After giving the ghosts instructions on what to do with anything or anyone we caught, I switched on the electro-net modules and walked around the back of the museum to meet Jonas.
The sky was dark and the air thick with the scent of rain. I grimaced and half wished I’d brought a coat with me . . . although if the mountains were infested with vampires, then getting wet would be the least of my problems.
Jonas was waiting at the far end of the museum’s grounds. He leaned against an ATV that had definitely seen better days, although the treads, at least, were thick and new-looking.
“Did you dig this thing out of a garbage dump or something?” I stopped several yards away from him. Despite being upwind, his scent still washed across my senses, oddly electric. It was as if the oncoming storm were somehow echoing through him.
“It’s called camouflage.” He pushed away from the vehicle. “We don’t need to be drawing attention to ourselves.”
I snorted. “What you call ‘camouflage’ we used to call ‘rust.’”
“Oh, there’s plenty of that, too.” He swiped a hand across a sensor, and the doors rose. “Your carriage awaits.”
“Shame my prince doesn’t,” I muttered. Not that there were any real princes left these days, as the royal family had been decimated in the earliest years of the war. I slung my rifles and backpack onto the rear seat, then climbed in.
He raised an eyebrow as he got in beside me and closed the doors. “You do not look the type to be searching for a prince.”
“I’m not. It was just a random comment.” I did, however, love stories about them, both real and fictional. I might not have had anyone read me such things growing up, but in the years since the war I’d had enough time to read whatever I liked—and I certainly hadn’t just read technical manuals. I added, “What did you do to my follower?”
“Nothing. She’d disappeared by the time I got down there.” He started up the ATV and the big engine’s roar shattered the silence.
“Yeah,” I commented, voice dry. “We’re really going to be unnoticed in this thing.”
He flashed me an all-too-quick smile as he typed our destination into the GPS, then switched to autopilot mode. “Once we near the Broken Mountains, I’ll throw her into stealth mode. At the moment it doesn’t really matter.”
I guess. I waited until the ATV had cleared the trees and reached the main artery away from Central, then said, “Did you try to track her?”
He nodded. “Her scent led to the market, but I lost it in the myriad of other smells.”
Which had no doubt been intentional. I had no idea who this woman might be, but if she now shared Sal’s DNA and some of his memories, she’d have an idea of how to lose any possible tail.
I was silent for a few minutes, watching the roadside gradually become a blur as the ATV picked up speed, then twisted in the seat and studied Jonas. “How did you and Nuri meet?”
He crossed his arms, his expression enigmatic. “Why?”
“Because you just seem an odd combination.”
“That’s true enough.” He shrugged. “We were thrown together by circumstances beyond our control.”
“When?”
“More than a few years ago.” He glanced at me. “If you’re going to ply me with questions, expect the same in return.”
“You and Nuri have done nothing but question me,” I replied evenly. “And you certainly don’t believe me.”
“That’s because you’re not telling the truth.”
“Says who?”
Another of those cool smiles touched his lips. “Nuri.”
Her seeker skills were a whole lot sharper than mine if she was pulling that sort of information from me without intimacy. “It’s rather unusual for a human witch and a shifter to be capable of linking telepathically, isn’t it?”
“It is, but Nuri is an unusual woman.”
That certainly wasn’t a statement I could argue with. “I have a suspicion the same could be said of you, ranger.”
He shrugged and didn’t answer. No surprise there.
“Are you lovers?”
He blinked, then laughed, the sound short, sharp, containing little in the way of humor. “No, we are not.”
“But you’re obviously close.”
“That we are.”
I was beginning to think it’d be easier to get water from a stone than information from this man. “And the others?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What about them?”
“How did you meet them? It’s obvious that Branna isn’t exactly on friendly terms with anyone.”
“No, he’s just not on friendly terms with you. And he hates liars.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Which doesn’t exactly gel with what you said earlier about him not trusting you for a year. Does that mean he thought you were lying about something?”
“No, but as I also said, he’s a lion shifter, and they tend to take a long time before they trust.”
“Why does he hate déchet so much?”
“His family was killed by them.”
My stomach sunk. That wasn’t the news I’d wanted to hear. “So he was born during the war? He doesn’t look that old.”
“Most shifters tend to hold their age better than humans, and their life spans are generally double.”
“Yes, but if he was born during the war, then he’s at least a hundred years old. He should be showing some signs of age, and he’s not.”
Jonas shrugged again and reached behind the seat to snag a backpack. “Hungry?”
“In other words, question time is over.”
His gaze met mine, green eyes glacial. “When you start telling your secrets, I might. Fruit or trail ration?”
“Fruit.”
He tossed me an apple, then ripped open the plastic surround on what smelled like beef jerky and began eating. Silence fell, but it certainly wasn’t an easy silence. It was too filled with awareness.
