by Kelly Meding
ALSO BY KELLY MEDING
Three Days to Dead
For Jade, my beautiful niece
Acknowledgments
Many thanks, as always, to my fantastic agent, Jonathan Lyons, for all of your hard work and patience with this semi-new author; at least I rarely make the same mistakes twice. Hugs and kudos to my awesome editor, Anne Groell, for your wisdom, your text smilies, and for loving “the grim.” Thanks to David Pomerico, Caitlin Kuhfeldt, the folks at Suvudu, and to everyone at Random House who put time into this book.
To my terrific betas, my humble thanks. Nancy, you are not afraid to tell me when something doesn’t make sense, and I treasure your friendship. Sarah, you will go down in history as the girl who coined “winged hawtness” for you-know-who.
Thanks to my best friend, Melissa, for putting up with my moods; my sister, Dawn, for being a terrific and fiercely loving mother to a very special little girl; and my parents for all that you both do and have ever done for me.
Contents
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Later
Copyright
Chapter One
Friday, 5:56 A.M.
Deep red bled into the predawn sky above the defunct Olsmill Nature Preserve, and I didn’t want to be around when the sun fully rose above the mountain treetops. Once sunlight hit the plethora of vampire and Halfie bodies strewn around the sea of pavement that surrounded the preserve’s Visitors’ Center, it was game over. I’d smelled burning vampire bodies—acrid and heavy, like scorched rubber. More than forty corpses littered the ground, victims of last night’s semi-epic battle.
They’d smell it in the city all day.
I wandered away from the grisly mess, back toward the line of Jeeps that created a barrier between the carnage and the dense forest, past the human Hunters collecting goblin corpses for the bonfire. I wanted out before they lit that, too. Even dead and rotting as they were, just the sight of the hunched, oily-skinned goblin warriors set my skin crawling.
Voices on the forest side of the Jeep trickled over.
“… you see how she got them inside the Visitors’ Center?”
“People can’t teleport. That’s impossible.”
“Can’t come back from the dead, either, but she did.”
“Like a friggin’ zombie or something.”
“She moves too fast to be a zombie.”
I was being discussed. Not surprising. How often did a Dreg Bounty Hunter get brought back from the dead, lead an attack on a possessed elf, discover she could teleport, and continually heal from wounds that would kill any regular human being? We lived in a city where magic existed, where teenagers were recruited to kill the beasts of nightmares, and the only way those guys could understand my existence was to go Romero on me?
Terrific.
The two gossipers shuffled to my side of the Jeep, carrying a goblin corpse between them. They froze when they saw me. I knew their faces but not their names. Each Triad unit consisted of three Hunters, with each unit working independently of one another and overseen by a trained Handler. Handlers kept in contact with other Handlers, but anonymity among Hunters protected us from attack by our enemies.
Today’s mass battle in the mountains north of the city was the first time I’d seen more than three Triads in one place, ever.
I narrowed my eyes at the pair and lowered my voice to a guttural growl. “Mmm, brains.”
The taller of the two grunted, his thickly lashed eyes going wide. His companion, shorter by several inches and with skin the color of strong coffee, snorted. He seemed the most familiar, and it finally struck me where I’d seen him before—Burger Palace. He belonged to a Handler named Rhys Willemy and had helped arrest my own Handler two days ago.
Huh.
They continued carrying their burden toward the bonfire pit to add more organic fuel to what was sure to be a disgusting fire. As they wandered off to collect the next corpse, I was glad I wasn’t required to help with cleanup.
Probably my reward for, you know, stopping the bad guy and keeping a demon from running amok.
I turned my attention back to the sprawl of dead things in front of me. My target hadn’t been collected. Kelsa’s broken body had shriveled from blood loss. The fuchsia liquid jelled on the blacktop around the goblin Queen to create a kind of paste. It squelched around my sneakers, which were already stained with blood and dirt. I breathed through my mouth, but it didn’t help. The cloying seawater stench was thick enough to taste.
The goblins would be furious when they learned of her death. I knew little about the specific hierarchy within hidden goblin society, but Kelsa was a rare and revered female. She’d led a horde of warriors. She had orchestrated the goblins’ end of Tovin’s plan to summon a demon. She had power within the goblin ranks. And I had killed her—payback for killing me last week. It was only a matter of time before they regrouped and came after me.
Again.
“Evy?”
I did a careful one-eighty in the puddle of blood. Wyatt Truman—my Handler and the man who’d almost become a demon suit—walked across the pavement toward me, and I nearly tackled him with another hug. Nearly. One sleeve of his shirt was stained red, darkening as it dried—a constant reminder of how I’d felt an hour ago when he’d been shot with an anticoagulant bullet and had died in my arms. A constant reminder, also, of the power of the gnome healing magic that had brought him back to me.
“How’re those?” he asked, pointing at my stomach.
