the Thirsters gone to ground, sleeping in the sewage tunnels beneath the city according to Issa, but groups of Mixen and Scorpio were out roaming the streets as if they owned the place – which he guessed they did now.
It made Lucas wonder if there were any resisters. Where had all the Shifters gone? Some must have escaped out of the city – surely? They couldn’t all be dead. He struggled, trying to remember what lay beyond the city limits. Wasn’t it just water? Weren’t all the realms just versions of the human world crossed with an environmental disaster? The Shadowlands a lunar wasteland, the Shifter realm covered ninety-nine percent in water, the Thirster world sunk in as much darkness and cloud as a nuclear winter, the Mixen and Scorpio realms competing for position of fewest natural resources. Only the Sybll had a realm worth living in. The only reason the Originals had chosen the human realm to move into next was the food source. It helped when your prey couldn’t see you coming. But that realm too would succumb eventually.
‘It’s just up ahead,’ Issa said as they rounded a street corner.
Things here were familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The sidewalks were almost identical to sidewalks in LA – cracked paving slabs, weeds sprouting in the gaps – but when you stopped to look more closely, you noticed something was off with the picture, like one of those spot-the-difference quizzes that appeared in trashy magazines and kid’s colouring books. It took a while before you saw it. The sidewalks were wider and the roads were narrower. There were no cars in this realm – people shifted into faster-moving animals or birds if they wanted to get somewhere. And there were signs everywhere along the street but not the usual traffic signs or pedestrian crossing signs. These signs had pictures of animals on them and were designed to show where shifting was permitted and where it wasn’t. All across the city were warning signs forbidding shifts into any animal deemed a danger to the public, or at least that’s what Lucas figured the picture of a lion with a red line bluntly crossed through it meant.
Issa ducked into the shadow of an apartment building, pulling him with her. They stared across a wide, empty plaza at a building that looked a little like a courthouse – sandstone-coloured bricks, Grecian-style columns and well-worn stone steps leading to an ornate double door. It was the only building on the street still in one piece, without boarded-up windows or broken glass or scorched patches of sidewalk outside it.
‘That’s where the gateway opens up?’ Lucas asked, frowning at the incongruity of it.
‘Yes,’ Issa answered.
‘How many inside?’ Lucas asked, his gaze taking in the windows and roof, trying to figure out the best way in.
Issa’s eyes whited over. Lucas waited.
‘Three Mixen and a Shadow Warrior.’
‘And on the other side of the gateway?’
He waited while Issa read the situation. A frown line deepened between her eyes and then they suddenly flashed open, filled with horror. She gasped as though surfacing from freezing water, her hands clawing desperately at his arm.
‘What is it? Issa? What?’ Lucas asked, grabbing her by the shoulders, feeling her panic invading his own body.
‘It’s Flic. And Jamieson,’ Issa choked, her voice a ragged whisper. ‘They’re right on the other side. You need to go. Now!’ Her face was a mask of terror.
Lucas didn’t stop for a moment to think. He just ran, leaving Issa standing there.
He faded as he sprinted across the open square in front of the building, drawing his blade as he ran, ignoring the sharp throbbing in his side from his stab wound and the blood pounding against his skull like an anvil. All his focus was on the building up ahead.
He leapt up the steps and threw his weight against the door, smashing through it with a splintering crash. Straight away he found himself in a high-ceilinged lobby. The three Mixen on sentry duty flew to their feet in panic, spinning in wild, confused circles as they tried to see him. They jabbed at the air in front of them with their blades.
Lucas moved fast. He slid on his knees beneath the whirling arms of the first Mixen and sliced him pelvis to throat, before leaping to his feet to finish off the second with a single slash across the jugular. She went down in a spray of red. Droplets landed on Lucas’s hands and he felt