The Night Before Dead

by Kelly Meding

  One of these days I'd like to go a solid week without someone wanting me dead.

  "Do you think Nessa was trying to draw you out?" Kismet asked. "And her idiot warriors nabbed me by mistake?"

  I shook my head. "No, I think she wanted her boys to grab any human I work with so she could send me a personal message. Bonus points if they’re someone close to me."

  She made a face.

  "So either you turn yourself over to the goblins, or this Nessa keeps unleashing her horde on humans?" Shelby said. "Is this one of those greater good conundrums?"

  "No." Wyatt turned on Shelby with a furious snarl that startled even me. "She isn't going back to the goblins. Period."

  I grabbed Wyatt's wrist and squeezed, half-afraid he'd take a swing at the naked were-bear. I doubted Wyatt would ever be able to forget those moments when I was found in that old train station, broken and dying. We both knew what turning myself over would mean, and no way in fuck was I that stupid. I'd sooner take a header off the Lincoln Street Bridge.

  "No one's going anywhere right this minute," I said. "Except for those of us heading home."

  "I vote home," Kismet said. "I need a shower."

  "You need to see Dr. Vansis, too. You're covered in cuts, and goblins aren't exactly sanitary."

  "You have as many as I do."

  I probably did. "Yeah, well, I heal a lot faster than you."

  She frowned, but didn't argue further.

  "How are you three for injuries?" I asked the guys, who all seemed amused by our banter.

  Shelby had a few scrapes, while Kyle's arms and legs looked as bad as mine felt. We trekked back to the car. I stuffed myself into the backseat with Kismet and Kyle so the two bigger guys could make use of the front. Shelby gave a brief phone report to someone in Ops while Wyatt drove us home.

  Kismet was shivering by the time we got back to the Watchtower. I rustled an emergency blanket out of the trunk. She pulled it tight around her shoulders. Instinct kept me close while we walked to the infirmary, our party leaving a trail of bloody footprints in our wake.

  Not exactly a rare occurrence around here.

  Phineas, Astrid and Dr. Vansis were waiting for us in the infirmary. For all that he shifted into a giant grizzly bear, Dr. Vansis often reminded me of a nerdy science professor. Slim, short multi-hued hair that all Ursia shared, and a penchant for being abrupt and clinical. But he was a damned good doctor, even when dealing with human physiology.

  "I send you on one errand," Astrid said with a huff.

  "It's not my fault." I pointed at Kismet. "She called for backup. We responded."

  "Good thing they did, too," Kismet said. "I don't think I've ever seen so many goblins attacking in broad daylight."

  "Broad rain light."

  "Whatever."

  "Who is bleeding the most?" Dr. Vansis asked.

  I pointed at Kyle and Kismet. "Take them."

  He led them off to cubicles to do his doctor thing.

  Phineas handed me a towel. "You are impressively injured yourself, Evangeline."

  "Thanks. Goddamn goblins." I rubbed the towel through my hair out of habit, surprised to find it nearly dry. Score for the short cut. Made tending it ten times simpler than when it was long and wavy.

  Wyatt explained what had happened in greater detail, with myself and Shelby chiming in with occasional details. He'd nearly finished the story when Astrid's phone rang.

  "It's Carly," she said as she answered. "You're on speaker."

  "We found another entrance to the sewers," Carly said, her voice tinny over the speaker phone. "Down by the trees where Stone saw some of the goblins disappear. It's well hidden, and it doesn't appear to be used very often. We found evidence of human blood near the entrance, but no remains."

  "I think the remains are in a VW bus," I said.

  "I want your team to stay there and guard that entrance," Astrid said. "Nothing comes in or out until further notice."

  "Understood," Carly replied. "How are our people?"

  "Alive and accounted for. I'll be in touch." Astrid switched off the phone, then pinched the bridge of her nose. "Okay, so the goblins are threatening to keep killing until they get Stone. We are obviously not turning her over to them. Options?"

  "I'm all for napalming the sewers," I said, "but you guys keep telling me that it's impractical."

