by Kelly Meding
“Do either of you know the layout of the Center?” I asked.
Tybalt nodded. “I came here a few times as a kid. The first floor is an open lobby, with a lounge and information booth. I think the second floor is offices and a couple of activity rooms. I never went up on the third, but the basement should be all storage.”
“And Tovin’s likely location. Underground gets him as close to the Break as possible. So I’ll aim for the lobby. It’s an open area. We’re less likely to land inside a desk or a wall.”
Kismet blanched.
I held out one hand to each of them and clasped theirs tightly. They reached to each other, completing the circle without being asked. I fed the thrum of energy through me and into them. Tybalt’s hand jerked; I held tight. “This might feel weird,” I said.
The world melted. The pain was immediate, because of the added weight and distance traveled. It furrowed between my eyes like a red-hot spike. We floated until the world turned blue. Power crackled around us. Agony exploded in my head. I screamed, pushed through it, and came out the other side, intent on the lobby.
As soon as I felt hardwood form beneath my feet, I let them go and fell to my hands and knees. Something warm and wet stained my upper lip. Drops of red hit the floor between my hands. The horrific pain faded, but the migraine-esque symptoms remained. My stomach tried to turn itself inside out. A hand touched the small of my back. I focused on the contact, used it to push the pain away and focus on standing.
“How did you do that?” Kismet asked.
“I’m Gifted now,” I said. “The girl whose body this was, she was an unfound tap. This is her—it’s my power. It’s never been this strong before, but Chalice and I … we’re truly one person now. Everything that was individually ours is mine.”
“So your emptying hourglass?”
“Busted.”
“Great. Now that you’ve solved that quandary for us, I—”
A low growl cut her off. I paid attention to our surroundings for the first time, cursing myself for not doing it sooner. The lobby was the length and width of the building itself. Freestanding walls had long since fallen over. The wood floor was warped in places, and scored in others. The main desk that dominated the very center of the lobby was covered with writing that, upon first glance, appeared to be graffiti. A better look revealed an actual language—albeit, one I couldn’t read.
And I didn’t have time to try, because the desk wasn’t the source of the growl. From the shadows of the rear corner of the lobby came a hulking shape—one that had become very familiar over the last three days. The snarling hound hybrid shambled into the light, saliva dripping from its bared fangs. It stopped, balanced on two legs, then drew up to its impressive height.
My fingers clenched around the hilt of the knife. I’d killed two of them. I could use one more notch on my belt.
“What rounds do you have in?” Kismet asked, her voice a hushed whisper.
“Anticoags,” Tybalt replied. “You?”
“Same.”
“Mine are frags,” I said. “Mix them up. It’ll kill that thing faster.”
Kismet reached behind me with precise movements, doing nothing to startle the hound into attacking faster. It was still fifteen feet away, approaching like it was on a Sunday stroll. She pulled my gun and tucked her own into its place.
“Get downstairs. We’ve got him,” she said.
“Destroy the desk, too. It could be the barrier spell,” I replied.
“Got it. Now go.” She stepped to the left. “Hey, ugly!”
I turned and ran as gunfire erupted behind me. Fast, toward the door marked EXIT. I crashed through the fire door and descended the dank, cement steps two at a time. The weapons play faded into the distance. I hit the basement level and was presented with two doors, made of the same heavy metal as the door upstairs, but these felt different—ominous and dark, the keepers of terrible secrets. The thrum of energy was strong. It crackled all around me. Whatever Tovin was doing, he’d already tapped into something.
My hand closed around the bar handle of the door on the left. A thunderous explosion from above shook the walls and trembled the ground beneath my feet. Dust drifted down. I sneezed and looked up, as if I could see up through the floor at what had happened.
“I hope that was the desk blowing up,” I said, wishing they could hear me. The barrier was beyond my powers or ability to detect, even through the Break. It didn’t matter, though, because Tovin had to know we were inside.
I pushed down on the bar. The door opened without resistance or noise. I slipped through into what, at first, looked like a high school science lab, or something out of a hokey television horror movie. Long metal tables covered with laboratory equipment straight from Young Frankenstein filled the center of the room—microscopes, petri dishes, flasks and vials, and intricate setups of tubes and burners and bubbling liquids.
