I took a deep breath and drew in the heat and energy of the day, letting it flow deep into my body, into every muscle, every fiber, until my entire being burned. Then I imagined that force wrapping around me, forming a shield through which none could see. Energy stirred as motes of light began to dance both through and around me, joining and growing, until they’d formed the barrier I was imagining. To the outside world, I no longer existed. The sunshine that played through me acted like a one-way mirror, reflecting all that was around me but allowing no one to see in. Thus protected from casual scrutiny, I moved out, following the old riverbed toward the railway yards.
My two little escorts spun around me, their excitement becoming tinged with trepidation as we drew closer to the rail yards. A pod slid silently into the station, its interior lighting coming to life as it stopped and the doors slid open. The men and women crowded onto the platform pressed inside and, in very little time, the pod doors closed and the train whisked its occupants off to whatever factory or farm they’d been allocated for the day.
I ran across the lines, jumped onto a platform, and made my way through the complex, moving swiftly past stony-faced guards, then out onto the old road that ran between the museum’s dome and Central’s drawbridge. There was little traffic here, aside from those making their way to the pods and the occasional private vehicle taking its occupants to who knew where.
Pain began to crawl into my head. It was a warning I dared not ignore. I ran on, deep into the shadows of the trees, stopping only when there was no possibility of either the guards or any passersby on the street seeing me.
“Cat, Bear, keep an eye out,” I said, then released the sunshine. Motes of light danced around me, slowly at first, then faster and faster, as they seeped from my body with increasing speed. Then, with a sound that was almost a sigh, they slipped away into the shadows. I fell to my knees with a grunt, my body aching and my head booming.
For several minutes, I did nothing more than kneel on the hard soil, sucking in air and trying to ignore the pain. This was the price all lures paid for using the sunshine shield. Even shadowing had its cost, although it was far easier to gather shadows and disappear into them, simply because, like the vampires, I could physically become smoke. It wasn’t a psychic skill, but rather part of my nature—a magic that came from my soul and the darkness within it. But it nevertheless drew on our strength, and in the heart of a battle, it could certainly be deadly. I often wondered how many of my kindred had been destroyed during this brief period of helplessness—more than a few, I imagined.
Once the stabbing pain had eased to a dull ache, I pushed to my feet and looked around to check my bearings. Central lay off to my left, as did the clearing where we’d found Penny and Jonas. I had no idea where exactly they’d entered the park, but given that the vamps had come from a southerly direction, that was probably the way I should head. I spun on my heel and marched through the trees, keeping an eye out for movement—not that anyone in Central made use of this park. Not until the sun had reached its peak in the sky and the remaining shadows had fled, anyway, and that was a few hours away yet.
It took an hour to reach Carleen’s southern border. I stopped at the edge of the park, my gaze sweeping the remnants of the old curtain wall and the broken buildings beyond it. Though the old city was little more than a vine-covered mass of rusting metal and disintegrating concrete, it had once been home to over twenty thousand people, most of them families. In a way it still was home to many of those people, as the evacuation order had come far too late. Over a third of Carleen’s population had still been here when the last bombs of the war had hit it.
Maybe it was the presence of so many ghosts that caused the pall of darkness that seemed to hang over this place, no matter what the time of day. Or maybe it was the existence of over a dozen rifts, many of which were still active. I didn’t know, and I don’t believe anyone in Central did, either. All I knew was that, even now, those in Central avoided this place like a plague, and it wasn’t just because the vampires were more prevalent here. There was something very wrong about the feel of this place. Something slightly off center, almost otherworldly.
It was almost as if the rifts that drifted through this ruined city had leaked far more than magic—had spewed forth far more than demonic creatures.
All of which made it even more odd that Penny had somehow ended up here.
Hopefully, the ghosts here could provide an answer. Or, at the very least, point me in the direction from which she’d actually come. If they were feeling communicative, that was. I’d been here only a couple of times—and then only in the first ten or so years after the war, to scrounge through the wreckage in a somewhat useless search for parts for my old machines. While the ghosts had never been hostile toward me, they hadn’t exactly been welcoming, either.
I swept my gaze across the long, broken wall one more time, though what I was searching for I couldn’t actually say, then moved forward. The sunshine bathed me briefly, and I breathed deep, trying to capture and keep the warmth for as long as possible as the shadows crept toward me.
I resisted the urge to flick a knife down into my hand and leapt up onto a low section of wall. I hesitated, taking in the ruptured remnants of buildings and—farther to my left—the remains of what once had been a main road through the city. It was littered with building rubble, weeds, and trees that had twisted into odd shapes thanks to the eddying magic of the rifts. Plastic of various shapes and sizes—rubbish that had survived the destruction far better than Carleen itself—added spots of bright color in many darker corners, but otherwise this place was still. Quiet.
Yet not unoccupied.
Unease slithered through me. There was a watchfulness here that went beyond the displeasure of ghosts. It was almost as if something had crawled into this place and infested it with evil.
