Chapter 211: Telling About Emily

"Could someone please tell me what all of you are doing here?"

Mei’s voice rang through. She sat perched on an ornate armchair in the living room like a queen surveying her court, her posture ramrod straight and her hands folded primly in her lap. The book she’d been reading—some leather-bound volume that looked older than any of us—rested on the chair’s arm.

"Why are you asking?" Christopher asked, claiming a spot on the sofa a bit tired. He almost collapsed into the cushions, leaning back with an exhausted sigh.

"Maybe because this is my house?" Mei replied.

"Nope, this house actually belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Sharp," Cindy countered cheerfully, holding up what appeared to be an old piece of correspondence. She shook it gently, sending a small cloud of dust particles through the air. Her smile was almost triumphant as she waved the evidence.

"You heard her, Mei—it’s not your house," Sydney chimed in, settling herself into another armchair. "So we can do whatever we want here. And it’s not like you sleeping here for one night suddenly makes it your personal property. That’s not how ownership works, even in the apocalypse."

"Besides, we aren’t planning to stay here long anyway," Rebecca added from where she stood near the doorway, her arms crossed across her chest.

"It doesn’t really matter to me either way," Mei said with a smile that absolutely did not reach her eyes. "I just wanted some peace and quiet while I’m reading Shakespeare. Is that too much to ask?"

"Are you still upset that Ryan didn’t give you a goodbye kiss before leaving, Mei?" Sydney asked with barely concealed glee, clearly enjoying poking at the sore spot.

"Sydney! Come on!" Daisy spoke up quickly, her voice rising in pitch with embarrassment. She shot Sydney a pleading look before Mei could respond beyond the murderous glare she was currently directing at Sydney.

"What kiss?" I asked, approaching the group after having spent the last few minutes checking around the house, maybe out of habit of scavenging around.

I’d only caught fragments of the conversation, but apparently I’d walked in at precisely the wrong moment.

"NOTHING."

Mei’s voice rang out with such force and intensity that I actually took an involuntary step backward. I found myself on the receiving end of a smile that could only be described as terrifying.

"Alright then..." I said, deciding that discretion was absolutely the better part of valor in this instance.

I cleared my throat and tried to redirect the conversation to safer ground. "Anyway, we’re not here to interrupt your reading, Mei. I actually wanted to tell you all something important. Since you’ve made it clear you don’t appreciate me hiding information from the group..."

I trailed off, and despite my best efforts to control it, my gaze drifted sideways toward Rebecca.

She caught my glance and immediately scoffed. Without a word, she moved deeper into the room and claimed a spot on another sofa;

"That’s very considerate of you, Ryan," Rachel said warmly, offering me an encouraging smile as she took a seat beside her younger sister. "Don’t mind Rebecca. She’s just processing things in her own way."

"As always, you’re taking his side in any disagreement between the two of us, big sister," Rebecca said annoyed. "It’s like you can’t help yourself."

"Please, Rebecca," Rachel sighed, her voice carrying the long-suffering patience of someone who’d had this argument too many times to count. "Can we not do this today? Just for once?"

"Can we just move on already?" Mei spoke with obvious exhaustion coloring her voice. "I need to sleep, and this conversation is keeping me from doing that."

"It’s four in the afternoon, Mei," Sydney pointed out.

"I saw Emily," I blurted out before the cyclical bickering could gain any more momentum and derail the entire conversation.

Silence fell over the room, smothering all other sound. Every pair of eyes turned toward me.

"And who exactly is Emily supposed to be?" Rebecca asked after a beat.

"Ryan’s first love," Sydney supplied helpfully before I could open my mouth to respond.

I’d been about to say ’classmate’, actually, but of course Sydney had other ideas about how to frame this revelation.

"His true love from high school, his biggest crush, and also—fun fact—the girl who took Ryan’s virginity," Sydney continued, apparently determined to share every potentially embarrassing detail she could think of.

Another silence descended, this one even more awkward than the first.

Now things had gotten really, profoundly uncomfortable.

"You might have led with ’classmate,’ Sydney," I said, shooting her a tired glare.

"So everything else I said is true, then?" She asked with feigned innocence, though her eyes sparkled with mischief.

"Right..." I sighed inwardly, recognizing that I’d walked directly into that trap.

I moved across the room and settled myself into another armchair, this one positioned slightly apart from the main seating arrangement. I needed a moment to gather my thoughts and figure out how to explain the situation with Emily and Callighan.

Sydney’s smirk only widened further. Before I could react or protest, her body suddenly crackled with that distinctive blue electrical energy that accompanied her enhanced speed. In a blur of motion too fast for most eyes to track, she closed the distance between her chair and mine, appearing on my lap as if she’d teleported there. Her legs dangled casually over the armchair’s side, and she settled against me.

