Winter Halo

by Keri Arthur

  “Complicated how?” I asked. “You can take your time to explain, because I’m in no particular hurry right now.”

  “Well, bully for you. I, however, start work in fifteen minutes and the boss doesn’t like me being late.”

  “Then talk.”

  She drank some coffee. “Halo was, at first, a good place to work. The money is above set salary rates, and being a security officer isn’t an overly taxing position either physically or mentally—not with all the electronic shit they have installed.”

  “What did you have to do?”

  “Watch monitors and do hourly patrols. There’s two guards per floor, but which one you’re assigned varies night to night.” She shrugged. “Even so, it can get monotonous.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “No. I left because the fucking place is haunted.”

  I blinked. That certainly wasn’t an answer I’d expected. “Haunted as in ghosts? Dead-people-type ghosts?”

  “What other fucking kind is there?”

  Her tone was sarcastic and I couldn’t help smiling. “What did these ghosts do?”

  She grimaced. “Nothing at first. I mean, I heard some of the other guards saying they’d been accosted and the like, but I put it down to nerves. Many of them really aren’t made of stern stuff; they’re hiring on looks rather than suitability if you ask me.” She paused and looked me up and down. “You certainly fit the profile, and at least you’ve got some muscle tone on you.”

  “Years of working in shitty positions,” I said, voice dry. “Did the women report the assaults when they happened? Or go to corps?”

  “It was reported internally, but nothing ever happened. I mean, they’re ghosts. What can be done to stop them?”

  “A witch could have been brought in to banish them.” But I was betting it was an option that had never been considered, even if we were talking about ghosts and not something a whole lot darker in origin. Or, in this case, brighter, given we already knew at least one of Sal’s partners was capable of using a sun shield. If there were actual ghosts in Winter Halo, I’d be very surprised.

  “Yeah, well, one wasn’t,” Kendra said. “And even if it weren’t ghosts, they make you sign a contract when you’re employed that basically states anything that happens inside that building stays in that building. Anyone caught discussing or complaining outside—even to family—has to repay all credits and face the possibility of prosecution.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought a contract like that would be legal.”

  “It is. Had it checked before I signed the thing.”

  “I would have thought even that would have been frowned upon.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She shrugged. “But they said they had nothing to hide.”

  On the surface, at least, it would appear so. “When did you become a victim of the ghosts? And what happened when they attacked you?”

  “It happened when I was finally assigned to the tenth level.” She paused. “It’s the top level any of us regular guards get to. You have to be one of the favori to go any higher.”

  “And how do you become one of those?”

  “You’re promoted. Don’t ask me how, because I never got there.” She drank some more coffee, then continued. “The first time I was attacked, I was slammed against the wall and touched up.”

  “Breasts and butt, or further?”

  “Oh, the lot. Ghostly bastard even dry-humped me.”

  “So you think it was a male?”

  “Yeah, felt his cock pressing against me.” She laughed, the sound sharp. “But it wasn’t really erect. The old boy wasn’t enjoying himself much, it seemed.”

  “And the second time it happened?”

  “It wasn’t sexual. The bastard bit me.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “He bit you.”

  “Yeah.” She swept the hair away from the right side of her neck. “You can still see the scar.”

  You could, but it wasn’t teeth marks; wasn’t a vampire bite. They were far too precise for either of those. They’d been created by either a very small blade or a large syringe.

  “Do you remember much about the attack?”

  She frowned. “Oddly, no. I felt this sharp sting on the back of my neck and then everything sort of went hazy. I could feel him biting, but that’s about it.”

  Meaning it was possible a very short-term drug had been used. But why would anyone want to steal blood if they weren’t actually a vampire? Did this have something to do with the attempt to gain light immunity for the vamps and the wraiths? Or was something weirder going on?

  “How long were you hazy?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes at the most.” She shrugged again. “What was weird, though, was the fact that my fellow guard claimed she saw nothing. I played back the vid, and she was right. Nothing showed up.”

  “Had it been erased?”

  She shook her head. “No, it simply showed me walking through the foyer as usual. No assault, no nothing, despite the evidence on my neck. Weird, as I said.”

  Meaning someone, somewhere, had tampered with it—and had done so pretty much at the same time as the attack. “What did you do after that?”

  “I went down to personnel and quit on the spot. No job is worth putting up with that shit.”

  “So why did you, given you were aware it was happening to others?”

  “Because it wasn’t a fucking problem until it happened to me, was it? And as I said, the pay was good. It was worth gambling on it not happening.”

  “Are all guards assigned to that floor attacked?”

  “All of them are attacked, yes, but not everyone gets bit. I was hoping to be in the latter group. Guess I got unlucky.” She shrugged again. “That’s why there’s such a high turnover of security guards. Some are scared to go up there again, and some simply don’t want to risk it being worse on the upper levels.”

  And I had no doubt it would be worse if they were taking blood samples. It was unlikely they’d be looking for something as simple as guards with a specific blood group—especially given that information had already been scanned in from their RFID chips when they were first employed.

