Ossified State (Chronicles of the Wraith Book 2)

by S. C. Green

  I whacked the phone from his hand with my wing. It clattered against the walls of the shaft before shattering against the top of the elevator. The man leapt backwards as my talons scraped across his scalp, drawing blood from shallow wounds. He held up his hands to protect his face. I flapped my wings madly against him, and he staggered toward the edge of the platform.

  Don’t fall, damnit. I’m not trying to kill you. Just get out of the shaft!

  Behind me, the other man screamed. I whirled around, my bird eyes piercing the darkness. The second man had made it onto the platform, but I didn’t know how long he’d stay there. He had his back against the safety railing, his white knuckles gripping the handrail.

  Red loomed over him, his mouth open in a silent scream. He thrust his hand into the guy’s chest, and the man’s shout turned into a choking wheeze. I stared in horror, my wings frozen in the air. The guy dropped to the grating, and a cloud of dust and skin flakes rose up around him.

  He’d been husked.

  A tremor ran to the tips of my feathers. I’d never seen a husking up close before, and it was even more horrible than I’d imagined.

  Red’s blue eyes glowed with a new warmth as he took the man’s life force within himself, gorging on the energy like it was a fine meal. He stared down at the dry husk of the man’s body – a gaping wound in his chest revealing an empty chest cavity – and smacked his lips together over that blackened mouth of his. Unable to contain myself, I let out a terrified squawk.

  Red glanced up and stared me straight in the eyes. For a moment, we both remained locked on each other – an old-fashioned standoff, a stalemate. I silently dared him to try that again. He dared me to reap him and lose my only chance at escape. His soul called to me across the void between us, begging me to take him over to the other side. But there was no point. Red was a wraith. He’d be back again. And right now we had a bigger problem on our hands.

  The other man had turned tail and ran, but he’d soon be back with reinforcements. Through the gap in the wall, more sirens wailed.

  I lowered my gaze, trying to avoid looking at the husk, and called back my human half. My body transformed once more, my wings retracting back into my body, biting into me as if they were sucked into my skin. My skull cracked and twisted, becoming itself once more. My feet slammed against the steel platform as I lost the ability to fly. I knelt down, taking the shock as the full weight of my human body dropped after me. The platform shuddered.

  I grabbed the down lever, and the service platform creaked downward. The screaming sirens dimmed as we plunged deeper into the shaft. I waved to Jack, who’d climbed on top of the elevator, his face pale with fear. He didn’t wave back. I stopped the platform above him, and after he scrambled on and clung to the safety railing on the edge, I slammed the platform into reverse, heading back up the shaft.

  Red stood on the opposite side of me, his blue eyes glowing through the gloom.

  “What’s th-that?” Jack stammered. His foot crunched into the man’s arm, and the dry skin crumbled beneath him, raining through the grating and disappearing down the black shaft below.

  “A husk,” I replied.

  “Red did that to him?”

  “He saved our lives,” I retorted, although the image of that dry guard’s body crumbling at our feet turned my stomach. Now was not the time for a moral debate.

  The platform clanked up against the open security hatch. We’d made it. I clambered out and helped Jack crawl over the edge. We landed in a heap in a strange hall. I glanced up. We were on sub-level five. Only two levels up to freedom.

  Red was already floating toward the stairs. “You coming?” He snarled, his raspy voice barely a whisper.

  “How do you know the way?” Jack demanded. “Was someone letting you out for walks around the station like a dog?”

  “I remember from when they brought me in.” Red floated over the stairs, his eyes still glowing from his meal. “I remember everything from my return.”

  Was he telling me that he remembered our conversations, our friendship? Was he reiterating that I could trust him?

  Or was he speaking of the ten years he’d endured alone inside that shell? Was he ready to husk me, like he’d husked that other man? I had to take my chances. Jack shot me a doubtful glance, but I was already racing to catch up with Red.

  My decision to trust him had already been made. No rolling back now.

  We took the stairs three at a time, then sprinted along another corridor and through a computer lab. Behind us, doors slammed, voices shouted, sirens wailed. They were getting closer, but I had no idea if they knew where we were, or if they were just searching the whole building.

