Kelly Meding: Requiem for the Dead

For every Dreg City fan who has supported this series since day one, this book is for you. It wouldn't have happened without you.

I don't like morgues. Never have, never will. My life started over again in a morgue, so naturally I have a pretty negative association with them—and with this one in particular, since it's where I was reborn. In the basement of St. Eustachius Hospital, not twenty feet from where I was standing, right behind that solid metal door.

Plus morgues smell to high hell and that's just never pleasant for anyone, especially a half-human, half-werewolf with an extra-sensitive sense of smell.

Not me. I'm completely human (well, kind of). The half-and-half I live with (he despised the word half-breed, so I gave him a nickname he despised just a little bit less) would be Wyatt Truman, my boyfriend, work partner, and also the guy creeping into the morgue with me late on a Saturday night. We never seemed to manage anything normal couples did together, like dinner and a movie, or even just a long walk in the park on a sunny afternoon. Our "dates" usually included any combination of hunting, capturing, questioning, killing, and breaking-and-entering. Normal has never been in our relationship description.

This particular morgue wasn't providing us with much of a challenge in regard to breaking and entering. The lower level of the hospital was nearly deserted at this hour, the corridor barely lit, and the only way I imagined we'd be interrupted during our little job was if a pileup on the city bypass resulted in a mad rush of casualties into the ER. And even then, our eyes and ears on the outside would give us ample warning.

Getting access to our objective was as easy as using the keycard we'd had copied for us the day before. In the dim corridor of the hospital basement, I slid the card down the door lock while Wyatt waited behind me, every muscle in his body tense and alert. Shadows made his black hair seem impossibly darker, and the telltale ring of silver around his otherwise black irises glimmered in the light of a nearby overhead. The silver was the only outward sign that he was no longer human—hadn't been for five weeks.

The lock light turned from orange to green, and something inside the door popped. I grabbed the handle, but didn't pull.

"Evy?" Wyatt said softly, his voice strangely loud as it burst the silence.

"Just reflecting," I said. "A few months ago, I was sneaking out of this place in sweats eight sizes too big and with every intention of stealing a lab tech's car."

"And now you're breaking back in."

"Yeah. Funny how life comes full circle." Usually right before it turned around and bit you on the ass, but I was trying to stay positive about tonight's adventure.

I pulled the door, and Wyatt and I slipped inside. The familiar smells stung my nose—formaldehyde and industrial cleaner and a deeper, darker scent of death. I felt along the wall to my right until I found a switch, then blinked as my eyeballs were assaulted with light. It took a minute for the room to come into focus.

Same plain gray walls and yellow tiled floors, with two beds on either side of a floor drain. Instrument tables stood clean and organized, waiting for their next victims to be brought in for autopsy. Just past those tables was the wall of doors that held individual trays, and some of those trays held bodies. My body had been in one of those for a few hours, until being put out for autopsy. Fortunately, I came back to life before they could cut me open, and I scared the hell out of a lab tech named Pat.

I was forever grateful I hadn't woken up still locked in one of those little cubicles; I'd have probably lost my shit completely and never adjusted to life in someone else's body. Or simply frozen to death before anyone knew I was back, and then Wyatt's sacrifice would have been for nothing.

The mental image of me, blue and cold, zipped up in a black bag, burrowed into my brain like a tick and refused to let go. I took a deep, steadying breath so the macabre thought didn't show on my face.

Keep it together, Stone.

"It's in number four," Wyatt said.

He crossed to the wall of doors and stopped near the top one, far right. He pulled the door lever and it creaked open with a hiss and burst of cool air. I waited a few feet away while he pulled the tray out, along with the black bag on top of it. It put the body at about chest-level.

"Evy, is this freaking you out?"

A snappy "no" resisted passing my lips. Wyatt would know I was lying. Even before he was infected by a Lupa bite and gained a few enhanced senses, it had been hard to lie to Wyatt. He knew me better than anyone, and despite all of the bullshit we'd dealt with in the last few months, he still loved me. And I loved him back in the best, fiercest possible way, so I decided to go against type and be honest.

"Yeah, a little bit," I said.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there when you woke up."

"I know. You've apologized for that already, and you're forgiven. It's just seeing everything again is giving me this bizarre sense of déjà vu."

"We didn't have to take this assignment."

"Yes, we did."

In the last two weeks, we'd been monitoring and investigating a sudden rise in goblin-related attacks—not only on innocent humans, but also on the occasional Therian and half-Blood vampire. The goblin Hordes hadn't been a threat for months, not since a mountainside battle at an old nature preserve killed one of their queens and a huge chunk of her forces. No one expected them to go underground forever, but we hadn't been prepared for the sheer number and viciousness of the new attacks.

With the loss of the vampire Families and their support of the Watchtower, our combined forces had been drained by nearly a third, and we had a difficult time finding new humans and Therians to join our ranks and help protect the city. Adding humans meant finding trustworthy people who could keep their big mouths shut about the existence of shape-shifters, vampires, goblins, gremlins, and various kinds of Fey. Not to mention possessing the necessary skills to track, fight, hunt, and kill.

The Therians…well, they were dealing with a few internal crises of their own, which made it hard to get support from more than half of the thirteen Clans on the Assembly. And without Clan Elder approval, an interested shape-shifter wasn't allowed to join.

Assembly politics made my head hurt.

So what had once been five-person squads (four members and a squad leader) were shrunk into four-person quads, managed from the Watchtower by three people who'd become the brains of our operation: Astrid Dane, a were-jaguar and granddaughter of the Felia Clan Elder; Adrian Baylor, a former Triad Handler with the build of a linebacker and the temper-control of a Buddhist monk; and Rufus St. James, another former Handler who'd finally agreed to work with us instead of sulking over an injury that had left him unable to walk without assistance. The three of them handed out quad assignments, and they made decisions based on the intel we returned to them.

So far the system was working. A few of us referred to our three esteemed leaders as Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gate to Hades. Considering we basically worked to keep hell monsters from taking over the city, it fit. We just didn't call them Cerberus to their faces.

Quad Two (us) and Quad Four (not us) were assigned to the goblin issue, even though what I really wanted to be doing was looking for a cure for the illness plaguing our vampire allies. But I was a soldier, not a general, so goblins it was. Our two quads were chosen because between the eight of us, we had the most experience dealing with goblins. Wyatt, Milo Gant, and I had all partaken in the massive nature preserve battle in May that pitted us against a shit-ton of goblin warriors—plus all of our combined Triad-related experience in hunting and killing the nasty beasts. The fourth member of our quad, Marcus Dane, made up for his lack of goblin slaughtering hours with his sharp senses, strength, and the two-hundred-pound black jaguar he shifted into.