The Immortal Rules
Julie Kagawa
My Vampire Creator Told Me This: ‘Sometime in your life, Allison Sekemoto, you will kill a human being. The question is not if it will happen, but when. Do you understand?’ I didn't then, not really.I DO NOW. FOR FANS OF THE HUNGER GAMESPraise for Julie Kagawa“Julie Kagawa's Iron Fey Series is the next Twilight" -Teen.com"A genuine page-turner…Julie Kagawa is a strong new voice in the young adult world."- The Sunday Express on The Iron King"We think we've found the next crossover hit…” - Sunday Times on The Iron King
The
Immortal
Rules
Julie Kagawa
A legend begins
BLOOD
OF EDEN
Also byJulie Kagawa
from
The Iron Fey series (in reading order)
THE IRON KING
WINTER’S PASSAGE (ebook)
THE IRON DAUGHTER
THE IRON QUEEN
SUMMER’S CROSSING (ebook)
THE IRON KNIGHT
Blood of Eden series
THE IMMORTAL RULES
To Nick,
who will always slay vampires with me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Funny story, back at the beginning of my writing career, I remember telling myself that I wouldn’t write a vampire book. That there were already so many books about our favourite bloodsuckers, I didn’t have anything new to add to the masses. Obviously, that plan went by the wayside, and I am so thankful it did. I’ve loved every moment of writing this book, and I have many people to thank for that. My wonderful agent, Laurie McLean, who convinced me to give this whole “write a vampire book” a go. My editor Natashya Wilson for all her encouragement, hard work and little smiley faces next to the passages that she really likes. I live for those smiley faces. The fabulous people at HQ for awesome covers, awesome support and all-around awesomeness.
As always, my gratitude goes to my family, and especially to my husband, Nick, who continues to point out obvious logic-holes in the plot when I’m being stubborn and want it to work out “because I say so.”
PART I HUMAN
CHAPTER 1
They hung the Unregistereds in the old warehouse district; it was a public execution, so everyone went to see.
I stood at the back, a nameless face in the crowd, too close to the gallows for comfort but unable to look away. There were three of them this time, two boys and a girl. The oldest was about my age, seventeen and skinny, with huge frightened eyes and greasy dark hair that hung to his shoulders. The other two were even younger, fourteen and fifteen if I had to guess, and siblings, since they both had the same stringy yellow hair. I didn’t know them; they weren’t part of my crowd. Still, they had the same look of all Unregistereds; thin and ragged, their eyes darting about like trapped animals. I crossed my arms tightly, feeling their desperation. It was over. The trap had closed; the hunters had caught them, and there was no place for them to run.
The pet stood on the edge of the platform, puffed up and swaggering, as if he had caught the kids himself. He was walking back and forth, pointing to the condemned and rattling off a list of crimes, his pale eyes gleaming with triumph.
“… assaulting a citizen of the Inner City, robbery, trespassing and resisting arrest. These criminals attempted to steal Class One foodstuffs from the private warehouse of the Inner City. This is a crime against you, and more important, a crime against our benevolent Masters.”
I snorted. Fancy words and legal mumbo jumbo didn’t erase the fact that these “criminals” were just doing what all Unregistereds did to survive. For whatever reasons, fate, pride or stubbornness, we nonregistered humans didn’t have the mark of our vampire masters etched into our skin, the brands that told you who you were, where you lived and who you belonged to. Of course, the vampires said it was to keep us safe, to keep track of everyone within the city, to know how much food they had to allow for. It was for our own good. Yeah, right. Call it what you wanted, it was just another way to keep their human cattle enslaved. You might as well be wearing a collar around your neck.
There were several good things about being Unregistered. You didn’t exist. You were off their records, a ghost in the system. Because your name wasn’t on the lists, you didn’t have to show up for the monthly bloodletting, where human pets in crisp white coats stuck a tube in your vein and siphoned your blood into clear bags that were placed into coolers and taken to the Masters. Miss a couple lettings and the guards came for you, forcing you to pony up the late blood, even if it left you empty as a limp sack. The vamps got their blood, one way or another.
Being Unregistered let you slip through the cracks. There was no leash for the bloodsuckers to yank on. And since it wasn’t exactly a crime, you’d think everyone would do it. Unfortunately, being free came with a hefty price. Registered humans got meal tickets. Unregistereds didn’t. And since the vamps controlled all the food in the city, this made getting enough to eat a real problem.
So we did what anyone in our situation would do. We begged. We stole. We scraped up food wherever we could, did anything to survive. In the Fringe, the outermost circle of the vampire city, food was scarce even if you weren’t Unregistered. The ration trucks came twice a month and were heavily guarded. I’d seen Registered citizens beaten just for getting out of line. So while it wasn’t exactly a crime to be Unregistered, if you got caught stealing from the bloodsuckers and you didn’t have the Prince’s cursed brand gracing your skin, you could expect no mercy whatsoever.
It was a lesson I’d learned well. Too bad these three never did.
“… eight ounces of soy, two potatoes, and a quarter loaf of bread.” The pet was still going on, and his audience had their eyes glued to the gallows now, morbidly fascinated. I slipped into the crowd, moving away from the platform. The smug voice rang out behind me, and I clenched my hands, wishing I could drive a fist through his smiling teeth. Damn pets. In some ways, they were even worse than the bloodsuckers. They’d chosen to serve the vamps, selling out their fellow humans for the safety and luxury it brought. Everyone hated them, but at the same time everyone was jealous of them, as well.
“The rules regarding Unregistered citizens are clear.” The pet was wrapping up, stretching out his words for the greatest effect. “According to clause twenty-two, line forty-six of New Covington law, any human found stealing within city limits, who does not have the mark of protection from the Prince, shall be hanged by the neck until they are dead. Do the accused have any last words?”
I heard muffled voices, the oldest thief swearing at the pet, telling him to do something anatomically impossible. I shook my head. Brave words wouldn’t help him. Nothing would now. It was fine and good to be defiant to the end, but it was better not to get caught in the first place. That was his first mistake and, ultimately, his last. Always leave yourself an out; that was the first rule of the Unregistereds. Do whatever you want—hate the vamps, curse the pets—but never get caught. I picked up my pace, hurrying past the edge of the crowd, and broke into a jog.
The clunk of the trapdoors releasing echoed very loudly in my ears, even over the gasp of the watching crowd. The silence that followed was almost a living thing, urging me to turn, to glance over my shoulder. Ignoring the knot in my stomach, I slipped around a corner, putting the wall between myself and the gallows so I wouldn’t be tempted to look back.
LIFE IN THE FRINGE is a simple thing, like the people who live here. They don’t have to work, though there are a couple “trading posts” set up around the Fringe, where people collect what they find and exchange it for other things. They don’t have to read; there are no jobs that require it, and besides, owning books is highly illegal—so why risk it? All they have to worry about is feeding themselves, keeping their clothes mended, and patching up whatever hole or box or gutted out building they call home well enough to keep the rain off them.
The secret goal of almost every Fringer is to someday make it into the Inner City, past the wall that separates the civilized world from the human trash, into the glittering city that looms over us with its great starry towers that had somehow resisted crumbling into dust. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who was taken into the city, a brilliant mind or a great beauty, someone too unique or special to be left here with us animals. There are rumors that the vampires “breed” the humans on the inside, raising the children to be their thralls, completely devoted to their masters. But since none who are Taken into the city ever come out again—except the pets and their guards, and they aren’t talking—no one knows what it’s really like.
Of course, this only feeds the stories.
“Did you hear?” Stick asked as I met him at the chain-link fence that marked the edge of our territory. Beyond the fence, across a grassy, glass-strewn lot, stood a squat old building that my gang and I called home. Lucas, the de facto leader of our gang, said it used to be a “school,” a place where kids like us gathered every day in huge numbers to learn. That was before the vamps had it gutted and burned, destroying everything on the inside, but it was still a refuge for a gang of skinny street rats. Three stories high, the brick walls were beginning to crumble, the top floor had fallen in, and the halls were filled with mold, rubble and little else. The charred halls and empty rooms were cold, damp and dark, and every year a little more of the walls fell away, but it was our place, our safe haven, and we were fiercely protective of it.
“Hear what?” I asked as we ducked through the gap in the rusty fence, striding through weeds and grass and broken bottles to where home beckoned invitingly.
“Gracie was Taken last night. Into the city. They say some vampire was looking to expand his harem, so he took her.”
I looked at him sharply. “What? Who told you that?”
“Kyle and Travis.”
I rolled my eyes in disgust. Kyle and Travis belonged to a rival gang of Unregistereds. We didn’t bother each other, usually, but this sounded like something our competitors would concoct just to scare us off the streets. “You believe anything those two say? They’re screwing with you, Stick. They want to scare you.”
He trailed me across the lot like a shadow, watery blue gaze darting about. Stick’s real name was Stephen, but no one called him that anymore. He was taller than me by several inches, but my five-foot nothing didn’t make this feat all that impressive. Stick was built like a scarecrow, with straw-colored hair and timid eyes. He managed to survive on the streets, but just barely. “They’re not the only ones talking about it,” he insisted. “Cooper said he heard her scream a few blocks away. What does that tell you?”
“If it’s true? That she was stupid enough to go wandering around the city at night and probably got herself eaten.”
“Allie!”
“What?” We ducked through the broken door frame into the dank halls of the school. Rusty metal lockers were scattered along one wall, a few still standing, most dented and broken. I headed toward an upright one and yanked the door open with a squeak. “The vamps don’t stay in their precious towers all the time. Sometimes they go hunting for live bodies. Everyone knows that.” I grabbed the brush that I kept here to go with the mirror that was stuck to the back, the only useable one in the building. My reflection stared at me, a dirty-faced girl with straight black hair and “squinty eyes,” as Rat put it. At least I didn’t have teeth like a rodent.
I ran the brush through my hair, wincing at the snags. Stick was still watching me, disapproving and horrified, and I rolled my eyes. “Don’t give me that look, Stephen,” I said, frowning. “If you’re out past sundown and get tagged by a bloodsucker, that’s your fault for not staying put or not paying attention.” I replaced the brush and shut the locker with a bang. “Gracie thought that just because she’s Registered and her brother guards the Wall, she was safe from vampires. They always come for you when you think you’re safe.”
“Marc is pretty torn up about it,” Stick said almost sullenly. “Gracie was his only family since their parents died.”
“Not our problem.” I felt bad for saying it, but it was true. In the Fringe, you looked out for yourself and your immediate family, no one else. My concern didn’t extend beyond myself, Stick and the rest of our small gang. This was my family, screwed up as it was. I couldn’t worry about the trials of everyone in the Fringe. I had plenty of my own, thanks.
“Maybe …” Stick began, and hesitated. “Maybe she’s … happier now,” he continued. “Maybe being Taken into the Inner City is a good thing. The vampires will take better care of her, don’t you think?”
I resisted the urge to snort. Stick, they’re vampires, I wanted to say. Monsters. They only see us as two things: slaves and food. Nothing good comes from a bloodsucker, you know that.
But telling Stick that would only upset him more, so I pretended not to hear. “Where are the others?” I asked as we walked down the hall, picking our way over rubble and broken glass. Stick trailed morosely, dragging his feet, kicking bits of rock and plaster with every step. I resisted the urge to smack him. Marc was a decent guy; even though he was Registered, he didn’t treat us Unregistereds like vermin, and even spoke to us on occasion when he was making his rounds at the Wall. I also knew Stick had feelings for Gracie, though he would never act on them. But I was the one who shared most of my food with him, since he was usually too scared to go scavenging by himself. Ungrateful little snot. I couldn’t watch out for everyone; he knew that.
“Lucas isn’t back yet,” Stick finally mumbled as we came to my room, one of the many empty spaces along the hall. In the years I had been here, I’d fixed it up the best I could. Plastic bags covered the shattered windows, keeping out the rain and damp. An old mattress lay in one corner with my blanket and pillow. I’d even managed to find a folding table, a couple chairs and a plastic shelf for various clutter, little things I wanted to keep. I’d built a nice little lair for myself, and the best part was my door still locked from the inside, so I could get some privacy if I wanted.
“What about Rat?” I asked, pushing on my door.
As the door squeaked open, a wiry boy with lank brown hair jerked around, beady eyes widening. He was older than me and Stick, with sharp features and a front tooth that stuck out like a fang, giving him a permanent sneer.
Rat swore when he saw me, and my blood boiled. This was my space, my territory. He had no right to be here. “Rat,” I snarled, bursting through the doorway. “Why are you snooping around my room? Looking for things to steal?”
Rat held up his arm, and my stomach went cold. In one grubby hand, he held an old, faded book, the cover falling off, the pages crumpled. I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I’d read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us all out of this place.
“What the hell is this?” Rat said, holding up the book. Having been caught red-handed, he quickly switched to the offensive. “Books? Why are you collecting garbage like that? As if you even know how to read.” He snorted and tossed the book to the floor. “Do you know what the vamps would do, if they found out? Does Lucas know about your little trash collection?”
“That’s none of your business,” I snapped, stepping farther into the room. “This is my room, and I’ll keep what I want. Now get lost, before I tell Lucas to throw you out on your skinny white ass.”
Rat snickered. He hadn’t been with the group long, a few months at most. He claimed he’d come from another sector and that his old gang had kicked him out, but he’d never said why. I suspected it was because he was a lying, thieving bastard. Lucas wouldn’t even have considered letting him stay if we hadn’t lost two members the previous winter. Patrick and Geoffrey, two Unregistered brothers who were daring to the point of stupidity, who bragged the vampires would never catch them. They were too quick, they claimed. They knew all the best escape tunnels. And then one night they went out looking for food as usual … and never came back.
Kicking the book aside, Rat took a threatening step forward and straightened so that he loomed over me. “You got a big mouth, Allie,” he snarled, his breath hot and foul. “Better watch out. Lucas can’t be around to protect you all the time. Think about that.” He leaned in, crowding me. “Now get out of my face, before I bitch slap you across the room. I’d hate for you to start crying in front of your boyfriend.”
He tried pushing me back. I dodged, stepped close and slammed my fist into his nose as hard as I could.
Rat shrieked, staggering backward, hands flying to his face. Stick yelped from behind me. Blinking through tears, Rat screamed a curse and swung at my head, clumsy and awkward. I ducked and shoved him into the wall, hearing the thump of his head against the plaster.
“Get out of my room,” I growled as Rat slid down the wall, dazed. Stick had fled to a corner and was hiding behind the table. “Get out and stay out, Rat. If I see you in here again, I swear you’ll be eating through a straw the rest of your life.”
Rat pushed himself upright, leaving a smear of red on the plaster. Wiping his nose, he spat a curse at me and stumbled out, kicking over a chair as he left. I slammed and locked the door behind him.
“Bastard. Thieving, lying bastard. Ow.” I looked down at my fist and frowned. My knuckle had been cut on Rat’s tooth and was starting to well with blood. “Ew. Oh, great, I hope I don’t catch something nasty.”
“He’s going to be mad,” Stick said, venturing out from behind the table, pale and frightened. I snorted.
“So what? Let him try something. I’ll break his nose the other way.” Grabbing a rag from the shelf, I pressed it to my knuckle. “I’m tired of listening to his crap, thinking he can do anything he wants just because he’s bigger. He’s had it coming for a while.”
“He might take it out on me,” Stick said, and I bristled at the accusing tone, as if I should know better. As if I didn’t think of how it might affect him.
“So kick him in the shin and tell him to back off,” I said, tossing the rag on the shelf and carefully picking up the abused book. Its cover had been ripped off, and the front page was torn, but it seemed otherwise intact. “Rat picks on you ‘cause you take it. If you fight back, he’ll leave you alone.”
Stick didn’t say anything, lapsing into sullen silence, and I bit down my irritation. He wouldn’t fight back. He would do what he always did—run to me and expect me to help him. I sighed and knelt beside a plastic box by the back wall. Normally, it was hidden by an old sheet, but Rat had ripped that off and tossed it in the corner, probably looking for food or other things to steal. Sliding back the top, I studied the contents.
It was half full of books, some like the paperback I held in my hand, some larger, with sturdier covers. Some were moldy, some half charred. I knew them all, front to back, cover to cover. This was my most prized, most secret, possession. If the vamps knew I had a stash like this, they’d shoot us all and raze this place to the ground. But to me, the risk was worth it. The vamps had outlawed books in the Fringe and had systematically gutted every school and library building once they’d taken over, and I knew why. Because within the pages of every book, there was information of another world—a world before this one, where humans didn’t live in fear of vampires and walls and monsters in the night. A world where we were free.
Carefully, I replaced the small paperback, and my gaze shifted to another well-worn book, its colors faded, a mold stain starting to eat one corner. It was larger than the others, a children’s picture book, with brightly colored animals dancing across the front. I ran my fingers over the cover and sighed.
Mom.
Stick had ventured close again, peering over my shoulder at the tote. “Did Rat take anything?” he asked softly.
“No,” I muttered, shutting the lid, hiding my treasures from view. “But you might want to check your room, as well. And return anything you borrowed recently, just in case.”
“I haven’t borrowed anything for months,” Stick said, sounding frightened and defensive at the thought, and I bit down a sharp reply. Not long ago, before Rat came to the group, I would often find Stick in his room, huddled against the wall with one of my books, completely absorbed in the story. I’d taught him to read myself; long, painstaking hours of us sitting on my mattress, going over words and letters and sounds. It had taken a while for Stick to learn, but once he did, it became his favorite way to escape, to forget everything right outside his door.
Then Patrick had told him what vampires did to Fringers who could read books, and now he wouldn’t touch them. All that work, all that time, all for nothing. It pissed me off that Stick was too scared of the vamps to learn anything new. I’d offered to teach Lucas, but he was flat-out not interested, and I wasn’t going to bother with Rat.
Stupid me, thinking I could pass on anything useful to this bunch.
But there was more to my anger than Stick’s fear or Lucas’s ignorance. I wanted them to learn, to better themselves, because that was just one more thing the vampires had taken from us. They taught their pets and thralls to read, but the rest of the population they wanted to keep blind, stupid and in the dark. They wanted us to be mindless, passive animals. If enough people knew what life was like … before … how long would it be until they rose up against the bloodsuckers and took everything back?
It was a dream I didn’t voice to anyone, not even myself. I couldn’t force people to want to learn. But that didn’t stop me from trying.
Stick backed up as I stood, tossing the sheet over the box again. “You think he found the other spot?” he asked tentatively. “Maybe you should check that one, too.”
I gave him a resigned look. “Are you hungry? Is that what you’re saying?”
Stick shrugged, looking hopeful. “Aren’t you?”
