbled.
He’d better not be the type to imprint on her after a few moments of compassion. The last thing she needed was a sad puppy following her around. After she’d assimilated into society and graduated high school, Ada had taken a job rehabilitating animals. There had been a rescued cougar kitten that refused to return to the wild. She’d almost considered moving to live in the forest with it, or bringing it home, but by that stage, she’d made friends in the city and knew she would miss them too much. The city and her friends had tethered Ada to reality. Without them, she would have returned to the lonely life of a hermit like Harold.
Once again, he shifted Ada to the side and used brute force to open the door. It might have taken all her energy to move it a simple inch, but he’d barely twitched a muscle to shift the entire frame.
“What do you bench?” she asked. “Seriously, like, two hundred pounds?”
No answer, so she followed him outside and into a courtyard overrun by nature, much as the inside had been. But out here…
“I can’t believe it,” she murmured, eyes lifting to the sky. “Blue.”
She’d assumed the gray through the gaps in the ceiling was the dull nuclear blanket of their scorched sky, but... blue interspersed with regular storm clouds. Could this be a surviving pocket, unaffected by the fallout? But the scorched sky had covered the entire globe.
Twittering birds leaped in the sunshine, hopping from branches to a three-tiered stagnant fountain, washing their beaks, and then dancing back. She turned in a three-sixty-degree rotation. Lush vegetation filled the garden courtyard. Vine-covered limestone walls surrounded them, along with the occasional shrubs and small fruit tree.
Ada rushed to the trees and searched for fruit. Who knew when she’d eat again? She riffled through the leaves, but disappointment dropped in her stomach like a stone. Nothing.
Wrong time of year, perhaps.
“This is incredible,” she breathed, and scrambled on top of a long stone table that may have been for outdoor entertaining. In her haste, her foot slipped on the slippery moss and she tumbled. Strong hands caught her around the waist. For a few moments, she held her rescuer’s gaze as he lowered her gently to the ground.
He looked at her as though she were the marvel.
She gave an awkward laugh. “I slipped.”
“You did.” A small smile tugged his lips. The light glinting in his eyes had only been fleeting, but a rush of reward hit right in her chest. She wanted to chase that high... to get him to smile again. He held out his hand and, when she reached for it, he snatched it back with an eyebrow waggle. She giggled like a damned school girl. Perhaps he enjoyed seeing her smile too, because he played the same game until eventually she stopped smiling. He got the picture, and he helped her onto the table like a proper gentleman. Heat warmed her cheeks.
He might be a little mute, or dumb, or whatever, but the dude had understated magnetism. Everything about him disarmed her. The random games. His heart-stopping smile. His weird chivalry. Clearing her mind, she forced her attention to the cottage surroundings and gasped.
The land beyond was a punch in the chest.
“It’s back,” she croaked. “It’s all back!”
The nuclear fallout had stolen the biodiversity of her adored wilderness. Everything had been dying. But now… now there were rolling green hills damp with recent rain and luscious trees bursting with life. Some sort of farm animal grazed in a distant field. She couldn’t see it clearly, but it had horns. Further afield, smoke curled from a cottage chimney. People.
Her temporary elation washed back with a wave of dread. Rotating, she surveyed the rest of the land surrounding the cottage. Land and forest stretched for miles… everywhere. While the abundance of natural life called to her carefree, nomadic spirit, the obvious and foreboding truth was too hard to ignore. No city scrapers. No lights. No hustle, bustle, and burnished party limos. They were nowhere near Vegas. Nowhere near home.
“Where are we?”