  Kendra glanced at the time. “You’ve got a couple of minutes left.”

  “Did you ever talk to the favori? Or talk to anyone who knew what was going on in the upper levels?”

  “No. But I can say that everyone who was bitten was moved up. You could probably talk to personnel and get a list from them.”

  Nuri probably could. I wasn’t about to risk either of my current identities being outed to Sal’s partners by accessing yet another employee.

  Kendra took a gulp of her coffee. “You know, if there’s one good thing about working in a brothel, it’s that I’m at least getting paid to be touched up and bitten.”

  Intuition stirred. “What brothel?”

  “Deseo.”

  Which just happened to be the brothel Sal had not only owned, but one that had a false rift sitting in its basement. Thank goodness I’d taken the time to alter my appearance—though I daresay if anyone did question Kendra, then an orange-haired woman asking questions about the company would still raise alarms.

  And if I was going to raise alarms, I might as well do it properly. “Who runs that place now? I thought I heard something about the owner dying recently.”

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

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

  Maybe that was a question Nuri and her crew ne
eded to ask.

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

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

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

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

  And with that, she left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And the friend?”

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

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

  “Is two weeks going to be long enough?”

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

  “No pressure, then,” I muttered.

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

  “You want to turn around?”

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

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

  “I am a war survivor, remember. There aren’t many things that could or would disturb me.” Even so, he crossed his arms and turned around.

  I stripped, changed to the appropriate shape, then put on the tunic. As before, my breasts tested the strength of the seams. I really needed to get more clothes.

  “Right, let’s do this.” I lightly plucked the soft material away from my belly in a vague attempt to cool the sweat still dotting my body after the shift.

  Jonas grabbed the scanner from the backpack, then hit a button. Blue light swept me, running my length several times to store all measurements—even my iris details. Once it had beeped to indicate completion, I held out my right hand, the underside of my wrist facing upward. His fingers wrapped around mine, his grip light and warm as he held me steady. I tried to ignore the flick of desire it caused and watched as he pressed the scanner against my skin. This time there was no sting of an RFID chip being inserted under my flesh. Instead, there was an odd, warm tingle as the information on my existing chip was altered.

  When the scanner beeped to indicate it was done, Jonas released my hand and stepped back. “Nuri has sent a new tunic, but said there will be more clothing in the apartment by the time you get there. Here are the address and security details, as well as the details of the new ID.”

  He handed me a piece of paper and a tunic in the softest pink. I scanned the note quickly, then tore it up. The ghosts chased the pieces as they fluttered away on the breeze.

  “You can now turn around again while I resume my regular shape.”

  “Seriously, have you ever seen a shifter shift? It’s not pretty—”

  “I have, but I’d still like you to turn around.”

  “You can’t have been in many camps during the war,” he commented, turning. “Because nakedness was commonplace.”

  “I’m aware of that. But being naked in front of someone I’m—” I cut the rest of the sentence off. It might be stupid to refuse to admit to the attraction, given the pheromones that often stung the air whenever we got too close, but by voicing it, I gave it power. Made it something we had to confront rather than ignore.

  He didn’t say anything, even though there was something in his expression that said he was well aware of how I’d intended to finish that sentence. He turned around. I repeated the shifting process, then redressed in my combat gear. Once that was done, I leaned against the wall and sucked in air.

  “You okay?” Jonas asked.

  “Yeah. It’s just that multishifting in such a short time period always takes it out of me.”

  “A problem all shifters face,” he said.
“It is not something we ever do lightly, no matter what human history might have you believe.”

  Which was an echo of a statement I’d made and one that had a somewhat bitter smile twisting my lips. The shifters had come out relatively sparkly under the prewar human version of history compared to the hatchet job the shifters had done on us after the war.

  I folded the two tunics up and placed them near the door; they’d be safe enough there until I got back. The vamps and Sal’s partners were the only ones likely to come out at night, and two nondescript tunics weren’t going to help them much.

  “I don’t know what your plans are this evening, Ranger, but I’m heading back to Carleen.”

  “Then so am I.” He dropped the scanner back into the pack, then slung it over his shoulder. “Do you hope to find that stranger again? Because it’s unlikely he’d risk a second meeting so soon after being discovered.”

  “He could be a she, remember.” I made my way across City Road and headed for the park.

  Jonas shook his head. “The scent track I followed from the false rift site had male overtones, not female.”

  I glanced at him. “But we’re talking about people who now share DNA and can shift form.”

  “Which does not mean they can alter their basic physiology. They can’t become male if they are female—you can’t, can you?”

  “No.” Though Rhea only knows our creators had certainly tried to make that happen. The in-tube death rate of the lure program had been high enough, but that rate became one hundred percent every time they tried to create a multisex body shifter. “But just because I can’t doesn’t mean that rule will hold when two males and a female were fused by a rift.”

  “I think it does, if only because, psychologically, they’ll identify as one or the other.” He shrugged. “How did your meeting with Kendra go?”