by Bec McMaster
Mia offered him the water canteen. "We'd better get moving."
"Mia, are you—"
"I'm fine," she muttered. Apart from being an idiot for a few minutes. "And we're not getting anywhere standing here talking. Time to go find some reivers."
Lights twinkled in the distance. She smelled cooking smoke, and could almost make out the figures below them as the reivers moved around their makeshift camp.
McClain peered through a set of binoculars. He lay on his belly in the dirt beside her, resting on his elbows. Mia snuggled next to him, little shivers of nervousness shooting up her spine.
"Can you see the captives?" she whispered, practically itching with the urge to get closer.
Sage was down there. She could feel it in her bones.
"No, but there's a pit or something at the back of the camp," he murmured, lowering the binoculars. A small line etched itself between his brows. "You want a look?"
Of course she did. Mia snatched them and peered through, searching the camp hungrily. Her vision shot forward until she could make out individuals. A tall reiver stood on guard, wearing a rough leather jerkin that bared his belly and a scruff of beard on his jaw. Another reiver behind him joked with another man. The pair of them pushed each other, settling into a shoving match, but they were of little interest. She found what she wanted and zoomed a little closer.
"That's definitely a pit," she whispered. "They've got five men on guard there. They look like they're arguing."
"Three of them are bleeding," he said, "and there's two bodies at least, laid out beneath old sheets of tin thirty feet from the camp. I can make out their boots."
She tilted the binoculars to where he was pointing. “Why would they…?”
"Did you count the reivers?"
Mia shook her head.
"I did. There's only sixteen of them down there."
What does that mean? "Where are the rest of them?"
"I don't know, but we were following at least fourteen vehicles today; three motorbikes and the rest cars of some description. There are only seven vehicles down there."
She looked again. McClain was right. "Over half the camp is missing." Mia slowly lowered the binoculars. "Do you think...?" She couldn't say it.
"Don't know." McClain stood and dusted off his pants. He reached out a hand to haul her to her feet. "Could be a trap, but I can't see the other vehicles anywhere. At least we know where they are now, and what the circumstances look like. Time to get the others."
Seven
NEITHER JAKE NOR Jenny waited at the rendezvous point, but someone had tied a torn piece of shirt to the dented grill of an old rusted car. It hadn't been there before.
"Jenny's," Mia said, examining the piece of linen. She couldn't imagine Jake wearing pale pink, even if it were so faded that it was more like a blush-white.
"Where'd they go?"
"Don't know." She looked up. There was a thin silvery gray arrow in the concrete wall straight ahead of her. It looked like someone scratched something metal along the wall. "That way. Camp."
McClain drained his flask, giving a satisfied nod. "Good. Hopefully they'll bring the rest of the group with them and meet us half—"
Mia looked up from where she was retying her bootlace. "Half—?"
McClain stood frozen, his head cocked to the side. He stared back in the direction they'd come from, and Mia swallowed. That stare told her a thousand words.
"What is it?" she whispered.
McClain grabbed her by the arm and set her to moving. "Don't look now, but there's something following us again."
Damn it. She caught herself before she looked. "Is it that thing you sensed before?"
"Maybe." He kept moving, just a little faster than they'd been going. "This must be its hunting ground. It’s near where it stopped tailing us before. "
Thick vines draped from broken balconies. All of a sudden she realized how quiet it was here. The two of them felt all alone in the world. And they were right out in the open.
Anything could be hiding in the rubble around them.
A horde of revenants.... Some kind of critter like a shadow-cat or warg. Even the rest of the reivers.
"Tell me about your bar," McClain said suddenly. "Why whiskey? I mean, your beer's not bad, but you obviously care more about the whiskey."
"What?"
He helped her around a pile of rubble. "Try and act normal. It already knows where we are, and it's stalking us. If it attacks we might be able to take it by surprise."
"Whiskey, right." Mia eyed the enormous hunting knife at his side. "It was my dad's favorite drink. Rare though, because of the price. You couldn't get it up here in the Badlands, you had to import it from down south where they grow heaps of corn and grains. After he died, I wanted something to remember him by. This traveller came through once who knew how to make whiskey. He showed me how to make it, and I rigged up an old copper still behind the bar. Then I talked to Thwaites and he started growing corn, and malted barley. I'm the only one north of the border forts who makes it, I think."
"Which makes you worth your weight in gold," McClain muttered, but most of his attention was behind them.
A piece of stone tumbled down from a ledge, ricocheting off the concrete below. Mia nearly leapt out of her skin. Only that warm hand on her wrist kept her from breaking into a run.
"It's above us," McClain said. "Up on that balcony there."
Nervous sweat trickled down her spine. She wanted to look so badly that she could barely breathe. "What do we do?"
"We can't risk using a gun," he murmured. "The reivers might hear it."
"I'm not so worried about that," she shot back. "If we shoot it, it won't eat us. We can hunt the reivers down later. You're the world's best tracker, aren't you?"
He made a noncommittal sound. "It won't eat us."
"I'm pretty sure it's not just following us because it wants to be friends. If we don't shoot it, then maybe we won't get a chance to rescue Sage from the reivers."
