by Pam Godwin
“Always taking caring of me.” My lips rose despite the sweat beading across my brow and the chill on my skin. I felt miserably weak and sick to my stomach. “What would I do without you?”
He stepped in front of me, concern etching his face. “I’m going to go get the horse. Wait here.”
“’kay.” I plopped down, knowing he wouldn’t leave me unprotected for longer than a few minutes.
Tucked beneath the fur cloak, I bandaged the wound with scraps of hide and devoured a stash of dried meat. Eddie returned, and for the next hour, I rode behind him on the horse, feeling marginally better, a little stronger and more alert. Despite the jarring ride, keeping weight off my leg and racing toward the rest of our group seemed to do wonders for my mental state.
Following the tracks they’d left in the snow, we galloped over barren tundra for miles. As we reached one of the abandoned villages we’d passed through several days ago, Eddie slowed the horse.
“What is it?” I leaned around him and glimpsed movement up ahead. “Is that our group?”
“Yeah.” He guided the horse along a row of crumbling shacks. “Why would they stop here? They should’ve kept going.”
“Maybe they needed to rest?” The tingle along my spine disagreed. Something was wrong.
I grabbed the bow from my back and positioned an arrow. The wound in my thigh protested as I used my legs to balance on the horse.
“Approach cautiously,” I whispered, tensing against every crunch of the horse’s hooves.
The wind was too quiet. The gutted shacks, the falling snow, the silhouettes moving just beyond the hill—it was all too fucking quiet. A lump formed in my throat.
A moment later, the faint aroma of burning wood reached my nose. “Do you smell that?”
Our soldiers knew better than to start a fire. The smoke alone would draw hybrids.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “But I don’t see smoke.”
At the top of the hill, I peered around his broad shoulder and gasped.
Our four soldiers and the twenty women we rescued sat around a doused fire pit, licking their fingers and eating…something. A quick scan of the perimeter revealed the carcass of a mountain goat, the bones picked cleaned and organs gone. Dread filled my insides.
“Shit.” Eddie pulled the horse to a stop. “Don’t they know?”
Apparently not. I focused on the soldiers’ teeth, relieved to find them straight and human. The women we’d rescued were all in their thirties and forties, which meant they were born pre-apocalypse, had been cured by my mother’s blood, and were immune to the spider venom. In other words, they were human and couldn’t be turned. But if I didn’t protect them, they would be recaptured, held until they gave birth, and slaughtered.
Lowering the bow, I slid to the ground, whimpered against the pain in my leg, and staggered toward them. “There are no mountain goats in this area. Not for miles.”
Two dozen startled eyes found mine, mouths paused mid-chew. Starvation lined the hollow indentions of their cheeks and bony frames, their desperation to eat heartbreaking.
“The goat was running that way.” One of the soldiers pointed at the tree line in the distance. “I think it was lost. Couldn’t pass up food like that.”
“Someone put that animal here.” A shiver licked my spine, and my pulse sped up. “It’s a trap to keep you in place. We need to go, right fucking now.”
The women glanced around, clutching their pregnant bellies as the soldiers scrambled to their feet. But it was too late.
A stampede of footfalls sounded in the valley behind me, racing over the snow at inhuman speeds. They were coming.
CHAPTER TWO
The distant rumble echoed through the frozen valley. I nocked an arrow, spun toward the din, and drew a shivery breath.
A dark smudge of silhouettes emerged on the white horizon between two rocky peaks. At least a dozen hybrids. My heart rate quickened.
The surrounding mountains, though miles away, created an echo chamber, magnifying every sound. The hybrids weren’t as close as they seemed, probably several minutes away by foot. That gave me just enough time to lose my shit or pull it together.
My pulse leapt in time with the throb in my leg as I raced toward the cluster of horses and scanned the saddle packs for our arrow supply. Eddie beat me there, grabbed the largest quiver, and added it to the one on my back.
“What’s your plan?” A winter storm churned in his expression. “I hope to Eve you’re not going to—”
“I need you to lead the women to our camp.” I pivoted toward the survivors, relieved to see they hadn’t moved.
