Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

We separated then, our individual actions needing no explanation—a testament to years of working together. Wyatt went to the front door, probably to check and see if anyone was coming. I wandered into the back bedroom, amazingly wide-awake, given the hour. Milo sat cross-legged on the floor with a bowl of melting ice cubes and a pile of dish towels. He folded a dozen cubes into one of the towels, then tucked it beneath the blanket, close to Felix’s body. Two similar ice packs bracketed Felix’s flushed face.

“It was the only thing I could think to do,” Milo said without looking up. His voice was tight, strained.

“It was a good call.”

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?” I circled around and crouched next to Milo. A soft twinge wormed through my back.

He looked at me, face clouded. “Cope with losing people you love?”

His question threw me. Milo and I had been very similar in team status—the newest members of our respective Triads. While Tybalt and I had left Boot Camp within weeks of each other four years ago, Milo had been a Hunter for just over a year. Felix and Tybalt had always been there with him, and now the future looked bleak for both men.

“You haven’t lost anyone yet,” I said. “Maybe Tybalt won’t be a Hunter anymore, but he’s alive. He’s strong. So’s Felix.”

Milo took Felix’s right hand in his and squeezed tight, a gesture of solidarity and comfort. My heart ached. I’d never offered that sort of support to my former partners when they were injured. Doing so felt like exposing my own weakness to them, and I hated appearing weak—to anyone.

My years in Juvie and hard training at Boot Camp had beaten weakness out of me and replaced it with hardness. Coldness. My survival instincts were slowly crumbling now under Wyatt’s persistent love and support—more powerful than the unwavering friendship I’d gotten from Jesse and Ash.

I let my gaze linger on Milo’s hand and the strong, anchoring grip he had on Felix’s. On the strain and barely contained grief bracketing Milo’s eyes—hooded eyes that gazed at his wounded partner with a scary intensity not dissimilar to the way Wyatt sometimes looked at me. I blinked.

The new observation only reinforced how little I knew about any Hunters outside my former Triad. Hell, how little I knew about anyone outside my narrow little world.

“So what’s our next step?” Milo asked after a few minutes of silence. “Break into Boot Camp and torture answers out of the people at R&D?”

“Nah. I plan to storm the front entrance.”

His mouth quirked. “You want backup for that?”

“I’ll take all the help I can get.”

Then the most beautiful sound I’d heard all day rumbled in the distance—engines. I scrambled outside to stand with Wyatt and was greeted by the glare of headlights. Three sets, all from Triad Jeeps. The first stopped just behind the half SUV, and Kismet tumbled out of the passenger door with a first-aid bag in her hand.

“His fever’s worse,” I said before she could ask.

She nodded and bolted into the cabin. Conrad Morgan climbed out of the first Jeep with his three Hunters in tow. One of the men I knew by face only—he’d been at Olsmill, battled alongside us to defeat the combined goblin/Halfie forces. The other male Hunter I glared at, and he wouldn’t look at me. Paul Ryan was a rookie, skittish, and had accidentally shot Wyatt once. I hated the kid on general principle. The third, Claudia Burke, a tall brunette Hunter with a scar that ran beneath her chin from ear to ear, was one of the only three Gifted Hunters in the Triads—not counting me—and was a limited telepath.

The other two Jeeps spilled out Adrian Baylor and his two Hunters. Baylor had lost one at Olsmill, then lost the replacement at Parker’s Palace. Either he’d run out of rookies or had refused to take another so soon.

Everyone who exited those Jeeps, save Kismet, stopped to stare at me and Wyatt, but mostly at me. While Kismet had probably told them I was still alive (there had really been no way around it), seeing is usually believing. Baylor seemed amused. Paul Ryan looked ready to barf all over his shoes.

“The perimeter’s clear,” Wyatt said. “A third hound surprised us. All three have been neutralized.”

Baylor nodded. “Paul, Oliver, go help them get Felix into the Jeep.” The two Hunters trotted past us without comment. “Gina mentioned something called a pùca?”

“It’s dead. Milo found a couple of pieces a few yards into the woods. Did Gina fill you in on everything?”

“Everything Tybalt didn’t know. He called about fifteen minutes before she did. Told me what he knew and that he couldn’t get anyone’s cell or the cabin’s landline. We were already mobilizing when I got word from Gina.”

Note to self: Tybalt deserves a big, sloppy kiss.

Muscled arms crossed over his chest, Baylor fixed me with a curious stare. “So once again things come down to someone wanting you.”

Internally, I flinched. Externally, I quirked an eyebrow and lifted my shoulder in a casual shrug. “Well, when you’re popular …”

“Claudia, open the back!”

Four people shuffled out the front door of the cabin, using a sheet as a quasi stretcher-hammock to support Felix. Claudia opened the rear of the last Jeep, then helped the carriers deliver their burden.

When Felix was tucked neatly inside and the rear door shut, Kismet turned to Milo and started to say, “Go with—”

“I’m staying to help.” His tone left no room for argument.

She frowned.

“I’ll take him,” said Baylor’s female Hunter. She was my height, with bowl-cut black hair and eyebrows so thin they looked drawn in marker. On the approving nod from her Handler, she climbed into the Jeep and started to turn it around.

“Tybalt’s meeting them at the hospital,” Kismet said to no one in particular. Her way of reassuring herself that the injured Hunter wouldn’t be alone. Milo touched her elbow, and Hunter and Handler shared their worry in a brief, pained exchange.

Silent up until now, Conrad Morgan seemed to creep out of the shadows to glare right at me. Unlike Baylor, this Handler wasn’t a large man. White-blond hair and sharp features made up for his average height and build. His ski-slope nose, pointed chin, and hollow cheekbones were attractive from one angle and terrifying from another. In the strange shadows cast by the headlights of the Jeeps, he looked like an angry corpse.

He said, “Excellent work getting an Assembly Elder kidnapped. Well done.”

I bristled, hands clenching into tight fists. Only Wyatt’s hand on my arm kept a bright flare of anger from propelling me across the muddy yard, fist-first into Morgan’s too-sharp face. “Phineas understood the risks,” I said darkly, “but Thackery will not hesitate to kill him if I don’t do what he wants.”

“Which is turn yourself over?”

“Yup. Me and my potentially very special blood.”

“Your what?”

Morgan’s confusion was reflected in Baylor, and in their Hunters. Shit. I cast Kismet a curious look. She gave a slight shake of her head. So they’d gotten only the condensed version of the day’s events. I fed them the details of the last week, from the crystal theft to the pùca’s motivation for attacking, up to their arrival. Half a dozen pairs of eyebrows arched to the heavens and several mouths were hanging open as my audience grasped the extent of what Thackery had done.

“And if anyone here,” I concluded with a growl, “even ponders the idea of tying me up and hand-delivering me to R&D for their personal research, know right now you will have to kill me first. I am fucking done being a guinea pig.”

Baylor was eyeing the closest hound corpse, one hand stroking his chin in a gesture of thought more suited to a college professor than a hard-hitting Handler. “Those look like the same hounds we confiscated from Olsmill,” he said.