by Kelly Meding
“Awesome for you. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised you came alone. I’ve always seen you with a bodyguard.”
“You assume I am alone. You have no idea what may lay in wait.”
“Let me guess. Dwarves are going to start pouring out of the woods and attacking us, right?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps there will be no need for a battle. If you believe anything I’ve said to you, Evangeline, it’s that sprites are peaceful. We cannot harm others directly. It is part of our nature, as much as fighting authority is in yours. But that is not a trait shared by all the Light Ones.”
“Okay, cool, no one wants a fight. That’s something. Why don’t you do what your elf buddies wanted a long time ago, and go back to your parallel world where you belong, and leave us to this one?”
“I have no desire to do such a thing.”
My fingers itched for a gun. One bullet between her eyes, and this was over. If a host body died while a sprite was still using it, the sprite died. It happened months ago with Amalie’s bodyguard Jaron. I could end this so fast.
Except no, I couldn’t. I’d be murdering an innocent woman. A police officer who’d been doing her job, and who was in the line of fire because a bunch of dwarves decided to lay waste to the Briar’s Ridge mall.
“Look,” I said, “we’re not interested in another mass genocide. I don’t want the sprites or any of the Fey killed down to near extinction like the Coni or the elves. We either want peaceful co-existence, or we want you the fuck off our planet.”
“Peaceful co-existence between whom?” Amalie laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. “The human race is so divided you’ve done our work for us. You wage wars over oil, you murder in the name of false gods, you hate because of ignorance you are unwilling to fix. You waste precious resources on mindless, senseless things. You are a stain on this planet.”
“We try. Every goddamn day, some of us try to make the world better. Safer.”
“You can dress up the corpse however you like, but it remains dead inside.”
Her skepticism and negativity were seriously damaging my calm. “Is this how parlaying works in the sprite world?” I asked. “We both state what we want, no one compromises, so nothing actually happens?”
“We are simply…what is your human slang? Putting our cards on the table.”
Oh good, an analogy I can work with. “How do we know who’s got the winning hand?”
“Oh my dear.” Amalie’s smile was wicked. “You were never even in the game.”
The blue light fled her eyes, and Officer Hendrix fell to her knees.
That wasn’t good.
Everyone turned outward, toward the long perimeter of trees surrounding us. Someone pressed the hilt of a blade into my right hand, and I curled my palm around it. Astrid sniffed the air. Aurora barked orders and four Coni took to the sky, skimming low over the treetops.
Nothing attacked us.
That really, really wasn’t good.
Astrid touched her earpiece. “Rufus, Amalie left her avatar, but nothing’s happening here.”
“Where am I?” Hendrix asked.
I glanced down at her. A thin ribbon of blood ran from her nostril to her upper lips, and her dark eyes were bewildered. “You’re in the middle of a really big shitstorm, that’s where you are.”
She finally seemed to really see me. “Oh hell, you’re her. Again.”
“Yeah, again.”
The tremor started in my head, in that part of me that is always tethered to the Break. Then it came up through my feet as the world itself began shaking. The rushing sound of three dozen Coni rising into the air at once battled with the rumble of the quaking earth beneath me. Trees swayed. Branches cracked.
A big, dark-skinned body swept me up into hard-muscled arms. The odor of ozone made my eyes and nose sting, but I didn’t struggle. I didn’t have to look to know who’d grabbed me and was trying to keep me safe from the earthquake.
The shaking stopped as abruptly at it began. Air swirled above from the beat of the Coni’s wings.
Wyatt placed me gently on the ground, and I dared to look at him. At the twisted angles and planes of his face, almost unrecognizable between the bi-shift and the Tainted. The pointed teeth and thick claws. The way he towered a foot above me, somehow both a monster and a protector.
“Rufus? Can you hear me?” Astrid said. “I lost contact.”
I palmed my phone at the same time as Carly and Jackson. Instead of calling into Ops, though, I called Milo’s phone.