Twenty pairs of wide eyes stared at me. Shoulders hunched, hands gripping swollen bellies, they probably thought I rescued them so I could kill them. Maybe I should. Pregnant women were a precious commodity, but these women had been bitten—bites that had turned their unborn children into hybrids.
I pointed at three of the four soldiers, and in a few clipped commands, I sent the men away on horseback with instructions to circle back for the women in twenty minutes. The fourth soldier, Jeremy, was our best rider, so I kept him with me, directing him to mount a chestnut mare.
My injured leg twinged as I climbed on behind him. “Everyone else, lay on the ground. On your backs or sides. Eyes closed. Pretend you’re dead. Hurry.” My hands shook as I waited for the women to obey. “Good, now don’t move. Don’t lift your heads. Don’t fucking breathe—”
“Dawn…” Eddie charged toward me, his jaw a stone block of stubbornness.
“That includes you.” With one hand on the bow, I clutched Jeremy’s waist with the other and narrowed my eyes at Eddie.
I hated leaving him short a horse. Unless they squeezed three to a saddle, a few women would have to walk.
Eddie lowered to the snow-covered ground, stretched out on his back, and set his bow beside him, his furious gaze locked on mine. “You really think they’ll believe you slaughtered the women?”
“Yes.” If I was wrong, Eddie would be on his own and outnumbered. A lump sealed my throat.
We’d traveled to this arctic land to take down the northern breeding facilities. As passionately as the Resistance wanted to save human women, it wasn’t a stretch to believe we were just as eager to exterminate their infected offspring. In truth, we killed the babies as soon as they were born. It was the best way to stop the spread of infection. The mothers were our priority.
“Don’t move until it’s safe.” I thrust a finger at Eddie and filled my eyes with a soul-deep command. Don’t you dare fucking die. “Then head straight to camp. Don’t stop to rest until nightfall.”
His face hardened, his six-foot frame rigid as steel, but he gave a tight nod.
The horse side-stepped, twitching with nervousness. I squeezed my thighs around Jeremy’s hips as he tangled his hands in the flaxen mane and turned us toward the hybrids.
The bloodsuckers sprinted out of the valley and across the open tundra, too far away to see us.
“Which way?” Jeremy glanced at me over his shoulder, his expression as pale as his white-blond hair.
The hybrids approached from the north. I’d sent our soldiers south. Dense woodland lay to the east and west. Our camp was east.
“West.” I pointed an arrow at the thickest section of evergreens about a mile away. “There.”
With a kick, he spurred the horse into a full-speed gallop. The frigid wind knocked the hood off my head and stung my eyes. I clung to the folds of his wolf-skin coat and tensed against the heavy burden of quivers banging against my back. Carrying about fifty arrows might’ve been enough on a lucky day, but I’d have to shoot backward. With frozen fingers. On a moving horse.
My insides knotted.
The path Jeremy chose led us closer to the attackers. Two, four, six…eleven male hybrids sprinted toward us, fur pelts flapping behind their leather-clad legs and eyes on the people I’d abandoned in the distance. I forced myself not to follow their gazes.
Pos
itioned between the hybrids and our group, Jeremy veered west toward the trees. I gripped hard on the bow, still out of range to make a shot. Come on, you fuckers. Follow us.
They slowed, faltering, their heads ticking between me and the group I left behind. I stole a backward glimpse at Eddie and the others, and my chest pinched. Bodies scattered the snowy ground, unmoving, vulnerable. They looked dead.
My muscles tensed with the urge to turn back. When it came to Eddie, my training and instincts always got twisted up. First lesson my fathers taught me was not to get attached to people, but I’d known Eddie since birth, born one day apart. We grew up together, fought together, and dammit, we would die together.
Neither of us are dying today.
The glacial air bit at my cheeks as I unraveled my braid and let my fire-red hair sail behind me like a flag. Even if the hybrids suspected the women weren’t dead, they’d already implanted their infected seed. I was the bigger prize.
