Kelly Mendig - Three Days to Dead

The figures landed on the hard blacktop with the ease of a step off a staircase, split into three groups, and surged toward the Center. One group left, one group right, the third directly up the center. Guns drawn and ready.

“Bloods,” I said. “Goddamn Isleen.”

“Guess she got tired of waiting,” Wyatt said.

2:10

Twenty feet from the Center, the three groups of Blood forces engaged a force field that knocked four of them backward onto their well-armed asses. The field shimmered briefly—a flicker of blue light. Someone called out an order, and they retreated en masse to the porch of the museum.

The Center remained quiet. No lights came on; no alarms blared. The Bloods didn’t open fire, but simply formed a protective circle, weapons still trained on the other building.

A slim, black-clad figure stepped from their ranks and into the open. It was impossible to tell if the Blood was male or female. My best guess, based on the walk, was male. He hefted something in his left hand, wound up, and hurled it at the Center. The object shattered against the barrier, which fritzed and snapped like water on an electric fence. Blue light sparkled. The stink of ozone filled the air. In seconds, the blue field dissolved and blinked out of existence. The Bloods surged forward again.

This time, an upstairs window opened and gun-fire rained down on the advancing Bloods. Several faltered and jerked. Blood splattered the pavement, but they pressed onward. Had to be regular bullets if the Bloods weren’t staying down. Two stopped in mid-advance, dropped to one knee, and concentrated return fire on the window. Wood and glass shattered. The onslaught stopped.

Isleen’s people were well trained, I had to give them that.

They had advanced within twenty feet of the Center’s front door when they faltered again. Many bent, hands clutching their ears, screeching in pain. Something tickled the very edge of my hearing. The back of my neck prickled.

“Dog whistle,” Wyatt said.

With the Bloods distracted, the opposition enacted a rear attack. The front door of the museum building opened. Halfies poured out, armed with knives and hatchets and their teeth. They moved too fast for recognition, surging toward the Bloods, thirty or more with one goal in mind.

I shouted for them to look out, but my voice was lost in the Halfies’ echoing battle cry. The crash of bodies was thunderous. The Bloods reacted immediately, overcoming the squeal of the dog whistle—if it was still being blasted, which I doubted, because it should have affected the Halfies, too—and turned weapons on their attackers.

Every single gun possessed by the Bloods flew into the air, lifted by invisible hands. Shouts of surprise mixed with screams of pain.

“What the fuck?” I asked.

I saw him then, standing on the second-floor balcony above the Center’s front door. Instinct told me it was Tovin, even though I’d never met him. He stood almost five feet tall, the tallest Fey I’d ever seen. His lean body seemed too thin, like pulled taffy, something a stiff breeze could knock over. Silver hair stood in short spikes, reaching high to the sky like his sharply pointed ears and eyebrows.

Small like most Fair Ones, he overcame that by radiating power. Even from where we stood in the cover of the forest, Tovin dwarfed everyone in front of him. I felt the power of the Break all around me, but Tovin lived it. He was born part of the Break. He was power. For the first time since I discovered his plan, I was genuinely afraid of him.

He levitated the weapons into the sky. The Bloods compensated by pulling blades, and the surface attack became more vicious, almost feral. The weapon cloud began to coalesce and spin. Each individual gun melted into the one next to it, until all that remained was a ball of metal the size of a washing machine. It fell and crushed two battling Bloods.

Wyatt had his gun out and aimed at Tovin before I could stop him. He squeezed the trigger, and for one brief, shining moment, I thought it would work. Tovin was watching the battle. The bullet roared at its target.

The world seemed to slow down, each second taking thirty. The bullet telescoped forward. Tovin turned his head and seemed to look right at me. I was certain he saw me. I felt deadly cold under that hateful gaze. He smiled, raised his hand, and plucked the bullet from the air.

Sound and action roared back to normal time. Tovin was gone. The balcony doors slammed shut behind him.

“Oh my God,” Wyatt said.

“He knows we’re here.”

“I’ve never seen that kind of power.”

I squeezed his bicep, trying to offer comfort and calm my own nerves. I could kill mortal creatures, and I never had a problem with the morality or with the actual task. Killing something that plucked bullets from the air? Not exactly within my realm of experience, Gifted or not.

“Should we help them?” I asked, tipping my head toward the battling Bloods.

“They seem to be doing okay.”

They were. I spotted Isleen in the fray. She’d removed her protective headgear, and her brilliant white hair flashed in the moonlight. She moved with the speed and grace of a dancer, each motion calculated for maximum damage as she spun through the battle bearing twin blades. Cutting and slicing, drawing blood from her most hated enemies. Dead or dying Halfies littered the pavement, but the battle was far from over.

In chess, you sent in the pawns first. We hadn’t yet seen the big guns.

“We need to get inside the Visitors’ Center,” Wyatt said.

Headlights flashed across our position. Vehicles approached from the access road. They’d turned a curve and would enter the open parking lot in moments.

“What now?” I asked, more to myself than to Wyatt, and took off.

I ran down the tree line, sticking to the shadows and dodging underbrush, Wyatt close behind. Four Jeeps were on the road. The first one crashed through the closed gate and turned sharply to the right. Three more followed, each tailing the other until they formed a wall of trucks by the gate, a good hundred feet from the actual fight. Men and women, armed for a fight, flooded out the passenger-side doors.

“Triads,” Wyatt shouted.

We had backup after all. No sense in waiting for three o’clock if they thought we’d died in the fire with Nadia or if they thought we’d set it and run. No way to know which they thought was true without asking, so I blundered forward and burst through the trees just behind the last Jeep.

Two familiar faces stood out among twenty-odd strangers.

“Tybalt,” I shouted, hoping to catch his attention. Tall and lean, Tybalt Monahan always seemed better suited for the pro-basketball court than our down and dirty job. He heard his name, turned, and saw me. Suspicion and confusion flared, and I realized my mistake too late. He didn’t know me as Chalice.

None of them did.

Wyatt put himself in front of me, but even his familiar face didn’t stop someone’s itchy trigger finger from twitching. The gun of a fresh-faced Hunter—probably a week out of Boot Camp—roared. Wyatt stumbled backward into me. Air hitched in my lungs.

“Hold your fire, goddammit,” Tybalt commanded.

Wyatt gained his balance. I ducked around to stand in front of him. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the blood on his shirt, with more oozing between his fingers. It was all I saw, hot and crimson—something meant to be inside of his body, not outside.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It went straight through, it’s fine.” His voice startled me back into breathing. He’d been shot in the bicep—not a mortal wound. Our eyes met. Pain had glazed his, and I could only imagine what he saw in mine.