When I finished the apple, I tossed the core out the window, then crossed my arms and stared at the countryside whizzing by. It had been ages since I’d been this far out, and it was good to see that the scars of war had all but disappeared into a sea of green. Here and there the remnants of a human city jutted skeletal metal and concrete fingers toward the sky, but as we got farther away from Central, the forests and ruins gave way to the vast tracts of farmland that were Central’s lifeline.
It took another hour to reach the Broken Mountains, and as the ATV began to climb, Jonas switched to stealth mode and silence fell around us. The shadows got deeper and the air colder, until I once again began wishing I’d brought a coat with me.
“Here, wear this.” Jonas pulled an old military coat from the floor behind his seat and handed it to me. It smelled vaguely of oil and musky male; it wasn’t Jonas’s scent, but someone else’s. Someone I hadn’t met yet. “It belongs to Micale, our mechanic, but I’m sure he won’t mind you borrowing it.”
I raised my eyebrows as I pulled the coat on. It was about two sizes too large, but right then I wasn’t caring, given it was also thick and warm. “You own this thing?”
“We do. It comes in handy if we are hired for work outside of Central.”
“And does that happen often?”
He flashed me another of those all-too-fleeting grins. “Often enough to warrant owning an ATV.”
I half smiled. “So where do you keep it? Obviously not in Chaos.”
“No. Aside from the fact it’s too wide to get through the lower-level streets, leaving any piece of technology unguarded in that place is just an open invitation for scavengers to help themselves.”
“So you keep it in Central?”
“Maybe.”
Frustration rolled through me, but I could hardly complain about his not directly answering questions when I was doing exactly the same thing. The GPS began to ping softly, and I glanced down as the screen came online. Our destination was a little circle of red we were rapidly approaching. Jonas switched back t
o manual mode, then pulled off the road and drove into the scrub. The ATV’s treads crashed their way through the undergrowth, leaving a thick trail of destruction behind us.
“There’s little point of remaining in stealth mode right now,” I commented. “Anyone with decent hearing is going to hear this thing ripping through the forest a mile away.”
“Which is why,” he said, hitting the kill switch, “we walk from here.”
The ATV came to a halt and the doors raised. I grabbed my pack and climbed out. The air was thick with the scent of eucalyptus and freshly churned dirt, and the light uneven. I glanced upward; all that was visible was a sea of mottled green. Bright shafts of sunlight stabbed through the canopy, spearing downward but not really lifting the deeper gloom of the forest floor.
Jonas locked down the ATV, then shouldered his rifle and said, “This way.”
“Have you been to this base before?” I had to run to catch up with him. He was moving fast, and with all the stealth of a hunter.
It was a stealth I didn’t possess.
“Once.”
“When?”
He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes bright in this shadowed place. “Does it matter?”
“It does in that it gives us pointers as to when this place was infested.” If it was infested, that is.
“It wasn’t when I was here. Not with vampires, anyway.”
That odd edge of anger was back in his voice, and I frowned. “Meaning what?”
“Nothing.” He paused, then added, “The ATV might have made a bit of noise, but you’re not exactly quiet yourself.”
“Given I’m not a trained soldier or ranger, that’s not surprising,” I snapped. “If you want me to be quiet, then we need to go a bit slower.”
“A vampire’s deepest sleep cycle hits at midday; if they are in that bunker, then that’s our best time to explore.” His voice was grim. “That gives us fourteen minutes to get there.”
“And how many miles do we have to traverse?”
“Only two.”
I swore softly, caught a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, and motioned him on. He instantly disappeared into the forest. I followed as fast and as silently as I could.
We made it to the base in thirteen minutes; it wasn’t the stuff of world records, but it was still pretty damn fast.
I stopped beside Jonas, my breath a harsh rasp that seemed to echo across the shadowed silence. The mountain slid away from our position under the trees, sweeping down into a low, cleared valley. The building that stood in the center of it was squat, long, and unremarkable. It was little more than an ugly concrete rectangle with no windows and very little in the way of distinguishing features. There was certainly no evidence that this place had once been a large and active military base.
And yet it had been from here that the humans—with several battalions of déchet—had brought the war to the shifter’s homeland in a last-ditch effort to defeat them on their own turf.
It was a move that had gone very badly not only for the déchet and the humans stationed here, but for the war itself. The base had lasted only five months before a retreat had been ordered, and that retreat had signaled the beginning of the end for both human hopes of winning, and for my kind.
“Is that the place?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“Not on the surface it doesn’t,” he said. “But like most human military bases, the business end is mostly underground.”
“How do we get in?” There were two exits that I knew of, one at the far end of the building, and another in the trees on the opposite side of the valley. But given I wasn’t supposed to know anything about this place, I could hardly admit to knowing about either.
“Certainly not through the main entrances,” he said. “They’ll have security on those for sure.”
“Then how?”
“Through an old blast break.” He shifted his rifle from his shoulder to his left hand; the safety, I noted, was now off. “Keep an eye out. If someone in Central is working with the vamps, then it’s possible they’ve set up additional security around the perimeter.”