The smell nearly felled me—a fetid mixture of waste and blood and rot, made sour by chemicals and lemon-scented cleaner. Fluorescent bar lights gave the entire room a sickly yellow cast. While my brain caught up to the stink, I scanned the perimeter of the room. The right wall was all open shelves and locked cabinets, fully stocked with supplies I couldn’t identify. The left and rear walls looked like dog kennels, each section four feet wide and the height of a man, partitioned by cement blocks. Iron bars more suited to a prison cell-block made up the fronts.
Something growled inside one of those kennels. A chill wormed its way up my spine. The hounds. They were artificially created hybrids, the source of which was right here and had been for quite a while, given the intricacy of the lab and its contents.
I made my way to the nearest cage, curiosity edging out common sense. The kennels weren’t lit, leaving the interiors cast in shadow. I remained at arm’s length and squinted through the iron bars. Matted, moldy straw covered the floor, which extended less than six feet to the rear.
Huddled in the corner was a creature the size of a five-year-old child. If it had ever been human, it had long ago ceased being so. Oily black skin glinted in the dim light. Short, connected spikes, like the dorsal fin of a pickerel, ran down its spine. I saw no face, no hands, only the backside of it.
The kennel had no label or designation, only the letter A painted above it. Each kennel was similarly lettered, all the way to N. Fourteen kennels, fourteen potential experiments. I forced myself to the next one. In the center, nestled in soiled straw, was a teenaged boy. Half of a teenaged boy. The entire left side of his body was stone, fixed in place and anchoring him to the ground. He blinked at me with one brilliant blue eye, an image of perfect despair.
“Holy shit.”
I backed away, unable to bring myself to look into the rest of them. I didn’t want to see the abominations created by mad scientists—or more precisely, a mad elf—for reasons I could never hope to understand.
Something squealed. My head snapped up and right, to the very last kennel. The door had swung open. I slipped sideways, putting the rows of lab tables between me and it, fixed on the shadowed interior. The occupant snuffled. Straw shifted—a dry and wheezy sound. My knife hand twitched.
The thing that finally showed itself shouldn’t have been able to move. It shouldn’t have even been alive. The size of a house cat, sans fur or distinctive markings or muscle mass of any kind, it had twin incisors at least four inches long. Like the living skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger kitten, it trotted out of its cage and leapt onto the nearest lab table.
Claws clicked on the metal surface. I watched it sniff a petri dish. It hissed—a horrible sound like steam escaping. One step at a time, I backed toward the door. It continued its forage along the table, paying me no heed. Only a few feet to go and I would escape the waking nightmare. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure the thing could hear it.
I closed my hand around the door handle and pushed down. The gentle clack was all it took. Skele-kitty raised its head, sunken eyes looking right at me. It yowled, a
nd the screech made my teeth ache. It raced toward me, faster than it had any right to move. I pushed against the door, went through, and shoved it closed again. The critter hit with a thump. Unless it knew how to open doors, it was trapped.
“Okay, let’s try door number two.”
With perfect silence in the stairwell and lobby above, I pushed through the second door and into another stairwell. The basement had a basement. Interesting. It also had no light of any kind. After a moment fiddling with the door and finding no way to prop it open, I gave up and let darkness envelop me.
The stairs were steeper, wood instead of cement, and still held a hint of pine fragrance. They were new enough that I doubted they were part of the original floor plans. I dragged my fingertips along the rough, packed-dirt walls, each step taking me farther into the gloom.
My foot finally landed on something harder than wood. I scraped the toe of my sneaker around. Cement floor. I’d hit bottom. I fumbled until my eyes adjusted enough to make out a thin line of light on the floor, roughly the width of a door. The metal frame was embedded in the dirt walls and within it was another steel fire door. Another handle. Another room.
I pressed my palm against the smooth metal. It hummed beneath me like a living thing. The short hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I was there, on the precipice of solving my entire three-day ordeal. Facing Tovin, and getting what few answers he might reveal before I cut his black heart out with my knife. But standing there, so close to what I wanted, I hesitated.
Wyatt was supposed to be by my side for this. We should have been facing Tovin together. A pang of loneliness loosed a flood of power through my body. I had to maintain control. The last thing I needed was to teleport out in the middle of killing the bad guy. I inhaled deeply, blew out through my mouth, and pushed down on the door handle.
Showtime.
Chapter Twenty-nine
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.
