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Chapter 1

There were ghosts in this place

Most kept their distance, sih the broken remnants of their tombstones One or two of the braver ones brushed ers—a caress that reached past the layers of jacket and shirt to chill hosts meant me no harm It was siain the heat and life that had once been theirs And while I knew froerous, I was not here to disturb or challenge the dead

I si

Because the person I was tracking had come from the ruined city of Carleen that lay behind us It was the very last city destroyed in a war that ht have lasted only five years but had altered the very fabric of our world forever One hundred and three years had passed since the war’s end, but Carleen had never been rebuilt No one lived there No one dared

Given that the figure had cos: Either he or she was a huood, or it was one of the two people responsible for kidnapping fourteen children froion No one else had any reason to be out here, in the ht was friend to no one but the vampires

Of course, vaht or the shadows these days The boainst huic that roa and anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their path But that was not the worst of it, because many rifts were also doorways into this world from another time or dimension Maybe even froh them—which were collectively called the Others but had been nickna on their forround

These rifts were the reason Carleen had never been rebuilt There were a dozen of theh the city’s ruins, and there was no way of predicting their movements Neither

wind nor gravitational pull had any influence on theale-force wind as they could leap upward to consuht that day—be it birds, aircraft, or even clouds Once upon a tiht in a rift meant death, but I no otherwise

Because the people responsible for kidnapping those children were living proof that rifts were survivable—although by calling the them a humanity they did not deserve Anyone who could experi short of aso in an effort to discover a ht just made them more abominable

But it wasn’t as if they could actually clained huun, as a th and speed of the shifters—but every bit of my DNA was of this world

The sa children

I’d ed to rescue five of the children but I had no idea how they were or if they’d recovered from the horrific injuries inflicted on theer etting a third chance

I continued to slip quietly through the night, following the teasing drift of footsteps Whoever—whatever—was up ahead certainly wasn’t adept at walking quietly Which suggested it wasn’t a vampire, or even a shifter The former rarely traveled alone, despite the fact that they had very little to fear at night, and the latter were night-blind Or so Nuri—as one of my former allies, and a powerful human witch—had said

I tended to believe her—at least on that point Even before the war, both shifters and humans had lived in either cities or caht towers twenty-four/seven Vampires had always been a problem—the war had just kept them well fed and increased their nu in never-ending daylight, the need for night sight would be filtered out of the DNA of all but a few throwbacks