by Lara Adrian
No time, Evy, no time. Get the cash and get out.
Under the kitchen sink seemed like the next best place to check for stashed money. It smelled strongly of fresh cleaning solution. I pushed a bucket and sponge out of the way, both still moist. More bottles and a few empty coffee cans at the very back of the cabinet. Dish detergent and a box of steel wool. Nothing terribly useful.
The front door rattled. I froze, head halfway under the sink, heart pounding. A male voice was talking as the door opened.
“I appreciate it, Teresa, and I’m sorry I missed the lab,” he said. “I—hold on, I have another call.” Something beeped. “Hello?”
The door closed. I backed out as slowly as possible, careful to not knock anything over and give myself away.
“Yes, this is Alex Forrester,” he said. “Yes, I was the one who—What?” Keys clanked to the floor. “What are you saying? She’s alive?”
His shock-laden voice seemed to come from the center of the living room. I crawled to the edge of the counter and peered around, but I couldn’t see him.
“How is that possible? We both—” He inhaled sharply. “Yes, if I see her, I’ll call. I just … don’t know what to say. Thanks.”
A snap, probably his phone closing. Utter silence filled the apartment, interrupted every few seconds by a deep exhalation of breath. I silently urged him to leave, to run from the apartment in screaming shock, so I could escape undetected. But footsteps shuffled across the carpet, stopped.
“The hell?” he said.
The bedroom door. I had left it open. Shit. Might as well get this over with.
I stood up and moved out from behind the kitchen counter. A broad-shouldered man faced away from me, wearing tight jeans and a black polo, hands fisted by his sides, staring at Chalice’s bedroom door.
“Alex?” I said.
He yelped and turned too quickly, tangling over his own ankles. He tripped, hit the wall with a rattling thump, and stopped. And stared. He was wild-eyed and red-faced, but definitely the fellow from the photos.
“Chal?” he asked. Beneath the spots of red on his cheeks, the rest of his face was taking on a frightening pallor.
“Breathe,” I said. “Do not freak out on me. I’ve seen quite enough of that today, thanks.”
He took direction well and began sucking in large amounts of air. He straightened and pushed away from the wall, but did not approach. So far, so good. His eyes roved all over my body, taking in the details. Assuring a confused mind that it wasn’t seeing things.
“It’s really you?” he asked.
“It’s me.” I hated lying to him; he seemed like a genuinely nice man.
“How?”
“No idea. I honestly don’t remember much about the last couple of days. It’s all a blank.”
He blinked hard. “You don’t remember yesterday?”
I shook my head. He stepped toward me. I backed up, and he stopped his advance, hurt bracketing both eyes.
“I have to go,” I said.
His hand jerked. “Go where?”
“I can’t tell you.”
His hurt and confusion became palpable. He seemed fragile. Scared. Great, he just had to be the sensitive type.
“Do you trust me, Alex?” I asked, taking a step toward him.
“With my life, Chal.”
“Then please trust me now.” Another few steps. He let me close the distance between us. “I need to go and figure out a few things, and I’ll try to explain all of this later. Okay?”
“You’ll come back?”
I stopped at arm’s reach. I could smell his cologne and see the razor nick on his throat. He had a few inches on me, and muscular arms that seemed ready to sweep me up into a protective hug and never let go—something I didn’t get often enough in my line of work.
“All my stuff’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “Where else would I go?”
“You’re leaving now.”
I sensed a challenge in his words, only I had no prior experience with which to judge them. “Yes, I am, but I’m coming back.” Maybe. “This is going to sound strange, but who else thinks I’m dead?”
His lips puckered. “The cops and EMTs who came when I called.”
My stomach roiled. So he had found her with her wrist open and called for help. He’d probably spent the entire night cleaning the bathroom, trying to erase the blood from memory and sight.
“The coroner’s office, obviously,” he continued. “Jenny called this morning when you didn’t show for work, but I didn’t pick up. I hadn’t …” He inhaled, held it, and blew hard through his nose. “I hadn’t called anyone else yet. Good thing, huh?”
