Another Kind of Dead

Chapter Three

Sprite-Jaron was an orange crystal-encrusted woman who barely came up to my waist. Jaron’s human avatar, besides being male, had the height and bulk of a professional wrestler, which made him an ideal bodyguard for Amalie’s avatar. It did not make him ideal for being dragged across the floor to the sofa. Even with Wyatt and me, it took several minutes to get him there. Jaron stayed quiet, grimacing but making no noise, even though he had to be in agony.

We finally gave up on the couch and left him on the rag rug that covered the area nearest the sofa. While Wyatt closed and locked the door, I fetched a couple of towels from the bathroom. I put one beneath his head and pressed another over his wounds. That’s when he cried out.

“Who did this?” I asked, trying to ignore the streak of blood that stretched from his feet to the door.

“Goblin,” he rasped. “I think.”

He thinks? Goblins were pretty damned easy to pick out of a crowd. “Why did it attack?”

“Don’t know.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. His brown eyes were wide, pained, unfocused. “Earth Guardians attacked. I left First Break. Situated myself here. Left my apartment. It stabbed me with … its hand.”

“Its hand?” Goblins had sharp claws, but not long enough to inflict the kind of damage done to Jaron’s abdomen.

“Fingernails, like small knives. Too long.”

Just the mental image of that made my stomach roil.

“Why come here?” Wyatt asked, kneeling on the other side of Jaron. “How did you know Evy was alive?”

Jaron rolled his eyes toward Wyatt. “Amalie knew. Gifted who are in her true presence … she can sense their aura. Their tether to the Break. She can sense you both.”

Creepy and cool. Wyatt and I had both spent time in Amalie’s true presence, seen her as she really was and not just in her human avatar. The aura thing was new information, but I really knew little about sprites and their ways with the Break. She knew I hadn’t died last Saturday, and she also, apparently, hadn’t shared that intel with the Triads. Interesting.

“But why here?” Wyatt persisted.

Jaron groaned. Blood gurgled up his throat, into his mouth, and down his cheeks. He coughed, dim eyes searching. I squeezed his shoulder and leaned in, desperate to know what had driven the sprite to drag a dying man to our little corner of Hell. His head listed toward me, but he didn’t seem to see.

“Jaron, please, tell us,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not … betrayal.” The words were barely intelligible. I leaned closer, missing most of his whispers. “Don’t … trust …” His eyes flared white, the briefest flash of the power of the Fey possessing his body. Then the light went out. His body stilled.

“Jaron? Fuck.” I rocked back on my heels, stunned. Why did they always die before they finished saying what needed to be said?

Wyatt checked his pulse and found none. We didn’t even know the man’s real name—the man who gave his body over to the will of a powerful sprite whenever she needed to walk among humans and was none the wiser. The man who died because someone had been sent to kill Jaron in her most vulnerable state.

“Betrayal,” Wyatt said. “But who’s betraying who?”

“She said she came here after the trolls attacked.” Or were attacked—either way, she had to be referencing the earlier earthquake. “Could they have turned on the other Fey? Maybe she was going to give that information to the Triads.”

He shook his head. “Then why come to us after being stabbed? Why not call the brass or one of the Handlers?”

“I don’t know.” I thought of how the avatar’s eyes had flashed, glowed that brilliant white at the moment of death. Just the avatar’s death, or … “Wyatt, if a sprite’s avatar dies while the sprite still possesses it, what does that do to the sprite?”

His eyes widened. “I have no idea. I don’t know enough about avatars to even guess.”

My stomach twisted as the implications caught up with me. Had Jaron come to the city to tell us something important about a betrayal? One so big she’d dragged her wounded avatar across town to find us, only to die before giving up anything useful? Possible. Horrifying, but possible. And who the hell was the man/goblin/thing with the clawed hands? Except for certain shape-shifters, I didn’t know of any other nonhuman species capable of manipulating their bodies like that.

“Amalie knows I’m alive,” I said. “She must have sent Jaron to contact us, which means that whether Jaron’s alive or dead, Amalie will know something went wrong. Maybe she’ll try to contact us again, some other way.”

“Let’s hope.” He dug beneath the dead man’s behind and retrieved a billfold. Some cash fell out when he flipped it open. “Jed Peters is the name on the driver’s license. He lives five blocks from here.”

“I would have pegged Jaron for picking a Parkside East type for her avatar.”

