CHAPTER 125: 125-SHE KNOWS HAIDEN

Clementine:

We gave each other a hand gesture, almost as if to say that just because they were calling for us didn’t mean we had to come out.

"Come on! It’s not like we can’t find you ourselves," the man called. Ian gestured toward the rooftop of the house next to ours. That’s when I noticed something else, the four brown houses each had matching ones across the road, like mirrored reflections. I wondered if the color actually meant something, now that we had seen inside them.

"Come on, let’s go." Haiden tugged my arm but still led me on tiptoe toward the other rooftop. We were going to jump, which meant whoever was already down there would find out.

"Clementine, you go first," Troy urged.

"Why me?" I asked, my hands gripping the small wall of the house we stood on.

"Because when you land, you’ll make noise. They’ll be alerted and start coming up at the same time as we are moving toward the rooftop. That’ll give you enough time to jump to the next one while we head for the old one where they’re already gathered," Yorick explained, trying to make it as simple as possible.

"You guys don’t have to watch my back all the time. You’re crusaders too. Save yourselves." I told them that making me their priority was starting to make me feel strange, even selfish. None of us had asked to feel a mate bond, so why did they always act like they had to? Maybe I was just never anyone’s first, so it felt odd now.

"Come on, stop talking. We don’t have time," Ian said, motioning for me to follow their rules. We could have stood there arguing, but I knew these alphas wouldn’t listen. They would only waste more time, so I jumped first.

The next thing I knew, footsteps and screams rose from below. I rushed toward the next house as fast as I could. All I heard was my breath, my heartbeat pounding in my temples, my footsteps, and the wind slamming against my face. One after another, I jumped until I landed on the first greenhouse rooftop. Suddenly, everything was quiet.

I turned and saw my squad mates racing over to join me. At the same time, people began appearing on the rooftops of the other brown houses. On the first one, though, they couldn’t get the door open. Once we were all together on the greenhouse’s rooftop, we turned and watched them. Seeing the faces of the ones performing the ritual was unsettling. They looked terrifying, and giving them faces made it all the more eerie.

There were women, kids, old people, and men, and then we looked down the road. A man with the longest hair, reaching his back, stood there staring at us.

"Just because you’re away from the brown houses, you think you’re safe?" the man yelled with a chuckle. He was tough but not very tall. My squad mates would tower over him. I had never seen anyone taller than them, unless it was an ogre or a giant.

"What are you doing to these people?" I shouted, asking about the bones I had found. He looked like he had no clue what I meant.

"We’re doing nothing. We find dead bodies, we bring them home, and we give them a proper burial. I mean, a proper goodbye, in a ritual’s way," he tried to explain.

But none of us believed him. He was lying. The way those bones were set, it wasn’t a goodbye.

"If that’s the case, if you’re so harmless, then why do you want us to come downstairs? Why were you trying to get your hands on us?" I shouted, and he chuckled.

"When did I ever say we want to capture you? We asked you to come out. Don’t you think we deserve that much? You spent the whole night in our home. If it were the other way around, you’d be calling the cops, you’d be calling warriors on us if we had slept in your bedroom," The men grunted. We all exchanged a look before turning back to them.

"So are you coming down or not?" He asked. We all shook our heads.

"You already know it’s not somewhere else, but it is north. We apologize for trespassing, but we are not coming down. Do what you want," Haiden hissed.

The man’s face began to change, a creepy smirk curling onto his lips.

"Well, well, then let me tell you this. Before evening, you all will be coming down."

After that person made the threat, he went back into the brown house. I could tell he belonged to the house we were in earlier. Maybe it was the leader’s house or something. I couldn’t be sure, but I knew some of them were still out there, hiding behind doors, ready to grab us the second they got the chance with whatever weapons they might be hiding.

"What are we going to do now?" I asked my squadmates.

"We don’t have anything to eat or drink here either," Troy reminded us. When they had run upstairs, they hadn’t managed to grab any of the food we secured last night from the mall.

"That’s not the issue. The mall’s right there. The problem is, if we leave now, who’s to say these people won’t follow us? It’s not like they can’t leave and enter the other houses, the other colors," Yorick pointed out, nodding and taking a deeper breath. "Besides, we can jump from rooftop to rooftop, but that doesn’t guarantee safety. They could be moving down through the houses, waiting for us to come down."

This time, Yorick made sense.

"And then there’s the creature out there, so we don’t even know when—" Haiden stopped mid-sentence.

I felt the shift in the air before I noticed him turning his head slowly toward the rooftop door. The silence was too heavy. Then a soft knock sounded against the door. That must have caught Haiden’s attention.

And then a voice came from behind it.

"Haiden!"