"S...Sydney?" Daisy stammered, her face flushing bright red as she stared at the scene with wide, shocked eyes.

Rebecca and Mei also looked genuinely surprised, their expressions mirroring Daisy’s confusion. Even Cindy raised her eyebrows, though she seemed more amused than shocked.

"Sydney..." I said her name slowly, not quite understanding what game she was playing here. "What are you doing?"

This display seemed like it might be pushing things a bit too far for the carefully maintained facade of ’just friends’ that we’d been presenting to Rebecca, Daisy, and Mei—the three people in our group who weren’t aware of my complicated, multiple romantic relationships with several of the women, including Sydney herself.

Sydney leaned in close, her breath warm against my ear as she whispered. "I’m just getting a bit sick of constantly hiding our relationship from everyone."

Before I could process what she’d said or formulate a response, I felt her teeth graze my earlobe in a light, playful bite—thankfully hidden from everyone else’s view by the angle of our bodies and the fall of her hair.

But what they absolutely could see was my body’s involuntary reaction. I stiffened noticeably, my muscles tensing, and my arms instinctively tightened around Sydney’s waist in a gesture that was far too intimate and protective to be explained away as casual friendship.

"So you want to just reveal everything right here, right now?" I whispered back to her, keeping my voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry to the others. "Don’t you care at all about what Rachel and Cindy think? They’ve been keeping this secret too, you know. This affects them."

Sydney rolled her eyes in response.

"What exactly are you two doing over there?"

Rachel’s voice cut through our whispered exchange asking silently to be careful.

I lifted my gaze from Sydney to find every single person in the room staring at us with expressions of confusions.

Moving quickly—perhaps too quickly, in a way that probably revealed more guilt than innocence—I lifted Sydney bodily off my lap and set her aside.

"Hey!" She protested, though without any real anger behind the exclamation.

"Anyway," I said, desperately trying to redirect the conversation back to safer ground, "as I was saying before I got... distracted... I saw Emily while I was at the Boardwalk. And she’s also the first person I ever... helped...."

The words came out awkwardly, my brain scrambling to find phrasing that wouldn’t reveal too much while still being truthful.

"The first person you helped?" Mei asked, lowering her book slightly to fix me with a penetrating stare. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"Yeah, I mean..." I trailed off, suddenly realizing with growing horror that I’d been about to walk directly into a verbal minefield.

I had been on the verge of explaining what happened that day in the storage room—including the crucial detail that I’d cured Emily’s transformation through sex. If I said that out loud, if I admitted that fact, they would start connecting dots. The pattern would become obvious: Emily was the first, then there were the others, all the women I’d been intimate with who’d undergone the same process. They would figure out that sex was the mechanism of stabilization, which was information that absolutely did not need to be public knowledge right now.

Not when three people in this room—Mei, Rebecca, and Daisy—were still completely unaware of that particular aspect of the Dullahan ability.

"Emily was my classmate at Lincoln High," I said instead, choosing my words with extreme care. "We were both at school when the virus first spread through the city. We got surrounded by Infected—completely cut off from any escape route—and we managed to run and barricade ourselves inside a storage room to hide."

"A storage room?" Christopher spoke up, one eyebrow rising suggestively. "Just the two of you? Alone? In a confined space? That sounds pretty sus, buddy."

"Don’t start, Christopher," Cindy immediately shot him down.

Christopher raised both hands in mock surrender, though the knowing smirk didn’t leave his face.

I offered an awkward smile, feeling the intensity of everyone’s gazes ratcheting up another notch.

"Yeah, so... we were trapped in there for hours," I continued. "We both thought we were going to die. The Infected were right outside, and we had no weapons, no way to defend ourselves. So we... we tried to find some happiness in what we thought were our final moments. And then something changed—I awakened Dullahan for the first time. The power just... manifested. And after that happened, well, we managed to escape and then we parted ways."

The explanation came out jumbled and awkward, each sentence feeling like I was picking my way across ice that might crack at any moment.

Damn it, this was incredibly difficult. Trying to explain the situation while omitting the most crucial aspect of how the Dullahan ability actually worked felt like trying to describe a car without mentioning the engine.

Mei, Rebecca, and Daisy had no idea about the specific mechanism of stabilization—the sex requirement—and maintaining that ignorance while telling this story required verbal gymnastics that made my head hurt.

Actually, if I was being honest with myself, it wasn’t just the difficulty of the deception that was bothering me. I felt guilty. Genuinely, deeply guilty about continuing to hide such important information from them. These were people I trusted, people who were risking their lives alongside mine, and I was keeping secrets about how our supernatural abilities functioned.

