Fields of Blood (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 2)

by Sonya Bateman

“What?” He gaped at me. “Look, you just told them you’re going to talk to a dead guy. Maybe they bought the fairy thing, but there’s no way—”

  “Chester…it’s true.”

  He made a strange sound and paled under his tan. “What’s true?”

  “All of it,” I said. “We are Fae—well, I’m half. And I can talk to the dead.”

  Chester’s mouth moved silently for a moment. Finally, he said, “Seelie or Unseelie?”

  I was too surprised he knew that much about the Fae to answer. But Taeral replied right away. “Unseelie.”

  He took a rapid step back and pulled out a strange-looking gun I hadn’t seen him pack, with an oversized tube-fed barrel and a muzzle split into a Y. “I knew there was something off about you,” he said. “All that stuff about being stronger in the moonlight. You’re mind-controlling me, aren’t you?”

  “No!” I said. “We can’t even do that. Uh, can we?”

  “Not you.” Chester pointed the gun thing at Taeral. “Him.”

  Taeral sneered. “You’ve nothing worth controlling, human.”

  “Come on, Taeral.” Sometimes I forgot how much he hated humans, until he reminded me at very inconvenient times. Like this one. “Look, Chester, we’re not doing anything to you. We’re the nice kind of Unseelie.”

  “Right. I’m not buying it,” he said. “You come to my place, pretending you’re human, telling me what I want to hear. That’s how the evil fairies get you. If you’re so nice, why didn’t you just tell me what you were?”

  “Because of this!” Taeral shouted, snatching the gun so fast that I barely saw him move. “Humans. You shoot first, and then you shoot some more. Anything you fail to understand, you try to kill.”

  Chester blinked and lowered his empty hand slowly. “Not all humans are like that,” he said. “I’m not…”

  “Really. Were you not, just now, threatening to shoot me? Merely because I am Unseelie?” Taeral shook his head, and one corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “Not all Fae are alike, either,” he said.

  “I guess not.” Chester managed a tentative smirk. “Sorry, son. I swear I’m not like that, most of the time,” he said. “Hell, a mermaid saved my life once, when I was stationed in Hawaii.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “A mermaid?”

  “Told you I’ve seen things. And just so you know, mermaids are not pretty.” He cleared his throat and nodded at Taeral. “Can I have that back? If, you know, I promise not to shoot you,” he said.

  Taeral handed the gun back. “What is this…thing, anyway?” he said.

  “Uh. Silver darts, elderberry infusion. Double shot in case of glamour.”

  “Well,” Taeral said. “You’ve one of them right, at least.”

  Chester frowned. “Which one?”

  “As if I’d tell you.”

  “Guys, we should get back in there,” I said before the argument could continue. “We’ll have to move on them soon, if we’re going to get Sadie and the rest of them out.”

  Chester stared at me. “You’re going after the aliens?”

  “Yeah. They have our friend. Again,” I muttered. “Look, I know you didn’t sign on for this. I’ll understand if you’d rather not come. Actually, you probably shouldn’t. These guys won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  “Are you kidding? You need me more than ever,” he said.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said. I really didn’t want him to get killed. “We’ve gone up against them before.”

  “Do you know the least guarded way into the compound?”

  “No, but—”

  “Know which building they do their experiments in?”

  “Not exactly…”

  “Can you hack a security system?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “You need me,” Chester said. “So let’s do this.”

  I smirked. “Right. I guess we’re all in.”

  When Mars and Luther returned, they laid the body out on the conference table. The guy was a blond with a face like a swollen weasel, wearing the SWAT-style body armor Milus Dei favored for their torture-victim raid parties. One arrow shaft protruded from his throat, and another from just beneath his left arm, entering at a downward angle that had probably pierced his heart.

  Mars was a damned good shot.

  I’d given them a brief explanation of the DeathSpeaker stuff, including that the dead people spoke in my head, they had to tell the truth—and I couldn’t do it for long without bleeding and passing out. “Before we get started,” I said. “Is there anything specific I should ask him, besides what they want with Sadie?”