Although my father, Michio, had slain the nutjob responsible for the apocalypse, the Drone’s fanatical plan to replace mankind with a perfect species lived on through his creations. His divine race of bloodsuckers had one objective: transform every human into hybrid.
According to the prophecy, only one thing could stop them.
Me.
The daughter of Eve.
But I was just a nineteen-year-old human girl. It might’ve been laughable, except every hybrid and human believed it. Even I struggled to refute it. My mother’s valiant life, her ultimate death, my very existence—all of it had been foreshadowed by a dead child. My half-sister, Annie. She never specifically said I would be a superhuman badass, but my fathers had assumed I would have some kind of genetic alteration like my mother. Well, that didn’t happen, and it sucked.
The hybrids sped up, but their trajectory swerved left, headed straight toward me.
“Holy shit!” I hugged Jeremy’s back. “It worked. They’re coming.”
“A little soon to celebrate.” His breaths huffed in white clouds as he leaned forward, kicking the mare into top speed.
Hybrids sprinted faster than horses, but a horse could run longer distances and excelled at navigating rugged terrain. We just had to wear the hybrids out.
And slow them down.
I twisted at the waist, positioned an arrow, and let it fly. Blood pumping, mind focused, I fired at our pursuers for the next two miles. In the distance, Eddie and the women grew smaller and smaller until the horizon swallowed them completely.
Releasing a huge breath, I continued to volley arrows. By the time we made it to the tree line, I’d only taken down two hybrids.
“Duck.” Jeremy swerved the horse.
I bent just as a decapitating branch whipped past my head. “Thanks.”
For the next hour, Jeremy sped us through the thick foliage, announcing when to dart and weave as I flew through my arrow supply and eliminated two more hybrids.
Daylight waned, and the shadows crept in around us. It didn’t take long for nightfall to cloak the woodland.
My hands turned to ice, my wounded leg pulsed from straining those muscles, and I swear to all that was holy, my nipples were so hard from shivering it felt like they had cut through the suede strap that bound my breasts. But somehow, we maintained the lead. Maybe because we weren’t dodging arrows or climbing over fallen trees. I had a new appreciation for a horse’s long, powerful legs.
Seven hybrids remained when I reached for an arrow and found none.
Fear spiked through my blood. “I’m out.”
The hybrids were gaining, no more than thirty yards away. I swapped the bow for my mother’s dagger.
“Dawn…” Jeremy said slowly, voice deep and cautious. “I think we have another problem.”
He steered the horse between skeletal trunks and bent down as if trying to see through the shadows of the evergreens ahead.
“What?” I squinted at the trees, my shoulders prickling as the trailing footfalls grew louder.
He broke through a thicket of pines and jerked the horse to the side, narrowly avoiding a collision with a towering wrought-iron fence.
“What the—?” I hooked an arm around his waist and held tight. “Follow the perimeter. Maybe there’s an opening.”
The hybrids stayed on our trail as we sped alongside the fence. It was at least ten feet tall, commercial grade, definitely pre-apocalypse, and topped with coils of barbed wire.
Why was it in the middle of nowhere Canada, blocking my escape route? More importantly, where did it fucking end? There was nothing but more trees and snow on the other side. For some reason, my intuition screamed at me to run far away from this man-made structure. But there was nowhere to go. We sure as hell couldn’t turn back.
“I see a gate.” Jeremy freed a long blade from the sheath on his leg. “Fuck, it’s not open. There’s no latch.”
As far as I could see, the fence didn’t end in either direction. When I peeked behind us, my pulse went ballistic. We had about ten seconds before the hybrids were on us.
“Go faster!” I dug my fingers into his waist.
“It’s opening!”
“What?” I leaned around his shoulder.
The gate stopped its creeping movement, leaving a crack just big enough for a person to slide through. The wind must’ve moved it.
“Think we can push it with the horse?” He slowed as we approached.
“We don’t have time. If the horse doesn’t fit through—”
“Get ready to jump.”
