Three Days to Dead

Chapter 29

I felt like I’d stepped out on the other side of the world. The walls were dug roughly from the earth. Roots protruded from both walls and ceiling, and the air was heavy with the odor of fresh dirt and incense. Sage, maybe, or some similar herb. It was about thirty feet in diameter, a perfect half-circle with the door at the top of the arch. In front of me, all along the straight wall, were dozens and dozens of lit candles, perched in the notched earth.

Six metal crates, the type people carry large-breed dogs in, stood along the wall, beneath the candles. The crates were half covered in dark cloths and vibrated with movement—scratching, growling, living beasts wanting to get out. After what I’d seen upstairs, the possibilities of what were in those crates chilled me.

In the center of the dugout space was a brick-lined circle the size of a hula hoop. Still, black water filled it—the same as the pool at the base of First Break’s waterfall—dark and mysterious, and seeming infinitely deep. Energy crackled and snapped in the air, and standing a few feet inside, I felt as close to true power as I’d ever come.

I stepped closer to the pool, drawn by its convergence of energy and uncertain why. Was water somehow part of the equation? It made sense, given what I knew and what I’d seen both in the mountains and the city. The majority of the Dregs were concentrated in the downtown area—a peninsula of land with a river on two sides and the mountains directly north. Location was just as important an ingredient in magic as emotion, it seemed.

I gazed into the onyx pool, at my tangled hair and bloodstained face and wide, searching eyes. Searching for someone seemingly not in the room.

The door slammed shut, its report echoing loud enough to set my ears ringing. I pivoted on one ankle, hand immediately on the grip of Kismet’s gun, and my heart nearly stopped. Tovin stood inside the room, as unconcerned by events around him as he’d seemed earlier on the balcony. In front of me, three paces away, he seemed unimpressive. But physical stature meant little. I had seen his power at work.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said, commanding and firm. I hadn’t expected a forceful voice from such a small, unassuming body.

I arched an eyebrow. “What I’ve done? Those aren’t my science projects upstairs, pal. Even I’m not that sick.”

“Unfortunate mistakes that I’ve grown rather fond of. I doubt you’ve ever had a pet in your short, meaningless life, but I can’t bring myself to destroy them.” He didn’t speak like I suspected an elf would. He had no practiced cadence or high-brow inflections. He spoke like any other person on the street.

“What are they for?”

“You were but one cog in this grandly designed wheel, Evangeline. You and Truman both, necessary parts to play, but not the only ones that mattered. I needed proper vessels.”

“Is that what’s in those cages? Vessels?” I wasn’t going to bother trying to puzzle that one out. Both my deductive reasoning skills and my patience had been left aboveground. Down here, I wanted fast and simple answers, so I could kill him and get it done.

Tovin nodded. “The perfect vessels for hosting the Tainted.”

Rather than walking, he seemed to float past me, along the curved line of the room, toward the nearest crate. He yanked off the black sheet. Inside, crouched on its haunches, was a man-sized version of the hound. Its snout was less pronounced, but its razor teeth just as plentiful. It looked able to stand and run on two legs, instead of four.

“We were missing the human element,” Tovin said, as if discussing a beloved child. “The vampire and goblin hybrids weren’t enough, even with the added canine traits. We had to mix in the right amount of human DNA. The result was startlingly perfect, as you can see.”

And startlingly ugly. “Perfect for demon possession?”

“You can’t possibly comprehend what will possess them.”

The final puzzle pieces came crashing into position. Our theory was correct: the freewill deal was meant to get Wyatt under his control. With a controlled mind, Tovin had the perfect vessel for his Tainted One, and a being of unbelievable power would be at his command. He had his hound-hybrids caged and ready to accept their own demons—probably lesser in power and controllable by the first. The only X-factor in this fucked-up situation was Tovin’s next move now that Wyatt was dead. And I had one last question to ask before we danced—a final confirmation.

“So this was all you?” I asked. “Every single moment, from the murders of my teammates to my kidnapping to Wyatt and the resurrection? You did this?”

“Yes. Humans are so malleable when it comes to their emotions. So many of my Fey brethren desire your range of emotional imbalances, but I’ve never seen the appeal. Love will always be your kind’s greatest flaw. It makes you do truly stupid things.”

“Like this?” I whipped out the gun and fired at his head. As before, time slowed and, after an eternity of anticipation, stopped completely. Just like on the balcony, he plucked the bullet out of the air.

With nothing to lose and no more tricks to try, I started squeezing the trigger a second time. An invisible hand yanked the gun from my fingers and pitched it across the room. My body was flung backward, and the sudden stop against the rough-hewn walls took my breath away. A thick root dug into the small of my back. I couldn’t move, held there by some invisible force, feet dangling two feet from the ground.

So not good.