“Surely the shifter communities would have picked something like that up.” I unslung my own rifle and followed him down the hill. “They still do regular patrols around here, don’t they?”
He shook his head. “Not really. The packs and prides that call these mountains home tend to avoid the old bases, be they human or shifter.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “They are a reminder of a past most would rather forget.”
“If you forget the past, you only end up repeating it,” I said. “History is evidence enough of that.”
He glanced at me. “So you have nothing in your past you would rather forget?”
My smile held little in the way of humor. “Haven’t we all?”
He half shrugged. “I suspect you and I have more than our fair share, though.”
That was undoubtedly true. “I was speaking generally rather than personally.”
“I know.” He motioned to the right of the building. “The blast shaft is over this way.”
We made our way down the hill. The grass was still dew-kissed despite its being close to ten, meaning we left a very clear trail behind us. But as Jonas didn’t seem worried about it, there was little point in my being so.
The grass gave way to gravel as we neared the base. The pitted concrete walls loomed above us, thicker and higher than they’d seemed from the valley’s rim. We kept to the shadows of the wall, moving in single file toward the western edge. The silence seemed heavy and oddly uneasy this close to the building, and I had a feeling we were not the only ones awake and aware in this place.
I flexed the fingers of my free hand and tried to relax. If there were watchers here, then surely Jonas would be aware of them. He was a ranger, after all, and trained for this sort of thing. Given that he wasn’t reacting in any way, either I was imagining things or our watchers were friendly.
He stopped about ten feet shy of the end of the building and motioned upward. “We can access the break from here.”
“And just how are we going to get up there? Neither of us have wings, and you didn’t bring any ropes.”
“Cats don’t need ropes, and I can boost you up.”
I had cat genes and I certainly couldn’t have leapt that high—the top of the wall was a good twenty feet or more away. That was one hell of a boost up.
“Come on,” he said, hunkering down and cupping his hands. “We’re running out of time.”
In more ways than one, I suspected. But I slung my rifle back over my shoulder, then placed a foot into his hands and lightly touched his shoulders for balance.
“Ready?” he said.
I nodded, my gaze on the building’s edge high above us. Without warning, he thrust up, and I was suddenly soaring into the air. A heartbeat later, something sleek and black raced past me, seeming to defy gravity as it ran up the pitted concrete wall and disappeared over the edge. An edge, I suddenly realized, I wasn’t going to make . . .
I made a grab for it anyway, but missed and, just for an instant, I seemed to hang in midair, going neither up nor down. Then gravity reinforced itself, and I began to drop. I slid my fingers against the concrete, trying to find something to grab on to, but there was nothing . . . then another hand wrapped around mine and my fall came to an abrupt halt.
“Got you,” Jonas said and, with a grunt of effort, hauled me up and over the edge.
The minute I was safe, he released me and rose. “Wait here. I’ll go check the break.”
I nodded, not about to admit that I really couldn’t have done anything else right then. While I’d never been afraid of heights, I wasn’t a fan of falling from them, even if my genes generally meant I landed on my feet.
I took several deep breaths to calm the butterflies in my stomach, then pushed to my knees and looked around. The roof was concrete like the rest of the building, but it w
as mostly covered with long drifts of leaves and other forest debris. At this end of the building, however, the concrete that was visible was black and riddled with cracks and large potholes. Bomb damage; obviously, though, the bombs used here had not been the ones they’d used on Carleen and the other satellite cities. This place would not be standing here in this condition if they had.
“Okay,” Jonas said. He was squatting next to what looked to be a particularly large fissure near the other edge. “It looks like we’re in the clear.”
I rose and walked over. The break was about three feet wide and double that in length, and it dropped down into a darkness that was thick and foul, but free from the scent of vampire.
“Are you sure this leads into the main base?”
“Yes.” He glanced up. “You ready?”
No, I wasn’t. Although I was well aware that we needed to figure out whether this place was the base I’d discovered earlier, I had no desire to enter it. And it wasn’t just the fear of the vampires. There was something within the darkness, an awareness that edged toward anger.
There were ghosts here, ghosts who were not only resentful but, I suspected, violent.
“Tiger?”
My gaze rose to his. “Vampires are not the only things we have to worry about in this place.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Ghosts?”
I nodded. “They’re filled with anger. We need to step lightly around their resting places and make sure we do not disturb their bones.”
“I’ll be as respectful as possible. Are you ready?”
I nodded. He gripped the edge of the fissure and dropped down. After a moment, he said, “Okay, your turn.”
I took a deep, somewhat shuddering breath, then gripped the edge of the fissure and fell into the heavy darkness.
Chapter 11
I landed in a half crouch and swept my gaze across the deeper shadows beyond the small puddle of light filtering in through the fissure. The air was thick and foul here, and entrenched with the scent of death. Old death, not new. There was no indication of vampires, however, nor did there appear to be anyone or anything else in the near vicinity.