Wrong Side of Dead

by Kelly Meding

  It was an old, familiar buzz, and I’d kind of missed it.

  We took the stairs quickly to the third floor. The curtains were drawn in all the windows, and a brightly colored floral doormat decorated the stoop. The door had a silver knocker and a bell.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  Wyatt closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, held it. On the exhale, he looked at me. “I smell death.”

  Terrific.

  “Do you sense the Lupa at all?”

  “No. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel, but I don’t feel any different.”

  Awesome.

  I rang the bell. Twice.

  “Maybe she’s out getting her nails done,” I muttered, then banged on the door with a closed fist. “Ms. Fair, are you home?”

  Wyatt grabbed the knob. It turned, and the door creaked open. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “This isn’t good.”

  My nose verified my trepidation as I stepped inside. Humid, hot air carried the odors of human waste and decay. The air-conditioning was off, the windows were sealed, and the room was stifling hot even with the shade. Something had died in here.

  The condo was tasteful and expensive, with chrome lighting fixtures and a black-and-white color scheme, and very little in the way of personality. It was an odd contrast to the colorful doormat. And despite the stink, it was clean and extremely tidy.

  We found the source of the smell in the master bedroom. Edwina Fair lay on her bed surrounded by deep purple pillows and an empty pill bottle. She’d been there a couple of days and her face was badly swollen, but I couldn’t mistake that hair—bright red ringlets, long and thick.

  The irrational side of my brain expected the dead woman’s sunken eyes to snap open, blazing with blue energy, and for Amalie’s voice to lay some vague threat on us like a creature from a horror movie. But I knew that wouldn’t happen. Sprites could inhabit only living bodies.

  Then again, almost everything I’d once believed about the Fey turned out to be wrong, or badly skewed.

  “So either Edwina Fair was a very, very disturbed and lonely woman,” I said, “or Amalie helped her avatar commit suicide.”

  “Could be both,” Wyatt said as he inspected the woman’s dresser. “Losing hours of your day, not knowing why, probably took its toll. Do you remember Jed Peters?”

  It took a moment for the name to click. “Jaron’s avatar?”

  “When the Triads cleaned out his apartment after his death, they found migraine medication and prescription painkillers and a lot of unpaid bills. Apparently he suffered crippling headaches and blackouts, which made it hard to keep a job. Doctors were unable to diagnose his illness, so they just kept him doped up.”

  “Jaron did that to him?”

  “I think so.”

  The truth of it disgusted me. The sprites had been recklessly using those humans to communicate with us, with no regard for their health or mental state. Being a sprite avatar had been slowly killing Jed Peters long before his death at Token’s hands. Just as it had likely been killing Edwina Fair long before she swallowed that bottle of pills.

  “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “This scares me, Evy.”

  I turned to face him, surprised and concerned by the admission. “That Amalie’s avatar is dead?”

  “Yes. My money is on Deaem’s avatar being dead, too. The brass collectively killed themselves last month. The Fey are pulling out of the city.”

  “It does seem like it.” Deaem had been Jaron’s replacement as Amalie’s second when the latter died almost two months ago. Like Wyatt, I wouldn’t be shocked if a look at recent suicides listed an Asian man of about thirty years old.

  The implications of the Fey cutting their ties to the city were staggeringly bad. They lived and breathed the magic of the Break, and they protected a doorway to the place where that magic originated. A place where demons existed.

  “Do you think they’d leave First Break?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess it depends on what happens next. I feel like we’re trying to cross a frozen river that’s cracking to pieces under our feet, and Amalie’s standing over us with a rock, waiting for the right time to drop it and shatter the ice.”

  “Chaos.”

  “And a lot of death.”

  The enormity of the situation threatened to smash me into the ground. It was too damned much, and I hated it. But hiding wasn’t an option, and it never would be. Looking at the big picture made our task seem impossible. I had to keep us focused on things we could affect. Things that were not beyond our ability to control—like two Coni who needed us.

