He shoved it into the back pocket of his trousers, spied the plate of food Mariah had meant for him to eat, then took out a swath of oiled material from his bag and wrapped up the vittles. He would find a nocturnal creature outside that would appreciate the sustenance simply enough, and then after he’d lured it, he would, in turn, take the blood it offered during what Gabriel always hoped would be an uncomplicated hunting session.
Though it didn’t normally turn out that way.
He put the food into his carryall. The crucifix had stunned him for a gut-tearing few moments, but now he could move with the best of them as he stood, tracking Mariah’s scent.
It led him to a room that was lined with rickety shelves, all of which bore books. Real books, too—not the e-backs that everyone in the world read on screens. These novels and encyclopedias and almanacs had actual paper and, thanks to the thousands of vampire-heightened olfactory receptors in his nose, he could inhale to smell the battered leather and pulp.
He wondered if this had been her dad’s private room. Chaplin had mind-flashed on Dmitri Lyander last night, but the dog had blocked Gabriel from knowing deeper details, such as where Mariah’s father was now. Dead, probably, since Chaplin hadn’t been able to hide a tinge of profound sorrow that had come with the image of the pipe-smoking, mustached scientist.
Mariah, who had her back to the shelves, still maintained contact with her revolver as she faced Gabriel, a book already laid open in her other hand as she perused a page.
In spite of himself, he looked up and down the length of her: the rough boots; the low-riding cloth pants that seemed practical save for some delicate lacings up the sides; the loose white shirt she’d donned that made him imagine what might be beneath.
His incisors pushed as he listened to the cadence of her blood, and he concentrated on those bookshelves.
“Thought you were resting,” she said in her usual accusatory style.
But she’d taken him in, and because of that alone, he would cope.
“Not to worry,” he said, playing up his aw-shucks nature in the hopes that it would steal the attention away from everything else he preferred to keep under wraps, like the pulse of famished longing he felt whenever he was within range of her. “I’m pretty sure I was only temporarily weakened. But your meal just remedied that.”
“Good to hear.”
Damage control,
he reminded himself. He was determined to lea, sway from any suspicions without getting himself into more trouble by using the power of sway to distract her. She just wasn’t easily opened to him. Besides, it was altogether simpler to slip by unnoticed when he wasn’t utilizing his abilities. Simpler to fade into a groove of survival.
But, most of all, Abby had made him wonder if trading his monster in for a better self truly did improve him.
“The books,” he said, nodding at the shelves. “No wonder you’re so steeped in the Old American language. You study how everyone used to talk and you’ve kept yourself away from all the dialects out there.”
“There’re too many to keep track of, anyway.” Mariah set the book down on a crate table and turned the page, all while keeping touch with that revolver. “You speak Old American pretty naturally yourself.”
All right, so she wasn’t very distracted just yet. Like most shut-in citizens in the hubs, she was relatively focused.
Mariah didn’t even glance up from the book. Chaplin squatted on his haunches next to her, bright-eyed as he wagged his tail.
Gabriel winked at his familiar, who, in spite of his helpfulness, still retained such loyalty to his mistress. Then he addressed his hostess’s comment, which had seemed conversational, though he was under no illusion that this was anything but a continued interrogation.
“I speak Old American,” he said, “because I lived in a sanctuary in the Southblock. We cut ourselves off from society there, just as you folks did out here. There’re a lot of places that outside forces haven’t corrupted yet.”
The mention of the Southblock finally merited a glance from Mariah, probably because it was a mass of states—the remaining part of Florida that hadn’t been consumed by encroaching waters, and what used to be known as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—that had been born from chaos. They’d once tried to secede from the Union, and it was the first part of the United States that the government had officially locked down with martial law.
By then, Gabriel had already become a vampire, saved by a young, anonymous, self-appointed female with frizzy dark hair and eyes like the shine of a firebird. She’d come to him a few years after the mosquito epidemic, when he’d been, like many others, still consistently drunk off his ass after the loss of his family. But that hadn’t stopped her from continuing her personal crusade to lure every human she met into a shadowed place, where she would bite, then exchange blood with one of her “lambs” to keep them alive, because monsters had proven immune to existing diseases and were said to adapt to new conditions quickly.
At first, he was grateful for what she’d done, and to hear her whisper her intentions to him during the exchange. She’d offered hope and what he thought would be a path to sobriety in such a time of darkness, but that was before the bloodlust had really hit. Still, he’d tried to locate her that night after he’d recovered, wishing for some real guidance in this new form. When he’d been unsuccessful in that, he’d spent weeks on her trail, only to hear that she’d been caught by a government-sanctioned slayer—one of the “Shredders.” However, for some reason, this Shredder hadn’t terminated her. Gabriel would’ve known if the slayer had done it, too, because, during his initiation in that black alley, his creator had left him with a slim survival pamphlet he’d eventually destroyed because it could prove easy evidence of his preter status. He’d read the thing before getting rid of it, and at least it’d said that his maker’s termination would result in the return of his humanity.
But that hadn’t happened just yet. And even if he got his soul back, he highly doubted he’d ever get rid of his monster, something he clung to even as he wished he could cut it out of him.
Once exposed, always mentally infected, he thought.
“I’ve heard of the Southblock,” Mariah said, still in investigatory mode. “Why’d you leave?”
Because Abby had disappeared without any warning.
But he didn’t mention it, even if Chaplin sensed what was haunting Gabriel and lowered his tail, tilting his head in empathy.
