by Kelly Meding
“Say it anyway,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. Wyatt was questioning him, so his attention remained there. “A human male. His given name is Thackery.”
“Why?” Wyatt asked.
A blink. “Because it is the name given to him.”
“Be literal with your questions,” Phin said. “He’ll take them that way.” Wyatt nodded. “Why did you accept this job?”
“It was required.”
“By what requirement?”
“No.”
Wyatt flicked on the barbecue lighter and held the paring knife blade in the orange flame. Silent seconds passed. “By what requirement?” he asked again, turning the blade handle around. The trickster didn’t reply. Wyatt buried the blade in the other man’s thigh.
The gasping wail shattered a glass somewhere in the kitchen. Wyatt removed the blade, coated with very little blood. The odor of singed flesh tickled my nostrils. Cauterize the wounds as you make them to maximize pain and minimize blood loss—words he’d spoken once upon a time while teaching me new methods for questioning suspects.
“By what requirement?”
Four more times, Wyatt repeated the question and the action, but we didn’t get an answer. Finally, sick of the hair-raising squeals and stink of burned meat, I said, “Why do you wear that crystal?”
“Focus,” the trickster said, apparently able to answer that particular query. “Longevity. Location.”
“Explain those words to me.”
“No.”
Contrary little prick.
“I have a theory,” Phin said. “According to legend, pùcas are able to maintain alternate forms for only brief periods of time. It’s possible the crystal allows him to maintain focus on this form for longer periods.”
I chewed on that. “So if we take the crystal off?”
“You remove his face.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic.” I stepped around Wyatt’s chair, grabbed the crystal, and yanked. A jolt of energy ran up my hand the instant the leather cord broke. Like candle wax, the fake face swam and ran, melting away. The body shape changed, thinning out and shortening.
Phin was behind the chair before I could register the slipping bonds, and he worked to secure them tightly as our prisoner’s form stopped shifting. He had shrunk to two-thirds his previous size, closer to child proportions than adult. The face left behind was half-formed and inhuman—lashless eyes the yellow green of baby poop, a small hump and two small holes instead of a nose, and a lipless, tiny mouth. His ears were holes on the sides of his head, waxy-white skin completely hairless. He looked like a creature that had dwelled in a dark cave too long.
“Hello, gorgeous,” I said. The crystal was warm in my palm. “How the hell did this clown track us down in the middle of the woods?”
“Magic, perhaps,” Phin said.
Wyatt frowned. “Thackery’s human, and, as far as we know, he’s not Gifted. How the hell did he manage to charm that crystal? It takes a damned strong magic user to manage a spell, and the only people who use crystals—” He stopped, the sentence dying on his lips. A queer look crossed his face, not quite a flinch, but nothing remotely pleasant.
“What?” I asked. “Crystals what?”
“The Fey,” Phin said. “You were going to say the Fey, weren’t you?”
Wyatt nodded.
“That’s not possible,” I said, my insides quivering. “The Fey Council is on our side. They couldn’t be working with Thackery.”
“Like all large organizations, the Fey are as likely to have dissenters as any other race,” Phin said. “It’s possible, Evangeline, that whoever is assisting Thackery is doing so without the approval or knowledge of the Council.”
Phin knew better than any of us. Some of his own people, other Therians, were working with the dark races to raise an army against the Triads in an effort to overthrow humanity’s control of the city. We hadn’t squashed their efforts completely, only maimed them momentarily. It shouldn’t have been so hard to swallow the idea of Fey following a similar path of vigilantism. But it was.
“Jaron knew,” Wyatt said. “She knew someone was being betrayed. If not someone in the Council, then someone close to them. Why else come to us first, instead of directly to Amalie?”
Politics made my head hurt. Beyond Amalie, I didn’t know the names or faces, or specific races, of the other members of the Council. She was our only direct link to them, so everything we knew was filtered through her. “So our theory,” I said, “is Thackery had the crystal cast for him by a Fey powerful enough to manage the spell, then gave it over to our trickster friend so he could track me down and take my blood?”
