by Keri Arthur
It said a lot about humanity’s opinion of us that we were given a nickname that meant “waste product.”
Most of us hadn’t come from human stock, but were rather a mix of shifter and vampire, which gave us most of their strengths and few of their weaknesses. We’d been humanity’s supersoldiers—designed to fight and to die without thought or feeling—and we’d almost turned the tide of the war.
Almost.
But not all of us had been trained strictly as soldiers, just as not all of us were unfeeling. There were a few who’d been created with more specific skills in mind—chameleons able to alter their flesh at will, and who’d been tasked with either seduction and intelligence gathering or assassination.
I was one such creation.
Of course, while humans might have designed us to be frontline soldiers in their battle with the shifters, they’d never entirely trusted us not to turn against them—even if they’d made that all but impossible through a mix of chemical and medical interventions. Which meant there’d been areas in this base that, as a déchet, I’d been banned from entering.
But as the sole survivor of the destruction that had hit this base at the war’s end 103 years ago, I’d made it my business to fully explore every available inch. The shifters had, in an effort to ensure the base could never be used again, blocked off all known access points into the base by pouring tons of concrete into them. While this had taken out sublevels one to three, it still left me with six others—and those six were huge. Which was hardly surprising since this had once been the home to not only a thousand-strong complement of déchet, but to all those who had been responsible for our creation and training.
I passed through several more security points—points that, like the one at the bunkhouse, were fixed and unalterable—and eventually made my way into the tight, circular stairwell that led to the surface level. These stairs had been one of two routes designed as emergency escapes for the humans in charge of the various sections of the Humanoid Development Project, so its presence had been unknown to all but a few, and it had been designed to withstand anything the shifters could throw at the base. As it turned out, it had also withstood the concrete.
It had taken me close to a year to find this tunnel, and a couple more to find the second one, but they gave me much-needed access points to the outside world. It might be a world I ventured into only once or twice a month—generally when food or equipment supplies were low or when the need for company that was flesh-and-blood rather than ghostly became too strong to ignore—but that didn’t assuage the need to know what was going on above me on a regular basis. Being able to venture out, to watch from shadows and distance, was all that had kept me sane in the long century since the war. That and the ghosts.
I reached the surface level and pried open the hidden escape panel. Sunlight poured in through the dome over the building’s remains, shielding it from the elements and further decay. This level had once contained the day-to-day operational center of the HDP, and the battered remnants had become part of a museum dedicated to the history of a war no one wanted to see repeated. Of course, it was also a museum created by the shifters, so it emphasized both the foolishness and waste of war and also the evils of gene manipulation and bioengineering. The body-part industry and all the benefits it had once provided were now little more than bylines in history.
And though fewer and fewer were visiting the museum these days, one of the most popular exhibits still seemed to be the old tower that held all the remaining solar panels. They might be an antiquated and curiously inadequate technology to those alive today, yet the panels continued to power not only the systems that had been preserved on this floor for demonstration purposes, but all of mine.
The ghosts surrounded me as I walked across the foyer, their ethereal bodies seeming to glow in the fading streams of sunlight bathing the vast open area. As ever, it was little Cat who kept closest, while Bear surged forward, leading the way.
Both he and Cat had always considered me something of a big sister, even though we déchet shouldn’t have even understood the concept. Our closeness was primarily due to the amount of time I’d spent in the nursery unit in the years leading up to the war. Even during the war, those lures not out on assignment or in a recovery period were put to use in the nurseries; our task had been to teach and to protect the next generation of fighters.
Because despite what the shifters had believed, there’d been only a finite supply of us. Our creators had discovered early on that while the use of accelerant increased the speed of physical growth, it did not enhance mental growth. Déchet might have been designed to be nothing more than superhuman soldiers able to match the strength and speed of shifters, but sending your rifle fodder out with the body of an adult and the mind of a child really defeated the purpose of their creation. So while they’d halved our development time, they hadn’t been able to erase it completely.
I came to the tower and unlocked the thick metal doors that led to the rooftop stairwell, then unlatched the silver mesh behind them. There was enough shifter in my blood that my skin tingled as I touched it, but it wasn’t as deadly to me as it would have been to a full-blood. I slipped through the mesh and ran up the old concrete stairs, breathing air that was thick with disuse and age. Visitors wanting to see the ancient solar technology did so from the special observation platform that had been built to one side of the tower rather than accessing the panels through the tower itself, simply because the old tower was considered too dangerous. For the last couple of years there’d been talk of tearing it down before it actually fell, but, so far, nothing had actually happened. I hoped it never did. I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do if it was knocked down and I was left with only the decaying generators to power my underground systems.
We reached the metal exit plate at the top of the stairs. It was also silver, but it was so scarred with heat and blast damage that it no longer looked it. I drew back the bolts and pushed the plate open.
