by Kelly Meding
The living room was empty when we emerged. The cooler air chilled my skin and sent prickles across the back of my neck. The half car sitting in a dripping heap in the center of the room still impressed me. We’d done that—together.
I checked the clock on the wall—about forty minutes since Kismet raced down the mountain. Backup should be arriving any time now. Not that we really needed backup as much as transportation. And answers. Goddamn did we need answers.
We separated then, our individual actions needing no explanation—a testament to years of working together. Wyatt went to the front door, probably to check and see if anyone was coming. I wandered into the back bedroom, amazingly wide-awake, given the hour. Milo sat cross-legged on the floor with a bowl of melting ice cubes and a pile of dish towels. He folded a dozen cubes into one of the towels, then tucked it beneath the blanket, close to Felix’s body. Two similar ice packs bracketed Felix’s flushed face.
“It was the only thing I could think to do,” Milo said without looking up. His voice was tight, strained.
“It was a good call.”
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?” I circled around and crouched next to Milo. A soft twinge wormed through my back.
He looked at me, face clouded. “Cope with losing people you love?”
His question threw me. Milo and I had been very similar in team status—the newest members of our respective Triads. While Tybalt and I had left Boot Camp within weeks of each other four years ago, Milo had been a Hunter for just over a year. Felix and Tybalt had always been there with him, and now the future looked bleak for both men.
“You haven’t lost anyone yet,” I said. “Maybe Tybalt won’t be a Hunter anymore, but he’s alive. He’s strong. So’s Felix.”
Milo took Felix’s right hand in his and squeezed tight, a gesture of solidarity and comfort. My heart ached. I’d never offered that sort of support to my former partners when they were injured. Doing so felt like exposing my own weakness to them, and I hated appearing weak—to anyone.
My years in Juvie and hard training at Boot Camp had beaten weakness out of me and replaced it with hardness. Coldness. My survival instincts were slowly crumbling now under Wyatt’s persistent love and support—more powerful than the unwavering friendship I’d gotten from Jesse and Ash.
I let my gaze linger on Milo’s hand and the strong, anchoring grip he had on Felix’s. On the strain and barely contained grief bracketing Milo’s eyes—hooded eyes that gazed at his wounded partner with a scary intensity not dissimilar to the way Wyatt sometimes looked at me. I blinked.
The new observation only reinforced how little I knew about any Hunters outside my former Triad. Hell, how little I knew about anyone outside my narrow little world.
“So what’s our next step?” Milo asked after a few minutes of silence. “Break into Boot Camp and torture answers out of the people at R&D?”
“Nah. I plan to storm the front entrance.”
His mouth quirked. “You want backup for that?”
“I’ll take all the help I can get.”
Then the most beautiful sound I’d heard all day rumbled in the distance—engines. I scrambled outside to stand with Wyatt and was greeted by the glare of headlights. Three sets, all from Triad Jeeps. The first stopped just behind the half SUV, and Kismet tumbled out of the passenger door with a first-aid bag in her hand.
“His fever’s worse,” I said before she could ask.
She nodded and bolted into the cabin. Conrad Morgan climbed out of the first Jeep with his three Hunters in tow. One of the men I knew by face only—he’d been at Olsmill, battled alongside us to defeat the combined goblin/Halfie forces. The other male Hunter I glared at, and he wouldn’t look at me. Paul Ryan was a rookie, skittish, and had accidentally shot Wyatt once. I hated the kid on general principle. The third, Claudia Burke, a tall brunette Hunter with a scar that ran beneath her chin from ear to ear, was one of the only three Gifted Hunters in the Triads—not counting me—and was a limited telepath.
The other two Jeeps spilled out Adrian Baylor and his two Hunters. Baylor had lost one at Olsmill, then lost the replacement at Parker’s Palace. Either he’d run out of rookies or had refused to take another so soon.
Everyone who exited those Jeeps, save Kismet, stopped to stare at me and Wyatt, but mostly at me. While Kismet had probably told them I was still alive (there had really been no way around it), seeing is usually believing. Baylor seemed amused. Paul Ryan looked ready to barf all over his shoes.
