It blinked and then dipped its head as though thanking me before taking off down South Rampart Street as Sebastian and Henri raced around the corner.
Henri kept booking after the creature. Sebastian ran past me, shouting and looking back. “You okay?!”
I nodded mutely, stunned by what had just happened but hurrying down the street after them as fast as I could. That thing was our ticket to Athena’s temple; we couldn’t lose it.
The only reason I caught up to Sebastian was because he had slowed. Henri was far in front of us, and the creature was putting some serious distance between itself and us.
“Henri, track it!” Sebastian yelled ahead.
Henri increased his speed, leaped into the air, and turned into a hawk.
A red-tailed hawk.
A screech blasted through the air as the bird shot upward. On the hunt.
I jogged to a stop, panting hard and bracing my hands on my knees. “Henri’s . . . a . . . hawk.” I straightened and started walking in circles. Now it all made sense. His strange hazel-yellow eyes. The fact that he cleared buildings of rats and snakes for the Novem. Yeah, easy job when you’re a predator. “Was anyone going to tell me?”
“It was his decision to tell. Or show. Come on, it’s headed into the ruins. With Henri tracking it we can walk from here.”
We headed west, away from safety and civilization and deep into the ruins of Midtown. As we walked at a fast clip my thoughts turned to Gabriel. I was so pissed that I’d allowed him to mess with me once again. I didn’t know how to fight something like that or how to guard against it.
Sebastian’s shoulder bumped mine. “It takes practice.”
“What?”
“Learning how to block a Bloodborn’s influence.”
My step faltered. I caught back up to Sebastian. “I wish you would stop doing that.”
“Stop doing what?”
“Reading my mind or whatever you call it.”
“I’m not reading your mind. I’m reading your emotions, and it’s not like I’m trying real hard. Kind of easy to put two and two together. I’d be pissed too if that happened to me.”
“Yeah. Somehow I doubt you’ll ever have to worry about Gabriel wanting to suck on your neck.” He smiled and shrugged. We went for a few more seconds before I said, “So how do I stop him from doing that?”
We veered off the sidewalk and around a mountain of trash and debris, and walked down the middle of the street.
“It’s just a matter of being aware and knowing his intent. Gabriel’s influence works because he waits until you’re distracted or your guard is down. All it takes is a second. You always have to have that block in place because as soon as you don’t, that’s when he’ll use it.”
“He’s such a jerk,” I said, wanting to rant. “If I’m going to go all gaga for a guy, it’ll be because I want to, not because some asshat is helping me along.”
God, how lame was that? Just shut up, Ari. Before you embarrass yourself even more.
“Well, just for the record . . . forcing a girl to go all gaga for me isn’t my style.” He paused, his tone doing nothing to hide his amusement. “I like the gaga to be natural.”
I rolled my eyes and took off at a jog before he could see that my face had gone straight past hot to volcanic.
Thirteen
MIDTOWN LOOKED LIKE AN OLD WAR ZONE.
And thirteen years ago I suppose war had come. In the form of wind-driven floods that used Dumpsters, vehicles, and a million other things as frontline soldiers. Some of the debris had been strong enough to take out supports and corners, collapsing parts of office buildings and high-rises. High winds had blown out windows, driving inside structures and pushing out debris.
We were entering a no-man’s-land. A place Sebastian had warned me about the very first day I spent in New 2. A place you never wanted to be once the sun went down.
Yet here we were walking down the middle of South Rampart Street at night. I seriously hoped Sebastian had a plan.
“Where are we going?” I asked in a low voice, pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“Biggest part of the ruins.” He nodded toward the high-rises. “We call it Center City.”
“You sure that’s a good idea, going into the center of the ruins?”
“We’re safer in numbers. If we stay together, we should be okay. The things here are solitary hunters, and they like solitary prey. So one trying to take down two . . . it’d have to be . . .”
“What? It’d have to be what?”
“Starving.”
“Oh, great. Perfect,” I muttered in a slightly demented voice, eyeing the dark, vacant buildings. A shiver went down my back. “I know I’m going to regret asking, but what’s out here, exactly?”
“Loups-garous, turnskins, revenants . . . Lots of things.”
“I don’t know what any of those things are.”
