Three Days to Dead

by Kelly Meding

  Over the stench of tar came another, equally rank odor. The air shifted. I pivoted, dropped to one knee, and plucked a knife from my right ankle sheath. I thrust up, right into the throat of an attacking goblin male. The point came out the back of its neck. Fuchsia blood oozed and gurgled from its mouth. I stood up and yanked the blade back. The dead creature slumped to the ground, having never uttered a single sound.

  “Think he raised the alarm?” I asked quietly.

  The buildings remained silent, the night air otherwise undisturbed. “Hard to tell,” Wyatt said. “But at least we know for sure that they have perimeter guards.”

  “And that goblins are here.”

  “Best guess is they’re in the Visitors’ Center. Let’s see if we can get closer.”

  Wyatt crept down the perimeter line. I hung back and gave myself permission to crush my heel into the dead goblin’s crotch. There wasn’t much of a target, though. Like dogs, a goblin’s penis only protrudes when aroused. Otherwise, only the barbed head remains exposed. My stomp was satisfying, but not quite so much had it still been alive and aroused to feel the excruciating pain.

  I caught up with Wyatt a few yards down. He stood behind a thick tree, shaking his head.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Some spies we are, Evy. We didn’t even bring binoculars.”

  I would have smacked my own forehead, if I weren’t afraid of the loud clack it might make. Any sort of actual surveillance equipment would have been useful, if we’d had access. Being out in the metaphorical cold certainly had its unique set of disadvantages.

  Bright lights flashed across the trees. I ducked behind Wyatt and pressed up against his back, out of sight. Damn me for not hearing the engine. A car drove erratically across the ocean of pavement, toward the front of the Center. It was too far away to see in the window. It pulled past the Center and parked beneath the darkness of the pavilion—I couldn’t help wondering how many other vehicles were hidden there.

  Three shapes emerged. Two were hunched over, short, with moonlight glinting off their black hair. Goblin males. Between them walked a female, her black hair flowing down to her waist and red eyes uncovered by contact lenses. She wasn’t trying to pass, but even without the decoration, I recognized her.

  Kelsa.

  My heart almost stopped. Anger and terror clenched my stomach, at once icy cold and fiery hot. I hadn’t seen her since she left me for dead. Rage bubbled above the terror. My nostrils flared.

  Wyatt grunted. I let go of my grip on his shoulder, forcing myself to relax. Flying to pieces would get us both into trouble. As long as Kelsa was here, I had a shot at killing her with my own two hands—if I could keep Isleen away from her.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  His entire body stiffened. “The goblin who tortured you?”

  “Yes.”

  I caught his elbow before he could reach for and retrieve one of his holstered guns. His head turned; fury danced in his eyes. His jaw was set, and I could practically hear his teeth grinding.

  “One shot will bring them down on us. It will wait,” I said. Besides, killing Kelsa like that was way too impersonal. And quick. When I killed her, I wanted her to know who was doing it and for it to last. Return the favor in a big way.

  One of the males scampered ahead and pulled open the Center’s front door. Kelsa swept inside, her bodyguards right behind. The Center itself stood in the middle of an ocean of pavement, with absolutely no cover. No way of sneaking in closer to have a peek inside.

  We moved farther down the perimeter. No more guards jumped at us. No one sounded any alarms. I wondered several times if Tovin had concocted any magical security measures that we couldn’t detect. While possible, it seemed likely we would have been apprehended by now if he had. Unless they were busy preparing our cages.

  The treetops rustled, singing their familiar tune—only louder and faster than before, as if a strong wind was building. I looked up, waiting for the answer to present itself. Instead of sight, it came through sound—a gentle pattering.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  Wyatt tilted his head to the sky. “Is it rain?”

  “I don’t think so. Sounds like a—”

  He grabbed my arm and yanked me to my knees in the damp leaves. Overhead, the patter became a whir, and then a constant stutter. Twin helicopters hovered over the parking lot. No police markings; they were private. Had we been discovered? Was this an emergency escape plan?