I shivered and shoved my imagination away. It wasn’t like déchet were even supposed to have imaginations, let alone feelings. But while it was true that in those déchet designed purely to be soldiers or assassins, the limbic system—or at least the parts of it that controlled emotions and sexual responses—had been medically “curtailed” upon creation, the same had not been done to those of us who were created as lures. We’d been designed as bait, and a being without feeling, one who couldn’t respond to emotional cues and who felt no emotion—be it pleasure or fear—wouldn’t have survived long in any sort of culture, let alone been sexually attractive to those we were sent to seduce.
Could I love? That was a question I’d often pondered, and one I’d never found an answer to. I certainly couldn’t breed; our creators had ensured that right out of the box. Or test tube, as was the case.
I swept my gaze across the ruins again, then—ignoring my increasing reluctance to enter this place—jumped down from the wall and headed for the remnants of the road. There was no immediate response from the Carleen ghosts, though a sudden sharpening in the tension that ran through the air suggested they were well aware of me.
Cat and Bear pressed close as I picked my way through the rubble. It seemed they disliked the feel of this place just as much as I did. We finally reached the road, though walking here wasn’t really any easier, given what little remained of the asphalt after one hundred years of weather eating at its surface was pitted with yellowed weeds and mutated trees. At least there weren’t any rifts in the immediate area—though that didn’t mean there soon wouldn’t be. There didn’t seem to be any logic—or, indeed, any compliance to the laws of gravity or nature itself—in their movements. Neither wind nor gravitational pull had any influence on them, and they could just as easily drift against a gale-force wind as they could leap upward to consume birds, shifters in winged form, or even whole aircraft. I had no idea what happened to humans or shifters caught in rifts, but I’d seen the magic within them mangle the DNA of the flora and fauna they passed over, creating monstrosities that were neither and yet both. I very much doubted such a thing was survivable. Certainl
y the poor beasts who’d become part stone or tree hadn’t lasted long.
Central—and presumably other cities in the proximity of the rifts—had made several attempts to destroy them, without success. These days they just attempted to track them, providing evacuation warnings where necessary—though, given the erratic nature of the things, those warnings were often useless.
A large tree loomed in the middle of the road, its gnarled trunk covered in a moss that glowed with an odd luminescence. I edged around it, taking care not to touch the moss, knowing from past experience that as pretty as the stuff looked, it leaked a substance that acted like acid when it touched your skin. Unpleasant and painful didn’t even begin to describe the few hours that had followed that particular exploration.
We walked on, moving deeper into Carleen. The watchfulness grew, crawling across my senses, itching at my skin. But the Carleen ghosts made no move to approach me, and that was unusual. It was almost as if they were afraid . . . but what did the ghosts of this place have to be afraid of? It wasn’t as if there was much in this world that could threaten them, and while there were vampires who lived off energy rather than flesh, they wouldn’t be active in the middle of the day. And the rifts certainly couldn’t affect them . . . could they?
Given what I’d seen rifts do to plants and animals, it was certainly possible.
The broken road began to slope up toward the center of Carleen. If the ghosts were anywhere, they’d be there, gathered in the vast remains of the shelters under city hall. It was the place where most of them had found their deaths.
Energy of a different kind crawled across my skin, its touch dark and somewhat unpleasant. It wasn’t the energy of a rift, not exactly, and yet it felt somewhat similar. I paused and looked left, scanning the shattered building remnants that rimmed a bomb crater. The sensation seemed to be ebbing from the base of that crater. I walked across and stared down into it. It was so deep that all I could see was darkness—a darkness that seemed thick enough to carve. For no good reason, I shivered and backed away from the rim. I had no idea what lay down there, and it wasn’t something I wanted to discover. Not unless I absolutely had to, anyway. Even Cat and Bear seemed reluctant to investigate, and given their love of a challenge and exploring new things, it spoke volumes about the wrongness of that darkness.
We continued on up the hill. The buildings around us fell into even more disrepair, until there was very little left but a sea of concrete and stone rubble interspersed by the occasional rusted metal strut that had been twisted into weird and wonderful shapes either by the force of the bombs, or by the rifts themselves. It was a somewhat surreal experience—almost as if I were walking on an alien landscape. Especially since the luminescent moss seemed to be more prevalent up here. I paused at the base of a monument to some forgotten general, and looked around. We were standing in the middle of what once had been a large city square. Government buildings and small eateries had lined this place, but all of them were little more than dust and memories now. To my right lay another cavernous crater—this one caused by the three bombs that had wiped out not only the government officials who’d taken refuge within the thick walls of city hall, but also everyone who’d hidden in the shelters underneath it. The ghosts were there. Their energy crawled across my senses, a touch that was as dark as it was dangerous.
I frowned, but nevertheless continued on. The Carleen ghosts stirred restlessly, but made no move to either attack or flee. They were waiting. Judging.
I stopped at the edge of the crater. This one, unlike the other, wasn’t wrapped in shadows, although the bottom of it was so deep I couldn’t pick out what lay there. But I could imagine, given the number of people who had died here. Their bones, even after a hundred years, would probably be meters deep.
“People of Carleen,” I said softly, “I need your help.”
