Kelly Mendig - Three Days to Dead

“We go farther south,” I said. “Over the Anjean River, and follow the train tracks to the East Side.”

“What’s over there?” Alex asked, shifting the gear back into Drive.

“An abandoned train station. That’s where I died.”

“So how does one become a Dreg Hunter, exactly?” Alex asked.

Neither of us had spoken in the ten minutes it took to reach the East Side, and his question came without preamble. I could only imagine what was going on in his head. “We recruit, same as anyone else.”

“Not quite like anyone else. You can’t exactly set up a booth on Career Day.”

I snickered. “We tend to do our recruiting at juvenile detention centers and orphanages.”

“Seriously?” His hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

“As a vampire bite. Though the recruiters don’t wear suits or ask for references. They want kids who are looking for direction, kids they can train to kill.”

“You say that like it’s normal.”

“Normal’s relative. When Bastian recruited me, I was barely eighteen, and my biggest goal at the time was avoiding an adult prison sentence for B&E.”

“Whose house did you break into?”

“The guy who ran the McManus Juvenile Detention Center. The one I was in for most of my teenage years.”

“Why’d you break into his house?”

“So I could beat the shit out of him. Payback for beating the shit out of me a couple of times.”

The steering wheel creaked; his knuckles were white. He stared at the road ahead, shoulders tense. “And orphans?”

“No one’s there to miss us when we die.”

“Someone obviously cared when you died.”

“I meant at Boot Camp.”

“What’s that?”

I blew hard through my teeth, glad we were nearly to the train station so the conversation could end. “They don’t just put a knife in our hands and tell us to kill, Alex. We have to survive Boot Camp first. The ones who live become the Hunters.”

“And this is legal?”

“Probably not, but it’s necessary. Why do you think you’ve never heard of us before today?”

“What about Wyatt?”

“He’s definitely heard of us before today.”

“He’s your Handler, right?” Alex asked, exasperation leaking into his words. “Do they do Boot Camp?”

My lips parted. It was a question that, in four years, I’d never actually pondered. Handlers knew what they were doing; it wasn’t my job to ask how they learned it. “I’m sure they’ve got their own training requirements. Think of Hunters as the prizefighters and Handlers as their coaches.”

“Some of the best coaches are former players.”

I shrugged. “If any of the Handlers are former Hunters, no one talks about it. We do our job, we save lives, end of story.”

“Okay.”

Trees green with spring leaves surrounded the station. It felt desolate and lonely, the perfect place for a kidnapping. Ten-foot-tall chain-link fencing lined the perimeter, but the lock had long since vanished. Alex drove through the empty parking lot, cracked and overgrown with grass and dandelions. Space lines had faded away, leaving behind a sea of grayed asphalt and little else.

The station itself was two stories tall—an old-fashioned gabled style with peeling red walls and white trim. Boards covered windows long devoid of glass. Childish graffiti marked dozens of teenage dares and initiations. The platform on the rear, facing the tracks, was warped and defaced and probably rotting in a dozen places. It smelled of fuel and decay.

Alex parked close to the building. He turned off the engine and reached for the door handle. I put a hand on his arm.

“Give me five minutes,” I said. “If I don’t come out, I want you to drive away like a bat out of Hell. Do you understand?”

He seemed poised to argue the point. Instead, he nodded.

I took a tire iron—the closest thing I had to a weapon—out of the trunk. Avoiding the platform and its potential fall hazards, I entered through the front. The door sported a brand-new padlock. It hung loosely on the hinge. I brushed a finger across its surface—no dust. Someone was there. My heart thudded; I willed it to slow. I wanted to warn Alex away, but curiosity drew me inside.

The knob turned without squeak or protest. The hinges were oiled. The thick odors of dust surprised me. My nose twitched. I pinched it to force back a sneeze.

The lobby was empty, illuminated by gaps in the boarded windows. The dusty floor sported a trail of footprints and smudges, all leading past the rows of glass ticket booths to a rear door marked PERSONNEL. I tiptoed toward it, following the trail, silent as the dead. Wood creaked, but not under my feet. Somewhere lower.

At the door, I stopped to listen. No voices, no footsteps. My hand ached, and I flexed my grip on the tire iron. It helped, but my heart still pounded like machine-gun fire. I wanted Wyatt—his gun, his courage, and his powers. I was weak in Chalice’s body, and I despised myself for it, but I had to press onward. If I quit or failed, Wyatt could die. No matter what Tovin demanded of him later, I couldn’t be responsible for his death. No one else I cared about was going to die before me.

The doorknob gave the tiniest squeak, which the hinges echoed. On the right were ticket windows long empty and relieved of their glass inserts. To the left was a staircase that descended into a distant light source. The old, grayed wood looked loud and dangerous, but I had no other way down. Progressing one foot at a time, I went down three steps before one creaked.

I froze. No movement below. No shouts or alerts. I was quickly running out my five-minute clock and had to keep going. Down three more. A narrow, dimly lit hallway came into view. Two bare bulbs hung from broken fixtures, set ten feet apart.

No sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me. No feeling of familiarity filled me or twisted my guts. Rufus said this was where I was kept, but I didn’t remember it—likely because I hadn’t been conscious during the trip down, and I’d certainly been dead during the trip back up. I needed to find the room I was held in.

The air shifted. I sensed it too late to duck properly. The cool body slammed into my shoulders instead of my back. I tucked and twisted and sent the body sailing over me. It hit the paneled wall with a rattling thud and a pained screech. I remained crouched, braced by my left hand, tire iron in the right, while the vampire righted itself with preternatural ease and flipped to its feet.

At first glance, vampire males are often difficult to distinguish from females—the same white-blond hair; the same pale, angular features; the same lithe, flat-chested figures—but this one was definitely female. Her violet eyes flashed. She bared brilliant white fangs. A feral growl bubbled up from her throat. She watched, but didn’t attack.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“The welcome wagon,” I said. “We heard the place had new tenants, and wanted to drop off a fruit basket.”

She sneered. “You are not afraid.”

“I used to kill things like you for a living.”

“Used to?”

“I lost my license.”

“Or your nerve.”

I laughed; I’d lost more than my nerve. She stood up straight, paying no attention to the weapon in my hand. Her nose twitched. Muscles rippled beneath pale, stretched skin. She was trained, probably a soldier out doing a little recon. Vampires are notoriously tall and skinny, rarely shorter than five foot ten, but this one put her own kind to shame. She clocked in at six foot two easy, and towered over my still-crouched position. Like a fashion model, she reeked of malnourishment and starvation.

Not surprising when all you ate was blood.