  Doors on both sides of the helicopters slid open as the machines dropped to twenty feet from the ground. The air whipped around us, swirling spring leaves and stinging my face with dirt particles. I waited for rappelling lines. None came. Twenty-one black-clad figures, dressed to the nines with armor and weapons and protective face gear, jumped gracefully out of the sides of the helicopters.

  The figures landed on the hard blacktop with the ease of a step off a staircase, split into three groups, and surged toward the Center. One group left, one group right, the third directly up the center. Guns drawn and ready.

  “Bloods,” I said. “Goddamn Isleen.”

  “Guess she got tired of waiting,” Wyatt said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  2:10

  Twenty feet from the Center, the three groups of Blood forces engaged a force field that knocked four of them backward onto their well-armed asses. The field shimmered briefly—a flicker of blue light. Someone called out an order, and they retreated en masse to the porch of the museum.

  The Center remained quiet. No lights came on; no alarms blared. The Bloods didn’t open fire, but simply formed a protective circle, weapons still trained on the other building.

  A slim, black-clad figure stepped from their ranks and into the open. It was impossible to tell if the Blood was male or female. My best guess, based on the walk, was male. He hefted something in his left hand, wound up, and hurled it at the Center. The object shattered against the barrier, which fritzed and snapped like water on an electric fence. Blue light sparkled. The stink of ozone filled the air. In seconds, the blue field dissolved and blinked out of existence. The Bloods surged forward again.

  This time, an upstairs window opened and gun-fire rained down on the advancing Bloods. Several faltered and jerked. Blood splattered the pavement, but they pressed onward. Had to be regular bullets if the Bloods weren’t staying down. Two stopped in mid-advance, dropped to one knee, and concentrated return fire on the window. Wood and glass shattered. The onslaught stopped.

  Isleen’s people were well trained, I had to give them that.

  They had advanced within twenty feet of the Center’s front door when they faltered again. Many bent, hands clutching their ears, screeching in pain. Something tickled the very edge of my hearing. The back of my neck prickled.

  “Dog whistle,” Wyatt said.

  With the Bloods distracted, the opposition enacted a rear attack. The front door of the museum building opened. Halfies poured out, armed with knives and hatchets and their teeth. They moved too fast for recognition, surging toward the Bloods, thirty or more with one goal in mind.

  I shouted for them to look out, but my voice was lost in the Halfies’ echoing battle cry. The crash of bodies was thunderous. The Bloods reacted immediately, overcoming the squeal of the dog whistle—if it was still being blasted, which I doubted, because it should have affected the Halfies, too—and turned weapons on their attackers.

  Every single gun possessed by the Bloods flew into the air, lifted by invisible hands. Shouts of surprise mixed with screams of pain.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  I saw him then, standing on the second-floor balcony above the Center’s front door. Instinct told me it was Tovin, even though I’d never met him. He stood almost five feet tall, the tallest Fey I’d ever seen. His lean body seemed too thin, like pulled taffy, something a stiff breeze could knock over. Silver hair stood in short spikes, reaching high to the sky like his sharply pointed ears and eyebrows. />
  Small like most Fair Ones, he overcame that by radiating power. Even from where we stood in the cover of the forest, Tovin dwarfed everyone in front of him. I felt the power of the Break all around me, but Tovin lived it. He was born part of the Break. He was power. For the first time since I discovered his plan, I was genuinely afraid of him.

  He levitated the weapons into the sky. The Bloods compensated by pulling blades, and the surface attack became more vicious, almost feral. The weapon cloud began to coalesce and spin. Each individual gun melted into the one next to it, until all that remained was a ball of metal the size of a washing machine. It fell and crushed two battling Bloods.

  Wyatt had his gun out and aimed at Tovin before I could stop him. He squeezed the trigger, and for one brief, shining moment, I thought it would work. Tovin was watching the battle. The bullet roared at its target.

  The world seemed to slow down, each second taking thirty. The bullet telescoped forward. Tovin turned his head and seemed to look right at me. I was certain he saw me. I felt deadly cold under that hateful gaze. He smiled, raised his hand, and plucked the bullet from the air.

  Sound and action roared back to normal time. Tovin was gone. The balcony doors slammed shut behind him.

  “Oh my God,” Wyatt said.