“I’ve already told you why I came out to the Badlands,” Gabriel said instead. “It’s not as crowded here. The Southblock sanctuary was filling up, and I thought that’d lead to a raid all too soon. I got out before bad guys got hold of us and took what was left of what we had.”
And then he’d hunted clues from east to west, tracking rumors of one person having seen Abby, then another. The path had finally guided him out here, into the New Badlands, to this community.
With every passing second, Gabriel was itching to say Abby’s name—to ask Mariah if she’d ever seen a woman with kind brown eyes and a smile that had all but disappeared on the night Abby had discovered Gabriel wasn’t like her. But he held back, knowing his questions would only be shot down.
Even Chaplin had blocked Gabriel’s initial queries about Abby. Both mistress and companion were protective about their hidden community, about the details of their lives and those of the other Badlanders. Gabriel had the feeling they’d been burned before, yet they were only hosting him based on Chaplin’s instincts that their guest truly wasn’t there to do them any harm.
Mariah finally closed that book, but when she gripped the butt of her weapon, Gabriel knew he hadn’t passed any kind of test.
Then she fired away—just not with her revolver.
“The crucifix,” she said. “Your cold skin. Sleeping all day. Everything else about you . . .”
Too late, he spied the cover of the old book she’d been reading.
Monsters.
He would need more than damage control here. Someone like Mariah might have it in her to disable him and then turn in his body to high authority for compensation. Before monsters had been deemed “cleared away” by the government, they used to be worth decent bounty, even to a recluse.
But he’d come a long way, and it would require more than a revolver to scare him. He had taken the gamble of living among humans in the Southblock, just to follow Abby there. He had risked going outside the sanctuary when he required feeding. He had been ready to die just to be near her because being away seemed even more suicidal.
Now, in this moment of possible exposure, Gabriel forced a grin that was even more seemingly careless than before.
“Vampires?” he asked Mariah, as if her question were too amusing to pursue.
She didn’t draw her weapon, but she didn’t release it, either. Next to her, Chaplin’s eyes weren’t bright anymore as the dog watched her, as if he dreaded having to make a decision between defending his new master and helping his old one.
“Hey,” Gabriel Yo, his voice low and calm as he held up his hands in placation. It was still a better option than swaying her; that would be the worst thing to do, testing her wariness. Last night when he was injured, he hadn’t cared as much. “If I
were
a vampire, I’d daresay you’ve got the wrong weapon with you. Aren’t they supposed to be killed by stakes and the like?”
She gestured with her free hand toward the book. “Or fire or decapitation.”
“Come on, Miss Mariah. Vampires and other preternatural things are only tales. Surely you know that, even out here.”
“And that’s why they have Shredders running round?” she asked.
Even the word itself was enough to send a shiver of wariness up Gabriel’s spine.
“They say society used to have Shredders,” he said, hedging the truth. “Back in the day when paranoia was at its height. Back when there was a run on sustenance and rumors about monsters were at their peak.”
Back when the Nets had whipped people into a frenzy after offering proof of preters.
There’d been hunts, and the surviving monsters had to hide their true natures. Some, like Gabriel, even masqueraded among the humans who called preters “parasites,” which was just a dirty name for creatures who used humans for food and water. The fear was actually that the monsters would feed off mortals—who were composed of a lot of water—for secondhand sustenance and would end up extinguishing the already-threatened human race altogether.
Gabriel added, “I haven’t heard rumors of Shredders for a good while. Stories say that they ran out of work after they supposedly extinguished what monsters there were, and after regular people killed the rest off with impunity. But that’s all bullshit, if you don’t mind my candid description, Miss Mariah. Monsters were always a product of the fearful collective imagination.”
“Urban legends,” Mariah said. “Is that your take on it?”
“I have no other.”
A hard smile shaped her lips, and he wondered anew just what’d happened to make her this way.
“Where do you get your information?” she asked. “The Nets?”
The toxic Web. Years ago, it had led to the demise of newspaper journalism, giving way to bloggers who weren’t subject to the fact-checking process. Rumor had become truth and truth, rumor. In fact, real truth had seemed to die a nonresurrecting permanent death.
“I suppose,” he said, leaning back against a wall, showing he had nothing to fear, at least from a revolver, “that I picked up some commentary about monsters during my travels. You probably also heard stories about a cure for preters, and that’s another reason for the sharp drop in their supposed population.”
“If monsters exist . . .” She narrowed her eyes, as if compensating for some vulnerability in his presence. “The bad guys would use the rumor of a cure to draw out any remaining creatures. Besides, there’ve always been stories, including the one about a cure for lyncanthropy.”
It was a condition that had introduced itself in full after the mosquitoes had been dealt with. But it wasn’t the same as actually being a werewolf; it was supposed to be a product of melancholia, which ran rampant after the world had altered. Lycanthropy had accounted for a lot of the “monster rumors,” and Gabriel had been reluctantly thankful for the diversion, ev while wondering if the condition had made humans more aware of monsters—fake or real—than ever.
He continued using a calm tone while avoiding hypnosis. “The only monsters out there are the human ones.”
Mariah’s gaze wandered to a wall. But Gabriel thought that maybe she was looking beyond it, outside, where there really were monsters who only needed to be invited in.
Just as Chaplin had invited
him
.
He watched her for a moment, caught a shard of some memory cutting through her gaze that made him tilt his head.
“What happened to you?” he asked, genuinely curious. “Why did you leave the world?”
She flinched, then turned back to him and, unable to control himself for a terrible instant, Gabriel sought her gaze and peeked into her temporarily unprotected mind to hear the cries of what he thought to be loved ones.