“They need humans with open minds, who willingly believe. They’re probably a lot more cynical on the other side of the river.”

“Good point.” I pulled the folded towel from beneath Jed Peters’s head and draped it over his face, then stood up. “So a dead body decorating the living room certainly adds a new wrinkle to today’s plans.”

“I’d say it’s less a wrinkle than a big damned bump.” He snagged one of the other towels and started wiping the blood off the floor, cleaning up the smear that led to the door. There’d be blood in the hall, too. Peters/Jaron had probably left a trail of it all the way from his apartment. Five blocks to here.

Wyatt mopped closer to the door. I watched him, uneasy, instinct telling me what my mind wouldn’t.

“The goblin with the claws he told us attacked him,” I said, trying to process it out loud. Hoping for a clue.

“What about it?” He reached up from his half crouch and flicked the door lock open.

“Jaron didn’t say she fought it off, just that it stabbed her and she came to us.”

He paused, turned his head, and looked at me. Understanding bloomed like a deadly flower. The knob turned under his hand. Wyatt slammed his shoulder into the door, but someone pushed from the other side. Someone a lot stronger. Wyatt went sprawling onto his left hip and continued to roll, clearing the door, which had just been kicked completely open. Jaron hadn’t managed to describe her attacker beyond the claws and thinking it was a goblin, but what stood in the open doorway wasn’t what I expected.

It was a goblin—or had been, at one time. Maybe four and a half feet tall, it stood up straight rather than hunched as other goblin males did. Skin that should have been slick and oily was dull, as if powdered with starch. Black hair tufted out from in and around its ears—ears that should have been wide and pointed but instead were round like a human’s.

I looked in its eyes, and my stomach lurched. Not the lusty red eyes I’d grown to know, but watchful brown that were completely human. The mismatched features, combined with the clothes—jeans and a black T-shirt, for Christ’s sake!—sent a shock wave of cold through my body. My insides quaked. This wasn’t right. I couldn’t possibly be seeing it.

Until it stretched out a decidedly goblinesque arm in my direction, as though pointing with its entire hand. Goblins had long, sharp fingernails, good for rending flesh and getting a grip. This creature had them, too, and before my very eyes, they grew to the length of four inches each. Tiny daggers, four in a row. Only the thumbnail didn’t grow.

It looked past me, at the body by my feet, and snarled. Dry lips pulled back, showing off a single row of sharp, jagged teeth. Bile scorched the back of my throat. It still didn’t attack. Good for us.

I had a small knife strapped to the side of my right boot, an easy grab, but the goblin-thing would be on me the instant I reached. The knife I’d taken from beneath the coffee table was still on the floor where I’d dropped it minutes ago, halfway between me and the monster. More weapons were in the kitchenette, another beneath the sofa, others in the bedrooms. If I went for any of them, it could attack and kill Wyatt.

Its too-human eyes flickered around the apartment, as though calculating its surroundings and various threats. It was a predatory thing to do, a hunter’s trait. But goblins were scavengers. The males didn’t assess threats; they followed orders given to them by their queens.

What are you?

That observant gaze swung back to me, and I realized I’d whispered out loud. Our gazes locked. I thought I saw a spark of emotion, some distant cousin to regret—which was impossible in a goblin, so it had to be something else—then it snarled again.

“Kill,” it growled.

My brain stuttered to a halt as the full implications of that single word sank in. I gaped, my chest tight, breath frozen in my lungs. Goblin males didn’t speak English. Females can barely manage the language in their harsh, guttural voices. It couldn’t have spoken.

“Kill who?” Wyatt asked.

It pointed one sharply clawed finger at Peters’s body. “Whoever … went to.”

Oh God, it’s talking. I was in the middle of a nightmare and I couldn’t wake up. Not an unusual state for me of late, but unsettling nonetheless. Downright nauseating. Almost terrifying, in so many ways.

This wasn’t the first time I’d faced down a creature that had traits of more than one species. The first had been right after my resurrection, when I was attacked by a monster from a horror movie. Part vampire and part beast, the thing had been one hundred percent predator. Engineered by whoever had been helping Tovin, it was a prototype to house the other demons the mad elf hoped to bring across First Break. We’d found even more hybrid monstrosities in Tovin’s underground lab.

Only this one seemed mildly intelligent.

“Why?” I asked.

