Warped World (Pack of Outcasts #3)

Chapter 1

Periwinkle

Ipride myself on being able to look on the bright side of almost every situation. But there really is no way to put a positive spin on a gigantic tidal wave of shadow energy crashing over an entire city.

I stand there gaping next to my colleagues, watching the filmy darkness churn amid the buildings half a mile away. The murk courses from the ground all the way up to the sky beyond the tops of the tallest skyscrapers, including the once-gleaming, now-dimmed Diamond Victory Tower.

My jaw hangs slack. My mind seems to be stuck in a loop that can only declare, Bad, bad, bad.

Good job stating the obvious. What the heck are we supposed to do about this massive badness?

After what feels like hours—but is probably only a few seconds, since I don’t think I’ve even blinked—a flood of emotion rebounds from the crash.

Even from all that distance away, a slurry of acid-sharp panic and rancid-banana-peel distress smacks into me from the hundreds of thousands of humans living in the city.

I jerk out of my shock with a yelp. Words start tumbling off my tongue without consulting my brain—which is probably fair considering my gray matter wasn’t being much use anyway.

“We have to help them! Whatever that stuff from the rift is, it’s scaring people—hurting them. They have no idea what they’re dealing with.”

“And we do?” Hail mutters in his typical cool tone, but the winter fae draws his slim frame straighter at the same moment. “How the fuck does a rift grow like that? How the fuck does it collapse?”

Rollick, the demon who’s been running our now-a-gazillion-times-more-complicated mission here, lowers his phone from his ear and shakes himself into action.

“It isn’t just here. At least two of the other strange rifts have just collapsed in the same way—but neither of those are affecting more than a few humans.

Luckily they were a lot farther from any area of civilization. ”

He jabs his hands this way and that to direct his assistants, his light brown hair rippling with a thrum of his supernatural power.

“Let’s get in there! Stay discreet, but move the humans and other mortal creatures out of any affected areas you can.

If you start to feel any significant effects, back off and take care of yourself first. And watch for any signs that might tell us what we’re dealing with. ”

Despite his take-charge attitude, tension winds through his tone and wafts off him in bitter trickles. Rollick is the most powerful shadowkind I’ve ever met, thousands of years old, but I think this problem might be too big and bad even for him.

His phone starts ringing again. He glowers at it as if he dreads answering.

As he lifts the device to his ear, Jonah sweeps his well-muscled arm toward the rest of us. “Come on, team.”

Our sorcerer sprints toward the nearest van. It’s a good thing the human among us moved fastest, because he’s the only one out of our group of five who can drive that thing.

As he dives behind the steering wheel, my other three men, a few of Rollick’s assistants, and I leap into the shadows to dart after him. I’m vaguely aware of Sorsha and her men racing to their strange RV and of the shadowbloods who’ve been working alongside us dashing to another of the vans.

I tumble into the back space of Jonah’s van and pop back into physical form to gasp out, “We’re all in!”

Jonah guns the engine before I’ve gotten more than the first word out. With a slam of the gas and a sway of his wavy black hair, he jerks the vehicle around and peels down the highway toward the city.

The rest of my teammates solidify around me. Raze wraps a brawny arm around my petite but pudgy body as if shielding me from the hazards of speedy driving. His eyes have narrowed, ominous even with the green contacts covering his naturally pure-black basilisk irises.

“Is part of the shadow realm coming right through into the mortal realm?” he asks. “How could that even happen?”

On the bench across from us, Mirage flicks his fox ears from his bright red hair. “Mix and match. Let’s hope it doesn’t hatch!”

He grins at his rhyme with a flash of his canine fangs, but his golden-brown face looks tight. I don’t think the playful fox shifter can see any more of an upside to the current development than I can.

The strange rift that was sending warped creatures out into the mortal realm was already bigger than any I’d ever seen, but even then it was only about the size of a house. Its sudden growth spurt blew it out thousands of times bigger—and made it lose its balance along the way.

Remembering its dark face toppling over onto the city sends a shudder down my spine.

“What matters the most is making sure everyone gets out of the mess!” I declare. “Then we can worry about what the mess is made of.”