My hand went to the torn, soaked fabric of my T-shirt. Below it, scabbed slash marks were slowly healing—gifts from my throw-down with Kelsa. An inch deeper and she would have gutted me, and I doubted my healing ability could have saved me from having my intestines stomped all over the blacktop. An ability I seemed to have retained, even though my three days were up. The bite on my ankle, the cuts on my cheek, and other gashes across my torso and legs were also healing, creating an itchy sensation not unlike rolling in dry grass.
“I’ve had worse,” I replied. “You ready to get out of here? Sun’ll be up soon.”
“Yeah, there was just one thing I wanted to do first.”
“Which is?”
Another pair of Hunters strode past us. One walked with his shoulders slumped, head turned away. Wyatt reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. The kid stopped and looked up. I saw his swollen lip an instant before Wyatt’s fist slammed into his nose. The kid squealed and stumbled backward, hands covering his face. Blood streamed between his fingers and down his chin.
“Wyatt,” I said. He glared at me and I glared right back. Like I cared if he punched that little shit in the nose. “I already did that.”
Wyatt shrugged. “Hey, you got to kill the bitch who killed you. Give me something here.”
“You have a good, if somewhat morbid, point.”
“You broke my nose,” the kid who’d fired that fatal anticoagulant shot said. Though muffled beneath his hands, it soun
ded closer to “You bruk by doze.”
“Hey, Truman! Ease up, will you?” Adrian Baylor’s question was barked from a brief distance. The burly Handler strode toward us from the other end of the Jeep line, bristling like an angry dog. “The kid’s a week out of Boot Camp, and it was an accident.”
“The kid,” Wyatt said, “is too skittish to be using live rounds. Who the hell’d he pay to graduate?”
“The kid has a fucking name,” snarled the kid in question. Color flamed both cheeks. He’d dropped his hands, allowing his broken nose to bleed freely. Half a foot shorter than Wyatt, he stood up like the class nerd facing down the playground bully. For a rookie, he had brass ones.
Wyatt crossed his arms over his chest. “Which is?”
“Paul Ryan.”
“Okay, then.” Wyatt tilted his head toward Baylor. “Paul Ryan is too skittish to be in the field with live ammo.”
Paul’s entire face turned beet red.
Baylor growled low in his throat—a challenge. “Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be taking training advice from a guy who got his whole team killed.”
Wyatt flinched. I tensed, expecting more punches. Or at the very least, a couple of choice insults. When nothing happened, I got pissed. For Wyatt and for me, being one of the three dead people referenced in Baylor’s snarky comment.
I was across the blood puddle and in Baylor’s face before anyone could stop me. I balled my fist in the front of his black turtleneck and leaned in until we were nose to nose. I’d just crossed an unspoken line of code among Hunters and Handlers, but I didn’t much care. It’s not like I worked for them anymore.
“Our deaths were not Wyatt’s goddamn fault, understand? You fucking asshole.” I let him go, and he stumbled back a step.
“Evy, stop,” Wyatt said.
I rounded on him, my hands clenched. His shoulders had slumped. He didn’t seem angry anymore, only sad, but that just fueled my anger. “Why, Wyatt? Our deaths were not your fault.”
“Yeah.” His tone said otherwise, but it wasn’t a fight I was prepared to relive in front of the others. Maybe not again until I’d had a few days’ sleep. I thought he’d accepted the fact that Jesse and Ash, my late Triad partners, had been killed as part of a larger plan. Their deaths—and, ultimately, mine as well—were orchestrated, unpreventable. Not his fault. Not my fault, either.
Yeah, not my fault. Maybe if I said that a few more times, I’d even believe it.
The Hunters and Handlers continued collecting bodies as the sun inched higher into the morning sky, turning purples and crimsons into pinks and golds. The odor of rot intensified as the cool morning gave way to warmth. A different sort of body pile was rising near our Jeep—six dead Hunters, each carefully covered with a cotton blanket. While fewer in number, those losses hit much harder. Adding in the deaths of Rufus’s entire Triad team yesterday, we had lost forty percent of our trained forces.
The battle had ultimately lasted only an hour, but the effects would be felt for a long time—not only among the Triads but also among the many species that inhabited both the city and the surrounding mountains. The goblins—a scavenger species that spent more time in the city’s sewers and subterranean tunnels than aboveground—had shown their manipulative hands by joining forces with Halfies and openly attacking us. They’d be hunted mercilessly for it. The Halfies—not fully vampire but no longer fully human—had no real power other than as thugs and roving street gangs, but someone had managed to keep them organized long enough to cause serious carnage tonight.
Their collective status had just gone from Irritant to Public Enemy Number One.
The Triads could handle the goblins and Halfies. We’d been doing it for years, in secret, keeping the existence of such creatures from the general public. No, it was the orchestrator of their activities that had the potential to cause the most upheaval. The Fey Council, humanity’s largest champion, had been betrayed by one of their own—an elf named Tovin, one of the very few elves known to exist. He had tried to release a demon into our world by transplanting the thing’s consciousness into Wyatt. We’d stopped Tovin and trapped the demon.