I rolled my eyes and walked to the mattress in the corner, dropping to my knees again. Pushing the mattress up revealed the loose boards underneath, and I pried them free, peering into the dark hole.
“Damn,” I muttered, feeling around the tiny space. Not much left—a stale lump of bread, two peanuts and one potato that was beginning to sprout eyes. This was what Rat had probably been looking for: my private cache. We all had them somewhere, hidden away from the rest of the world. Unregistereds didn’t steal from each other; at least, we weren’t supposed to. That was the unspoken rule. But, at our hearts, we were all thieves, and starvation drove people to do desperate things. I hadn’t survived this long by being naive. The only one who knew about this hole was Stick, and I trusted him. He wouldn’t risk everything he had by stealing from me.
I gazed over the pathetic items and sighed. “Not good,” I muttered, shaking my head. “And they’re really cracking down out there, lately. No one is trading ration tickets anymore, for anything.”
My stomach felt hollow, nothing new to me, as I replaced the floorboards and split the bread with Stick. I was almost always hungry in some form or another, but this had progressed to the serious stage. I hadn’t eaten anything since last night. My scavenging that morning hadn’t gone well. After several hours of searching my normal stakeouts, all I had to show for it was a cut palm and an empty stomach. Raiding old Thompson’s rat traps hadn’t worked; the rats were either getting smarter or he was finally making a dent in the rodent population. I’d scaled the fire escape to widow Tanner’s rooftop garden, carefully easing under the razor-wire fence only to find the shrewd old woman had done her harvest early, leaving nothing but empty boxes of dirt behind. I’d searched the back-alley Dumpsters behind Hurley’s trading shop; sometimes, though rarely, there would be a loaf of bread so moldy not even a rat would touch it, or a sack of soybeans that had gone bad, or a rancid potato. I wasn’t picky; my stomach had been trained to keep down most anything, no matter how disgusting. Bugs, rats, maggoty bread, I didn’t care as long as it faintly resembled food. I could eat what most people couldn’t stomach, but today, it seemed Lady Luck hated me worse than usual.
And continuing to hunt after the execution was impossible. The pet’s continued presence in the Fringe made people nervous. I didn’t want to risk thievery with so many of the pet’s guards wandering about. Besides, stealing food so soon after three people had been hanged for it was just asking for trouble.
Scavenging in familiar territory was getting me nowhere. I’d used up all resources here, and the Registereds were getting wise to my methods. Even if I crossed into other sectors, most of the Fringe had been picked clean long, long ago. In a city full of scavengers and opportunists, there just wasn’t anything left. If we wanted to eat, I was going to have to venture farther.
I was going to have to leave the city.
Glancing at the pale sky through the plastic-covered window, I grimaced. The morning was already gone. With afternoon fading rapidly, I’d have only a few hours to hunt for food once I was outside the Wall. If I didn’t make it back before sundown, other things would start hunting. Once the light dropped from the sky, it was their time. The Masters. The vampires.
I still have time, I thought, mentally calculating the hours in my head. It’s a fairly clear day; I can slip under the Wall, search the ruins and be back before the sun goes down.
“Where are you going?” Stick asked as I opened the door and strode back down the hall, keeping a wary eye out for Rat. “Allie? Wait, where are you going? Take me with you. I can help.”
“No, Stick.” I turned on him and shook my head. “I’m not hitting the regular spots this time. There are too many guards, and the pet is still out there making everyone twitchy.” I sighed and shielded my eyes from the sun, gazing over the empty lot. “I’m going to have to try the ruins.”
He squeaked. “You’re leaving the city?”
“I’ll be back before sundown. Don’t worry.”
“If they catch you …”
“They won’t.” I leaned back and smirked at him. “When have they ever caught me? They don’t even know those tunnels exist.”
“You sound like Patrick and Geoffrey.”
I blinked, stung. “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?” He shrugged, and I crossed my arms. “If that’s how you feel, maybe I won’t bother sharing anything I bring back. Maybe you should hunt for your own food for a change.”
“Sorry,” he said quickly, giving me an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Allie. I just worry about you, that’s all. I get scared that you’ll leave me here, alone. Promise you’ll come back?”
“You know I will.”
“Okay, then.” He backed away into the hall, the shadows closing over his face. “Good luck.”
Maybe it was just me, but his tone almost implied that he was hoping I’d run into trouble. That I would see how dangerous it really was out there, and that he’d been right all along. But that was silly, I told myself, sprinting across the empty lot, back toward the fence and the city streets. Stick needed me; I was his only friend. He wasn’t so vindictive that he’d wish me harm just because he was pissed about Marc and Gracie.
Right?
I pushed the thought from my mind as I squeezed through the chain-link fence and slipped into the quiet city. I could worry about Stick some other time; my priority was finding food to keep us both alive.
The sun teetered directly above the skeletal buildings, bathing the streets in light. Just hang up there a little longer, I thought, glancing at the sky. Stay put, for a few more hours at least. Actually, feel free to stop moving, if you want.
Vindictively, it seemed to drop a little lower in the sky, taunting me as it slid behind a cloud. The shadows lengthened like grasping fingers, sliding over the ground. I shivered and hurried into the streets.
CHAPTER 2
People will tell you that it’s impossible to leave New Covington, that the Outer Wall is impenetrable, that no one can get in or out of the city even if they want to.
People are wrong.
The Fringe is a massive concrete jungle; canyons of broken glass and rusting steel, skeletal giants choked by vines, rot and corrosion. Save for the very center of the city, where the looming vampire towers gleam with dark radiance, the surrounding structures look diseased, hollow and perilously close to collapse. Below the jagged skyline, with few humans to keep it in check, the wilderness outside creeps closer. Rusted shells of what were once cars are scattered about the streets, their rotted frames wrapped in vegetation. Trees, roots and vines push up through sidewalks and even rooftops, splitting pavement and steel, as nature slowly claims the city for its own. In recent years, a few of the looming skyscrapers finally succumbed to time and decay, tumbling to the ground in a roar of dust and cement and breaking glass, killing everyone unlucky enough to be around it when it happened. It was a fact of life anymore. Enter any building nowadays, and you could hear it creaking and groaning above your head, maybe decades away from collapse, or maybe only seconds.
The city is falling apart. Everyone in the Fringe knows it, but you can’t think about that. No use in worrying about what you can’t change.
What I was worried about, more than anything, was avoiding the vamps, not getting caught, and getting enough to eat to survive one more day.
Sometimes, like today, that called for drastic measures. What I was about to do was risky and dangerous as hell, but if I was worried about risk, I wouldn’t be Unregistered, would I?
The Fringe was divided into several sections, sectors as they called them, all neatly fenced off to control the flow of food and people. Another device built “for our protection.” Call it what you want; a cage is still a cage. As far as I knew, there were five or six sectors in a loose semicircle around the Inner City. We were Sector 4. If I had a tattoo that could be scanned, it would read something like: Allison Sekemoto, resident number 7229, Sector 4, New Covington. Property of Prince Salazar. Technically, the Prince owned every human in the city, but his officers had harems and thralls—bloodslaves—of their own, as well. Fringers, on the other hand—Registered Fringers anyway—were “communal property.” Which meant any vampire could do anything they wanted to them.
No one in the Fringe seemed bothered by their tattoo. Nate, one of the assistants at Hurley’s trading post, was constantly trying to get me to Register, saying the tattooing didn’t hurt very much and the whole giving blood part wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. He couldn’t understand why I was being so stubborn. I told him it wasn’t the scanning or the giving blood that I hated the most.
It was the whole “Property of” bit that bothered me. I was no one’s property. If the damn bloodsuckers wanted me, they’d have to catch me first. And I wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
The barrier between sectors was simple: chain-link topped with barbed wire. The steel curtains ran for miles and weren’t well patrolled. There were guards at the iron gates in each sector that let the food trucks in and out of the Inner City, but nowhere else. Really, the vamps didn’t particularly care if some of their cattle slipped back and forth between sectors. The majority of the deadly, lethal force was dedicated to protecting the Outer Wall every night.
You had to admit, the Outer Wall was pretty impressive. Thirty feet high, six feet thick, the ugly monstrosity of iron, steel and concrete loomed over the perimeter of the Fringe, surrounding the entire city. There was only one gate to the outside, two doors of solid iron, barred from the inside with heavy steel girders that took three men to remove. It wasn’t in my sector, but I’d seen it open once, while scavenging far from home. Spotlights had been placed along the Wall every fifty yards, scanning the ground like enormous eyes. Beyond the Wall was the “kill zone,” a razed strip of ground littered with barbed-wire coils, trenches, spiked pits and mines, all designed to do one thing: keep rabids away from the Wall.
The Outer Wall was feared and hated throughout New Covington, reminding us that we were trapped here, like penned-in sheep, but it was greatly revered, as well. No one could survive the ruins beyond the city, especially when darkness fell. Even the vamps disliked going into the ruins. Beyond the Wall, the night belonged to the rabids. No sane person went over the Wall, and those who tried were either gunned down or blown to bits in the kill zone.
Which was why I planned to go beneath.
I PUSHED MY WAY THROUGH the waist-high weeds that filled the ditch, keeping one hand on the cement wall as I maneuvered puddles and shattered glass. I hadn’t been here in a while, and the weeds had covered all traces of previous passing. Circling the rock pile, ignoring the suspicious-looking bones scattered about the base, I counted a dozen steps from the edge of the rubble, stopped and knelt down in the grass.
I brushed away the weeds, careful not to disturb the surroundings too much. I didn’t want anyone knowing this was here. If word got out—if the vampires heard rumors that there was a possible exit out of their city, they would have every square inch of the Fringe searched until it was found and sealed tighter than a pet’s hold on the food warehouse key. Not that they were terribly concerned about people getting out; there was nothing beyond the Outer Wall except ruins, wilderness and rabids. But exits were also entrances, and every few years, a rabid would find its way into the city via the tunnels that ran beneath. And there would be chaos and panic and death until the rabid was killed and the entryway found and blocked off. But they always missed this one.
The weeds parted, revealing a circle of black metal sunk into the ground. It was insanely heavy, but I kept a piece of rebar nearby to pry it up. Letting the cover thump into the grass, I gazed into a long, narrow hole. Rusty metal bars were set into the cement tube beneath the cover, leading down into the darkness.
I glanced around, making sure no one was watching, then started down the ladder. It always worried me, leaving the tunnel entrance wide open, but the cover was too heavy for me to slide back once inside the tube. But it was well hidden in the long grass, and no one had discovered it yet, not in all the years of me sneaking out of the city.
Still, I couldn’t dawdle.
Dropping to the cement floor, I gazed around, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Putting a hand in my coat pocket, I closed it around my two most prized possessions: a lighter, still half full of fluid, and my pocket knife. The lighter I’d found on my previous trip into the ruins, and the knife I’d had for years. Both were extremely valuable, and I never went anywhere without them.
As usual, the tunnels beneath the city reeked. The old-timers, the ones who had been kids in the time before the plague, said that all of the city’s waste was once carried away through the pipes under the streets, instead of in buckets emptied into covered holes. If that was true, then it certainly explained the smell. About a foot from where I stood, the ledge dropped away into sludgy black water, trickling lazily down the tunnel. A huge rat, nearly the size of some of the alley cats I glimpsed topside, scurried off into the shadows, reminding me why I was here.
With one last glance through the hole at the sky—still sunny and bright—I headed into the darkness.
PEOPLE USED TO THINK rabids lurked underground, in caves or abandoned tunnels, where they slept during the daylight hours and came out at night. Actually, most everyone still thought that, but I’d never seen a rabid down here, not once. Not even a sleeping one. That didn’t mean anything, however. No one topside had ever seen a mole man, but everyone knew the rumors of diseased, light-shy humans living beneath the city, who would grab your ankles from storm drains and drag you down to eat you. I hadn’t seen a mole man, either, but there were hundreds, maybe thousands of tunnels I’d never explored and didn’t plan to. My goal, whenever I ventured into this dark, eerie world, was to get past the Wall and back up to the sunlight as quickly as possible.
Luckily, I knew this stretch of tunnel, and it wasn’t completely lightless. Sunlight filtered in from grates and storm drains, little bars of color in an otherwise gray world. There were places where it was pitch-black, and I had to use my lighter to continue, but the spaces were familiar, and I knew where I was going, so it wasn’t terrible.
Eventually, I wiggled my way out of a large cement tube that emptied into a weed-choked ditch, almost sliding on my stomach to get through the pipe. Sometimes there were perks to being very skinny. Wringing nasty warm water from my clothes, I stood up and gazed around.
Over the rows of dilapidated roofs, past the barren, razed field of the kill zone, I could see the Outer Wall rising up in its dark, deadly glory. For some reason, it always looked strange from this side. The sun hovered between the towers in the center of the city, gleaming off their mirrored walls. There were still a few good hours left to hunt, but I needed to work fast.
Past the kill zone, sprawled out like a gray-green, suburban carpet, the remains of the old suburbs waited for me in the fading afternoon light. I vaulted up the bank and slipped into the ruins of a dead civilization.
Scavenging the ruins was tricky. They say there used to be massive stores that had rows and rows of food, clothes and all kinds of other things. They were enormous and easily identified by their wide, sprawling parking lots. But you didn’t want to look there, because they were the first to be picked clean when everything went bad. Nearly sixty years after the plague, the only things left behind were gutted-out walls and empty shelves. The same was true of smaller food marts and gas stations. Nothing was left. I’d wasted many hours searching through those buildings to come up empty-handed every time, so now I didn’t bother.
But the normal residences, the rows of rotting, dilapidated houses along the crumbling streets, were a different story. Because here’s something interesting I’ve learned about the human race: we like to hoard. Call it stockpiling, call it paranoia, call it preparing for the worst—the houses were far more likely to have food stashed away in cellars or buried deep in closets. You just had to ferret it out.
The floorboards creaked as I eased through the door of my fifth or sixth hopeful—a two-story house surrounded by a warped chain-link fence and nearly swallowed up by ivy, windows broken, porch strangled under vines and weeds. The roof and part of the upper floor had fallen in, and faint rays of light filtered through the rotten beams. The air was thick with the smell of mold, dust and vegetation, and the house seemed to hold its breath as I stepped inside.
I searched the kitchen first, rummaging through cupboards, opening drawers, even checking the ancient refrigerator in the corner. Nothing. A few rusty forks, an empty tin can, a broken mug. All stuff I’d seen before. In one bedroom, the closets were empty, the dresser overturned, a large oval mirror shattered on the floor. The blankets and sheets had been stripped from the bed, and a suspicious dark blot stained one side of the mattress. I didn’t wonder what it might be. You don’t wonder about things like that. You just move on.
In the second bedroom, which was not quite as ravaged as the first, an old crib stood in the corner, filmy and covered in cobwebs. I eased around it, deliberately not looking inside the peeling bars, to the once-white shelves on the wall. A shattered lamp stood on one shelf, but beneath it, I saw a familiar, dust-covered rectangle.
Picking it up, I wiped away the film and cobwebs, scanning the title at the top. Goodnight, Moon, it read, and I smiled ruefully. I wasn’t here for books, and I needed to remember that. If I brought this home instead of say, food, Lucas would be furious, and we’d probably fight about it, again.
Maybe I was being too hard on him. It wasn’t that he was stupid, just practical. He was more concerned with survival than learning a skill that was useless in his eyes. But I couldn’t give up just because he was being stubborn. If I could get him to read, maybe we could start teaching other Fringers, kids like us. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to start … something. I didn’t know what, but there had to be something better than just survival.
I’d tucked the book under my arm, filled with a new resolve, when a soft clink made me freeze. Something was in the house with me, moving around just outside the bedroom door.
Very carefully, I laid the book back on the shelf without disturbing the dust. I’d come back for it later, if I survived whatever was coming.
Slipping my hand into my pocket, I gripped my knife and slowly turned. Shadows moved through the sickly light coming from the living room, and the faint, tapping steps echoed just outside the doorway. I flipped the knife blade open and stepped backward, pressing myself against the wall and the dresser, my heart thudding against my ribs. As a dark shape paused just outside the door, I heard slow, labored panting, and held my breath.
A deer stepped into the frame.
My gut and throat unclenched, though I didn’t immediately relax. Wildlife was common enough in the city ruins, though why a deer would be wandering around a human house, I didn’t know. Straightening, I blew out a slow breath, causing the doe to jerk her head up, peering in my direction, as if she couldn’t quite see what was there.
My stomach growled, and for a moment, I had visions of sidling up to the deer and plunging the blade into her neck. You almost never saw meat of any kind in the Fringe. Rat and mouse were highly prized, and I’ve seen nasty, bloody fights over a dead pigeon. There were a few stray dogs and cats running around the Fringe, but they were wild, vicious creatures that, unless you wanted to risk an infected bite, were best left alone. The guards also had leave to shoot any animal found wandering about the streets, and usually did, so meat of any kind was extremely scarce.
A whole deer carcass, cut into strips and dried, would feed me and my crew for a month. Or I could trade cuts for meal tickets, blankets, new clothes, whatever I wanted. Just thinking about it made my stomach growl again, and I shifted my weight to one leg, ready to ease forward. As soon as I moved, the deer would probably bolt out the door, but I had to try.
But then, the doe looked right at me, and I saw the thin streams of blood oozing from her eyes, spotting the floor. My blood ran cold. No wonder she wasn’t afraid. No wonder she had followed me here and was watching me with the flat, glazed stare of a predator. She had been bitten by a rabid. And the disease had driven her mad.
I took a quiet breath to slow my heartbeat, trying not to panic. This was bad. The doe was blocking the door, so there was no way I could go through her without risking an attack. Her eyes hadn’t turned completely white yet, so the sickness was still in its beginning stages. Hopefully if I kept calm, I could get out of here without being trampled to death.
The doe snorted and tossed her head, the jerky movement causing her to stumble into the door frame. Another effect of the sickness; diseased animals seemed confused and uncoordinated one moment but could switch to hyper-aggressive fury in the blink of an eye. I gripped my knife and eased to the side, toward the broken window along the wall.
The doe raised her head, rolling her eyes, and gave a raspy growl unlike anything I’d ever heard from a deer. I saw her muscles bunching up to charge, and I bolted for the window.
The deer lunged into the room, snorting, hooves flailing in deadly arcs. One of them caught my thigh as I darted past, a glancing blow, but it felt like someone had hit it with a hammer. The doe crashed into the far wall, overturning a shelf, and I threw myself out the window.
Scrambling through the weeds, I ran for a partially collapsed shed in the corner of the backyard. The roof had fallen in, and vines completely covered the rotting walls, but the doors were still intact. I squeezed through the frame and ducked into a corner, panting, listening for sounds of pursuit.
