Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

“The pùca failed me. I was simply tying up loose ends. He knew too much to allow him to stay in your hands for long.”

“Did you kill his enisi , too?”

“Of course not. He was returned to the desert from which he was taken.”

The nearest desert was hundreds of miles away, across several states. “By who?”

A muscle twitched in Thackery’s jaw. “Who, indeed?”

“Token’s still out there, you know. You keep losing your science projects, Thackery. That’s pretty careless.”

He quirked his eyebrow, but my words produced no other reaction. Still, I had only one more bluff up my sleeve. “They tested my blood at R&D before I left. Hate to see you going through all this trouble when there’s nothing useful to be found.”

“Your scientists have no idea what to look for.”

“You feel confident of that?”

“Yes.”

Shit .

“Get in the coffin, Ms. Stone.”

I hesitated. Not good. Thackery barked something at the boy, who immediately pounced on me. I wriggled and kicked, surprised by his steel grip on my arms. Something stung my shoulder, spreading warmth beneath my skin. Then the strange musk of the boy’s scent faded, my muscles grew too heavy to move, and I passed out.

The first thing clueing me in to impending consciousness was the gentle rumble of movement. Not me moving, exactly—an encompassing sensation of motion. Vibrations beneath me and around me, like I’d fallen asleep in a car.

I lurched toward a sitting position and didn’t even get my head up. I was strapped down to something moderately padded, secured at every joint from my ankles to my wrists, across my stomach, and even one strap over my forehead. Sleep and tears had sealed my eyes shut. I worked them open, aware of a barrage of new smells—disinfectant, motor oil, bleach, blood, sweat—among other, unidentifiable odors.

My eyes focused on a ceiling of sheet metal, dull and unpolished, reflecting light from elsewhere in the room. It wasn’t very wide, maybe ten feet. The length was impossible to tell without turning my head, which I couldn’t. Panic splashed across me like ice water. Where the hell was I? Why was I moving? Where was Thackery? Had Phin been found?

On my right was an IV stand with a single bag and tube attached. A bag slowly filling up with blood. I flexed my right arm, felt the prick of the needle in my vein. He’d already started collecting his samples. Bastard. I tested my other limbs. Nothing could move, but nothing else felt poked, pricked, or cut. Just held down and a little numb—especially my ass. I’d been lying there a while.

My tongue was dry and did little to wet my parched lips. My brain was muddled, almost lethargic. Side effects of whatever he’d knocked me out with, I’d bet. My eyelids kept drifting shut, ready to sleep again.

No, not yet.

A door opened and closed, and shoes squeaked across the floor. Thackery stepped up on my left side, smiling like a doctor welcoming his favorite patient back to life. “Didn’t expect to see you awake,” he said. “Not after drawing nearly six pints of your blood.”

Shit, so that’s why I was so sleepy. He really was going to drain me dry. Still, this allayed my fears of him performing exploratory surgery on me. You can’t torture someone if they’ve bled to death first. But the thought gave me little comfort. Fast or slow, dead was dead.

“Why … moving?” Both words took a concentrated effort that left me panting.

“Staying on the move makes it harder for my enemies to track me.”

Good point. I poked around for my tap. Felt nothing. Was I too weak? Were we so far out of the city that the Break’s power had disappeared? Had he enchanted this mobile lab with protection like he had the parking garage? All three thoughts made my heart ache. No, I wouldn’t let Thackery see me cry. I closed my eyes and allowed fatigue to overtake me. I’d rather die in my sleep than give him the satisfaction.

I drifted for a while, thinking of my morning in bed with Wyatt, holding him, being held by him, and let those precious memories carry me into blackness.

Bleach … urine … car exhaust. I had to be in Hell; no way heaven smelled this bad. Ugh. I always thought Hell would smell more like brimstone—not that I knew exactly what brimstone smelled like. Rotten eggs or something. And shouldn’t it be hotter in here? I wasn’t cold. I just couldn’t feel anything below my neck.

What the—?

That subliminal sense of motion was still there. Getting my eyes open took a concentrated effort. Glued together from sleep and tears, I probably tore out a couple of eyelashes forcing them apart. A silver blur greeted me. Even out of focus, I knew it was the same roof. The same table, the same straps, the same damned place. I wasn’t dead. So what the fuck was Thackery playing at?

My head wasn’t strapped down as before, giving me a bit more freedom to look around. The IV stand was still there. Instead of a bag sucking out blood, a clear bag hung from it, dripping something into me. Gee, so nice to offer an intravenous snack in between drainings.

The thought seized my heart. Was that his game? Drain me as dry as he could, then let me rest and refuel for a while before round two? Or three, or ten? I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. Hours? Days? My numb body was cause for concern. I’d been lying here for too damned long. I tried testing my extremities again. Wiggled my fingers and toes, flexed one knee. Nothing else. Just an odd pressure between my legs that didn’t make—Son of a bitch! I’d been hospitalized with traumatic injuries enough times to recognize the feel of a catheter. He’d also removed my clothes and put me into a plain cotton gown, not unlike a hospital drape.

Asshole had seen me naked!

“Welcome back.”

A low growl rumbled out of my throat in response to the strange voice. It warbled in that odd middle between adolescence and maturity. The blond teen shifted into my line of sight, that same blazing hatred in eyes I now saw were a deep, glinting silver. The coloring was familiar somehow. I licked my parched lips with a still-dry tongue, then rasped out, “Fuck you.” It wasn’t poetry, but it would do.

Bastard laughed at me. “No thank you, you’re not my type.”

Grrrr . “Why?”

“Why are you not my type? Because you’re a filthy, fucking human.”

Which meant he wasn’t. “No, why am I alive?” God, my throat was on fire.

“Because you’re of less value to the master dead.” Spoken as though his reply should have been painfully obvious. Maybe it was, and I just didn’t want to admit it.

“Leverage?”

“Goodness no,” Thackery said, stepping up behind the teen. “I think I gave away my best leverage yesterday. You, Ms. Stone, intrigue me.”

Yesterday. It had been a whole day since the trade. Wyatt must be going out of his mind.

“Point of fact, you were dead,” Thackery continued. “For precisely forty-three seconds, your heart stopped beating from the blood loss. After I unhooked the drain, your body recovered on its own. I was, as you can imagine, fascinated. No matter what my other experiment yields, I couldn’t pass up this chance to study you.”

I had a sudden, terror-inducing vision of a high school–level science video I’d watched once upon a time, in which some man in glasses and a loud bow tie had expounded on a lizard’s ability to regenerate its own tail.

“In the interest of full disclosure, this is the third time I’ve had to reinsert your IV needle. Over the course of about three hours, your body pushes out the foreign object and then heals the tiny wound.”

A small, fascinated part of my mind wondered if that meant my body would expel a bullet on its own, given enough time. Not that I was about to give Thackery any ideas.