Especially not when there were nearly three platoons—or, to be more precise, ninety-three—of fully trained adult déchet haunting the lower levels. The children might have few memories of the hideous way the shifters had killed everyone at the base, but the same could not be said of the adults.
I shifted my focus to the log and the strands of golden hair blowing on the breeze.
“Child, you need to come with me.” I said it as gently as I could, but the only response was a tightening of fear in the air. But it was fear of me rather than the situation or even the night.
Cat spun around me, her energy flowing through my body, briefly heightening my sense of the night. The vampires would be here soon.
The urgent need to be gone rose, but I pushed it down. Dragging the child from the log would only make her scream, and that in turn would make the situation a whole lot worse. Noise was our enemy right now. The vampires weren’t the only dangers night brought on—many of the Others tended to hunt by sight and sound.
“The vampires are coming, little one,” I continued, even though I was talking to scarcely more than a strand of hair. “Neither of us are safe here.”
“Jonas will protect me. He promised.” Though her words were stilted, there was nothing in the way of fear or uncertainty in them. Which was odd.
“Jonas is injured and can’t help anyone right now.” Not even himself. I hesitated, then added, “We need to get out of here before the vampires arrive.”
She didn’t respond for a moment. Then a dirt-covered cherub face popped up from the hollow of the tree. She scanned me, then stated flatly, “I won’t leave without Jonas. I won’t.”
“Jonas is unconscious, but I’m sure he’d want me to get you to safety rather than worrying about him.”
She continued to study me, her blue eyes wide and oddly luminous. I had a strange feeling that the child understood all too clearly just what I was saying—and her next words confirmed that. “I won’t leave him here to die. I won’t let you leave him for the vampires. You have to save him.”
“Child—”
“No,” she said, her lip trembling. “He saved me. And he’ll save you. You can’t leave him here to die.”
I frowned. He’d save me? A ranger? Even if he didn’t realize what I was, it was an unlikely scenario, given rangers had been notorious for forsaking the wounded. And if he did realize . . . I thrust the thought away with a shudder and simply said, “His wounds are fairly serious—”
“Promise me you’ll help him!”
Cat spun around me, her whisperings filled with urgency. If we didn’t get moving soon, we’d be dead. Given I had no wish to die, I had to either snatch the child and race her—screaming—to our sanctuary, or do as she wished. The first would attract all manner of trouble other than the vampires, but to help a ranger . . .
I took a deep breath and released it slowly. I might have been trained to seduce rather than destroy, but that didn’t alter the fact that shifters had eradicated everything and everyone I knew or cared about. It went against every instinct I had to save this one.
And yet the instinct—need—to save this child was stronger still.
“Okay, I’ll help him.”
She eyed me for a moment, a little girl whose gaze seemed far too knowing. “You promise?”
“Yes.”
Cat whisked through me. The image of the vampires flowing through the trees rose like a deadly black wave. We had five minutes, if that.
“Who’s that?”
The child’s blue gaze wasn’t on me, but rather on the energy that was Cat as she hovered near my shoulder. I raised an eyebrow. “You can see Cat?”
“Cat? What sort of name is that?”
“It’s short for Catherine,” I said. Which it wasn’t, but I had no idea where this child was from or how much she might have been taught about the war and déchet. Those who’d created us hadn’t afforded us real names—couldn’t humanize the military fodder in any way, after all. So they used the breed of shifter we’d been designed from, and whatever number we were of that breed. Cat was number 247 in production terms. And while it was unlikely our names would be a giveaway, I wasn’t about to take a chance. Not when there were still shifters alive today who’d survived the war. “Mine’s Tig.”
She didn’t ask me what it was short for. Her gaze went from Cat to me, then back to Cat. “She’s not real. You are.”
“She might not have flesh, but she’s as real as you and me.”
The little girl frowned and stood. She was wearing a smock that was grimy and blood-splattered, and there were half-healed slashes all over her arms and legs. Anger rose within me, then swirled away. I needed to make sure we were safe before I could allow any reaction to those cuts.
Because those cuts were too sharp, too straight, to have been caused by anything other than a blade.
“How can she have no body and be real?”
There was still no fear in her voice, and no apparent realization just how close to disaster we truly were. I wondered briefly if she was human. She didn’t smell like it, but then, she didn’t exactly smell like a shifter, either.
“Because not everything that is real has human flesh.”