  “He knows we’re here.”

  “I’ve never seen that kind of power.”

  I squeezed his bicep, trying to offer comfort and calm my own nerves. I could kill mortal creatures, and I never had a problem with the morality or with the actual task. Killing something that plucked bullets from the air? Not exactly within my realm of experience, Gifted or not.

  “Should we help them?” I asked, tipping my head toward the battling Bloods.

  “They seem to be doing okay.”

  They were. I spotted Isleen in the fray. She’d removed her protective headgear, and her brilliant white hair flashed in the moonlight. She moved with the speed and grace of a dancer, each motion calculated for maximum damage as she spun through the battle bearing twin blades. Cutting and slicing, drawing blood from her most hated enemies. Dead or dying Halfies littered the pavement, but the battle was far from over.

  In chess, you sent in the pawns first. We hadn’t yet seen the big guns.

  “We need to get inside the Visitors’ Center,” Wyatt said.

  Headlights flashed across our position. Vehicles approached from the access road. They’d turned a curve and would enter the open parking lot in moments.

  “What now?” I asked, more to myself than to Wyatt, and took off.

  I ran down the tree line, sticking to the shadows and dodging underbrush, Wyatt close behind. Four Jeeps were on the road. The first one crashed through the closed gate and turned sharply to the right. Three more followed, each tailing the other until they formed a wall of trucks by the gate, a good hundred feet from the actual fight. Men and women, armed for a fight, flooded out the passenger-side doors.

  “Triads,” Wyatt shouted.

  We had backup after all. No sense in waiting for three o’clock if they thought we’d died in the fire with Nadia or if they thought we’d set it and run. No way to know which they thought was true without asking, so I blundered forward and burst through the trees just behind the last Jeep.

  Two familiar faces stood out among twenty-odd strangers.

  “Tybalt,” I shouted, hoping to catch his attention. Tall and lean, Tybalt Monahan always seemed better suited for the pro-basketball court than our down and dirty job. He heard his name, turned, and saw me. Suspicion and confusion flared, and I realized my mistake too late. He didn’t know me as Chalice.

  None of them did.

  Wyatt put himself in front of me, but even his familiar face didn’t stop someone’s itchy trigger finger from twitching. The gun of a fresh-faced Hunter—probably a week out of Boot Camp—roared. Wyatt stumbled backward into me. Air hitched in my lungs.

  “Hold your fire, goddammit,” Tybalt commanded.

  Wyatt gained his balance. I ducked around to stand in front of him. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the blood on his shirt, with more oozing between his fingers. It was all I saw, hot and crimson—something meant to be inside of his body, not outside.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It went straight through, it’s fine.” His voice startled me back into breathing. He’d been shot in the bicep—not a mortal wound. Our eyes met. Pain had glazed his, and I could only imagine what he saw in mine.

  Gina Kismet appeared, with Milo and Felix—the rest of her Triad team—in tow. Kismet was the only female Handler I’d ever met. She was built like a gymnast—short, muscular, and not an ounce of extra fat anywhere—but looked like a pixie, with short red hair, angry green eyes, and a voice like a Marine drill sergeant. She seemed more suited to being a Hunter than a Handler, but I’d never bothered to ask her story. It had never mattered.

  “We thought you were dead,” Kismet said to Wyatt.

  “Not for lack of trying,” Wyatt said through gritted teeth.

  “Rufus?”

  “We saw him taken away in an ambulance, but Nadia never got out.”

  She nodded, then gave me her full attention. A quick sweep with her eyes preceded a terse, “Stone?”

  “In someone else’s flesh,” I said.

  “When Rufus called and asked for our help, he said you’d … ah, changed.”

  “He’s a master of understatement.” I had to get their brains back on the continuing bloodbath on the other side of the Jeeps. “The Bloods are on our side right now. We know Tovin is inside the Visitors’ Center. Goblins are here, too; we just haven’t seen their numbers yet. Anyone got a bandanna or something?”

  A nameless Hunter whose face I barely remembered handed me a red-checked cloth. I pulled Wyatt’s hand away from his still-bleeding arm and tied the bandanna around the wound. I tightened it, until he hissed.