"I'm a bounty hunter, Mia. This is what I do. It won't hurt you, because I won't let it," he told her firmly. "I can kill it with my knife, if it gets close enough."
His confidence was a suit of armor. And it worked, because her nerves died down just a fraction. She wasn't used to this. Sure, she knew how to work a shotgun, ride a motorbike, and skin a deer. She was handy with a knife and knew how to throw a punch, thanks to growing up with Jake.
But she was also just a desperate bar owner who wanted to get her sister back.
A shard of glass still clinging in the gaping window of a jeep reflected back a monstrous white creature behind her. She gasped. "What the hell is that?"
"Keep moving," McClain told her. "I can smell it now. Smells like a cat. A large cat."
Shadow-cat. The very name of it obliterated all her senses. Mia began to panic. Nobody had ever seen one and lived to tell the tale.
Her feet were still moving. Her body felt distant though, and she realized her hand was on the butt of the shotgun she had strapped over her shoulder.
"We might have to run," McClain told her. "If we do, you go on ahead." He glanced back as they turned the corner. "Can't see it anymore, but it's still there. I'll cover your back."
I don't know if I can. The words dried on her tongue. All she could see were her parents lying dead in that truck. Her mother's dark arm hung out the smashed window, those fingers lifeless.
"...got this," McClain was saying. "Mia? Mia, are you listening?"
She looked at him blankly. "Shadow-cat."
His thumb rubbed the inside of her wrist carefully. "I don't think so. It's got stripes, but it's white. That doesn't sound like a camouflaged creature of prey. And shadow-cats are larger than this. They were created by gene-splicing in a lab. This... this looks like something natural caught a few rays of radioactive chemical somewhere along the way. It's all warped, from what I've seen on it."
Mia focused on breathing. Okay. Not a shadow-cat. She cou
ld cope with that.
"Mia, I won't abandon you," he told her. "I just need you to focus. Can you do that?"
She nodded. The feel of his hand grounded her. Somehow McClain was so solid that he made her feel safe, despite the state of the world.
"Good. Let's move. It vanished, but I can still smell it out there. Somewhere. I think it's circling around ahead of us."
They paused at the next intersection. Mia unabashedly held his hand. Broken cars cluttered the streets like a metal graveyard. Some were parked right in the middle of the pitted asphalt. Others looked like their owners had just stepped out of them, except for the rust and body damage. One door hung awry, swinging in the wind. She had the sudden thought that people had fled from their cars here. Maybe it happened right after the meteor hit the earth 140 miles east of this place. The cars were packed in along the road, as though people had been trying to escape something.
There were dozens of places the creature trailing them could hide. Rubble was strewn into the streets from an enormous building. The walls looked like they'd been pink or red once, but now they were bleached a faded peach. Wind stirred a few dry leaves. Nothing else moved. No matter where she looked.
McClain's nostrils flared. "It's between us and the camp."
"Deliberately?"
He hesitated. "I don't know. It knows this terrain better than we do. Maybe it just thinks a better place to ambush us lies ahead. It knows we saw it." He looked to the left, down the street that cut across the one they stood on. "We could circle around."
"We don't know what's around any of the corners," she pointed out.
McClain looked uncertain again. "I'll hear if there's something coming."
"You and your super freaking senses," she grumbled, slinging the shotgun off her shoulder. "And don't look at me like that. I'm not going to use the shotgun unless absolutely necessary."
A tail lashed ahead of them. Mia froze as an enormous cat appeared in the street.
A growling huff of warning came from its throat. She could see it now. Face twisted with mutation, those golden eyes locked on the pair of them.
And then something that sounded like a strangled baby cried out.
"Aw, hell," McClain suddenly swore. "It's not hunting us. It's protecting its kits. We walked right into its home territory."
"Is that... a tiger?" She'd seen an old world animal book once. Sage adored the book as a kid. Mia vaguely remembered something golden with black stripes and a regal expression.
This was neither golden, nor regal. It did have stripes, however, and a massive tumor growing up the side of its face.
The creature picked up its kitten by the back of the neck, watching them with dangerous eyes. It suddenly leapt from the street onto the balcony of a faded pink hotel, a distance of almost eight feet that it cleared in a single bound.
McClain let out a breath. "I didn't think they were white."
"We don't exactly know everything about the old world," she pointed out. "Only what survived in books, or was passed down by word of mouth once our ancestors came out of the underground bunkers."
"I do know that those were big teeth," he replied, his hand settling in the small of her back. "Come on. Let’s go around so we don't disturb her, or whoever fathered that cub. I'd rather not kill them."
“Strange attitude for a bounty hunter.”
“I kill predators, Mia. Not defenseless animals.”
"Do you think we just saw ac’tun ahili?" Now that the danger had passed, she felt a little breathless. Most of the animals that survived the Darkening were predators, but there'd been something about the way the tiger moved that spoke of grace and power.
She'd never seen anything like it.
"Maybe," McClain muttered. "These ruins are immense. There could be anything hiding here.”
As if to concede his point, a strange roar lit up the night. It sounded almost like it came from some sort of horn. Birds screamed, and took off from a stand of trees several hundred meters away.
