Winter Halo

  Bear, I wish you could keep your promise to be with me when I die.

  But even as that thought crossed my mind, I locked it down. Hard. I might want to die in the arms of my little ones—just as they’d died in mine—but I wasn’t about to place either Bear or Cat in the middle of a dangerous situation. There were vampires in this world who could feed off energy—even the ectoplasmic energy of ghosts—and there might well be Others capable of doing the same.

  Something smashed into my back and sent me tumbling. I landed faceup, staring at the stars—stars that danced in crazy circles across the wide, dark sky. I could barely even breathe, the pain was so great, but I nevertheless felt the approach of the creature. It was in the air and coming straight at me.

  And this time, it wasn’t invisible.

  I raised the guns and fired. It wouldn’t stop the creature, I knew that, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and there was nothing else I could do.

  Everything seemed to slip into slow motion. I watched the ripple of air as the bullets cut through it and the creature’s gleaming claws gained length and began to drip with sparks. Saw the creature’s flesh shudder and jerk in rhythmic harmony with the bullets that tore into its body. Saw the ever-growing glow of determination and fury in its golden eyes. I might not be able to speak its language, but there were some things that needed no words or explanations. It wanted revenge and it wanted my death, and it didn’t care if it had to die as long as it took me with it.

  I can’t die. There’s still too much I need to do.

  But I guess someone else would have to do it.

  Chapter 2

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see any more.

  A shot rang out across the night, the sound deeper, harsher, than anything coming from my own guns.

  It was just a single shot, then nothing.

  I held my breath, wondering where it had come from even as I waited for the creature to crush me. Kill me.

  It did neither.

  I stopped firing and opened my eyes. Shock rippled through me. The creature hovered above me, but it was encased in a net of silver that was slowly tightening around its body. An electro-net. They’d been designed to capture both shifters and vampires, and I was currently using them to protect the main tunnel out of our bunker. But none of the ones I had were capable of holding a captive suspended aboveground and, other than the fact that they were made of pure silver, which made life extremely unpleasant for shifters, certainly wouldn’t kill anyone.

  The wraith screamed, and this time it was a long, agonized sound of pain rather than fury. As the net began to bite deeper into its flesh, blood and gore began to fall like rain around me; if I didn’t want to be covered in the stinking stuff, I needed to move. I tried to roll over, to push up onto hands and knees and crawl out of the way, but there was absolutely nothing left in me and it was all I could do to keep breathing.

  Hands grabbed me and pulled me out from under the creature. The familiar scent of cat, wind, and evening rain spun around me, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. My rescuer was none other than Jonas—Nuri’s second, a shifter who hated déchet with a passion that bordered on obsession, and one of the rare throwbacks who could see as well at night as he could during the day.

  He was also the more sensible of Nuri’s two men. The other—Branna, a lion shifter—probably would have let the wraith kill me and then danced on my remains. Especially given that both his efforts to end my life so far had gone astray.

  “Don’t move.” Jonas’s voice was low and filled with fury. No surprise there; it seemed to be a regular occurrence whenever he was near me.

  And it wasn’t like I could actually go anywhere, even if I wanted to. My head felt weirdly light, my body was heavy, and my lungs burned even though I was gulping down air as quickly as I could. The wounds that littered my body were becoming life-threatening, and if I wanted to survive the blood loss and shock, I had no option but to fast-track the healing process. I just had to hope that I had the strength to maintain the healing state long enough to make a difference.

  I closed my eyes and focused entirely on my breathing, on slowing every intake of air, on feeling it wash through my nostrils and down into my lungs. After far too many minutes, the fear and pain finally began to slide away and a sense of calm descended. It was in this almost meditative state that my body had been programmed to heal quickly—and it was this same state that sometimes made the process very dangerous. While I might be aware of what was going on around me, I couldn’t actually react to it. Not with any sort of speed.

  But I doubted Jonas intended any harm, given he’d only just rescued me. Besides, he happened to believe Nuri’s edict that the children wouldn’t be saved if I didn’t do it.

  Time passed. Healing could take minutes or it could take hours, depending on the extent and complexity of the wounds. Somewhere along the line, the wraith stopped screaming, and if Jonas moved about, then I certainly couldn’t hear it.

  But he was watching me.

  Even in this meditative state, I could feel it. It was a slow, invisible caress that had heat not only skittering across my skin, but pooling deep inside. And while part of that reaction was undoubtedly because I’d been designed to attract—and be attracted to—those shifters who ruled, this was more than that. How much more I couldn’t say; I’d never felt anything this fierce before, not during the war and certainly not in the one hundred and three years that followed it. But it was also a feeling I would never have the chance to pursue. While I had no doubt the attraction was shared, it was one he was unlikely to ever act upon. Because of what I was. Because he believed I was nothing more than an unthinking, unfeeling abomination with no right to life.

  The only reason he’d saved me—both now and previously—was the missing children.