“Yeah. Good thing.”
“Are you sure you don’t remember—?”
“I don’t.” I held up a hand. Twenty questions dangled on my lips, but Chalice was not my priority. “I really don’t. Later, okay?”
“Okay.” His hand rose up, away from his hip. I tensed. He stopped, fingers hovering inches from my face. I forced myself to relax, to give him this little thing. The tip of one finger traced a line from my cheek to my chin, feather light. Sweet. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said.
Instinctively, I reached up and grasped his roaming hand. Squeezed. He clutched it like a lifeline, his eyes sparkling with moisture.
“I’ve never been so glad to be wrong about something in my life,” he said. “When I saw you like that, the tub full of blood, I almost died. You’re my best friend, Chalice. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
My heart broke for him. For a brief, blinding moment, I considered spitting out the truth. But it would do me no good. He would return to mourning for his friend sooner or later. Today, he had the luxury of make-believe. Sometimes denial was better than reality.
“Me, too,” I said, forcing out the lie. “Just … don’t tell anyone you saw me?”
“Okay.”
I released his hand. He watched, silent but intent, as I laced up a pair of running shoes. I kept my eyes forward, away from him, pretending that I belonged there as much as he did. He bought the illusion, every scrap of it.
Still wishing I had a cell phone and more cash, I headed for the front door. Alex watched me go from his spot by the bedroom door. I stopped with my hand on the knob and looked back at him. He smiled. I smiled back, then ducked out into the hallway.
Chapter Three
70:33
Once I crossed the Black River and retreated to the east side of the city, I lost the keen sense of displacement that had haunted me since waking up in the morgue. In its place, I discovered something new and barely detectable. The air around me seemed alive, energized, like an impending lightning strike. It might have been a side effect of the resurrection, but I doubted that. It hadn’t started until I crossed the river again—until I found myself downtown, in the neighborhood known as Mercy’s Lot. It was where I belonged, among the hopeless and the damned. Angry human souls without privilege, living side by side with creatures they couldn’t comprehend and chose not to see.
The real cause of the city’s sharp contrasts between prosperity and decay isn’t unemployment or a police department impotent to stop rising street gang violence. It’s the Dregs: creatures of nightmare and legend, eking out their existence with the rest of us. Some are friendly to humans—gargoyles, the Fey, and most of the were-Clans are tentative allies. Other races, like gremlins and trolls, just don’t care; they leave us alone and we leave them alone.
But vampires, goblins, and some weres longed to see us wiped out, and that’s where people like me came into play. Dreg Bounty Hunters. Enlisted young and trained hard, we are the only defense between the violent Dregs and innocent humans. Our credo is simple: they break the law, they die.
The fun part was deciding how they died.
I took the Wharton Street footbridge across a spiderweb of intersecting railroad tracks. The heavy odor of metal and burning coal tingled my nostrils, familiar and welcoming. Far away, a
train whistled. I paused and looked at the tracks, the warehouses on both sides of the stretch of sandy ground, and the rows of abandoned boxcars.
My first kill as a trainee had been down there. Six months of Boot Camp hadn’t prepared me for working as part of a team. It taught me to defend myself, to think on my quickly moving feet, and to kill. Teamwork is learned in the field or you die fast.
Two days after being assigned to Wyatt and given a room in a shabby apartment above a hole-in-the-wall jewelry store, our Triad went hunting. Physically, we were an odd group. Ash Bedford was senior Hunter, but she barely hit the five-one mark; black hair and almond eyes hid a wealth of savagery always tempered by a sunny smile, present even when killing. Jesse Morales, conversely, towered at six-one—with dark hair, dark eyes, and smoldering cynicism that hid his marshmallow center.
I hadn’t known those things at the time. My impressions were less than sparkling, as were theirs of me—the skinny, blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from the south side, with a huge chip on her shoulder and enough ice around her heart to sink a luxury liner.
Our first assignment: two rogue vampire half-breeds had crashed the local prom. We had to kill them before they could turn their dates into midnight snacks.