Rebecca especially—she didn’t even know about my serious, committed relationship with her own sister. We’d been hiding Rachel and my relationship from her for months now.

I was genuinely afraid of the moment she would inevitably discover the truth.

As for Daisy and Mei, I felt less personal guilt about keeping secrets from them since our relationships weren’t as deeply intertwined. But it was still annoying.

"Why do I get the distinct feeling that you’re hiding things from us again?" Rebecca asked, as expected picking on my awkwardness.

"He’s terrible at lying, isn’t he?" Mei said with barely concealed annoyance, though she’d returned her attention to her book. Despite the appearance of reading, I noticed she was avoiding my gaze everytime I looked at her.

"I’m not lying about anything important," I said, though even I could hear how defensive the words sounded. "Some things are just personal. Do you really want me to describe in graphic detail every aspect of my sexual encounter with Emily? Is that what you’re asking for?"

The blunt, crude phrasing had exactly the effect I’d intended. They all fell silent and awkward.

"So the point is," I continued into that uncomfortable silence, "Emily is someone who matters to me. Someone important. And right now, she’s caught in Callighan’s group, under his control."

"Callighan?" Cindy’s voice rose in disbelief. "Wait, what? How did she end up with him?"

Rachel and Sydney thankfully seemed to have briefed them about Callighan after coming back yesterday.

"That’s what I’m trying to figure out," I replied. "But I don’t believe—I absolutely refuse to believe—that she’s with someone like Callighan willingly. She’s not that kind of person. And when I saw her, she was showing clear signs of... withdrawal, I mean pain."

I looked specifically at Sydney, Rachel, and Cindy as I said that last word, loading it with significance. I needed them to understand what I meant without spelling it out for everyone else in the room.

Thankfully, all three of them immediately grasped my meaning. Their expressions shifted simultaneously—eyes widening with understanding. They knew I was talking about the symptoms of an unstabilized awakening, the mental degradation that occurred when someone with Dullahan abilities wasn’t properly anchored through the stabilization process.

"You don’t think she’s with him willingly?" Rebecca scoffed. "Maybe she chose to join his group. Maybe she’s exactly where she wants to be. Did you consider that possibility?"

"Let me correct myself," I said, standing up from the armchair with enough force that it rocked slightly. "I don’t think it—I’m absolutely certain of it. I know Emily, I know her character, and there is zero chance she aligned herself with someone like Callighan by choice. Which means I need to see the situation for myself. I need to investigate what’s actually going on."

"See it for yourself?" Rachel stood up as well, her face painted with worry. "Ryan, what exactly are you planning?"

"I want to help her," I said, meeting Rachel’s eyes with as much sincerity as I could convey. "She needs help, Rachel. Desperately. I can’t just abandon her to whatever’s happening there."

"Wait, hold on," Rebecca spoke up, her voice rising with incredulity. "This Callighan—he’s that psychotic killer Sydney was telling us about? The one who runs a group of murderers and raiders? And you want to involve all of us in a conflict with him? Are you insane?"

"No, I’m not involving anyone," I replied. "I’ll handle this myself. Alone."

"Ryan, not this again," Cindy said, standing up and fixing me with a serious look. "Please tell me you’re not about to do the lone wolf routine one more time."

"Here we go," Christopher sighed heavily, leaning back into the sofa. "Right back to square one—Ryan wanting to handle everything by himself without asking for help or accepting support."

"I want to do this alone because I can do it alone, Christopher," I said. "Listen to me—Emily is currently with people from my high school. Tommy, Liam, others I recognize. I can talk to them, reason with them, maybe find out what’s really going on. I have a connection there that none of you have. And more importantly, I don’t want to involve anyone else in this."

"You’re going to get yourself killed if you insist on doing this alone, regardless of how strong you think you are, Ryan," Cindy said bluntly. "You’re not invincible."

"She’s absolutely right," Sydney added, also giving me a serious look. "You aren’t immortal, you know. Bullets can still kill you. Being outnumbered can still overwhelm you. One mistake, one moment of bad luck, and you’re dead."

I let out a small, bitter scoff before standing up fully and preparing to leave the room.

"Ryan..." Rachel called me softly. She reached out toward me, her hand extended.

I raised my own hand, palm out, stopping her approach. "I’m fine, Rachel," I said, though my voice betrayed the lie. "I just..."

I paused at the doorway, turning back to look at them, sweeping over all of them.

"I just don’t want to lose anyone else I care about," I said quietly. "And Emily... she’s among those people. She matters to me just like all of you guys. I can’t just leave her to suffer when I have the power to help her."