  Regret stirred, but it was heavily tainted by both bitterness and anger. I resolutely pushed the emotions down and locked them deep inside—a trick I’d learned a long time ago, when emotions could get a déchet “readjusted.” While lures had been designed with the emotional centers of their brains intact—unlike those destined to become soldiers—our creators had believed that we were capable of neither love nor heartache. Whether the former was true I couldn’t say, but my heart had certainly ached when I was forced to kill my one and only friend. But the fact was, I did kill him. Did that mean any hope of true emotional depth was nothing more than a flight of fancy on my part?

  I guess I’d never know.

  At least once I rescued the remaining children, Nuri and her people would be out of my life and I could get back to living in solitude, with no one but the ghosts for company. I’d been happy living that way for over a hundred years. I could find that happiness again.

  A cool breeze stirred my short hair and crusted the blood on my skin and clothes, and if it weren’t for the acidic scent of gore rising from the earth, it would almost be easy to believe that the night held no danger.

  But that was a lie. There was still another wraith out there, as well as the cloaked figure I’d been following. Jonas might be a ranger—a formidable class of shifter-soldier who’d once been used to destroy whole déchet divisions, and who now formed the backbone of the fight against the Others—but I doubted he’d come here prepared for that sort of battle.

  Although given he’d apparently brought an electro-net device with him, maybe I was wrong.

  It was a thought that finally forced my eyes open. Jonas squatted near my feet, his arms crossed and the variegated grays of his combat pants and close-fitting shirt almost making him one with the night. He was a lean and powerful man with mottled black hair—the only hint of the panther he could become. The three scars that ran from his right temple to just behind his ear—a signature all rangers wore to this day—stood out starkly against his sun-kissed skin.

  “So, the rumors were true.” His voice was deep, rich, and
oddly melodious, but it nevertheless held echoes of the ice that glinted in his cat-green eyes.

  I sat up, but the effort had my head swimming. While my body no longer felt like lead, and blood had at least stopped flowing from most of my wounds, I was a very long way from healed.

  “Which particular rumor are we talking about now?” The question came out clipped, and annoyance surged—at myself more than him. Why was emotional control so difficult around this shifter?

  “The one that said déchet were capable of self-healing,” he said. “It was one of the few rumors I hadn’t actually believed until now.”

  “Shifters heal themselves all the time, so why are you so surprised that we can do the same?” I thrust my guns onto their clips and then resolutely got to my feet.

  He rose with me, one hand half-extended, as if to catch me. My legs threatened to buckle, but I determinedly locked my knees. I would not fall. I did not need his help.

  Even if I was only alive because of it.

  “Our healing is basically a side benefit of shifting from one form to another—it’s more muscle memory than anything else. But déchet don’t shift.”

  “I can.” I might not be able take on an animal form—even though I did have tiger DNA—but I could alter my body into any other human form I desired. That ability was part of the reason why lures had been so successful during the war. There might have been only a relatively small number of us, but with the ability to totally transform our looks and our scent, huge numbers weren’t actually needed.

  “Yes, you can.” He was still standing close enough to catch me, and his scent filled every breath, rekindling the ashes of desire. “What were you doing out here?”

  His abrupt change of direction didn’t faze me. Jonas had a habit of doing that; he was always trying to trip me up, to make me whisper secrets.

  Not that I had many of those left now.

  I took my time to answer and studied him instead, knowing full well it would annoy him even as I acknowledged it was somewhat childish to want that. His face was still slightly gaunt—a result of whatever he’d been infected with when I first rescued both him and his niece, Penny, from the vampires—and it made his sharp nose look even more aristocratic. But even with that nose—or maybe because of it—I’d definitely class him as handsome, though not classically so. There was a roughness to his features that made them far more interesting than beautiful.

  “That is a question I should be asking you,” I said eventually.

  The smile that briefly flirted with his lips held little in the way of amusement. “Nuri sent me here.”

  “Why? I told you all several days ago I was finished, Jonas. I meant it.”

  “Nuri didn’t—doesn’t—believe you truly mean to walk away from those children. She says it’s simply not in your makeup.”

  “I’m déchet, remember? We don’t think, we don’t feel, and we certainly don’t care.”

  “The latter has been proven false—at least in your case.” His gaze swept me, and just for an instant, pheromones stung the air, his and mine, mixing enticingly. Desire sparked, fierce and bright, but its flame was all too brief and shut down the minute he stepped back. “We need your help, Tiger, and we’re not going to leave you alone until we get it.”

  “Stalk me all you want. It won’t make a difference.”

  Again that cool smile touched his lips. “You might be able to change your form, but that won’t stop me from tracking you.”

  Good luck with that, I wanted to bite back, but somehow held the words inside. The last thing I needed right now was to make him suspect I could change my scent as well as my looks. “Then I believe you’re going to get mighty bored.”

  “Oh, I doubt it.” He waved a hand toward the bloody mess of flesh, sinew, and bone—all that remained of the wraith. “Why was it chasing you?”

  “Probably because I annoyed it by attempting to kill it.”

