“I let you sleep,” Naomi countered. “I’ve been awake for over two hours. It’s daylight outside.”
Warren looked through the door and saw a blurred grayness reflecting on the snow and indicating that the sun had risen. He closed his fist—the silver one—and crushed the rock to powder, then let it leak between his fingers.
“Where’s Lilith?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen her.”
Warren struggled to his feet. He hated letting go of the warmth he’d built inside his coat. The winter chill nipped at him at once. His body ached from sleeping in a seated position, and from all the walking and manual labor he’d been doing over the past few days.
“I’m out here,” Lilith called.
Wary, Warren stepped back through the opening. Lilith stood atop the ditch that the zombies had dug out to reach the buried structure. The zombies continued the excavation, but Warren wondered if any of them had wandered off in the middle of the night. Their numbers were once again thinning.
Warren climbed the uneven steps he’d cut into the wall. Although the zombies could dig, he hadn’t been able to get the concept of steps across to them.
“Stop,” Lilith said.
Calmly, Warren froze where he was and watched her. She’d changed. She looked more real than she had before. Her color was back. More than that, she actually left footprints in the snow.
As he watched her, she stretched out a hand and crooned in a strange melody that beckoned to Warren at the same time it frightened him. Movement darted in the brush ahead of her. After a couple of moments, a fat rabbit hopped across the snow-covered ground and came to a stop at Lilith’s feet as she coaxed it to her.
Still singing, the demon leaned down and tentatively stroked the rabbit. In the next instant, she grabbed the rabbit by its scruff with one hand and took its head in her other. She twisted violently.
The sharp crack of the rabbit’s neckbones pierced the cold air. For a moment, the rabbit kicked furiously, then it was still.
Before Warren figured out how he was supposed to react, Lilith tore the rabbit’s throat open and drank its blood. He heard Naomi cursing behind him, then throwing up.
When she’d drunk her fill, Lilith cupped a handful of snow and washed the blood from her mouth. She looked at Warren with too-bright eyes.
“I haven’t eaten in thousands of years,” she said in a slurred tone. “I’d forgotten what the taste of blood was like.”
Warren didn’t know what to say.
“Come on,” Lilith coaxed, shaking the dead rabbit at him. “I’ve got breakfast waiting. She can eat, too. There’s enough, and I’m feeling generous.”
For the first time, Warren noticed the smell of cooked meat hanging in the air. His stomach growled in spite of what he’d just witnessed.
She led him to a windbreak she’d arranged in the brush. A cheery campfire burned there. The overhanging branches defused the smoke and disappeared against the leaden sky that promised only more snow.
Three rabbits hung on spits near the fire. The flesh was cooked and browned. Warren salivated when he saw them and smelled them. It had been weeks since he’d had fresh meat, and he’d had to barter with one of the survivors still hanging about London.
“Sit,” Lilith encouraged. “Eat. If this isn’t enough, there are more rabbits.”
Warren had never eaten rabbit before, and he’d drawn the line at rats caught inside the Metro area. He wouldn’t have eaten rats anyway, but he knew that many of those in Central feasted on dead humans that had recently been killed or succumbed to injury, sickness, or starvation.
Rabbits don’t eat meat, he told himself. They haven’t eaten anything foul. He brushed the snow from a fallen tree, folded his coattails under him, and sat. He took up one of the spitted rabbits and pinched flesh from it. The meat fell off the bone, and it tasted divine.
Although she’d looked appalled, Naomi sat beside him and picked up one of the rabbits as well. She ate tentatively at first, then more hungrily. Grease dripped down her chin.
“Have you rested?” Lilith asked.
“Yes,” Warren answered.
Naomi said, “Yes.”
Lilith didn’t look at Naomi. “Do you think the interior of the tomb is safe for you to go into now?”
“Is that what it is?” Warren asked. “Your tomb?”
“I haven’t died,” Lilith pointed out. “I only fell into near-death. My death, as long as I stayed protected, was still a long way off.”
“Are you flesh again?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But soon.” She tore the rabbit’s fur from its body and consumed it raw. When she had the meat from its bones, she broke the bones and sucked the marrow.
Repulsed, Warren turned away from her and concentrated on his own meal. That was hard as he listened to her crunch the bones.
TWENTY-FOUR
Simon stood beside Leah’s bed in the surgery. From the tightness round her good eye and her elevated respiration, he knew she was nervous. He didn’t need his armor to tell him that. Round them, the OR team prepped her for surgery.
“I never much cared for hospitals,” Leah admitted.
“Neither have I, but I’m glad we’ve got a good one.” Simon felt awkward standing there as the other people worked round him.
“The surgeon’s done this before?”
“He’s the one that put Eoin’s eyes in.”
“Can they match my eye color? My eyes aren’t exactly off-the-rack, you know.”
Simon did know. Those violet eyes sometime haunted his thoughts.
“They’ll match,” he told her. “The nanobots pick up color from the DNA and push it right into the new eye they build for you.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” she said. “I’ve always been a little vain about my eyes.”
“You’ve got lovely eyes,” Simon told her.
Some of the tension in her face went away as she smiled at him. “You’ve never told me that before.”
“No.” Simon suddenly felt