Temporarily trapped. Amalie, Queen of the sprites, would likely send someone along shortly to collect the lemon-sized onyx crystal the demon had hardened into, for proper storage and disposal. She’d given me the magic spell to stop the demon; I trusted her to handle it from here.
But perhaps the most important outcome of tonight’s battle was that the Triads had found a tentative ally in the vampires—something I’d never expected three days ago from a species who did their collective best to ignore us and, when they didn’t, looked down their noses at us. It was an alliance that sprang out of more than just a unified view that all Halfies should be wiped out, only I couldn’t put my finger on the more.
And I was too exhausted to worry about it now. “Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I said.
“You going to file an official report on this, Truman?” Baylor asked.
Wyatt snorted. “Are you offering me my job back?”
“Not mine to offer, but you had a huge part in this. Once a Handler, always a Handler, right?”
“Yeah.” That time he seemed to mean it.
I grabbed Wyatt’s wrist and tugged him away. He came without further prompting, seemingly as ready to get out of there as I was.
“Stone!”
Christ, what now?
Gina Kismet jogged over from the direction of the pavilion opposite the Visitors’ Center and pulled to a dead stop in front of us, not even out of breath. Her left leg was bandaged, red already seeping through, but the red-haired, pint-sized Handler seemed unbothered by the wounds. She held out a black cell phone; I eyed it.
“Instinct tells me this isn’t over,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Then take this, just in case.”
I did, slipping it into the rear pocket of my jeans. “Thanks.”
“We’ll see you.”
“Undoubtedly.”
She wandered back, already barking orders at someone else. I didn’t know her well but decided then that I liked her. Ballsy and strong, like a Hunter—only not. Flaming red hair disappeared among the remaining figures, though I knew I’d see her again. Probably a lot sooner than I wanted.
Last night, Wyatt and I had come in via the forest, but we decided on a more convenient route back to our hidden car. Several dozen yards down the pot-holed access road, barely halfway back to the main road, he started laughing. I stopped in the middle of the leaf-strewn pavement and stared at him. He waved one hand at me, not overcome, just privately amused at something in his own head. I glared at him, waiting for an in on the joke.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “Here we are walking a mile back to the car when you could probably teleport us both in less than a second.”
I hadn’t even considered using my newfound Gift to get us back. It would take time to orient to it, just as it would take time to orient to the fact that I’d just taken full possession of my current body. A week ago, I’d been tortured to death by goblins. Three days ago, I’d been resurrected into the body of Chalice Frost, recently deceased via suicide. Less than two hours ago, the magical bargain that gave me only a three-day afterlife had been broken in a flurry of memories and physical sensations. Permanent possession of someone’s body apparently also came with the memory of that body’s life experiences.
Weird didn’t even begin to cover it.
Wyatt and I had also stumbled onto the fact that, unbeknownst to her, Chalice had a Gift. A direct tether to the Break—the source of magic for the world. Only a handful of humans possessed that tether, giving each a unique Gift. Wyatt’s was summoning inanimate objects; Chalice’s—now mine—was teleportation. I just needed to learn to use it better.
“Not this morning, pal,” I replied. “I’m barely over teleporting three people through the force field Tovin put around the Visitors’ Center; I haven’t slept more than a few hours at a ti
me since, oh, I was dead, and I’m so hungry I could close down a buffet house. I’m done teleporting for the immediate future. Come to think of it, I’m done doing a lot of things for the immediate future.”
“Like?”
I started walking again. A gentle breeze swirled from behind, bringing with it the acrid odor of burning things. Not sweet like charred meat but heavy and oily. Disgusting.
“I’m exhausted, Wyatt,” I said. “Mentally, physically, emotionally, and any other L-Y you want to toss into the mix. I just want to find a motel in the middle of nowhere and sleep for a week. Then take a long, hot bath and sleep for another week.”
“And after you’ve slept for two weeks?” he asked, from somewhere behind me. A second, unvoiced question followed, hinting at the one thing I’d left off my list—him, sharing in these activities.
Maybe after the first week of sleep, I’d have the stamina to contemplate my new Evy/Chalice super-combo existence and his place in it. Part of me wanted to haul him into that hypothetical motel and physically celebrate surviving the battle until we were exhausted and sore. But fear of my reaction to him the last time we’d attempted intimacy kept sex firmly out of my near-future plans. My new body may have given me a physical distance from the memories of being tortured and raped by a goblin, but Wyatt was right—three days was nowhere near enough time to process it all. With my deadline over, I had time to figure out this thing I felt for Wyatt. The attraction had started in Chalice and been fueled by my memories of him, and it was now something entirely its own.
Something I was unable to articulate.
I’d figure out how to articulate it later. “After I’ve slept for two weeks, maybe I’ll use this cell phone to give Kismet a call and make sure the world hasn’t gone to hell in a handcart while I’ve been asleep.”
“Hell seems pretty keen on crossing the Break.”
“Well, Tovin’s dead, the Tainted is contained, and the Fair Ones still guard First Break. I’d say their chances of getting across are looking pretty damned bleak, wouldn’t you?”
