Kelly Meding - Another Kind of Dead

“What about it?” He reached up from his half crouch and flicked the door lock open.

“Jaron didn’t say she fought it off, just that it stabbed her and she came to us.”

He paused, turned his head, and looked at me. Understanding bloomed like a deadly flower. The knob turned under his hand. Wyatt slammed his shoulder into the door, but someone pushed from the other side. Someone a lot stronger. Wyatt went sprawling onto his left hip and continued to roll, clearing the door, which had just been kicked completely open. Jaron hadn’t managed to describe her attacker beyond the claws and thinking it was a goblin, but what stood in the open doorway wasn’t what I expected.

It was a goblin—or had been, at one time. Maybe four and a half feet tall, it stood up straight rather than hunched as other goblin males did. Skin that should have been slick and oily was dull, as if powdered with starch. Black hair tufted out from in and around its ears—ears that should have been wide and pointed but instead were round like a human’s.

I looked in its eyes, and my stomach lurched. Not the lusty red eyes I’d grown to know, but watchful brown that were completely human. The mismatched features, combined with the clothes—jeans and a black T-shirt, for Christ’s sake!—sent a shock wave of cold through my body. My insides quaked. This wasn’t right. I couldn’t possibly be seeing it.

Until it stretched out a decidedly goblinesque arm in my direction, as though pointing with its entire hand. Goblins had long, sharp fingernails, good for rending flesh and getting a grip. This creature had them, too, and before my very eyes, they grew to the length of four inches each. Tiny daggers, four in a row. Only the thumbnail didn’t grow.

It looked past me, at the body by my feet, and snarled. Dry lips pulled back, showing off a single row of sharp, jagged teeth. Bile scorched the back of my throat. It still didn’t attack. Good for us.

I had a small knife strapped to the side of my right boot, an easy grab, but the goblin-thing would be on me the instant I reached. The knife I’d taken from beneath the coffee table was still on the floor where I’d dropped it minutes ago, halfway between me and the monster. More weapons were in the kitchenette, another beneath the sofa, others in the bedrooms. If I went for any of them, it could attack and kill Wyatt.

Its too-human eyes flickered around the apartment, as though calculating its surroundings and various threats. It was a predatory thing to do, a hunter’s trait. But goblins were scavengers. The males didn’t assess threats; they followed orders given to them by their queens.

What are you?

That observant gaze swung back to me, and I realized I’d whispered out loud. Our gazes locked. I thought I saw a spark of emotion, some distant cousin to regret—which was impossible in a goblin, so it had to be something else—then it snarled again.

“Kill,” it growled.

My brain stuttered to a halt as the full implications of that single word sank in. I gaped, my chest tight, breath frozen in my lungs. Goblin males didn’t speak English. Females can barely manage the language in their harsh, guttural voices. It couldn’t have spoken.

“Kill who?” Wyatt asked.

It pointed one sharply clawed finger at Peters’s body. “Whoever … went to.”

Oh God, it’s talking . I was in the middle of a nightmare and I couldn’t wake up. Not an unusual state for me of late, but unsettling nonetheless. Downright nauseating. Almost terrifying, in so many ways.

This wasn’t the first time I’d faced down a creature that had traits of more than one species. The first had been right after my resurrection, when I was attacked by a monster from a horror movie. Part vampire and part beast, the thing had been one hundred percent predator. Engineered by whoever had been helping Tovin, it was a prototype to house the other demons the mad elf hoped to bring across First Break. We’d found even more hybrid monstrosities in Tovin’s underground lab.

Only this one seemed mildly intelligent.

“Why?” I asked.

It swung its hateful stare back at me. Mixed with its need to attack and kill was a bit of confusion. I latched onto that as its best weakness. “Master … said,” it ground out.

“Who’s your master?”

Wrong question. It moved at a speed I didn’t expect, in a direct line for my guts, clawed hand slashing and hoping to spill them all over the floor. I dropped at the last possible moment, hips twisting, and brought my right heel up to crack it in the chest. It tumbled sideways, stunned by the blow. Claws ripped the hem of my pant leg, missing skin.

I rolled out of its way, already reaching for the knife at my ankle. My fingers closed around the handle just as a body slammed me sideways into the sofa—thing was fucking fast. The knife clattered to the floor, out of reach. Dammit. I jerked to my right, throwing all my weight down, smashing the creature against the cement floor. Its claws ghosted the skin on my neck, too damned close.

“Evy, left,” Wyatt shouted.

I moved without thinking, tumbling to my left, barely missing the couch a second time. A dark blur passed—it had to be Wyatt. His target let out some sort of grunt. I twisted around, rolled to my feet, and sought the nearest weapon handy, which just happened to be a ten-dollar thrift store table lamp. I yanked off the shade, ripped the cord out of the wall, and pulled it back like a baseball bat.

Wyatt and the goblin-thing were tangled together on the floor, wrestling for dominance. Both of Wyatt’s hands were wrapped around the creature’s wrists, keeping those claws at a distance, but what Wyatt had in bulk, the goblin had in speed. It wriggled like an eel on a fishing line. I looked for an opportunity to hit it with my lamp, but it just wouldn’t stop moving.

Screw this. I shifted the lamp into my left hand and scooped up my discarded knife in my right. I turned back to the flailing pair and took aim, ready to drive my knife straight into the middle of the goblin-thing’s back.

“Don’t kill it,” Wyatt said.

“Why not?” But I stabbed it in the back of the thigh instead—no easy feat with a moving target—and for a brief moment of panic, I thought I’d missed and hit Wyatt.

Then the goblin shrieked and lurched away, tugging at the knife stuck in its leg. Wyatt sat up quickly. The front of his shirt was torn, four equally wide slash marks. “We need to question it.”

Oh, right, a talking goblin-hybrid. As much as we needed to pick answers out of its brain, killing was so much simpler than taking prisoners.

The creature was crouched near the kitchenette counter, blood running down its leg. It looked at the knife I’d stuck it with, then tossed it over its shoulder. It snarled at us, this time less angry and more … fearful?

“Don’t like being ganged up on?” I asked.

It bared its teeth.

“You’re not as impressive as your big brothers.” Taunting an unknown element wasn’t the smartest trick in my arsenal, and Wyatt gave me a withering stare.

It growled something that could have been any number of garbled cuss words and lunged— okay, so stupid question —at my throat. I swung hard with the lamp, aiming for its slashing hand, and heard bone crunch as I connected. Its body slammed into mine and knocked us both sideways. I tripped over the lamp cord, hit the floor on my ass, and kept rolling. Momentum threw the goblin-hybrid over my head and into the far wall.

The splat was punctuated by a pained roar. Wyatt bolted past me. I curled onto my knees and pulled up in a crouch just in time to see Wyatt spear the critter’s left hand to the wall with a knife. It squealed and slapped at the knife’s hilt with its useless, broken right hand. It tried its teeth, but Wyatt kicked it in its jeans-clad groin. The thing shrieked.