Kelly Mendig - Three Days to Dead

His hand jerked. I’d struck a nerve. Good. My own nerves were well frayed. I wanted to share the wealth.

“We just need to jog your memory,” he said, slipping first his wallet and then the yellow jewel into his jeans pocket. “I’m not calling this a loss yet, Evy. Not until the clock’s run out.”

Breath caught in my throat. Right; the clock. I forced an exhale, but my heart continued to beat too fast. “Wyatt, how long do I have? I know that spells like this have a shelf life, and if you were expecting an instant replay, you wouldn’t have bargained for a lot of time. A week? Five days?”

His shoulders slumped. “Three days.”

Hell. Seventy-two hours. I shivered. Was that enough time? It didn’t feel like enough, not if we were running cold.

His hands gently squeezed my knees, offering silent support. I looked up, right into his eyes. One of his hands reached up and brushed a lock of hair away from my cheek, carefully tucking it behind my ear.

I caught myself staring at his slightly parted lips, wondering … what? No, not wondering. Wanting . Wanting something I had never wanted before.

No. “Do you have a plan?” I asked.

He nodded, the intensity of his stare never wavering. “I want you to talk to Smedge. He would always talk to you, give up what he knew when you asked. He won’t talk to me. I’ve tried.”

Smedge, one of my most loyal informants. One of my strengths as a Triad Hunter was my ability to get Dregs to trust me, even if they had no reason for it. Maybe it was my smile, or my all-American blond-haired, blue-eyed looks. It didn’t matter, as long as they talked. But I hadn’t spoken to Smedge in weeks.

“I don’t think Smedge ever liked you,” I said.

“Bridge trolls don’t tend to like human males, period.”

“Too true, but he really didn’t like you.” I nudged his leg with my foot. “Can’t imagine why, though. You’re such a charmer in person.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “I insulted his bridge once.”

“You didn’t!”

Wyatt shrugged. I punched him in the shoulder.

“What?” he asked, drawing back.

“You never insult a troll’s chosen bridge, you idiot. Hell, even a trainee knows that.” Of all the stupid things to say to another species …

“I apologized later on,” he said.

“Smedge’s bridge is across town from here. How are we going to get there?”

“I have a car parked the next block over.” He hesitated. “Something else is out there hunting and it’s not human, so we need to be careful.”

“Something?” I recalled how I’d felt crossing the Wharton Street Bridge. The oddest sense of being followed, contrary to physical evidence.

“I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard rumors. Some call it an interspecies breeding, but they don’t know of what. Just that it has a keen sense of smell and can track anything.”

“No one’s ever heard of a successful interspecies breeding.”

“Like I said, it’s a rumor. I haven’t seen it.”

“Sounds charming.”

“Did I mention the double rows of razor teeth?”

“Are you trying to get me all hot and bothered?”

He rolled his eyes. “I know you like to kill things, Evy, but this one’s different.”

“If it’s real.”

“It’s real.”

“Okay, it’s real. I take it you have weapons?”

A sly smile confirmed it even before he replied. “You’d better believe it.”

69:26

Calling the stockpile of weapons in the trunk of Wyatt’s car a “cache” only insulted the variety and care that had gone into the selection. “Arsenal” painted a better picture of the plethora of weapons stored in cases beneath the trunk’s false bottom. There were revolvers and rifles, each with multiple-round clips. Regular and fragmenting bullets for thinner-skinned targets like goblins and gremlins—although in five years I’d never had to hunt a gremlin, much less shoot one. Anticoagulant-coated bullets for the Bloods. Silver nitrate tips for weres. Acid tips for gargoyles.

Grenades and flash bombs were lined up in fleeced cases next to smokers. My personal favorites were the blades—sharp enough to slice paper on their edges. A variety of smaller knives, smooth edge and serrated, came in a variety of sizes. There were also two sharpened broadswords—I was trained for them, but hated their weight—and a pair of machetes on velvet pads, next to a row of throwing stars and brass knuckles. I spotted a couple of dog whistles tucked into the corner, gleaming silver—with their heightened hearing, it was an easy and underrated method of knocking Halfies and Bloods for a loop.

I took a sheathed serrated knife the size of my palm and strapped it to my right ankle. A closed butterfly knife went into the back pocket of my jeans. Wyatt strapped on a shoulder holster for one of the revolvers and grabbed a fragging clip and an anti coag clip—standard gear for Handlers, since they acted more like a guide for the Triads than an active participant in our activities. I had never seen Wyatt fire a gun in my life, but things had changed. He looked completely able to pull the trigger and mean it.

When we were safely in his car and cruising toward downtown’s Lincoln Street Bridge, I asked, “So what did you do? Raid the Department vault before you went rogue?”

“Of course not,” he said. Pity. “I raided them afterward.”

He smiled as if joking, but something in his voice hinted at sincerity.

“How about that cloaking jewel? You get that there, too?”

“No, I traded it for a favor.”

“Yeah? What was her name?”

“His name is Brutus.” The annoyance in his tone came out of nowhere.

I turned sideways in my seat, less interested in the scenery than in the subtle changes peeking through the man I thought I knew. Only three days and he seemed a different person. “What was the favor?”

He grunted. “I summoned something, and he gave me a one-shot cloak. I needed to stay off the radar for a while.”

“Until you had me back?”

“Something like that.”

“So the jewel?”

“Useless.”

Of course, because having an invisibility cloak at our fingertips was too damned easy. “So you going to tell me about those bruises?” I asked.

His hands white-knuckled the steering wheel. “Does anyone else know that Candace—”

“Chalice.”

“That Chalice is alive?”

I tilted my head to one side. “You mean besides the two morticians who nearly died of heart attacks when I came to life on their table?” Another half smile from him.

“Yeah, besides them.”

“Chalice’s roommate.”

“How did she find out?”

“He. Since I woke up butt-naked and abandoned in a morgue, I needed money and clothes. I found Chalice’s address on a chart, so I went home to change. He interrupted me.”

“He saw you naked?”

“No, pervert.” I rolled my eyes. “And Alex does get points for neither passing out nor screaming like a little girl, since he both called the ambulance and later identified the body. He saw her—saw me—dead.”

“How did she die?” Wyatt made a left-handed turn at a four-way intersection.

“Does it matter?”

“Guess not. Yet.”

We had left the high-rising apartment complexes behind for the darker, grittier streets of Mercy’s Lot. Ancient brick buildings, many of them old industrial shops that had closed at the turn of the century, lined the streets. Sidewalks held broken benches and overflowing waste cans, gutters filled with trash and standing rainwater. In a few hours, when the sun went down, neon lights would blaze and welcome people inside to rid them of their hard-earned money.