“The perimeter’s clear,” Wyatt said. “A third hound surprised us. All three have been neutralized.”
Baylor nodded. “Paul, Oliver, go help them get Felix into the Jeep.” The two Hunters trotted past us without comment. “Gina mentioned something called a pùca?”
“It’s dead. Milo found a couple of pieces a few yards into the woods. Did Gina fill you in on everything?”
“Everything Tybalt didn’t know. He called about fifteen minutes before she did. Told me what he knew and that he couldn’t get anyone’s cell or the cabin’s landline. We were already mobilizing when I got word from Gina.”
Note to self: Tybalt deserves a big, sloppy kiss.
Muscled arms crossed over his chest, Baylor fixed me with a curious stare. “So once again things come down to someone wanting you.”
Internally, I flinched. Externally, I quirked an eyebrow and lifted my shoulder in a casual shrug. “Well, when you’re popular …”
“Claudia, open the back!”
Four people shuffled out the front door of the cabin, using a sheet as a quasi stretcher-hammock to support Felix. Claudia opened the rear of the last Jeep, then helped the carriers deliver their burden.
When Felix was tucked neatly inside and the rear door shut, Kismet turned to Milo and started to say, “Go with—”
“I’m staying to help.” His tone left no room for argument.
She frowned.
“I’ll take him,” said Baylor’s female Hunter. She was my height, with bowl-cut black hair and eyebrows so thin they looked drawn in marker. On the approving nod from her Handler, she climbed into the Jeep and started to turn it around.
“Tybalt’s meeting them at the hospital,” Kismet said to no one in particular. Her way of reassuring herself that the injured Hunter wouldn’t be alone. Milo touched her elbow, and Hunter and Handler shared their worry in a brief, pained exchange.
Silent up until now, Conrad Morgan seemed to creep out of the shadows to glare right at me. Unlike Baylor, this Handler wasn’t a large man. White-blond hair and sharp features made up for his average height and build. His ski-slope nose, pointed chin, and hollow cheekbones were attractive from one angle and terrifying from another. In the strange shadows cast by the headlights of the Jeeps, he looked like an angry corpse.
He said, “Excellent work getting an Assembly Elder kidnapped. Well done.”
I bristled, hands clenching into tight fists. Only Wyatt’s hand on my arm kept a bright flare of anger from propelling me across the muddy yard, fist-first into Morgan’s too-sharp face. “Phineas understood the risks,” I said darkly, “but Thackery will not hesitate to kill him if I don’t do what he wants.”
“Which is turn yourself over?”
“Yup. Me and my potentially very special blood.”
“Your what?”
Morgan’s confusion was reflected in Baylor, and in their Hunters. Shit. I cast Kismet a curious look. She gave a slight shake of her head. So they’d gotten only the condensed version of the day’s events. I fed them the details of the last week, from the crystal theft to the pùca’s motivation for attacking, up to their arrival. Half a dozen pairs of eyebrows arched to the heavens and several mouths were hanging open as my audience grasped the extent of what Thackery had done.
“And if anyone here,” I concluded with a growl, “even ponders the idea of tying me up and hand-delivering me to R&D for their personal research, know right now you will have to kill me first. I
am fucking done being a guinea pig.”
Baylor was eyeing the closest hound corpse, one hand stroking his chin in a gesture of thought more suited to a college professor than a hard-hitting Handler. “Those look like the same hounds we confiscated from Olsmill,” he said.
“Might just be,” I said.
He snapped his head in my direction, eyes narrowing. “Meaning what? They escaped their cages, made it out of a second-level basement facility, and then got past the perimeter fence?”
“No.” Time to put these particular cards on the table. “Not if they were let out.”
“Impossible,” Morgan said.
“Fine, then let’s go to R&D, check out sublevel 3, and make sure there are still six hounds in captivity. Because if even one of them is missing, every person who works in that building is on my goddamned suspect list.”
“What the hell is it with you and seeing traitors everywhere you look, Stone?”
