Another Kind of Dead Read online

  “Of course.” I untangled from the pile of blankets atop me so I could sit up, keeping one around my shoulders. My ribs protested the movement. I ignored the ache and tucked my legs so I was kneeling on the bed, a thin blue blanket folded around me like a cape. All I wanted was time alone to process this, but I couldn’t send him away. Not now. “Wyatt, please come here.”

  He didn’t move, coiled so tight I thought he’d shatter. Even from a distance, I saw the faint vibrations in his arms and chest. He was shaking. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here again, that I didn’t protect you.”

  He’d walked into a situation so similar to the way I’d died, and all my fear and anger were reflecting back from him tenfold. In his mind, he’d failed to save me once from misery and death. Now he’d decided he had almost failed me a second time. If the drug had worn off just a few seconds later, if I hadn’t moved as fast as I had—

  No. No what-ifs about this one. I was fine. Shaken up and hell-bent on carving answers out of the thing in the other room, but fine. My broken wrist and bruised ribs and aching head would heal. The real Wyatt was standing nearby, proving to my trauma-addled brain that he hadn’t been the one to hurt me. We had survived our deaths; we could survive this, too.

  “Wyatt, it wasn’t your f—”

  He took two sudden steps toward me. I flinched away, heart racing. He froze, and I wanted to weep when I realized what I’d done. Grim acceptance pulled his mouth into a straight line, and, with curt precision, he pivoted and left the room.

  I collapsed against the mound of blankets, too stunned to do anything but stare at the hewn door for a while, silent tears leaving hot trails down my cheeks.

  Chapter Ten

  The longer I lay in bed, the more rage overtook my anxiety. Rage at the stolen blood, at the assault, at the seeds of doubt the attacker had planted in me simply by wearing Wyatt’s face. I had to fix this, so I forewent a second shower in favor of acquiring information.

  Two pairs of jeans, three of my solid-colored T-shirts, underwear, and a bra were neatly folded in one of the dresser’s top drawers—Wyatt must have gone back to the apartment. Curled on one of the shirts was my cross necklace, safe and sound. After struggling one-handed with the bra, jeans, and a T-shirt, and earning a few painful jostles to my wrist, I tried to smooth my damp hair into submission. The shorter locks around my face were stiff in places, darkened with blobs of dried blood.

  Gross.

  I couldn’t manage the necklace with one hand, so I tucked it into my front pocket, just grateful to have it near.

  Three familiar faces and one agonizing copy greeted me when I entered the living room. David was sitting up on the sofa, flexing his hands and arms as the numbing agent wore off. He blushed and ducked his head. I wouldn’t patronize him; we’d both been fooled. End of story.

  Wyatt was barely visible through the kitchen doorway, fiddling with something on the counter. His doppelgänger was tied to a wooden chair with bungee cords, a length of nylon rope, and a twisted bedsheet. The man (or whatever) was bleeding through the bandage on his neck. He had a knot on one cheek, likely from my whack with the pot, a bloody nose, and more blood splattered on his clothes. Most of the blood was a dark shade of red, and I recalled the bitter, oily taste of it. Our prisoner was definitely not human.

  Phin had a second chair placed an arm’s reach away, and he sat there like a sentinel, shoulders stiff and back straight, full attention on his quarry.

  “What is he?” I asked, stopping behind Phin.

  “I believe he is a pùca, although he will not speak.”

  “What the hell’s a pùca?” I cast a searching look at Wyatt, who shook his head. This one was new to both of us.

  “A rare and distant cousin of Therians. Few are known or recorded in our history, as they are an antisocial sort. They prefer playing tricks and starting trouble to productively living in man’s world. I’ve never met one before, but it does explain his shape-changing ability.”

  “He’s a trickster,” Wyatt said, joining us with a paring knife, a serrated bread knife, and a barbecue lighter. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  Phin tilted his head, considering the word. “Yes, from your mythological texts, ‘trickster’ describes him well.”

  “Not to me,” I said. “They didn’t teach this one at Boot Camp, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention in school.” After three full minutes of explanation from Phin that included names I didn’t know—Coyote of the Southwest, Loki in the Norse, Kokopelli and Zuñi, and a lot of others that blended together—I waved my good hand in surrender. “Information overload.”

  “Apologies.”

  “So why now?” My question was half directed at the silent doppelgänger, who hadn’t looked up from his lap since I’d entered the room. “Why would something that’s been unseen and unrecorded for decades suddenly show up, track me down, and suck marrow out of me?”

  “Let’s ask the fucker.” The coldness in Wyatt’s voice was almost a physical presence. He switched places with Phin and was now directly across from the man wearing his face. The reflection was eerie in its sameness and in the differences. Wyatt exuded hate in a way I’d never seen and prayed to never, ever be on the receiving end of. The doppelgänger—pùca, trickster, whatever—still stared at his own lap, face bruised and bleeding, resigned.

  “You should know up front that you’re going to die,” Wyatt said to his reflection. “The only thing you get to decide is if you die fast, or piece by piece until you’re begging me to end it.”

