Page 3 of The Dearly Departed

“You don’t want to tell me?”

She sniffled and shook her head again.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. But …” I swallowed and glanced toward the crowd of library-goers, slowly moving along with their arms full of books. “Can you … can you show me, um … where?”

Through the veil of her long, dark hair, I watched as her pale cheeks reddened with embarrassment, like she had any reason to be ashamed of the terrible things adults chose to do to children, and that only made me angrier.

She lifted a shaking hand from her rabbit to hover it briefly over her waist before she dropped it again and gave her head another rapid shake.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “You don’t have to. It’s okay.”

She’d already said enough.

And as I pulled her against my chest and swore to God that I would do something to save her, I realized that she’d been right.

Jim really was sick … but with a different sort of plague.

One that had spread to many, many people, yet nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.

And maybe that was because they didn’t look sick, and if they didn’t look sick, how was anyone else supposed to know they were infected?

These people had the ability to hide, to take in kids who were in desperate situations, to pick them up off the street and do whatever they wanted to them. Because adults were strong, and kids were weak, and nobody on the outside of it all could stop moving long enough to notice and help.

Where’s a plague doctor when you need one? I thought as Anna clung to me like her life depended on it.

Then I huffed a bitter, sardonic laugh because nobody was going to help us.

Nobody ever did.

It was on me to do something.

It was always, always on me.

CHAPTER ONE

Age Sixteen

“What the hell is he doing?”

Shawn was freaking out, but that wasn’t anything new.

It was par for the course after we’d finally made the decision to run away from the foster home we were in.

He was always worried that the cops would be called, that we’d be found and thrown back where we’d come from … and he had good reason to be freaked out.

Every single time, without fail, that was exactly what happened. Different houses, different families, but that didn’t matter. Same shit, different faces—that was how we always put it—and every single time, when we’d finally had enough, we’d run with the hope that this time, we’d get lucky. This time, we’d get away. This time, we wouldn’t get caught.

And right now, from the sound of Shawn’s panicked voice, there’d be no such luck this time around either.

With a groan, I pulled my cigarette away from my lips and turned to peer through the trees at the little mom-and-pop corner store we’d just robbed.

Smokes and snacks—that was all we were supposed to go in for. Whatever we could fit into our pockets and the backpack we’d taken from the house. Nothing crazy. Just enough until we had the chance to hit another store—maybe tomorrow or the day after. And Shawn followed the rules—he always did. He and I were always on the same page.

But then, of course, there was Isaac.

“Fucking hell, Ike,” I growled under my breath as I watched my little brother attempt to walk out the shop door with a six-pack of beer before getting stopped by the owner.

The little shit didn’t even like beer.