  We turned a corner and found ourselves in the small lobby we’d arrived in. The door to the parking lot was shut, the blinking light of the lock pointing our way to freedom.

  I took a step into the room. A gunshot exploded. A bullet whizzed past my shoulder and buried itself into the wall ahead.

  Shit. They’d found us.

  “Run!” Jack yelled.

  Terror swamped my insides. I poured on speed, careening around the corner and streaking through the lobby as though I were on a race track.

  Red reached the door at the end of the corridor and floated right through it. Jack was running so fast, he couldn’t slow himself in time. He slammed against the metal face. He fumbled for his card and swiped it through the slot.

  Behind us, two men rounded the corner, guns raised. Shots rang in my ears. My body begged to run, but there was nowhere to go. I squeezed my eyes shut. No, they hadn’t hit me.

  The door opened. Beside me, Jack moaned, clutching his leg.

  I crashed into him, shoving him through the door and pulling it shut behind me. More bullets cracked against the metal. Jack groaned, his face twisted in agony. I slotted my arm under his shoulder and dragged him to the car.

  “Shit.” Jack gritted his teeth, limping as best he could. Blood streamed from the wound, leaving a slick trail across the parking lot.

  Another loud bang behind us. Footsteps slammed on the concrete.

  Red zoomed back the way we came, his body causing a wave of cold air to settle across my skin. He charged the door just as the first guards came through, his hands raised to attack. An inhuman hiss escaped from his lips.

  “Get back!” someone yelled. “You’ll be husked!”

  He didn’t have to say it twice. The men raced back into the hall, slamming the door behind them.

  Red gave one last menacing hiss, then floated through the back of the car and hovered over the backseat just as I managed to shove Jack inside. We tore through the gates at high speed, heading for the desert as the sirens wailed behind us.

  I wound the window down, my black hair streaming out behind me. I’d just broken every rule in the book, but now we had our key, we could get inside the dome, and hopefully get my family back.

  “Ride on into the bleeding sun,” Red said, staring out the window at the blood-red horizon.

  We’d done it. I should have felt elated, but all I could see was that poor man in the elevator, his body now a dry, empty husk. A red horizon seemed appropriate, for I now had blood on my hands. That man was dead because of me.

  I had a sinking feeling he would be the first of many.

  3

  Sydney

  “May, stop playing with your food and eat your rat.” Alain frowned at his daughter as she held up her dinner by its tail.

  May wrinkled her nose in disgust. “No thanks,” she said, tossing the rat I’d expertly roasted against the wall. It slid to the floor where five kittens leapt at it like piranhas on a bleeding tourist.

  I stifled a sigh. Not like I could blame her. Some things were very different now that the wraith were gone. But others didn’t change one bit. Kids still didn’t want to eat their meat.

  It had only been a couple of hours since I destroyed the Mimir. We’d finally managed to pick ourselves up from the middle of the Citadel and trudge bac
k to my apartment. We couldn’t go to the Compound because it would still be full of Dorien’s supporters. The going was slow anyway because I was pretty shaky on my feet, and Harriet and her two GI Janes insisted on sweeping every street for potential ‘hostiles’ before we took off.

  We didn’t see a single wraith. Hurray for that.

  After walking for some time, I could no longer support myself. My head spun, and the road in front of me wobbled and blurred. Alain and May gripped me under my shoulders, supporting my weight and barely letting my feet touch the street. Alain’s gaze stayed glued on mine, his eyes kind, caring. He was trying to protect me and the baby.

  The baby. It was still so hard to believe, still so much to process. My foot missed the edge of the curb, and I sagged into May.

  She bolstered me against Alain. “Easy, baby mama.” She grinned.

  “I’m … fine ... “ I puffed, sweat pouring down my face from the effort of remaining upright.

  “You’ve just expended a phenomenal amount of energy,” Alain said, sweeping me into his arms and carrying me. “No wonder you’re struggling.”