  "The Watchtower Initiative is here to keep the peace, not impose blanket genocide."

  "Right, only Therians get to declare genocide on someone they don't like."

  Astrid's lips pulled back. I shouldn't have been goading her by mentioning the centuries old destruction of the Lupa Clan, but my brain to mouth censor was usually fried after a life-and-death fight.

  Ever the rational one, Phineas steered me to the far side of the waiting room where he plunked me down into a chair. "I know you'll heal, but those wounds should be cleaned."

  "So I'll take a shower." I was damp, exhausted, and very cranky. All of my cuts and gashes were making themselves known. Dealing with antiseptic swabs was not on my list of things to do in the immediate future.

  Phineas possessed the uncanny ability to make me feel like a chastised child with only the arch of one slender eyebrow. He looked up. "Will you deal with her, please?"

  Wyatt sat in the chair next to me and put a possessive hand on my knee. "I'll make sure she takes care of herself."

  “She’ll make sure she takes care of her own damned self,” I said. I appreciated the love, but the hovering was starting to grate. “I could have gone straight to take a shower and let my unnatural healing power do its thing, but no, Alpha dude over here insisted the Infirmary.”

  Phin’s lips twitched. “She does have a good point.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t encourage her,” Wyatt said.

  “Bite my blood soaked ass, Truman. You know what? I’m going to take that shower. Whatever cuts and gashes are still around when I’m done can be looked over by the doc.”

  I stalked out of the Infirmary, sore and tired and kind of annoyed. Not really at Wyatt or Phineas. Mostly at the goblins. Nessa in particular, who’d decided to make it her mission to see me dead again, no matter how many innocents paid the price. All of my friends at the Watchtower were targets. The only other ally of mine still bopping around the city unprotected was a private investigator named James Reilly, who’d some me some favors lately. He knew about the city’s supernatural underbelly. He knew how high the stakes were.

  Bringing him in for his protection might not be a bad idea. God only knew how the goblins got their information, and we’d been seen together in public more than once. He didn’t deserve to get caught up in my ever-present drama.

  Wyatt shocked the hell out of me by not immediately landing on my heels. Probably saved himself some blue balls for a while, too. I didn’t need to be coddled, damn it, and I wasn’t the one who’d nearly been carted off to become a goblin horde’s newest plaything. Kismet needed their support. I needed a fucking shower.

  At the angle in the corridor that would lead me to the apartments, I nearly ran Milo down. His walker was the only thing that saved us from a full-on collision, but I hit it hard enough to send him reeling. I grabbed his shirt collar and tugged, keeping him upright. Marcus would skin me if Milo fell and hurt himself.

  “Hey, have you seen Gina?” he asked. “I keep hearing things, but no one seems to really know what happened on her patrol.”

  “Gina’s fine. She’s in the infirmary getting a bunch of goblin cuts looked at but she’s fine.”

  Kind of.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. I knew that expression well enough by now. “Tell me what happened.”

  I did, leaving out the goriest of the details. Milo had fought as many goblins as I had. He knew how they fought and how disgustingly they died. When I got to the part about them dragging Kismet off, his face got hard. Furious. Behind it was something else kind of like grief. Then the fury and grief merged into determination. �
��She’s in the infirmary?”

  “Yes, and she’s not alone,” I said. “Wyatt, Phin and Astrid are all there.” It finally hit me that for the first time in the last couple of days, Milo was missing his shadow. “Where’s your other half?”

  “He said he’d look into what happened today, but I got impatient waiting.”

  “Marcus will have kittens if he finds out you’re wandering around alone.”

  Milo snickered. “Yeah, well, I’m a big boy and I can hobble around without assistance, thank you very much. And if Gina was—I need to talk to her. Make sure she’s okay.”

  Okay, I was missing a piece of the puzzle. A few days ago, Gina had had an uncharacteristic moment of weakness and confided in me about her past. Only a snippet, but enough to know that she’d suffered as a teenage runaway who put her trust into an older man. A man who said he’d take care of her and abused her in ways that I hadn’t brought myself to ask about. We each had our personal demons, and we didn’t need to compare notes to know the pain was genuine.