“Basically.”
Okay, fine, I could accept that. It made all kinds of sense, in a bad-vibe, Fey-betrayal-in-aisle-three kind of way. “So why steal blood samples?” I asked the trickster. “Why didn’t he just have you kidnap me, or kill me outright?”
“Did not need to know,” he replied, voice even more inhuman with his smaller mouth.
“And he probably wouldn’t have bothered asking,” Phin said. “Whatever compelled him to take this job also compelled him to do as he’s told without question. The only person who knows the whys of this conversation is Thackery.”
“Not all the whys,” I said. Phin’s explanation made sense up to a point. If the only thing Thackery wanted was my blood, why take the time to feel me up? The improvisation of the plan demanded answers. “Phin, do pùcas have anatomy similar to humans?”
“Basic humanoid shape, yes, as well as brain stem functions and—Oh.” He got it a few seconds too late. “No, they do not reproduce sexually or maintain organs for a similar function.”
So it hadn’t been horniness. That didn’t leave a lot of other options. I snatched the serrated bread knife from Wyatt’s hand with my left and crouched in front of the trickster. With the crystal gone, that same sour smell I’d detected earlier was wafting off him. “I’m guessing you were warned about my healing ability,” I said, running the tip of the knife across his abdomen, scoring the shirt. “Which means you had to be very careful about dosing me. Too much and I’d probably go into cardiac arrest or something, too little and I’d do what I did, which is snap out of it and get away. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
He said nothing, horrid eyes fixed on me. I skimmed the same trail a second time, hard enough to slice the shirt and reveal pasty, translucent skin. I flicked my wrist, and dark blood welled up from an inch-long cut. “So consider your answer to this question carefully, because if I don’t like it, I’m going to see if you have kidneys in the same place as humans. Understand?”
A nod.
“Why did you try to rape me?” I felt, rather than saw, Wyatt start at the blunt question. He still sat behind me. Phin stood behind the trickster. All attention was on the interviewee.
“For pleasure.”
I dragged the blade across pale skin, deep enough to create a steady flow of blood and a high-pitched shriek. More glass shattered. My legs started to tremble, but I kept the knife steady. “What kind of pleasure can a dickless Dreg like you get?”
His puke-yellow eyes swirled as I stared into them. A soft nudge in my mind startled me, like a tiny hand knocking on the inside of my skull. His eyes flashed briefly black and red, before changing back. I blinked hard—those had been goblin eyes.
“Pleasure in mayhem,” he said. “Pleasure in chaos. Opportunity presents itself, I am compelled to take it. It is in me.”
“Phin, can you translate that for me?”
“It’s in a pùca’s basic nature to create havoc, to play tricks on others and manipulate them. It’s what he is and how he finds pleasure. It wasn’t enough to simply betray your emotions by posing as Truman when he stole your blood.” Phin’s voice was ice-cold. “He knew how to take it further.”
A tremor stole up my spine, and I contemplated my earlier threat to go excavating for kidneys.
“The desire to inflict mayhem and play tricks is i
nfused in his being,” Phin continued. “In the same manner gremlins sneak around and steal, or goblins crave havoc, he sensed an opportunity and had to seize it.”
I shot Phin a withering glare, in no mood for one of his civics lessons. “I don’t need a conscience, Phin, and I really don’t fucking need you defending him. He made a choice.”
“I don’t believe he did.”
A flare of frustration lit in my belly. I stood up, left hand on my hip, knife tucked sideways so I didn’t stab myself. “So what you’re saying, Phin, is since he was already impersonating Wyatt in order to sedate me and get my marrow, he saw an opportunity to get his nonexistent pùca rocks off and had to do it, because it’s what he is? He had absolutely no choice in the matter? He had to attack me with Wyatt’s face on because of the orgasmic pleasure he’d get in screwing with my head? He had to?”