It swung its hateful stare back at me. Mixed with its need to attack and kill was a bit of confusion. I latched onto that as its best weakness. “Master … said,” it ground out.

“Who’s your master?”

Wrong question. It moved at a speed I didn’t expect, in a direct line for my guts, clawed hand slashing and hoping to spill them all over the floor. I dropped at the last possible moment, hips twisting, and brought my right heel up to crack it in the chest. It tumbled sideways, stunned by the blow. Claws ripped the hem of my pant leg, missing skin.

I rolled out of its way, already reaching for the knife at my ankle. My fingers closed around the handle just as a body slammed me sideways into the sofa—thing was fucking fast. The knife clattered to the floor, out of reach. Dammit. I jerked to my right, throwing all my weight down, smashing the creature against the cement floor. Its claws ghosted the skin on my neck, too damned close.

“Evy, left,” Wyatt shouted.

I moved without thinking, tumbling to my left, barely missing the couch a second time. A dark blur passed—it had to be Wyatt. His target let out some sort of grunt. I twisted around, rolled to my feet, and sought the nearest weapon handy, which just happened to be a ten-dollar thrift store table lamp. I yanked off the shade, ripped the cord out of the wall, and pulled it back like a baseball bat.

Wyatt and the goblin-thing were tangled together on the floor, wrestling for dominance. Both of Wyatt’s hands were wrapped around the creature’s wrists, keeping those claws at a distance, but what Wyatt had in bulk, the goblin had in speed. It wriggled like an eel on a fishing line. I looked for an opportunity to hit it with my lamp, but it just wouldn’t stop moving.

Screw this. I shifted the lamp into my left hand and scooped up my discarded knife in my right. I turned back to the flailing pair and took aim, ready to drive my knife straight into the middle of the goblin-thing’s back.

“Don’t kill it,” Wyatt said.

“Why not?” But I stabbed it in the back of the thigh instead—no easy feat with a moving target—and for a brief moment of panic, I thought I’d missed and hit Wyatt.

Then the goblin shrieked and lurched away, tugging at the knife stuck in its leg. Wyatt sat up quickly. The front of his shirt was torn, four equally wide slash marks. “We need to question it.”

Oh, right, a talking goblin-hybrid. As much as we needed to pick answers out of its brain, killing was so much simpler than taking prisoners.

The creature was crouched near the kitchenette counter, blood running down its leg. It looked at the knife I’d stuck it with, then tossed it over its shoulder. It snarled at us, this time less angry and more … fearful?

“Don’t like being ganged up on?” I asked.

It bared its teeth.

“You’re not as impressive as your big brothers.” Taunting an unknown element wasn’t the smartest trick in my arsenal, and Wyatt gave me a withering stare.

It growled something that could have been any number of garbled cuss words and lunged—okay, so stupid question—at my throat. I swung hard with the lamp, aiming for its slashing hand, and heard bone crunch as I connected. Its body slammed into mine and knocked us both sideways. I tripped over the lamp cord, hit the floor on my ass, and kept rolling. Momentum threw the goblin-hybrid over my head and into the far wall.

The splat was punctuated by a pained roar. Wyatt bolted past me. I curled onto my knees and pulled up in a crouch just in time to see Wyatt spear the critter’s left hand to the wall with a knife. It squealed and slapped at the knife’s hilt with its useless, broken right hand. It tried its teeth, but Wyatt kicked it in its jeans-clad groin. The thing shrieked.

“I think that was a two-base hit,” Wyatt said without looking away from our quarry.

“Three at least,” I said. “Maybe even a homer.” I dropped the lamp on the sofa and circled, giving the wriggling creature a wide berth. Actual tears streaked its cheeks. Amazing.

I took the brief respite from attack to remove the knife from my ankle sheath. As soon as I got what I needed, I intended to kill it quickly—which was an odd realization. I should have wanted to take my time, use the captured goblin for a little therapeutic payback for all the hell I’d been put through by one of its queens, but I didn’t. Something in its too-human eyes, as brown as my own, quelled that need. Produced just a little bit of mercy.

And let’s face it—mercy and I were not good friends.

The hybrid kicked out with one foot, slipped on its own blood, and fell. Its hand was knifed to the wall above its head, and the jerking stop produced another bellow of anguish. Wyatt had the sense to dash back across the apartment and shut the door. No need to arouse the neighbors any more than we already had.

“Who sent you here?” I asked, staying out of the wailing creature’s reach.

