Winter Halo

by Keri Arthur

  “And this is important because . . . ?”

  “Because the Albrights were instrumental in paving the way for peace after the bombs were dropped. The other surviving houses wanted to fight until the bitter end, but the Albrights convinced them that peace was the only way our world was going to survive what was to come.”

  “So she and her family foresaw the rifts and the coming of the Others?”

  He hesitated. “She’s never really said, but I get the impression they saw the latter if not the former.”

  “All of which is interesting, but doesn’t do much to answer the initial question.”

  “No.” A smile made a brief appearance, then fell away. “She was sent as an envoy to broker a deal with my kin in the mountains. Central wanted to use the lands at the foot of the mountains for farming purposes, but were well aware those lands were traditionally ours. Given that forced acquisition of shifter land by humans was the cause of the war, the ruling families in Central—new and old—sent Nuri out as an envoy to seek permission and broker a deal. I was assigned to accompany her.”

  “Why did the shifters allow humans to remain in positions of power after the war?”

  “It was a way of appeasing the human masses—a means of showing them that while the shifters had won the war, they intended to treat all survivors equally.” A somewhat cynical smile touched his lips. “And it wasn’t like they could overrule the decisions of the five shifter clans who stepped into the remaining seats.”

  How very true. “And Penny?”

  He blew out a breath. “Shouldn’t have been there. I was on an official assignment and broke all sorts of rules, but the couple looking after her could no longer do so. I was taking her up to kin, as I’ve already said.”

  I frowned. “So she wasn’t living with you at the time?”

  He shook his head. “I was still a ranger; military accommodation is no place for a little girl.”

  It wasn’t a place for any child, male or female, I thought, thinking of my little ones. Of the strange life they’d had before the gas took even that. “So she—and the people looking after her—were living in one of the refuges set up after the war?”

  “Everyone was living in refuges in the years immediately after the war.” His voice was grim. “The humans did as good a job of destroying our camps and adobes as we did their cities.”

  I hadn’t really thought about that, but then, my time during the war had been split between the constantly moving ranger camps and the bunkers. I really hadn’t seen much of the destruction—not until many years after the war had ended, anyway.

  “The farmhouse is a prime example of the twisted mess a rift can make of matter, so how come you, Nuri, and Penny escaped it basically intact? How did Sal and his partners?”

  “Luck?” Another smile appeared, but once again faded as he glanced at me. “The truth is, no one is really sure. Luck does play a part, but we also suspect it has something to do with the type of rift you’re hit by, and what else is in the immediate vicinity. You’ve more hope of surviving if you’re in a clearing or a field rather than a forest or near anything man-made. And you can’t be touching anyone.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” I’d seen what had happened to wildlife who’d sheltered under trees and rocks at the approach of a rift, and it hadn’t been pretty. “Is the rift the reason you’re in Chaos with Nuri rather than living with your kin in the mountains?”

  He nodded. “Initially, it was simply a matter of expediency—it was a means of protecting each other’s back at a time when the world feared our presence.”

  Because it was believed survivors would attract the rifts. “And now?”

  “We’re a good team, the money is brilliant, and I’m using the skills I was born with.” He glanced at me, eyebrow raised. “Can you honestly see me as a farmer?”

  I studied him for several seconds through slightly narrowed eyes. “About as much as I could see me being one.”

  He laughed. It was a sound so natural, so relaxed, and so very real that it pulled at something deep inside me. I glanced out the window, fighting the tears that weirdly prickled my eyes. It wasn’t as if I’d never heard a laugh like that before; I had, many a time. It had been part of my training to make shifters feel secure enough around me that they’d unwind and de-stress, but this was the first time it had happened without the barrier of being someone else. For the first time ever, I was simply me.

  And he wasn’t afraid of that, despite the history he’d had with déchet.

  It was scary and wonderful all at the same time.

  “How long will it actually take us to get back to the bunker?” I said, after a while.

  He glanced at the clock on the instrument panel. “We should be there just before five.”

  It was just past three thirty now, so we really were taking the long way home. I yawned hugely, then waved a hand. “Sorry.”

  “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Jonas said. “I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

  “You sure? An extra pair of eyes might be useful given who’s out there, trying to find us.”

  “Given the extra pair of eyes are struggling to remain open, the point is rather mute. Sleep, Tiger. You may not get another chance for a while.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is that Nuri’s intuition speaking or yours?”

  “I don’t have intuition. I just have my training.”

  “So how did you come to the conclusion I wouldn’t be getting much in the way of sleep in the near future?”

  “Simple.” The glance he cast my way heated my soul and yet could have meant anything. “You’re going back to Charles. And if you were in my bed, sleep sure as hell wouldn’t be on the agenda.”

  My heart began beating a whole lot faster. “Meaning you’ve decided what you’d do if I indicated I was receptive to an approach?”

  “Receptive to an approach?” Amusement flitted across his expression. “Such a mundane way of describing something I suspect will be anything but.”

