Kelly Meding: Requiem for the Dead

Marcus and Milo were waiting at different places in the hospital, acting as lookouts so Wyatt and I didn't get caught by any of the hospital staff. Marcus hated playing lookout, though, so thinking of him standing in a corridor somewhere, bored out of his mind, made me grin.

"What?" Wyatt asked. He was still watching me, one gloved hand poised to pull down the zipper on the black bag.

"Nothing." I moved to stand on the opposite side of the tray. "Let's do this and get out of here."

"Good plan." He pulled the zipper tab, its teeth snicking open with an ominous staccato, then pushed the sides of the bag out of the way.

The police report we'd intercepted said the teenage boy had died of an animal attack—like so many of the others. Sooner or later the explanation wasn't going to fly anymore, because we lived in a big damned city, not the middle of the Everglades. Cities had rats, pigeons and alley cats, not carnivorous beasts who could rip a human to pieces half-a-block from a busy street without a single pedestrian hearing the fight.

Unless you lived in our city. Then there was a good chance your neighbor could shift into an animal, that the tall, pale-skinned woman with the white-blond hair was actually a vampire, and that a gremlin really did screw up your wireless internet last night.

The body in the bag definitely looked like it could have been ripped apart by a wild animal. Or in this particular case, a couple of goblins. The teen's face was mostly gone, torn to ribbons of flesh and muscle, some down to the bone. His throat was slashed in several places. The majority of his T-shirt was gone, exposing a torso that looked like cubed steak, and a slashed abdomen with hints of exposed intestine.

And it only got worse the further down Wyatt pulled the bag's zipper. The teen's groin was covered in bite marks—too small to be a dog, but just the right size to be goblin teeth, which was our first big clue. Except for the deep bruising and scrapes on his knees, the front of his legs were mostly unscathed. Wyatt checked the backs of his legs.

"Thighs are pretty cut up," he said. He glanced up higher and his eyes narrowed. "Dammit."

I knew his tones too well. A surprised "dammit" would have prompted me to ask what he saw. The resigned, almost sad way he'd said it told me what he'd seen. I didn't need him to say it.

In goblin society, females are both rare and revered, much like the queen ant of an ant colony. It means only the most elite goblin warriors get to mate. And human bodies are not designed to handle hooked appendages of any kind. It was the worst kind of agony any human being could endure before they died, and I could say that from my own goddamn experience.

I closed my eyes against the visual and mental assault. Six months ago, I'd have shrugged at the torture and gone about my job hunting and killing the goblins responsible. But I'd been through too much this summer, changed too much to be so unaffected by the violence that permeated my life. Empathy for this boy—someone I didn't know, but who'd died so horribly by the same monsters who'd tortured and killed me once—choked me.

Warm arms wrapped around me from behind and I leaned against Wyatt's chest, hands coming up to squeeze his where they clasped over my heart. A heart that was pounding too damned hard. He pressed his chin to my left shoulder, and I inhaled the familiar scent of him—coffee and cinnamon, and the new earthiness of his werewolf half.

"I can finish this up," he whispered.

"I'm fine, I just need a second."

I could hear all of the things he wasn't saying: You shouldn't have come in here with me, I should have brought Milo, I hate that you're reliving this, goddamn fucking goblins . It was all in the way his arms tightened, as though he could hug away all the painful memories. And I loved him for it. I loved him for a lot of reasons.

"There's more than enough proof that this was a goblin attack," I said, opening my eyes and straightening up.

Wyatt let go and shifted to stand next to me, the concern still plain on his face. "Agreed," he said. "The goblins are getting bolder. Estimated time of death was five o'clock this evening."

And considering it was late August, that meant broad daylight. Goblins used to only come out at night, preferring to spend the day down in the sewers. This was seriously bad news.

He reached for the zipper and started tugging it up. Just past the dead boy's knees he stopped. Leaned down to peer at something. "Evy, look at this."

I stepped around him and followed his gaze to a spot on the body's inner thigh. At first, all I saw were a bunch of deep cuts, like razor slices. But as I stared, they turned into letters. And then a word.

Kelsa.

"Fuck me," I said.

Kelsa was the goblin Queen who'd ordered me captured, tortured, raped and left to die, all at the orders of an elf whose grand plan included stealing Wyatt's free will. I killed her a few months ago, at the same time the rest of the goblins went underground. Seeing her name carved on the leg of a dead human said one clear thing to me: this was fucking personal.

After Wyatt took a few pictures of the carved name with his phone, we put the body back and then got the hell out of there. I texted Milo and Marcus that we were leaving, so they'd meet us at the arranged location.

They were already waiting when we arrived, leaning against the metal barrier that protected one side of the sidewalk from a steep drop into the Anjean River, as though they had every right to be loitering there at one-thirty in the morning. The rush of the river below us was the only real sound as Wyatt and I made our way toward them.

I was still a little shaky after our morgue trip and had broken a sweat the instant we stepped outside into the humid late-summer air. Usually I'm better at hiding my immediate need to vomit, but I must not have been doing a very good job on approach because Milo stood up straight as soon as he got a good look.

"Evy?" he said.

"I'm okay," I replied.

"That bad?"

"Worse, but it was definitely goblins."

"This behavior is extremely unusual," Marcus said. He hadn't moved from his casual lean against the rail, and the female in me appreciated the way he could make such a simple stance look sexy. Marcus was tall and muscular (but not muscle bound), with tan skin and long, black hair he liked to wear in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. A little bit of scruff on his chin—not quite a goatee, but more than a soul patch—gave him a look I could only describe as "pirate."

Contrast to Milo Gant, who was about my height of five-foot-seven, and lean enough to occasionally appear scrawny, despite his speed and strength. He had sandy brown hair and brown eyes that, once upon a time, I'd have described as kind. Nowadays they were mostly cold. Mostly, depending on the company he kept. Lately Marcus was one of the only people who could make Milo smile.

"There was more," Wyatt said and held out his phone. "They're making this personal for Evy."

Marcus studied the image, while Milo blanched and looked away—the photo did have an unfortunate angle of the dead man's mangled testicles. "What's your assessment?" Marcus asked.

"That whatever's happening isn't random," Wyatt replied. "We know the goblin warriors can't plan for shit, so at least one of the Queens has been cooking this up for a while. Maybe since Kelsa died."

"Could it be tied to the Fey?"

"Possibly. They followed orders from an elf once, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility for them to follow the orders of a sprite."

My temper began a slow burn, as it always did when I thought about Amalie and how the Fey Council had betrayed and lied to us since first contact more than ten years ago. The Triads had been duped and manipulated to serve their whims, and while the Fey were pacifists who couldn't attack us directly, they'd put a lot of other enemies directly into our path. Sending the goblins against us was not beneath them.