Winter Halo (Outcast 2)

I can’t die. There’s still too much I need to do.

But I guess someone else would have to do it.

Chapter 2

I closed my eyes, not wanting to see any more.

A shot rang out across the night, the sound deeper, harsher, than anything coming from my own guns.

It was just a single shot, then nothing.

I held my breath, wondering where it had come from even as I waited for the creature to crush me. Kill me.

It did neither.

I stopped firing and opened my eyes. Shock rippled through me. The creature hovered above me, but it was encased in a net of silver that was slowly tightening around its body. An electro-net. They’d been designed to capture both shifters and vampires, and I was currently using them to protect the main tunnel out of our bunker. But none of the ones I had were capable of holding a captive suspended aboveground and, other than the fact that they were made of pure silver, which made life extremely unpleasant for shifters, certainly wouldn’t kill anyone.

The wraith screamed, and this time it was a long, agonized sound of pain rather than fury. As the net began to bite deeper into its flesh, blood and gore began to fall like rain around me; if I didn’t want to be covered in the stinking stuff, I needed to move. I tried to roll over, to push up onto hands and knees and crawl out of the way, but there was absolutely nothing left in me and it was all I could do to keep breathing.

Hands grabbed me and pulled me out from under the creature. The familiar scent of cat, wind, and evening rain spun around me, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. My rescuer was none other than Jonas—Nuri’s second, a shifter who hated déchet with a passion that bordered on obsession, and one of the rare throwbacks who could see as well at night as he could during the day.

He was also the more sensible of Nuri’s two men. The other—Branna, a lion shifter—probably would have let the wraith kill me and then danced on my remains. Especially given that both his efforts to end my life so far had gone astray.

“Don’t move.” Jonas’s voice was low and filled with fury. No surprise there; it seemed to be a regular occurrence whenever he was near me.

And it wasn’t like I could actually go anywhere, even if I wanted to. My head felt weirdly light, my body was heavy, and my lungs burned even though I was gulping down air as quickly as I could. The wounds that littered my body were becoming life-threatening, and if I wanted to survive the blood loss and shock, I had no option but to fast-track the healing process. I just had to hope that I had the strength to maintain the healing state long enough to make a difference.

I closed my eyes and focused entirely on my breathing, on slowing every intake of air, on feeling it wash through my nostrils and down into my lungs. After far too many minutes, the fear and pain finally began to slide away and a sense of calm descended. It was in this almost meditative state that my body had been programmed to heal quickly—and it was this same state that sometimes made the process very dangerous. While I might be aware of what was going on around me, I couldn’t actually react to it. Not with any sort of speed.

But I doubted Jonas intended any harm, given he’d only just rescued me. Besides, he happened to believe Nuri’s edict that the children wouldn’t be saved if I didn’t do it.

Time passed. Healing could take minutes or it could take hours, depending on the extent and complexity of the wounds. Somewhere along the line, the wraith stopped screaming, and if Jonas moved about, then I certainly couldn’t hear it.

But he was watching me.

Even in this meditative state, I could feel it. It was a slow, invisible caress that had heat not only skittering across my skin, but pooling deep inside. And while part of that reaction was undoubtedly because I’d been designed to attract—and be attracted to—those shifters who ruled, this was more than that. How much more I couldn’t say; I’d never felt anything this fierce before, not during the war and certainly not in the one hundred and three years that followed it. But it was also a feeling I would never have the chance to pursue. While I had no doubt the attraction was shared, it was one he was unlikely to ever act upon. Because of what I was. Because he believed I was nothing more than an unthinking, unfeeling abomination with no right to life.

The only reason he’d saved me—both now and previously—was the missing children.

Regret stirred, but it was heavily tainted by both bitterness and anger. I resolutely pushed the emotions down and locked them deep inside—a trick I’d learned a long time ago, when emotions could get a déchet “readjusted.” While lures had been designed with the emotional centers of their brains intact—unlike those destined to become soldiers—our creators had believed that we were capable of neither love nor heartache. Whether the former was true I couldn’t say, but my heart had certainly ached when I was forced to kill my one and only friend. But the fact was, I did kill him. Did that mean any hope of true emotional depth was nothing more than a flight of fancy on my part?

I guess I’d never know.

At least once I rescued the remaining children, Nuri and her people would be out of my life and I could get back to living in solitude, with no one but the ghosts for company. I’d been happy living that way for over a hundred years. I could find that happiness again.

A cool breeze stirred my short hair and crusted the blood on my skin and clothes, and if it weren’t for the acidic scent of gore rising from the earth, it would almost be easy to believe that the night held no danger.

But that was a lie. There was still another wraith out there, as well as the cloaked figure I’d been following. Jonas might be a ranger—a formidable class of shifter-soldier who’d once been used to destroy whole déchet divisions, and who now formed the backbone of the fight against the Others—but I doubted he’d come here prepared for that sort of battle.

Although given he’d apparently brought an electro-net device with him, maybe I was wrong.

It was a thought that finally forced my eyes open. Jonas squatted near my feet, his arms crossed and the variegated grays of his combat pants and close-fitting shirt almost making him one with the night. He was a lean and powerful man with mottled black hair—the only hint of the panther he could become. The three scars that ran from his right temple to just behind his ear—a signature all rangers wore to this day—stood out starkly against his sun-kissed skin.

“So, the rumors were true.” His voice was deep, rich, and

oddly melodious, but it nevertheless held echoes of the ice that glinted in his cat-green eyes.

I sat up, but the effort had my head swimming. While my body no longer felt like lead, and blood had at least stopped flowing from most of my wounds, I was a very long way from healed.