Winter Halo (Outcast 2)

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s news to me. The manager certainly hasn’t mentioned anything along those lines, and the place is running as usual.”

Sal had said he was a silent partner, so were the two people he’d been caught in the rift with now running Deseo? Or was it someone completely unrelated to either Sal or the immunity plot? And did he or she know about the false rift sitting in the basement?

Maybe that was a question Nuri and her crew ne

eded to ask.

I shrugged. “Maybe it was another brothel and not Deseo.”

“Maybe.” She glanced at the time again, then drained her remaining coffee and rose. “I won’t wish you good luck, because a woman with your looks won’t have any trouble getting the job. But I do hope you manage to avoid them damn ghosts.”

“Most of the ghosts I’ve come across have always been the friendly, if somewhat mischievous, type.” Laughter ran around me at this statement, tugging a smile to my lips.

Kendra’s expression suggested she wasn’t sure whether to take me seriously or not. “Yeah, well, let’s hope for your sake you don’t discover otherwise.”

And with that, she left.

I finished my coffee, then made my way back out to the market, stocking up on meat and fruit before walking back to the bunker—only to discover it was filled with not only more engineers and museum staff, but also bright lights. While I could shadow in light, it took a whole lot of strength—strength I wasn’t about to waste, given I had no idea what I might be facing tonight when I headed back into Carleen.

So instead I walked deep into the park and found a nice tree to sit under. The meat had been cryovacced and placed in cool bags and the day wasn’t hot, so both it and the fruit would be okay until this evening. After asking Cat and Bear to keep watch, I closed my eyes and got some much-needed sleep.

I woke with dusk and made my way back to the bunker. The horde of people had gone and the museum was quiet again. Once I’d slipped through the doors, the rest of the ghosts greeted us, excitedly filling us in on everything that had happened over the day. Cat and Bear returned the favor as I hugged the food containers close, then took on vampire form and slipped through the staircase remains.

By the time I’d stored the food, then showered and dressed, the ghosts informed me that Jonas was outside, waiting. I headed to the ammunition store and grabbed my automatics, attaching them to the thigh hooks on my combat pants as I walked across the store to get a couple of the slender machine rifles I’d adapted to fire small sharpened stakes rather than bullets.

On the way out, I remembered the reason Jonas had come here, and tracked back to the bunk room to grab my tunic as well as the trail bread to munch on the way to Carleen. I hesitated again as intuition flared, and grabbed a medipac even as I hoped intuition was wrong and I wouldn’t need it.

Jonas was waiting to the right of the main doors, leaning against the glass dome that protected the old walls of the tower and the various other bits of the operations center—a position that normally would have resulted in him being fried by the laser curtain that protected the museum at night. But the power still hadn’t been restored to the museum, and the curtain wasn’t working. It was a point that made me nervous; if I could get in and out of my bunker by shadowing, then the vampires certainly could. I guess the only thing I had in my favor was the ghosts and the fact that I knew where the stair entrance had been located and the vampires—and those who were working with them—did not. Even so, I silently asked Bear to go back and boot up the lights in the bunker’s main corridors. If the vamps did get down that far, then at least the bastards would fry long before they got anywhere important.

Jonas rose as I walked toward him, his gaze briefly scanning me. “Back to normal proportions, I see.”

“Yes. Did you bring the scanner with you?”

“I did.” He motioned to the backpack at his feet. “Nuri managed to get you an apartment on Third Street—it’s small and near the gatehouse end rather than the more prized area closer to the park, but it’ll do for your purpose.”

Any apartment on Third would do. Even the so-called less preferable ends were worth more than most of the people on Twelfth could ever hope to make. “Is it rented? Because that might be a problem if anyone checks—”

“It belongs to a friend of hers,” he cut in. “Access logs have been altered to show you’ve been staying there for three weeks.”

“And the friend?”

“Left this afternoon to visit relatives in Brighten Bay. She’ll be gone for two weeks.”

Brighten Bay was an upper-class holiday port on the other side of the Broken Mountains. It was one of the few rebuilt cities that wasn’t fully surrounded by a curtain wall. Instead, both the wall and the buildings it protected stretched out over the water for about half a kilometer and then simply stopped. Despite this, it had never been attacked—not on that open side, anyway. Theories were numerous and varied, but most seemed to think the wraiths couldn’t swim and the vampires simply didn’t like or didn’t trust the sea. There were UVs, of course, meaning the sea was never dark, and that in itself provided an additional barrier for any wraiths or vamps that did get that far.

“Is two weeks going to be long enough?”

“According to Nuri, it has to be. If we do not rescue the kids by then, they’re dead.”

“No pressure, then,” I muttered.

“None at all. You want to change appearance so I can scan in your details?”

“You want to turn around?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re shy? Really?”

“There are some things I really prefer not to share, and the shifting experience is one of them. It’s . . . unpleasant viewing.”