We stopped a few feet away. The moment our feet hit the ground, the horse raced off, spooked by the approaching hybrids. I shoved Jeremy through the opening, and the gate didn’t give. Why was it stuck?
I followed him through and tried to shove it closed while holding tight to the knife. “Shit, it won’t budge. Come on, you bastard.”
Was it mechanical? Electrical? Technology was nonexistent so far away from human sanctuaries. Whatever it was, I needed the damn thing closed!
Jeremy slammed his shoulder against it, but the hybrids were already here, seconds from slipping through the gate.
“Run!” Adrenaline surged through me as I took off through the trees with Jeremy at my side.
A few paces in, I expected to be tackled to the ground, held down, bitten—
“Daughter of Eve!” One of the hybrids shouted. “Come back here.”
I turned just as the gate snapped shut, locking the hybrids on the other side. How was that possible? Was someone operating it?
Relief loosened my shoulders, but vanished just as quickly. There were only three sets of eyes glaring through the rungs.
“Some of them slipped inside.” Four hybrids. My heart jackhammered as I grabbed Jeremy’s arm and weaved through the trees.
Branches tore at my face and clawed at my fur pelts. Grinding snow crackled beneath my boots. The trumpeting coo-cooo of an owl echoed overhead, and behind me, the tread of feet was muffled, farther back. Were the hybrids toying with us?
I ran faster, my legs burning with exertion and the cold seeping into my bones. The chill was the worst, the full-body trembling heightening the dread, the terror. It was such a raw, helpless feeling. I couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t catch my breath. I longed to be anywhere but here. Like back at camp with Eddie and my fathers. Warm and safe. Please don’t let me die here.
With my fingers locked around the dagger, I ran as hard as I could, glancing over my shoulder at the pitch-black woodland and yanking Jeremy forward when he tripped. Clambering over the trails, pulse racing, breathless and terrified, I was just buying time. The hybrids would catch up. We couldn’t run forever.
“Is that—?” Jeremy pointed his blade at something up ahead.
The forest ended abruptly. We shot into a moonlit clearing, and there, just a few yards ahead sat a sprawling mansion. My breath froze in my throat.
I didn’t stop running as I took in the multiple stories, stone foundation, solid roof, heavy front door, all o
f it was maintained by…someone. That someone was home, given the candles flickering behind the unbroken windows. And the mechanical fence. And the way the front door was cracked open, just like the gate.
“I don’t like this.” Goosebumps engulfed my arms.
Jeremy pulled me forward without slowing his gait. “Could be a wealthy recluse. Maybe they want to help.”
That front door looked a whole lot like salvation, but as I raced toward it, doubt poured in.
I knew people lived like this once. Rich folks who preferred isolation and wilderness. But twenty-two years after the apocalypse, it was all we could do just to stay alive. No one retired in well-kept mansions. Definitely not humans. We congregated in packs, built fortresses out of scrap metal, and survived through strength in numbers.
Hybrids wouldn’t live here either. They were too busy hunting and feeding and overrunning the planet. We were at war. Everyone was struggling. This preserved mansion was unnatural.
A few feet from the door, I skidded to a stop. Jeremy halted beside me, and we both turned at the sound of footsteps.
One male hybrid strolled across the clearing and tilted his bald head, his fangs stark in the moonlight.
“Who lives here?” I backed up a step, searching the darkness for the others.
“Maybe the devil.” The hybrid glanced up at the estate, his expression unreadable.
He prowled closer, his strides slow. Taunting? Or being cautious? Did he know who was inside? Was he trying to trick us into entering or scare us into running?
I tightened my grip on the knife and took another step back, pulling Jeremy with me.
“Could be the beast that created us all,” the hybrid said, shifting his gaze to the door and stopping a few yards away.
A tremor skated down my spine. The Drone was dead, and there was no such thing as a devil or a beast or whatever he was implying. He was fucking with us. If we fled, he and the others would catch us. If we made it inside and barred the door, we might survive.
“We’re going in,” I said under my breath, second-guessing my decision immediately.
It was freezing cold outside. No way was the door left open by accident.
