Wrong Side of Dead

by Kelly Meding

  The adjoining workout room was empty. Blue mats lined the floor, with two specific wrestling areas taped out. The opposite side of the room had several suspended heavy bags and three speed bags. Throwing some punches at sand-filled leather was a better alternative to taking my anger out on someone’s softer flesh, so I found a pair of gloves that fit.

  My first punch sent a shock up my right shoulder. I hadn’t done this in a while. The majority of my physical training these last few weeks had been about endurance. Getting my cardio stamina back up, getting my joints loose and flexible again, and putting back on some useful muscles—all lost during those weeks of torture.

  I spread my feet, corrected my stance, tried again. Better.

  Left hand, right hand. Jabs, upper cuts, crosses. Sweat slicked my back and face and trickled down my neck. It felt great. I imagined Thackery’s face on that heavy bag. A face I’d looked up at from a metal gurney for twenty days, always calculating and earnest, a zealot to his own research. A face I longed to beat into a bloody, broken mess and then watch as it took its last breath.

  My arms and back muscles burned from exertion. My legs felt like jelly, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe. I just couldn’t stop. Stopping was giving up, and I wasn’t giving up on this. Wouldn’t stop until I had Ava, Aurora, Joseph, Leah, Michael Jenner, and all the missing others back.

  Back from wherever they’d been taken.

  Back from someone who’d kill without hesitation.

  I should have done more to protect them.

  Sweat trickled down my cheeks—no, not sweat. Tears. My throat closed, making it almost impossible to breathe. The dam I’d been slamming against all night finally broke, and I fell to my knees sobbing. For Felix. For Ava. For my own pent-up frustration and anger. For everyone whose loved ones were missing.

  I couldn’t stop the torrent of tears or stifle the choking gasps. Couldn’t do anything but let it out. And then someone’s arms were around me, pulling me close. I let him drag me against a firm chest, held tight by those strong, warm arms. I pressed my face into the crook of his shoulder, awareness breaking through with a single thought—Wyatt.

  The realization just deepened my sobs. I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on. One hand cupped my neck while the other stroked my back in gentle circles. I let him hold me, let him rock me, like he hadn’t for so long.

  “I should have died, Wyatt.” I barely choked out the words. “He should have killed me. They’d all be safe if I was dead.”

  “You don’t know that,” he replied. His voice rumbled in his chest, a soothing sound beneath my cheek.

  “Everyone else dies, but not me. Not even when I give up and ask.”

  He tensed. My words were the source of our most recent argument. An argument that had split us down the center. One I didn’t care to repeat. Not now, not ever. In my lowest moment, I told Walter Thackery I wouldn’t resist his experiments if he promised to kill me when he was done. I’d been convinced I wouldn’t mentally survive being tortured again.

  I’d been wrong—so fucking wrong—but it didn’t change the fact that I’d given up. More than the memories of the torture, it was my own cowardice that haunted me, that had changed me, and I was terrified that it had forever altered the way Wyatt saw me. That he’d never again look at me the way he had a month ago at Boot Camp, with wonder and need and love.

  “It’s okay, Evy,” he said softly.

  It wasn’t, but I loved that he’d said it anyway, and that he held me without judgment while I cried.

  BEFORE

  Chapter Five

  Sunday, June 29

  Boot Camp

  I launch myself at Wyatt and throw my arms around his neck in a choking hug. His arms snake around my waist, painfully tight. I press my face into his neck, inhaling his scent, feeling his sandpapery skin on my face. He twirls us in a circle, and I laugh out loud—I didn’t feel him lift me off the ground.

  He sets me back down and crushes his lips to mine. I open for him and groan under the bruising, possessive force of a kiss tinged with desperation and joy. I don’t want it to end, but I’m sore and tired and the adrenaline rush is almost gone. It’s way too easy to collapse against Wyatt’s chest; he doesn’t let me fall.

  His hand strokes my neck, tangles in the thick waves of my ponytail. “When?”

  I understand his shorthand. “Yesterday morning. Max and his coven attacked the truck the day before, but he brought me back to the city yesterday before sunrise.”

  “Truck?”