Hail gives me a teasing poke of his elbow where he’s materialized at my other side. “Spoken like a true cream puff.”

The nickname is only affectionate now, holding none of its previous disdain. But when the winter fae glances toward the front of the van, his skin turns even paler than usual alongside a wobble of lemon-jelly uncertainty.

I can taste my teammates’ emotions even more easily than any other beings’ thanks to the glowing marks I accidentally blazoned onto all of their chests, which thankfully we’ve all ended up agreeing are a welcome addition. None of us are feeling all that confident right now.

Hail’s gaze slides back to me, butterscotch-sweet fondness drizzling over his anxiety. “Don’t rush in too fast, Peri. We’ll all help, but we should stick together. And we need to pay attention to our bodies—if the mess starts weakening us, we have to get out before it does any real damage.”

The tenderness the normally icy man now offers me leaves me a little giddy even in the midst of a catastrophe. I lean my head against the side of his shoulder. “We’ll all watch out for each other.”

With a squeal of the tires, Jonah brings the van to a stop. He peers through the windows, his stance rigid. “I think we need to go forward from here on foot.”

Hopping out of the van, I can’t argue with his decision. A wall of the hazy darkness drifts up from the road just a few feet from where he parked. It stretches as high as I can see, turning the structures on the other side wavery as if we’re looking at them through murky water.

Murky water that’s not actually water, that we need to dive into if we’re going to rescue the people within it from drowning. Or whatever it’s actually doing to them.

A thrum of dissonant energy radiates down from above. I squint at what I can see of the sky through the haze. “Is the rift still up there? I thought it… broke.”

Could it have bounced off the ground and up to the clouds, vomiting shadows as it went, like some horrifying trampoline act?

Does that mean it’s going to spew out even more of this murky mess?

Raze’s muscles ripple uneasily. “I can sense it too. I guess it didn’t totally collapse, then?”

Hail scowls. “Is that better or worse than if it did?”

None of us can answer that question.

I swallow hard and gather all my gumption. “The mortals have even less idea what’s going on than we do. Let’s get to them fast.”

I stride forward, ignoring the initial pinches of pain that prickle through my feet and ankles. My companions hustle after me.

Stepping into the murk feels like walking into a shower of cold porridge—and feels about as comfortable as that sounds. Even lukewarm porridge would be an improvement. Add a little maple syrup—

My thoughts scatter with another swell of frightened emotion from the city’s inhabitants.

I keep walking on as fast as the porridgey sensation allows, peering through the haze at the buildings we’re passing and checking my leather-jacket-and-sundress clothed body to make sure the unpalatable breakfast isn’t eating me.

My nerves keep jittering with the same sort of unnerving push-pull vibe that emanated from the rift before it graduated from slightly-larger-than-usual portal to city-swallowing void.

One positive: the rift’s massive growth spurt seems to have diluted the effect a little, so the sensation is more like it tickling my skin than nibbling into it.

I’d still rather be eating warm maple porridge.

The structures we pass don’t look all that pleased to be encased in the shadowy sludge either.

Lampposts and telephone poles lean at odd angles; a couple are doing their best Superman impressions floating sideways off the ground.

Some windows look as if they’re dripping into the walls that are supposed to be holding them.

Rooftops undulate like they’re ready to send ships off to sea.

“Row, row, row your boat,” Mirage murmurs in his singsong voice, and shivers. “Everything’s gotten muddled.”

That includes some of the living beings.

We pass a few humans lying sprawled in the street beyond rescuing, one whose leg has migrated to his chest and is stretched upright like he’s in the middle of a synchronized swimming routine, another who appears to have misplaced her hair on the soles of her sneakers.

A stray dog lope-hobbles past, its limbs drifting in a slow merry-go-round along its torso, one ear dribbled to its chin.

That animal is still less weird than the shadowkind creatures roaming between the buildings.

A scaly-winged pelican with sharklike teeth swoops down at us, forcing Raze to punt it away.

Something I’d think was a kangaroo if its skin wasn’t translucent and glisteningly wet—and if it didn’t have three bat wings unfurling down its back—thumps by.

There are other people nearby, though—people who are alive. Their terror washes over me in waves from all around.