  “Ask him what they’re doing to Rennie. Our little sister,” Luther said tightly. “They took her, too.”

  The kid sounded sick with concern. “I can’t,” I said with real regret. “He won’t know anything that’s happening after he died.”

  Elara took a step toward the table. “Ask him why they kidnapped the people from the village,” she said, her voice oddly strained. “I saw them there, at least a dozen. I heard them…screaming.”

  My gut twisted. Capturing and torturing humans was not standard operation for Milus Dei—well, not for the ones from New York. “I’ll find out,” I said. At least now I could keep my promise to Sheriff Gormann, and hopefully even bring them back alive.

  “All right,” I said, staring down at the body. “Here we go.”

  I pressed a hand to the dead man’s armored chest.

  Within seconds, a tugging sensation filled my head, and a voice spoke. Our New York brothers said they’d found you, DeathSpeaker. We didn’t believe them.

  “Guess you do now,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  There was a brief pause that strained my brain before he said, Hector! Damn, it’s true!

  I winced a little at the stabbing words. “Afraid so, Hector,” I said. “You have to answer me. And you’re not going to like my questions.”

  You’re a monster, Hector snarled. My brothers will do what the Quaestio branch has failed to. We’ll capture you, torment you, and cleanse the world of your filth.

  “Yeah. Haven’t heard that one before,” I muttered, closing my eyes until the pinpricks subsided. “What do you want with Sadie?”

  Who?

  “Sadie. The werewolf from New York. Subject two-six-two, you son of a bitch.”

  The tugging grew harder. Her blood contains Compound 23, he said. Those Quaestio idiots destroyed the rest with their headquarters.

  I knew what he must have meant. The stuff they injected Sadie with to suppress her human side. At least I wouldn’t have to suffer through an answer to that question. “Why do you want Compound 23?”

  To stabilize L39.

  “What the hell is L39?”

  The dead guy practically yanked my brains out through my ears before he replied in angry, grinding tones that drilled into my head. Temporary lycanthropy. It gives humans the strength, speed, and senses of a werewolf, until it wears off.

  “Jesus Christ,” I rasped. “You’re weaponizing lycanthropy?”

  I ignored the shocked sounds from the others in the room. Yes, Hector said. With their abilities, our soldiers can take down any non-human.

  My head throbbed badly, and not just from the pain. “So what will this compound in Sadie’s blood do?” I said.

  L39 has an unfortunate side effect. It drives people insane. In the right amounts, Compound 23 will shield the human from the virus while it’s active.

  The long explanation felt like knives in my brain, and started my nose bleeding. I had to ask about the rest while I still could. “Why did you kidnap a bunch of people from the town?” I said.

  Hector laughed. The sound grated in my head like sandpaper. We need test subjects.

  “What, your soldiers aren’t good enough to test this stuff on?”

  My brothers are highly trained. Far too valuable to risk insanity, or death.

  “You son of a bitch,” I gasped as the blood went from trickle to gush. “You’r
e killing them?”

  Eventually. And with our enhanced soldiers, we’ll have no trouble capturing you. DeathSpeaker.

  “That’s not going to happen, Hector,” I ground out. “Enhanced or not, your soldiers are going down.”

  I pulled away from him, with the cold sound of his laughter still echoing through my aching head.

  A hand on my shoulder made me flinch. It was Elara, offering something that looked like a handkerchief. “Here,” she said. “For your nose.”

  “Thanks.” I wiped the blood away and held the material in place for a few seconds, knowing it wouldn’t stop bleeding right away. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now. “We need to get to that compound,” I said. “Before they figure out how to turn themselves into werewolves on demand.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Four young werewolves, one and a half Fae, and one crazy human against a hundred-plus highly trained soldiers who may or may not be able to go wolf whenever they wanted.

  This was really going to suck.