  She’d also told me I was the only living person who knew about that man—unless she’d confided in Milo in the past few days, which was unlikely given their combined mental states. Both grieving the loss of a brother in arms.

  Milo knew about something else.

  “What happened to her?” I asked, surprising myself with the depth of my concern over a woman who’d once tried to kill me on orders from her former bosses.

  He glanced around, but the few residents coming and going weren’t paying us any real attention. “You remember Felix’s first night on the Triad, when Gina was brought into the ER because she’d been seriously beaten by some asshole frat boys in the parking lot of our apartment building?”

  I cast about for those memories, roughly two and a half years ago. Wyatt had been out of his mind with worry and unable to keep Gina’s Hunter Lucas Moore from picking and sniping at my Triad. I’d always had a short temper, but it was far worse before my death and resurrection—bad enough that my late Triad partner Jesse had once marveled I managed to last four whole years.

  “Sure I do,” I said. “Lucas and I ended up in a bit of a scuffle that our respective Triad partners broke up. But you weren’t even a Hunter yet when all that happened.”

  “I know. Felix and Tybalt told me about it later, because my first night I made a comment about Tybalt walking Gina to her car.”

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me. Trauma changed a person. Even someone as strong as Gina Kismet. Eventually the cops tracked down the three assholes who assaulted her, and—fuck me.

  Milo must have seen my thought process in my expression, because he held up a staying hand. “Hold on, before you leap to conclusions.”

  Me? Never. “Then what?”

  He leaned forward. “They tried to rape her that night, but they didn’t. Tybalt and Lucas and Felix, they stopped it before it got that far, but…”

  “I get it.” Kismet had still felt that fear, that sense of horror knowing that she was about to be violated. Getting dragged toward a tunnel by a horde of goblins had likely put her right back in that parking lot. “Go talk to her then.”

  “Thanks. Where are you headed?”

  I glance down at my blood-splattered clothes, then quirk an eyebrow at him.

  Milo grinned. “Dumb question. How many did you get?”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  Never enough, not until all of them were dead.

  “You okay?” he asked, all serious again.

  “I think so. Never thought I’d say this, but I’m getting tired of killing. One of these days, Milo, I swear to Christ I want the biggest decision I have to make is which fruity drink a server will bring to me on a tropical beach somewhere.”

  “I hear you.” He looked all around us, his cheeks darkening. “I’ll never abandon Marcus and the Watchtower, but I’m tired of all of this. The hunting and the killing and the fighting. All of the goddamn pain.”

  “You know Rufus will give you a place in Ops the second you ask. You used to be a hacker for fuck’s sake. You’re the biggest geek we’ve got in this place.”

  “I know.” He studied me, so serious in that moment. “What about you? What would you do if you didn’t have to fight anymore?”

  The million dollar question.

  “You know what?” I said with a conviction that came from deep down where hope still flickered. “You and me, pal? We’re both going to find out one day.”

  “Good answer, Evy. Now go take a shower. You reek.”

  I flipped him off, then headed for the apartment. The boys were there, watching a movie on the television, and they didn’t make a single comment while I rummaged for clean clothes, and then disappeared into the bathroom.

  A hot shower was pure heaven and fiery agony as the spray lifted drying goblin blood out of dozens of small cuts and gashes, many of them already beginning to heal. I’d be itchy as hell in about thirty minutes. My reflection still startled me, as it had when I first came back to life. Seven months ago, it was because I’d gone from skinny blonde with a page-cut to busty brunette with thick, long hair. Last week I’d chopped it all off and dyed it to go briefly under the radar.

  The girl staring back at me from the mirror looked as exhausted as I felt inside. Exhausted of all of this. Exhausted of all the things Milo mentioned, and more. Mostly I wanted to be on that tropical beach with Wyatt, enjoying the rest of our lives in peace—except that wouldn’t happen until this war with the Fey was over. Neither one of us could abandon the fight this close to the end.