  I explain what I can stand to remember. How Walter Thackery kept me in a tractor-trailer laboratory for almost three weeks, kept us on the move, kept those twenty days an endless cycle of hellish pain. I gloss over the details; Wyatt has a pretty good imagination, and he’s seen some of the injuries I’ve healed from with his own eyes.

  Wyatt’s walkie crackles to life with a stranger’s voice: “Marcus to Truman. You alive, pal?”

  Wyatt grabs the walkie off his impressively weaponed belt. “Yeah, I’m alive. There’s a Pit behind the main building. Meet me there.”

  He puts the device back without waiting for a response from this Marcus person, and I can’t help wondering if he has something to do with Wyatt’s new look. The Black Ops outfit and rigging, especially.

  “Stone!” echoes down into the Pit before I can question him.

  I look up, shielding my eyes with one hand. A tall, slim figure descends the bleachers, heading quickly for our position. As soon as he’s within reach, I let go of Wyatt and throw my arms around Tybalt. I surprise myself and him, too, because it takes a few seconds for him to hug back.

  “How many lives are you down to?” he asks.

  I snort laughter. “Might be on my last one after this. Heard you killed something today.”

  He pulls back, one hand still gripping my left elbow, and I glance down. His missing forearm has been replaced by … well, it looks robotic and a little bit deadly. “Yeah, I did,” he says, not hiding the pride in that statement. “Guess I’m not useless after all.” He gives a pointed look at Wyatt as he speaks, which reminds me of all the questions I have for both of them.

  Wyatt beats me to it. “How’d you get out here?”

  “Rode in with Baylor’s team,” Tybalt replies. “Carly and I stayed in touch after Felix got hurt, and since I’m not a Hunter anymore, there are no rules against us being friends.”

  Carly—I vaguely recall meeting her the night the hounds attacked us at the cabin in the woods. Good for Tybalt, too, for doing everything he can to help. I twist my wrist to give his arm a squeeze. He looks down and both eyebrows shoot to his hairline. Crap.

  Tybalt takes my left hand in his and lifts it up, anger etching deep lines in his forehead. “Jesus Christ, Stone. Did Thackery do that to you?”

  “Yep.” I wrench my hand out of his grip and take a step backward, away from both men and their angry, confused looks. “He thought my healing powers made great nighttime entertainment. Thought if he could prove it was physical and not magical, he could re-create it somehow.”

  “And he cut off your finger to prove that?”

  “At the end.”

  Wyatt shudders. There’s a deadly anger radiating from him, so strong it’s almost a physical force.

  “We looked for you,” Tybalt says.

  “I know. Thackery kept us on the move.”

  He nods, quiet misery in his expression. Coming from someone who tried to kill me only a few weeks ago, the emotion is both touching and overwhelming. His gaze flickers beyond my head, and he blinks hard. “What the hell is that?”

  I don’t have to look to know what he’s talking about. The corpse of Wolf Boy is baking in the mid-morning sun, my knife still buried in its mouth. In its half-transformed state, it looks like some hybrid beast that Walter Thackery might have cooked up, only I’m sure it’s not a hybrid. It’s something else.

  “Whoever he was, he worked for Thackery,” I reply. “I’ve
seen him before, both as a huge wolf and as a teenage boy.”

  “A shape-shifter?”

  “If so, he’s not from a Clan I’ve ever heard of.”

  A low feline growl raises the hair on the back of my neck, and I pivot with a complete lack of grace. An unfamiliar man dressed in clothes identical to Wyatt’s is crouched over the wolf-thing’s body. I didn’t even hear him descend the bleachers. Felia. Has to be.

  He looks up, copper eyes going past me, right to Wyatt. “Well, it seems like we finally found the source of the smell,” he says in a voice as smooth and rich as gourmet coffee.

  “Smell?” I ask.

  “It was detected in the parking garage where Thackery left Phineas,” Wyatt says. His voice is strained, tight, as though he’s struggling to not scream the words. “And a few other places around the city, including the old train station.”

  “Detected by who?”

  “Myself,” the Felia says as he stands, “as well as several other of our brethren. Our sense of smell is more developed than yours.”

