Kelly Meding - Wrong Side of Dead

Past that was my target.

Thackery saw me first, and whatever rebuttal he was about to deliver died on his lips. His eyebrows arched, which got the attention of everyone else. Astrid tossed me a poisonous glare. I ignored her.

“Ms. Stone,” Thackery said. “I had hoped to speak with you again.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, circling to stand closer to Phin, hands planted on my hips. “I’d hoped to see you dead and bleeding by now, but we don’t always get what we want.”

“A lesson well learned?”

“As if I had a choice. You know, you have a bad habit of killing people I care about.”

“I have never killed—”

“Blah, blah, blah. You can twist words any way you want, Thackery, it doesn’t change your actions. Tie a pretty bow around a jar of horse shit, but it’s still horse shit inside.”

He snickered. “That’s colorful. Then again, you always were.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I’ve seen you bleeding and screaming, child. I think I know you very well.”

Behind me, Phin shifted. I held out my left hand, a stop gesture. My insides were quaking with anger and loathing for the man in front of me, but I would not allow the man behind me to do something he might (intellectually, at least) regret later. If one of us lost it and killed Thackery, both Ava and Aurora would pay the price. That couldn’t happen.

“You know,” I said, “you always seemed like a man who honored his promises. First you promised Felix a cure, but then you blew him to pieces.”

“I promised to free him, and I did. Just not in the way he expected.”

Oh, how I loathed that smug bastard. “What about me?”

“I’ve promised you nothing.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?”

“Oh yeah.” I took one step closer. “You remember that day in the tractor-trailer, when you told me what you were going to do to me? You outlined your thoughts on my ability to heal?”

“I remember,” he said cautiously.

“We made a deal that day. I promised to cooperate, to answer your questions, and to not fight you or your experiments. Remember?”

His expression went slack. “Yes.”

“Do you remember what you promised in return?”

“Yes.”

“Did you fulfill your end of our bargain?”

Trapped like the rat he was, and he knew it. Pride was one of the human male’s greatest flaws, and I was playing his ego like a piano prodigy. “No. The opportunity was removed when my lab was destroyed by the gargoyles.”

A fortuitous turn of events for me, as it turned out. The gargoyles saved my life that day by preventing Thackery from taking it. “Regardless, you welched on our deal. You owe me.”

Those dark, haunted eyes simmered with annoyance. I ignored the three people in the room with us, keeping my attention wholly on my target. He was so close to cracking, to giving me at least one of the answers I desperately needed.

“What do you want?” Thackery asked.

Score one for our team .

“Three questions,” I said.

“One.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“Two questions, then.”

Phin touched my arm. I turned my head and met his gaze, his blue eyes cold as ice. A thousand different emotions churned in them, asking a thousand different questions. As much as I wanted to ask Thackery where Ava and Aurora were, he’d find a way to truthfully dodge the location. And I had no doubt that Thackery wanted the Lupa to stay on the move. I could ask and get “in a van driving through the hillside” just as easily as a street address.

I had to be more direct, less obtuse. I just hoped Phin would understand. No one had any intention of trading Thackery for Ava only.

“All right,” I said, mentally reviewing the wording of my first question. “You say you found a cure for the insanity wrought in half-Bloods by the vampire parasite. What are the ingredients of this cure?”

Thackery fidgeted in his chair, distressed at having to divulge the secret of one of his precious projects. Not that I gave a shit about his distress. I had a suspicion—had ever since I found out he’d been drawing blood from the Therians—but I needed to know from his own lips.

“Therian blood,” he replied.

Hell .

“He lies,” Astrid said. “Half-Bloods have fed off our people before.”

“It isn’t ingested,” Thackery said, affronted by being called a liar. “Fifty milliliters given intravenously every twenty-four hours. I’ve been studying this for months, at first using the Lupa to collect samples. Ingested, the blood does nothing. The correct dosage administered directly into the bloodstream, though … the change is almost instantaneous.”

He was drugging his Halfies with Therian blood. He’d kidnapped Therians involved with the Watchtower and used their blood to drug his Merry Band of Halflings. He’d taken the blood of a child. And he’d initially used the blood of the Lupa pups he’d been given. Three of which were still loose in the city, with half a million potential human bite victims at their mercy.

“Fact,” I said. “You, a human male, were given charge of at least seven Lupa children whose saliva is highly infectious to you.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Question,” I continued. “How is human infection by a Lupa bite cured?”

For such a brief moment that I might have imagined it, Thackery seemed sad. My insides quaked. It was my answer; he didn’t have to say it.

“There is no cure that I am aware of, Ms. Stone,” he replied anyway. “I was only lucky to have never been bitten by my boys.”

I closed my eyes, held my breath, fighting off a wave of despair. Although I trusted Dr. Vansis to do everything he could to save Wyatt, part of me had always hoped for a miracle serum from among Thackery’s dozens of illicit experiments. Anything to stop the raging fever and give Wyatt back to me. To prevent a potential disaster scenario if the Lupa trio decided to get snacky on the general population.

“Rumor is your lover is infected,” Thackery said. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?”

The impact of my fist against his jaw vibrated up my arm and shoulder. His head snapped sideways and stayed there. “Don’t you compare our losses, you son of a bitch. I wasn’t responsible for your wife’s infection, but you are wholly responsible for Wyatt’s.”

Thackery flexed his jaw as he turned his head again to look at me. “Perhaps. But with all the other charges you’re leveling at me, one more death is of no consequence.”

I saw red at that, and Phineas, bless him, grabbed me by the waist before I could inflict any permanent physical damage on Thackery’s person. I let Phin spin me around and hold me tight against his chest. His heart jackhammered against mine, faster than its usual accelerated rate. My own pulse was threatening to put me into cardiac arrest.

No consequence. No fucking consequence, motherfucker!

“The Lupa have their instructions,” Thackery said. “If I don’t meet them at a predetermined location at seven o’clock this evening, they will kill mother and child.”

2:10 P.M.

After this morning’s round of Question the Werewolves, my tolerance for torture was completely topped out. Marcus took Phin’s place on the interrogation squad, and we left before they settled in to pry more answers out of Thackery. He’d hold out, I had no doubt, and it would likely get messy. And as much as I despised Thackery, I just didn’t want to see anyone else suffering today.

Or ever, really, if I had my druthers, but my line of work pretty much ruled that out. Violence was part of my job, part of my life, and not something I could escape. Not until I was dead.