Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

I slapped my open palms flat against the counter, frustrated at my inability to control myself. My former partners, Jesse and Ash, had taught me what Boot Camp never could—how to put a safety on my hair-trigger temper. How and when to unleash that anger upon the Dregs I hunted. All that training had been destroyed by my first death, and I was constantly struggling to keep it in check. I’d be ineffective if every goblin I stumbled across set me off into a rage.

Wyatt appeared on the opposite side of the counter. He slid his hands over mine. I looked up, into warm black eyes. No sympathy, no annoyance—just understanding, colored with an unspoken command to get ahold of myself.

“We should have suspected this,” he said.

I quirked an eyebrow. “What? Me blowing up?”

“No.” The corner of his mouth pulled into a half smile. “We should have expected more hybrids. The lab we found at Olsmill probably wasn’t the only one. It was just the only one we found.”

The horror movie laboratory I’d discovered in the basement of a defunct nature preserve had held monsters from nightmares—genetic mutations of all sorts, caged in cinder block and steel. Things that shouldn’t have existed, much like the boy-monster impaled to my apartment wall.

“If there was another lab,” I said, “then who turned Token loose?” A chill niggled its way down my spine. “A third partner?”

“Possibly. We know that Tovin was the brains of the operation, and we know that Leonard Call provided the muscle to get it all done.”

“But neither one of them were scientists, capable of combining and manipulating the DNA of such disparate species.” I tried to recall my conversation (if it could be termed that) with Call the night I’d put him into a coma. He’d admitted to working with Tovin, to providing brawn in the form of cooperative goblins and Halfies, in return for Tovin’s help in his own personal quest for vengeance. Vengeance against Wyatt specifically, and humanity in general, for the murder of Call’s lover.

Motives that I understood but couldn’t support—for obvious reasons.

“Following that train of thought,” Wyatt said, “we could also assume that whoever organized the attack on Boot Camp wants their science projects back.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the creatures we’d found at Olsmill. I’d only gotten a good look at three of them. One had been a teenage boy. Half his body was stone, as though he’d been split down the middle and sprayed with cement coating. At the time, I had assumed some sort of cross with a gargoyle. Now I wasn’t so sure. This mysterious third party had creatures who could attack via the ground, moving through the earth as easily as trolls. That was bad on so many new levels.…

Wyatt’s face remained annoyingly neutral when I shared my thoughts. “I can see the goblin queens donating a few of their weaker warriors to experimentation if it meant gaining an advantage,” he said.

“Some advantage. The goblins have all but disappeared since we kicked their asses at Olsmill.” I said it lightly, but the truth of my statement was worrisome. Goblins were a matriarchal society, and while we’d killed one of their rare queens, she wasn’t the only one they had. The fact that most of the goblins had withdrawn from the city, or were at least hiding underground where we couldn’t find them, hinted at something big on the horizon. And I hated surprises.

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Which means they probably have a plan we won’t see coming.”

So what else is new?

“We need concrete information to give to the Triads,” he continued. “Something they can look into that’s more tangible than our leaps of logic.”

“I know.” I shot him a determined look. “So let’s get it.”

I rummaged around in one of the drawers until I found a butter knife and a barbecue lighter, then returned to Token. He’d stopped crying. Blood still dripped from his wounded hand. He watched me squat in front of him, flick on the lighter, and heat the tip of the knife.

“Do you hurt?” I asked, choosing the simplest words I could manage.

“Yes,” Token replied. “Hurt.”

“Do you like to hurt?”

“No. Hate … to hurt.”

“Who’s your master?” Silence. I held up the heated knife. “Do you think this will hurt?” His too-human eyes flickered to the blade. Like a child who doesn’t understand about a hot stove, he just stared.

I swallowed, then pressed the tip to the skin on the back of his broken hand. He screamed. I jerked out of reach, wincing. Cruel, perhaps, but now he understood my threat.

“Hurts,” he said, betrayal in his eyes. “Why?”

“Who is your master?” After another pained, sulky glare, I started heating the blade again. “I will keep hurting you until you tell me. Do you want me to hurt you again?”

“No.” Such a human whine; it turned my stomach.

“Who is your master?”

He fidgeted, wriggled, whined, did everything except answer my question. I had no real desire to torture the thing further, but I needed this answer.

“Ask him differently,” Wyatt said. “I don’t think he understands what you want.”

Okay, fine. I waved the heated knife in front of him. “Token, what is your master’s name?”

Understanding dawned. “The … cur … ee,” he said, forcing out each sound.

I looked up at Wyatt; he shrugged, not recognizing the combination, either. To Token, I repeated it back. “The cur ee. This is your master’s name?”

“All name.”

“Come again?” No response. “What the hell does—?”

“Thackery,” Wyatt said. “Walter Thackery.”

“Yes,” Token said.

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“Master.”

“Not you.” I stood up and abandoned the knife and lighter on the back of the sofa. “Wyatt, who’s Walter Thackery?”

He held up his index finger in a “wait” gesture, dashed into my bedroom, and returned moments later with my laptop already open and booting up. He put it on the scarred table that served as our eating area. As soon as it was ready, he opened an Internet search engine and typed in the name.

“Thackery was a molecular biologist who worked and taught at the university, up until five years ago,” he said as news articles began to scroll across the computer screen. “He wasn’t even on the Triads’ radar until August of that year. Three days before classes were to resume, he cashed out all his stocks, liquidated his assets, issued his resignation, then disappeared with his wife and a boatload of cash. At the same time, the labs at the university were broken into and ransacked. A quarter-million dollars in equipment was stolen. The regular police never connected the two, but we did.”

“Why?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

“Six months after the disappearance, Morgan’s team found Thackery’s wife in an alley, sucking a teenage boy dry, and killed them both.”

“His wife was a Halfie?”

“There was no way to know for how long, but Morgan reported she had a completely developed set of fangs, so she wasn’t new. Probably turned right before Thackery quit and dropped off the radar. We had no luck tracking him down.”

I reached around Wyatt, keenly aware of the slim pocket of air between us, and fingered the mouse pad. I clicked on a photo from a university benefit; the date put it at a few weeks before the disappearance. In the image, a beaming couple radiated their love for each other. Walter Thackery was tall, lean, with close-cut dark hair and dark eyes, a sharply chiseled jaw, and ear-to-ear grin. His wife (the caption named her Anne) glowed, even in the black-and-white image. Her dress was tasteful, her makeup and jewelry simple. She held one arm loosely around her tuxedo-clad husband’s waist. The other hand was draped across her flat belly, almost protectively. Poor woman.