Kelly Meding: As Lie the Dead

Wyatt crossed his arms over his chest. “Which is?”

“Paul Ryan.”

“Okay, then.” Wyatt tilted his head toward Baylor. “Paul Ryan is too skittish to be in the field with live ammo.”

Paul’s entire face turned beet red.

Baylor growled low in his throat—a challenge. “Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be taking training advice from a guy who got his whole team killed.”

Wyatt flinched. I tensed, expecting more punches. Or at the very least, a couple of choice insults. When nothing happened, I got pissed. For Wyatt and for me, being one of the three dead people referenced in Baylor’s snarky comment.

I was across the blood puddle and in Baylor’s face before anyone could stop me. I balled my fist in the front of his black turtleneck and leaned in until we were nose to nose. I’d just crossed an unspoken line of code among Hunters and Handlers, but I didn’t much care. It’s not like I worked for them anymore.

“Our deaths were not Wyatt’s goddamn fault, understand? You fucking asshole.” I let him go, and he stumbled back a step.

“Evy, stop,” Wyatt said.

I rounded on him, my hands clenched. His shoulders had slumped. He didn’t seem angry anymore, only sad, but that just fueled my anger. “Why, Wyatt? Our deaths were not your fault.”

“Yeah.” His tone said otherwise, but it wasn’t a fight I was prepared to relive in front of the others. Maybe not again until I’d had a few days’ sleep. I thought he’d accepted the fact that Jesse and Ash, my late Triad partners, had been killed as part of a larger plan. Their deaths—and, ultimately, mine as well—were orchestrated, unpreventable. Not his fault. Not my fault, either.

Yeah, not my fault. Maybe if I said that a few more times, I’d even believe it.

The Hunters and Handlers continued collecting bodies as the sun inched higher into the morning sky, turning purples and crimsons into pinks and golds. The odor of rot intensified as the cool morning gave way to warmth. A different sort of body pile was rising near our Jeep—six dead Hunters, each carefully covered with a cotton blanket. While fewer in number, those losses hit much harder. Adding in the deaths of Rufus’s entire Triad team yesterday, we had lost forty percent of our trained forces.

The battle had ultimately lasted only an hour, but the effects would be felt for a long time—not only among the Triads but also among the many species that inhabited both the city and the surrounding mountains. The goblins—a scavenger species that spent more time in the city’s sewers and subterranean tunnels than aboveground—had shown their manipulative hands by joining forces with Halfies and openly attacking us. They’d be hunted mercilessly for it. The Halfies—not fully vampire but no longer fully human—had no real power other than as thugs and roving street gangs, but someone had managed to keep them organized long enough to cause serious carnage tonight.

Their collective status had just gone from Irritant to Public Enemy Number One.

The Triads could handle the goblins and Halfies. We’d been doing it for years, in secret, keeping the existence of such creatures from the general public. No, it was the orchestrator of their activities that had the potential to cause the most upheaval. The Fey Council, humanity’s largest champion, had been betrayed by one of their own—an elf named Tovin, one of the very few elves known to exist. He had tried to release a demon into our world by transplanting the thing’s consciousness into Wyatt. We’d stopped Tovin and trapped the demon.

Temporarily trapped. Amalie, Queen of the sprites, would likely send someone along shortly to collect the lemon-sized onyx crystal the demon had hardened into, for proper storage and disposal. She’d given me the magic spell to stop the demon; I trusted her to handle it from here.

But perhaps the most important outcome of tonight’s battle was that the Triads had found a tentative ally in the vampires—something I’d never expected three days ago from a species who did their collective best to ignore us and, when they didn’t, looked down their noses at us. It was an alliance that sprang out of more than just a unified view that all Halfies should be wiped out, only I couldn’t put my finger on the more .

And I was too exhausted to worry about it now. “Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I said.

“You going to file an official report on this, Truman?” Baylor asked.

Wyatt snorted. “Are you offering me my job back?”

“Not mine to offer, but you had a huge part in this. Once a Handler, always a Handler, right?”

“Yeah.” That time he seemed to mean it.

I grabbed Wyatt’s wrist and tugged him away. He came without further prompting, seemingly as ready to get out of there as I was.

“Stone!”

Christ, what now?

Gina Kismet jogged over from the direction of the pavilion opposite the Visitors’ Center and pulled to a dead stop in front of us, not even out of breath. Her left leg was bandaged, red already seeping through, but the red-haired, pint-sized Handler seemed unbothered by the wounds. She held out a black cell phone; I eyed it.

“Instinct tells me this isn’t over,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Then take this, just in case.”

I did, slipping it into the rear pocket of my jeans. “Thanks.”

“We’ll see you.”

“Undoubtedly.”

She wandered back, already barking orders at someone else. I didn’t know her well but decided then that I liked her. Ballsy and strong, like a Hunter—only not. Flaming red hair disappeared among the remaining figures, though I knew I’d see her again. Probably a lot sooner than I wanted.

Last night, Wyatt and I had come in via the forest, but we decided on a more convenient route back to our hidden car. Several dozen yards down the pot-holed access road, barely halfway back to the main road, he started laughing. I stopped in the middle of the leaf-strewn pavement and stared at him. He waved one hand at me, not overcome, just privately amused at something in his own head. I glared at him, waiting for an in on the joke.

“I was just thinking,” he said. “Here we are walking a mile back to the car when you could probably teleport us both in less than a second.”

I hadn’t even considered using my newfound Gift to get us back. It would take time to orient to it, just as it would take time to orient to the fact that I’d just taken full possession of my current body. A week ago, I’d been tortured to death by goblins. Three days ago, I’d been resurrected into the body of Chalice Frost, recently deceased via suicide. Less than two hours ago, the magical bargain that gave me only a three-day afterlife had been broken in a flurry of memories and physical sensations. Permanent possession of someone’s body apparently also came with the memory of that body’s life experiences.

Weird didn’t even begin to cover it.

Wyatt and I had also stumbled onto the fact that, unbeknownst to her, Chalice had a Gift. A direct tether to the Break—the source of magic for the world. Only a handful of humans possessed that tether, giving each a unique Gift. Wyatt’s was summoning inanimate objects; Chalice’s—now mine—was teleportation. I just needed to learn to use it better.

“Not this morning, pal,” I replied. “I’m barely over teleporting three people through the force field Tovin put around the Visitors’ Center; I haven’t slept more than a few hours at a time since, oh, I was dead, and I’m so hungry I could close down a buffet house. I’m done teleporting for the immediate future. Come to think of it, I’m done doing a lot of things for the immediate future.”

“Like?”

I started walking again. A gentle breeze swirled from behind, bringing with it the acrid odor of burning things. Not sweet like charred meat but heavy and oily. Disgusting.