Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

… not healing …

… not regrowing …

… don’t understand …

… no, can’t be magical …

… dammit to hell …

… so sorry, Anne …

Unceasing agony beckoned to me from the source of that damned voice, and I shied away. Tried to stay locked firmly into my own mind. To ignore Thackery’s ranting. He was angry. I was glad. We’d completed his last experiment. Time for him to uphold his end of the deal and kill me.

Please, just let me go.

… can’t do that yet …

No, no, no, you promised.

… can’t kill you yet …

Son of a goblin’s bitch! I wanted to wake up and attack him. Stab his eyes out with the scalpel. Cut a few small appendages off with that electric knife. Pay him back for what he’d done to me. For taking back his promise. I just can’t move. Won’t stretch toward consciousness, not now. It hurts, and it’ll hurt worse if I wake up. I can’t scream for him again.

What was that noise? Cell phone?

… us out of here!

The world around me shuddered. Pitched. Rolled.

I slammed against my restraints as everything turned upside down.

I jackknifed into a sitting position, screaming to wake the dead. Or the supposed-to-be-dead. My body was on fire, burning with every muscle I clenched or patch of skin that rubbed against fabric. Each scream was torture to my damaged throat—scorching shocks that put the taste of blood and bile on my tongue.

No. Either I’d gone deaf or the screaming was just in my head. The only sounds coming from my throat were tiny squeaks and squeals. I caught hold of myself and realized two things. First, I was sitting up, which seemed wrong. Second, I was in a dusty, dim room with a single newspaper-covered window that hid any hint of day or night, and no furniture. Just the pile of blankets on which I sat.

Where the hell was I?

My nose twitched, and I forced back a sneeze. Black dots danced in my vision. The pained muscles in my back gave out, and I flopped onto the hard floor again, energy spent. I felt the sticky pull of bandages on my arms, legs, and stomach. My left hand was wrapped tight in gauze, and as I lifted it above my head to really look, agony speared me all the way to the shoulder. Blood splattered the cotton gauze above my left pinkie joint—the source of that awful shock of pain.

What happened to my hand? What happened to the rest of me?

I closed my eyes and tried to think. Push past the cocoon of pain that kept my brain muddled and my thoughts mushy. This wasn’t my room, of that I was positive. Being able to move had surprised me, but I didn’t know why. I was wounded and didn’t know how I’d been hurt, or by whom. I couldn’t even shout for help, because my throat was damaged. This was so fucked-up.

Think, girl. Think .

An image formed in my mind’s eye. A man with black hair and dark eyes, a shadow on his chin and cheeks. He was smiling at me, laughing. I knew him, didn’t I? What was his name?

Hell, what was my name?

Footsteps thundered toward me from elsewhere in the house. I stared at the warped, faded door, my heart pounding in my ears. The steps seemed heavier than any man should make, like bricks falling on wood. The stamps stopped at the door. My right hand fumbled for a weapon and found only scratchy blankets.

The knob twisted, and the door squealed open on rusty hinges. A large figure towered in the doorway, so tall he actually ducked to step inside. I sucked in a startled shriek, positive I’d lost my mind. It couldn’t be a man, this seven-foot-tall giant with his hard-looking gray skin and figure that seemed hewn from stone. His face was squared off, his head flat and hairless. Eyes gleamed predator-like, and I suddenly knew what a cornered mouse felt like as the cat approached.

“You are awake,” the thing said, his voice grating like sandpaper on metal. “This pleases me.”

I couldn’t come up with a reply. Did he prefer his meals awake before he consumed them? He took another shambling step forward, and I hunched lower under the blankets. Instinct screamed at me to flee or attack, but my body hadn’t the strength to do either. Just lie there and let it kill me, like someone else should already have done.…

The creature regarded me for a moment, head tilted to one side, his chiseled face blank. “Evangeline, do you not remember me?”

He knew my name. “Evangeline” sounded correct, even though something else lingered in the recesses of memory. A name that sounded like “Alice.” I studied him, repeated the way his gravelly voice had said my name, so foreign and familiar at the same time. It seemed impossible to be both. My head hurt from trying to decipher it all.

“You have suffered recently,” he said. “It is not uncommon for memory loss to occur.”

“I know you?” I whispered, barely able to hear the words.

He didn’t seem to have trouble. “Yes, for many years. You called me Max.”

“Max.”

The name fell easily from my lips. Shadowed images swirled in my mind. A large library in the middle of a city. Neat piles of gleaming bird bones, picked clean and set aside. Standing with him on a ledge high above that same city, gazing down at its nighttime colors. Sneaking into his lair. Hit from behind. A woman with white hair bleeding to death while Max stood by and watched. The handsome man with black hair threatening Max with a ball of sunlight.

A ball of sunlight. Max. Gargoyle. I did know him.

“You left,” I wheezed. “Left the city.”

“I did, and have not returned since our last encounter.”

Memories were coming back in snips and bits—Max saying his race would not choose sides in the upcoming war; realizing he’d been responsible for my kidnapping once before; racing to stop an elf mage from raising a demon. It played out like a video on fast-forward, flashing faces and events without any real clarity. Most of their names hovered on the edge of conscious thought, just out of reach.

“Where?”

“In a small rural town sixty miles south of the city,” he said. “This house is secluded, and it serves our need for protection during daylight. We have been searching for one of our coven these past five weeks. We found him the day before yesterday, his body taken apart, the remnants turned to stone. He had likely been dead for several days.”

I thought of a young boy, half his body stone, the other half barely human, dead on an operating table. Only gargoyles turned completely to stone in sunlight. Their cousin race, vampires, scorched and burned. Vampires … A shiver tore up my spine. Gargoyles, vampires, and half-breeds, oh my!

“We were not far behind the man who disposed of our coven member so carelessly.” A biting edge crept into Max’s voice, making it even more inhuman than usual. “We attacked only moments before dawn, sending the tractor-trailer and its inhabitants off a high mountain road to the gorge below. We were not able to search the wreckage until the sun set again.”

Tractor-trailer. My stomach gurgled at a dimly recalled sense of motion, of constant movement rocking me in and out of consciousness. I’d been on that trailer, strapped to a table. Someone had held me there. The same person who’d held and tortured Max’s friend. Someone named—

“Thackery,” I squeaked. “Alive?”

“I believe he is.” My heart howled in agony. “His body was not found in the wreckage. We discovered footprints leading off, back to the road, but they were not human. They were animal, some sort of dog.”

“The driver?” Someone had to drive the tractor-trailer. Had it been that blond kid? No, he’d been inside with us a few times.