The children flung themselves into the glorious sunset, and that alone told me there was nothing dangerous nearby. But there was no shaking the years of training, even though the need for such measures had long since passed. I drew in a deep breath and sorted through the various scents, looking for anything unusual or out of place. There was nothing. As I climbed out of the stairwell, a slight breeze tugged at my short hair, and I looked up to see the dome’s panels had fissured yet again. It was an odd fact that this section of dome failed regularly. It was almost as if the old tower wanted to feel the wind and the rain on its fading bones. It just might get that wish tonight, because the heaviness of the clouds so tinted by the sun’s last dance of the day suggested it wasn’t going to be a good night to be out on the streets.
Not that there was ever a good night to be out on them.
I zipped up my jacket and walked through the banks of solar panels to the old metal railing that lined the rooftop. The walls of Central City rose before me, and, beyond them, a sea of glass and metal that shone brightly under the strengthening glow of the UV light towers perched on top of the massive metal D-shaped curtain wall. There were also floodlights on the rooftops of the many high-rises, all of them aimed at the streets in an effort to erase any shadows created by either the buildings or the wall itself.
Lying between Central and the bunker’s dome was the main rail line, which transported workers in glowing, caterpillar-like pods to the various production zones that provided the city with the necessities of life. But with dusk coming on, there was little movement in the yards, and the city’s drawbridge had already risen, securing Central against the coming of night.
The inhabitants of Chaos—which was the long-accepted name given to the ramshackle collection of buildings that clung to the curved sides of Central’s curtain wall—had no such protection. It was an interconnected mess of metal storage units, old wood, and plastic that was ten stories high and barely five wide. Th
e upper reaches bristled with antennas and wind turbines that glimmered in the wash of light from Central’s UV towers, but the lower reaches of Chaos already lay encased in darkness. Lights gleamed in various spots, but they did little to lift the gathering shadows.
And it was in these shadows that the vampires reigned supreme.
The shifters might have claimed victory in the war, but in truth, the only real winners had been the vampires. While they’d never been a part of the war—or of society in general—their numbers had certainly grown on the back of the war’s high death toll. They were creatures untouched by the basic needs of the living. Water, power, sanitation—the very things humanity considered so vital—had no impact on the way vampires lived their lives, because their lives consisted of nothing more than hunting their next meal. And though they preferred to dine on the living, they were not averse to digging up the dead.
Before the war, most cities had relied solely on the UV towers to stop the vampires. But the cities of old had been built on a network of underground service tunnels, which gave the vampires access and protection. With most of these cities lying in ash and ruin after the war, the shifters had taken the chance to rebuild “vampire-proof” cities for both victor and vanquished to live in. So not only were there massive curtain walls and UV towers around every major city, but services now ran aboveground, in special conduits that had been “beautified” to disguise what they were.
Chaos, unprotected by either lights or walls, and still sitting on many of the old service tunnels, was regularly hit by the vampires—but neither the inhabitants of Chaos nor those in charge of Central seemed to care.
Of course, vampires were no longer the only evil to roam the night or the shadows. When the shifters had unleashed the bombs that had finally ended the war, they’d torn apart the very fabric of the world, creating drifting doorways between this world and the next. These rifts were filled with a magic that not only twisted the essence of the landscape, but also killed anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. That in itself would not have been so bad if the Others had not gained access into our world through many of these rifts. These hellish creatures—creatures the humans and shifters had named demons, monsters, and death spirits, although in truth no one really knew if they were from hell or merely another time or dimension—had all found a new and easy hunting ground in the shadows of our world.
But at least one good thing had come from their arrival—it had finally forced shifters and humans to set aside all differences and act as one against a greater foe.
And yet humanity’s fear of vampires had not been usurped by this newer evil. Even I feared the vampires, and I had their blood running through my veins. It didn’t make me safe from them. Nothing would.
Ghostly fingers ran down my arm and tugged at my fingertips. I followed Cat as she drifted toward the left edge of the building, my gaze scanning the old park opposite. The shadows growing beneath the trees were vacant of life, and nothing moved. Nothing more than the wind-stirred leaves, anyway. I frowned, moving my gaze further afield, studying the street and the battered remnants of what once had been government offices, trying to uncover what was causing the little ones so much consternation.
Then I heard it.
The faint crying of a child.
A young child, not an older one, if the tone of her voice was anything to go by.
She was in the trees. At dusk, with the vampires about to come out. An easy meal if I wasn’t very quick.
I spun and ran for the stairs. The ghosts gathered around me, their energy skittering across my skin, fueling the need to hurry. I paused long enough to slam down the hatch and shove the bolts home, then scrambled down the steps three at a time, my pace threatening to send me tumbling at any moment.
At the bottom I again stopped long enough to lock up behind me. I might have an instinctive need to save that child—a need no doubt born of my inability to save the 105 déchet children who’d been in my care the day the shifters had gassed this base and killed everyone within it—but I wouldn’t risk either discovery or the security of our home to do so.