“Where are you?” he asked without even a hello. “Are you trapped?”
“What? No. I’m not at HQ anymore.”
“You aren’t?”
“No. How are things there? We lost com with Ops.”
“A giant earthquake somewhere in the city knocked out everything but backup power. Some of the walls cracked and fell over. I’m trying to get out of the dorms.”
“Ten gets you twenty that was a troll attack.”
“Why?”
I gave him a brief rundown of my conversation with Amalie.
“Christ, Evy, you teleported that far?” he asked. “Is your brain mush?”
“Funny. Look, just stay safe, okay? We have no idea what’s happening in the city right now.” And that was a scary, scary thought.
Everyone who had a phone was on it with somebody. The Tainted had clustered to the side, sticking together like the creepy-ass family they were, and I stopped trying to see my friends there because it was too big of a mind-fuck. Instead I offered Hendrix a hand to her feet.
“Do you have a working radio?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you find out what’s going on? Strange activity in the city? Possible epicenter of that earthquake?”
“I’ll try.” She climbed into her car and shut the door. I watched in case she tried to turn it on. Instead she grabbed a handset from her console and started talking into it.
Astrid hung up with whomever she’d been talking and took another call. “Where are you?” Her eyes widened. “Were there people inside?”
That question got my complete attention.
“Okay, thanks Morgan.” She hung up with a frustrated huff. “It looks like the focus of the troll activity and the earthquake was uptown. The Fourth Street Library is a pile of bricks and books. They hadn’t opened yet so it’s possible no one was killed, but there’s a lot of damage for blocks in all directions.”
The Fourth Street Library’s roof had once been the nesting place of my gargoyle ally Max. While the gargoyles had left the city months ago, that target felt incredibly personal.
“Power is out all over uptown,” Shelby reported. “And parts of Mercy’s Lot.”
“Things are about to get very ugly,” I said. My gut was screaming it at me. “Amalie might not come at us directly, but she’s got a knack for turning people against each other. Setting other species at us.”
“We need to get back into the city,” Astrid said. She looked up, and I realized we were missing quite a few shadows. Only Aurora, Pike, and two other Coni remained in the sky. Waiting. “Go. Keep in contact.”
Aurora attempted a salute, then off they flew.
Between us, we had Jackson’s car, the cop car, and the SUV that Wyatt had driven his crew up here in.
“There are reports of human looting going on in Mercy’s Lot,” Hendrix said, rejoining the conversation. “A lot of weird rumors are flying around on the radio, including more hairy monsters like what attacked the mall last night.”
More dwarves. Great.
“Okay, load up everyone,” Astrid said. “Shelby and Carly, I need you both to stay here and protect the elves. As long as they’re alive, they have control of the Tainted. They—the fuck?”
I turned in a circle, the reason for her “the fuck?” becoming insanely, terrifyingly clear.
Silent as a shadow and as quick as a switch, the three Tainted were gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Thank
God for contingency plans. Or in this particular case, thank Rufus.
Before they left the Watchtower, Wyatt, Marcus and Phineas were injected with our tracking dye. Even though they were probably outside of our half-mile tracking radius by the time we got the tablet booted up and the SUV headed back into the city, the chances of someone seeing a blip on the radar were—for once—kind of in our favor.
Especially if they were attracted to the violence and chaos of Mercy’s Lot. My old hunting grounds.
Astrid drove while I held the tablet. Hendrix was in the backseat, probably scared out of her mind, but we couldn’t leave her behind, and we couldn’t turn her loose. Not when she’d seen the big, scary monsters for herself.
As we descended from the mountains and the edges of the city came into view, my first real wave of adrenaline hit. We had no idea what was happening, what was going to happen, and what sort of body count we were looking at. Human beings were easily frightened by things they didn’t understand. And fear often turned to violence.
I learned that lesson the hard way while working for the Triads.