I clipped the rifle onto a loop on my belt and squatted beside the ranger as Cat’s energy hit again. Images slashed through my mind—dark beings running through the trees, their hunger surging across the night. We needed to go. Now.
I gripped the man under his shoulder and heaved him over mine. “Do you have a name?”
She hesitated, and then said, almost shyly, “Penny.”
“We need to go, Penny.” I thrust upward, my legs shaking under the stranger’s sudden weight. Holding him steady with one hand, I unclipped the rifle and rested my finger against the trigger. “Run with Cat. She’ll take you into a safe place. Wait for me there.”
The little girl’s lips trembled a little. “And Jonas?”
“Jonas and I will be right behind you.”
She nodded, then scrambled over the tree trunk and ran after the energy that was Cat as she retreated through the trees. I followed, Jonas’s body a deadweight that allowed no real speed or mobility.
Bear reappeared, his whisperings full of warning. I ran up the hill as the night around me began to move, to flow, with evil.
They were close.
So close.
But there was something else out there in the night. It was a power—an energy—that felt dark. Watchful. At one with the vampires and yet separate from them.
And instinct suggested I needed to fear that darkness far more than the vampires who swept toward us.
I cursed softly and pushed the thought away. One threat at a time. I needed to survive the vampires before I worried about some other, nebulous threat. “Bear, I need your help here.”
His energy immediately flowed across mine, allowing me to see everything he saw, everything he felt. While this level of connection wasn’t as deep as some we could achieve, any bond between the living and the dead could be deadly. All magic had a cost, an old witch had once warned me. While my ability to link with the ghosts wasn’t so much magic as a mix of psychic abilities and my own close call with death, it still taxed both my strength and theirs. And it could certainly drain me to the point of death if I kept the connection too long.
But for certain situations it was worth the risk—and this was definitely one of those situations.
There was at least a score of vampires out there, which meant this wasn’t the usual hunting party. If I’d been alone, if I hadn’t promised to keep Jonas safe, I would have shadowed and run. The vampires might sense me in this form, but if I became one with the night—became little more than dark matter, as they could—then it was harder for them to pick me out from their own. I knew that from my time in the war, when the vamps had overrun a village I’d
been assigned to.
But I had promised, and that left me with little choice. Using the images Bear fed me as a guide, I raised the rifle and fired over my shoulder, keeping the bursts short to conserve ammunition. The needle-sharp projectiles bit through the night and burrowed into flesh. Three vampires went down and were quickly smothered by darkness as other vampires fell on them and fed. The scent of blood flooded the night, mingling with the screams of the dying.
I crashed through yet another garden bed, my feet sinking into the soft soil. A deeper patch of darkness leapt for my throat, and the pungent aroma of the dead hit. I flipped the rifle and battered him out of the way with the butt, then switched it into my other hand and fired to the right, then the left. Two more vamps down.
I leapt over a fallen branch. Jonas’s weight shifted, making the landing awkward and losing us precious speed. Sweat broke out across my brow but I ignored it, grabbing the ranger’s leg to steady him as I ran on.
“Bear,” I said, my voice little more than a pant of air. “Light.”
Ethereal fingers tugged at the bag of flares by my side and lifted one. Energy surged across the night and light exploded, a white ball of fire surrounded by a halo of red.
It was bright enough to force them back, but they didn’t go far. They knew, as I did, that the flare would give me only a minute, at most.
And they knew, like I did, that a little ghost probably wouldn’t have the energy to light a second flare so soon after the first.
I ran on as hard as I could. The dome’s lights beckoned through the trees, forlorn stars of brightness that still seemed too far away.
The flare guarding our back began to sputter, and the black mass surged closer. I fired left and right. The nearest vampires swarmed their fallen comrades, while those at the back flowed over the top of them, hoping to be the ones to taste fresher, sweeter flesh.
Thirteen vampires left, if I was lucky. It might as well have been a hundred for all the hope I’d have if they dragged me down.
Sweat stung my eyes and dribbled down my spine, and my leg muscles were burning. But the end of the park was now in sight. The old tower’s searchlights suddenly came on, hanging free from both the tower and the dome, supported by ghostly forms. Their sunshinelike light swept City Road and provided a haven of safety if I could get to it.
Fifty yards to go.
Just fifty yards.
Then the flare went out and the vampires hit us.
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Keri Arthur, Ashes Reborn
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