Kelly Mendig: Three Days to Dead

I stopped at arm’s reach. I could smell his cologne and see the razor nick on his throat. He had a few inches on me, and muscular arms that seemed ready to sweep me up into a protective hug and never let go—something I didn’t get often enough in my line of work.

“All my stuff’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “Where else would I go?”

“You’re leaving now.”

I sensed a challenge in his words, only I had no prior experience with which to judge them. “Yes, I am, but I’m coming back.” Maybe. “This is going to sound strange, but who else thinks I’m dead?”

His lips puckered. “The cops and EMTs who came when I called.”

My stomach roiled. So he had found her with her wrist open and called for help. He’d probably spent the entire night cleaning the bathroom, trying to erase the blood from memory and sight.

“The coroner’s office, obviously,” he continued. “Jenny called this morning when you didn’t show for work, but I didn’t pick up. I hadn’t …” He inhaled, held it, and blew hard through his nose. “I hadn’t called anyone else yet. Good thing, huh?”

“Yeah. Good thing.”

“Are you sure you don’t remember—?”

“I don’t.” I held up a hand. Twenty questions dangled on my lips, but Chalice was not my priority. “I really don’t. Later, okay?”

“Okay.” His hand rose up, away from his hip. I tensed. He stopped, fingers hovering inches from my face. I forced myself to relax, to give him this little thing. The tip of one finger traced a line from my cheek to my chin, feather light. Sweet. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said.

Instinctively, I reached up and grasped his roaming hand. Squeezed. He clutched it like a lifeline, his eyes sparkling with moisture.

“I’ve never been so glad to be wrong about something in my life,” he said. “When I saw you like that, the tub full of blood, I almost died. You’re my best friend, Chalice. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

My heart broke for him. For a brief, blinding moment, I considered spitting out the truth. But it would do me no good. He would return to mourning for his friend sooner or later. Today, he had the luxury of make-believe. Sometimes denial was better than reality.

“Me, too,” I said, forcing out the lie. “Just … don’t tell anyone you saw me?”

“Okay.”

I released his hand. He watched, silent but intent, as I laced up a pair of running shoes. I kept my eyes forward, away from him, pretending that I belonged there as much as he did. He bought the illusion, every scrap of it.

Still wishing I had a cell phone and more cash, I headed for the front door. Alex watched me go from his spot by the bedroom door. I stopped with my hand on the knob and looked back at him. He smiled. I smiled back, then ducked out into the hallway.

70:33

Once I crossed the Black River and retreated to the east side of the city, I lost the keen sense of displacement that had haunted me since waking up in the morgue. In its place, I discovered something new and barely detectable. The air around me seemed alive, energized, like an impending lightning strike. It might have been a side effect of the resurrection, but I doubted that. It hadn’t started until I crossed the river again—until I found myself downtown, in the neighborhood known as Mercy’s Lot. It was where I belonged, among the hopeless and the damned. Angry human souls without privilege, living side by side with creatures they couldn’t comprehend and chose not to see.

The real cause of the city’s sharp contrasts between prosperity and decay isn’t unemployment or a police department impotent to stop rising street gang violence. It’s the Dregs: creatures of nightmare and legend, eking out their existence with the rest of us. Some are friendly to humans—gargoyles, the Fey, and most of the were-Clans are tentative allies. Other races, like gremlins and trolls, just don’t care; they leave us alone and we leave them alone.

But vampires, goblins, and some weres longed to see us wiped out, and that’s where people like me came into play. Dreg Bounty Hunters. Enlisted young and trained hard, we are the only defense between the violent Dregs and innocent humans. Our credo is simple: they break the law, they die.

The fun part was deciding how they died.

I took the Wharton Street footbridge across a spiderweb of intersecting railroad tracks. The heavy odor of metal and burning coal tingled my nostrils, familiar and welcoming. Far away, a train whistled. I paused and looked at the tracks, the warehouses on both sides of the stretch of sandy ground, and the rows of abandoned boxcars.

My first kill as a trainee had been down there. Six months of Boot Camp hadn’t prepared me for working as part of a team. It taught me to defend myself, to think on my quickly moving feet, and to kill. Teamwork is learned in the field or you die fast.

Two days after being assigned to Wyatt and given a room in a shabby apartment above a hole-in-the-wall jewelry store, our Triad went hunting. Physically, we were an odd group. Ash Bedford was senior Hunter, but she barely hit the five-one mark; black hair and almond eyes hid a wealth of savagery always tempered by a sunny smile, present even when killing. Jesse Morales, conversely, towered at six-one—with dark hair, dark eyes, and smoldering cynicism that hid his marshmallow center.

I hadn’t known those things at the time. My impressions were less than sparkling, as were theirs of me—the skinny, blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from the south side, with a huge chip on her shoulder and enough ice around her heart to sink a luxury liner.

Our first assignment: two rogue vampire half-breeds had crashed the local prom. We had to kill them before they could turn their dates into midnight snacks.

I hadn’t expected much from my new partners that night, so I ignored Ash’s plan and barreled into the open, blades flashing. I never expected one of the two unsuspecting victims to hit me in the head with her rhinestone clutch. Teenage girls are, apparently, protective of their boyfriends, vampire or not.

Jesse had yanked me out of the way before Halfie Number One could sink his half-formed fangs into my elbow and leave me to a fate worse than dying.

Halfies are easy targets for a rookie, because they’re often young, always dumb, and, once in a while, completely insane from the infection. Creating half-breeds, though, is a major no-no, and the vampire Families, like the Hunters, make it their business to thin them out. Even more than humans, they disdain the mixing of species. Tainting bloodlines, so to speak, and it’s one thing on which I actually agree with them.

For almost four years, Jesse, Ash, and I had been the most feared Hunter Triad in the city, our kills more than double that of the next team. The Dreg populations knew our faces and our reputations, and for the first time, I had a family. The first family to truly accept me.

My mother had ignored me in favor of a string of live-in boyfriends and, later, a heroin addiction, leaving me to fend for myself at the ripe old age of ten and a half. Seven months after my stepfather left us, she became Jane Doe Number Twelve, dead a week before the body was found. I became a ward of the state, and their rules and I did not get along. Bitterness was my only friend for seven years, until the Triads found me.

Ash showed me how to apply mascara. Jesse taught me how to whistle. For all their trouble, I watched Ash get stabbed in the throat, and then I shot Jesse in the back. Nothing puts your allies on you faster than being accused of turning traitor and murdering your teammates.

Even if that’s not what happened.

The only advantage to walking around the city in Chalice’s body was anonymity. If both Triads and Dregs knew Evangeline Stone was dead, they’d never see me coming.