  “Big baby,” I said.

  “We need to form a perimeter around the Visitors’ Center,” Kismet said. “Just in case Tovin gets any ideas about leaving. Morgan, Willemy, take your teams to the north side of the Center. Nothing gets past you.”

  Eight people tore away from the group. One of them was the baby-face newbie. I tapped him on the shoulder as he passed. He looked up. I punched him square in the mouth. Teeth cut my knuckles. He yelped and stumbled back, blood seeping from his lip. Someone snickered, but no one reprimanded me.

  “That’s definitely Evy,” Tybalt said.

  “That idiot could have killed him,” I said. Maybe ended the fight sooner, rather than later, but I was not giving up hope of an alternate solution to one of us dying. Not yet. We had time, dammit.

  “Once Morgan and Willemy are in place—” Kismet started, only to be cut off by a raucous war whoop that started as one voice and rose into dozens. Screeching and inhuman, it signaled a fresh attack.

  Goblin warriors streamed from the cover of the trees behind us. Too clumsy for guns of their own and too fast for us to shoot them down, they swarmed over and around the Jeeps. The sight of them, barely clothed and aroused by bloodlust, flooded me with fury. Hatred pushed pure adrenaline through my veins, and I found myself looking forward to the carnage.

  “Use your blades!” Kismet ordered, barely audible above the din of the war cry.

  Claws swiped; teeth gnashed. Serrated knives in hand, I dove in.

  Movement blurred around me as I searched for the hunched shapes of goblin males. They were faster than they had any right to be and outnumbered us four to one. I still heard scattered gunfire as I plunged one knife into the back of a goblin. Fuchsia blood spurted in stinking jets. Thoughts of anything but slitting throats and spilling blood fled with my first kill.

  One of them jumped on my back, its razor teeth sinking into the flesh of my left shoulder. Muscle and skin ripped. My right hand swung sideways and buried a blade into its skull. It dropped away, taking some of my shoulder with it, and two more goblins quickly took its place. I killed them with fast slashes across their t
hroats.

  “Don’t kill her!”

  My head snapped toward the familiar, tingle-inducing voice. Kelsa stood on top of the last Jeep, hands on hips, like the battle had already been won. She seemed unconcerned with the rate at which her warriors were falling. She bared her teeth and held out her hand. Light glittered off a silver chain and cross. I dropped one knife and reached for the gun still tucked in the back of my jeans. Bitch had my necklace.

  I hadn’t seen it since the mall. I’d written it off as lost during capture. But Halfie-Alex had said Kelsa was at the jail while I was unconscious. She may have taken it then. One of the Halfies who captured me may have given it to her. The details didn’t matter. I wanted it back.

  Teeth clamped around my right ankle like a bear trap. I shrieked, pulled the gun, and fired, splattering the goblin’s head against the pavement and my jeans. I yanked my leg free. A red-tipped dart struck the ground, barely missing me. Hell, no, I was not going to sleep again. Not this time.

  Loneliness, that’s what I needed. Wyatt was shot. He could have died. That fear remained fresh and close to the surface, and I latched on to it. Focused on Kelsa atop the Jeep, and felt the familiar tingle of the tap. The power of the Break. Dissolution. Movement.

  The pain was duller this time, likely due to the shorter jump distance. I gained my bearings quickly. On the Jeep roof, right behind Kelsa—exactly where I wanted to be. She was still staring at the fray, dart gun in hand, seeming unsure where I’d suddenly gone.

  I smashed the butt of my gun against the back of her head. She dropped like a stone. The necklace fell from her hand and clattered to the Jeep’s roof. I rolled her over and knelt down hard on her arms, knees against elbows, until I heard one snap. She shrieked. Gleaming red eyes glared up at me, pained and slightly unfocused.

  “You’re not so tough when I’m not tied down,” I said.

  “I killed you once. I can do it again,” she snarled.

  I popped the anticoag clip out of my gun and replaced it with the fragmenting clip. Snapped one into the chamber. “This isn’t going to be fast. You aren’t going to enjoy this, but you will remember it in whatever hellish afterlife your kind goes to.”