City of Never (City of Never Series Book 1) Read online

  CITY OF NEVER

  CITY OF NEVER SERIES BOOK #1

  RACHEL HIGGINSON

  CONTENTS

  Also by Rachel Higginson

  Follow Rachel

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Follow Rachel

  Blood Spell

  Copyright@ Rachel Higginson 2022

  This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights: you are not allowed to give, copy, scan, distribute or sell this book to anyone else.

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  Any people or places are strictly fictional and not based on anything else, fictional or non-fictional.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Editing by Marion from Making Manuscripts, Jenny from Editing 4 Indies, and Karen from The Proof is in the Reading

  Cover Design by Zach Higginson

  ALSO BY RACHEL HIGGINSON

  Other Young Adult series by Rachel Higginson

  The Star-Crossed Series

  The Siren Series

  The Starbright Series

  Love and Decay

  Love and Decay: Revolution

  FOLLOW RACHEL

  Keep up with Rachel on her Substack

  Connect with Rachel on her Facebook Page

  Follow Rachel on Instagram

  To Scarlett,

  Because if any girl can save the world,

  I believe it’s you.

  ONE

  Pushing back into the corner of an alley, I willed my body to become invisible. I was covered in rags and dirt, part daily wardrobe, part disguise. The alley smelled like putrid sewage and rotting corpse, but I barely notice.

  Five years ago, the stench would have been too much. I would have run from this alley screaming and crying, and downright traumatized. But by now, I was used to the rotten smell curdling the liquids of indistinct origins all around me. I was even thankful for it. It added to my disguise and those pieces of me I couldn’t make hidden, no matter how strategic I was.

  My fingers were numb and stiff from the cold. I tucked my hands into my pockets and scanned the alley again for activity. Nothing.

  If Trebian’s information was wrong, I was going to filet him and toss his worthless body in the middle of the Platz. He promised I would see some action today. But after over an hour of waiting, my butt was sore, and my legs felt like they were being stabbed by needles. Plus, it was freezing out. Winter had taken Pax by the throat. The ancient buildings rising up on either side of me rattled with the force of the northwestern ice storm ravaging the city.

  “He won’t go out in this,” I’d told Trebian. “Nobody goes out in this.” At least not from his side of the city.

  “He will,” Trebian had insisted. “He never misses.”

  So now, my body trembled in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover from, and my layers of clothing had gathered a thick cocoon of ice, but I waited anyway. Not that Trebian wouldn’t lie to me. But I’d saved his neck last month when the Blasters came for him, and he owed me.

  I saved his life regularly, so he always owed me.

  “Argh,” I growled at nothing. “This is a waste.” I was nearly to my feet when the door I’d been watching for hours banged open, sending me back to my butt and the unforgivable ground.

  I stilled while my heart jumped into a disoriented sprint, proving it was still alive and well, even if I felt mostly frozen. Thumping music poured out of the black hole of the open door. Every few seconds, a beam of hazy red light would wave in the twilight sky of the alley, promising pleasure and a different kind of numbness than the one wrapped around my bones.

  An oafish man stepped through the space. His bare, muscled arms seemed unfazed by the temperature of the snowstorm. He scanned the alley, his eyes drifting over my hiding space without seeing it. A puff of white air escaped my lips in relief.

  He stood there, a stationary statue of bulk and bad attitude, without flinching. Hope flickered like a match strike in my shivering soul. He was waiting for someone in an alley. Either his guest wasn’t welcome through the front door—a fete in itself in the filthy, sordid pleasure clubs of Pax—or he didn’t want to be seen. Which was the more likely answer.

  And then, as if my thoughts had conjured it into existence, a glossy civil HOV pulled to a stop at the mouth of the alley, lights off, hover engines on silent. The door opened, and a decorated officer stepped out. He had his cap pulled low over his brow and his fur-lined coat draped around his shoulders, metal war pins glinting beneath the collar.

  Bingo.

  As he approached the door, I caught a second glimpse of his glittering medals in the gray haze of the sky. For once, Trebian had been right.

  The car slinked off back into traffic as the bodyguard stepped to the side and let the officer enter the club. A sly exchange of chips took place, the guard pocketing the red and gold medallions smoothly with his deceptively deft hand. The officer disappeared into the hypnotic music and red-tinged darkness without looking back. The guard stepped back inside the warmth of the club too, and the door slammed shut. The entire exchange took forty-five seconds.

  I let out a shaky breath of relief and felt the strange lift of a small smile on my cold lips. What was this feeling? Hope? A dangerous emotion in a place like this.

