Kelly Meding - Wrong Side of Dead

Shit .

The crush of Halfies near the stairwell left a semi-open area that looked like a poor college campus’s version of a rec room. I pulled on my tap to the Break and let its power tingle through my body. Focused on that open space and shattered. Heard the Halfie cry out in surprise.

The brief, headache-inducing teleport put us away from the main fight, next to a stained futon. The shock of it loosened the Halfie’s arms. I broke free, and spun and sliced his throat in one quick motion. He flopped onto the futon.

I paused a moment to catch my breath. The air reeked of something both familiar and foreign—and ultimately nauseating when I realized it was the smell of sex. I guess the Halfies, being of a certain virile age, needed something to entertain themselves.

This entire deck seemed to be a hangout for the Halfie horde, which meant Thackery was either on the deck above, or he was hiding below in the engine room. And up seemed less likely than down.

Additional familiar faces had entered the fray, and bleeding bodies were piling up. Tybalt moved through the fight like a dancer, his prosthetic blade slicing throats and torsos and limbs, carving a path for more of our fighters to join in. On the other end of the deck, Paul fought like a whirling dervish, cracking skulls and breaking bones with each resounding contact with his aluminum bat.

Phin broke away from the battle, arms streaked with red, eyes blazing with battle lust. He had a particularly wriggly Halfie by the throat and was dragging him along like a piece of luggage. Phin threw the Halfie hard against a metal bulkhead, and I swore I heard bones crack. Maybe twenty years old, the Halfie slumped to the floor, whimpering. Phin stepped on the kid’s ankle, and this time I did hear a bone crack. The half-Blood screamed.

“Where are the Therians being held?” Phin asked. The intensity of his appearance aside, by his tone he could have been asking for directions to Uptown.

“Down below,” the kid replied, sobbing openly. His small fangs had torn through his lower lip, and blood streaked his chin.

“Thank you.” Phin reached down and snapped his neck cleanly. The body slumped to the ground.

The heart of the continuing battle was centered around the stairwell—the only visible access to the lower decks. Phin could fly through easily, but I’d have to fight my way past and that would take time. “The parking area is below us, right?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Empty, open, no obstacles that you saw?”

He seemed to understand where I was going with this. “None that I recall. Can you?”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ll meet you down there.”

Phin rose up in a gust of air, his wings beating hard in the enclosed area. He soared close to the ceiling, slicing a few Halfie throats as he went. I pulled on my tap again, opening up to even more power. Everything snapped and crackled as I teleported through the floor of an old ferryboat and materialized on the deck below. A dagger of pain poked me between the eyes, and I stumbled. The din and crash of fighting continued overhead, as well as outside and across the dock, echoing through the cavern of the parking deck.

“This way,” Phin said.

I spun toward his voice. He stood across the parking area from the stairwell, about ten yards from me. I jogged over and didn’t see the door until I was almost on top of it. Probably designed to fade into the walls and not be noticed by passengers, the metal door had NO ADMITTANCE printed in small block letters. Just below it, hand-painted, was a late-addition caveat, probably put there by Thackery: Without Permission, Under Penalty of Execution.

Dude ran a tight ship. So to speak.

“Bingo,” I said. The only thing I didn’t see was a handle of any sort. “So what do we do? Say Open Sesame?”

“An explosive of some sort would be useful,” Phin said.

“I left my C4 in my other pants.”

He huffed. Took a step back and slammed his foot down on the spot a doorknob would normally be found. The reverberation shook the wall and echoed behind. Phin stumbled back, eyebrows furrowed, lips tight.

“Sounds hollow just behind it,” I said. “Pray it stays that way for the next twenty seconds, or this is really going to hurt.”

“Evy?”

I closed my eyes and imagined an empty stairwell landing just behind the metal door. Fell into the Break and let it shatter me. The knife between my eyes stabbed a little deeper, burned a little hotter, and I moved through the door. Sensed the open space around me, and pulled back out. A wave of vertigo nearly bowled me over. Three teleports in less than five minutes. My body felt like jelly, my head like a zit about to pop.

It was also pitch black, so regaining my equilibrium took a moment. A fist pounding on the other side of the door helped orient my sense of direction. I felt along the rectangle of cool metal until I found a solid bar. Pushed down and out, and the door swung open.

The flash of light illuminated a steel stairwell that went both up and down—probably staff stairs to get from the upper deck to the engine rooms. Phin slipped inside with me, and we descended. I kept my hand firmly on the slick, grimy rail as the door swung shut and cast us both into blackness.

At the bottom, I traded my knife for my second gun, unsure what we’d find behind Door Number Two. My heart hammered against my ribs, and my mouth was dry.

“I smell them,” Phin said, his voice barely a whisper of sound. “Stay behind me.”

I considered objecting, but this was Phin’s family. His heritage as a Coni. He slipped around me. Metal squealed. Light splashed through the door, along with the most bizarre odor combination of antiseptic and scorched hair. We were at one end of a long, low-ceilinged corridor of gray metal. Exposed lightbulbs ran along the ceiling, spaced every five feet or so, giving the gray metal a sickly yellowish glow. I expected warm, dank air, something like a basement, and instead got a waft of coolness around my ankles.

Wings tucked close to his back, Phin crept silently forward. I allowed the door to close as quietly as I could, but it really didn’t matter. Thackery had to know we were here.

A few paces from the stairwell, we found a long row of Plexiglas windows inserted where walls had probably once stood. Behind them, our Holy Grail. Individual cells, each roughly the size of a modest bathroom, composed of stark metal walls and floors, with a plastic bucket and nothing else. And in each cell, a naked, prostrate body.

Phin pressed his palm flat against the Plexiglas window of the first cell, shoulders tense. “Joseph,” he said.

The wrinkled, ancient Coni lay facing us, one bony arm stretched out toward the Plexiglas window. His thin chest rose and fell, and a small puddle of drool had formed on the floor by his open mouth. A bloodstained white bandage was taped to his temple—the source of the blood we’d found at the country house, I’d bet. The sight constricted my chest and settled a ball of hot anger deep in my guts.

The cell wall had a rectangular line that framed the window much like a door, but there was no handle or indication of how the damned thing opened. While Phin continued inspecting the cells I smashed the butt of my gun against the Plexiglas, and the impact shook my wrist without making a dent.

“Leah de Loew, Lynn Neil, Dawn Jenner,” Phin said as he spotted each person.

With every name, the heavy weight on my heart lifted just a little. I followed him down the line, glancing at each person, horrified to find each one as naked and unconscious as Joseph. God, what had Thackery been doing to them?

Phin stopped at the last cell and stared. Aurora and Ava had to be in that one. His silence ratcheted up my pulse. I stepped to his side and glanced in, braced to see a helpless child asleep on the floor.