Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

“How many lives are you down to now?” he asked. “Six?”

“More like four,” I replied. My mouth was dry, but talking no longer felt like gargling razor blades.

Kismet crouched next to us and offered me an open bottle of water. I took a few sips, eager to guzzle the entire thing, holding back only because I wanted to keep it down. It moistened my mouth and cooled me a little. I handed it back and licked my lips.

“Where’s Wyatt?” I asked.

Milo looked away, and Kismet couldn’t hide a flash of guilt. My heart thundered in my chest. Blood roared in my ears. I grabbed Kismet’s wrist and squeezed.

“Where?”

“We don’t know, Evy,” she said. “No one’s heard from him in three days.” She cringed, and I loosened my grip on her arm.

“How long have I been gone?”

She chewed on her lower lip. “Twenty days.”

Everything tilted. I’d expected to hear a week, ten days max. Not twenty days. Almost three weeks. Wyatt must have gone out of his mind. Or accepted I was dead and moved on. Or accepted I was dead and—No, no more “ors.” Not going there.

She didn’t need prompting from me to start filling in the gaps. “We lost track of you at the park that day. You moved so damned fast the tracking dye was useless before we could get on the road. It was two hours before we got a call telling us where to find Phineas.”

He’d laid on that cold cement for two hours, alone. “Is he okay?”

“Almost one hundred percent again, last I heard. Therians not only grow faster than humans, they also heal much more quickly.” She cleared her throat. “He was taken to the hospital while we searched the parking garage. We didn’t find anything except tire tracks, footprints, and some odd paw prints. Any trail we might have followed was cold. We drove around all day and half the night with that computer, until long after Bastian said the effects of the dye would wear off.”

Bastian —grrrr .

“I finally dragged Wyatt to my place and made him sleep for a few hours. We all looked for you, Evy, as often as we could, even after the brass forbade it. Whenever Wyatt wasn’t in the field searching, he was at the hospital with Phineas. Both of them felt so guilty. Wyatt went back to your apartment once, I think. After Phineas was released, he stayed with them. Rufus is still wheelchair-bound, and I’m sure he convinced Wyatt that the two invalids needed him, but I—”

“Rufus wanted to keep an eye on Wyatt,” I said.

“Yeah. He’s been so cold, Evy.”

I closed my eyes, fighting back tears. I blinked away a film when I opened them again. “Amalie couldn’t sense that I was still alive?”

Another uncomfortable look. “As far as I know, no one has had contact with Amalie since the day Thackery shot you and we told her we didn’t recover the Tainted crystal.”

Shit. “No one?”

Kismet shook her head. “There was another disturbance—Break-quake, Wyatt called it—about a week ago, and another one yesterday, according to Claudia. There’s been no contact with any of the Fey for more than three weeks, not to the brass or the Assembly.”

“That’s …” I didn’t know what it was, but “bad,” “screwed-up,” “fucked-up,” and a number of other things raced through my addled mind. “And you haven’t seen Wyatt for three days?”

“No. Rufus said Wyatt got a phone call on Wednesday, talked to whoever it was in private for nearly half an hour, then just left.” She sucked in her lower lip and looked away, hiding something. Some detail she didn’t want to share.

“For fuck’s sake, what?”

“Phineas is gone, too. He’s been missing the same amount of time. Rufus hasn’t talked to or seen either of them, and Michael Jenner isn’t returning my calls. I’ve tried to get the brass involved, but they no longer consider Wyatt an active Handler, so they won’t interfere.” The sneer in her voice was striking. “I even called Aurora yesterday, and she said she hasn’t heard from either of them in days.”

Poor Aurora. The gentle were-kestrel was one of Phin’s last living Clans-people, and he had already gone to great lengths to protect her and her daughter, Ava. Being abandoned by him had to hurt like hell.

“You tried his phone?” I asked stupidly. “The apartment again?”

“Went straight to voice mail, and now the damned box is full, so I can’t even tell him you’re alive and hope he hears it. We bugged the old apartment, but no one’s gone in or out. We’re trying, Evy, but Wyatt knows how to disappear if he wants to.”

“But he can’t.” It came out as a wail, and the sound shamed me. I could not lose it now, not in front of Max and Kismet and Milo. I found moderate comfort in the fact that Phin and Wyatt were probably together, wherever they were. It meant Wyatt hadn’t done something really stupid, like fling himself off the Wharton Street Bridge.

“Thackery’s still out there,” I said. I had to focus on business or I’d fall apart. “It sounds like he lost most of his research, so he’s going to get desperate.”

“Desperate people make mistakes,” Milo said. “And then we catch them.”

“Bastian?”

“He was interrogated, with both Claudia Burke and a freelance telepath present,” Kismet replied. “They believed him when he said he never shared our information with Thackery. He accepted information from him only regarding certain scientific applications of his research. He said Erickson’s team never knew where the information came from, so they were cleared, too.”

“Bastian was cleared?” I gaped at her.

She frowned. “Pretty much. He got a wrist slap for not passing along what he knew about Thackery after Olsmill went down. The brass is of the opinion that the Hunter known as Evangeline Stone died on May seventeenth, so nothing that happened to you afterward is their problem.”

My shoulders were shaking as I tried to rein in my fury. “That’s what they’ve declared, huh? Thackery slips Bastian info that helps us build a better bullet, so he gets a free fucking pass?”

“They still want Thackery caught, but, yeah, Bastian remains on the payroll. I guess they think they’re hemorrhaging Handlers and Hunters so fast they can’t afford to lose any more people.” Her voice was bitter enough to make a lemon pucker.

I studied her face—the lines of grief bracketing her eyes and the dullness of her skin. Milo had the same basic look, down to the red veins spiderwebbing his eyes. They both seemed overstressed, sleep-deprived, and ready to shatter. Twenty days later and their lives had descended into Hell. Unless it was … Damn.

“Felix?”

Milo flinched and his brown eyes went dull, cold. My heart ached.

Kismet said, “The infection kept him in ICU for days. It weakened his heart. A severed nerve in his back has pretty much left him in serious pain all the time. He can walk, but I don’t—” She paused.

“He’ll probably never hunt again, just like Tybalt,” Milo said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. I squeezed his hand, not bothering with placating words, and he squeezed back—a gesture of comfort for another hurting soul, small comfort though it was. His tentative smile never reached his eyes.

“Anything else happen while I was out of town?” I asked, exhausted and emotionally torn—a dish towel wrung out hard and left to slowly untwist. “Token? Was he found?”

“No, he wasn’t,” Kismet said. “There’s been no sign, but all active Triads have a description. So far no one’s seen him. He’s either dead or hiding.”

I was impressed something as unusual as Token had remained hidden for so long. Unless we just hadn’t yet tripped over his body.

Someone else was still unaccounted for. “Reilly?” I asked. “The guy looking for Chalice? Where’d he end up?”