He didn’t flinch away from my anger or my sarcasm. “It was instinct.”
“Yeah?” Heat rose in my cheeks. “Well, my instinct is to kill the piece of shit, so he can’t run around inflicting his practical jokes on anyone else. What happened to ‘He tried to steal from you, and for that he deserves death’? You taking that back?”
His head cocked sideways in that perfect down-my-beak-at-you look he seemed to use only when really frustrated. I brought that out in him a lot. “The sentiment stands, Evangeline. I don’t take it back. If I believed he had tried to steal from you out of calculated malice, I would tear his neck from his shoulders for you.”
“You just don’t believe it.”
“No, now that I understand what he is, I no longer believe it. However, he isn’t my prisoner to punish. He’s yours.”
Irritation prompted an instinctive reaction, and I clenched both fists. White-hot needles shot up my right wrist. I stumbled away from the interrogation scene, tears sparking again, trying to relax my hand and ease the hurt. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I dropped the knife on a small handmade side table and held my bandaged wrist up, closer to my chest.
“Evy?” Wyatt asked.
“I’m fine,” I snapped, harsher than I’d intended.
I pivoted toward Phin, my mind churning with indecision. Since I’d first met him, he had made a point of challenging all my preconceived and training-ingrained notions about the nonhumans in the city—and the rest of the world, by extension. My prejudices had kept me alive for a long time in a profession that left good people dead in a matter of years, sometimes months. Dregs were bad, so if they stepped out of line, they died. No jail, no reformation, no penitence—just death.
He’d shown me layers of a world I’d always viewed as flat, and in that cabin in the middle of the forest, when the irrational, passionate side of my brain was screaming at me to kill the thing that had hurt me while wearing Wyatt’s face, I hesitated. Because I saw the damned layers, and all I really wanted to see was the pùca’s blood splattered across the floor.
Goddamn Phineas for doing this to me.
“Okay, new deal,” I said, moving back to my previous position. The pùca watched me carefully, less tense now that I was without the knife. “You’ve got one minute to convince me you’re worth saving. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“I failed,” he replied. “I will die for this. At your hands or at his.”
“You seem pretty capable. If you escape us, what’s to stop you from running from Thackery?”
“Compelled to return.”
There was that damned word again. “What compels you?”
“Failure brings death to my enisi.”
“Phin?”
“The closest human translation,” Phin said, “is ‘grandfather.’ ”
My mouth fell open. A human was blackmailing a Dreg by threatening a family member—and here I’d thought nothing else could surprise me today.
Chapter Eleven
An hour’s discussion around the sofa kept leading us in frustrating circles. The trickster, whose preferred name was Axon, had met Thackery in a neutral location to receive the syringes, instructions, and verification of his enisi’s capture. Axon had been unable to “taste” Thackery during the meeting—his word for how he knew if someone was ripe for tricking—and that was unusual. His people had targeted humans throughout history because we were so “delicious.” His word.
As my adrenaline rush cut off and my body settled in to heal itself, I’d curled up on one corner of the sofa with a mug of instant soup and tried to be useful in the discussion. Mostly I listened to Wyatt and Phin bat around ideas on how to find Thackery, ways to use Axon against him, the merits of letting Axon help us versus locking him up good and tight, and who we should include in the current problem.
The latter interested me the most. Kismet hadn’t reported me as alive, so her original report on the factory fire and my demise stood on record. Her Hunters were sworn to secrecy. If we needed backup muscle, her team was the only real recourse. Willemy’s murder was unsolved. For now. The theory that a powerful Fey was helping Thackery created a good argument against involving Amalie yet—if we could even reach her to do so.
The only thing we knew for certain was that Thackery wanted my blood, and he was going through a hell of a lot of trouble not to kill me for it.