  While Chester led the way toward the compound, I explained as best I could what the dead guy had told me. How they were using Sadie’s blood to try and infect people with lycanthropy without driving them insane, and testing the stuff on the people they’d kidnapped from Elk Heights.

  Hector was right about one thing. A pack of werewolf-enhanced humans could probably take down anything.

  “I don’t understand,” Tate said. “The stuff they want is in Sadie’s blood, right? So why did they take the elders?”

  Taeral’s jaw clenched. “They need no reason. They’ve always captured and tortured Others, simply because they can.”

  “Yeah, but it still doesn’t make sense,” I said. “That base has been there for years, on the same mountain as a whole pack of werewolves. If they just wanted to grab them and take them apart, they would’ve done it before now. Wouldn’t they?”

  “I suppose,” Taeral said.

  “Dead Hector called them the Quaestio branch. The assholes from New York, I mean. So maybe these guys are doing something different out here.”

  “I already told you,” Chester said over his shoulder. “They’re building an alien army. Didn’t I say they were making super soldiers?”

  Elara and Tate both looked at me. “Aliens?” Elara mouthed.

  “Uh, yeah. Some of us aren’t convinced on the alien thing,” I muttered.

  “I heard that.”

  “But he’s right about everything else,” I said louder. “Anyway. Whatever they took your family for, it’s not going to be good. We’ll have to figure it out after we go in and get them, and the people from town.”

  “Yeah, and what then?” The heavy voice came from Luther. “They already got whatever they needed from Sadie. And they have an army. What are we supposed to do when they come after us again?”

  I let out a breath. “I wish I knew, kid.”

  The only thing I did know was I couldn’t think about massive numbers, global sites, and cult members in the Pentagon right now. All of that was happening somewhere else.

  The odds were already impossible from here.

  We’d been picking our way across rough terrain for nearly an hour when Chester led us through a thick, steep stretch of trees and onto a well-worn path. “Douse your lights and keep an eye out,” he said, making an adjustment to his own flashlight that reduced the bright glow to a pale, focused beam. “I doubt anyone would be up here this time of night, but you never know.”

  “Where’s here?” I said.

  “Hiking trail. They train on this sometimes, but mostly they just use it for walking.” He looked back over the group. “I’d have a weapon ready.”

  I grabbed the .45, and a small burst of rustling and clicking erupted around me as everyone armed themselves.

  At least it was relatively easy going, except for the tension of trying to watch everywhere at once for signs of Milus Dei. I focused on catching my breath. It’d been a long time since my last trek through the wilds, on a mountain a lot like this one. The only time I’d ever traveled the wilderness alone.

  When I finally escaped the Valentines, and ended my sixteen-year sentence in hell.

  I’d been planning the night I left for just over a year. They never would’ve let me leave—the Valentines were poachers, illegal big-game hunters with a long list of crimes under their belts from petty theft to outright murder. I’d witnessed it all, and they knew I hated them, wouldn’t hesitate to turn on them if I got the chance. My only way out was dead. So that’s what I intended to make them think.

  Unfortunately, I got caught.

  The family was camped in the northern Pennsylvania Appalachians, hunting down black bears. I’d planned to take off in the middle of the night while the rest of them were passed out in drunken stupors, and leave a staged ‘animal attack’ behind. I had three days’ worth of food and water, a few bottles of fresh blood from the day’s kills for stage dressing, and a hunting knife I’d finally managed to steal from one of my brothers.

  Part of the plan involved cutting off some of my own skin and hair, just to make it convincing. It would’ve been worth it.

  But Orville, the man I thought was my father for most of my life, happened to stumble out of the Airstream he shared with Mama Reba to heed the call of nature—just before I’d hit the safety of the tree line bordering the camp. He somehow managed to figure out my plan, despite the handicap of having a brain entirely fueled by meanness and whiskey.