For the moment, everything was silent. After my heartbeat returned to normal, I peered through a crack between boards and could just make out the doe’s dark form still in the room, stumbling about in confusion, occasionally attacking the mattress or broken dresser, blind in her rage. Okay, then. I would just sit tight until psycho deer calmed down and wandered away. Hopefully, that would be before the sun went down. I needed to head back to the city soon.
Easing away from the wall, I turned to observe the shed, wondering if anything useful was still intact. There didn’t seem to be much: a few collapsed shelves, a handful of rusty nails that I quickly pocketed, and a strange, squat machine with four wheels and a long handle that looked like you’d push it around. To what end, I hadn’t a clue.
I noticed a hole in the planks beneath the strange machine and shoved it back, revealing a trapdoor underneath. It had been sealed with a heavy padlock, now so rusty a key would’ve been useless, but the floorboards themselves were rotten and falling apart. I easily pried up several planks to make a big enough hole and found a set of folding steps leading down into the darkness.
Gripping my knife, I descended into the hole.
It was dark in the basement, but at least an hour of broad daylight remained, enough to filter in through the hole and the cracks in the ceiling above me. I stood in a small, cool room, concrete lining the walls and floor, a lightbulb with a string dangling overhead. The walls were lined with wooden shelves, and on those shelves, dozens upon dozens of cans winked at me in the dim light. My heart stood still.
Jackpot.
Lunging forward, I snatched the nearest can off the shelf, sending three others clattering to the floor in my excitement. The can had a faded label wrapped around it, but I didn’t bother trying to figure out the words. Digging out my knife, I jammed the blade into the top and attacked the tin furiously, sawing at the metal with shaking hands.
A sweet, heavenly aroma arose from inside, and my hunger roared to life in response, making me slightly dizzy. Food! Real food! Prying back the lid, I barely took the time to glance at the contents—some kind of mushy fruit in a slimy liquid—before I dumped the whole thing back and into my mouth. The sweetness shocked me, cloyingly thick and pulpy, unlike anything I’d tasted before. In the Fringe, fruit and vegetables were almost unheard of. I drank the entire thing without pause, feeling it settle in my empty stomach, and grabbed another can.
This one contained beans in more glistening liquid, and I devoured that, too, scooping the red mush out with my fingers. I went through another can of fruit slime, a can of creamed corn, and a small tin of sausage links the size of my finger, before I finally slowed down enough to think.
I’d stumbled upon a treasure trove, one so vast it was staggering. These kinds of hidden caches were the stuff of legends, and here I was, standing in the middle of one. With my stomach full—a rare sensation—I started exploring, taking stock of what was here.
Nearly one whole wall was dedicated to cans, but there was so much variety, according to the different labels. Most were too faded or torn to read, but I was still able to pick out a lot of canned vegetables, fruit, beans and soup. There were also cans containing strange foods I’d never heard of. Spa Gettee Ohs, and Rah Vee Oh Lee, and other weird things. Shelved in with the cans were boxes containing squarish bundles of something wrapped in shiny, silvery paper. I had no idea what they were, but if the answer was more food, I wasn’t complaining.
The opposite wall had dozens of clear gallon water jugs, a few propane tanks, one of those portable green stoves I’d seen Hurley use, and a gas lantern. Whoever set this place up sure wasn’t taking any chances, for all the good it did them in the end.
Well, thanks, mysterious person. You sure made my life a lot easier.
My mind raced, considering my options. I could keep this place a secret, but why? There was enough food here to feed my whole gang for months. I scanned the room, pondering how I wanted to do this. If I told Lucas about this place, the four of us—me, Rat, Lucas and Stick—could come back and take everything in one fell swoop. It would be dangerous, but for this amount of food, it would be worth it.
I turned slowly, regretting that I didn’t have anything to carry the food back in. That was intelligent of you, Allison. I usually took one of the backpacks the crew kept in a hall closet when venturing into the ruins—that’s what we kept them for, after all—but I hadn’t wanted to run into Rat again. Still, I had to take something back. If I was going to convince Lucas to risk a very dangerous trip out of the city, I’d need some kind of proof.
Scanning the room, I paused. A pair of bulging garbage bags lay on the top shelf, shoved against the wall. They looked like they might hold blankets or clothes or other useful things, but right now, I was more concerned with food.
“That’ll work,” I muttered and walked up to the shelves. Without a ladder or a box or anything to stand on, I was going to have to climb. Putting a foot between the cans, I heaved myself up.
The board creaked horribly under my weight but held. Gripping the rough wood, I pulled myself up another foot, then another, until I could reach my arm over the top shelf and feel around for the bags. Gripping a corner of filmy plastic in two fingers, I pulled it toward me.
The wood suddenly groaned, and before I knew it, the entire shelf tipped backward. Panicked, I tried to jump clear, but dozens of cans rushed forward, slamming into me, and I lost my grip. I struck the cement floor, the ring and clatter of metal tins all around me, and had a split-second glance of the shelves filling my vision before everything went black.
CHAPTER 3
A pounding in my skull brought me back to reality. My ears rang, and when I opened my eyes, darkness greeted me. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. Something heavy pressed on my chest and legs, and when I shifted, several small, metal things rolled off me and pinged to the ground.
“Shit,” I whispered, remembering. Frantically, I wiggled out from beneath the shelf and limped to the steps, gazing up. Through the hole in the roof, the night sky was hazy and starless, but a sickly yellow moon peered through the clouds like a swollen eye.
I was in trouble.
Careless, stupid mistake, Allie. Creeping up the steps, I scanned the darkness and shadows, my heart crashing against my ribs in the silence. Below me, the cans made soft metallic sounds as they rolled across the floor, but I couldn’t worry about the wealth I was leaving behind. I had to get back to the city. I couldn’t stay here. I’d heard stories of rabids tearing through walls and floors to get to their prey; they never gave up once they sensed you. I couldn’t let anything slow me down.
Carefully, I eased myself out of the hole and crept to the door, reaching out to push it open. Froze.
Along the side of the shed, something was moving.
Weeds hissed against the wall as footsteps shuffled over the ground, and low growling that might’ve belonged to an animal slithered through the cracks. Withdrawing my hand, I silently eased into a corner and put my back to the wall, squeezing my knife to stop my hands from shaking. Outside the shed, it was nearly pitch-black, but I caught glimpses of a pale, emaciated figure through the cracks in the wood, listened to its steps as it moved along the outer wall … and stopped at the door.
I held my breath, counting the seconds with every frantic heartbeat, biting my cheek to keep from panting.
The door creaked and swung slowly inward.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I felt the rough wood at my back and imagined myself a part of the wall, part of the shadows that cloaked me, hiding me from everything. On the other side of the door between us, the slow, raspy growls grew louder as the shadow turned its head from side to side, scanning the walls.
An eternity passed.
Finally, the door slowly creaked shut, and the shadow turned away, slouching off into the weeds. I listened to the shuffling footsteps as they moved away, growing fainter, until the only sounds were the buzz of insects in the night.
It was a moment before I could move or even breathe properly. Once the shaking stopped, I slipped out of the shed and hurried through the weeds, following the same path I’d taken to get there. With a chill I noted that my trail wasn’t the only one cutting through the tall grass; a few other paths now crisscrossed the yard, showing I hadn’t been alone in my time belowground. If it had found the stairs …
I shuddered and hurried onward, stumbling through the empty streets. In the moonlight, the ruins looked even more foreboding, stark and hostile to the intruder in their midst. After dark within the city walls, people vanished off the streets and vampires walked the night, but the shadows were familiar, the darkness comforting. Here in the ruins, the darkness was alien, and the shadows seemed to creep closer, reaching out for you.
Something shrieked in the night, a scream of animalistic fury, and I began to run.
IT WAS THE LONGEST FEW MINUTES of my life, but I made it back to the tunnels. Wriggling through the drain pipe, I’d almost convinced myself that something was behind me and sharp claws would close around my ankles, dragging me back. Mercifully, that didn’t happen, and I leaned against the wall, gasping in short, frantic breaths until my heart stopped racing around my rib cage.
In the tunnel, I couldn’t see my hand before my face, and no amount of waiting would help my eyes adjust to the pitch blackness. Digging in my pocket, I brought out the lighter, clicking a tiny flame to life. It barely illuminated the ground at my feet, but it was better than nothing.
With the flickering light held up before me, I started down the tunnels.
Strange how a few short hours could change your view of the world. The once familiar tunnels were menacing now, the darkness a living thing, pressing in on all sides, suffocating me. My footsteps seemed too loud in the quiet, and several times I held my breath, listening for phantom noises I was certain I’d heard over my quiet panting.
The tunnels went on, and despite all my fears and imaginings, nothing leaped out at me. I was nearly home, just another turn and a few hundred yards to the ladder that led topside, when a splash echoed in the darkness.
It wasn’t loud, and in the daylight hours, with sunlight slanting in through the grates, I might’ve blamed a rat or something similar. But in the looming silence and blackness, my heart nearly stopped, and my blood turned to ice. I doused my flame and ducked into a corner, holding my breath, straining my ears to listen. I didn’t have to wait long.
In the darkness of the tunnel ahead, a single flashlight beam flickered over the ground, and low, guttural voices echoed off the walls.
“… what’ve we got here?” a voice wheezed, as I pressed myself into the wall. “A rat? A big rat, come creeping out of the darkness. You sure picked the wrong night to go wandering the undercity, friend.”
Holding my breath, I risked a quick peek around the corner. Four men blocked the exit of the tunnel, thin and ragged, in filthy clothes and unkempt hair. They stood slightly hunched over, their shoulders bent and crooked, as if they spent all their lives in small cramped spaces and weren’t used to standing up straight. They clutched jagged, rusty blades in their hands and grinned maniacally at a lone figure in the center of the tunnel, their eyes gleaming with anticipation and something darker.
I ducked behind the corner again, heart pounding. You’ve got to be kidding, I mused, sinking farther into the concealing shadows, hoping they didn’t hear me. This just isn’t my night. Deer, rabids, and now freaking mole men in the tunnels. No one is going to believe this. I shook my head and huddled lower, clutching the handle of my knife. Now all I need is a vampire to come sauntering through and it’ll be perfect.
The mole men chuckled, and I heard them ease forward, probably surrounding the poor bastard who’d walked into their ambush. Run, you idiot, I thought, wondering what he thought he was doing, why I didn’t hear footsteps pounding frantically away. Don’t you know what they’ll do to you? If you don’t want to be on a stick over the fire, you’d better run.
“I want no trouble,” said a low voice, calm and collected. And even though I couldn’t see him, didn’t dare peek around the corner again, it sent shivers up my spine. “Let me pass, and I’ll be on my way. You don’t want to do this.”
“Oh,” one mole man purred, and I imagined him sidling forward, grinning, “I think we d—”
His voice abruptly changed to a startled gurgle, followed by a wet splat, and the faint, coppery stench of blood filled the air. Enraged cries rang out, the sound of a scuffle, blades cutting through flesh, agonized screams. I crouched in my shadowy corner and held my breath, until the final shriek died away, until the last body fell and silence crept into the tunnels once more.
I counted thirty seconds of quiet. Sixty seconds. A minute and a half. Two. The tunnel remained silent. No footsteps, no shifting movements, no breathing. It was as still as the dead.
Warily, I peered around the corner and bit my lip.
The four mole men lay in heaps, weapons scattered about, the flashlight shining weakly against a wall. Its beam pointed to a vivid splash of red, trickling down the cement to a motionless body. I scanned the tunnel again, looking for a fifth heap, but there were only the mole men, lying dead in the pale flashlight beam. The dark stranger had disappeared.
I sidled closer. I didn’t want to touch the bodies, but the flashlight was a valuable find. One that would keep me fed for several days if I could find the right trader. Edging around a pale, dirty arm, I snatched my trophy and rose—
—shining the light right into the face of the stranger. Who didn’t wince. Didn’t even blink. I scrambled back, nearly tripping over the arm I’d stepped around, bringing my knife up before me. The stranger remained where he was, though his eyes, blacker than pitch, followed me as I retreated. I kept both the blade and the flashlight pointed in his direction until I reached the edge and tensed to bolt into the shadows.
“If you run, you’ll be dead before you take three steps.”
I stopped, heart pounding. I believed him. Gripping my knife, I turned around, staring at him over the bodies of the dead, waiting for his next move.
There was no doubt in my mind. I knew what I faced, what stared at me across the tunnel, so still he might’ve been a statue. I was down here, alone, with a vampire. And there was no one who could help me.
“What do you want?” My voice came out shakier than I’d wanted, but I planted my feet and glared defiantly. Show no fear. Vampires could sense fear, at least that’s what everybody said. If you ever ran into a hungry bloodsucker alone at night, not looking like prey might give you an edge in surviving the encounter.
I didn’t believe that, of course. A vampire would bite you whether you were scared of him or not. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, either.
The vamp tilted his head, a tiny movement that would’ve gone unnoticed, save the rest of him was so very, very still. “I am trying to decide,” he said in that same low, cool voice, “if you are a simple scavenger, eavesdropping on the conversation, or if you are about to scuttle off to tell the rest of your clan I am here.”
“Do I look like one of them?”
“Then … you are a scavenger. Waiting until your prey is dead to feed, instead of killing it yourself.”
His tone hadn’t changed. It was the same, cool and detached, but I felt myself bristle through my fear. Anger, hate and resentment bubbled to the surface, making me stupid, making me want to hurt it. Who did this murdering, soulless bloodsucker think he was, lecturing me? “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you let the cattle starve,” I snapped, narrowing my eyes. “They start turning on each other, or didn’t you know that?” I gestured to the dead mole men, scattered at my feet, and curled a lip. “But I’m not one of them. And I sure as hell don’t eat people. That’s your thing, remember?”
The vampire just looked at me. Long enough for me to regret taunting him, which was a stupid thing to do from the start. I almost didn’t care. I wouldn’t grovel and beg, if that’s what he was looking for. Vampires had no souls, no emotions and no empathy to appeal to. If the bloodsucker wanted to drain me dry and leave me here to rot, there wasn’t anything I could say that would stop him.
But I’d give him one hell of a fight.
“Interesting,” the vamp finally mused, almost to himself. “I forget, sometimes, the complexities of the human race. We’ve reduced so many of you to animals—savage, cowardly, so willing to turn on each other to survive. And yet, in the darkest places, I can still find those who are still, more or less, human.”
He wasn’t making any sense, and I was tired of talking, of waiting for him to make his move. “What do you want, vampire?” I challenged again. “Why are we still talking? If you’re going to bite me, just get on with it already.” Though don’t expect me to lie down and take it. You’ll have a pocketknife shoved through your eye socket before I’m done, I swear.
Amazingly, the vampire smiled. Just a slight curl of pale lips, but in that granite face, he might as well have beamed from ear to ear. “I have already fed tonight,” he stated calmly, and took one step backward, into the shadows. “And you, little wildcat, I suspect you have claws you wouldn’t hesitate to use. I find I am in no mood for another fight, so consider yourself lucky. You met a heartless, soulless bloodsucker and lived. Next time, it might be very different.”
And just like that, he turned on his heel and walked away into the darkness. His final words drifted out of the black as he disappeared. “Thank you for the conversation.” And he was gone.
I frowned, utterly confused. What kind of vampire killed four people, had a cryptic conversation with a street rat, thanked the street rat for talking with him, and then walked off? I swept the flashlight around the tunnel, wondering if it was a trick to get me to lower my guard, and the bloodsucker was lying in ambush just ahead, laughing to himself. That seemed like something a vampire would do. But the tunnel was empty and silent in the flashlight beam, and after a moment, I picked my way over the still-bleeding corpses, hurried to the ladder and scaled the tube as fast as I could.
Aboveground, the city was silent. Nothing moved on the streets; the crumbling stores and houses and apartments lay quiet and dark. Overhead, looming above everything, the vampire towers glittered in the night, cold and impassive like their masters. It was still the predator’s time, this silent hour before dawn, and everyone was off the street, huddled in their beds with their doors and windows barred. But at least on this side of the Wall, the darkness didn’t conceal savage, mindless horrors that had once been human. Here, the predators were more complex, though just as dangerous.
A cold wind blew down the street, stirring up dust and sending an empty can skittering over the ground. It reminded me of what I’d left behind, on the other side of the Wall, and anger burned its way into my stomach, killing the last of the fear. So much food! So much wealth, to have to leave it all behind…. The thought made my gut boil, and I kicked a rock into a dead car, the stone clanking off the rusty frame.
I had to get back there. No way was I going to huddle behind the Wall, eating cockroaches, fantasizing about shelves and shelves of real food rotting away in someone’s basement. One way or another, I was going to return to that place and reclaim what I’d lost.
But right now, my stomach was full, I ached from my fall, and I was damn tired. The flashlight beam shone weakly in the darkness, and I clicked it off, not wanting to waste valuable battery life. I didn’t need artificial light to navigate the Fringe, anyway. Slipping my single prize into a back pocket, I headed for home.
“OH, MY GOD, you’re alive.”
I gave Stick a disdainful look as I slipped into my room, kicking the door shut behind me. He scrambled off my mattress, gaping, as if I was a hallucination. “What’s that look for?” I frowned at him. “And why are you here, anyway? Have you been waiting up for me all night?”
“You didn’t hear?” Stick’s eyes darted about, as if someone could be lurking in the shadows, listening. “Lucas didn’t tell you?”
“Stick.” I sighed and collapsed on the mattress. “I just got back from a rather hellish night out,” I muttered, putting an arm over my eyes. “I’m tired, I’m cranky, and unless someone is on the verge of death or the vampires are breaking down our doors, I want to go to sleep. Whatever this is, can it wait till morning? I need to talk to Lucas, anyway.”
“The vampires were out tonight,” Stick continued, as if I hadn’t said a word.
I removed my arm and sat up to face him, a chill crawling up my spine. His face was pale in the shadows of the room, thin mouth tight with fear. “I saw them. They were going from sector to sector with their pets and guards and everything, breaking down doors, going into people’s houses. They didn’t come here, but Lucas moved us all into the basement until he was sure they had moved on. I heard … I heard someone was killed … trying to run away.”
“Was anyone Taken?”
Stick shrugged bony shoulders. “I don’t think so. They just came through, went into several buildings and left. Lucas said they were looking for something, but no one knows what it is.”
Or someone. I thought back to the vampire in the tunnels below the city. Was he part of that search party, exploring the underworld for whatever item the bloodsuckers wanted? Or … was he the mysterious thing they were all searching for? But that didn’t make much sense. Why would the vampires be hunting one of their own?
And if they were, why couldn’t they do it more often?