“The Assembly will assist if you ask them,” Phin said, nearest me on the sofa. “They have great respect for Evangeline, and I can curry much support from the Clans.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to have more than just humans on the lookout for him,” I said. “But I don’t want to see more innocents dragged into this, and he’s been off the grid for this long. I can’t see him slipping up and getting randomly spotted on the street.”
“And when Axon doesn’t return on time with your blood, Thackery will send someone else to find you. Perhaps we should use that to our advantage and try trapping him?”
“The trouble with sitting around and waiting is that the enisi dies. If he’s just as irritating as his grandson, I can’t say I care much in the long run, but I’m not fond of letting hostages get killed.”
“Which gives us about three hours to devise an alternate solution.”
I glanced at the only clock in the room—an old cast-iron skillet modified with clockworks and numbers—and verified Phin’s time frame. Axon had been told to return to a specific phone booth at three o’clock today in order to verify he had my blood and receive further instructions. We’d already shot down David’s suggestion to use Axon as bait and coax Thackery out of hiding. Axon was intellectually incapable of participating in subterfuge on the level required to pull that off.
Fucking literalism.
“I just can’t believe Kismet hasn’t turned anything up,” I said, more to myself than the others, since we’d already covered the topic forty minutes ago. “How has Thackery managed these experiments for years without leaving a paper trail for us to follow?”
Phin shook his head. David huffed from his spot on the far end of the sofa.
Wyatt had settled in one of the chairs, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, hands folded in his lap. His eyebrows were scrunched, and he worried his lower lip with his teeth. Thinking hard about something. Our only direct conversation outside of the current topic had been me thanking him for preparing the mug of instant soup. Not a word about the elephant in the room.
“If you’ve got money, you can buy secrecy,” David said, “but someone always slips up. We just haven’t found the crack yet.”
My gaze slid past Phin to David, who I’d guess to be around twenty. Young, but not without experience. Yet he also seemed nervous enough to jump out of his own skin. This mysterious, conspiracy-minded side of things wasn’t within his comfort zone, yet he was doing his best to contribute.
“You’ve been looking for cracks for over a week,” I said. “If there was a trail to be followed, you’d—”
“Token,” Wyatt said, jackknifing up from the chair. He almost tumbled right out, eyebrows arching into his hairline.
“Did you just sneeze?�
�� Phin asked, confused.
Wyatt shook his head. “Token is the human-goblin hybrid who killed Jaron last week. He was taken to Boot Camp with the other science projects until we could figure out what to do with him.”
“I thought Token gave up everything,” I said.
“Not everything.” Determination blazed in his eyes. “Thackery created Token, and when he was questioned, Token couldn’t tell us where. He didn’t understand. All we got were vague descriptions of gray walls, metal, and wind.”
“Wind?”
“Wind in the walls is how he described where he lived. He was taken from there blindfolded, driven for a little while, then released to hunt in Grove Park, about a mile from Jaron’s avatar’s apartment.”
I tilted my head to the side and frowned, not following his train of thought on this. “But if he was blindfolded—”
“What’s a goblin’s most heightened sense?”
“Smell.”
“And how do their tiny, illogical minds find their way back to their queen’s nest?”
It clicked. “Token would have left his scent behind wherever he was made and kept. He could theoretically still follow his own scent trail back to that source, like a warrior returning to its nest.”
“Exactly.” His smile was guarded but genuine, and I found myself returning it.
“How do you know you can trust this creature?” Phin asked.
“We don’t,” I replied. “But he was human before he became a monster, and it may be our best option. Plan B consists of us sitting on our asses until Thackery sends another blood collector after me. And this time, he might not be so generous about letting me live.”
If my answer didn’t please Phin, he kept it to himself. “To avoid detection, I can track him from the sky. You can then track me with whatever electronic means you have at your disposal.”
“Okay, good. That’s doable. Next problem is gaining access to Token and getting him out of Boot Camp.” To Wyatt, I asked, “You think Kismet will pull some strings for this?”