  “You, Ranger, have an annoying tendency to avoid direct questions.”

  I couldn’t help the edge creeping into my tone and his amusement got stronger.

  “It’s undoubtedly a result of hanging around a witch too long. As to the question—it remains a battle between the brain and the loins.”

  “Then stop throwing suggestive comments my way, because it’s not helping.”

  “Then decide what you want, Tiger, so that we can both move on, one way or another.”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  “It is that easy.”

  “No, it’s not.” Not for someone like me. I might have been created with the gift of thought and free will, but I wasn’t entirely sure I was given the courage to go after something I truly wanted. Not after all these years. Because it wasn’t just about sex, but rather emotion, and a connection. And maybe that was something Jonas could never offer, but until I took the risk and explored what might lie between us, I would never know.

  “From the very beginnings of time itself,” he said, “enemies have become friends, and friends have become lovers. It is not beyond the realm of possibility, even if history and experiences might be against it. Against us.”

  And they certainly were against us.

  I wearily scrubbed a hand across my eyes. Why was it so much easier to decide to go to war against the vampires and the people who were in league with them than it was to accept the advances of one man?

  “Jonas, I—”

  He held up a hand to silence me. For several minutes he didn’t say anything, but tension rolled from him, the feel of it so thick it made it difficult to breathe.

  He swore and flattened his foot. The solar vehicle immediately leapt forward, the trees around us quickly becoming a blur as our speed grew.

  “Is it the range
rs?” I twisted around to look behind us, but there was nothing in the sky and nothing on the ground. Just trees and dust.

  “No. Worse.” The look he briefly cast my way was grim. “Rift.”

  I swore, even as fear leapt into my heart. I scanned the countryside again but still couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “Are you sure?”

  It was a stupid question, because I already knew the answer. Thanks to the fact that he’d already survived one rift, he was now sensitive to their presence. But part of me was hoping he’d say no.

  That part didn’t get the answer it wanted. In fact, he didn’t even answer. He just kept his attention on the road.

  “This thing should be able to outrun it, shouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s fast, but the rift is moving at almost double our speed.”

  And we were in the middle of a damn forest. Rhea help us . . .

  The trees seemed to go on and on, an endless sea of green. I had no idea how close the rift was, and no desire to ask. Some things were better not to know—and it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it if it was close. All I could do was hope that the rift changed course and went on to destroy something else. That it left us alone and alive.

  Even if the gathering tension and fear emanating from the man beside me suggested it was a rather forlorn hope.

  With an abruptness that was startling, the forest gave way to vast emptiness. Something within me relaxed, if only slightly. At least we had a chance—a very minor chance—of surviving the rift in one piece and untainted by trees and rocks if it did hit.

  The vehicle seemed to increase its pace in the open air—no surprise, given the sun was no longer being filtered through the canopy of the trees. I twisted around and studied the fast-disappearing forest fringe.

  And saw the rift touch down.

  It ripped up the road as it barreled toward us, a tornado of unseen energy that was twisting, unraveling, and remaking everything it touched before tossing it aside.

  “Jonas—”

  “I know.”

  I stared at the alien force behind us in growing horror, my heart racing so fast it felt like it was about to tear out of my chest. And maybe it was, because tendrils of the rift’s energy were now whipping around us. The vehicle was shuddering under the force of them, and my skin stung and shivered and bled.

  “We can’t outrun this, Jonas.”

  He glanced in the mirror and swore. “You’re right. We can’t.”

  With that, he slammed on the brakes and flipped the doors open. “Run. Get as far away from this vehicle and the road as you can.”

  I was out and sprinting before he’d even finished. Energy was fiercer out in the open; became a storm that was dust and destruction and nigh on impossible to run against. The empty landscape disappeared and all I could feel, all I could hear, was the roar of the rift approaching.

  A hand grabbed mine and held tight. “Faster,” Jonas yelled, almost yanking me off my feet. “You have to go faster.”

  “I can’t!” I was already at top speed. There was nothing more to give, nothing more I could do. “Shift shapes and leave me, Jonas. One of us needs to get out of here.”

  “A ranger never leaves a man behind,” he snapped. “Now fucking move.”

  I somehow found the strength to increase my speed. But only incrementally and that wasn’t enough. My lungs were burning, my legs felt like lead, and the storm was so close it felt like fragments of my body were tearing away.

  We raced on, speeding across the unseen landscape even as time and the rift now seemed to be crawling. Just for a minute the force of it waned and hope surged. Maybe Rhea had taken pity on us; maybe we would escape.

  Then Jonas swore, his grip left mine, and the rift hit us and tore us both apart.

  Chapter 11

  Everything seemed to end. Everything except pain and consciousness. There was no sense of movement in this rift. It held no light, no sound, no life, even though it moved through a world that contained all those things. It was suffocating and deadly, and alien in a way I couldn’t even begin to understand. It tore me apart and examined every particle and every facet of my being, as if each tiny piece of me needed to be fully understood before it was discarded. It was almost as if the rift was in some way sentient, though how that was possible when it was energy and magic rather than life I had no idea.