We drove into the outskirts of what would become Mercy’s Lot. This part of the city I knew. I’d lived and hunted here for four years. I’d killed dozens of goblins and Halfies in these streets and alleys. I’d bled here. As a Hunter, I’d been prepared to die here. Jesse and Ash had died here.
A single red blip on the corner of my tablet map got my attention back. “Southwest.”
Astrid took the next right.
The blip didn’t repeat itself for several blocks, not until we passed the scorched earth ruins of what had once been a retired potato chip factory—until the gremlins who used to live there were relocated, and Kismet and her Hunters tried to blow me up in it.
Ah, memories.
“Astrid, if they’re moving as a group, will I see one blip or three?” I asked.
“Depends on how closely they’re moving. The tech could blur them into a single dot.”
“Okay, because I only see one, which either means they’re clustering, or they split up.”
Split up was bad and required a lot more work on our part.
“What exactly are we tracking?” Hendrix asked.
“You really do not want an answer to that question,” I replied.
“I kind of do.”
I twisted around to face her. “We had three elves summon demons into the bodies of my boyfriend and two of my best friends, and they got loose.”
Hendrix gave one slow blink. “Your friends or the elves?”
“Huh?”
“Which ones got loose?”
Her calm was delightfully unexpected. “My friends. They’re mostly in control but it’s complicated.” I’d caught her listening to my phone explanation to Milo, so she had some of the back story. “I’m sorry you got mixed up in this mess.”
“Sounds like you can use all the help you can get. I have a sidearm, a baton, and a taser.”
I glanced at Astrid, who shrugged. At this point, Hendrix had seen and heard enough to be our newest Watchtower recruit. It would be nice to have a cop ally again. “Look, officer, the three men out there who look uber-scary? We don’t want to kill them, we only want to find out what they’re doing. The Tainted possessing them agreed to help us, and running off on their own wasn’t part of the plan.”
Hendrix’s lips quirked. “The best laid plans, huh?”
“No kidding.” Okay, it was official: I liked her.
Traffic thickened a bit as we left the bones of the old industrial yards behind for the tightly-packed apartments and strip malls that made up the heart of Mercy’s Lot. The blip continued its southward pace. At the intersection of Cottage Place and Peach Street, they ceased forward motion.
“I think they stopped.” I told Astrid how to get there, and the location made my gut cramp. “Something got their attention.”
The SUV slammed to a stop at the next left because of standstill traffic. It was a one-way street, and someone came up behind, blocking us in.
I grabbed the door handle.
“Let me come with you,” Hendrix said. “A uniform might help.”
“In this neighborhood? Stay in the car.”
Astrid shifted into park but left the engine running. “Please, stay with the car, officer.”
We both abandoned ship to investigate the cause for the traffic snarl. Half a block from our destination I heard the first roar of an angry beast. The screaming got louder, more insistent. I turned the corner at a dead run and nearly slammed into a crowd of gawkers.
The front windows of Sally’s Diner were smashed in, the door wide open. I went in without thinking, blade in hand. The sharp tang of blood mixed with the odors of fryer grease and coffee. At least a dozen bodies littered the floor and booths. I stared at the back booth where I’d watched a private investigator friend named James Reilly devour many a plate of pancakes.
His dead body wasn’t there, but an elderly man was.
Four of the bodies on the floor were Halfies. Those had been ripped to shreds.
I found a waitress cowering under the front counter and urged her to come out. “What happened?”
“At first it was these four punk kids,” the woman replied. She took in the carnage and turned a little green. “They were, ah, being mouthy. Loud. Then this one kid, he grabs Teddy, the cook, yeah? Grabs him by the neck and just…bites his throat. The other three go at my customers, and it was awful, and then these three big…things. I heard them mostly, because I hid. I was so fucking scared.”
“It’s okay, hiding was smart.”
“They killed the Halfies and kept going,” Astrid said. “That’s a good sign.”
