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“He’s not escaping. He can’t.” Why I was sure of that, I couldn’t say. But he and the others seemed very tied to Central, and not only because the businesses they ran were all very successful—a point that made me wonder just what their female partner was involved in. “Besides, we can’t risk moving at night, Bear. The vampires are aware of our presence now, and I have no doubt they’ll be watching our bunker even if they can’t get in.”
Bear wasn’t happy with this decision, but, despite his grumbles, I knew he understood. Just as I knew he had no more desire than me to confront vampires at night, when they were at their strongest. “Tomorrow we’ll head to Carleen and see what the ghosts say. In the meantime, could you keep an eye on the electro-nets I set up in the tunnel? And let me know the minute one of them activates?”
He zoomed off, happy to have something to do. Cat also drifted off, but I could her chattering to the other little ones, no doubt filling them in on their adventures over the day. Smiling, I climbed into bed, shut down the lights, and slept the sleep of the dead.
• • •
I woke just before dawn and headed to the main weapons cache. I had no idea what I might find in Carleen now that Sal and his partners were clearly aware that someone not only knew of their activities, but also was actively trying to stop them—and that meant I had to be prepared for any eventuality. So I strapped on as much weaponry as I could physically carry—it was better to be overprepared than underprepared.
The city’s drawbridge was still closed as we made our way through the rail yards, but many of the pods were already humming to life, powering up for the day’s activities. I crossed the main road quickly and moved into the park. Shadows still haunted the more densely treed sections, but Bear assured me that—no matter what my imagination might be saying—there were no vampires lurking in the undergrowth, ready to jump out at us.
It took us a little under an hour to reach Carleen’s broken curtain wall. I scrambled over it and once again moved carefully through the clumps of luminescent moss, avoiding the darker energy of the rifts as I headed toward the road that climbed up to the remains of the town’s main center.
But the Carleen ghosts met me halfway up the hill, and their anger was so fierce it felt as if I’d slammed into a physical wall. I gasped and bent over, suddenly battling to breathe.
“Blaine,” I somehow managed to croak, “the force of your anger is too overwhelming—you need to tell everyone to tone it down.”
The emotive output immediately pulled back. I took several quivery breaths, then dropped the rest of the way to the ground and crossed my legs. The fastest way to find out what had been going on since I’d last been here was to connect directly to them via my ghosts, but it would have to be fast. Creating this type of connection so often in a short space of time was a severe drain on my strength, and I had a bad feeling I would need to be at peak abilities to cope with the crap that was heading my way.
Of course, that same intuition didn’t illuminate exactly what it meant by “crap,” which was damn frustrating.
“Cat, I need your help again.”
I held out my hand. Cat’s energy immediately began to seep into my body and, just as quickly, the chill of death began to creep into my outer extremities.
With the countdown to death begun, I ran my gaze across the figures clustered in the middle of the road until I found Blaine. He was standing to one side of the main group and was accompanied by several others. No matter what the crisis was, it seemed the leaders of this place still preferred to hold themselves apart from the general public.
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“The wraiths came back,” he said. “This time they did more than just shift a false rift. This time they created a wall we cannot get through.”
My gaze jerked to the top of the hill. All I could see were the skeletal remains of once-grand buildings. Certainly there wasn’t any sort of barrier visible—not even that of a false rift. I frowned. “What sort of wall?”
“Magical,” Blaine spat back. “It banned us all from our resting place, and it burns at our bones.”
If it felt as if the magic was burning at their remains, then it was probably some sort of earth magic. But witches capable of using the energy of the earth to power the creation of magic were few and far between, and those capable of twisting that energy to evil purposes even rarer.
But it was scary knowing the people behind the false rifts were apparently capable of doing just that. “How many wraiths were there?”
“Two—one male, one female. It was the latter who performed the magic.”
The chill of death was reaching past my knees. I had to hurry this along. “And they were both wraiths?”
“In appearance, yes, although they were speaking common tongue.”
If they were speaking, then despite appearances they certainly weren’t wraiths, as wraiths had no mouths. But then, I didn’t really expect them to be. Not after everything I’d learned over the last day or so.
I imagined Sal’s facial features in my mind, superimposed the larger eyes and grayer skin of a wraith, and then pushed the image out to the ghosts. They immediately began to stir and mutter, answering my question before I even asked it. But I asked it anyway, just to be certain. “And is this one of them?”
“Yes,” Blaine said immediately. “You know him?”
“I thought I did.” My voice was grim. “Did they do anything other than raise the wall and boot you out of your resting place?”
“Yes. They moved the children.”
“They what?”
“Moved the children. Five were taken by the male into a rift; the other eight were taken by the women into the vehicle she arrived in.”