I hadn’t expected much from my new partners that night, so I ignored Ash’s plan and barreled into the open, blades flashing. I never expected one of the two unsuspecting victims to hit me in the head with her rhinestone clutch. Teenage girls are, apparently, protective of their boyfriends, vampire or not.
Jesse had yanked me out of the way before Halfie Number One could sink his half-formed fangs into my elbow and leave me to a fate worse than dying.
Halfies are easy targets for a rookie, because they’re often young, always dumb, and, once in a while, completely insane from the infection. Creating half-breeds, though, is a major no-no, and the vampire Families, like the Hunters, make it their business to thin them out. Even more than humans, they disdain the mixing of species. Tainting bloodlines, so to speak, and it’s one thing on which I actually agree with them.
For almost four years, Jesse, Ash, and I had been the most feared Hunter Triad in the city, our kills more than double that of the next team. The Dreg populations knew our faces and our reputations, and for the first time, I had a family. The first family to truly accept me.
My mother had ignored me in favor of a string of live-in boyfriends and, later, a heroin addiction, leaving me to fend for myself at the ripe old age of ten and a half. Seven months after my stepfather left us, she became Jane Doe Number Twelve, dead a week before the body was found. I became a ward of the state, and their rules and I did not get along. Bitterness was my only friend for seven years, until the Triads found me.
Ash showed me how to apply mascara. Jesse taught me how to whistle. For all their trouble, I watched Ash get stabbed in the throat, and then I shot Jesse in the back. Nothing puts your allies on you faster than being accused of turning traitor and murdering your teammates.
Even if that’s not what happened.
The only advantage to walking around the city in Chalice’s body was anonymity. If both Triads and Dregs knew Evangeline Stone was dead, they’d never see me coming.
Unless Chalice was a klutz, and I couldn’t get her body to do what needed to be done.
At the far end of the bridge, a sharp tremor tore up my spine. I grabbed on to the handrail, certain I’d been attacked, but no one was within a dozen yards of me. Traffic continued past, paying me no mind. I looked for shadows, strange shapes, prying eyes, anything out of the ordinary. Nothing.
“You’re being paranoid, Evy,” I muttered, and kept walking.
Four blocks from the train yards, the ground began to slope. On the east side of the river, the city had dozens of hills and dips. Some streets followed the natural curve of the ground, and others crossed above the city on elevated bridges, in a maze of over- and underpasses.
Cars and trucks drove past. Once or twice I earned a honk. I discounted hitching on the grounds that, in the middle of a fight, I didn’t need to discover that Chalice had a glass jaw.
My progress took me into a residential area on the north side of Mercy’s Lot, full of weekly apartment rentals and cheap motels that advertised hourly rates. Many of them rose ten or more stories into the sky. Already elevated on hills, they appeared to tower over the rest of the city. Then a gap appeared in the distance, a block to the west of my current position. As I continued up the sloping street, the gap became more pronounced, like a missing tooth in an otherwise perfect mouth.
Yellow tape cordoned off the block. Sawhorses stood a weak sentry line across the sidewalk that ran parallel to the wreckage. It looked like no one was willing to pay to have the site bulldozed, so a mass of burnt wood and brick and metal lay where the Sunset Terrace apartment complex had once stood.
I stopped across the street, hands shaking, overcome by a wave of grief. Many were-Clans lived together, finding comfort and safety in their own kind. The Owlkins—a race of gentle shape-shifters who took on the form of owls, falcons, eagles, and other birds of prey—had once lived in Sunset Terrace. The community had thrived, because they chose neutrality over hostility. Levelheaded and fair, they often served as negotiators between disputing weres.
Now, because of me, they were gone. I didn’t know if any had survived the Triads’ assault.
I could still hear their screams. Feel the scorch of the fire on my face. The smell of burning wood and flesh. Danika’s voice telling me to run. Three hundred dead. It was the price they paid for harboring a fugitive Hunter. Fugitive for a crime she didn’t even commit.
