Winter Halo (Outcast 2)

Which was why the flesh down my spine was twisted and marred. I’d pulled a kid from a burning car, saving her life but leaving us both disfigured. Fire may be mine to control and devour, but there’d been too many witnesses and I’d dared not use my powers. It had taken me months to heal, and I’d sworn—yet again—to stop interfering and simply let fate take her natural course. But here I was, out on the streets in the cold, dead hours of the night, trying to keep warm as I waited in the shadows for the man who was slated to die this night.

Because he wasn’t just a man. He was the man I’d once loved.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and tried to keep warm in the confines of the abandoned factory’s doorway. Why anyone would even come out by choice on a night like this was beyond me. Melbourne was a great city, but her winters could be hell, and right now it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a mutt—not that there were any mutts about at this particular hour. They apparently had more sense.

The breeze whisked around the parts of my face not protected by my scarf, freezing my skin and making it feel like I was breathing ice.

Of course, I did have other ways to keep warm. I was a phoenix—a spirit born from the ashes of flame—and fire was both my heritage and my soul. But even if I couldn’t sense anyone close by, I was reluctant to flame. Vampires and werewolves might have outed themselves during the peak of Hollywood’s love affair with all things paranormal, but the rest of us preferred to remain hidden. Humanity on the whole might have taken the existence of weres and vamps better than any of us had expected, but there were still far too many who believed nonhumans provided an unacceptable risk to their existence. Even on crappy nights like this, it wasn’t unusual to have hunting parties roaming the streets, looking for easy paranormal targets. While my kind rarely provided any sort of threat, I wasn’t human, and that made me as much a target f

or their hate as vamps and weres.

Even the man who’d once claimed to love me was not immune to such hate.

Pain stirred, distant and ghostly, but never, ever forgotten, no matter how hard I tried. Samuel Turner had made it all too clear what he thought of my “type.” Five years might have passed, but I doubted time would have changed his view that the only good monster was a dead one.

And yet here I was, attempting to save his stupid ass.

The roar of a car engine rode across the silence. For a moment the dream raised its head, and I saw again the flashes of metal out of the car window, the red-cloaked faces, the blood and brain matter dripping down brick as Sam’s lifeless body slumped to the wet pavement. My stomach heaved and I closed my eyes, sucking in air and fighting the feeling of inevitability.

Death would not claim his soul tonight.

I wouldn’t let her.

Against the distant roar of that engine came the sound of steady steps from the left of the intersection up ahead. He was walking toward the corner and the death that awaited him there.

I stepped out of the shadows. The glow of the streetlights did little to break up the night, leaving the surrounding buildings to darkness and imagination. The ever-growing rumble of the car approaching from the right didn’t quite drown out the steady sound of footsteps, but perhaps it only seemed that way because I was so attuned to it. To what was about to happen.

I walked forward, avoiding the puddles of light and keeping to the darker shadows. The air was thick with the growing sense of doom and the rising ice of hell.

Death waited on the other side of the street, her dark rags billowing and her face impassive.

The growling of the car’s engine swept closer. Lights broke across the darkness, the twin beams of brightness spotlighting the graffiti that colored an otherwise bleak and unforgiving cityscape.

This area of Brooklyn was Melbourne’s dirty little secret, one definitely not mentioned in the flashy advertising that hailed the city as the “it” holiday destination. It was a mix of heavy industrial and run-down tenements, and it housed the underbelly of society—the dregs, the forgotten, the dangerous. Over the past few years, it had become so bad that the wise avoided it and the newspapers had given up reporting about it. Hell, even the cops feared to tread the streets alone here. These days they did little more than patrol the perimeter in a vague attempt to stop the violence from spilling over into neighboring areas.

So why the hell was Sam right here in the middle of Brooklyn’s dark heart?

I had no idea and, right now, with Death so close, it hardly mattered.

I neared the fatal intersection and time slowed to a crawl. A deadly, dangerous crawl.

The Commodore’s black nose eased into the intersection from the right. Windows slid down smoothly, and the long black barrels of the rifles I’d seen in my dream appeared. Behind them, half-hidden in the darkness of the car’s interior, red hoods billowed.

Be fast, my inner voice whispered, or die.

Death stepped forward, eager to claim her soul. I took a deep, shuddering breath and flexed my fingers.

Sam appeared past the end of the building and stepped toward the place of his death. The air recoiled as the bullets were fired. There was no sound. Silencers.

I lunged forward, grabbed his arm, and yanked him hard enough sideways to unbalance us both. Something sliced across my upper arm, and pain flared as I hit the pavement. My breath whooshed loudly from my lungs, but it didn’t cover the sound of the unworldly scream of anger. Knowing what was coming, I desperately twisted around, flames erupting from my fingertips. They met the sweeping, icy scythe of Death, melting it before it could reach my flesh. Then they melted her, sending her back to the frigid realms of hell.

The car screeched to a halt farther down the street, the sound echoing sharply across the darkness. I scrambled to my feet. The danger wasn’t over yet. He could still die, and we needed to get out of here—fast. I spun, only to find myself facing a gun.

“What the—” Blue eyes met mine and recognition flashed. “Red! What the fuck are you doing here?”

There was no warmth in his voice, despite the use of my nickname.

“In case it has escaped your notice,” I snapped, trying to concentrate on the danger and the need to be gone rather than on how good he damn well looked, “someone just tried to blow your brains out—although it is debatable whether you actually have brains. Now move, because they haven’t finished yet.”