Snow covered my boots. It touched the sides of my ankles, and my skin froze where it snuck under my pants. The snow had been falling pretty steady flow for an hour, which meant we were going to have to stop sooner than normal. I’d never lived in any world except this one. A lot of the people I knew, who had once existed in a time where snow wasn’t usually deadly, told me they used to look forward to something they called snow days. It got them out of having to go to school that day.

I’d have liked the chance to go to school—to learn something other than killing Vampires and Werewolves. It would have been a damned privilege. In a post-apocalyptic world, there were priorities and luxuries—math and literature didn’t factor much into my early life. Now I was twenty, and I supposed I was who I was.

The wind howled all around us. The former prince of Genesis and my current partner in crime, Micah Lyons, led us into his choice of abandoned home. It was one of the brown ones. All of the houses in wherever the hell we were looked the same to me. Maybe they were supposed to. Maybe the people who lived in them desired sameness. The same model, repeated ten times on one block. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand pre-apoc people, and I never would.

This house—the third brown one in the row—had a roof without too many holes. So there was that. I hated winter, and snow was a special kind of pain. Not that I planned to complain aloud. The whole adventure had been my idea. I wouldn’t give the perpetually happy Micah the pleasure of hearing me grumble. The man would never shut up with his platitudes in his efforts to cheer me up.

“This will do, right?” Micah entered the house first. Technically, he and I were both Warriors. That meant we had the ability, thanks to the now very dead Isaac Icahn messing with our genes, to sense Vampires and Werewolves. I wasn’t feeling any, but Micah was better at sensing them than me. I didn’t work at it. If I felt them, I felt them. If I didn’t, I didn’t. He actually took steps to enhance his abilities. I wasn’t sure why he bothered. The monsters would kill us all eventually. People like us didn’t grow old.

Micah looked around, repeating, “This’ll do, right?”

He wasn’t really asking me. In the two weeks we’d been together, I’d discovered a few things about Micah. He didn’t speak much, which was a good thing, but when he did, it wasn’t to ask permission. If Micah spoke, he’d decided on a course of action and that was what we would be doing. I’d never have chosen to take this trip, adventure, or whatever we were calling it alone with Micah if I’d had a choice. My friend Darren was supposed to come with us. Like me, he’d figured out too late that Icahn was evil. Maybe our joint stupidity was why we called each other friends. I didn’t know. I didn’t have friends, not really.

Last minute, the son-of-a-bitch had fallen in love. The great trio had become a dynamic duo. That was a Micah-ism. Not my idea.

“One place is basically the same as the other.”

“You’re in a great mood.” Micah set his pack down and started doing what he did in every abandoned house we camped within—exploring.

I really didn’t care how many bedrooms the place had or if any of the old decorations remained in someone’s room. Micah must have elected to come because he wanted to remember the past. I was here because there had to be a future.

We had to have a future, because otherwise, what was the point?

Micah and I had very different backgrounds. He’d actually been born a long time before, then placed in stasis by a madman to survive the Vampire uprising—a disaster caused by the same damn madman’s meddling with viruses. His mind had been tweaked so he didn’t remember any of it. Except eventually, he and everyone else who went through the same mind-screw had remembered.

As for me, I’d been born in a Vampire prison where the vamps bred us to be their food supply. The same dude who screwed with Micah’s head did the same to mine at one point, but all of that was after Rachel Clancy rescued me from the Vamp menu.

I knew enough pop culture from Micah’s time, thanks to the brain screw, that I could talk a bit with the others but not enough to know why all these houses were frickin’ brown.

Slumping on the floor of the living room, I pulled better socks out of my pack. If my pants pushed up again tomorrow in the snow, these socks would better suit the situation. I couldn’t decide which I hated less: being wet or being cold.

Micah descended the stairs, taking them two at a time, which meant he felt better about the soundness of this structure than I did. I wouldn’t have been so easy on those stairs. The whole structure might come down around us if we weren’t careful.

It had happened before. Clancy fell through a roof and two floors before Darren and I managed to save her earlier in the year.

Micah plopped down next to me. “So you’re in a mood.”

“I’m not in a mood.” I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, bro, you are.” He elbowed me then pulled out his cards.

Maybe I should have thanked him for bringing the fucking cards. I wouldn’t. But maybe I should have. I wasn’t that good of a player and didn’t know all the games he did, but they certainly helped to pass the nights. I tugged out a small lantern from my pack and lit it. The device offered only low light, not something easily seen from outside of a house, and we always took care to keep it away from windows. If need be, we’d blow it out. Fortunately for us, we’d feel the monsters and know to go into complete blackness. It didn’t, however, give off any heat. We’d be freezing until we climbed into our sleeping bags.