“Doesn’t help us find them, though.”
“What’s a Halfie?” the waitress asked. “Is that a gang name?”
I rolled my eyes. “Something like that. Come on.”
Traffic must have gotten going again, because Hendrix had the SUV idling outside the diner when we emerged. “Your people are moving again,” she shouted out the open passenger side window.
I deferred shotgun to Astrid and climbed into the backseat. Every SUV had weapons stored under the seat and I produced a handgun and a switchblade on Astrid’s orders. She liked to fight in her true form, but I couldn’t very well run around the city with a giant jungle cat as backup.
That would be weird.
We drove down Cottage Place, directly west now. Past my old Triad apartment. The road eventually dead-ended on a north-south highway that ran along the Black River, but our quarry stopped moving again six blocks from that road.
We saw the commotion while we were still a block away. Hendrix pulled onto the sidewalk in between two out of service parking meters so Astrid and I could get out. Up the road, the sound of gunshots sent a chill down my spine. No cop cars, so someone must have pulled a personal piece.
Another business had shattered front windows, this time a Mexican grocery store. Crashes and screams. Another gunshot.
Astrid grabbed my arm before I could barrel inside and shoved me against the brick building. Onlookers had phones up, probably recording, but whatever. She peeked in through the broken glass.
“Store’s a wreck,” she said. “One man behind the cash register with a gun. Looks like more’s going down in the rear. Hard to see.”
Astrid slid inside first, gun in hand. I followed behind. The terrified teenage boy behind the counter turned his aim on us. “Policìa,” Astrid said.
He seemed to buy it, because he ducked down to hide.
A bloody body came sailing at us and hit the cash register with a sickening splat. The teenager screamed, and then bolted out the front door. Streaked hair and nubby incisors. Fresh Halfie. I had no idea where our guys were heading, but at least they were taking care of business on the way.
Frustration mounting, I said to hell with it all, and shouted, “Wyatt Truman! Stop fucking running from me!”
I felt Astrid’s eye roll.
/> Someone roared in the rear of the store. Probably Wyatt’s inner wolf, responding instinctively to his mate’s order. The Tainted had a plan of its own, and I couldn’t imagine the mental battle going on in Wyatt’s head.
Metal squealed.
I took off running, dodging fallen displays and seas of broken glass. All kinds of things crunched under my feet. Something thudded in the distance. More dead Halfies, a few random shoppers. Blood streaked a swinging door that said something in Spanish. I shoved through, past racks of boxed product, to find the sun streaming in through what used to be a big back door.
No sign of our guys.
“Damn it, Truman!” My voice bounced down the empty access alley that reeked of garbage and piss.
Bloody footprints, spaced wide, led east down the alley. I followed them, determined to find my boyfriend and his Tainted cohorts. Halfies were suddenly on the warpath, and I had no doubt in my mind that Amalie had somehow orchestrated these organized attacks on places where innocents were likely to cluster.
Easy targets.
The footprints faded until they were gone. I’d followed them a good four blocks east, and now I’d lost not only them, but also Astrid. She hadn’t followed me into the alley. Frustrated and thirsty, I retraced my steps back to the grocery store.
Astrid and the SUV were gone.
“You are shitting me,” I said to the sky.
It made sense. The guys were moving; I was gone. They had to follow. Not like I couldn’t handle myself in Mercy’s Lot. I did my best to disappear into the flow of foot traffic, people going to work or going home after a long night on the street corner. My half-bandaged arm didn’t do me any favors, so I tugged the rest of it off. My hand was still pretty gross looking, the skin craggy and red, almost like a bad burn. The tendons and muscles mostly worked okay, even though it ached like a bitch in that moment.
Three blocks from the grocery store, my phone rang.
“We haven’t lost them,” Astrid said. “They’re still moving south, pretty consistently.”
“And taking out Halfies along the way. This is insane.”