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He didn’t say anything. None of them did. My gaze flicked down to the weapons he still held. “Shoot me if you want. I really don’t care at this point.”
And with that, I turned and walked away.
They didn’t try to stop me.
They didn’t shoot.
But the weight of their gazes lingered long after I’d left them behind, and it made the guilt even harder to bear.
Because despite all my denials, Nuri was right about one thing—I couldn’t ignore the plight of those children. It wasn’t in my nature.
I just had to find a way to help them that didn’t involve Nuri and her men.
DON’T MISS THE NEXT OUTCAST NOVEL BY KERI ARTHUR,
Winter Halo
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2016 FROM SIGNET SELECT
There were ghosts in this place.
Most kept their distance, simply watching as I made my way through the broken remnants of their tombstones. One or two of the braver ones brushed my arms with ethereal fingers—caresses that reached past the layers of jacket and shirt to chill my skin. But these ghosts meant me no harm. It was simple curiosity, or maybe even an attempt to feel again the heat and life that had once been theirs. And while I knew from experience that ghosts could be dangerous, I was not here to disturb or challenge the dead.
I was here simply to follow—and maybe even kill—the living.
Because the person I was tracking had come from the ruined city of Carleen, which lay behind us. It had been the very last city destroyed in a war that may have lasted only five years but had altered the very fabric of our world forever. One hundred and three years had passed since the war’s end, but Carleen had never been rebuilt. No one lived there. No one dared to.
Given that the figure had come from that city, it could mean only one of two things. Either he or she was a human or shifter up to no good, or it was one of the two people responsible for kidnapping fourteen children from Central—the only major city center in this region. No one else had any reason to be out here, in the middle of nowhere, at night. Especially when the night was friend to no one but the vampires.
Of course, vampires weren’t the only evil ones to roam the night or the shadows these days. The bombs the shifters had unleashed to finally end their war against humans had resulted in the rifts—bands of energy and magic that roved the landscape and mauled the essence of anything and anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their path. But that was not the worst of it, because many rifts were also doorways into our world from either another time or another dimension. Maybe even from hell itself. And the creatures that came through them—collectively called the Others but nicknamed demons, wraiths, or death spirits, depending on their form—had all found a new and easy hunting ground in the shadows of our world.
These rifts were the reason Carleen had never been rebuilt. There were a dozen of them drifting through the city’s ruins, and there was no way of predicting their movements. Neither wind nor gravitational pull had any influence on them, and they could just as easily move against a gale force wind as they could leap upward to consume whatever might be taking flight that day—be it birds, aircraft, or even clouds. Once upon a time I’d believed that being caught in a rift meant death, but now I knew otherwise.
Because the people responsible for kidnapping those children were living proof that rifts were survivable—although by calling them “people” I was granting them a humanity they did not deserve. Anyone who could experiment on young children for any reason was nothing short of a monster. That they were doing so in an effort to discover a means by which vampires could become immune to light just made t
hem all the more abominable.
But it wasn’t as if they could actually claim humanity in the first place. I might be a déchet—a lab-designed humanoid created by humans before the war as a means to combat the superior strength and speed of the shifters—but every bit of my DNA was of this world.
The same could not be said about those responsible for the missing children.
I’d managed to rescue five of them, but I had no idea how they were or if they’d recovered from the horrific injuries inflicted on them. Those who could tell me were no longer my allies; they’d tried to kill me. Twice. They would not get a third chance.
I continued to slip quietly through the night, following the teasing drift of footsteps. Whoever—whatever—it was up ahead certainly wasn’t adept at walking quietly. Which suggested it wasn’t a vampire, or even a shifter. The former rarely traveled alone, despite the fact they had very little to fear at night, and the latter were apparently night-blind. Or so Nuri—who was one of my former allies, and a powerful human witch—had said.
I tended to believe her—at least on that point. Even before the war, both shifters and humans had lived in either cities or campsites that were lit by powerful light towers twenty-four/seven. Vampires had always been a problem—the war had just kept them well fed and had allowed them to increase in number. It made sense that after generations of living in never-ending daylight, the need for night sight would be filtered out of humanity’s DNA.
No, it was Nuri’s promise—that no harm would befall the ghosts living with me in the old military bunker if I helped them find the remaining children—that I wasn’t so sure about. While she might not hold any prejudices against déchet, the others in her group were all shifters and, from what they’d said, had all lost kin to déchet soldiers during the war.
While I wasn’t by design a soldier, I could fight and had certainly been responsible for more than a few shifter deaths. Only my kills hadn’t happened in open fields or battered forests, but rather in the bedroom. I was a lure—a déchet specifically created to infiltrate shifter camps and seduce those in charge. Once firmly established in their beds, it had been my duty to gain and pass on all information relating to the war and their plans. And then, when my task was completed, I killed.
I’d been a very successful lure.
And I still was, I thought bleakly. Images of Sal—and the brutal way I’d killed him—rose in my mind, but I pushed them away. Sal might have been the only friend and confidant I’d really had during the war, but he’d also been the third member of the group who’d kidnapped the children. And when I’d realized that, I’d had little choice but to take action. There were many things in this world I could ignore—many things I had no desire to be part of—but I could not idly stand by and watch children suffer. Not again. Not if I could help it.
It was thanks to Sal—to the information I’d forced out of him before he’d died—that those five kids were now free. Six, if you included Penny, the child I’d rescued from the vampires that had been tracking her in the park.
But that still left eight. And while I had no intention of helping Nuri and her crew, I also had no intention of abandoning those children to their fate.
