Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

Milo produced a key, but the door swung open before he could use it. The apartment seemed to face the parking lot, so Felix must have seen us coming. Kismet was behind me and the last to go inside.

The front room was an impressive disaster—clothes strewn around on the sofa and two overstuffed chairs, a trash can overflowing with takeout bags marking the entrance to the kitchen, and empty cola bottles and cans littering other available surfaces. More impressive than the disaster, though, was the enormous—and ten years outdated—television shoved into the far corner, surrounded by gaming devices. Men.

Wyatt wrinkled his nose as he looked around. Milo headed straight for one of the back bedrooms while Kismet perched on the corner of the sofa. Felix leaned against the wall near the front door, arms crossed over his chest, daring any of us to comment.

David let loose with a low whistle. “Goddamn, man, you ever heard of housekeeping?”

“Wasn’t expecting houseguests today,” Felix replied.

One face was conspicuously missing. “Tybalt home?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Felix jacked his thumb toward the rear of the apartment. “He promised not to shoot you if you went back.”

To a stranger on the street, that might sound odd, but it made me smile. I didn’t wait for anyone else’s permission. The door at the end of the short hall was half-open. Milo’s low voice drifted out. I tapped my knuckles on the frame and waited.

Milo appeared in front of me, familiar sour expression back in place. “Don’t tire him out,” he whispered, then brushed past me.

I rolled my eyes, slipping through the half-open door and into a dimly lit bedroom. Curtains were drawn, casting a brown glow on the room. Two twin beds opposite each other, a single closet and dresser with clothes spilling out. I didn’t see Tybalt until he stepped from the corner of the room, pulling his tall, lean frame out of a deep shadow. I scooted sideways, startled. His left arm was in a sling, the canvas flat just below his elbow—where his forearm would have been.

“Someone should nickname you the Cat Lady,” he said. “You’ve got nine fucking lives, don’t you?” There was no derision, no sarcasm. Just measured sincerity and something very close to awe. He tilted his head; I understood and closed the door.

“We were wrong, Evy.”

His words struck like iron, heavy and forceful. I stared dumbfounded as he sat on one of the beds. He shuffled like an old man, aged and beaten. Seeing him like that, a warrior I’d not have wanted to go toe to toe with in the past, broke my heart a little.

“We’ve all been wrong about a lot of things,” I said.

“We should have trusted you, though, when you asked for more time at the factory. Should have given you until noon like you asked.”

“You thought I was a traitor, Tybalt, and you weren’t wrong. I knew going after the brass would hang a Neutralize order around my neck, but I was so sure.…” I found a spot on the floor that was a lot more interesting to stare at than him.

“If we’d listened to you, maybe those people wouldn’t have died at Parker’s Palace.”

My head snapped up. He was on the self-pity train after all. “Listen up, pal,” I said, stalking toward him. “You cannot change the fact that those people died. Getting blown up in a potato chip factory hurt like fucking hell, but I lived. I still figured it out in time, and we saved a lot of lives that night.”

“You could have figured it out sooner if we hadn’t—”

“Snap out of it!” My voice was louder than I intended. “We did our jobs, you and me. You were ordered to stop me because I was a threat. I don’t like it, but I accept it, and if you need to hear it, I forgive you. I did my job by not dying, and by stopping the asshole who set up the benefit attack in the first place. Three hundred people could have died that night instead of sixty-four. Weigh it.”

He looked up, searching my face, and in his I saw just how scared he was. Scared of being kicked out of the Triads because of his injury. Scared of losing the only career he knew, the family he’d built, and the life he’d fought so hard for. I didn’t know Tybalt Monahan well—hardly at all before the last few weeks—but I swore to myself I’d do what I could for him.

“You know,” he said, “you sound like a Handler sometimes. Sure you aren’t bucking for a promotion?”

I snorted. “Not on your life, pal. I’m grateful to the Triads for my training and my knowledge, but after this is all settled, I’m out of here.” The words came out before I realized I’d made that decision. To get away from all this shit and try to be normal, even if only for a little while.

As if . Unless we found another city with a tap into the Break, we couldn’t stay away long. Chalice, my host body’s former owner, had been away for years, and the loss of her tap had driven her to depression, which later resulted in her suicide. I had no desire to fall into that pit, or see Wyatt do the same. We’d both died enough for a lifetime.

“Do you really think they’ll let you quit?”

The question hung between us for a moment. It wasn’t mocking or sarcastic, and it was a damned good question. I’d tried once, right after defeating Tovin. Letting everyone think I’d died in the factory fire had been attempt number two, and that wasn’t working, either.

“What did they always tell us at Boot Camp?” I asked. “The job ends when we’re dead. Seems to me I’ve been given the pink slip, but shit keeps happening to bring me back in to consult. The person they trained, beat the crap out of, and forced to kill another person in order to graduate? She’s dead. I think Kismet and the brass just need to get their fucking heads around that concept.”

His face hardened as a high flush rose in his cheeks. “Your body died, yeah, but not the things you know. Look at it from our side, Stone. It’s like having a how-to manual floating around out there, full of every method of defeating the Triads and revealing Dregs to the unsuspecting world, and we can’t keep track of it. When you threatened to expose the brass last week? That was cutting our legs out from under us, and you know it. You didn’t give us a goddamned choice about neutralizing you.”

“You’re right,” I said.

He stared for several long seconds, mouth flapping open, words not coming. He hadn’t expected me to agree so readily.

“I’ve had that conversation with myself half a dozen times, Tybalt. I was looking for any possible way to save Rufus’s life, and I latched onto a really bad idea. You didn’t have a choice, and I get that. I also get that I have a lot of knowledge in my head, but after this mess is sorted, I meant what I said. I’m through being a hired gun for the Triads. At least, as they stand now, because if Leonard Call said anything to me I believed, it was that change is coming. We worked for ten years, but we won’t work like this much longer. Especially not at the rate we’re losing people.”

If possible, his expression became even stonier. “Yeah, Felix told me about Willemy.”

“The rookie we lost at the theater,” I went on. “The six Hunters we lost at Olsmill, not to mention Rufus’s entire Triad and mine. And we’re another Handler down until he’s fully recovered. We’re bleeding out right now.”

“You have some useful alternatives?” The corners of his mouth twitched. “Something more practical than resurrecting our lost friends and giving them superpowers?”

I heaved a tolerant sigh. “Not really, no. But you want to know something tragic, Tybalt? I seem to be the person all the city’s shit storms center around, but there’s really nothing so special about me. It’s random, blind bad luck that I’ve got these weird abilities now.”