  “I’m scared, too, Wyatt,” I said. “Terrified, in fact. But I can’t think about whether or not Amalie’s dropping that rock. Right now, only two deaths matter to me. The deaths of Ava and Aurora, and those are deaths I can’t let happen. I need to save them. The rest has to come after.”

  He was quiet a moment, then looked at me with a familiar and comforting expression of sheer determination. “You’re right.”

  We left the apartment as we found it, careful to wipe the few surfaces we’d touched. Without the protection of the brass (a hilarious concept, now that I knew just what the brass had been), we needed to be extracautious about not leaving fingerprints. Our report on the apartment was greeted with similar reactions of surprise and dread from our companions in the SUV.

  “I don’t get it,” Milo said. “If all the Fey want is mass chaos and to see humans and vampires and Therians fighting one another, why all the subterfuge? They’re insanely powerful.”

  “But they are also, by their very nature, pacifists,” Marcus said. “They suggest and whisper in your ear, and they provide certain means, as they’ve done for centuries, without direct interference. They will not raise their hands to strike directly, nor will they order someone to do it for them.”

  “So they have both the ability and the desire to see this city in ruins, but they won’t just do it because … they’re too nice?”

  “Something like that. Sprites could no more raise their hands in violence to me than you could shift into a jaguar.”

  Milo’s face screwed up into an epic frown, and he turned his head to glare out his window. Marcus reached over and gave the younger man’s shoulder a tentative squeeze. Milo impressed me by not shrugging off his touch.

  “So option one was a bust,” I said. It was four o’clock. Three hours and counting. “Now what?”

  “While you were inside,” Kismet said, “Reilly came through with some information on Matthew Goodson.”

  “Alias?”

  “Yep. Reilly stumbled across the name in his earliest research into the city’s vampires. He has a surveillance photo of Goodson meeting with an unidentified vampire female, and he’s traced him to an herbal tea shop in Mercy’s Lot owned by a man named—”

  “Brutus Longfellow,” Wyatt said. His fists were clenched in his lap, his eyes narrowed.

  I knew that name. “Why do I know that name?”

  “He’s a mage I’ve done business with before.” A low, deep growl filled the SUV. “Bastard.”

  Then I got it. “The invisibility spell.”

  Wyatt had traded with Brutus for the enchanted orange crystal that briefly rendered me invisible to the eye, so that I could attend Alex’s funeral service. I never met Brutus, but I knew that Wyatt had done business with him in the past for various things. I guess Brutus didn’t discriminate with his customers.

  “Old World Teas,” Wyatt said. “It’s in Mercy’s Lot, corner of Adler Road and Cottage Place.”

  The drive took less than ten minutes. Cottage Place was a block north of Wharton Street, and Adler Road intersected it two blocks east of the Black River in a busy little slice of the Lot popular with college students and wannabe hippies. About six blocks farther east, my old neighborhood crept up like a dirty little secret. Lined with loft apartments and dozens of shops and unusual restaurants that sold everything from used records to
chipotle ice cream, the trendy area was bustling with business this Saturday afternoon.

  Old World Teas was situated in a narrow building between a beeswax candle shop and a tattoo parlor, with a simple, painted-wood sign the size of a mailbox. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d probably wander past it. A parking spot didn’t look likely, so Kismet drove half a block down and stopped.

  I climbed out with Wyatt, Phin, and Marcus. The SUV pulled away.

  A trio of girls sitting in an outdoor café giggled and pointed at us, and it took me a moment to realize they were admiring my male companions. All three were incredibly handsome in their own ways—something I probably didn’t stop to appreciate often enough.

  Wyatt led the way back down the sidewalk. We followed single file, with Marcus in the rear. We didn’t have time to plan this carefully, and none of us knew what to expect from Brutus. So Wyatt barged inside the shop door, which rang with the jingle of a happy bell.

