Cade Read Online Free

be alive. They bitched about clothes and celebrities. They bitched about shit that didn’t matter. They ploughed money into building useless landmarks, yet let children and families live in squalor and poverty, and even die. Cade was glad he wasn’t Human . Whoever had bitten this boy had probably given him a chance at a better life. All he had to do was survive.
    Cade stared down at the trees and woods, dread and dismay flooding him. He could tell it was a controlled fire. “Urobach,” he muttered under his breath. He knew all too well what they were. They controlled fire. They burnt towns and communities and didn’t care who was there or who died. They burnt Others alive, whether they were innocent or not. He had seen them when he was a child. He had been hiding in one of the barns on the local farm. He wasn’t meant to be there. It was a farm for Others —Billy’s Place, they had called it. Billy had kept sheep and cows. They had been lame cattle that had been too weak and scrawny for Human consumption. Not enough to feed the greedy fat Humans . Cade had been hanging out with Stephen, and like any young boys, they had played, hunting and rounding the animals up.
    Only, Billy had suddenly been accused by Humans of stealing horses. He had had two of them, which was true. Cade and Stephen had seen them many times … but they were unwanted, frail things—too old for any use. Too slow for any need. But the real problem had been the mare. 
    Others weren’t allowed horses. To the Humans , horse meat was the gold of meat. It didn’t matter to them that the horses were useless to them. It was a matter of control and power. So, they had showed up with the Urobach then—fire demons.  He didn’t really blame the demons. The Humans controlled them, summoning and binding them with false promises of relief. What the demons—who were nothing more than children possessed by dark powers—didn’t realise was that ‘relief’, by Human standards, actually meant relieving them of their lives, or rather, the suffering, as they liked to call it.
    It wasn’t the fire that had bothered Cade at the time. It was the sounds of the animals bleating, terrified, as the fire raged. He had seen the mare, fat, her swollen belly holding her unborn foal. She had been caught inside a circle of flames, and Cade could still smell the scent of the singed fur when he brought it to mind. The mare had bucked in terror, whinnying in a desperate call for help. But Cade had done nothing. He couldn’t. He was just a boy. He had watched as she had fallen to the ground, still alive when the Urobachs got to her. There had been no mercy for her. Only death. A painful death that echoed in Cade’s mind to this day. This is what they would do to the boy—if they found him.
    Sweat beaded and rolled down Cade’s back, and he welcomed the coolness. The roar from the fire grew louder, although it was still far away. He tore himself away from the display of Human destruction and yanked the car door open. With another curse, he hastily lifted the boy and laid him on the backseat, then slammed the door shut and jumped into the driver’s seat.
    The boy murmured something unintelligible from where he lay on the backseat. “Not long,” he murmured to him. “Not long.”
    Cade forced himself not to slam his foot down on the accelerator and peel away the moment the car hummed to life But the Humans would hear that for sure, and then there would be two roasted wolves served up this evening. They’d fry them both in the car and ask questions later.
    Cade rolled the car out of the parking lot, wincing at the sound of the tyres on the gravel. But he knew his enhanced hearing was why the sounds were so loud in his mind Thank god, the Humans were as deaf as they were stupid.
    When he finally got to the road, relief was still far from him. They weren’t free just yet. He gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He kept alert, his eyes searching