“There are rumors of a citywide lockdown,” Stick went on in a low, frightened voice. “Curfews, guards, area restrictions, everything.”
I muttered a curse. Lockdowns were bad news and not just for Unregistereds. There had been two in the past, once when gang warfare swept through the Fringe, clogging the streets with dead bodies, and once when an infestation of rabid rats created a citywide panic. Lockdowns were the vampires’ last resort, their answer when things got out of control. Everyone was required to stay in their homes during curfew hours, while armed guards swept the streets. If you were caught outside during lockdown, they would shoot you, no questions asked.
“Allie, what are we going to do?”
“Nothing,” I said, and he stared at me. I shrugged. “Nothing tonight. It’ll be dawn in a few hours. The bloodsuckers will go back to their towers, and nothing will be done until this evening. We can worry about it then.”
“But …”
“Stick. I. Am. Tired.” I rose from the mattress and, taking his elbow, steered him to the door. “If Lucas is still up, tell him I need to speak to him tomorrow. It’s important. Really important.” He started to protest, but I firmly pushed him over the threshold. “Look, if you want to stay up and worry about vampire hunts, you can do it for both of us. I’m going to sleep while I still can. Wake me when it’s dawn, okay?” And before he could make any more excuses, I shut the door in his face.
Collapsing on the mattress, I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes. Stick’s news was troublesome, but I’d learned that worrying about things you couldn’t change was useless and just kept you from getting sleep. Tomorrow, I’d talk to Lucas and tell him about the food cache I’d found, and he could convince the others to go after it. Before the city went into lockdown, of course. Working together, we could probably clear that whole room in two or three trips and not have to worry about the coming winter. Rat was a dick and a bully, but he was part of my crew, and we looked out for each other. Besides, it would take a single person forever to clear that place, and I didn’t want to be in the ruins any longer than I had to be.
With plan firmly in mind, I dismissed all thoughts of that night—of rabids and manhunts and vampires in the sewers—and drifted into oblivion.
CHAPTER 4
“Allison,” Mom said, patting the cushion beside her, “come up here. Read with me.”
I scrambled onto the threadbare couch that smelled of dust and spoiled milk, snuggling against her side. She held a book in her lap, bright happy animals prancing across the pages. I listened as she read to me in a soft, soothing voice, her slender hands turning the pages as if they were made of butterfly wings. Except, I couldn’t see her face. Everything was blurry, like water sluicing down a windowpane. But I knew she was smiling down at me, and that made me feel warm and safe.
“Knowledge is important,” she explained patiently, now watching an older version of me from across the kitchen table. A sheet of paper lay in front of me, marked with scrawling, messy lines. “Words define us,” Mom continued, as I struggled to make my clumsy marks look like her elegant script. “We must protect our knowledge and pass it on whenever we can. If we are ever to become a society again, we must teach others how to remain human.”
The kitchen melted away, ran like water down a wall, and turned into something else.
“Mom,” I whispered, sitting beside her on the bed, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest under the thin blanket. “Mom, I brought some soup for you. Try to eat it, okay?”
The frail, white form, surrounded by long black hair, stirred weakly. I couldn’t see her face, though I knew it should be somewhere within that dark mass. “I don’t feel well, Allison,” she whispered, her voice so faint I barely caught it. “Will you … read to me?”
That same smile, though her face remained blurry and indistinct. Why couldn’t I see her? Why couldn’t I remember? “Mom,” I said again, standing up, feeling the shadows closing in. “We have to go. They’re coming.”
“A is for apple,” Mom whispered, falling away from me. I cried out and reached for her, but she slipped away, into the dark. “B is for blood.”
Something boomed against the door.
I JERKED AWAKE, THE DOOR TO MY ROOM still rattling from the sudden blow. On my feet, I glared at the door, heart pounding. I was already a light sleeper, hypersensitive to footsteps and people sneaking up on me while I slept, so the first bang nearly made me jump through the ceiling. By the fourth, I had wrenched the door open, even as Lucas was pulling his fist back to knock again.
Lucas blinked at me. Dark and muscular, he had large hands and a curiously babylike face, except for his thick, serious eyebrows. When I first joined the group, Lucas had been intimidating; a serious, no-nonsense figure even as a twelve-year old. Over the years, the fear had lessened, but the respect had not. When our old leader started demanding a food tax—a portion of everything we scavenged—Lucas had stepped in, beaten him to a pulp and taken over the gang. Since then, no one had challenged him. He was always fair; survival was his priority, regardless of feelings. Like me, he’d watched members of our gang die of starvation, cold, sickness, wounds, or just vanish off the face of the earth. We’d burned more “friends” than anyone should ever have to. Lucas had to make hard, unpopular decisions sometimes, and I didn’t envy him the job, but everything he did was to keep us alive.
Especially now that the group was so small. Fewer people meant fewer mouths to feed, but that also meant fewer bodies to hunt for food and to protect us from rival gangs if they ever got the notion to invade our turf. It was just the four of us—me, Rat, Lucas and Stick, not enough protection if Kyle’s gang decided they wanted us gone. And Lucas knew it.
Lately he confused me. We’d always been friends, but this past year his interest in me had changed. Maybe because I was the only girl in the group, maybe something else; I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to ask. We’d kissed last summer, more out of curiosity on my part, but he had wanted more and I wasn’t sure if I was ready. He hadn’t pressed the issue when I’d stopped him, saying I needed time to think about it, but now it hung between us, unresolved, like a big flag. It wasn’t that Lucas was ugly or undesirable; I just didn’t know if I wanted to get that close to someone. What if he disappeared, like so many of our kind did? It would just hurt that much more.
Lucas was still frozen in the doorway, broad shoulders filling most of the frame. I glanced past him and saw sunlight streaming in the broken windows of the school, casting jagged spots of light over the cement. By the looks of the sky, it was early to midafternoon. Damn. I’d slept far too long. Where was Stick and why hadn’t he woken me?
“Allison.” The relief in Lucas’s voice was palpable. Stepping forward, he surprised me by pulling me into a tight hug. I returned it, feeling the hard muscles of his back, his breath against my skin. Closing my eyes, I relaxed into him, just for a moment. It was nice, having someone I could lean on for a change.
We drew back quickly, not wanting the others to see just yet. This was still new for both of us. “Allie,” Lucas muttered, sounding embarrassed. “Stick told me you came back. Were you out all night?”
“Yeah.” I gave him a crooked smile. “Sounds like things got exciting after I left.”
He glared at me. “Rat started telling everyone you’d been Taken. Stick was freaking out. I had to tell both of them to shut up or I’d put a fist in their face.” His glare grew sharper, almost desperate. “Where the hell were you all night? The bloodsuckers were all over the streets.”
“The ruins.”
Lucas’s dark eyes bulged. “You went outside the Wall? At night? Are you crazy, girl? You want to get eaten by rabids?”
“Believe me, I didn’t mean to get stuck there after sunset.” I shivered, remembering what had almost happened in the shed that night. “Besides, rabids or no, I found something that made it all worth it.”
“Yeah?” He raised a thick, bristling eyebrow. “This I gotta hear.”
“A whole basement of food.” I smirked as both of Lucas’s eyebrows shot up. “Canned goods, packaged stuff, bottled water, you name it. I’m serious, Luc—wall-to-wall shelves, full of food. And no one’s guarding it. We’d be set for months, maybe the whole winter. All we have to do is get out there and grab it before anyone else does.”
Lucas’s eyes gleamed. I could almost see the wheels in his brain turning. The thought of going into the ruins was scary as hell, but the promise of food trumped that easily. “Where is it?” he asked.
“Just past the kill zone. You know the drainage pipe that empties out near the old—” He gave me a confused look, and I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I can get us there. But we should leave now, while there’s daylight.”
“Now?”
“You wanna wait to see if there’s a lockdown?”
He sighed and jerked his head down the hall. I followed him toward the common room. “No, but it’ll be risky. Lots of patrols today—pets and guards combing the streets, still looking for something. It’ll get worse tonight, though.”
We entered the common room, where Rat lounged in a moldy chair playing with his knife, his legs dangling over the arm.
“Oh, hey, the lost bitch returns,” he drawled. His voice was honking and nasal, as if his nose was still full of blood. “We were sure you’d been Taken, or had your throat torn out in some dark alley. Sure was nice and quiet without you. Except for your wuss boyfriend, bawling in the corner.” He sneered at me, mean and challenging. “I had to shove his pasty head into a doorjamb to get him to stop mewling.”
Lucas pretended to ignore him, though I saw his jaw tighten. We’d kept our … thing … a secret from the others, which meant Lucas couldn’t show favoritism by leaping to my defense. Fortunately, I could take care of myself.
I smiled sweetly at Rat. “I’m sure you did. How’s that busted nose treating you, by the way?”
Rat’s sallow cheeks reddened, and he held up his rusty knife. “Why don’t you come over here and take a look?”
Lucas kicked the back of his chair, making him yelp. “Make yourself useful and get the backpacks from the hall closet,” he ordered. “Allie,” he continued, as Rat pulled himself to his feet, scowling, “find Stick. If we’re going to do this now, we need all the help we can get.”
“With what?” Stick asked, coming into the room. Seeing the three of us, his eyes widened, and he edged closer to me. “Are we going somewhere?”
“Oh, there you are.” Rat smiled like a dog baring its fangs. “Yeah, we were just talking about how we don’t have enough food and that the weakest link, the one that doesn’t do anything around here, should be fed to the vampires. And hey, it’s you. No hard feelings, right?”
“Ignore him,” I said, locking eyes with Rat as Stick cringed away. “He’s being an ass, as usual.”
“Hey.” Rat held up his hands. “I’m only being honest. No one else has the guts to say it, so I will.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” Lucas asked in a warning voice, and Rat left the room with a leer, waggling his tongue in my direction. I made a note to break his nose the other way as soon as I got the opportunity.
Stick frowned, looking back and forth at both of us. “What’s going on?” he asked warily. “You guys aren’t …” He trailed off, looking at me. “You aren’t really discussing what Rat said, right? I’m not that pathetic … am I?”
I sighed, ready to brush it off as being stupid, but Lucas spoke up before I got the chance. “Well, now’s your chance to prove him wrong,” he said. “Allison, in her insane nighttime wandering, found something important. We’re going to get it.”
Stick blinked, glanced nervously at Rat coming into the room again, four dusty, tattered backpacks slung over his shoulders. “Where?”
“The ruins,” I answered as Rat instantly dropped the packs in horror and disbelief. “We’re going into the ruins.”
WE SPLIT INTO TWO TEAMS, partly to avoid notice with the patrols still wandering about the Fringe, and partly because I would’ve strangled Rat if I had to hear him complain one more time that I was going to get us killed. Stick wasn’t happy, either, but at least he shut up after the first round of protests. Lucas finally gave Rat a choice: either help out, or get out and don’t come back. Personally, I was hoping Rat would choose the latter, swear at us all and stalk out of our lives in a huff, but after a murderous look at me, he grabbed a pack from the floor and finally shut up.
I gave Lucas directions to the tunnel entrance before we split into two groups, taking different routes in case we met with any patrols. Guards didn’t look kindly on street rats and Unregistereds, and because we “didn’t exist,” this gave some the idea that they could do anything they wanted to us, including beatings, target practice and … other things. I’d seen enough to know it was true. It was almost better to be caught by the hungry, soulless vampires; the most they would probably do was drink your blood and leave you to die. Humans were capable of far, far worse.
Stick and I reached the ditch first and descended into the tunnels. I had the flashlight, but it was more of a “just-incase” item. I didn’t want to be spoiled by artificial light or, more important, use up all the battery life. The sun peeking in through the grating up top was still more than enough to see by.
“Rat and Lucas better get here soon,” I muttered, crossing my arms and gazing up at the cracks overhead. “We have a lot of stuff to move, and there’s not much daylight left. I’m not doing a repeat of yesterday, that’s for sure.”
“Allie?”
I glanced at Stick, huddled against the wall, an oversize pack hanging from his skinny shoulders. His face was tight with fear, and his hands clutched the straps so hard his knuckles were white. He was trying to be brave, and for a moment, I felt a stab of guilt. Stick hated the dark.
“Do you think I’m useless?”
“Are you obsessing over what Rat said?” I snorted and waved it off. “Ignore him. He’s a greasy little rodent with a security problem. Lucas will probably kick him out soon, anyway.”
“But he has a point.” Stick kicked at a loose bit of pavement, not meeting my eyes. “I’m the weakest link in the gang. I’m not good at stealing like Rat or fighting like Lucas, and I’m not brave enough to go scavenging outside the Wall by myself like you. What am I good for, if I can’t even take care of myself?”
I shrugged, uncomfortable with this conversation. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, my voice coming out sharper than I’d intended. Maybe it was the fight with Rat, maybe I was still tense from last night. But I was tired of listening to excuses, of him wishing for things to be different. In this world, you were either strong, or you were dead. You did what you had to if you wanted to survive. And I could barely take care of myself; I couldn’t worry about someone else’s insecurities. “You don’t like the way you are?” I asked Stick, who shrank back from my tone. “Fine—then don’t be that way. Grow some balls and tell Rat to piss off. Punch him in the nose if he tries to bully you. Do something, but don’t just roll over and take it.” He seemed to collapse in on himself, looking miserable, and I sighed. “You can’t depend on me forever,” I said in a softer voice. “Yeah, we look out for each other, mostly. Yeah, Lucas preaches family and all-for-oneness and whatever, but that’s a load of crap. You think any of them would jump in front of a vampire for you?” I sneered at the thought. “Lucas would be the first one out the door, with Rat right behind him. And me.”
Stick turned away, hunching his shoulders. It was an old tactic of his, avoid the problem and hope it went away, and that only pissed me off more. “I know that’s not what you wanted to hear,” I continued ruthlessly, “but, God, Stick, wake up! This is the way things are. Sooner or later, you’re going to learn that it’s everyone for themselves out here, and the only person you can depend on is you.”
He didn’t answer, just continued staring down at the pavement. I turned away as well, leaning against the wall. I wasn’t worried. Give him a few minutes, and he’d be back to normal, talking and pretending that nothing had happened. If he wanted to keep burying his head in the sand, I wouldn’t stop him. But I wasn’t going to keep holding his hand anymore, either.
After several long minutes, Rat and Lucas still hadn’t showed. I fidgeted and glanced at the sky through the grate. Hurry up, you two. Cutting it this close to evening was already making me jumpy. But I wanted that food. I was hungry again, and knowing there was a whole stash of food out there, just beyond the wall, was driving me crazy. I’d almost forgotten what it was like not to be starving all the time. Not feeling your stomach cramp so badly you wanted to puke, only there was nothing in it to throw up. Not having to eat roaches and spiders, just to stay alive. Or share a crust of stolen bread with Stick, because if I didn’t take care of him, he would curl up somewhere and die. If we could get to that food, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that for a long, long time. If Rat and Lucas ever got their sorry butts down here.
And then, I had another thought, one that the cynical street rat in me hadn’t had before. If we could get all that food, I wouldn’t have to worry about Stick as much. Lucas would probably be happier and less stressed, and might agree to learn how to read. Even Rat might go for it—if I could stomach teaching him, anyway. Again, I had no idea where it would lead, but every revolution had to start somewhere.
The vampires have taken everything from us, I thought, angrily kicking a pebble into a wall. Well, I’m going to make sure we take something back.
First things first, though, and that was surviving.
Several minutes later, Rat and Lucas finally showed up. Both were panting, and Rat glared daggers at me as he dropped from the ladder, his beady eyes filled with fear and hate.
“What happened?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as Lucas came down the tube.
“Ran into a couple pets near the broken statue,” he muttered as he dropped beside me, wiping sweat from his brow. “They followed us several blocks before we lost them in the park. Everyone up there is twitchy. Wish I knew what was going on.”
“This is stupid,” Rat broke in, his gaze darting up and down the tunnel, as if it was about to close on him. “We shouldn’t be going … out there.”
“Should we go back?” Stick whispered.
“No,” I snapped. “If we don’t do this now, who knows when we’ll get another chance.”
“How do we even know she’s telling the truth?” Rat continued, switching tactics now that he couldn’t scare me into giving up. “A whole basement of food? Gimme a break.” His lips twisted. “Girls don’t know what to look for out there. Maybe she saw a few empty cans and jumped to conclusions. Maybe she’s too scared to go by herself and needs a big strong guy to keep her safe.”
“Keep talking, moron. I think it’s funny when you use big words.”
“Will you two shut up?” Lucas snapped, showing how on edge he was. “We’re wasting time! Allie, you know the way, right?” He motioned me down the tunnel. “After you.”
The sky was considerably darker when we crawled out of the drainage ditch into the open, gazing around warily. Overhead, slate-gray clouds massed together, and a flicker of lightning lit up the ground.
“There’s a storm coming,” Lucas muttered unnecessarily, as a growl of thunder followed his statement. I muttered a curse. Back in New Covington, the rain would fill the wells and cisterns of the sectors, but it also drew more things out into the open. “And the sun is going down. We have to do this now.”
“Come on,” I said, pushing through weeds and bush and chest-high grass to reach the top of the bank. They followed, scrambling up the ditch until we came to the edge and the tangled, empty ruins sprawled out before us, silent and menacing in the fading light.
Rat swore and Stick was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating. “I can’t do this,” he whispered, edging away toward the ditch. “I can’t go in there. I have to go back. Let me go back.”
“I knew it,” Rat sneered. “Pissing little coward. Totally useless. Let him run home, but he sure ain’t getting my share of the food.”
Lucas grabbed Stick’s arm before he could run away. “Rat’s right. You do this, don’t expect a share of anything we bring back.”
“I don’t care,” Stick panted, his eyes wide. “This is crazy. The sun is about to go down. You’re all going to be killed.”
“Stick,” I said, trying to be reasonable, “you don’t know the way back. Are you going to go through the tunnels in the dark? Alone?”
That seemed to get through to him. He stopped fighting Lucas and cast a fearful glance at the dark entrance to the sewers. Shoulders sagging, he looked up at me, pleading. “I don’t want to,” he whispered. “Let’s go back, Allie, please. I have a bad feeling about this.”
Rat made a disgusted noise, and my annoyance flared. “No,” I said flatly. “We keep moving. There’s still some light left. We’re not going back without that food.” I looked at Stick with an encouraging smile. “Wait till you see how much there is—it’ll be worth it.”
He still looked terrified but followed silently as we sprinted through the cracked, tangled streets, leaping over roots and weaving between rusty cars to beat the coming storm. A small herd of deer scattered before us as we hurried down the sidewalk, and a flock of crows took to the air with startled, screaming cries. But other than that, the ruins were still except for our footsteps pounding over the cement and our own raspy breathing.