  On and on it went, endless and unforgiving. But somewhere in the midst of it all, stubbornness flared. I’d been torn apart once already in my lifetime, though the source had been chemical rather than a force from another world. If I could survive the melting of flesh and muscle, I could survive this.

  Death, some distant part of me thought, you are once again rejected.

  And in a single moment of serendipity, that thought had no sooner crossed my mind than the force of the rift abandoned me and I was spat out whole and breathing into sweet sunshine.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I simply lay there, sucking air into still-burning lungs as I stared up at blue skies and thanked Rhea—and every other god that might be listening—for the miracle of survival. And not just survival, because I could feel my fingers, my toes, and though every bit of me in between seemed to be nothing but a mass of agony, everything still seemed to be where it was supposed to be. I hadn’t become some twisted, unrecognizable remnant of what I’d once been.

  I was alive. And that meant I could return to my little ones, just as I’d promised.

  Of course, to do that, I first had to uncover where the hell I now was. There was nothing but silence around me. There were no birdcalls, no familiar scents, no sense of life . . .

  Oh Rhea, Jonas . . .

  I tried to speak, to call out, but my throat was raw and no sound came out. I tried to move, to turn my head and look around, but my body was still a mass of quivering, aching jelly and refused to obey my commands. Had I been wrong? Had I come through in one piece but little more than an inert lump of flesh? Panic surged and a scream of denial tore up my throat. And though it came out as little more than a squeak, it broke through the fear and forced me to get a grip on my emotions. If I could squeak, I would eventually be able to talk. And I would probably be able to move, too. All I had to do was keep control and heal.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on regulating my breathing. On fighting the panic and ignoring the burning in my lungs that suggested I wasn’t getting enough air into my body. But the simple act of breathing in and out in a calm, orderly manner had never seemed so damn hard.

  Eventually, though, the pain and weakness began to subside as the peace of the healing state descended. It was a state I remained in for hours—long enough that by the time I emerged, the heat of the day had left the air and dusk was spreading pink fingers across the darkening sky.

  I took a deep, shuddery breath and sat upright. The sudden movement had my head spinning, which meant that although my body no longer felt like it had been pushed through a meat grinder, I was a long way from being fully healed. But it didn’t matter; nothing did, except finding Jonas.

  The plain stretched before me, a vast and empty space. There was no forest, no road, nothing to indicate where I’d landed. I twisted around and again saw nothing but emptiness. Rhea help me, he couldn’t be dead. Surely the goddess would not be so cruel as to tease me with possibilities and then snatch them away . . .

  In the distance far to my left I spotted an unmoving brown lump. Hope flared, even though I knew it might be nothing more than a rock twisted into a humanlike shape by the rift’s force.

  I pushed upright and scrambled toward it. The nearer I got, the clearer it became it was no rock.

  I dropped to my knees beside him and felt for a pulse. It was there—rapid and thready, but there. Relief surged, a force so fierce that a sob escaped. I leaned my forehead against his arm and battled the sting of tears. Against
all the odds, we’d both survived and in one piece . . . I stirred at the thought and began checking him for wounds, breaks, or any other sign that the rift had done something extreme to his body. But there didn’t appear to be anything untoward. Nothing visible, anyway.

  “Isn’t that typical?” His voice was little more than a harsh whisper, but never had I heard a sweeter sound. He moved fractionally and his gaze met mine, the vivid green depths filled with relief and something else. Something I couldn’t really name but that had my pulse racing. “A pretty woman decides to caress me and I’m unconscious for the majority of it.”

  Hopefully, that majority had included the few minutes of tears. I sat back on my heels and smiled. “Yeah, well, you might have slapped my hand away if you’d been awake.”

  “Doubtful.” He drew in a breath, then released it slowly. I could almost see the strength flooding back into his body. “What’s the damage?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  He shook his head. “Everything is aching, although I feel a damn sight better than I did at this point last time. It took days before any of us could fully function. We were just lucky there’d been no predators in the vicinity to take advantage of our weakened state.”

  “If there had been, their DNA might have mingled with yours, and you would have come through as something entirely different.”

  “I know. Help me up.”

  I raised an eyebrow and didn’t move. “Wouldn’t it be better if you rested a little bit longer?”

  “Probably.” The smile that twisted his lips held little in the way of amusement. “But night is almost on us and I have no intention of being caught out in the open. The solar vehicle has to be around here somewhere—we should find it.”

  “Why? If the rift did a number on it, then it’s not going to be of much use.”

  “Perhaps, but we might be able to retrieve some weapons or at least some rations from it.”

  “That’s a pretty big ‘might.’”

  “So was surviving the rift.”

  “Good point.” I rose, straddled his legs, then wrapped my hands around his and hauled him upright. It was an effort that left me shaking. Full strength, it seemed, really was a long way off.