The Dishonored Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

too.”
    The thin candle in the middle of their table flickered shadows across her face.
    “I’m so … so happy .”
    “Are you?”
    She reached across the table, took his hand in hers. “I am.”
    Conrad thought about the zombie from the other night, how he’d hesitated in killing it. He thought about Kyle this afternoon, coming back from the woods and saying he’d heard something weird. He thought again about what would need to be done if Kyle turned, and once more he thought about the woman he didn’t know and wondered who she was.
    Holding his wife’s hand, staring back into her black eyes, Conrad said, “Good. I’m happy too.”

     

     
    After dinner they went for a drive. They backtracked through those city streets, out of Olympus and into the suburbs, out of the suburbs and into the country.
    One hand on the steering wheel, the other holding his wife’s hand, Conrad drove the car without any conscious thought of where they were going. Eventually certain buildings, signs, even trees started looking familiar to him, and he turned off the main highway, started up the hill into the woods, winding and winding around the dark trees, until they came to a spot that overlooked a good section of the country and suburbs and city beyond.  
    “Do you remember this place?” Conrad asked.
    Denise had snuggled back into her seat. Her head back on the headrest, she looked around at him and smiled. “This is where you first told me you loved me.”
    “And where we first made love.”
    “And where you asked me to marry you.”
    Outside the car, the trees were animated with the chirping of dead insects.
    “Do you know what other first we had here?”
    “What?”
    “This was where you first showed me your poem.”
    She sat up a little straighter in her seat, gave him an uncertain smile. “I was hoping you hadn’t remembered.”
    “Of course I remembered. Why would you say that?”
    “I don’t know. I just … it was a mistake.” She looked at him again, that uncertain smile still on her face, and said, “Do you want to know a secret?”
    “Sure.”
    “I sort of wish I’d kept it.”
    “Really?”
    Denise sat back in her seat, stared out her window. “I know it was illegal, that I could have been instantly expired, but it … it felt sort of nice.”
    A silence fell between them then, a silence where both remembered the times they’d shared up here, how this had become their own special haunt but which they had both forgotten once they got married and had Kyle and Conrad had been promoted again and again. Conrad remembered the first time he’d met Denise, how he’d been in his first year at Artemis and he had gone out with some of the guys to a local bar. It was his first time at a bar—his first true social interaction of any kind—and he had been standing alone in the corner, just watching, trying to get a sense of what to do and how to act. And when Denise approached him, asked him to dance, he didn’t know what to say. In fact, he didn’t say anything. Denise sensed his shyness, his insecurity, and she smiled, took his hand, led him to the dance floor.
    Now, thirteen years later, Denise said, “Sometimes I …” but she let the words trail away, as she leaned her head back against the seat and stared out her window.
    “Sometimes you what?”
    She didn’t answer.
    Conrad touched her knee. “Please. Sometimes you what?”
    So he didn’t know how to dance, but that was okay; Denise taught him. She taught him how to dance and she talked to him and later, out in the parking lot, with the neon bar sign buzzing above their heads, she leaned in and kissed him on the lips.
    At that point Denise had no idea he was training at Artemis. She had no idea—just like everyone else in the world—who Conrad’s father truly was. Six months passed before he finally told her he would someday become a Hunter, but by then their relationship had become serious.
    By then they had been going out on drives, coming