As I led them through the overgrown yard to the crumbled shed, the first raindrops began to fall. By the time we had crowded into the tiny building, a deluge was drumming the tin roof and pouring in through the holes. I clicked on the flashlight as I descended the ladder into the basement, half-terrified that when we got there the food would be gone. But everything was as I had left it: a section of shelf lay broken on the cement, and cans were scattered everywhere, glinting in the flashlight beam.
“Holy shit.” Rat shoved past me, stumbling into the room. His mouth dropped open as he scanned the wall of tins, his eyes gleaming hungrily. “The bitch wasn’t kidding. Look at all this.”
“Is that … all food?” Stick asked timidly, picking up a can. And before I could reply, Rat shocked me with a wild, high-pitched laugh.
“It sure is, piss-wad!” Snatching the can from Stick’s fingers, he pried the top open and shoved it back at him. “Check that out! Tell me that’s not the greatest thing you’ve ever seen!” Stick blinked in astonishment, nearly dropping the opened can, but Rat didn’t seem to notice. Grabbing two more tins from the floor, he wrenched the tops away and started digging into them with long dirty fingers.
“We don’t really have time for this,” I cautioned, but not even Lucas was listening now, busy tugging the lid off his own can. Stick gave me an apologetic look before scooping out handfuls of beans, devouring them with as much gusto as Rat, whose face was now smeared with a slimy coating.
“Guys!” I tried again. “We can’t stand around stuffing our faces all night. We’re almost out of time.” But they were deaf to my arguments, drunk on the amount of food and the prospect of filling their stomachs. That’s what being Unregistered teaches you; when you find food, you eat as much of it as you can, because you don’t know when your next meal might be. Still, all I could think of was how they were fattening themselves up for the things that wanted to eat us.
Outside, the storm had picked up, howling against the walls of the shed, and water began to drip through the trapdoor. It was very dark up top, a dimming twilight, the clouds hiding what little sun remained. I peered up the steps, narrowing my eyes. The spaces between the slats were almost impossible to see in the darkness, but I thought I saw something move outside the wall. It could’ve been a tree branch, blowing in the wind, or it might’ve been my imagination.
I clicked off the flashlight. The room plunged into shadow. There was a startled yelp from Stick, and then a moment of silence as everyone finally realized what was happening.
“Something is out there,” I said into the stillness, very aware of my own heartbeat thudding against my ribs. And, for just a moment, I wondered why I’d been stupid enough to lead everyone here. Stick was right. This had been a mistake. In the darkness, with the rain screaming outside, the piles of food didn’t seem important enough to die for. “We have to get out of here now.”
“Get the packs.” Lucas’s voice was gruff, embarrassed, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I shot him a glance, and it was difficult to see his face in the shadows, but he must’ve seen my expression. “We’re not leaving empty-handed,” he said, “but let’s do this as quickly as possible. Take as much as you can, but don’t pack so much it slows you down. We’re not going to get it all in one trip, anyway.” I started to say something, but he cut me off with a sharp gesture. “Let’s move, people!”
Without arguing, Rat and Stick knelt and began stuffing their packs with cans, moving as quietly as they could. After a moment, I unzipped my bag and joined them. For several minutes, the only sounds were the scuffle of hands in the dark, the clink of metal on metal and the rain beating the roof overhead.
I could hear Stick’s frightened breathing, Rat’s occasional curses as he dropped cans in his haste to stuff them into the packs. I said nothing to anyone as I worked, only looking up when my bag was full. Zipping it up, I hefted it onto my shoulders, wincing at the weight. It might slow me down a bit, but Lucas was right; we’d come too far to leave empty-handed.
“Everyone ready?” Lucas asked, his gruff voice sounding low and small in the darkness. I looked around as Rat and Stick finished zipping their packs and stood up, Stick grunting a little under the weight of his half-full bag. “Let’s get out of here, then. Allie, lead the way.”
We left the basement, inching up the steps to the ruined shed. Water poured in from the storm, running in streams from the roof, splashing over everything. Somewhere in the darkness, droplets kept striking a metal bucket with a rhythmic ping-pinging sound. It sounded like my heartbeat; rapid, frantic.
A gust of wind blew open the door with a creak, knocking it into the side of the building. Beyond the frame, the ruins were blurry and dark.
I swallowed hard and stepped out into the rain.
Water drenched me in half a second, sliding down my neck and flattening my hair. I shivered and hunched my shoulders, striding through the tall, wet grass. Behind me, I heard the others following my steps as I pushed through the weeds. Lightning flickered overhead, turning everything white for a split second, showing rows of ruined houses side by side before plunging everything into darkness once more.
Thunder boomed. As the rumble faded, I thought I heard another sound, somewhere to my left. A faint rustle that didn’t come from my friends behind me.
Something brushed against my jeans in the grass, something hard and pointy. I jerked away and clicked on the flashlight, shining it at whatever snagged me in the darkness.
It was a hoof, small and cloven, attached to a hind leg that led to the gutted carcass of a doe lying on her side in the weeds. Her stomach had been torn open, and intestines spilled from the hole like pink snakes. Her eyes, glazed and dark, stared sightlessly up at the rain.
“Allie?” Lucas whispered, coming up behind me. “What’s going—Oh, shit!”
I swung the light around, taking a breath to shout a warning to the others.
Something pale and terrible rose from the grass behind Rat, all limbs and claws and shining teeth. Before he knew what was happening, it yanked him off his feet. I didn’t even have time to shout before he vanished into the weeds and darkness with a yelp.
Then he began to scream.
We didn’t pause. We didn’t waste breath to scream out the word. The grass around us started to move, rustling madly as they came toward us, and we just ran. Behind us, Rat’s agonized shrieks abruptly cut off, and we didn’t look back.
I reached the chain-link fence surrounding the yard and vaulted over it, landing unsteadily as the bag’s weight nearly toppled me over. Lucas was right behind me, using both hands to launch himself over the top. Stick scrambled over and fell in the dirt on the other side but bounced to his feet in an instant and followed me as we ran.
“Allie!”
Lucas’s scream made me look back. His backpack had caught on the prongs at the top of the fence, and he was yanking at it madly, his eyes huge and frantic. I glanced at Stick, sprinting away into the darkness, and swore.
“Just leave the damn bag!” I shouted, stepping toward Lucas, but my voice was drowned in a roar of thunder overhead, and Lucas continued to yank on it, terrified. “Lucas, leave the pack already! Just get out of there!”
Understanding dawned on his face. He shrugged out of the straps, just as a long white arm whipped over the links and grabbed his shirt, dragging him back against the fence. Lucas screamed, yanking and thrashing, trying to free himself, but another claw reached over and sank into his neck, and his screams became gurgles. My gut heaved. I watched, dazed, as Lucas was dragged, kicking and wailing, back over the fence, and vanished under the pale mass of creatures on the other side. His screams didn’t last as long as Rat’s, and by that time, I was already running after Stick, ignoring my twisting insides and not daring to look back.
I could barely make out Stick’s lanky form in the distance, running down the middle of the road, weaving between cars. Stripping off my pack, I followed, feeling highly exposed on the open street. The rain was slowly letting up, the brunt of the storm passing on, toward the city. Over the fading rain, I heard the cans clanking against his back with every step he took. In his panic, he hadn’t thought to take off his pack, either. I sprinted after him, knowing he couldn’t keep up that pace for long.
Two blocks later, I found him leaning against the rusty hulk of an overturned car, next to a tree growing out of the sidewalk. He was gasping so hard he couldn’t speak. I crouched down beside him, breathing hard, seeing Lucas’s and Rat’s deaths over and over again, their screams echoing in my mind.
“Lucas?” Stick’s voice was so soft I barely heard him.
“Dead.” My voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. It didn’t seem real that I’d lost him. My stomach threatened to crawl up my throat, and I forced it down. “He’s dead,” I whispered again. “The rabids got him.”
“Oh, God.” Stick’s hands went to his mouth. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!”
“Hey,” I snapped, and shoved him, halting the string of words before they got even more frantic. “Stop it. We have to keep our heads if we’re going to get out of here, okay?” There would be time later to shed tears, to mourn what I’d lost. But right now, the most important thing was figuring out how to stay alive.
Stick nodded, his eyes still glazed and terrified. “Where do we go now?”
I started to look around to get my bearings but suddenly noticed something that turned my blood to ice. “Stick,” I said softly, looking down at his leg, “what happened?”
Blood was oozing from a gash in his knee, spreading through the thin fabric of his pants. “Oh,” Stick said, as if he’d just noticed it himself. “I must’ve cut it when I fell off the fence. It’s not very deep …” He stopped when he saw my face. “Why?”
I stood slowly, carefully, my mouth going dry. “Blood,” I murmured, backing away. “Rabids can smell blood if they’re close enough. We have to go n—”
It leaped atop the car with a howl, lashing out at the space I’d been a moment before, ripping through the metal with its claws. Stick yelled and dove away, skittering behind me, as the thing atop the car gave a chilling wail and looked right at us.
It had been human once, that was the most horrible thing about it. It still had a vaguely human face and emaciated body, though its skin, nearly pure white and stretched tightly across its bones, looked more skeleton than human. The tattered threads of what had been clothes hung on its frame, and its hair was tangled and matted. Its eyes were white orbs with no irises or pupils, just a blank, dead white. It hopped off the car and hissed at us, baring a mouthful of pointed teeth, the two oversize fangs extending outward like a snake’s.
Behind me, Stick was whimpering, soft choked noises that made no sense, and I caught the sharp ammonia smell of urine. Heart pounding, I eased away from him, and the rabid’s hollow gaze followed me before returning to Stick. Its nostrils flared, and bloody foam dripped from its jaws as it took a lurching step forward.
Stick was frozen in terror, watching the rabid like a cornered mouse would a snake. I had no idea why I did what I did next. But my hand reached into my pocket and grabbed the knife. Pulling open the blade, I closed my fist around the edge and, before I thought better of it, sliced it across my palm.
“Hey!” I yelled, and the rabid snapped its horrible gaze to me, nostrils flaring. “That’s right,” I continued, backing away as it followed, leaping atop another car as easily as walking. “Look at me, not him. Stick,” I called without taking my eyes from the rabid, keeping a car between it and myself, “get out of here. Find the drain—it’ll take you back to the city. Do you hear me?”
No answer. I chanced a sideways glance and saw him still frozen in the same spot, eyes glued to the rabid stalking me. “Stick!” I hissed furiously, but he didn’t move. “Dammit, you spineless little shit! Get out of here now!”
With a chilling shriek like nothing human, the rabid lunged.
I ran, ducking behind a truck, hearing the rabid’s claws screech off the rusty metal as it followed. I dodged and wove my way through the vehicle-littered street, keeping the cars between myself and the pursuing rabid, glancing back to gauge how close it was. It snarled and hissed at me over the vehicles, hollow eyes blazing with madness and hunger, its claws leaving white gashes in the rust.
Dodging behind another car, I gazed around frantically for a weapon. A pipe, a branch I could use as a club, anything. The rabid’s shriek rang out behind me, horrifyingly near. As I reached down and grabbed a chunk of broken pavement from the curb, I glimpsed a pale form in the corner of my eye and turned quickly, swinging with all my might.
The jagged concrete hit the rabid square in the temple as it lunged for me, grasping claws inches from my face. I heard something crack beneath the stone as I knocked the creature aside, smashing it into the door of a car. The rabid collapsed to the pavement, trying to get up, and I brought the stone down again, smashing the back of its skull. Once, twice and again.
The rabid screamed and twitched, limbs jerking sporadically, before collapsing to the sidewalk. A dark puddle oozed from beneath its head and spread over the street.
Trembling, I dropped the stone and sank to the curb. My hands shook, my knees shook, and my heart was doing its best to hammer its way through my ribs. The rabid looked smaller in death than in life, all brittle limbs and protruding bones. But its face was as horrible and terrifying as ever, fangs frozen in a snarl, soulless white eyes staring up at me.
And then a hiss behind me made my heart stop a second time.
I turned slowly as another rabid slid out from behind a car, arms and mouth smeared with wet crimson. It clutched a branch in one claw … only the branch had five fingers, and the tattered remains of a shirt clung to it. Seeing me, the rabid dropped the arm to the pavement and crept forward.
Another rabid followed. And another leaped to the roof of a car, hissing. I spun and faced two more, sliding from beneath a truck, pale dead eyes fastened on me. Five of them. From all directions. And me, in the center. Alone.
Everything grew very quiet. All I heard was my pulse, roaring in my ears, and my ragged breathing. I gazed around at the pale, foaming rabids, not ten yards from me in any direction and for just a moment I felt calm. So this was the knowledge that you were about to die, that no one could help you, that it would all be over in a few short seconds.
In that brief moment between life and death, I looked between cars and saw a figure striding toward me, silhouetted black against the rain. Something bright gleamed in its hand, but then a rabid passed through my field of vision, and it was gone.
Survival instincts kicked in, and I ran.
Something hit me from behind, hard, and warmth spread over my neck and back, though there was no pain. The blow knocked me forward, and I stumbled, falling to my knees. A weight landed on me, screeching, tearing at me, and bright strips of fire began to spread across my shoulders. I screamed and flipped over, using my legs to shove it away, but another pale creature filled my vision, and all I could see was its face and teeth and blank, dead eyes, lunging forward. My hands shot out, slamming into its jaw, keeping those snapping teeth away from my face. It snarled and sank its fangs into my wrist, chewing and tearing, but I barely felt the pain. All I could think about was keeping the teeth away from my throat, though I knew its claws were ripping open my chest and stomach—I had to keep it away from my throat.
And then the others closed in, screaming, ripping. And the last thing I remembered, before the bloody red haze finally melted into blackness, was a flash of something bright and the rabid’s body dropping onto my chest while its head continued to bite my arm.
Then there was nothing.
WHEN I WOKE UP, I knew I was in hell. My whole body was on fire, or at least it felt that way, though I couldn’t see the flames. It was dark, and a light rain was falling from the sky, which I found strange for hell. Then a dark figure loomed over me, jet-black eyes boring into mine, and I thought I knew him from … somewhere. Hadn’t I met him before …?
“Can you hear me?” His voice was familiar, too, low and calm. I opened my mouth to reply, but only a choked gurgle escaped. What was wrong with me? It felt as if my mouth and throat were clogged with warm mud.
“Don’t try to speak.” The soothing voice broke through my agony and confusion. “Listen to me, human. You’re dying. The damage the rabids did to your body is extreme. You have only a few minutes left in this world.” He leaned closer, face intense. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Barely. My head felt heavy, and everything was foggy and surreal. The pain was still there, but seemed far away now, as if I was disconnected from my body. I tried raising my head to see the extent of my wounds, but the stranger put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “No,” he said gently, easing me back. “Don’t look. It’s better that you do not see. Just know that, whatever you choose, you will die today. The manner of your death, however, is up to you.”
“Wha—” I choked on that warm wetness, spat it out to clear my throat. “What do you mean?” I rasped, my voice sounding strange in my ears. The stranger regarded me without expression.
“I’m giving you a choice,” he said. “You are intelligent enough to know what I am, what I’m offering. I watched you draw the rabids away to save your friend. I watched your struggle to fight, to live, when most would have lain down and died. I see … potential.
“I can end the pain,” he continued, smoothing a strand of hair from my eyes. “I can offer you release from the mortal coil, and I promise that you will not spend eternity as one of them.” He nodded to a pale body, crumpled against a tire a few yards away. “I can give you that much peace, at least.”
“Or?” I whispered. He sighed.
“Or … I can make you one of us. I can drain you to the point of death, and give you my blood, so that when you die you will rise again … as an immortal. A vampire. It will be a different life, and perhaps not one that you would suffer through. Perhaps you would rather be dead with your soul intact than exist forever without one. But the choice, and the manner of your death, is up to you.”
I lay there, trying to catch my breath, my mind reeling. I was dying. I was dying, and this stranger—this vampire—was offering me a way out.
Die as a human, or become a bloodsucker. Either way, the choice was death, because the vampires were dead, they just had the audacity to keep living—walking corpses that preyed on humans to survive. I hated the vampires; everything about them—their city, their pets, their domination of the human race—I despised with my entire being. They had taken everything from me, everything that was important. I would never forgive them for what I had lost.
And I’d been so close, so close to changing something. To maybe making a difference in this stupid, screwed-up world. I’d wanted to know what it was like not to live under vampire rule, not to be starving all the time, not having to shut everyone out because you were afraid they would die in front of you. Such a world had existed, once. If I could only make others realize that as well … but that choice was gone. My world would remain as it always was: dark, bloody and hopeless. The vampires would always rule, and I couldn’t change anything.
But the other choice. The other choice … was to die for real.
“You are running out of time, little human.”
I wished I could’ve said I would rather die than become a bloodsucker. I wished I had the courage, the strength, to stick with my convictions. But in reality, when faced with death and the great unknown that came after, my survival instinct snatched wildly at whatever lifeline was offered. I didn’t want to die. Even if it meant becoming something I loathed, my nature was, first and always, to survive.
The stranger, the vampire, still knelt beside me, waiting for my answer. I looked up into his dark eyes and made my decision.
“I want … to live.”
The stranger nodded. He didn’t ask if I was sure. He only moved closer and slid his hands under my body. “This will hurt,” he warned and lifted me into his arms.
Though he was gentle, I gasped as pain shot through my broken body, biting down a scream as the vampire drew me to his chest. He lowered his head, close enough for me to see his cold pale skin, the dark circles beneath his eyes.
“Be warned,” he said in a low voice, “even if I turn you now, there is still a chance for you to rise as a rabid. If that happens I will destroy you permanently. But I will not leave you,” he promised in an even softer voice. “I will stay with you until the transformation, whatever it may be, is complete.”
I could only nod. Then the vampire’s lips parted, and I saw his fangs grow, lengthen, become long and sharp. It was nothing like the rabid’s teeth, jagged and uneven, like broken glass. The vampire’s fangs were surgical instruments, precise and dangerous, almost elegant. I was surprised. Even living so close to the bloodsuckers, I had not seen a vampire’s killing tools until now.
My pulse throbbed, and I saw the vampire’s nostrils twitch, as if smelling the blood coursing through my veins, right below my skin. His eyes changed, growing even darker, the pupils expanding so they swallowed all of the white. Before I could be terrified, before I could change my mind, he lowered his head in one smooth, quick motion, and those long, bright fangs sank into my throat.