  “And you are?”

  He flashes a predatory smile. “My name is Marcus Dane, and you must be the infamous Evangeline Stone. I’ve heard quite a lot about you.”

  “I really can’t say the same.”

  “And for good reason.”

  I hold his stare, unsure if I like his candor or find it annoying. Probably a little of both. His information only enforces my suspicion that Thackery used Wolf Boy to do quite a bit of his dirty work. And wherever Thackery is now, he’ll be super-fucking-pissed to find out his teenage sidekick is a corpse. I break the stare-off first.

  “I want to take him back with us,” Marcus says, jacking his thumb at said corpse. And he isn’t talking to me.

  “Agreed,” Wyatt says. “Do you know what he is?”

  “Perhaps, yes. The Assembly must be told about this.”

  I glance at Tybalt, whose confusion mirrors my own. We’re both completely lost in the conversation.

  “All right.” Wyatt shifts his attention to me. “Evy, I know you have a lot of questions—”

  “Most of my questions can wait,” I reply. If I start asking them now, we’ll be in this Pit all damned day. “I need to see what’s happening topside, and there are still a lot of wounded to tend to.” Such as Greg, the Hunter I didn’t know at all until half an hour ago and am now curious about—his arm and leg were bleeding heavily the last time I saw him.

  “Yourself included,” Marcus says, gesturing at my ankle and forearm.

  My ankle is a mass of itchy-healing sensations. My arm isn’t bleeding as it was, but it does hurt like a bastard. The skin is swollen and hot, but I ignore it in favor of getting the hell out of the Pit. I’m just lucky Wolf Boy never got a better angle with his teeth. “I’ll heal.”

  He tilts his head. “Indeed.”

  I’m winded by the time we reach the top of the Pit and am doing my best to not pant or gasp. Though frustrating, my lack of energy doesn’t really surprise me. I haven’t eaten properly in weeks, and my stamina wouldn’t let me go two rounds with a toddler right now, even after sleeping most of yesterday and all night. One hour’s battle has completely exhausted me. I need to rest.

  I also need answers, and the latter seriously trumps the former.

  Wyatt stays close without actually touching—hovering yet still giving me space. I can’t read his face and that worries me. He’s always been so open with me, so blunt and honest, that this invisible wall around his emotions is jarring, almost painful.

  Understandable, though. It’s not every day your girlfriend comes back to life for the second time.

  Our group heads for the front of the Admin building, where I left Kismet and company earlier, with Marcus in the lead and Tybalt behind us. As we round the smoking remains of Boot Camp’s most important building, two things are immediately clear.

  First, a triage area is already under way, with Adrian Baylor shouting orders to both the injured and able-bodied trainees. The teens are tense, most of them pale-faced but stoically doing as they’re told by someone whose sheer size and voice command their attention. They’re setting up in the parking lot next to Admin. Someone’s already raided the infirmary for supplies. The only thing I don’t see is any of the medical staff.

  Second, the few non-wounded Hunters and a handful of brave trainees have gathered around one of the Jeeps in a tense cluster. Gina Kismet is standing on the hood next to a raven-haired woman in Black Ops gear identical to Wyatt’s. I locate Phineas in the crowd, as well as Milo and a handful of other familiar faces, both Hunters and Handlers.

  Two more Black Ops strangers, male and female, break away from the group and head over to intercept us.

  “What the hell is Astrid doing?” Marcus asks. The angle of his head suggests he means the woman with Kismet.

  The new female has the palest green eyes I’ve ever seen, and short, spiky hair in numerous shades of brown. “Volunteering our help with cleanup, apparently,” she replies. “Preliminary death count is twenty-six, but that will probably go up.”

  Twenty-six. Jesus Christ. Anywhere from twenty to thirty teens are at Boot Camp training at any given time, plus the trainers, medical staff, and people employed at R&D, which totals maybe fifteen more. That’s more than half of our numbers dead.

  “Are they all trainees?” Tybalt asks.

  The female shakes her head. “It appears the beasts rampaged through your Admin building before they made their presence known outside. Your staff is dead. Many of your trainees are wounded and several more may die.”

  I shudder. “What about Hunters?”