“Master,” it snarled.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, we’ve been over that. Who is your master?”

“He.”

Okay, that narrowed my suspect list down to the entire male population of the city, maybe even the state. “Do you know his name?”

It snarled and tried to stand. I kicked its legs out from under it, eliciting another shriek as its hand ripped against the knife. Blood ran down its arm and pitter-pattered to the floor. The color was off—some dusky shade of mauve that wasn’t goblin-fuchsia or human-red. I sniffed the air. Goblin blood had a very distinct seawater odor. All I smelled was sweat and, from the dead body behind me, the faint metallic scent of Peters’s blood.

“What is your master’s name?” I asked again. It didn’t reply. I dangled my knife in front of its face. “Want me to nail your other hand to the wall?”

A whimper hid behind its growl; it understood my threat. “For … forbid … den.”

“You’re forbidden from saying his name?”

Nod.

Fabric whispered behind me. I twisted my neck to look at Wyatt. Intense concentration creased his forehead and deepened the lines around his mouth. The look was similar to when he was summoning something difficult—far away or too large to move without serious effort. Energy crackled around us. I started to ask what he was doing but didn’t want to break his focus.

The hybrid shrieked. A dark bruise appeared on its neck, to the left of where its Adam’s apple should be. I blinked. Wyatt grunted. On his outstretched palm was a tiny square of metal, barely half an inch wide.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Tracking device, I think,” Wyatt said.

I watched, flummoxed, while Wyatt dropped the device into the sink, turned on the water, and then flipped the switch on the disposal. Metal gears ground it with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. When he turned it off, I asked, “How did you know?”

“I guessed. I couldn’t see it, but I felt something inside its body that could be summoned, something small. I wasn’t sure what it was until I had it in my hand.”

“I thought you needed line of sight to summon something.”

He blinked. “I always have before,” he said slowly, speaking while turning the realization over in his mind. “But it was just under the skin. Practically line of sight.”

Neither one of us said it, but we had to both be thinking it—had Wyatt’s death and resurrection-via-magic last week altered his Gift?

“Guess this master likes to keep track of his toys,” I said, dragging the conversation back to our prisoner.

“Looks that way.”

Still out of reach, I squatted eye level with the sobbing creature. It seemed to know it had lost its last advantage. “So,” I said, drawing the single syllable out into three, “now that backup isn’t going to find you, how about you make a choice? Long, slow death, or fast and mostly painless?” Part of me begged it to say long and slow.

Too-human eyes gazed at me, full of very human tears. How did a goblin get eyes so human, ears so much like mine? Its skin was smooth, unmarred by age, almost young. Colored oddly, but not slick and oily like a goblin’s normally was.

My stomach twisted as a frightening idea burrowed into my brain and didn’t let go. This hybrid was not, as I first assumed, a goblin with human traits. Worse than that, it had once been human, and a very young human, given its size. I was certain of it, and grew more certain as the seconds passed—so certain I nearly vomited. I did drop the knife.

“Evy?” Wyatt was beside me instantly. I couldn’t look away from the creature, but he must have seen something in my expression. “Evy, what is it?”

Ignoring him, I pierced the hybrid with a stare. “You were human once.”

The creature cocked its head, a picture of perfect agony. It wetted its lips with a pink tongue—not the thin sandpaper strip of a goblin. “Toe … kin,” it said. Raised its broken hand toward its chest. “Token.”

“Your name is Token?” Wyatt asked.

No, no, no. I didn’t want to know the thing’s name. Not when I was about to put it out of its misery. We weren’t friends, or allies. It was an abomination of nature. A creature that had no business existing, much less having a name.

“Name,” it tried out the word. “Yes.”

“Okay, great,” I said, snarl indicating it was anything but. “So, Token, what’s your master’s name?”

Token crunched up his face. “Token … good.”

I snorted. “Good? You murdered a man!”

Wyatt wrapped his hand around my forearm, a silent comfort and an attempt to control me. My temper was spiking, and he knew it.

“Master told … me.”

“Your master was wrong.”

Token’s face reflected utter disbelief. He’d stopped crying, but a river of clear snot trailed from nose to chin. He looked like a chastised child who’d been told Santa Claus was dead. “Can’t be,” he said. “Is master.”

“Even masters can fuck up.”

Wyatt made a sound—something between a grunt and a snort. We knew all too well how people in charge could make blind, dumbass decisions that got people under them killed. Me, for example.