The ghosts swirled around me, urging me to hurry, to run. I did, but down to the weapons stash I’d created in the escape tunnel rather than to the front door. I fastened several automatics to the thigh clips on my pants, then strapped two of the slender machine rifles—which I’d adapted to fire small sharpened stakes rather than bullets—across my back. Once I’d grabbed a bag of flares and threw several ammo loops over my shoulders, I was ready to go. But I knew even as I headed for the main doors that no amount of weaponry would be enough if the vampires caught the sound of either the child’s heartbeat or mine.
The dome’s security system reacted far faster than mine, the doors swishing open almost instantly. The pass-codes might change daily, but I’d been around a long time and I knew the system inside out. Not only had the motion and heat sensors installed throughout the museum been programmed to ignore my lower body temperature, but I’d installed an override code for the outer defenses that didn’t register on the daily activity log. I might be flesh and blood most of the time, but as far as the systems that protected this place were concerned, I was as much a ghost as the children who surrounded me.
Once the laser curtain protecting the front of the dome had withdrawn, I headed for the trees. Cat and Bear came with me, their ethereal forms lost to the gathering darkness. The others remained behind to guard the door. It would take a brave—and determined—soul to get past them. The dead might not be the threat that the vampires were, but the astute didn’t mess with them, either. They might be energy rather than flesh, but they could both interact with and manipulate the world around them if they so desired.
Of course, the smaller the ghost, the less strength they had. My little ones might be able to repel invaders, but they could not hold back a determined attack for very long. I just had to hope that it didn’t come to that tonight.
City Road was empty of any form of life and the air fresh and cool, untainted by the scent of humanity, vampire, or death. No one—living or dead—was near.
So where was the child? And why in hell was she alone in a park?
I ran into the trees, breathing deeply as I did so, trying to find the scent of the child I’d heard but gaining little in the way of direction.
Thankfully, Cat seemed to have no such trouble. Her energy pulled me deeper into the park as the stamp of night grew stronger. Tension wound through my limbs. The vampires would be rising. We had to hurry.
Bear spun around me, his whisperings full of alarm. Like most of us created in the long lead-up to the war, there was no human DNA within his body. In fact, despite his name, he was more vampire than bear shifter and, in death, had become very attuned to them.
They were rising.
Sound cracked the silence. A whimper, nothing more.
I switched direction, leapt over a bed of old roses, then ran up a sharp incline. Like the crying I’d heard earlier, the whimper died on the breeze and wasn’t repeated. If it hadn’t been for Cat leading the way so surely, I might have been left running around this huge park aimlessly. While my tiger-shifter blood at least ensured I had some basic tracking skills, basic wouldn’t cut it right now. Cat, while not trained to track, was almost pure tabby. Her hunting skills were both instinctive and sharp.
The urgency in her energy got stronger, as did Bear’s whisperings of trouble.
The vampires had the scent. They were coming.
I reached for more speed. My feet were flying over the yellowed grass, and the gnarled, twisted tree trunks were little more than a blur. I crested the hill and ran down the other side, not checking my speed, my balance tiger sure on the steep and slippery slope.
I still couldn’t see anything or anyone in the shadows, but the desperation in little Cat’s energy assured me we were getting close.
But so, too,
were the vampires.
Their scent began to stain the breeze, a mix of decay and unwashed flesh that made me wish my olfactory senses weren’t so keen.
Where was the damn child?
I reached for a rifle, unlocked the safety, and held it loose by my side as I ran. Bear whisked around me again, whispering reassurances, his energy filled with excitement as he raced off into the trees. Seconds later I heard his whimper, strong at first but fading as he ran away from us. If the vampires took the bait, it would give us time to find our quarry. If not, I would be neck deep in them and fighting for life.
I broke through the trees and into a small clearing. Cat’s energy slapped across my skin, a warning that we were near our target. I leapt high over the remnants of another garden bed, and saw her. Or rather, saw the bright strands of gold hair dancing to the tune of the breeze. She was hiding in the shattered remains of a fallen tree. Beside that tree lay a man. I couldn’t immediately tell if he lived. The scent of death didn’t ride his flesh, but he didn’t seem to be breathing, either. Though I could see no wounds, the rich tang of blood permeated the air—and if I could smell it, the vampires surely would. Bear’s diversion probably wouldn’t last much longer.
I dropped beside the stranger and rolled him over. Thick, ugly gashes tore up his chest and stomach, and his left arm was bent back unnaturally. I pressed two fingers against his neck. His pulse was there—light, erratic, but there.
Yet it was the three uniform scars that ran from his right temple to just behind his ear that caught my attention. They were the markings of a ranger—a formidable class of shifter soldier who’d once been used to hunt down and destroy the déchet divisions, and who now formed the backbone of the fight against the Others. While it was unlikely this ranger would know what I was by sight or scent—especially given that lures had been genetically designed not to have any of the telltale déchet signatures—he still wasn’t the sort of man I wanted anywhere near either me or my sanctuary.