  We wove our way through the deserted streets of the Hub between the towering skyscrapers with their petrified facades. The city felt completely different and yet exactly the same. We neared my place on Hellsgate, passing old familiar landmarks – two lampposts bent toward each other like a triumphal arch, and Joey’s laundromat sitting dark and deserted on the corner, the words GOD SAVE US scrawled across the opposite wall in red paint.

  Alain carried me up the stairs and laid me on the couch. Weariness washed over me, and I fell asleep with voices filling my ears, talking in excited tones about what had just happened. I heard that strange word repeated...valeda.

  I need to find out … what it means … what exactly it is that I did … in a moment, just as soon as I get up ...

  When I opened my eyes again, it was still dark out. I couldn’t be sure of the time. Everyone was still sitting around the room, jabbering about what we’d witnessed, what I’d done. My stomach growled, and I rose shakily to my feet. Alain tried to get me to lie down again, but I pushed him away. I needed to eat. We all did.

  With the wraith gone, the threat of husking may have completely vanished, and with Harriet and her girls wielding powerful guns, we were in no immediate danger from the gangs. The threat of starvation, however, still loomed very real. I opened all the kitchen cupboards and checked in the small box of food Harriet’s women had given us, but I could find very little to feed this large group. Luckily, I had a small stash of rat carcases rescued from the cats. I kept them in a tupperware container under the sink, and they smelled...fresh enough. Diana and I had perfected the art of rat cuisine while living for months in my tiny apartment, and I’d managed to whip up something resembling a Sunday roast for all of us over a small fire out on the balcony.

  Diana. Just thinking her name caused a painful spasm to clench my chest. I missed her so much already, the ache in my arms to hold her again was a real, visceral pain, like a wraith had its cold hands wrapped around my heart and was squeezing, slowly draining all the life from me.

  “Sydney?” Alain must’ve noticed a change in my face. His voice sounded far away, as though he called to me from underwater, even though he sat next to me at the table. He gazed at me, his ice-blue eyes wide with concern.

  I tried to chew, but the rat suddenly tasted like cardboard. Which was odd, because cardboard was generally more appetizing than rat.

  I sucked in a breath, holding it in my tight chest, willing the lump in my throat back down. My heart still ached from the vise of my grief, and I knew I was only minutes away from losing it completely. But I couldn’t break down with the others here. The flat felt too crowded, too public for that kind of display.

  On the couch, May and Harriet laughed as they dangled a ribbon for the cats. Goddamnit. White-hot rage flared inside me. This was our flat. This was Diana’s place, that was her ribbon, her stupid kittens. These people don’t belong here. She belongs here, and now she’s gone.

  I balled my hands into fists, biting back the pain until my jaw hurt. Alain rested his hand on my shoulder.

  “Alain,” I whispered, my voice catching. Rage boiled under my skin. “Get them out of here.”

  He stared into my eyes, his face hardening. He understood. He’d been to the same place I was at now when Raine was lost to the other side of the dome. He knew the crushing power of raw grief.

  He squeezed my hand, then turned to Harriet. “Isn’t it about time you check on your girls?”

  Harriet was the self-appointed leader of a group of women recently escaped--with my help, but mostly I just watched--from a brothel, where they were being held and used against their will.

  She nodded, licking the last of the meat juices off her fingers. Unlike May, she didn’t seem squeamish about her dinner.

  May gripped Harriet’s knee, her face suddenly nervous. The pair had been lovers, hiding their relationship from everyone who knew them, including Alain. They hadn’t seen each other in months, not since Harriet was captured and imprisoned in the brothel. Reunited by chance, May clearly didn’t want Harriet to leave her side.

  “Take May with you,” Alain said quickly. “I imagine you two have a lot to say to each other.”

  “Thank you, Dad.” May touched her father’s shoulder. As her gaze passed over my face, I caught a flash of my own pain reflected there. May had loved Diana, too. She had her own grief to bear.

  Harriet and her girls grabbed their guns. May pulled her black coat tight around herself and followed them into the hall.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Alain wrapped his arms around me. “I’ll hold you as tight as you need,” he whispered in my ear.