Token stared at me, long seconds ticking away while his childlike mind tried to puzzle things out. Something sparked in his brown eyes. I braced for an attack. He surprised me with “You … master?”

I shuddered. “No, I’m no one’s master.”

“Token’s master.”

“Fuck you, you piece of shit.” I shot to my feet too damned fast and my left knee buckled. Wyatt caught me before I fell. I pushed him away, harder than I intended, and he almost tipped backward over the sofa.

I wheeled around and stormed into the kitchenette, hands fisted, fuming. Angrier for the uncontrolled outburst than at Token’s actual statement. “Hate” wasn’t a strong enough word for how I felt about goblins. Experience had taught me everything that training hadn’t, and I’d put all that information to good use over the last four years, hunting and killing any I could find. Enjoying it when I knew they’d broken the law and harmed a human. And I’d done my job well.

If I’d done it too well, I had paid for it and more ten days ago, when a goblin queen had kidnapped me and tortured me to death. She’d enjoyed it, returning every injury I’d inflicted on her kind and then some over the course of two and a half days. I’d hated goblins before that; now my gut desire (right or wrong) was to see the entire race wiped off the face of the Earth.

Genocide wouldn’t make the pain go away, but the illusion did tend to brighten my day.

I slapped my open palms flat against the counter, frustrated at my inability to control myself. My former partners, Jesse and Ash, had taught me what Boot Camp never could—how to put a safety on my hair-trigger temper. How and when to unleash that anger upon the Dregs I hunted. All that training had been destroyed by my first death, and I was constantly struggling to keep it in check. I’d be ineffective if every goblin I stumbled across set me off into a rage.

Wyatt appeared on the opposite side of the counter. He slid his hands over mine. I looked up, into warm black eyes. No sympathy, no annoyance—just understanding, colored with an unspoken command to get ahold of myself.

“We should have suspected this,” he said.

I quirked an eyebrow. “What? Me blowing up?”

“No.” The corner of his mouth pulled into a half smile. “We should have expected more hybrids. The lab we found at Olsmill probably wasn’t the only one. It was just the only one we found.”

The horror movie laboratory I’d discovered in the basement of a defunct nature preserve had held monsters from nightmares—genetic mutations of all sorts, caged in cinder block and steel. Things that shouldn’t have existed, much like the boy-monster impaled to my apartment wall.

“If there was another lab,” I said, “then who turned Token loose?” A chill niggled its way down my spine. “A third partner?”

“Possibly. We know that Tovin was the brains of the operation, and we know that Leonard Call provided the muscle to get it all done.”

“But neither one of them were scientists, capable of combining and manipulating the DNA of such disparate species.” I tried to recall my conversation (if it could be termed that) with Call the night I’d put him into a coma. He’d admitted to working with Tovin, to providing brawn in the form of cooperative goblins and Halfies, in return for Tovin’s help in his own personal quest for vengeance. Vengeance against Wyatt specifically, and humanity in general, for the murder of Call’s lover.

Motives that I understood but couldn’t support—for obvious reasons.

“Following that train of thought,” Wyatt said, “we could also assume that whoever organized the attack on Boot Camp wants their science projects back.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the creatures we’d found at Olsmill. I’d only gotten a good look at three of them. One had been a teenage boy. Half his body was stone, as though he’d been split down the middle and sprayed with cement coating. At the time, I had assumed some sort of cross with a gargoyle. Now I wasn’t so sure. This mysterious third party had creatures who could attack via the ground, moving through the earth as easily as trolls. That was bad on so many new levels.…

Wyatt’s face remained annoyingly neutral when I shared my thoughts. “I can see the goblin queens donating a few of their weaker warriors to experimentation if it meant gaining an advantage,” he said.

“Some advantage. The goblins have all but disappeared since we kicked their asses at Olsmill.” I said it lightly, but the truth of my statement was worrisome. Goblins were a matriarchal society, and while we’d killed one of their rare queens, she wasn’t the only one they had. The fact that most of the goblins had withdrawn from the city, or were at least hiding underground where we couldn’t find them, hinted at something big on the horizon. And I hated surprises.

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Which means they probably have a plan we won’t see coming.”

So what else is new?

“We need concrete information to give to the Triads,” he continued. “Something they can look into that’s more tangible than our leaps of logic.”

“I know.” I shot him a determined look. “So let’s get it.”