He tossed me a half smile. “Loups-garous and turnskins are shape-shifters who’ve gone wild. Feral. They no longer recognize anything from their human life. They’d hunt their own family if they could. ‘Revenant’ is a French word. It means returning, like returning from the dead—”
I grabbed Sebastian’s arm and stopped dead in the street. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about corpses walking around undead, like zombies?”
“Yes and no.” He seemed very quiet and completely in tune with everything around us. “Call it whatever you want, I guess. Revenants are more than undead humans. They’re soulless vampires. And before you say vampires don’t have souls, that’s a myth. Me, my mother, my grandmother, Gabriel . . . we all have souls. We were all born into this world just like humans. And the humans who are Turned, they keep their souls too; they just awake changed as a Dayborn vampire.”
“So how does a vampire lose its soul and become a revenant?”
“It happens when a vampire Turning a human screws up. If the person dies during the blood exchange, they end up reviving without a soul, and without it, they aren’t . . . right, you know? That’s why the Novem has strict rules about Turning humans. Taking a person to the brink of death, doing the blood exchange before their soul leaves their body, is an exact science. Revenants are usually a result of amateurs.”
“So why not kill them right away, when they realize?”
He was quiet for a moment as we turned onto Girod Street. Ahead, tall gray skyscrapers rose into the night sky, windows blown out, skeletons of their former selves. Our footsteps were loud, crunching over layers of debris and passing rotted-out vehicles and things that didn’t belong—a bathtub, a lone carousel horse lying on its side, a pontoon boat. . . .
“Imagine wanting to save someone you love,” he said. “Or Turning someone you love so they won’t grow old, so you won’t lose them. And it comes out wrong. How can you kill them? How can you douse them with gasoline and light them on fire? Because that’s the only way to completely kill them once they’ve risen. So their makers let them go. But like I said, the Novem is pretty strict, so there aren’t too many of them around.”
The area was so still that any noise, any occasional shuffle or metallic creak, was like thunder. Sebastian’s words were oddly depressing. There was humanity even in the creation of the walking dead. Loss. Regret. Love.
“When is the Novem going to clean up this place?”
“Who knows. Maybe never. They’ll restore the GD before they’ll ever get to this place. They send out executioners every once in a while to keep the ruins from becoming overrun, but other than that, they leave it alone.”
The street up ahead was blocked with a huge rubble pile. One side of a building had collapsed in the street, making a barrier of rebar, concrete, and glass.
“Be careful of glass and metal,” Sebastian said as we climbed over the pile at the lowest point. Everything in the ruins smelled like concrete dust and damp rot. The scent was thick and it stuck in the back of my throat. No matter how many times I swallowed, it wouldn’t go away.
The cry of the hawk echoed suddenly. “This way,” Sebastian said.
Once we made it over the debris, we crossed into the intersection with Loyola.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
From the blackness of the ruins we were being watched. Out in the open we were moving targets. Everywhere, on either side of us and above us in the tall buildings, it felt like a thousand eyes were upon us.
I turned slowly in a circle, gazing up the tall buildings of Entergy Tower and the Hyatt Regency, behind which was the Superdome.
My hand fell back onto the grip of my 9mm; curling my fingers around the cool material gave me a sense of calm. Every once in a while we heard noises, scrapes of metal, thuds, and scramblings.
“They’re following us,” I whispered, knocking shoulders with Sebastian as we crossed the street. “Why aren’t they attacking? And why the hell didn’t you bring a flamethrower?”
I wasn’t being funny—I was being desperate. How were we supposed to fight something that didn’t die until it was burned to ashes? We headed for Entergy Tower. It rose up from a base of debris, and most of the twenty-eight floors were open to the elements.
“Don’t run yet,” Sebastian said. “Just keep walking like you are. They might hesitate long enough for us to make it inside. If they attack, though, we run like hell.”
My skin was crawling. I didn’t like this, didn’t like being out in the open. My heart was pounding. I was sweating even though it wasn’t warm.
As we approached the tower, the hawk swooped down and materialized into Henri. He hadn’t even broken his movement, just fell into step next to Sebastian and immediately began giving us the stats. “Doorway is inside Entergy Tower. Eighteenth floor. East face. I was able to barricade the thing in a closet before he could disappear. It won’t hold him for long.” Our pace had picked up. “There are two turnskins, one near the Hyatt, the other near the rubble pile.” Okay, that wasn’t too bad, we could—“Three revenants. One in the parking deck, another on the roof of the tower, and the third one is coming up behind us!”