  Brevin’s meeting with the Clan Elders and two vampire delegates would decide which way the winds of war would blow—and if we non-Fey had a chance in hell of winning.

  Chapter Four

  19:45

  While our first meeting with Brevin had been as clandestine as possible, the main corridor was teaming with Watchtower members who weren’t out on patrol, all eager for the first scraps of information about today’s big show. Every single Therian Clan Elder was in attendance, some of them good friends and some tentative allies. Astrid and Marcus’s cousin Riley Dane was the Felia Elder, and he looked so much like them they could have been siblings.

  The War Room was full of Elders and their personal guards, as well as the top people in the Watchtower: Astrid, Marcus, Kismet, Rufus, Kyle, and Wyatt. I was there because I had war experience. Same reason my fellow humans Carly Hall, Paul Ryan and Seth Nevada were invited.

  The vampires had sent Eulan and a woman I didn’t know named Omal. I’d met Eulan a few times in the past, but I didn’t get a chance to speak with him before the meeting. I wanted to know how Isleen was fairing now that she’d received the cure for a near-fatal virus that had infected many of our vampire allies at the Watchtower. Isleen and I had a long, sordid history, but at the end of the day, I was almost willing to call her a friend.

  I was glad she wasn’t dead, so that said something.

  Our guests of honor sat around the entire perimeter of the conference table. Astrid and Kismet stood together at the head, waiting for the speaker of the hour to enter. Phineas had named himself Brevin’s personal bodyguard, and he’d been with the elf almost non-stop since their arrival at the Watchtower, giving me precious little time to chat with my best friend.

  I’d missed him while he was gone, and I still missed him while he was back.

  The sudden silence in the room was as good as a bullhorn announcement. Phineas and Brevin stood in the archway that separated the War Room from the rest of Ops. Maybe he wanted to add a little drama to the proceedings, or maybe he wanted to remind the other Elders that he was one of the last of his kind of bi-shifting Therians, because Phin stood there shirtless, his large feathered wings arched high and to the side, a rainbow of browns and tans.

  The first time I met Phin, he’d landed on the roof of a parked car, wings spread, like an angel fallen to earth. He was just as stunning today as he’d been all those months ago, a protector and a predator to
his very core.

  My attention shifted to the faces of the Elders around the table. Their expressions were fairly identical—skepticism mixed with alarm. Elves were extremely powerful magic users, living and breathing the power of the Break, more connected to it than any other Fey. Everyone here knew what Tovin had tried to do.

  Just wait until they hear Brevin’s plan for beating Amalie.

  I’d had two days to wrap my head around the idea, and it still didn’t sit right.

  Phin led Brevin to the head of the table and stood next to Kismet. Brevin climbed onto the only vacant chair at the table, giving him more height and allow him a better view of the faces in attendance. Trepidation and curiosity thickened the air, tension pulling everything taut. No one spoke as Brevin took in his audience.

  “Thank you for taking the time to hear me out on this grave matter before us,” Brevin said, his voice clear and strong. “We disparate species stand at a crossroads unlike anything we have ever faced. A crossroads that could end in not only the destruction of the human race that we allowed millennia ago to rule this planet, but also of our own peoples. Therians. Vampires. Elves. Gargoyles. Goblins. So many others who aren’t here today, but who might be gone tomorrow, if Amalie, Queen of Sprites, has her will be done.

  “As many here are aware, all magic and beings tied to magic, are spun from the power of the Break. The name is very apropos, in that First Break is a rift in the fabric between two worlds. This world and the place where magic originated. While this universe was still in its infancy, we all lived on the other side of the Break. Until we discovered the rift to this world and a war began over closing the rift. We elves opposed, so we were banished to this slowly developing place as punishment. Your world was so young and untested, and we found ourselves enjoying the company of the strange creatures oozing out of your oceans and beginning to crawl on land.

  “Others, of course, noticed the possibilities here, and they began to cross over. Our interference in the natural course of evolution brought about the creatures who would one day become the Therian Clans.”

  I glanced at Phineas, because yeah, that was news. Looked like news to him, too, if his arched eyebrows were any indication.