Chosen by Fate Read Online Free PDF

other was gone.
    As if they didn’t trust her to be alone.
    Wraith shook her head, an ugly jeer twisting her expression. Apparently, blowing herself up and rushing into a room filled with toxic gas had been too much to take, even when she’d had no other choice. In doing the first, she’d gotten the team inside the North Korean compound that housed the vamp antidote. And in doing the second, she’d saved both Caleb and Mahone. But instead of high-fiving her for her bravery and quick thinking, Lucy and Caleb obviously thought she was suicidal.
    The thought instantly sobered her.
    If they only knew.
    “. . . felines are a menace to you and your children. Their very nature has ensured they’re more animal than not.”
    Words drifted toward Wraith from the other room. She left the bathroom and walked up to the TV. The local news was playing, broadcasting the most recent rant by Harry Jenkins, pulpit leader and Otherborn basher. None of the Others, however—not even the vampires—got as much heat from Jenkins as the felines did. Given the fact that a feline betrayed and delivered Wraith into the hands of a sadist, Jenkins’s vendetta against the race shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did. The man was a smallminded bigot who lived to spread misinformation and fear. No matter what her past was, she judged individuals by their actions, not their DNA. At least, she tried.
    “. . . are controlled by their urge to fornicate, and they don’t care who it’s with—man, woman, child.”
    At Jenkins’s words, Wraith snorted and angrily punched the power button on the TV so the screen went blank. Another second of listening to that stuff, and she’d be tempted to track the man down and make sure he never made such ridiculous statements again. Because racial hatred against one Otherborn race ultimately spread to the others; even if Wraith, as a dead human, wasn’t technically an Otherborn, she’d probably faced more judgment and discrimination than any of them.
    She returned to the bathroom, stared into the mirror once more, and considered the havoc Jenkins could wreak if he knew that wraiths, the creatures who’d been granted a second chance at life, and an immortal one at that, came with an expiration date.
    In Korea, she hadn’t yet seen any changes, but the possibility had been there. Now she knew it was more than a possibility.
    Raising a steady hand to her face, she smoothed a finger over her hairline, where her bluish-hued skin normally met stark white hair. Today, her hair was longer—no longer spiky so much as shaggy—and was showing a hint of color: faint, dark root that no one else would ever notice.
    But she saw it. And she knew exactly what it meant.
    She was changing, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore the timing. Thirty-eight days ago had been the tenth anniversary of her “die day,” or, as most wraiths called it, the day of her transitioning. She was the oldest known wraith in America, and like the few that had come before her, she was about to meet her fate.
    It wasn’t until after the War, when they’d begun cohabitating in their compound in Maine, that the wraiths had realized their numbers were dwindling. An odd thing for immortals. One wraith had noted something interesting—that the “ability” for wraiths to die seemed to have only one thing in common: Dying only happened between a wraith’s tenth and eleventh transition year, after a wraith started to regain more and more physical human traits. Of course, when that theory had been developed, Wraith had already abandoned Maine for the familiarity of Los Angeles. She’d still heard the rumors, though. Then she’d seen it for herself—a wraith she’d met only once before, one who was several years older than herself, and thus would have been almost eleven years old in wraith life, dead, lying in the back alley of a Texas bar, blood seeping out of her wounds. She’d accepted the rumors for what they were