“We should have left in the springtime.”

Micah nodded. “We would have if my parents hadn’t needed me to stay to help with the rebuild of the river flow. And then there was the flu that took out half the agricultural community. This coldness is on me and bad frickin’ luck.” He shrugged. “But then again, since we mean to stay away from Genesis for the next couple of years, or until you get over Rachel Clancy Lyons, we were going to hit winter at some point. We’re getting the pain over early. And I’d like to point out that we’d made great time until it started snowing. I’ve never been this far west. Have you?”

I’d been north—way up north saving Clancy—but never this far west. “No. I spent most of my life underground, remember?”

“So did I. Well, this part of my life.” Micah dealt the first round of cards. I had a pair of twos. We didn’t have anything to bet except small bits of chocolate. One thing I’d give to Micah, he knew how to budget his food. I wasn’t going to have to worry about him running out before me. We’d both agreed before it was dire, we’d hunt. We were good at it.

He was annoying, but he was smart. I appreciated that quality, if nothing else.

“I don’t have to get over Rachel.” Not exactly sure why I felt the need to defend myself. Yet, there it was.

He rolled his eyes. “Sure you do. She married my brother. She’s probably pregnant, and you believed you’d be the last man standing. Don’t deny it. If you’d just held on long enough, Jason and Chad would’ve taken care of themselves. Chad already died once, and came back. That had to suck for the game plan. And Jason did eventually take himself out of the game by being too much Werewolf. But… Chad, he came back.”

I bet my two pieces of chocolate. “Thanks for the recap. It’s not like I was there or anything.”

I’d also been fully aware of the second I officially lost my chance. Even after the oldest Lyon prince came back from the dead with help from the madman’s now defunct cloning machine, I’d had a chance. I was Rachel’s best friend, even more so than Micah. She would have come around to see we had more in common and more of a future than she’d ever have with a Lyons guy. After, I ended up on the wrong side of the fight, and Keith got killed.

Her favorite teacher, murdered by Isaac Icahn, while I stood right behind the now-dead Keith on a view screen. It was all over then. The shittiest part was I’d really, really liked Keith. I’d never get over his death either or the role I played in it by believing Icahn, even after Rachel told me he was evil.

I just hadn’t liked how my part in the world was featured if her version of reality was true. I preferred the fiction I’d been fed. I liked my role better. I’d responded by basically being a douchebag. No other defense or excuse required.

Micah raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t kill him.”

My thoughts were my own, and I wasn’t that easy to read, so he could screw himself. “Bet or show.”

He smirked, throwing in two pieces of chocolate. “She was in love with me first.”

Now he just egged me, and we both knew it. Micah wanted to get a rise out of me tonight, but it was too cold for me to tell him to screw off. I didn’t feel like finding another house. Why did he always have to dig at this old wound?

“She was. She loved me for years and years. Even before, in the world before the Vampires, she flirted with me while she dated Jason. I was her love first.”

“Yeah, hers and every girl in Genesis over the age of sixteen. Isn’t that kind of your thing?” He wasn’t the only one who could do recent history conversations. “Make them fall in love with you then not return their feelings?”

Micah narrowed his eyes. “Maybe we should stop this.”

“Yeah, probably.” Look, he could take a hint.

The thing with Rachel, I’d been so damn certain we were meant to be, like so ridiculously sure. She’d shown up in the darkness. I’d been slated to die. I was such a pain in the ass to the Vampires they didn’t even want to feed on me anymore. They’d put me in a cage then they would have dropped me into a pit filled with their sick and weak. I’d have been overwhelmed simply by the sheer numbers. I’d known it was coming, having seen the ritual hundreds of times since birth. She’d appeared with Jason’s father, Andon. I hadn’t known him personally, but I’d recognized him as a Wolf. I’d always had an awareness of them, even before Icahn enhanced it in me.

She hadn’t run off with him. She’d stayed and fought for me when I’d been a complete stranger. I’d believed she was meant for me. That the way we met had to have meant something. Fate or some shit like that. As it turned out, I was a complete idiot.

A flash of light appeared in the barren night. Micah and I saw the illumination at the same time and jumped to our feet. I blew out our lantern, and we rushed to the window. Some distance away, someone had lit a fire.