"What was that?" Mia whispered. It hadn't sounded like the tiger. Which might be a good thing. Or might not.
McClain stared in that direction, his nostrils flaring. "Hell if I know," he finally said. "But I'm not inclined to stay around and find out. Let's get back to the others."
Which was the most sensible thing anyone had said today.
Eight
THE JOURNEY BACK through the ruins with the rest of their people was far simpler. Nothing bothered them, most likely because of the numbers. McClain took the lead, with Thwaites and his fellows following as quietly as they could. A long walk, but then nobody wanted to risk the reivers hearing them coming. The reivers had every advantage already; the position they'd been camped in was tucked up against the walls of a ruined hotel, and the camp was fortified with old jeeps hauled into a circle around it. McClain's little group would have to clear the jeeps to attack, and that meant leaving themselves open to gunfire for a crucial second. Plus the reivers could escape into the bowels of the building if they needed to.
Mia couldn't help feeling like they were walking into a trap. Where were the other reivers? She'd expected them to leap out at any moment as the group made their long journey, but they were almost upon the camp and there were still no signs of them.
She hurried ahead to catch up to McClain who was working point. "Got anything?"
Flies buzzed. McClain scented the air, the moonlight catching on his irises for a second as his nose screwed up.
He held up two fingers, and then dragged his index finger across his throat.
Two dead reivers. Right.
"How?" Mia mouthed.
McClain shrugged. "Lots of blood," he whispered.
Something had gotten to the reivers—or maybe they'd fought amongst themselves. She hoped for the latter. After all, they still didn't know what this ac’tun ahili was. Maybe it was the tiger creature they'd seen, but maybe there was something else out there. She'd be quite happy to ride out of this hellhole still not knowing.
They crept past the dead bodies. Smears of blood on the asphalt revealed the reivers had been dragged here and then discarded. She tried not to look at them. Something stunk to high hell—their bowels opening after death probably. And they weren't even covered over. Just left out here to rot.
McClain paused beside them, kneeling down to press his fingers to the blood. He looked around.
"What is it?" she whispered.
He slowly withdrew his fingers, frowning. "They dragged four more of them out here. But the bodies are missing."
The second he said it, she could see the signs. Scuff marks in the dirt showed where something had hauled the other four bodies away. They led directly to a hole in the ground. A sewer grate?
Mia looked sharply at McClain. Ac’tun ahili?
He understood her. "Let's get moving," he said quietly. "We're not alone out here."
In the distance, shadows rippled behind a shattered statue. Jake and Jenny, she guessed. They blended into the statue, whose head had been half-dismembered by the fall. It had been pale green once, and the blank eyes stared sightlessly at her, its head crowned by a diadem of spikes. Mia eyed it uneasily. Now that she knew something preyed on the dead bodies, she couldn't stop feeling like they were being watched.
Best to get this over and done with, then get the hell out of here.
McClain made some kind of gestures, and Jake nodded, flicking his fingers back in some sort of unspoken language. McClain urged her forward, his warm hand firm on the small of her back.
They took shelter behind a car.
Pressing close to her, he breathed in her ear. "There are sixteen reivers here," he whispered. "Fourteen in camp, and two on guard. Your people are definitely in the hole in the ground."
"Good," she murmured, gesturing to Thwaites and his group to creep after them. She couldn't help wondering where the rest of the reivers had gone.
As soon as she thought it, her gaze shot to the two bodies. Some kind of figh
t had broken out—she just knew it. Or maybe whatever was snatching the bodies had taken live ones too.
"How many of our people are in there?" Mia whispered, a breathless feeling almost choking her.
McClain shook his head. He didn't know.
What if Sage was not here? She’d been so certain she would be, but… maybe the reivers fought, and some of them separated from the group?
Worry about that later. She gripped her shotgun in clammy hands. She and Jenny were the best shooters, which meant they were to get around back and pick off as many reivers as they could.
I've never killed someone before.
"Stop it," she whispered to herself. Adrenaline punched through her veins. It made every little noise echo in her ears.
"Okay," McClain murmured. "I'm heading in with Jake. Are you ready?"
Ready to get my sister back. She nodded firmly, pushing aside all her doubts. There'd be time to think over everything later. Right now, she needed to focus.
"Then go."
Mia crept across the pitted asphalt, and slipped in next to Jenny. They both squatted behind a rusted out car.
"You know what you're doing, girl?" Jenny pumped a pair of shotgun pellets into the chamber.
"Yes." No. Her hands were wet with sweat.
"Just remember: they ain't men or women. They're scum. Scavengers. This is just like picking off the coyotes near Salvation Creek."
Mia nodded. "I know."
It didn't make this any easier. She wasn't shooting to warn someone off, the way she had in the past. This was killing, plain and simple.
Jenny had it easier. Once upon a time, she'd ridden on the back of a Nomads bike, one of the bikie gangs that owned the coastlands. Susan—Mia's mother—told stories of her when Mia was a little girl. It wasn't until Susan and Greg were killed that Jenny returned home, and when she came she said little about her life out West. Mia knew she'd left her man, but she never spoke of him. Instead, she'd settled into their home and finished raising both Mia and Sage.