Instead of infuriating me, Morgan’s question made me laugh. Actual, amused laughter. “Are you kidding? After what happened last month with my Triad, you have the balls to ask me that?”
After my Triad had been set up by a group of Halfies, my partners Jesse and Ash killed, and me blamed for their deaths, I hadn’t known who to trust. Maybe I still hadn’t gotten past that initial betrayal, and maybe I’d let it color my judgment last week when I’d wanted to expose the brass and make them take responsibility for the massacre of a were-Clan, but not now. This time all evidence pointed at a traitor.
Morgan’s jaw twitched. “You really think someone at Boot Camp is working with Thackery?”
“Yes,” I said, in stereo with Wyatt and Kismet.
“They’re not lying,” Claudia said. Her voice was lighter than I’d have guessed, almost breathy in a stage whisper sort of way.
Limited telepath, huh? “You’re reading our minds?” I asked, bristling at the idea of such an intrusion.
“Not exactly,” she said. “More like reading the emotion in the words as they’re linked to your subconscious mind. Truth sounds different from lies.” She shrugged, and I noticed the pinched lines around her eyes and the crease in her forehead.
“You have a hard time during the storm, too?”
She blinked, seeming startled by the question.
“Who do you think is working against us?” Morgan asked, steering the conversation back on course.
“There’s only one way to find out,” I replied. A way that may or may not involve my fists and someone else’s kidneys.
“You want back into Boot Camp?” Baylor asked.
I decided not to inform him I’d already been there twice in the very recent past. “I need to see for myself that the six hounds are still there. So, yes, I want back in.”
Baylor’s left eye twitched. Even though Wyatt had seniority, and Kismet second after him, everyone seemed to defer to Baylor on this decision. Probably because he had seniority over Morgan and was less personally invested in this than the other two Handlers. Adrian Baylor had been a huge asset at Olsmill, and I found myself silently pleading for him to be on my side. I couldn’t keep doing this with the Triads as my enemies—not with the odds we were facing.
“Morgan,” he finally said, “your team is on cleanup. Get the bodies together for collection. The hounds have to go back to Boot Camp.” There was no need to ask where David’s body was going. We had disposal locations for slain Hunters.
Morgan scowled, then started barking orders to his Hunters.
“Everyone else,” Baylor said, “in the front Jeep.”
Five bodies went in one direction; I went in the other. Wyatt called out, but I dashed back into the cabin. No way was I walking into semi-enemy territory empty-handed. I shuffled through the cache of weapons on the floor, choosing a small knife, which I tucked into my shoe, and a .38 with regular rounds. With the gun in the back waistband of my jeans, I left the cabin without a backward glance.
One more location on my list of places I hoped never to see again.
Chapter Sixteen
For the third time in one week, I was back on Boot Camp grounds. Only this trip, I wasn’t hiding in the back of an SUV and I wasn’t breaking in. I was being escorted into a building I’d never had access to by three Handlers to whom I’d trust my life. Okay, Baylor wasn’t quite on that list yet, but he was damned close. Research and Development was restricted to Handlers only, so taking me inside was a huge risk.
Milo and Oliver waited in the Jeep. Kismet used her password to gain entry, then led the way with Baylor and Wyatt watching my back. It was the middle of the night, and the lobby was empty. Small, like a doctor’s waiting room, it had two leather couches flanking the entry and framed watercolors hanging on the walls. Opposite the entrance was an elevator and two heavy gray doors. All three exits had keypads. Next to the center door was a black wall-mounted telephone. The room reeked of furniture polish and bleach.
Kismet strode to the phone, picked up the handset, and pressed one of the four multicolored keys. Waited, then said, “Gina Kismet, Triad Three, requesting sublevel escort.” She waited a beat, then hung up.
“An escort?” I asked.
“Our passwords won’t get us into the sublevels,” she said.
“What about those doors?”
“We can get into those. It’s mostly offices and low-level research behind one of them. The other houses the entire history of the Triads.”
“Ever been in there?”
“Once or twice.”