  “Annoyance does seem to be a common emotion around you.” Amusement glinted in his eyes, but it was gone just as quickly. “Where did you come across it?”

  “Not it, them.” I motioned to the rear of the graveyard. “I was following a cloaked figure and he led me straight to an active rift.”

  “Meaning the wraiths killed him?”

  I hesitated. While I had no desire to be a part of any investigation involving him, Nuri, or the rest of them, I was also aware that I couldn’t chase every lead myself. Practicality had to win over stubbornness in this particular case. “No. He was meeting with them.”

  “What?” The word exploded from him. “Why in Rhea would anyone want to do that?”

  “Given I had no chance to ask, I can’t really say.” My voice was grim. “But as he came from Carleen, I could make a guess or two.”

  “You think it was one of Sal’s partners?”

  I nodded. “Who else could it be? No one else has any reason to be in that place, especially at night.”

  He thrust a hand through his short hair and began to pace. His strides were long, lithe, and full of repressed fury. “But if it was one of them, why the hell would they be meeting with a wraith? That doesn’t make sense. Unless—”

  “Unless,” I interrupted, “they’re planning to gain sunlight immunity for not only the vampires but also the wraiths—which is exactly what Sal said they were doing.”

  “Surely not even they’d be so stupid as to contemplate that.”

  “Why not? The three of them were caught in a rift with a wraith, remember, and they now carry those genes in their DNA.”

  “Yes, but they’re still a part of this world. Surely they could see that such actions might well destroy the structure of all we hold dear—”

  “Which might be the whole point,” I cut in. “Not everyone likes the current status quo, Jonas. Not everyone is happy that the shifters won the war.”

  “For Rhea’s sake, that was a hundred years ago. We’ve all moved past that now.”

  “Have we?” I couldn’t quite control the bitterness in my voice. “You and Branna still hate déchet as fiercely as ever. Why is it so hard to believe that there’d be some humans who’d feel a similar hatred for the victors?”

  He stopped and studied me for several seconds. “Did your déchet friend feel that way?”

  My smile held very little in the way of humor. “Oh yes.”

  And if Sal’s loathing of both humans and shifters had bled over into the other two, then it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that they’d do whatever they deemed necessary to end the current status quo.

  Jonas grunted. “You’d better show me where this meet happened.”

  “There’s at least one other wraith still unaccounted for, plus that stranger—”

  “We’ll deal with them if we need to.” He hesitated, and his gaze swept me again. “Can you move?”

  “If that thing attacks, I’ll certainly be moving faster than you, Ranger.”

  He smiled—another all-too-brief flash that bathed me in warmth. “Fair enough.” He stepped to one side and waved me on. “After you.”

  I hobbled more than walked. The cut on my thigh pulled tightly with every step and my knee ached. When or how I’d done that I had no idea.

  The graveyard ghosts followed us at a distance, still wary, still uncertain, about my presence here in their home, but obviously also curious about what we were up to. I paused once we reached the graveyard’s boundary and looked down the hill. The crater was no longer hidden by that foul darkness.

  “What?” Jonas immediately asked.

  “The rift and the dark veil that was covering it are gone.”

  He frowned, his gaze scanning the rubble-strewn slope. “It must have shifted when the wraiths were chasing you.”

  “Real rifts don’t come supplied with their own little cloud cover, Jonas.” At least all the o
nes I’d come across hadn’t. “If they’re both gone, then it’s because either the wraith or the cloaked figure shifted them.”

  “The former is a possibility I really don’t want to contemplate.” His expression was dark, and for good reason. If the wraiths were capable of dismantling a rift, then it was very possible they could create them—and that would have dire consequences for us all if they ever gained light immunity. “Where was it located?”

  “In the crater.”

  His gaze swept it. “The crater’s too deep to see its base, but it’s possible the man you were tracking is still there.” His gaze met mine. “It’s also possible he’s set another trap. He’s certainly had the time.”

  Which felt like a rebuke, whether it was meant to or not. “I guess the only way we’re going to find out is to go down there.”

  “You’re in no state to traverse—”

  I snorted. “Since when have you worried about the state I’m in? If you want answers, Ranger, this is the only way we’re going to get them.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. No surprise there. I started down, moving carefully, not wanting to risk the ground sliding out from underneath me. The last thing I needed right now was to split my barely healed wounds open.

  The graveyard ghosts remained with us, seemingly intrigued by Jonas even if they kept their distance from me. I wished again I could talk to them, as they were probably the only witnesses to what had gone on in the crater while the wraiths were chasing me. But to do that, I’d have to call in Cat, and that was something I was still reluctant to do. Maybe tomorrow, when the sun was bright and there was no chance of vampires or wraiths jumping out of slimy shadows . . .

  I shivered but resisted the urge to rub my arms—if only because the wounds were heavily scabbed over, and I might just open them up again if I touched them. We reached the rim of the crater without mishap and stopped. The darkness that clustered around the base was deep but natural, and filled with nothing more threatening than rocks.