Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

Look at her hair.

No.

Face facts, Wyatt, she’s gone!

I’m not, I’m here! Get me out of here, please! Too many smells. Too much fear. It hurts .

The dark shawl shudders. It doesn’t like the fear. It destroys fear, covers it, buries it. I fall deeper into myself, looking for fear. Memories. Anything to wrench this from my body .

Down, down into the past. An erect goblin male sinks onto the mattress on which I lie, waiting to die. Wyatt falls in the midst of battle, bleeding to death for half an hour. Living with so much loneliness and rage that I’d rather slit my own wrist than bear another day. Becoming one of the monsters I hate so much .

The black cocoon shudders, trembles, weakens .

Keep him back, dammit!

No, Gina! Stop! Please!

They’re hurting you, Wyatt. Why?

I see it—living without him, the rest of my days alone .

NO! My shout is like a sonic boom. The cocoon shatters. Warmth drops away in shrieking pieces, smoking out of existence as they fall. I race toward the light, toward the chilling cold and pain and throbbing. Toward a body on fire with fever, wracked with chills, wrapped so tightly in sheets and blankets it can barely wiggle. Hands that can’t protect. Legs that can’t kick .

My mouth. I can work my mouth. Through the ache and scorching dryness in my throat, I force words . Stop, please.

Gina, listen to her!

Hands on my face, not his. Someone else’s. Forcing my eyelids open. The light blinds me. I hold still. Let them look. Just don’t kill me. My eyes are released. I close them gladly. Words become a rumble of noise. It hurts too much to listen. Everything fades away .

I fall into the good kind of darkness, and let sleep come .

Awareness stole in on tiny feet, adding increments of consciousness to the cold blanket of blackness I was stuck in. Not a deep, dreamless sleep, but also not restless. Stuck somewhere between awake and asleep, where the sharp odors of blood and desire lingered on the edges of thought. As awareness overtook unconsciousness, I was more alert to my body.

More specifically, to the fact that I could no longer move it. I tested my arms and legs to no avail. They felt squeezed, legs flat together and arms at my sides. Like a mummy. I forced bleary eyes open—an unfamiliar ceiling of dark, rough-cut wood. Unfamiliar smells of pine and earth and burning wood permeated the dark-paneled room with its antique dresser, sunset water-color, and single door. Serenity was in that room, just not in me. Not while my entire body was wrapped up in a damned sheet, some ass-backward method of strait-jacketing me.

What the hell—? Oh, right . I’d almost become a half-Blood.

A choked sob caught in my throat, followed by a high-pitched keen. It wasn’t the time for a mental breakdown, but I was alone and in a strange place and my emotions had other plans. My body trembled and shuddered. The keen upgraded to a wail.

Then Wyatt was there, hands framing my face, looking down at me. His eyes were bloodshot, red-rimmed and puffy, smudged with dark circles. He hadn’t shaved in a while. He was breathing hard through his mouth. I tried to quiet my cries and merely succeeded in changing the wails to silent sobs.

He didn’t hold me, and I wanted him to. Instead, the pressure around my body loosened. The makeshift wrap fell away, releasing arms I could barely work. It didn’t matter. He gathered me up, held me close, and I sobbed into his neck. Sobbed for what I’d almost become, and for the fear Chalice had once felt at the prospect of living when the last thing I wanted to do was die. Wyatt stroked my back and arms, cooed soft words, coaxed it all out.

I cried myself back to sleep, because when I woke next, we were side by side in bed, my back pressed to his chest. I was free of the restricting sheet, carefully spooned beneath a heavy blanket instead. Naked except for a long T-shirt and panties. Safe with Wyatt, and very much still human.

Laughter gurgled in my throat.

“Evy?” The arms around my waist tightened.

“Glad to be alive,” I forced out between loose giggles. My voice was hoarse, throat dry and tight. From one extreme to the other—maybe I had lost it after all.

“Me, too.”

The momentary hysteria subsided after a few minutes. I rolled around to face him, moving easily in the large bed. His onyx eyes seemed to pin me to the bed and never let me go. It wasn’t a horrible idea. Every last muscle ached with exhaustion, like I’d been smashed beneath a steamroller and allowed to slowly reinflate.

“I almost didn’t come back,” I said.

He went stone-faced. “I know.”

“How long?”

“You fought it for six days.”

My mouth fell open. I didn’t believe him. Six days drifting in and out of Hell. Battling to retain control of my body and mind. His expression never changed. Six days. “Where are we?”

“A hunting cabin north of the city. Tybalt knows a guy who comes up here in the fall, and Gina said she stayed here before. We needed someplace safe, away from people. You wouldn’t stop yelling, fighting us.…” His jaw clenched, loosened. “At first, she wanted to chain you.”

I shuddered. “You came up with the sheet trick?”

“Yeah, and it barely kept you down. Every time one of us got too close, you’d try to bite us. You bucked me off a few times. David, too. Phineas was the only one strong enough to hold you down. Your hair changed a little, but it’s gone back. You’d fight and scream the most awful things, then cry and shriek, then go quiet, and then start all over again.”

“For six days.” I could only imagine the things I’d said out loud in that time, especially stoned out of my gourd on vampire saliva. “I remember some voices, I think. You told Gina to stop once.”

Fury lit a fire beneath his stone-faced demeanor; I couldn’t imagine how hard he was battling to keep his temper under control. “There at the end, your eyes changed. It was enough for her. She … She said I could do it, or she would do it.”

I swallowed against nausea. This was the second time she’d tried to kill me. “And?”

“I told her to go fuck herself, that no one was killing you unless they killed me first. We had a bit of a scuffle.”

“You and Kismet got into a fight?”

He touched the corner of his right eye. When I looked closer, the bruising was distinctly darker than the other eye. “Yeah. She came toward you with a knife, then you just up and screamed no like you knew. But it was you, Evy, not the person who’d been screaming at us all week. You.”

“Good timing.”

“You think?” He stroked my cheek, featherlight. “Your eyes had changed back. Gina finally left on my promise not to unroll you until you’d woken up and verified you were normal.”

“Relatively speaking. Wait, you said Phineas?”

“Yeah, he was here for most of the week. When you woke yesterday, I sent him home for a shower and some sleep. He should be coming back later today.”

Knowing that Phineas el Chimal, one of the last surviving Coni shape-shifters in the city, had been here all week surprised me. And in some ways, it didn’t. His loyalty was unwavering, his heart true. “Was Kismet here the whole time?”

“A lot of it. She rotated in and out with her team when they weren’t active, so we were never alone. David and Tybalt were here a lot, too. We kept it quiet. So far, no one outside our group knows about this.”

The effort they’d gone through astounded me. Six days of waiting for me to either change or die, coming to a cabin in the woods like conspirators planning their destructive legacy. Keeping a deadly secret. “How long was I out this time?”