  He beat the hell out of me. Broke my left arm and a few ribs, blacked one eye shut, and battered me hard enough I was pissing blood for a week. Lucky for me, he was too tired to finish killing me—so he chained me down in the bed of his pickup and promised to finish the job in the morning. Said I was officially useless dead weight, and he was going to make me the ultimate hunting trophy.

  Orville went into detail about how he was going to skin me alive and carry the skin around with him, mount it up in the Airstream and charge his twisted poacher friends ten bucks a pop to look at my dead husk.

  I believed he would.

  That was the night I learned about the power of sheer desperation and my incredible will to save my own ass. At the time I had no idea I was half-Fae, but I did have the moonstone pendant. It must’ve helped me open the padlock Orville used to secure the chains, when I thought it had somehow popped from me pulling it with my teeth, shoving a splinter of metal into the lock and fumbling around, and finally begging it to just open.

  Looking back, I figured my non-human status had been the only thing keeping me alive all those years while Hodge and Morris used me for target practice. They’d shot me so many times, I should’ve died from the shock alone.

  But the Fae healed fast, even when they didn’t know they were Fae. And it probably didn’t hurt that the Valentines were most active at night, so I spent a lot of time in the moonlight.

  After I slipped the chains and ran, I spent four days wandering the mountain in a delirium of pain and fear. Jumping at every noise, thinking they’d found me. Knowing that every minute I stayed away, they’d make my death that much slower and more painful. I’d eventually made my way to a paved road, where a man headed to New York gave me a lift.

  He was too drunk to notice I was half-dead. The cop who pulled him over when he crossed into the city wasn’t.

  From there I was shuffled into the system, but I made sure I disappeared from that system as soon as possible. I could never let the Valentines find me. By now, they probably figured they owed me a painful death stretched out over ten years or so.

  “Um. Gideon?”

  Elara’s soft voice beside me scattered the memories. I looked over, and realized I could see much better than I expected without the flashlight. At least while the moon was up. Her face, so much like Sadie’s, was pinched with worry.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Go for it.”

  She drew a shaking breath. “Did Sadie really come back…just for me
?”

  “Yeah. She did,” I admitted.

  “So it is my fault, then,” she whispered.

  “It is absolutely not your fault.” I tried for a reassuring smile. “You know, you’re a lot like her,” I said. “She tried to blame herself for something Milus Dei did too. But it wasn’t her fault—and this isn’t yours. Okay?”

  “I guess.” Her expression said she wasn’t convinced. “You think I’m like her?”

  I nodded. “That’s a good thing, by the way.”

  “Yeah. But some of the others, they don’t think so.” She sighed and stared ahead at nothing. “Dad’s always been so mad that Sadie keeps going against family traditions. He thinks she doesn’t belong, and says her running off just proves it.”

  I couldn’t help a short laugh. “Have to take Sadie’s side here,” I said. “Just because it’s tradition, doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  “Tell me about it.” Elara’s features darkened. “And Marlon…well, he’s an asshat. He’s the one who drove her away. Dad was only going to—” She stopped suddenly and looked at me. “Do you know why she left?”

  “She told us about Michael,” I said.

  “Oh. She must really like you, then.” The corners of her mouth twitched down. “It was all Marlon’s idea,” she said. “Dad wanted to forbid her from seeing him, but Marlon talked him and the elders into…what they did. To make an example, he said.” Anger burned from her eyes, glinting in the moonlight. “He told me about it once. How he killed Michael, how he begged for his life. Marlon said he was weak. And he was laughing.”

  I shuddered inwardly. This Marlon sounded like a real winner, and I wasn’t looking forward to rescuing him. Especially if he was the one I’d stabbed when they took Sadie—which seemed likely, since he’d been giving orders.

  But Sadie was the important thing here. We had to get her back.

  Ahead of us, Chester slowed his pace, and then stopped. “Okay, it’s right around this bend,” he said. “I just have to hack into their security system and disable the alarms, and we’re in.”

  “Right,” I muttered, hoping Chester really wasn’t as crazy as he seemed—because otherwise, we were officially screwed.