Their energy stirred, tinged with disbelief.
“A little girl was found here several days ago,” I continued. “A ranger was with her. I need to know how she got here.”
Anger exploded, fierce enough to knock me back several feet. Cat and Bear flung themselves around me, but the attack didn’t happen. The ghosts of Carleen might be angry—murderously angry—but they weren’t angry with me.
Not yet, anyway.
But to know what was happening here, I needed to be able to garner more than just emotion. I needed to see these people, talk to them properly, and that meant joining forces with little Cat. I might have an innate ability to hear the whisperings of the dead, but it would take more than that to talk to those who’d once lived here. Carleen had been a human city, and that one fact placed these dead beyond both my seeker and communication skills. Lures might have escaped most of the DNA interventions and restrictions that had been placed on our soldier brethren, but our creators had certainly made it impossible for us to read their thoughts. I had no idea if they’d also made it impossible for us to kill a human, because I’d never had to try. But in the five years our world had been at war, I’d never heard of a lure turning on their creators. Given that soldier déchet had been rendered incapable of harming a human, it was likely similar restrictions had been placed on us.
But Cat had been created in the months before the war had erupted, when the rush to create more rifle fodder had led to greater use of growth accelerants and all sorts of other shortcuts. While she’d been destined to become a soldier, neither she nor Bear—nor any of the other, littler ones who’d been in my care that day, in fact—had had their limbic systems altered in any way. Which meant, thanks to her tabby-cat heritage, she was highly attuned to all things supernatural. These ghosts might be little more than energy and emotion to me, but for her, they were fully fleshed beings.
“Cat, I need your help to communicate.”
A mix of excitement and trepidation spun around me. What we were about to do was dangerous—for me, more than her. To converse with the human dead, I had to immerse deep into Cat’s energy, all but becoming a ghost myself—and if I stayed in that state too long, I would actually die.
Still, the need for answers was far deeper than the fear of death. “Bear, keep watch.”
I sat cross-legged on the stony ground, then closed my eyes and held out my hand. Cat’s energy settled into my palm, then began to seep into my skin, into my body, creating a connection so strong that it was hard to tell where my energy ended and hers began. At the same time, a chill touched my outer extremities and began to creep slowly inward. It was the chill of death; when it claimed my heart I would die. The clock had begun its countdown.
I opened my eyes and saw what Cat saw. Thousands of people—men, women, and children—were gathered within the crater, some of them so solid they almost looked flesh-and-blood real, others little more than insubstantial scraps of frosted air. I scanned them until I saw a small group standing slightly apart from the others. The officials, I thought grimly. Leaders then, and leaders now, if the body language in the two groups were anything to go by.
My gaze settled on the tallest of the separated dozen. “I need your help, as I said.”
“And why would you expect any help from those who have been abandoned and forgotten?”
“You’ve not been—”
“Then why has no one come to bury our bones? Why has no priest ventured here to bless our spirits and help us move on?” His voice was low but oddly rich and definitely not unpleasant. “You cannot expect to receive what you cannot give.”
“There is nothing any of us alive today can do for you now,” I replied. “The time for enabling you all to move on peacefully to your next life has long gone—just as it has for my little ones.”
His gaze flickered slightly—regret, sorrow, it was hard to say. “Your little ones didn’t have to die the way ours did. No child, then or now, should ever have to face such a fate.”
“My little ones,” I said, unable to help the edge of anger in my voice, “faced a death far worse than anything you could ever imagine. Trust me,
the death that came with the bombs—however horrible—was nothing compared to what we faced.”
“‘We’?” He raised an eyebrow. “You live. The two little ones are as we are.”
“I live by a quirk of fate.” And the genetics that made me immune to all known poisons. “But I am not here to talk about our fate or yours. What can you tell me about the child who was here a few days ago?”
The air tightened around me. The deep-voiced man scowled. “And why would you be interested in that one?”
I frowned. “Why are you so . . . scathing about such a young girl?”
“It is not so much her—or any of the others who come through here, though there is much about them that speaks of the rifts that ravage this place,” he replied, “but rather the one who accompanied her.”
My frown grew. “The ranger?”
“No, not the ranger,” he all but spat, “although one such as he has no right to enter Carleen. Not when his people are the reason we are bound here.”
Vehemence stung the air, so sharp it snatched my breath and made breathing impossible for several seconds. “If you hate the ranger so much,” I said, “why did you allow him entry?”
“Because the ranger was tracking it.”
The creeping sensation of ice had reached both knees and elbows. I needed to hurry this along, and yet, that was the one thing I couldn’t do. It would offend the ghosts and possibly shut down the lines of communication. “‘It’?”
“The creature who always accompanies the children.”
“Creature?” A dead weight began to form in my stomach. “What sort of creature are we talking about?”
“The thing with few features.” The hate and revulsion in his words were amplified a thousand times by the rest of the ghosts, creating an emotive wave that just about blew my senses apart.
I blinked back tears and tried to ignore both the pain induced by that wave and the strengthening creep of death. “Was this creature tall and thin in build, with a gray skin tone?”