I gasped, arching my back, my hands fisting in his shirt. I couldn’t move or speak. Pain, pleasure and warmth flooded my body, coursing through my veins. Someone once told me there was some kind of narcotic in the vampire’s fangs, a soothing agent; that was why having two long incisors in your neck wasn’t the blinding agony one thought it should be. Of course, that was only speculation. Maybe there wasn’t a scientific explanation. Maybe the bite of a vampire just felt like this: agony and pleasure, all at the same time.
I could feel him drinking, though, feel my blood leaving my veins at an alarming rate. I felt drowsy and numb, and the world started to blur at the edges. Abruptly, the vampire released me, brought a hand to his lips and sliced his wrist open on his fangs. As I watched, dazed and nearly insensible, he pressed the bleeding arm to my mouth. Thick, hot blood spread over my tongue, and I gagged, trying to pull away. But the hand pressing against my mouth was as immovable as a wall.
“Drink,” a voice commanded, low and stern, and I did, wondering if it would come right back up. It didn’t. I felt the blood slide down my throat, burning a path all the way to my stomach. The arm didn’t move, and hot liquid continued to flow into my mouth. Only when I had swallowed three or four times did the wrist pull away and the vampire lay me back down. The pavement was cold and hard against my back.
“I don’t know if I got to you in time,” he murmured almost to himself. “We shall have to wait and see what becomes of you. And what you will become.”
“What … happens now?” I was barely conscious enough to force out the words. Sleepily, I gazed at him as the pain faded to a distant throbbing that belonged to someone else. Blackness crawled at the edges of my vision like a million ants.
“Now, little human,” the vampire said, placing a hand on my forehead. “Now, you will die. And hopefully I will see you again on the other side.”
Then, my eyes flickered shut, darkness pulled me under and, lying in the rain, in the cold embrace of a nameless vampire, I exited the world of the living.
PART II VAMPIRE
CHAPTER 5
Fragments of nightmare plagued my darkness.
Lucas and Rat, pulled under by grasping white hands.
The dead deer, rising from the grass to stare at me, her gaping ribs shining in the moonlight.
Running through aisles of rusty cars, thousands of pale things following me, shrieking and hissing at my back.
Ripping the tops off metal cans, finding them filled with dark red liquid, and drinking it furiously …
I BOLTED UPRIGHT, SHRIEKING, clawing at the darkness. As I opened my eyes, a searing light blinded me, and I cringed away with a hiss. All around me, strange noises assaulted my eardrums, familiar yet amplified a hundredfold. I could hear the scuttle of a cockroach as it fled up the wall. A trickle of water sounded like a waterfall. The air felt cold and damp against my skin, but in a strange way—I could feel the chill, but it wasn’t cold at all.
I felt waxy and stiff, empty as a limp sack. Gingerly I turned my head and fire spread through my veins, hot and searing, nearly blinding me with pain. I arched back with a scream as the flames spread to every part of my body, liquid agony shooting through my skin. My mouth ached, my upper jaw felt tight, as if something sharp was pressing against my gums, trying to burst out.
Flashes of emotion, like the shards of someone else’s life, flickered through my head. Pity. Empathy. Guilt. For a split second, I saw myself, my own body, writhing on the floor, clawing at the cement and the walls. But then a bolt of pain turned my stomach inside out, doubling me over, and the strange image was lost.
The pressure against my jaw grew unbearable, and I screamed again, sounding like a snarling animal. And suddenly, something did burst through my gums, relieving the awful pain. The heat through my veins flickered and died, and I slumped to the hard cement, shuddering with relief. But there was a new pain inside me, a hollow, throbbing ache radiating somewhere from my middle. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, shaking, growling deep in my throat. Hungry. I was hungry! I needed food!
Something pressed against my face, cold and wet. Plastic? I recoiled with a snarl. Wait, the bag smelled of food, it was food! I lunged forward, sinking my teeth into the bag, tearing it from the air. Something flooded my mouth, cold and thick, cloying. Not warm, like it should be, but it was still food! I sucked and tore at the flimsy plastic, freeing the food within, feeling it slide down my throat into my stomach.
And then, as the awful Hunger faded and the ache inside was filled, I realized what I was doing.
“Oh, God.” Dropping the mangled bag, I looked at my hands, covered in blood. The ground I lay on was splattered with it, dark stains against the cement. I could feel it around my mouth, on my lips and chin, the scent of it filling my nose. “Oh, God,” I whispered again, scrambling away on my butt. I hit a wall and stared in horror at the scene before me. “What … what am I doing?”
“You made a choice,” came a deep voice to my right, and I looked up. The vampire loomed over me, tall and solemn. A flickering candle sat behind him on an end table—the light that had blinded me earlier. It was still painfully bright, and I turned away. “You wanted to survive, to become one of us.” He looked to the torn blood bag, lying a few feet away. “You chose this.”
I covered my mouth with a shaking hand, trying to remember, to recall what I’d said. All I could see was blood, and me in an animal rage, tearing at it, ripping it open. My hand dropped to my lips and jaw, probing my teeth where the ache had been. I drew in a quick breath.
There they were. Fangs. Very long and very, very sharp.
I snatched my hand back. It was true, then. I really had done the unthinkable. I’d become that which I hated most in the world. A vampire. A monster.
I slumped against the wall, trembling. Looking down at myself, I blinked in surprise. My old clothes were gone. Instead of my thin, faded patchwork shirt and pants, I wore black jeans and a dark shirt without a single hole or tear. The filthy, torn and probably bloodstained jacket had been replaced with a long black coat that looked almost new.
“What … what happened to my clothes?” I asked, touching the sleeve of the coat, blinking at how thick it was. Frowning suddenly, I looked up at the vampire. “Did you dress me?”
“Your clothes were torn to pieces when the rabids attacked you,” the vampire informed me, still not moving from where he stood. “I found you some new ones. Black is the best color for us—it hides the bloodstains rather well. Do not worry.” His deep, low voice held the faintest hint of amusement. “I did not see anything.”
My mind spun. “I—I have to go,” I said shakily, getting to my feet. “I have to … find my friends, see if they made it back to the hideout. Stick is probably—”
“Your friends are dead,” the vampire said calmly. “And I would abandon all attachments to your life before. You are not part of that world any longer. It is better to simply forget about it.”
Dead. Images flashed through my mind—of rain and blood and pale, screeching things, hands pulling someone over a fence. With a hiss, I shied away from those thoughts, refusing to remember. “No,” I choked out, shuddering. “You’re lying.”
“Let them go,” the vampire insisted quietly. “They’re gone.”
I had the sudden, crazy urge to snarl and bare my fangs at him. I stifled it in horror, keeping a wary eye on the stranger, who watched me impassively. “You can’t keep me here.”
“If you want to leave, you may go.” He didn’t move, except to nod to a door on the other side of the small room. “I will not stop you. Though you will be dead within a day, if it takes that long. You have no idea how to survive as a vampire, how to feed, how to avoid detection, and if the vampires of this city discover you, they will most likely kill you. Alternatively, you could remain here, with me, and have a chance of surviving this life you have chosen.”
I glared at him. “Stay here? With you? Why? What do you care?”
The stranger narrowed his eyes. “Bringing a new vampire into the world is something I do not take lightly,” he said. “Turning a human only to abandon it without the skills it needs to survive would be irresponsible and dangerous. If you stay here, I will teach you what you need to know to live as one of us. Or—” he turned slightly, gesturing to the door “—you can leave and try to survive on your own, but I wash my hands of you and whatever blood comes after.”
I slumped back to the wall, my mind racing. Rat was dead. Lucas was dead. I’d seen them, pulled under by rabids in the old city, torn apart before my eyes. My throat closed up. Stick, much as I hated to admit it, was most likely dead as well; he couldn’t survive the trek back to the city on his own. It was just me now. Alone. A vampire.
My chest felt tight, and I bit my lip, imagining the faces of my friends staring at me, pale and accusing. My eyes burned, but I swallowed hard and forced back the tears. I could cry and scream and curse the world and the rabids and the vampires later. But I would not show weakness in front of this stranger, this bloodsucker who might have saved me, but about whom I knew nothing. When I was alone, I would cry for Rat and Lucas and Stick, the family I’d lost. Right now, I had larger issues to deal with.
I was a vampire. And, despite everything, I still wanted to live.
The stranger waited, as unmoving as a wall. He might be a bloodsucker, but he was the only familiar thing I had left. “So,” I said softly without looking up. Resentment boiled, an old, familiar hate, but I shoved it down. “Do I call you ‘master’ or ‘teacher’ or something else?”
The vampire paused, then said, “You may call me Kanin.”
“Kanin? Is that your name?”
“I did not say it was my name.” He turned as if to leave, but crossed the room and sank into a rusty folding chair on the other side. “I said it was what you could call me.”
Great, not only was my new teacher a vampire, he was one of those cryptic, mysterious ones, too. I crossed my arms and eyed him warily. “Where are we?”
Kanin considered this. “Before I disclose anything about myself,” he said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, “I would like to know a bit more about you. I will be teaching you, after all, and that means we will be spending a great deal of time together. I want to know what I am up against. Are you amenable to this?”
I shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
“Your name, first off.”
“Allie,” I said, then elaborated. “Allison Sekemoto.”
“Interesting.” Kanin straightened, watching me with intense black eyes. “You know your full name. Not many humans do, anymore.”
“My mom taught me.”
“Your mother?” Kanin leaned back, crossing his arms. “Did she teach you anything else?”
I bristled. I suddenly didn’t want to discuss my mom with this bloodsucker. “Yeah,” I said evasively.
He drummed his fingers on his biceps. “Such as?”
“Why do you want to know?”
He ignored the question. “If you wish for me to help you, you will answer me.”
“Reading, writing and a little math,” I snapped at him. “Anything else?”
“Where is your mother now?”
“Dead.”
Kanin didn’t seem surprised, or shocked at my bluntness. “And your father?”
“I never knew him.”
“Siblings?”
I shook my head.
“So you have nothing on that side to go back to.” Kanin nodded. “Good. That will make things easier. How did she die?”
I narrowed my eyes, about fed up with this interrogation. “That’s none of your business, vampire,” I snapped, wanting some emotion to cross his impassive face. Except for a raised eyebrow, his expression remained the same. “Besides, what’s it to you? Why should you care about the lives of a couple humans, anyway?”
“I don’t,” the vampire said and shrugged. “Like I said before, I want to evaluate my chances of success. Humans have a tendency to cling to the past, which can make teaching them difficult. The more attachments a person has, the harder it is to learn to let go when becoming a vampire.”
I clenched my hands, trying to calm the sudden rage. I would have been tempted to leap up and punch him, ungrateful as that was, if I didn’t know he could tear my head off without blinking. “Yeah, well, I’m beginning to regret that decision.”
“It’s a little late now, don’t you think?” Kanin asked softly as he rose. “Take a moment,” he said, walking to the door on the opposite wall. “Mourn your past life if you wish, for you will not see it again. When you are ready to learn what it means to be a vampire, come find me.”
He opened the door and strode through without a backward glance, leaving me alone.
AFTER KANIN LEFT, I sat on the chair, scraped the dried blood off my hands and thought about what I was going to do next.
So. I’m a vampire now. I bristled, trying not to dwell on it—it was either that or die in the rain. Kanin was right, it was my decision, after all. I’d chosen this. I’d chosen to become undead, to never see the sunlight again, to drink the blood of the living.
I shuddered and kicked the empty bag away. That was the part that bothered me—well, besides the whole undead, soulless-monster thing. I shoved that thought to the back of my mind. Vampires were predators, but maybe there was a way not to feed on humans. Maybe I could survive on animal blood, though the thought of biting into a live, squirming rat was disturbing. Did vampires have to drink human blood, or did they just prefer it? How often did they have to feed? Where and how did they sleep during the day? I realized that, even living in this city for seventeen years, I knew virtually nothing about its most famous citizens except that they drank blood and came out at night.
Well, there is one person who could tell you all about it.
I struggled with myself a moment longer. He was a vampire, but if I was going to survive, then I needed to learn. Perhaps later, when I had all I needed to know, I would take my revenge for my mom, for Stick, Lucas and everyone else who was taken from me. But right now, I could swallow my pride and start learning how to be undead.
Reluctantly, I pulled myself to my feet and went looking for my new mentor.
The door led into another room that might’ve been an office once. A few broken chairs were tossed carelessly to the side, and several long metal cabinets lay on the floor, spilling paper everywhere. Against the far wall, Kanin sat behind a large wooden desk covered in dust and scratches. He glanced up from a stack of folders and raised an eyebrow as I came in.
“I have a few questions,” I said, wondering if it was improper to ask and then deciding I didn’t care. “About vampires, and this whole drinking-blood thing in general.”
Kanin shut the folder, put it aside and nodded to one of the chairs. I pulled it upright and sat down, resting my arms over the back.
“Let me guess,” he said, lacing his hands together. “You’re wondering if you have to prey on humans, if you can survive by drinking the blood of animals or other creatures. You’re hoping you won’t have to kill people to live. Am I right?”
I nodded. Kanin smiled bitterly.
“You cannot,” he said in a flat voice, and my heart sank. “Let me give you your first and most important lesson, Allison Sekemoto—you are a monster. A demon who feeds on human beings to survive. The vampires at the center of the city may look and act and pretend to be civilized, but do not let that fool you. We are monsters, and nothing will change that. And do not think that you can cling to your humanity by drinking the blood of dogs or rats or sheep. It is junk food—garbage. It will fill you for a time, but it will never sate the Hunger. And you will soon crave the blood of humans so badly that the mere sight of one will send you into a frenzy, and that human will die, because you will be unable to stop yourself from draining them completely. That is the single most important thing you must understand, before we go any further. You are no longer human. You are a predator, and the sooner you accept that, the easier this life, this existence, will become.”
My heart sank even lower. It seemed everything I’d thought about vampires was proving to be right. But I still said, “I’m not going to kill humans to feed on them, I can tell you that now.”
“It always starts out that way,” Kanin said, and his voice was distant, as if remembering. “Noble intentions, honor among new vampires. Vows to not harm humans, to take only what is needed, to not hunt them like sheep through the night.” He smiled faintly. “But it becomes harder and harder to remain on their level, to hold on to your humanity, when all you can see them as is food.”
“I don’t care.” I thought of Stick, of Lucas and even Rat. They had been friends. People. Not walking blood bags. “I’ll be different. I’m sure as hell going to try.”
Kanin didn’t argue. Rising, he stepped around the desk and beckoned with a large pale hand. “Come here.”
Wary, I stood, edging toward him. “Why? What are we doing?”
“I said I would teach you how to survive as a vampire.” He took a single step forward, and I now stood a foot or two away from him, gazing up at his chin. Geez, he was big. His presence was overwhelming. “To live, you must understand the vampire body, how it works, how it endures. Take off your coat.”
I did, dropping it on the chair behind me, wondering what he was getting at. In one blindingly quick motion, he grabbed my wrist, yanked my arm up, and slashed it open with that long, bright dagger he carried. Blood welled and streamed from the wound, a second before the pain hit like a hammer.
“Ow! What the hell are you doing?” I tried yanking back, but it was like pulling on a tree. Kanin didn’t even twitch. “Let go, you psychopath! What kind of sick game are you playing?”
“Wait,” Kanin ordered, giving my arm a little shake. I gritted my teeth as the vampire held up my wrist. “Look.”
My arm was a mess, blood everywhere, oozing down my elbow. I could see the wound, the deep, straight gash that probably went to the bone. Psychotic vampire. But as I watched, panting, the wound started to heal, the gaping flesh drawing together, turning from red to pink to white until only a faint, pale scar remained. And then nothing at all.
I gaped as Kanin released my arm. “We are very difficult to kill,” he explained to my shocked expression. “Stronger than humans, faster than humans, and we heal from most anything. This is why we are the perfect predator, but be warned, we are not invincible. Fire harms us, as does any massive trauma. The strongest vampire will not walk away from a bomb going off under his feet. But bullets, knives, clubs, swords—it will hurt, being struck by one, but it will not usually kill us. Although …” He touched my chest. “A wooden stake driven through the heart will not instantly kill us, but it will paralyze and usually send us into hibernation. That is our body’s last-ditch effort to survive—it shuts down completely and we are forced into sleep, sometimes for decades, until we can rejoin the living world again.” He withdrew his hand. “But to completely destroy a vampire, beheading it or burning it to ash is the only sure way. Are you getting this?”
“Kill a vampire, aim for its head,” I muttered. “Got it.” The pain was gone now, and there was a gnawing ache in my gut, though I still wanted to learn more. “But why am I bleeding at all?” I wondered, looking up at him. “Do I even have a heartbeat? I thought … I thought I was dead.”
“You are dead.”
I scowled. “I suppose this is a case of death taking a while to kick in, then.”
Kanin’s expression didn’t change. “You are still thinking like a human,” he said. “Listen to me, Allison, and keep your mind open. Mortals view death in terms of black and white—you are either alive, or you are not. But between them—between life and death and eternity—there is a small gray area, one that the humans have no knowledge of. That is where we reside, vampires and rabids and a few of the older, inexplicable creatures that still exist in this world. The humans cannot understand us, because we live by a different set of rules.”
“I’m still not sure I understand.”
“We have no heartbeat,” my mentor continued, lightly touching his own chest. “You wonder how the blood can pump through your veins, right? It doesn’t. You have no blood. None that is your own, anyway. Think of it as our food and drink—it is absorbed into the body the same way. Blood is the core of our power. It is how we live, it is how we heal. The longer we go without, the farther we slip from humanity, until we resemble the cold, empty, living corpses the humans think us to be.”
I stared at Kanin, looking for any sign that he wasn’t human. His skin was pale, and his eyes were hollow, but he wasn’t corpselike. Unless you looked really hard, you wouldn’t know he was a vampire at all.
“What happens if we don’t … uh … drink blood?” I asked, feeling a pang in my stomach. “Can we starve to death?”
“We’re already dead,” Kanin replied in that same infuriatingly cool tone. “So, no. But go long enough without human blood, and you will start to go mad. Your body will shrivel, until you are nothing but an empty husk wandering around, very much like the rabids. And you will attack any living creature you come across, because the Hunger will take over. Also, because your body has no reserves to draw upon, any damage that doesn’t kill you could drive you into hibernation for an indefinite amount of time.”
“You couldn’t have told me all this without slicing my arm open?”
“I could have.” Kanin shrugged unrepentantly. “But I had another lesson in mind. How do you feel?”
“Starving.” The ache in my gut had grown more painful; my body was crying out for food. I thought longingly of the once-full blood bag, lying empty on the floor. I wondered if there was anything left that I could suck out, before I caught myself in horror.
Kanin nodded. “And that is the price of such power. Your body will heal itself from most anything, but it will draw upon its own reserves to do so. Look at your arm.”