Tovin stepped closer to the black pool, sparing me a pitying look before gazing down. The mirrored water began to ripple and, as I watched, came to a rolling boil. “These events have been in motion for some time, Evangeline,” he said, his voice difficult to hear over the roar of the pool. “I can no more stop it than I can change the color of the sky. This Tainted requires a vessel more controllable than the soldiers I’ve created. With my puppet Truman gone …”

He cast a contemptuous glare at me, and I swore I saw uncertainty hiding just below the surface. “My soldiers do not possess a human’s free will to choose. It’s something your people stupidly take for granted as you live your meager lives. I can’t manufacture it, but I can steal it and bind this Tainted with it.”

I finally got it. Amalie had said the Tainted were beings of pure emotion and instinct, unable to make moral choices. They simply acted. Humans, on the other hand, had been making moral choices ever since Eve supposedly bit into that damned apple. Free will was Tovin’s apple, and owning Wyatt’s was his guarantee of control. So how—?

“You won’t be as easy to manipulate as one whose free will I own,” Tovin continued, turning back to his bubbling pool, “but the Tainted’s crossing cannot be stopped, and your body will have to do.”

My stomach knotted. Oh hell no. He was not putting a demon into me. I struggled in vain against my barrier, fear bordering on panic.

The boiling water began to swirl, until its entire surface was a maddening whirlpool. Energy snapped and spit in our underground dungeon. The candle flames flickered, but the air remained completely still. Tovin recited words in a language I didn’t know. He was doing it—bringing a Tainted across the Break. Turning a demon loose on me and the rest of the unsuspecting world.

Blackness rose up from the center of the whirling vortex, like a jet of ink through water. It hovered several feet above, a shapeless web of pitch no larger than a volleyball. Tovin’s mouth kept moving, speaking words unheard above the screaming in my head. He swept his hand out, indicating me. The black blob shuddered, and I swear it looked right at me. Then it floated forward.

No!

I reached for the threads of the Break, so faint behind the wall of magic holding me down. I caught it and pulled, fixated quickly on loss and loneliness, and then I was moving. Every fiber of my existence felt pulled part, vibrated, stretched to the point of shattering. I shrieked, hoping only for a destination far from here and the demon intent on possessing me.

My face hit dirt first, and I tumbled to the ground in a shuddering heap. Tovin snarled, an angry sound more befitting a wild dog than a revered—and slightly insane—elf mystic. I rolled onto my left side in time to see the black blob slam into Tovin’s midsection and disappear. He froze in place, his aged face a contortion of anger and confusion. And pain.

I sat up and blinked hard in the dim light, positive he had grown a few inches in the last five seconds. It didn’t seem possible, but it was happening.

To the tune of strangely melodic screaming, his entire body expanded to the bulk of a professional wrestler—height and weight and expanse of muscle. The short, white hair that had crowned his head fell out, revealing bald, oily skin. His complexion darkened to a slick violet, not quite dark enough to be purple. Fingernails grew and sharpened. Incisors dropped down over his lower lip. Anything once elvin about him was gone, save his eyes.

Something else leered at me from across the half-moon room. Something evil.

“What the hell are you?” I asked, standing with caution, fear choking the words.

“The thing you mistakenly call a demon, girl.” Its voice was impossibly deep and completely inhuman. “We are older than the Earth, part of Her long before your wretched kind crawled from Her womb.”

“The Tainted.”

His laughter was a thunderclap. It vibrated the floor and sent bits of the ceiling trickling down. “We have many names. We are Legion. We are the Horsemen. We are the Titans. We are the Maladies. We are myth and legend and story. We are Hell, girl, and we’re coming home.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Your dead body is what this elf once desired, but his plans to control us are as lifeless as he. This body suits me. I taste freedom for the first time in millennia, and I will not leave my family imprisoned on the other side of the Break—not when life on Earth is so much sweeter.”

A crazy noble idea coming from a … well, whatever he was. It was time for this demon, Old One, Titan, or just plain Crazy Ugly Thing to go back across the Break to Hell. For me, for Wyatt, for Alex, and for everyone else who’d died along the way.

“I have to admit, demon, that Tovin had a good plan.” My fingers flexed around the knife’s hilt. I didn’t have to reach far to feel the Break’s power and grasp it. “But he didn’t count on one thing.”

His bushy eyebrows arched. “And what is that, girl?”

“Me.”

The teleport destination was so close that the blur, ache, and swish seemed to happen instantaneously—from across the room to right in front of him in a blink. I plunged the knife into his chest—given his great height, it was nearly his abdomen—and twisted. He roared and the thunderous sound shook the room.

I was flying through the air and hit the opposite wall before I registered the blow. My head cracked against the rough dirt. I tumbled to the floor, bright stars of color bursting in my vision, and came to rest on my side, too stunned to move. I heard the knife clatter. Shambling footsteps. A shadow fell across me. Shit.