  “Several injuries, but I believe they are all alive.” She gives me a once-over with her creepy pale eyes. My instincts scream she’s Therian; I’m just not sure which Clan. “Evangeline Stone, I presume?”

  Does everyone know who I am? “Yep. Who are you?”

  “Leah de Loew. You’re prettier than I imagined you’d be.”

  “Um, thanks?” I’m too exhausted to put more thought into a response or wonder just exactly what she’s heard about me, other than the obvious. Died and rose again; died again and rose one more time. Okay, so less “rose one more time” and more “didn’t actually die the second time.” Or if you count the factory fire from last month, it’s the third time … oh forget it. Trying to make sense of my second life is going to give me migraines.

  “Leah, Kyle,” Marcus says. “I want to show you something.”

  They wander back toward the Pit with Marcus. Knowing their names doesn’t make me trust them, even though Wyatt seems to, and I hate being left out of the conversation about Wolf Boy. Sooner or later, though, I expect Marcus will confirm my werewolf theory.

  “You went and got some new friends,” I say to Wyatt.

  “Well, I needed to keep busy after the brass fired me and forbade Gina, Adrian, and the rest of the Triads from helping me look for you.” He’s so matter-of-fact about something that shocks me. Not so much the part about the brass forbidding Kismet and Baylor from searching for me—it’s the fact that they wanted to look for me at all that trips me up.

  “Some of them looked anyway, when they could,” Tybalt says. “Milo and I went out when he wasn’t on patrol or sitting with Felix.”

  “I heard about Felix,” I say, oddly touched by Tybalt’s admission. It’s been so long since anyone except Jesse, Ash, and Wyatt cared if I lived or died that I don’t quite know how to accept the idea of new friendships. Or that others care. It’s equally odd to care so much that a Hunter who once tried to kill me is now permanently disabled and will probably never walk without serious pain again. “I’m sorry.”

  “Us, too.”

  “So how come you’re not dressed like you’re about to rob a high-security vault?”

  “I wasn’t invited. Conflict of interest.”

  A look is exchanged by Wyatt and Tybalt, and I don’t have the first clue how to interpret it. Amazing how much people and circumstances ca
n change in three weeks. The thought makes me kind of dizzy. Everything feels ten degrees hotter. My arm seems twenty pounds heavier, the Wolf Boy bite on my arm throbbing and achy.

  “Which means what, exactly?” I ask.

  “Evangeline?” Phin’s voice is a welcome sound, and his attention flickers to my swollen arm as he approaches. “That’s newly acquired.”

  “What can I say? I collect injuries everywhere I go.” I curl my left hand into a fist and hide it behind my hip, not in the mood for more shock over my missing pinkie. The heat and humidity of the June morning are adding to my exhaustion, as is my painful forearm. A bead of sweat trickles down my forehead and into my eye—when did I start sweating so badly? “Oh, and sorry. I lost your gun in the Pit somewhere.”

  “We’ll find it.” He touches my shoulder, but his face is fuzzy and I’m not sure if he’s frowning or smiling. “Evy?”

  Vertigo hits. “I think I’m gonna pass out.”

  Someone catches me.

  * * *

  Waking up in a nice, soft bed surrounded by air-conditioning and the wonderful scent of coffee is too much to hope for. It’s still damned hot, but at least I’m horizontal on something moderately comfortable. My head’s pounding, and I consider sleeping awhile longer. At least until the pounding goes away.

  Then someone screams and I jerk upright. Every muscle in my back aches, and the world fuzzes out for a few seconds as everything spins in circles. My stomach grumbles, demanding food. Or a gulp of water, at the very least. I try to recall where my weapons are as my vision clears.

  The interior of a high-tech-looking helicopter comes into focus. The sliding doors on both sides are open, allowing a moderate flow of air into the stuffy interior. It’s powered down on the lawn opposite the parking lot, where someone has erected a kind of tent to protect the wounded. Did one of them scream?

  Someone had wrapped my forearm in gauze. Faint spots of blood have oozed through the white, as well as a few pale streaks of yellow. It’s itchy, though, instead of achy, so I know it’s finally healing.