  But after months . . . years . . . of looking for a lead, I finally had one. That officer, addicted to the indulgence of a pleasure club, was in my territory.

  Well, technically, he was out of my reach in the recesses of that awful, corrupted place. But only for now.

  He would come back to Pax again. And next time, I would know how to get what I wanted from him.

  Sure, he showed up with a detail that was now likely circling the area, waiting for him to finish, ready to permanently eliminate any threat. And sure, a pleasure club bodyguard was on his payroll, willing to let him inside the club without putting a bullet through his head first—which meant the guard was paid well and remained reliable to protect him from someone like me, someone after his hip clip. But . . . I had a mark and time and location.

  Slipping out of the alley and into the main flow of the evening rush, I couldn’t help but smile wider. I had no idea how to do what I wanted to do. But my end goal felt closer than ever before. And that was enough.

  I pulled the hood of one of my layers tighter over my face and watched the ground as I weaved between the press of people going to or from their work shifts. Worn boots shuffled over the broken sidewalk, sidestepping the more dangerous potholes. Slick, modern clubs pulsed with
music between a bare bread shop and a run-down apartment building packed with more people than they had room for.

  Only a few cars moved around on the streets, either sputtering taxis, hoping to find anyone tired enough of the cold to waste a few chips on a ride, or newer models meaning dangerous, deadly things.

  Drug dealers, traffickers, and gunrunners were the only ones on my side of the city able to afford anything that worked properly. And even then, unless you were a gang king, you weren’t likely to waste precious chips on a car.

  I watched a sputtering taxi push through a light, the driver hanging out of the window, shouting at the slow-moving pedestrians clogging the intersection to move out of the way. For a second, I thought about sliding into the back seat. I had four chips left. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough for a cab ride back to my spot. But then I wouldn’t have anything to eat this week.

  Did I really need to eat?

  That was the question I always asked myself. Who cared about food when there was so much else to do?

  Final decision? I should have gotten in the cab. But now it was too late.

  The stillness crept over my heart like a hand reaching up from the grave. Behind me, people dashed out of the way. I felt it like a physical thing—Danger. I leapt into a run, but meaty hands clamped down on my shoulders, locking me in place. The sidewalk felt unforgivable beneath my feet, hard and traitorous.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” a gruff voice snarled in my ear.

  I sucked in a harsh, icy breath, trying to pull rational thoughts from my spinning mind.

  “With me,” the voice snarled. The troll-like hands moved from my shoulders to my biceps, steering us back toward the alley I’d just escaped from.

  Nobody looked at me as I was shoved along the crowded sidewalk, nobody acknowledged that some tremendous beast of a man was kidnapping or murdering or whatever-was-about-to-happen-ing to me, a poor innocent sixteen-year-old girl. The pedestrians hopping out of our way simply looked at the ground and pulled their hats and scarves tighter around their faces.

  “Hey!” I shouted loudly, hoping to capture someone’s—anyone’s—attention. “Let go of me!” I added quickly. Maybe all these people didn’t know this was happening against my will. Maybe they thought I was friends with this guy. Or that I enjoyed being abducted. “Help me!” I tried again, when nobody bothered to acknowledge my desperate, croaking pleas.

  Grimy fingers slammed against my mouth. “Quiet,” he snarled in my ear.

  I flinched at his hot breath against my frozen skin. His fingers smelled of metal and dirt. His fist dug into my back as he wrestled me around a corner. I gasped in pain, but his fingers were still over my mouth, cutting off my breath.

  Just when I thought to panic, realizing I couldn’t breathe, he roughly released me, propelling me into a wet bank of garbage-tainted snow.

  Flopping over like a fish out of water, I kicked my legs against nothing and sucked in another desperate breath. I kept kicking. Just in case he planned to throw his huge body on me. I didn’t have a solid plan, but I wasn’t going down without a fight. My hood fell back, and my coppery-red hair tangled in the snow, sticking to my face and clothes.

  The red hair gave him pause. He loomed over me, his eyes squinting against the bright color of my hair in the dim light of what was left of the day. “What business do you got lurking ’round my alley?” he snarled, his voice deep and unforgiving.

  I finally recognized him as the bodyguard who had been at the back door to the club. I stopped flailing like a wild woman and pushed up on my elbows, the cold, wet snow immediately saturating the thin layers of clothes I wore.

  “I-I-I thought about applying for a j-job,” I stuttered through chattering teeth I didn’t have to fake. “B-B-But I changed my mind.”

  His scowl deepened until I could barely see his black eyes. “Why didn’t you go through the front door?”

  “I was e-e-embarrassed,” I said in a humbler tone. In warmer days, I probably could have worked up a blush.

