A cold breeze hit my face as I scrambled out of the shaft, gazing around warily.
There had been a building here once. I could see the remains of steel beams and girders surrounding us, along with maybe half a wall, falling to pieces in the long yellow grass. The plaster was blackened and scorched, and charred bits of furniture—beds, mattresses, chairs—were strewn about and half hidden in the grass spreading across the floor. The tube we’d just come through was nothing more than a dark hole in the tile, hidden among the rubble and weeds. If you weren’t standing directly above it, you might never see the gaping hole until you tumbled down the shaft and broke your spine at the bottom.
“What happened here?” I whispered, gazing around at the devastation.
“A fire,” Kanin said, starting across the empty lot. He moved quickly, and I scrambled to keep up with him. “It started on the ground floor of the hospital. It quickly grew out of control and destroyed the building and most everyone inside. Only the lower levels were…spared.”
“Were you there when it happened?”
Kanin didn’t answer. Leaving the hospital ruins, we crossed an empty lot where nature had risen up to strangle everything it could get its green-and-yellow claws around. It pushed up through the once-flat parking lots and curled around several outbuildings, choking them with vines and weeds. When we reached the edge of the lot and looked back, you could barely see the hospital remains through the vegetation.
It was dark on the streets of the Fringe. Clouds scuttled across the sky, blocking the moon and stars. But I still saw everything clearly, and even more amazing, I knew exactly what time it was and how long we had until dawn. I could sense the blood on the air, the lingering heat of warm-blooded mammals. It was an hour past midnight, long after the bravest humans closed their doors against the dark, and I was starving.
“This way,” Kanin murmured and glided into the shadows.
I didn’t argue, following him down a long, dark alleyway, subtly aware that something was different, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Then it hit me. The smell. All my life, I had grown up with the smells of the Fringe: the garbage, the waste, the aroma of mold and rot and decay. I couldn’t smell any of that now. Perhaps because smelling and breathing were so closely linked. My other senses were heightened: I could hear the scuttle of a mouse, scrambling into its hole a dozen yards away. I could feel the wind on my arms, cold and clammy, though my skin didn’t respond as it should and pucker with goose bumps. But when we passed an ancient Dumpster and I felt the buzz of flies from within, heard maggots writhing through dead, rotting flesh—of an animal I hoped—I still couldn’t smell anything.
When I mentioned this to Kanin, he gave a humorless chuckle.
“You can smell, if you want to,” he replied, weaving around a pile of shingles that once belonged to a roof. “You just have to make a conscious effort to take a breath. It’s not a natural thing anymore because we don’t need to do it. You’ll want to remember that if there’s a situation where you’re trying to blend in. Humans are usually unobservant, but even they will know something is wrong if you don’t appear to be breathing.”
I took a breath and caught the stench of decay from the Dumpster. I also smelled something else on the wind: blood. And then I saw a splash of paint across a crumbling wall—a skull with a pair of red wings on either side—and I realized where we were.
“This is gang territory,” I said, horrified. “That’s the sign for the Blood Angels.”
“Yes,” said Kanin calmly.
I resisted the instinct to scramble away from him, to flee into the nearest alleyway and head for home. Vampires weren’t the only predators to roam the city streets. And scavengers weren’t the only groups to stake their territories in the Fringe. While some Unregistereds were simply thieves, bands of kids looking to survive, there were other, more sinister groups. Reapers, Red Skulls, Blood Angels: these were only a few of the “other” gangs that had carved out certain parts of the Fringe for themselves. In this world, the only law was to obey the Masters, and the Masters didn’t care if their cattle occasionally turned on each other. Run into a bored, hungry gang, and you’d be lucky if all they did was kill you. I’d heard stories of certain gangs who, after having their “fun” with a trespasser, would slice them up and eat them, as well. Urban legends, of course, but who was I to say they weren’t true? That was why venturing out of familiar territory was a bad idea at best, suicidal at worst. I knew which parts of the Fringe were gang turf and had avoided them like the plague.
And now we were walking right into their territory.
I eyed the vampire at my side. “You know they’re going to kill us for being here.”
He nodded. “I’m counting on it.”