The sick prickles of Werewolf awareness moved through me. I gritted my teeth. I loathed the sensation. Glancing sideways, I met Micah’s equally tense expression.

“Should I be worried we saw the light before we felt it?”

Micah nodded. “I don’t love it. There is that risk. Now that Icahn is dead and not infusing us with whatever, we’ll lose the extra sense. We could just be normal humans.”

“Normal, lethal humans who know how to fight monsters. Someday they’ll kill us. But not today.”

Micah laughed. I wasn’t being funny, but whatever.

“We have two choices,” he said, staring out the window. “We stay in here, cold but covered, and wait out the night. Hope they’re gone in the morning. Hope more of them don’t show up. Hope we get away unnoticed. Hope they don’t smell us. Hope…”

I held up my hand. “You know I don’t hope.”

“Then we should get our gear back on, make sure our machetes are ready, and go kill us some Werewolves tonight.”

Hunting was one way to keep us warm. The only good Werewolf was a dead Werewolf. Underground, with the Vampires always needing to use or kill us for food, the Werewolves had enforced the Vamp’s law. They’d all been under the direction of Isaac Icahn, at least in our little area of the world.

Werewolves were nasty. They killed at will then pretended to be human, which made them worse in my book. At least the Vamps looked like monsters they were, no pretense.

I couldn’t make the ones who had hurt me pay. But I could take my frustration out on all Werewolves I met from now on. One good thing about being away from Rachel was that I didn’t have to try to make nice anymore. Although now they’d tried to kill her, I doubted she remained one of their biggest fans either.

Not that I’d ever get the chance to ask her. After I’d brought her back to Chad, I hadn’t lingered. With Keith dead, and everyone knowing my part in it, I’d made myself scarce. I’d never see her again, much less get a chance to ask Clancy if she liked Werewolves still. When I left Genesis, I knew in my heart I’d never return.

Why should I stay in a place where everyone hated me? My family was still there—the ones we’d rescued—and they seemed happy. My days in Genesis happyville were done.

There had to be more to this world than what I’d left there. More people. More stuff. More adventures. More chances to start again. More fucking everything.

For tonight, however, there were monsters to eliminate. That could be my gift to the world. Fewer Werewolves and Vamps to contend with. I planned to enjoy every second of it.

With nothing but the light of their fire to guide us, Micah and I walked quietly through the snow. They had great noses and ears and would likely know we were coming long before we wanted them to. It was possible to sneak up on a Werewolf but not in our current conditions. The wind didn’t favor us. It would bring our scent straight to them. Unless there was something going on we didn’t know about, they weren’t going to be particularly distracted.

A cry carried on the night air, and it took me a second to recognize it as a woman’s. Micah and I looked at each other before we abandoned any pretense of stealth and ran. It wasn’t a howl. This late at night, even without the Full Moon, the Werewolves would howl. That was a human, and she needed help

We reached the fire just in time to see a woman trying to fend off three Werewolves while wielding a stick. What was she even doing there? She didn’t have a coat, and her shoes weren’t made for snow. She wore a nightgown.

“Give my brother back, you beasts,” she hollered, striking at them with her stick.

That was when I saw the kid. Not dressed for the elements, he stood in a sack like device, and it probably protected him pretty well from the snow. The fire the Wolves build was also keeping him warm. Still, the boy cried and shivered. He couldn’t have been more than two. “Help. Wolfies.”

The biggest of the filthy beasts laughed. “Our Alpha’s mate hungers for children.” They were so unconcerned with our presence they hadn’t even shifted.

Huh.

We weren’t near Genesis anymore. Maybe these asshats didn’t know they should be afraid of us. Maybe they’d never encountered Warriors before.

Well, I’d wanted to have a good time. This could turn out to be better than what I imagined other people’s birthdays were like. Not that I knew when mine was.

My machete wouldn’t fail me. Micah would use his without hesitation as well. Keith had taught us how to fight. We were good at it. In Genesis, we’d been like a well-oiled machine. We got the job done.

I swung and took the head off the Wolf right in front of me. The moment slowed and seemed to elongate. In the split second before my blade connected with his throat, with his gaze fixed on my machete, his eyes widened with realization of what was about to happen. Indecision held him rigid. Run? Shift? Run and Shift? Shift and Fight? Too bad he’d never complete the thought.

Micah dispatched his guy with equal swiftness.

The third Werewolf had time to witness both slaughters. He shifted, which was unfortunate. They were much easier to kill not in wolf form. I ducked when he swiped at me and ran behind him when he lunged at Micah. As prepared as we were, a giant Werewolf was still a thing of beauty in its ability to kill. One swipe of his claw and he could cut us in half.