  The shop was long and narrow, with polished wood shelves lining both walls and filled with dozens of jars of teas. Two small tables with mismatched chairs filled the front window, and a three-foot counter sported an antique register, an antique balance, and an electric kettle. Teacups hung on hooks behind the counter. The entire place had an air of magic, rippling just below the surface like water trapped in the desert. Just waiting for someone to tap into its potential.

  A teenager was browsing a row of teas halfway down the shop. He saw us and left, either assuming we were cops or intimidated by the glares he was likely receiving. The bell dinged as the door shut.

  “Be right there,” a voice bellowed from the far rear. I noted the beaded curtain, and what was probably a storeroom beyond it.

  Marcus locked the front door and turned over the Out to Lunch sign.

  Wyatt didn’t wait. He stormed down the length of the shop. A shadow moved behind the beads and a meaty hand reached through to brush them aside. Wyatt grabbed the hand and yanked Brutus into the shop, hard enough to send the larger man crashing into a shelf of teapots. Several broke; Brutus yelped.

  “There’s cash in the register,” Brutus said.

  Snarling, Wyatt crowded in and grabbed the front of Brutus’s shirt, making sure Brutus got a good look at his old client. Brutus went pasty white. His lips parted and his eyes widened. I pulled my gun and took a position opposite the pair, giving me a good line of sight on both men—just in case one of them did something stupid. Phin and Marcus flanked me.

  “Mother and Earth, Truman, what happened to you?” Brutus asked.

  “Seen anything with eyes like this lately?” Wyatt said.

  Brutus swallowed hard.

  “I smell them,” Marcus said.

  “Go,” I said.

  He and Phin disappeared behind the beaded curtain. Brutus started to protest. Wyatt shoved him hard against the shelves.

  “You sold a sunscreen to the vampires three years ago on behalf of a human named Walter Thackery,” Wyatt said.

  Brutus shifted from surprised to annoyed in a single breath. The magic around us felt denser, as though it was crowding in. Our resident mage was not a happy guy anymore. “Yes, I did,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m a businessman, Truman. I’ve done jobs for a lot of people in the thirty years since I opened this shop, yourself included. I stay in business and I stay alive because I keep my blessed nose out of things and don’t rat on my clients.”

  I snorted. “Which means he paid you a lot of money.”

  Brutus tried to look at me, which earned him a firm shake from Wyatt. “Money buys monthlong vacations in warm, tropical climates.”

  “Money also signs death warrants for entire races of living beings,” Wyatt snapped. Even from his profile, I saw the solid silver color of his eyes. His canines had grown just enough to hang below his upper lip—far enough for Brutus to notice the change.

  “What in the name of Mother Earth happened to you?”

  Wyatt bared his teeth. “Werewolves.”

  “Werewolves don’t exist.”

  “Try telling that to the one who bit me. Are they here?”

  “Are who here?”

  Another hard shake sent a ceramic teapot shattering to the floor. “The Lupa. Teenagers. They work for Thackery.”

  Brutus started to shake his head, then stopped. Thought about something. “Wait, those kids were werewolves?”

  “They were here? You saw them?” I asked.

  “A few hours ago. They paid me a grand to babysit a pair of caged birds until six-thirty.”

  My heart leapt into my throat and my hand jerked.

  “Go,” Wyatt said. “I’ll watch him.”

  I didn’t like leaving Wyatt alone with Brutus, but the idea that Ava and Aurora were so close, almost safe, propelled me forward. I’d just crashed through the wooden beads when Phin shouted my name. I peered through the gloom of the back room, past stacked boxes and a tiny desk that served as an office. A single open door was tucked away behind a row of storage containers, and it led to a rickety staircase.

  Up I went, into the odors of bacon grease and patchouli. Halfway there I sneezed. The stairs led into an apartment—kitchen and living room, two other doors. One door was open and obviously a bathroom. The other door would have been my destination, even if I hadn’t heard the unmistakable sounds of a kestrel keening.

  “Phin?” I said, charging at the door.

