Dark Age Dawning #02 - Midnight by Ellen Connor

Author:Ellen Connor [Connor, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780425242995
Google: FI34M_dNiV4C
Amazon: 0425242994
Goodreads: 8396758
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Chris climbed up the rusted iron ladder to the watchtower on the outskirts of town. From up in its crow’s nest he would be able to see the entire lay of the valley. But at the moment he saw nothing but red. She’d banished him.

He pulled to the top and flopped down to sit. His feet dangled over the edge. With an automatic rifle lying between his shoulder blades, he felt the scrape of metal and fabric over the bandages covering his new tattoo. Marked for life. And not a damn thing to show for it.

What was worse? That he’d opened up to Rosa about his ex-wives—and, more painfully, about watching Angela die? That Rosa had found the courage to reveal a few dark corners of her past? Or that she’d completely shut him down afterward?

The wind ferried away his curse. One step forward, five steps back.

Down below, at the north edge of town, the procession began the slow walk toward where Manuel’s body was laid out on a pyre. From that vantage Chris could only make out the dead man’s form wrapped in pale cloth. He hadn’t known Manuel well; the armband he wore was out of respect, not mourning. But Rosa had excluded him. Purposefully. The crow’s nest might as well have been an emotional Siberia.

For such a strong woman, she was behaving like a damn coward.

Chris stretched and felt the strain of the last two weeks in his muscles. He’d had another dream of Rosa—only in this dream she’d been younger, wide-eyed and hardened at the same time. Tears looked wrong on her face, but so did a girl’s bright smile. It had been like watching a grainy home movie of her life Before. But no matter how realistic, that dream hadn’t held the aura of magic and strangeness that the ones bearing premonitions did.

He was beginning to tell the two apart.

After what he’d witnessed since the Change, and after what he’d recently experienced firsthand, he wouldn’t put it past the ways of this new world. The science he once trusted and explored and, hell, even loved—it no longer mattered. He had needed to grieve for that passing too. It was not the gut-wrenching pain of losing a human being, but the quiet loss of part of one’s soul.

He stood and surveyed the valley, making a circle to appraise each horizon. Sunlight had just crawled over the distant eastern slopes. Long, long shadows licked across the desert floor, reminding him of the tattoo still healing on his back. But then he was back to Rosa again.

Damn.

Fatigue made him tight and sluggish, as did a tension he hadn’t known in years. When walking the wasteland, he had been his own person. His solitary years spent studying mountain lions had been equally liberating. The whole continent had fallen into chaos, but he had been at peace with the silence and the wild. It was lonely. It was grueling and violent. But anything that bothered him too much became a memory come morning.

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