I glanced at Wyatt. “You?”
He nodded but didn’t elaborate. His lips were pressed thin, his cheeks pallid. I wasn’t used to seeing Wyatt Truman nervous. For someone who’d helped create the program and place we were in, he didn’t seem very sure of his position. Not that I begrudged him a little anxiety. His rank hadn’t helped save me from a Neutralize order the first time around.
The center door swung open, and a too-familiar striking face stepped into the lobby. White-blond hair, still model-handsome, dressed in the same black slacks and white tieless dress shirt I’d always seen Bastian wear.
What the hell was the Triad recruiter doing here at the ass crack of dawn?
Bastian froze when he saw me, his face going absolutely still. Unreadable. His eyes flickered to my left, where Wyatt stood, then back to me. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” he said, each word clipped and carefully chosen.
Don’t be so sure.
Kismet surprised me by saying, “Call her Chalice. She used to know Evy Stone.”
He turned that even gaze on Kismet. He seemed uncertain how to react to her proclamation. Like everyone else in the Triads, he’d have heard about my resurrection three weeks ago. And like everyone else who paid attention, he’d have heard Kismet’s report of my death at the potato chip factory a week after that. Even though he’d never met me in my present body, he knew. I could see it in the slant of one eyebrow and the thin line of his lips.
“I hope she has a damned good reason for being here,” Bastian finally said, radiating familiar calm. “Otherwise, she may not be allowed to leave.”
I nearly snorted in his face. Unless they kept some sort of Break-blocking magic crystal handy—I mentally shuddered, remembering that damned thing—there wasn’t a holding cell in Boot Camp that could keep me against my will.
“One of your Hunters was killed tonight,” I said before anyone could stop me, “and another seriously wounded by hounds that are exact replicas of the six you supposedly have locked up in this building.”
His lips parted, that steady calm starting to crack. “The hounds from Olsmill are still locked up. The only nonhuman who’s left this building in the last four days is the goblin-hybrid who was mysteriously ghosted away yesterday.”
“Let’s pretend I’m very cynical and will believe only what I see for myself.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten into this building, much less be getting past this lobby, Chalice.”
I threw ou
t a name. “Walter Thackery.”
Another crack in the form of furrowed eyebrows. “What about him?”
Not “Who is he?”
“He created the hounds and all the other hybrids locked down in your sublevels. I have information that can help you catch him, but first I need to see those hounds.”
His eyes narrowed. Bastian seemed to weigh my words, in no hurry, unaware I was on a big damned deadline. He finally broke the hold on my gaze and looked at the trio of Handlers. “Who’s responsible for her?”
“I am,” all three replied in chorus. I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so generous.
Bastian blinked. “Adrian comes with us. You two stay.”
Wyatt made a startled grunt. I squeezed his arm just above the elbow, then winked when he caught my eye.
“Weapons stay here,” Bastian said.
“Not a fucking chance in hell,” I replied, as nonchalant as if he’d asked whether I wanted cream in my coffee.
He scowled, then walked over to the elevator and entered a code. A little yellow light flashed green, and the doors slid open. I followed him and Baylor into the wide polished-metal interior, turned, and held Wyatt’s gaze until the doors closed. My stomach flipped as the elevator dropped. I hated elevators, had for most of my life. Felt too much like free-falling.
Bastian flanked my right side, and, this close, I smelled oranges and patchouli—an odd mix of scents that mingled with memory. If not for Bastian, my life would have been completely different. Maybe I’d have died long ago on the streets, another victim of random violence—Dreg or otherwise. Maybe I’d have fallen in love with a handsome older man who would have taken me away from this damned city, to a life of luxury and pleasure. And maybe rainbows would’ve shot out of my ass. For better or worse or something in between, Bastian had gotten me here.
I was tempted to punch him in the eye for it. Fortunately for his good looks, the elevator dinged on level S-3. Another keypad lit up by the door, and Bastian typed in another code. The security in the place impressed me. It meant everyone who went in and out was recorded and logged somewhere—information that would make discovering the traitor much easier.