  He and Marcus were inside a cramped bedroom. Two metal cages stood atop an old wooden dresser, and inside of them, the two most beautiful things I’d ever seen—Ava and Aurora in their true forms. One was an adult, the second a miniature version of her mother. Phin stood in front of the cages, hands out and palms up, both crisscrossed with weeping red welts.

  “The cages are silver,” Marcus said. “They can’t shift and we can’t break them.”

  “We need a key,” Phin added.

  “Something tells me the Lupa have the key,” I said. “Maybe Wyatt can summon off the locks?”

  “Where—?”

  “Downstairs with Brutus.”

  Marcus left without being asked. I moved closer to the cages holding my friends, so relieved to see them that I wanted to weep. Ava was crying constantly, her kestrel scream indignant and frightened, even with her mother close by.

  “We’ll get you out,” I said to them.

  Aurora screeched at me.

  I lifted one of the cages—heavy, but not impossible to move. Phin grabbed a pillow off the bed and shook it out of its case. He ripped the case into strips and began wrapping them around his hands. I caught on and helped until we’d created a pair of makeshift mittens.

  As I pulled the last knot, Phin’s head jerked toward the bedroom door. “Something’s happening downstairs,” he said.

  “Come on.”

  I grabbed Aurora’s cage. Phin took Ava’s and followed me into the living room.

  The floor in front of the stairs exploded upward, and a big black shape was flung toward the ceiling. It bounced off and landed in a heap next to the kitchen’s miniature fridge—Marcus in jaguar form.

  Shit.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  4:30 P.M.

  Marcus lifted his head and blinked at me, dazed, before putting his head back down. Anything that had sent a two-hundred-pound cat through the floor wasn’t something Wyatt needed to be fighting alone.

  I put the cage down, leapt over the hole in the floor, and landed on the first step with enough grace to twist my left ankle. I stumbled down the steps two at a time anyway, pulling my gun again, all to the sounds of Wyatt’s deep-chest growling. Something else crashed and thumped in the shop below. Then it went quiet.

  The beads were down. Wyatt was crumpled on the floor in the doorway, conscious but stunned. I hopped over him, into the shop, stupidly blind as to what awaited me.

  Brutus stood in the middle of his shop, clutching a leather cord. Dangling from it was a blue crystal, about four inches long, tapered at on
e end like a nail. Power crackled around the room, caressing my skin and urging me to tap into my Gift. I didn’t know much about mages, but I’d seen crystal magic at work, mostly as some sort of blocking spell. Blocking a person from sight, for instance, or blocking their ability to tap into the Break. It was organic magic, requiring proximity to the crystal for it to work.

  Brutus glared at me, his eyes swirling with a faint hint of light and power. “I won’t be bullied by you people. I took a blessed job, nothing more!”

  Rationally, I understood that. He was a businessman. He sold exotic tea, and he enchanted crystals if you could pay him enough money. He’d helped us out a few times in the not so distant past.

  Emotionally, I didn’t give a shit. He’d hurt Wyatt. He’d held people I cared about in tiny cages made of a material that injured them if they touched it. He’d taken money from my greatest enemy.

  “Please, try to take me down, little girl,” Brutus said.

  As much as I loved the idea of breaking his nose with my fist, I knew I’d get bounced into a concussion by that crystal in his hand. I couldn’t get through. But I bet a bullet could.

  “If you insist,” I said. I raised my right hand, steadied it quickly across my left wrist, aimed my gun at his fist, and fired.

  He screamed loud and long as his hand exploded, and the crystal fell. It shattered against the concrete floor, releasing a blast of power not unlike a faint electric shock. He fell to his knees, clutching his wounded hand against his chest. I walked over and kicked him in the face. He toppled over, unconscious.

  “Little girl, my ass,” I said.

  “Evy?”

  I turned at the sound of Phin’s voice. He stood just behind Wyatt, one cage in each hand. I holstered my gun and squatted in front of Wyatt. His eyes remained wholly silver and his canines long, but he didn’t snap or snarl. He let me help him sit up.

  “How’s Marcus?” he asked.