I’d seen it too many times.

I jumped on top of him. The Wolf actually oomphed before the two of us started to wrestle in the snow. I was enormously grateful I’d put on my better socks to manage the snow.

Our struggle for control didn’t last long. With a swish, Micah took off its head.

I had a headless, dead Werewolf on top of my beaten up body. For a second, I just let myself lie in the snow and breathe, grateful I still could. If there had been even one more Wolf, we’d have been dead. End of story. Goodnight world.

“Dead?” Micah stared down at me.

“You wish.” I pushed the Wolf off then climbed to my feet. Every one of my joints screamed that I had to be more than twenty years old. Oh, who was I kidding? Twenty was old in our world. Only in my fake memories were twenty-year-olds young and carefree.

I scanned the area around the fire to make sure we had no others coming after us. The woman and her brother shivered against a tree. After a second of study, I could make her out pretty well thanks to the fire. She looked our age. That would be my guess, although to know for certain in the dark, even with the red embers glowing, was hard. She had long, blond hair that fell past her shoulder. Her face was lean with high cheekbones and a pert nose that turned upward at the end just a little bit. I wasn’t short at six feet tall, and she was almost my height. She was thin but looked strong, which she’d have to be to survive out here. Her brother was tiny, and she held him to her fiercely.

How the Werewolves got him was a question I wasn’t sure I’d get an answer to. Just because we all fought the Werewolves didn’t make us friends, just strangers with death wishes.

“Hello,” Micah called out. He was the perfect person to address her. Girls loved Micah and tended to end up hating me.

She nodded, her gaze traveling from Micah to me to Micah again. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I answered. The night was cold, the Werewolves dead, and I wanted to go back to the stupid brown house before my aching body really started to throb. “I’m Deacon. This is Micah.”

She nodded again, looking at the ground. “I’m Lydia. This is Charlie. He’s terrified or he’d say thank you.”

“Well, he’s welcome, too,” Micah said, grinning at her. I waited for the swoon. They all swooned for Micah. We all had a moment of silence before Micah spoke again. “What happened?”

She sucked in their breath. “They took him. Mama’s sick. Daddy’s missing. I couldn’t let him go. Wouldn’t. I know it’s stupid. Once they have someone, you don’t get them back. But…” Her voice shook, and she closed her mouth. I nodded at her, hoping she’d understand that I got how hard this was. It sucked to be put on the spot. “I don’t intend to lose anyone else to them. It’s so hard.”

“You’ve lost others?” I stepped toward her, wanting to know if her eyes were blue or green in the firelight. They were blue and huge. Fuck me, they were beautiful.

“Hasn’t everyone? That’s what Werewolves do. They pick and pick and pick. You never know why or who. And then it’s over.”

Crickets sounded in the night air. Shouldn’t they be dead? It was winter. Didn’t everything die in the cold? “Wherever you’re from, the Werewolves hurt you guys regularly?”

Why wasn’t Micah weighing in on this? Had he lost his voice?

Lydia clutched Charlie tighter. “Of course.”

“Well, not any longer.” What the hell was I saying? It was like I lost all control of my mouth. “We can help.”

Micah turned to look at me straight on. Maybe he’d refute me, get me out of whatever misfire in my brain had me giving Lydia promises I had no business making. Instead, he lifted his eyebrows. “Sure. We can help. Why the hell not?”

Shit. “Look, Lydia—”

“How did you do it?” She pointed at my machete on the ground. “I mean, those tools surely helped. But you leaped on it. That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. Can you teach me? Others? I mean, you made it look like it was possible to fight them. You must have done this before.”

Micah slapped my shoulder. “That’s our Deacon. The bravest guy you’ll ever know. How far is your camp from here?”

“Camp?” She blinked then pointed west. “My town is a distance that way.” We would have run into them in the morning. “You’d be more than welcome. Generally, the elders don’t take to strangers, but the Werewolves are getting worse and worse. There’s hundreds of them it seems. You saved Charlie.” Why was she looking at me and not Micah? “They’ll be so glad to have you. And honestly, if you don’t come, they’ll never believe me about what happened here tonight. You did do it. You killed those beasts.”

We had.

Hundreds of them? Lydia grinned, and I smiled back. Maybe I had a concussion… women didn’t smile at me. Hell, most women didn’t even notice I was there—especially when Micah was present.

Yep. Had to be a concussion.