Meaty hands closed around my throat, hauled me up by my neck, and slammed me against the wall. My sore back protested. Oxygen rushed from my lungs. My feet kicked a foot above the floor, unable to find purchase. He squeezed. I raised my knee and hit nothing but rock-hard muscle. Slowly, painfully, he was choking me to death. Blood rushed to my head. Dizziness spread. My eyes seemed to bulge, threatening to pop out of their sockets.

His leering face was close to mine. His hot breath stank of rot and death. Lust gleamed in his eyes and pulled his pale lips into a taunting snarl. “I’ll put my wife into you, girl,” he growled. “I look forward to getting to know her again.”

Rage jolted through me. Drawing on the last of my energy, the last of the Break’s spark, I concentrated on the far side of the room, by one of the crates …

… and found myself lying there, gasping for air, sucking oxygen greedily down a bruised and battered throat to the tune of an elf-demon hybrid’s angry snarls. It was a small victory. He’d be on me again in moments. My head spun and ached. My body felt like liquid. I had nothing left with which to fight him.

I watched him come with black blood oozing down his chest, each footstep falling like an anvil. A thudding pattern interrupted by the unexpected—and wonderful—sound of an ammunition clip snapping into place. He stopped, and his oily head snapped toward the dugout room’s only entrance.

A gun roared. The Tainted took a frag round in the center of his forehead. Bone cracked and splintered, and meat shredded. A second shot followed the first, and the back of his head exploded, coating the floor with black and pink gore. I gaped. He continued to stand, a thin trickle of blood dancing down the bridge of his angled nose. Eyes wide, lips parted, stunned.

A third shot caught him in the throat, followed immediately by a fourth that destroyed his neck and severed his head. Body and head dropped to the ground and hit with a sound like spaghetti plopping to a plate—wet and soft and disgusting.

Thank God for the Triads; they’d finally found their way down.

As I gaped, all of the blackness in the dead thing’s blood and body seemed to melt together in a single puddle by its severed neck. As it left, Tovin’s body returned to normal—shrinking and regaining actual color, until all signs of the Tainted were gone.

The black puddle shuddered and swirled like a beached jellyfish, stunned, but far from finished. Right where I never imagined it would be. I fished out the pouch containing Amalie’s spell, loosened the drawstring, and spilled the contents over the squirming Tainted.

White powder dusted down, reeking of mustard and blood and crushed rose petals, and like salt on a slug, the Tainted shriveled into an onyx rock the size of a baseball. And didn’t move.

Holy shit, it worked.

Footsteps shuffled in my direction. I rolled onto my left side and stared at the black sneakers in front of me. And at the blue jeans above them—not Triad standard for an assault. My savior crouched in front of me, the left sleeve of his shirt stained red.

I swallowed, unable to believe it. Unwilling to give in to the illusion. I was delusional, seeing what I wanted to see, not what was in front of me.

Strong arms wrapped around my waist and drew me up against his chest. A familiar, wonderful heartbeat thrummed steadily against mine. I pushed back so I could see. Brilliant onyx eyes looked down at me over a mouth stretched into a joyous smile. Color flushed his cheeks. Life vibrated from him like a live current.

“Wyatt.” I said the word like a prayer, afraid he would vanish in a puff of smoke.

He nodded. “It’s me.” He stroked my cheek with the tip of his finger. “I don’t know what you did to my chest, but it hurts like hell.”

I started laughing and flung my arms around his neck. He was alive—truly alive and well and in my arms. His scent filled my nostrils; his existence invaded every sense. My chest ached, but it was a sweet ache. The gentle pain of something broken that was on the mend.

His laughter mingled with mine and we held each other. We had wallowed in shit and, against the odds, had come out clean on the other side. Clean, alive, and together.

“Amalie’s magic pouch worked,” I said.

“I see that. What do we do with it now?”

“Nothing. I say we contact Amalie and let her people deal with it. They’re the ones who were supposed to keep this from happening in the first place.”

“I like that plan.”

“So does this mean we get to compare our death experiences?”

He grinned. “Absolutely not. You win, hands down. Although I do know how you feel now, scaring the shit out of people who think you’re dead.”

“Kismet?”

“Tybalt, actually. I never thought a grown man could shriek like a girl.”

I tucked my head beneath his chin, content in a place that, only a week ago, I never thought I’d want to be. “I thought I lost you, and I hated it.”

“I know, Evy, but I think it’s finally over.”

“Not quite.” Over his shoulder, past the contained demon, I spied the six crates. “It isn’t quite done yet.”

I couldn’t bring myself to go back into that laboratory. Seeing those wretched, tortured creatures once was more than enough. Some had been human, most not. But all were living creatures, and they didn’t deserve what Tovin had done to them.