  The vise closed around my heart, and rage spilled out through my skin. My body flared into a ball of fire, a churning maelstrom of pain that could burn everything good left inside me if I let it. I could lose myself in a dark storm of loss and loathing, a world where Diana had been twice robbed of the life she deserved, once by the dome, and once by Dorien.

  The only thing I could sense of the world outside of that awful pain was Alain’s arms, steady and strong against the horror of my grief as they held me tight.

  I woke up in my bed, my skin sticky with tears, my whole body aching with unfinished sleep. The filthy sheet beside me was rumpled and empty except a few stray feathers by the pillow.

  Outside the window, the black of night was giving way to a cold, grey day. Every day within the dome was the same – a night so dark you could lose your shadow, the day a dreary midwinter minus the rain.

  My mind replayed what had happened last night in the Citadel. I’d saved the city, but I still wasn’t really certain what I’d done. I’d been inside the Mimir, and then I spoke with my mother. After that … I’d been inside another globe of energy, but it wasn’t just a piece of the Mimir. It spun on an axis, and through the white light of it I could see everything and nothing. I could see a world made up of energies, threads of life and death I could pull like a puppeteer. I thought it was the earth, or at least a kind of model of the earth, a way to travel through areas that could not be plotted on a map, to find things that had been lost.

  And now, it – along with my mother and Diana – was lost to me. Alain and May could get back there, but I knew with a certainty that shocked me that I was forever stuck in this world.

  I stared down at my hands, turning them over in the grey light. Apart from some new scrapes and bruises, they didn’t look any different. I didn’t feel any different. But something had happened to me in the Citadel when I defeated Dorien. And I had a horrible feeling I would find out exactly what soon.

  To find things that had been lost.

  I laid my hand on my stomach, feeling the smooth skin there. And underneath, a baby. Growing inside me was a tiny half-human, half-Reaper. I didn’t understand how. I’d had surgery to remove the damaged pieces of my womb, after a particularly violent beating fro
m my ex. I wasn’t supposed to ever be able to have children. I’d been living with the pain of that loss ever since that horrible day. Diana had made it better. She’d been like a daughter to me. But now, Diana was dead, and I was pregnant …

  “If you can hear me, little one,” I whispered to my unborn child, my voice catching as fresh tears brimmed in my eyes. These weren’t tears of grief, but something else entirely, something welling up from deep within me. “I’m making you a promise. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. For all I know, I might not live out the week. But I’m going to do everything I can to survive, to get you out of Petrified City, to give you … everything I didn’t have, everything Diana didn’t have. Do you hear me? I’m going to look after you.”

  Then I did something I’d never done before since the day I was five and accidentally peered inside the muscles of my thigh. It was so gross that I’d thrown up. But now...I just wanted a peek at my baby. I pressed my hand to my stomach and peeled away the layers of skin with my mind until I was looking inside my womb.

  My womb. I wasn’t supposed to have much of one left, but there it was, all reddish and wrinkled and ready to expand. I could see the twin ducts of the fallopian tubes extending from the sides, and there, embedded in the wall, was a tiny egg, just starting to form itself into a peanut-like shape.

  My baby. Our baby. Mine and Alain’s.

  Tears ran down my face in an unstoppable flow. I watched that little peanut, my mind whirring, my body wracked with overwhelming love and hope and loss and worry.

  From the other room, raised voices sounded. I pulled my hand away, and the peanut disappeared. I wiped the tears from my eyes and glanced toward the living room. Alain had shut the door to the bedroom. Was he trying not to disturb me, or did he not want me to hear what was being said?

  With a groan, I pulled my weary body out of bed and pressed my hand and ear to the door. The layers of wood peeled away within my mind, and on the other side, Alain stood in the middle of the room. Blackie sat on his shoulder, his back arched into Alain’s dark curls and claws digging into Alain’s coat. May faced off against him, her dark eyes flashing. Harriet stood behind May, her large gun slapping against the blonde hair coiled over her shoulder.