I hadn’t understood it then, and I still didn’t. We’d been lured to Halfie territory and attacked. So why come after me less than ten minutes after I reported the assault? Why was I dodging the bullets of other Hunters, instead of working with them to learn who set us up in the first place?
If I knew any of that before I died, it was lost to a well in the Swiss cheese mess of my memories. All I recalled was going to the Owlkins for protection, being tracked there by the Triads, and running yellow while three hundred gentle souls were burned alive for their kindness. A hostile and over-the-top reaction I just did not understand. And I couldn’t imagine how the Triads had justified it to themselves.
“Now what?” I asked the wreckage. The faraway beep of a car horn was the only response given.
Behind me, a door slammed. I jumped, pivoting on one foot with a surprising amount of grace. A woman in a short skirt, wearing makeup piled on with a shovel, clacked down the sidewalk in high heels, away from the building behind me. She paid no attention to me, but even from a distance, I sensed something off about her. It was the way she walked, holding herself a little too upright, too stiff-legged—the way a goblin female walked when she was trying to pass as human.
Only goblin females could pass and, even then, it was a rare feat. Goblins had naturally curved spines, which accounted for their hunched-over appearance. Some females were able to overcome the curve and maintain a straight posture. Contacts covered red eyes, dye took care of the blue-black hair, and files flattened sharp teeth. Males were incapable of passing. They had more severe hunches, oily skin, pointed ears, and rarely grew taller than five feet—even when standing straight up.
On a normal day, I would have slipped into the shadows and tailed Madame Goblin until I discovered why she was wandering around the city in broad daylight, dressed like a hooker. But today was hardly normal, and I had no proof she wasn’t just bad at walking in heels.
She disappeared around the block. On the same corner stood an old-fashioned telephone booth. Dialing Wyatt’s number should have been as natural as breathing, but even if I could remember it, what would he say? When had I last spoken to him? What did we say? He had been a driving force in my life for the last four years. At once fiercely supportive and shatteringly critical, and somehow he always made it work. We worked as a Triad because of him.
Only now his team
was dead, and nothing was how it used to be. Now I had no one to turn to, except for Chalice’s roommate, and he was likely to have me committed if I tried to tell him the truth.
At some point, I’d started walking toward the phone. I stopped halfway there. Turning myself in to the Department was giving up. It meant that the Owlkins died—no, not died, they were slaughtered—for nothing.
No. They died for something: me. A debt worth more than I could possibly repay.
The wind shifted, pushing the acrid stench of burnt wood and tepid water in my direction. I sneezed and bit my tongue. My eyes watered.
Overwhelming loneliness—something I hadn’t felt in a very long time—crashed over me like a wave. I was crushed beneath it, helpless and alone. The world grayed out, at once fuzzy and keenly electric. I held on to consciousness until the dizzy spell passed. Fainting in the street was not on today’s To Do list. Getting answers was.
I grabbed the pay phone’s handset, unaware that I’d entered the booth until I touched the grimy plastic. I lifted it, then dropped it back into the cradle. Was getting those answers worth probable execution? The Department would file me away as Neutralized. Normally they allowed Triads to operate under our own rules, answerable only to our Handlers, who answered to the brass—three key people in the Metro Police. Until someone really, truly screwed up.
The phone rang. I yelped and jumped back, slamming my elbow into the corner of the door. Needles lanced up my right arm, numbing the nerves. Fucking funny bone.
Two rings, sharp and clear.
I spun in a complete circle, halfway in the booth, surveying the surrounding buildings. No one came running to answer the call. The street was quiet, empty.
Three rings. Insistent.
My fingers closed around the mouthpiece.
Four.
I picked it up, silencing the offending noise. Gingerly, I held it to my ear. The line was open, but I heard nothing. Not even heavy breathing. Seconds ticked off, each one stretching out in a lengthy silence.
Frustrated, I swallowed my doubt, and said, “Hello?” Silence. I took a chance, not daring to hope. “Wyatt?”