I did and gasped. My skin, especially the area where Kanin had cut me, was chalk-white, definitely paler than before, and cold. Dead flesh. Bloodless flesh. I shuddered and tore my gaze away, and felt the vampire’s smile.
“If you do not feed soon afterward, you will fall into a blood frenzy, and someone will die,” he announced. “The greater the wound, the more blood you need to replenish it. Go too long without feeding, and the result will be the same. And this is why vampires do not become attached to humans, or anyone. Sometime in your life, Allison Sekemoto, you will kill a human being. Accidentally or as a conscious, deliberate act. It is unavoidable. The question is not if it will happen, but when. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I got it.”
He watched me with depthless black eyes. “Be sure that you do,” he said quietly. “Now, from here, you must learn the most important part of being one of us—how to feed.”
I swallowed. “Don’t you have any more of those bags?”
He chuckled. “I procured that from one of the guards at this week’s bloodletting. It’s not something I’d normally do, but you needed food immediately upon waking. But you and I are not like the vampires in the city, with their slaves and pets and cellars of ‘wine.’ If you want to feed, you must do it the old-fashioned way. I’ll show you what I mean. Come, follow me.”
“Where are we going?” I asked as he opened the door, and we stepped out into a long, narrow hallway. Once-white paint was peeling from the walls, and glass crunched under my feet as we walked. Every few yards, a doorway opened into another room, the remains of beds and chairs and odd machines I didn’t recognize scattered about and broken. A strange chair with wheels lay on its side in one doorway, covered in dust and cobwebs. I realized I could see perfectly in the dark corridor, though there was no light, and it should’ve been pitch-black down here. Kanin looked back at me and smiled.
“We’re going hunting.”
WE TURNED A CORNER, and the hallway opened into what looked like an old reception area with another big wooden desk in the middle of the room. Above the desk, tarnished gold letters hung on the wall, most of them skewed or broken, so it was impossible to make out what it had once said. There were a lot of smaller signs, too, on walls and at the entrances to hallways, all difficult to make out. Glass, debris and sheets of paper were scattered about the cracked tile floor, rustling where we walked.
“What is this place?” I asked Kanin. My voice echoed weirdly in the open chamber, and the silence of the room seemed to press down on me. The vampire didn’t answer for a long moment.
“At one time,” he murmured, leading me across the room, “this was the sublevel of a hospital. One of the busiest and most well established in the city. They did more than treat patients—there was a team of scientists here, researchers committed to ending disease and discovering new cures. Of course, when the Red Lung virus hit, the hospital was overrun—they couldn’t keep up with the amount of patients pouring through their doors. A lot of people died here.” He gazed at the desk, his eyes hooded and far away. “But then, a lot of people died everywhere.”
“If you’re trying to creep me out, congratulations. So, how do we get out of here?”
He stopped at a large, square hole in the wall and gestured at the opening. I peered through the gap and saw a long shaft, leading up into darkness, with thick metal ropes dangling from somewhere up top.
“You’re kidding, right?” My voice echoed up the tube.
“The stairs to ground level are collapsed,” Kanin replied calmly. “There is no other way in or out. We have to use the elevator shaft.”
Elevator shaft? I frowned and looked back at him. “There’s no way I can climb that.”
“You aren’t human anymore.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re stronger, you have unlimited endurance and you can do things humans cannot. If it puts your mind at ease, I will be right behind you.”
I looked at the elevator tube and shrugged. “All right,” I muttered, reaching out to grab the cables. “But if I fall, I expect you to catch me.”
Tightening my hold, I pulled.
To my surprise, my body rose off the ground as if I weighed nothing at all. I shimmied up the tube, going hand over hand, feeling a thrill I’d never known. My skin didn’t tear, my arms didn’t burn, and I wasn’t even breathing hard. I could’ve done this forever.
I paused, my rhythm stumbling to a halt. I wasn’t breathing. At all. My pulse didn’t race, my heart didn’t pound … because I wasn’t alive. I was dead. I would never age, never change. I was a parasitic corpse who drank the lifeblood of others to survive.
“Having problems?” Kanin’s deep, impatient voice echoed from below me.
I shook myself. Empty elevator tubes were not the best places for personal revelations. “I’m fine,” I answered and started climbing again. I would sort all this out later; right now, my dead-corpse stomach was telling me I was starving. I found it very strange that my heart and lungs and other organs didn’t work, but my stomach and brain were still functioning. Or maybe they weren’t—I had no idea. Everything about vampires, I was learning, was a complete mystery.
A cold breeze hit my face as I scrambled out of the shaft, gazing around warily.
There had been a building here once. I could see the remains of steel beams and girders surrounding us, along with maybe half a wall, falling to pieces in the long yellow grass. The plaster was blackened and scorched, and charred bits of furniture—beds, mattresses, chairs—were strewn about and half hidden in the grass spreading across the floor. The tube we’d just come through was nothing more than a dark hole in the tile, hidden among the rubble and weeds. If you weren’t standing directly above it, you might never see the gaping hole until you tumbled down the shaft and broke your spine at the bottom.
“What happened here?” I whispered, gazing around at the devastation.
“A fire,” Kanin said, starting across the empty lot. He moved quickly, and I scrambled to keep up with him. “It started on the ground floor of the hospital. It quickly grew out of control and destroyed the building and most everyone inside. Only the lower levels were … spared.”
“Were you there when it happened?”
Kanin didn’t answer. Leaving the hospital ruins, we crossed an empty lot where nature had risen up to strangle everything it could get its green-and-yellow claws around. It pushed up through the once-flat parking lots and curled around several outbuildings, choking them with vines and weeds. When we reached the edge of the lot and looked back, you could barely see the hospital remains through the vegetation.
It was dark on the streets of the Fringe. Clouds scuttled across the sky, blocking the moon and stars. But I still saw everything clearly, and even more amazing, I knew exactly what time it was and how long we had until dawn. I could sense the blood on the air, the lingering heat of warm-blooded mammals. It was an hour past midnight, long after the bravest humans closed their doors against the dark, and I was starving.
“This way,” Kanin murmured and glided into the shadows.
I didn’t argue, following him down a long, dark alleyway, subtly aware that something was different, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Then it hit me. The smell. All my life, I had grown up with the smells of the Fringe: the garbage, the waste, the aroma of mold and rot and decay. I couldn’t smell any of that now. Perhaps because smelling and breathing were so closely linked. My other senses were heightened: I could hear the scuttle of a mouse, scrambling into its hole a dozen yards away. I could feel the wind on my arms, cold and clammy, though my skin didn’t respond as it should and pucker with goose bumps. But when we passed an ancient Dumpster and I felt the buzz of flies from within, heard maggots writhing through dead, rotting flesh—of an animal I hoped—I still couldn’t smell anything.
When I mentioned this to Kanin, he gave a humorless chuckle.
“You can smell, if you want to,” he replied, weaving around a pile of shingles that once belonged to a roof. “You just have to make a conscious effort to take a breath. It’s not a natural thing anymore because we don’t need to do it. You’ll want to remember that if there’s a situation where you’re trying to blend in. Humans are usually unobservant, but even they will know something is wrong if you don’t appear to be breathing.”
I took a breath and caught the stench of decay from the Dumpster. I also smelled something else on the wind: blood. And then I saw a splash of paint across a crumbling wall—a skull with a pair of red wings on either side—and I realized where we were.
“This is gang territory,” I said, horrified. “That’s the sign for the Blood Angels.”
“Yes,” said Kanin calmly.
I resisted the instinct to scramble away from him, to flee into the nearest alleyway and head for home. Vampires weren’t the only predators to roam the city streets. And scavengers weren’t the only groups to stake their territories in the Fringe. While some Unregistereds were simply thieves, bands of kids looking to survive, there were other, more sinister groups. Reapers, Red Skulls, Blood Angels: these were only a few of the “other” gangs that had carved out certain parts of the Fringe for themselves. In this world, the only law was to obey the Masters, and the Masters didn’t care if their cattle occasionally turned on each other. Run into a bored, hungry gang, and you’d be lucky if all they did was kill you. I’d heard stories of certain gangs who, after having their “fun” with a trespasser, would slice them up and eat them, as well. Urban legends, of course, but who was I to say they weren’t true? That was why venturing out of familiar territory was a bad idea at best, suicidal at worst. I knew which parts of the Fringe were gang turf and had avoided them like the plague.
And now we were walking right into their territory.
I eyed the vampire at my side. “You know they’re going to kill us for being here.”
He nodded. “I’m counting on it.”
“You know that they eat people, right?”
Kanin stopped, turning to me with intense black eyes. “So do I,” he said evenly. “And now, so do you.”
I felt slightly sick. Oh, yeah.
The smell of blood was getting stronger, and now I could hear the familiar sounds of a fight: cursing, shouting, the smacks of fists and shoes on flesh. We turned a corner and entered the back lot between several buildings, surrounded by chain-link, broken glass and rusting cars. Graffiti covered the crumbling bricks and metal walls, and several steel drums burned around the perimeter, billowing a thick, choking smoke.
In the center of the arena, a group of ragged, similarly dressed thugs clustered around a crumpled form on the pavement. The body was curled into a fetal position, covering its head, while two or three thugs broke away from the circle to punch or kick at it. Another body lay nearby, disturbingly still, its face smashed beyond recognition. My gut twisted at the sight of the broken nose and staring eyes. But then the scent of blood came to me, stronger than ever, and I growled low in my throat before I realized I’d made a sound.
The gang members were laughing too loud to hear and were too focused on their sport to notice us, but Kanin kept walking forward. Calmly, as if out for a late-night stroll, he approached the ring of humans, making no sound whatsoever. We could’ve sauntered right past them and continued into the night, but as we neared the circle of thugs, who still hadn’t noticed us, he deliberately kicked a broken bottle, sending it clinking and tumbling over the pavement.
And the Blood Angels looked up.
“Good evening,” Kanin said, nodding cordially. He continued to walk past them, moving at a slower pace, I noted. I followed silently, trying to be invisible, hoping the gang would just let us go without a challenge.
But part of me, the strange, alien, hungry part, watched the humans eagerly and hoped they would try to stop us.
It got its wish. With muffled curses, the whole group moved to block our path. Kanin stopped and watched impassively as a thug with a scar over one pale eye stepped forward, shaking his head.
“Look at this,” he said, grinning at Kanin, then me. “Lucky night for us, ain’t it, boys?”
Kanin didn’t say anything. I wondered if he was afraid speaking to them would clue them in to what he was; he didn’t want to scare away our food.
“Look at him—so scared he can’t even talk.” Derisive laughter all around. “Shoulda thought of that before you came through our turf, pet.” Scar-face stepped forward, the jeers and insults of his gang backing him up. “Gonna drop your pants so we can kiss your shiny ass, is that what you want, pet?” He spat the word, before his gaze flicked to me, and his leer turned ugly. “Or maybe I’ll just save it for that sweet little Asian doll. We don’t get many whores through here, do we, boys?”
I snarled, feeling my lips curl back. “Bring your cesspit mouth anywhere near me and I’ll tear it off,” I spat at him. The gang hooted and edged closer.
“Ooh, she’s a feisty one, ain’t she?” Scar-face grinned. “I hope there’s enough of that to go around. You don’t mind sharing, do you, pet?”
“Be my guest,” Kanin said and stepped away from me. I gaped at him as Scar-face and his gang exploded with eager, taunting laughter.
“Pet’s so scared, he pissed his pants!”
“That’s a real man, hiding behind a girl!”
“Hey, thanks, pet,” Scar-face called, his mouth split into a truly evil grin. “I’m so touched, I’m gonna let you go this time. Thanks for the Asian doll! We’ll try not to break her, too quickly.”
“What are you doing?” I hissed, betrayed. The thugs stalked forward, grinning, and I backed up, keeping them in my sights while glaring at the vampire. “What about all that talk of ‘teaching’ and ‘preparing’ me and all that crap? What, you’re just going to throw me to the wolves now?”
“Your sense of predator and prey is backward,” the vampire said in a low voice, so that only I could hear. I wanted to throw something at him, but the approaching gang members were more of a problem. The raw lust in their eyes made me feel sick, and I felt a snarl rising in my throat. “This will show you exactly where you stand on the food chain.”
“Kanin! Dammit, what am I supposed to do?”
Kanin shrugged and leaned against a wall. “Try not to kill anyone.”
The thugs rushed me. I tensed as one grabbed me around the waist, trying to lift me off my feet and push me to the ground. I hissed as his arms touched me, planted my feet, and shoved him away as hard as I could.
He flew backward as if he weighed nothing at all, crashing onto the hood of a car twenty feet away. I blinked in astonishment, but the next thug came rushing up with a howl, swinging a fist at my face.
Instinctively, I raised a hand and felt the meaty fist smack into my palm, surprising us both. He tried pulling back, but I squeezed hard, feeling bones crunch and grind together, and gave it a sharp twist. His wrist snapped with a popping sound, and the thug screamed.
Two more Blood Angels came at me from different directions. They moved slowly, like they were running through water, at least that’s how it looked to me. I easily sidestepped the first lunge and kicked the thug in the knee, feeling it snap under my ankle. He jerked sideways and smashed to the ground. His friend swung at me with a lead pipe; I grabbed it, wrenched it from his grasp, and backhanded him across the face with it.
The scent of blood from the gang member’s cheek misted on the air, and something inside me responded. I pounced on him with a roar, feeling my teeth burst through my gums.
The bark of gunfire shattered the night and something small whipped past my head. I felt the wind from its passing rip at my hair, and I spun into a crouch, hissing and baring my fangs. Scar-face’s eyes went wide, a string of swearwords falling from his lips as he pointed a smoking pistol at me.
“Vampire!” he shrieked, amid a flurry of cussing. “Oh, shit! Shit! Get away from me! Get away—!”
He took aim, and I tensed to fling myself across the pavement, to pounce on my prey and drive my fangs deep into his throat. But suddenly, his eyes went wide, and he was lifted off his feet, kicking helplessly as Kanin picked him up as easily as a cat, wrenched the gun away, and threw him into a wall.
The crack of the Blood Angel’s head against the brick pierced my wild, foaming rage and brought everything into focus again. I shook free of the bloodlust, the consuming Hunger, and gazed around in both horror and amazement. Five bodies lay on the ground, moaning, broken and bleeding. By my hand. I looked at Kanin, who tossed the gun almost disdainfully and raised an eyebrow as I approached.
“You knew,” I said softly, glancing at one dazed Blood Angel. “You knew what I would do—that’s why you let them attack me.” He didn’t answer, and I realized I wasn’t shaking with fear or adrenaline or anything. My heart was still and cold. I glared up at Kanin, furious at his manipulation. “I could have killed them all.”
“How many times must I tell you?” Kanin said, peering down at me. “You are a vampire now. You are no longer human. You are a wolf to their sheep—stronger, faster, more savage than they could ever be. They are food, Allison Sekemoto. And deep down, your demon will always see them as such.”
I looked at Scar-face lying in a heap beside the wall. Though his forehead was cut open and a large purple bruise had already begun to form, he groaned and tried to get up, only to slump back again, dazed. “Then why didn’t you kill him?” I asked.
Kanin’s stare went cold. Turning, he walked stiffly over to the gang leader, grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him back to me, throwing him at my feet.
“Drink,” he ordered in a steely voice. “But remember, take too much, and you will kill the host. Take too little, and you will have to feed again very soon. Find the balance, if you care whether you drain them or not. Usually five or six swallows will suffice.”
I looked down at the gang leader and recoiled. Chomping through a blood bag was one thing, but biting the neck of a living, breathing person? I had been so eager to do it a moment ago, when my Hunger and fury were raging, but now I felt nauseated.
Kanin continued to stare at me. “You will do this, or you will starve yourself to the point of frenzy and kill someone,” he said in a flat voice. “This is what being a vampire is about, our most basic, primal need. Now …” With one hand, he hauled the thug up and grabbed his hair with the other, wrenching his head back and exposing his throat. “Drink.”
Reluctantly, I stepped forward. The human moaned and tried fending me off, but I easily slapped his arms away and bent close to the hollow at the base of his throat. My fangs lengthened as I inhaled and sensed the warm blood coursing just below the surface of the skin. The scent of life was overwhelmingly strong in my nose and mouth. Before I could even think about what I was doing, I lunged forward and bit down hard.
The Blood Angel gasped and jerked, twitching weakly. Warm thickness flowed into my mouth, rich and hot and strong. I growled and bit down harder, eliciting a strangled cry from my prey. I felt heat spreading through my body, filling me with strength, with power. It was intoxicating. It was … I couldn’t describe it. It was bliss, pure and simple. I let my eyes slip shut, almost in a trance, consumed with wanting more, more …
Someone took my hair, pulling me back from my prey, breaking the connection. I snarled and tried to lunge forward again, but an arm barred my way, moving me back. The thug’s body collapsed bonelessly to the ground. I snarled again and tried to reach it, fighting the arm that held me back.
“Enough!” Kanin’s voice rang with authority, and he shook me, hard. My head snapped back like a rag doll’s, making me dizzy for a moment. “Allison, enough,” he repeated as my vision slowly cleared. “Any more and you’ll kill him.”
I blinked and backed off a step, the Hunger slowly ebbing away into something that wasn’t frantic and raging. Horrified, I stared at the Blood Angel crumpled on the pavement. He was pale, barely breathing, two dark puncture wounds oozing crimson from his throat. I’d almost killed him. Again. If Kanin hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve drained him dry. Self-loathing curled my stomach. For all my hatred of vampires, all my resolve not to be like them, I was no better than the worst bloodsucker to stalk the streets.
“Seal the wound,” Kanin ordered, pointing to the gang leader. His voice was cool, unsympathetic. “Finish what you started.”
I wanted to ask how, but suddenly I knew. Bending down, I pressed my tongue against the two small punctures and felt them close. Even then, I could sense the blood slowly pumping beneath the skin, and it took all my willpower not to bite him a second time.
Standing up, I turned to Kanin, who nodded his head once, watching me. “Now,” he said, his voice dark and unyielding, “you understand.”
I did. I gazed at the bodies scattered about the lot, at the destruction I’d caused, and I knew. I was truly inhuman. Humans were prey. I craved their blood like the worst addict on the street. They were sheep, cattle, and I was the wolf, stalking them through the night. I had become a monster.
“From here on,” Kanin said, “you will have to decide what kind of demon you will be. Not all meals will come to you so easily, ignorant and seeking to do you harm. What will you do if your prey invites you inside, offers you a place at the table? What will you do if they flee, or cower down, begging you not to hurt them? How you stalk your prey is something you must come to terms with, or you will quickly drive yourself mad. And once you cross that threshold, there is no coming back from it.”
