City of Light (Outcast 1)

“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?”