Wyatt and I hung around the Visitors’ Center lobby while Kismet, Baylor, and two other Handlers conferred with their bosses, via cell phone, over the hybrid problem. I kicked at the charred remains of the front desk. Destroying it had knocked down the protection barrier, as I suspected, and allowed the Bloods and Triads to continue their assault on the last of the Halfie forces.

The battle hadn’t lasted long. Tybalt had a few deep lacerations on his thigh from the hound getting too close, but he would live. The Triads had only suffered six deaths—the least of any side. The pavement outside was littered with corpses. The Halfies and Bloods would burn with the morning sun. A bonfire would deal with the rest.

“Evangeline.”

I turned toward the Center’s entrance. Isleen strode toward me, her body armor somehow blood-free, every white hair tucked firmly into place. I was almost sorry I’d hit her in the gut. Her ghostly white face needed a little color.

“You going to try and deck me again?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I am certain you, of all people, understand actions taken in the heat of battle.”

“Kelsa killed your sister.”

“Yes, and while not by my hands, she paid for that crime.”

“And a few others.”

Isleen half turned, as if to go, and paused. Over one shoulder, she said, “I cannot guess where our paths may cross next, Evangeline Stone. I hope it continues to be as allies.”

“Ditto.” I offered my hand. She eyed the dirt and bloodstains and shook it anyway. Her grip was firm, cold, and truthful.

She spared Wyatt a nod and a terse “Truman,” and left. Probably to gather her troops and leave us humans to clean up the carnage.

“Did anyone tell her about the critters downstairs?” Wyatt asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Think she’ll be annoyed at being left out?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you even care right now?”

“Not even a little bit.” Kismet strode past. I took a step toward her and asked, “What will happen to the hybrids?”

“We’ll take them out of here,” she replied. “We have a secure facility south of the city.”

My mouth fell open. “You’re taking them to Boot Camp?”

“It’s a secure facility, and it’s the best we’ve got on short notice. We need someplace to sort them out.”

“You mean kill them?”

“I don’t know, Stone; I really don’t. We’ll do what we can for the ones that can still function. The others … It’s wait and see. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

She started to walk away. Stopped. “By the way, Rufus will live. He’s got some pretty bad burns, but he’s tough. Just thought you’d like to know.”

Relief settled warmly in my stomach. Score one more for the good guys.

Kismet disappeared into the mix. No one paid us much attention. Wyatt slipped one arm around my waist. I leaned against him. We were both splattered in complementary shades of red and fuchsia. My shoulder had stopped bleeding, and the gashes on my stomach itched like a bitch. Overall, though, we’d come out ahead.

“So you going to get your old job back?” I asked. “Seeing as you’re a hero and no longer a hunted criminal?”

He grimaced. “I doubt it. Having everyone turn against you and try to kill your girlfriend kind of sours a working relationship.”

“Girlfriend? Presume much?”

“Probably, yes.” He turned his head, breath tickling my cheek. “I told you yesterday, Evy, you have healing to do, and I’ll be here for you. Whatever it takes.”

My physical body seemed to be healing on its own, but only time would tell if the healing gift was as permanent as my new body. The emotional wounds, though, were more plentiful and harder to reach. I was just glad to know I wasn’t alone. “And in the meantime?”

“I’m sure we can find something to keep us occupied and out of trouble.”

“Like what?”

“Ever wanted to open a nature preserve?”

I punched him in the shoulder.

“How about a Grecian dress shop?”

“I am never wearing a getup like that again, so kiss that fantasy good-bye.”

“Not even if Amalie invites us down for tea?”

I could only imagine how Amalie and her people felt about tonight’s victory. Anger at the Tainted’s successful crossing into our world. Joy over the continued security of First Break. Annoyance at being tasked with babysitting the Tainted we’d captured. Relief at never getting her own blue hands dirty in its protection. Then again, all of those reactions were emotional. Human. Beneath her kind, and yet something I would never give up.

“If I ever set foot in that place again without her asking for a favor, suicidal or otherwise, I’ll eat that damned dress.”

He kissed my temple. “That’s the Evy I know. So, what do you want to do next?”

I faltered. I hadn’t given any thought past today and the events I had felt certain would end in my death. Tomorrow was a gift, and I was glad to have it. I just didn’t know what the hell to do with it.

“I think I want to go get a bag of cheese puffs,” I said.

“You … what?” His expression—openmouthed and eyebrows arched—was priceless. “Since when do you like cheese puffs?”

“Remember the part where you died and, instead of renting, I got full and permanent residence of Chalice’s body?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it seems like the body comes as a packaged deal with residual memories and odd food cravings.”

His eyebrows arched higher. “Really? Think you’ll be brave enough to try sushi now?”

“Never.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Waiting to take a hot bath and a weeklong nap, along with the rest of me.”

“And after that?”

I shrugged and smiled, unwilling to think that far into my after-afterlife. “I think we’ll just wait and see where the day takes us.”