Friction (The Frenzy Series Book 4) by Casey L. Bond Page B

his game by now. Right?
    His blood on her lips. I had to remove it. Immediately. I wanted to drain him until his eyelashes fluttered and then stilled; until his heart sped in fear and stopped altogether. I wanted to end Saul Daniels. The next time we went hunting together, I wouldn’t waste the opportunity.
    “This way,” I barked and sped into the night. Porschia kept up easily.
    “I need to give you a nickname,” she said, smiling as we ran together.
    “Why is that?”
    “You call me kitten. I need something to call you.”
    “Stallion works.”
    She smiled widely and shook her head. “Don’t worry about Saul, Tage.”
    “I’m not.” I was.
    “Liar.”
     

     

     
    We slowed as the sun began to rise, pausing beside a small creek. We’d covered a lot of land already and I wasn’t sure if we were even going in the right direction.
    “How do we know we haven’t passed it, or that we’re even going the right way?”
    Tage smiled, hands on his hips. “We don’t. That’s part of the fun, though. Right?”
    “Right,” I agreed, stepping over larger stones until I was across. The water trickled musically over them. There were no animal tracks in the mud.
    “Let’s walk up that hill,” Tage said, pointing to a taller one ahead. “We’ll have a good vantage point from the crest.”
    “Okay.” My breath clouded in front of my face as we walked up until the hilltop became flat and we could see the valley beyond. In the distance was a cross work of houses encircled by a tall, wooden wall. We found it. The Glen was just that – a valley of flat land surrounded by rolling hills, and it was beautiful. A small pond sat just beyond the western wall of the town. Fog hovered above the cool water.
    At our feet, the grass was thickening into dark green clumps. It swayed in the wind as we left the forest behind and entered the rectangular patches of earth that had obviously been farmed last season. Why hadn’t they turned the soil yet?
    Tage sniffed the air. He turned to me. “It’s cold. There’s no fire from any of the houses.”
    No smoke trails rose in the brightening morning sky, yet it was cold outside. It made no sense. How were they able to stay warm or cook?
    Tage grabbed my hand. “We aren’t staying. We tell them about the cure and then make our way back to Mountainside.”
    I nodded. “I know.”
    He watched my expression for a moment and then began walking down the hill. A vee of honking geese flew overhead opposite us, and a shiver crawled up my spine. It was almost as if something was warning us away from this place, no matter how peaceful it seemed on the outside.
    I heard the hum of bugs, dancing grass, and the sound of mice and moles burrowing beneath the ground. Birds chirped overhead as they flittered here and there, bobbing up and down in the light westerly wind.
    When the land flattened, we could see the wall much better. It was made of large tree trunks, sharpened into points along the top edge. They were almost as tall as the flood wall in Blackwater and had dried and cracked, bleaching in the sun for what looked like a very long time. Why didn’t the Elders ever tell us about the existence of these other places?
    It was stupid to think about now that I’d seen Mountainside, but growing up, I thought Blackwater was it; that we were the only survivors of the apocalyptic plagues that extinguished an entire nation, maybe the entire world. It never occurred to me that there were others out there, struggling just as we were and surviving under similar circumstances.
    Tage stopped abruptly, his hand tightening on mine. I looked to him. “What is it?”
    “We should leave. Now.”
    I followed his crystal blue eyes until I saw what concerned him. The enormous gate to the wall we’d been walking beside was wide open. “Maybe they always leave it open?” I said, not believing it myself.
    “Why go to the trouble of building one at all if you don’t plan to use it?”
    “I was trying