  He pushed a puff of air out of his big lips while digesting my excuse. For as rough and tough as he was, his arms were naked against the elements. I could see goose bumps rise off his skin, a sign that this nasty weather was even getting to someone as indomitable as him.

  A gray, almost invisible drone swooped down from up high, buzzing and rocking back and forth as it observed our exchange. I stared at it, hoping it had newer versions of facial recognition technology, but after just a few seconds, I quickly turned away. Facial recognition would only help me if the owner and operator of the drone worked on the other side of the wall.

  He glanced at it before returning his gaze to mine. “You got a home?”

  The softer tone to his question surprised me. “Yeah.”

  “Go back to it,” he ordered. “You’re too pretty for a place like this.”

  His words were meant to be kind—a rare, precious thing in a place like this—but they pissed me off instead. I resented being pretty. It wasn’t something I asked for. It wasn’t something I wanted.

  My mom had been pretty, and it cost her her life.

  Jumping to my feet, I shook the excess snow off my pants and flipped my hood back into place. I had a hundred things I wanted to spit at him, but it was better to get out of here than make a point. Letting my gaze linger on the back door for dramatic effect, I nodded, my chin trembling because of the cold. “Thanks, Mister.”

  “Yeah, don’t mention it,” he huffed, a suspicious edge returning to his voice. Maybe I’d overplayed the whole lost and afraid bit. “Don’t come back around here again. Got it?”

  My shoulder bumped the hard corner of the building as I shoved between him and the wall. “Got it,” I murmured noncommittally as I once again pushed onto the packed sidewalk.

  I didn’t turn around, but I could feel his harsh gaze on the back of my head as I worked my way home. Stupid. Why didn’t I just assume there would be surveillance drones watching the area? Rookie mistake number one.

  And it probably cost me the entire escape plan.

  The walls of the city—not just the real ones, but the invisible ones too—seemed to shrink around me, tighten until my lungs struggled to suck air and my bones hurt from the crush of them. Pax was my prison. My forever home. I should never have let hope wiggle in.

  Rookie mistake number two.

  I hadn’t seen any of the rest of the world, or what was left of it, but Pax seemed like it would be darker than any other place at night. Maybe the darkest place on earth—which seemed fitting.

  As I moved out of the city center, away from the Platz and toward my little corner of the dark abyss, the crowds thinned, and monuments from civilizations long ago appeared. Long, metal poles with broken glass dotted the sidewalk in even intervals. Trebian had told me they used to light up, help people see their way after nightfall.

  On the other side of the city, entire sidewalks glowed through the night. I remembered them from my childhood. Warm, soft light that made everything feel safe and familiar.

  But here, in Pax, there was no light. No stars. No moon. No city street lamps. Only darkness.

  It ate up my portion of the world like a hungry, yawning beast. It swallowed us whole and then spit us out every morning when it decided we tasted like sin and death.

  I skated silently next to the buildings, keeping cover and using the darkness to my advantage. There wasn’t safety on this side of the city, but especially not for me.

  Being a girl rarely gave anyone an advantage, but specifically on this side of the river, all alone and too hungry and cold to have any muscle for self-defense. I felt especially vulnerable tonight.

  Maybe it was the unexpected face-off with the club bouncer that left my clothes soaked and a blooming bruise along my backside. Or maybe it was the way the cold weather seemed to freeze everything, putting the entire city in an icy stillness. Or maybe it was just my active imagination.

  There was a lot I didn’t let myse
lf think about or remember, but tonight, I’d discovered a small chance of how I could go home. And it sparked something inside me that felt uncomfortably warm.

  I’d been a prisoner to Pax for five long, grueling years. I was battered, broken, hungry . . . but most of all, I was exhausted from the effort to survive. From the sweat and grit it took to stay away from the gangs and not give in to a lifestyle that promised food and warmth and a thousand different ways to die tomorrow. I was exhausted with being pretty and trying to hide it so I didn’t attract too much attention or find myself in an alley I wouldn’t be allowed to leave or trafficked as some skeevy warlord’s child bride.

  Time was a funny thing. I’d had eleven good, beautiful years. But they were nothing compared to the struggle of the past five. Time didn’t mean anything when you were suffering. Time only announced the identical days, the hours in which I lived and breathed and slept in suffering. But these five years might as well have been an eternity for how agonizing they’d been.

  Dogs barked in the distance. It sounded like a pack of them, chasing something they intended to be their supper. I picked up my pace, realizing I had forgotten to grab anything to eat for myself on the way home. I’d been too shaken up by getting caught.