“How do you do it?” I whispered. Kanin shook his head with a chuckle.
“My method would not help you,” he said as we started to leave the lot. “You will have to find your own way.”
As we entered the alley, we passed one of the thugs who was just starting to come around. He groaned and swayed as he staggered to his feet, gasping with pain, and though my Hunger was sated, something inside me reacted to the sight of a wounded, helpless creature. I half turned with a growl, fangs lengthening, before Kanin grabbed my arm and dragged me away into the darkness.
CHAPTER 6
When I awoke next, I was alone, lying on a dusty cot in one of the old hospital rooms. It was night once more, and I knew the sun had set about an hour ago. Kanin had kept me out last night until it was nearly dawn, explaining that, as a vampire, I needed to know when the sun approached and how much time I had to seek shelter. Despite the legends, he explained, we wouldn’t immediately burst into flames, but our body chemistry had changed now that we were, technically, dead. He likened it to a human disease called porphyria, where toxic substances in the skin caused it to blacken and rupture when exposed to ultraviolet sunlight. Caught outside with no shelter, the direct rays of the sun would burn our exposed skin until it did, eventually, catch fire. It was a messy and extremely painful way to die, he said to my horrified expression, and something you wanted to avoid at all costs.
Despite this, we almost didn’t make it back. I remembered approaching the ruined hospital, growing more sleepy as the sky went from pitch-black to navy blue. But even through the lethargy, I had felt a growing panic and desperation, urging me on to find shelter. As I’d fought desperately against the sluggishness weighing me down, Kanin had scooped me up, holding me close as he strode through the grass and weeds, and I had drifted off against his chest.
The events of the previous night came back to me, and I shivered. It still felt unreal, as if everything I’d been through had happened to someone else. Experimentally, I tried growing my fangs and felt them lengthen immediately, pushing through my gums, sharp and lethal. I wasn’t hungry, though, which was both a relief and a disappointment. I wondered how often I would have to … feed. How soon before I could plunge my fangs into someone’s throat and have that rush of heat and power flow into me—
I shook myself, furious and disgusted. One night as a vampire, and I was already slipping, giving in to the demon.
“I’m not like them,” I seethed to the darkness, to the coiling thing inside me. “Dammit, I will beat this. Somehow. I will not become a soulless monster, I swear it.”
Pushing myself off the bed, I ducked into the dark, narrow hallway in search of Kanin.
He was sitting at the desk in the office, sifting through a large stack of papers. His eyes flicked to me as I came in, then he continued to read.
“Um.” I perched on one of the overturned cabinets. “Thanks. For not letting me burn this morning. I suppose that’s what would happen if I get stuck outside in the sun, right?”
“It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” Kanin replied without looking up. I watched him, remembering how he’d carried me inside, and frowned.
“So, why were you able to stay awake when I fell asleep?”
“Practice.” Kanin turned over one sheet and started on another. “All vampires must sleep in the daytime,” he went on, still not looking at me. “We are nocturnal creatures, like owls and bats, and something in our body makeup makes us lethargic and tired when the sun is high overhead. With practice and a great deal of willpower, we can fight off the need to sleep for a little while. It just grows more difficult the longer we stay awake.”
“Well … thank you.” I stared at the top of his head and wrinkled my nose. “I guess I’m glad you’re extremely stubborn, then.”
He finally looked up, raising an eyebrow. “You are welcome,” he said, sounding amused. “How are you feeling now?”
“Okay, I guess.” I picked at a sheet of paper on the cabinet. No one ever asked me how I was feeling, not since I was young. “I’m not hungry, anyway.”
“That’s normal,” Kanin explained as he started on a new stack of paper. “Typically, barring wounds and overexertion, one needs to take blood every fortnight to remain fed and sated.”
“Fortnight?”
“Every two weeks.”
“Oh.”
“Though it is not unusual for a vampire, if he has the means, to feed every night. The Prince of the city and his council, you can be sure, indulge far more often than that. But two weeks is the safest amount of time one can go without human blood. After that, you will get hungrier and hungrier, and nothing will satisfy you until you feed again.”
“Yeah, you might’ve mentioned that once or twice.”
He eyed me over his paper and set it down, coming around the desk to lean against the front. “Do you want me to continue teaching you?” he asked. “Or would you like me to leave so you may figure everything out yourself?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, looking away. “Still getting used to this whole being-dead thing, I guess.” A thought came to me, and I looked back, frowning. “So, what am I supposed to do, once this ‘training’ is over?”
“I suspect you will continue to live as a vampire.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it, Kanin.” I gestured vaguely at the ceiling. “Will I be allowed into the Inner City? Will the other vampires let me past the gates now that I’m one of them?”
Now that I’m one of them. That was a disgusting thought. I’ll never be one of them, I promised myself. Not completely. I’m not like them. I won’t sink to their level, won’t think of humans as nothing more than animals.
“Unfortunately,” Kanin said, “there is more to it than that.”
It sounded as if he was going to give another lecture, so I dropped into the chair from the night before, resting my chin in my hands. Kanin paused, watching me a moment, before he continued. “You’re a vampire now, so, yes, you’ll be allowed past the gates into the Inner City. That is, if you do not bring up your association with me. But you need to understand the politics of your undead brethren before you can strike out on your own. There is a hierarchy among city vampires, a chain of rank and command, that you must be aware of if you hope to fit in.”
“Fit in,” I repeated and snorted. “I’ve been a street rat and a Fringer my whole life. I don’t think I’ll be cozying up to the vampires of the Inner City anytime soon.”
“Regardless.” Kanin’s voice didn’t change. “This is something you need to know. Not all vampires are created equal. Are you aware of the differences between the Prince of this city and his followers?”
I frowned. To me, all bloodsuckers were the same; they had fangs, they were dead, they drank blood. But Kanin wouldn’t accept that for an answer, and I really didn’t want him to leave yet, so … “I know the city has a Prince,” I replied. “Salazar. And all the other vamps listen to him.”
“Yes.” Kanin nodded approval. “Within every city, there is a Prince, a Master Vampire, the strongest and most powerful of them all. He, or she, heads the council, commands the lesser vampires, and makes most of the decisions within the Inner City. That’s how most vampire cities work, though there are a few that are set up differently. I’ve heard of territories where only one vampire rules over everything, though that type of city is extremely rare and usually doesn’t last long. The Prince would have to be very strong, to keep his city from falling to other vampires or even his own humans.”
“How many vampire cities are there?”
“Worldwide?” Kanin shrugged. “No one really knows. It’s constantly in flux, you see, especially within the smaller regions. Cities rising and falling, attempts to take over another’s territory, disease or rabids wiping out whole populations. But the largest vampire cities, like New Covington, have survived since the plague, and there are perhaps a few dozen, worldwide.”
“All ruled by a Master.”
“Usually. Like I said before, there are exceptions, but, yes, most cities are ruled by a Master.”
That meant there were several very strong, probably very old, vampires out there. That was something to keep in mind, though it sounded as if most of them stayed in their cities, like Salazar, and never ventured beyond the Wall.
“Beneath the Prince,” Kanin continued, “are the Type-2s, the vampires who have been sired by a Master. They are not as powerful as the Prince, but they are formidable in their own right, and usually make up the council, the elite guard and the Prince’s trusted seconds. Are you following so far?”
“Type-2s?” I bit down a smirk. “I was expecting something a little more … exotic, and vampirey-sounding. Type-2 sounds like the symptoms of a disease.”
Kanin shot me an exasperated look. “The bloodlines of certain old families are extremely long and complex,” he explained in a sharper voice. “It would be pointless to explain them to a new vampire, so I am giving you the simplified version.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Beneath them,” Kanin continued, “are the Type-3s, the mongrels, and these are the most common and least powerful in the hierarchy. They have been sired by either a Type-2 or another mongrel, and they are the type of vampire you will most likely encounter wandering the streets. Mongrels make up the vast majority of the population, and they’re the weakest of us all, though still stronger and faster than any human.
“So, the stronger the vamp who sired you, the stronger you’re likely to be?”
“To a point.” Kanin leaned back, resting his palms on the desk. “Before the virus, vampires were spread across the world, hidden from mankind, blending into society. Most of them were mongrels, Type-3s, and if they occasionally sired another vampire, they would always create a mongrel. The Masters and their covens were few and far between, secluded from the rest of the world, until the Red Lung virus hit. When the humans began to die from the virus, our food source disappeared, and we were in danger of starving or going mad.
“Then rabids started to appear, and things grew even more chaotic. At that time, we didn’t know whether the rabids were the final effect of the Red Lung virus or if they were something new, but there was mass panic for both humans and vampires. Eventually a few ingenious Masters devised a way to keep the few remaining, noninfected humans close, creating a never-ending food supply in exchange for protection from outside threats. And so the vampire cities were born. But there are so few Masters now.” He paused and looked away. “And that means fewer vampires every year. It’s only a matter of time before our race disappears completely.”
He didn’t sound sad about it. More … resigned. I blinked. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought you said mongrels or Type-2s or whatevers could create other vampires. What do you mean, you’re dying out?”
He was silent, his eyes dark and far away. Finally, he looked up, staring right at me. “Do you know how the rabids were created?” he asked in a soft voice. “Do you know what they are?”
I swallowed. “You mean, besides the obvious?”
“They’re vampires,” Kanin continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. “Originally, rabids were vampires. In the early stages of the plague, a group of scientists discovered that vampires were immune to the virus that was killing the human race. Up until that point, our race was virtually unknown, hidden and scattered throughout the world. We were happy to remain the monsters of Halloween and horror films. It was better that way.”
“So what happened?”
Kanin made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “A fool of a Master vampire went to the scientists himself, exposing our kind, wanting to ‘save the human race.’ Apparently, he thought—and rightly so—that if mankind went extinct, vampires would soon follow. The scientists told him that vampire blood was the key to finding a cure, that they could beat the Red Lung virus if they only had live samples to work with. So, the Master tracked down and captured other vampires for the scientists to experiment on, betraying his own kind for a cure that would save the world.” Kanin shook his head. “Unfortunately, what they created, what they turned those vampires into, was far worse than anything anyone had anticipated.”
“The rabids,” I guessed.
He nodded. “They should have destroyed them all when they had the chance. Instead, the rabids escaped, carrying inside them the mutated Red Lung virus that had killed most of humanity. Those same pathogens spread rapidly across the world, infecting both human and vampire. Only now, instead of dying from Red Lung, the infected humans changed. They became like the original rabids themselves: vicious and mindless, craving blood, unable to come out in the daytime. Over five billion people succumbed to the mutated virus and went rabid. And whenever a vampire came into contact with someone who carried the virus, he became infected as well. Most of us didn’t turn, but the virus spread through our ranks just as quickly as the humans’. And now, over the course of six generations, all vampires have become carriers of Rabidism. Unlike humans with Red Lung, our bodies adapted more quickly to the virus, and we were able to fight it off. But our race is still in decline.”
“Why?”
“Because the virus prevents the creation of new vampires,” Kanin said gravely. “Masters can still sire Type-2s, and on the very, very rare occasion, other Masters. But for every new vampire he creates, there is the chance he won’t sire a vampire at all, but a rabid. Type-2s sire rabids more than ninety percent of the time, and mongrels?” Kanin shook his head. “Mongrels will always create a rabid. They cannot sire anything else. Most Masters have sworn not to create new offspring. The risk of Rabidism inside the city is too great, and they are very protective of their remaining food supply.”
I thought of the sick deer, flailing blindly about, the absolute viciousness of the rabids themselves, and shuddered. If this was the world outside the city walls, it was a wonder anyone could survive out there. “So,” I mused, looking up at Kanin, “I suppose I’m a carrier now, too, right?”
“That is correct.”
“So, why didn’t I turn into a rabid?”
He shook his head. “Think about it,” he said quietly. “Think about what I told you. You’re bright enough to figure it out.”
I thought about it. “I didn’t turn into a rabid,” I said slowly, “because … you’re a Master vampire.” He gave me a humorless smile, and I looked at him with new eyes. Kanin was a Master vampire; he could be a Prince. “But, if you’re a Master, why don’t you have a city of your own? I thought—”
“Enough talking.” He pushed himself off the desk. “We have somewhere to be tonight, and it is a long way through the undercity. I suggest we get moving.”
I blinked at his sudden change of mood. “Where are we going this time?”
Kanin spun so gracefully I didn’t even know he’d moved until he had me pinned against the wall, the long, curved blade of his dagger pressed against my throat. I froze, but a split second later the pressure on my neck was gone and the knife disappeared into the folds of his black coat. Kanin gave me a faint, tight smile, and stepped away.
“If I was an enemy, you’d be dead now,” he said, walking down the hall again like nothing had happened. I clutched my chest, knowing that if I’d still had a heartbeat, it would have been pounding through my ribs. “The city can be a dangerous place. You’re going to need something bigger than that two-inch blade you keep in your pocket to defend yourself.”
AS A STREET RAT, I’d had the underground tunnels below the city as my turf, my secret passageways, the hidden road that let me slip through the districts unseen. I’d been proud of my knowledge of the city’s underworld. But my vampire mentor either had a near-perfect memory, or he’d been through the dark, twisty underground many, many times before. I followed him through passageways I’d never seen, never known existed. Kanin never slowed down or appeared to be lost, so keeping up with him was a challenge sometimes.
“Allison.” There was a hint of exasperation in his voice as he turned, pausing to wait for me. “The night is waning, and we still have a good ways to cover before we reach our destination. Would you kindly get a move on? This is the third time I’ve had to wait for you.”
“You know, you could slow down a little.” I leaped down from a dead subway car and jogged back to him, ducking a pipe that dangled above the tracks. “In case you haven’t noticed, short people have short legs. I have to take three steps to one of yours, so stop griping.”
He shook his head and continued down the cement tunnel, walking a bit slower now, so it was a small victory. I hurried to keep pace. “I had no idea there was another railway system down here,” I said, gazing at the hulk of a rusty car, overturned on the tracks. “I knew the one that ran below the third and fourth districts, but it was blocked when a building collapsed above it. Where does this one go?”
“This one,” Kanin said, his voice echoing down the dark tunnel, “runs straight through the heart of the Inner City, right between the towers themselves. The station that leads down to it has long been closed off, and the tunnels have been sealed, but we’re not going all the way to the towers.”
“We’re below the Inner City?” I glanced up at the ceiling as if I could see the looming vampire buildings through the concrete and cement. I wondered what it was like up there; glass towers and sparkling lights, well-dressed humans, and even vehicles that still worked. A far cry from the dirty, hopeless, starving existence of the Fringe.
“Don’t be too enamored,” Kanin warned, as if reading my thoughts. “The humans of the Inner City might be better dressed and better fed, but only because they are useful. And what do you think will happen to them, once their master grows bored or displeased?”
“I’m guessing they don’t have a retirement plan.”
Kanin snorted.
“And you want me to eventually live up there?”
He glanced down at me, his expression softening. “Allison, how you live your life is up to you. I can only give you the skills you need to survive. But eventually, you will have to make your own decisions, come to your own terms about what you are. You are Vampire, but what kind of monster you become is out of my hands.”
“What if I don’t want to live up there?” I gave him a sideways look, then focused on the tracks at my feet, watching them glimmer as we passed. “What if I wanted to … go with you?”
“No.” Kanin’s voice was sharp, booming down the tunnel, making me wince. “No,” he said again, softer this time. “I would not suffer anyone to endure the path I walk. My road must always be traveled alone.”
And that was the end of it.
The subway went on, but Kanin took me down another, narrower tunnel, through a dozen more twists and turns, until I was completely lost. We passed under storm drains and metal grates, where I could look up and finally see the city above, gleaming and bright. But the streets seemed empty, abandoned. I’d been expecting crowds of people out walking the streets, unafraid of the night and the predators surrounding them. Maybe I would even catch a glimpse of a vampire, surrounded by his pets and thralls, strolling down the sidewalk. A vehicle passed overhead, making a manhole cover clink, filling the quiet with the growl of its engine. I gaped at the sight of a real, working car, but other than that, the city was as silent as the Fringe.
And, as we continued under the quiet streets, the lights revealed other things, too.
You didn’t notice it at first, being dazzled by the lights and the tall buildings, but the Inner City was just as broken and damaged as the worst parts of the Fringe. There were no rows of gleaming mansions, no buildings overflowing with food and clothes and everything you’d need, no cars for every family. There were a lot of broken, half-decayed buildings that looked slightly more taken care of than the rest of the city. There were flickering streetlamps and rusty cars and weeds growing through walls and concrete. Except for the trio of gleaming vampire towers in the distance, the Inner City looked like a brighter, well-lit version of the Fringe.
“Not what you expected, is it?” Kanin mused, as we ducked into another cement tube and the lights faded above us. I followed, not knowing if I was vindicated or disappointed.
“Where are all the people?” I wondered. “And the vampires?”
“The humans who are awake are all working,” Kanin said. “Keeping the electrical grid up and running, managing the remains of the sewer systems, repairing broken machinery. That’s why the vampires look for those who are talented or knowledgeable or skilled and take them into the city—they need them to keep it running. They also have humans to man their factories, clean and repair their buildings, and grow the food needed for the rest of the population. The rest of them, guards, thralls, pets and concubines, serve them in other ways.”
“But … everyone can’t be working.”
“True,” Kanin agreed. “Everyone else is behind closed, locked doors, keeping off the streets and out of sight as much as they can. They are much closer to the monsters than the people of the Fringe, and they have just as much reason to be afraid.”
“Wow,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Wouldn’t everyone back home be surprised to learn how it really is up there.”
Kanin didn’t say anything to that, and we traveled in silence for a while.
He finally stopped at a steel ladder that went up to a metal grate on the ceiling. Pushing it aside with the ease of vampire strength, he climbed through the hole and beckoned me to follow.
“Where are we now?” I asked, trailing him down another long cement hallway. At the end of this one, we hit a rusty metal door, locked, of course, but Kanin put his shoulder to the metal and bashed it open.
“We,” he replied, stepping back for me to take in my surroundings, “are in the basement storage of the city’s old museum.”
I gazed around in wonder. We were standing at the edge of the largest room I’d ever seen in my life, a warehouse of cement and steel that stretched farther than even my vampire vision reached. Rusting metal shelves created a labyrinth of aisles, hundreds of narrow corridors that vanished into the back of the room. The contents of those shelves were covered in sheets or stored in wooden boxes, wrapped in a thick film of spiderwebs and dust. If I took in a breath I could smell the choking stench of mold and fungi, growing everywhere, but surprisingly, the shelves seemed fairly intact.
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