  I shuddered.

  “Who are you working for?”

  The doppelgänger looked up. A crystal shard hung around his neck, swirling a lazy purple, tied with some sort of thin brown leather. “You know who,” he replied, and I understood why he had never spoken. His voice was like nails on a chalkboard, high and screechy and teeth-chattering.

  “Say it anyway,” I said.

  He didn’t look at me. Wyatt was questioning him, so his attention remained there. “A human male. His given name is Thackery.”

  “Why?” Wyatt asked.

  A blink. “Because it is the name given to him.”

  “Be literal with your questions,” Phin said. “He’ll take them that way.” Wyatt nodded. “Why did you accept this job?”

  “It was required.”

  “By what requirement?”

  “No.”

  Wyatt flicked on the barbecue lighter and held the paring knife blade in the orange flame. Silent seconds passed. “By what requirement?” he asked again, turning the blade handle around. The trickster didn’t reply. Wyatt buried the blade in the other man’s thigh.

  The gasping wail shattered a glass somewhere in the kitchen. Wyatt removed the blade, coated with very little blood. The odor of singed flesh tickled my nostrils. Cauterize the wounds as you make them to maximize pain and minimize blood loss—words he’d spoken once upon a time while teaching me new methods for questioning suspects.

  “By what requirement?”

  Four more times, Wyatt repeated the question and the action, but we didn’t get an answer. Finally, sick of the hair-raising squeals and stink of burned meat, I said, “Why do you wear that crystal?”

  “Focus,” the trickster said, apparently able to answer that particular query. “Longevity. Location.”

  “Explain those words to me.”

  “No.”

  Contrary little prick.

  “I have a theory,” Phin said. “According to legend, pùcas are able to maintain alternate forms for only brief periods of time. It’s possible the crystal allows him to maintain focus on this form for longer periods.”

  I chewed on that. “So if we take the crystal off?”

  “You remove his face.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic.” I stepped around Wyatt’s chair, grabbed the crystal, and yanked. A jolt of energy ran up my hand the instant the leather cord broke. Like candle wax, the fake face swam and ran, melting away. The body shape changed, thinning ou
t and shortening.

  Phin was behind the chair before I could register the slipping bonds, and he worked to secure them tightly as our prisoner’s form stopped shifting. He had shrunk to two-thirds his previous size, closer to child proportions than adult. The face left behind was half-formed and inhuman—lashless eyes the yellow green of baby poop, a small hump and two small holes instead of a nose, and a lipless, tiny mouth. His ears were holes on the sides of his head, waxy-white skin completely hairless. He looked like a creature that had dwelled in a dark cave too long.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” I said. The crystal was warm in my palm. “How the hell did this clown track us down in the middle of the woods?”

  “Magic, perhaps,” Phin said.

  Wyatt frowned. “Thackery’s human, and, as far as we know, he’s not Gifted. How the hell did he manage to charm that crystal? It takes a damned strong magic user to manage a spell, and the only people who use crystals—” He stopped, the sentence dying on his lips. A queer look crossed his face, not quite a flinch, but nothing remotely pleasant.

  “What?” I asked. “Crystals what?”

  “The Fey,” Phin said. “You were going to say the Fey, weren’t you?”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “That’s not possible,” I said, my insides quivering. “The Fey Council is on our side. They couldn’t be working with Thackery.”

  “Like all large organizations, the Fey are as likely to have dissenters as any other race,” Phin said. “It’s possible, Evangeline, that whoever is assisting Thackery is doing so without the approval or knowledge of the Council.”

  Phin knew better than any of us. Some of his own people, other Therians, were working with the dark races to raise an army against the Triads in an effort to overthrow humanity’s control of the city. We hadn’t squashed their efforts completely, only maimed them momentarily. It shouldn’t have been so hard to swallow the idea of Fey following a similar path of vigilantism. But it was.

  “Jaron knew,” Wyatt said. “She knew someone was being betrayed. If not someone in the Council, then someone close to them. Why else come to us first, instead of directly to Amalie?”

  Politics made my head hurt. Beyond Amalie, I didn’t know the names or faces, or specific races, of the other members of the Council. She was our only direct link to them, so everything we knew was filtered through her. “So our theory,” I said, “is Thackery had the crystal cast for him by a Fey powerful enough to manage the spell, then gave it over to our trickster friend so he could track me down and take my blood?”

  “Basically.”

  Okay, fine, I could accept that. It made all kinds of sense, in a bad-vibe, Fey-betrayal-in-aisle-three kind of way. “So why steal blood samples?” I asked the trickster. “Why didn’t he just have you kidnap me, or kill me outright?”

  “Did not need to know,” he replied, voice even more inhuman with his smaller mouth.

  “And he probably wouldn’t have bothered asking,” Phin said. “Whatever compelled him to take this job also compelled him to do as he’s told without question. The only person who knows the whys of this conversation is Thackery.”

  “Not all the whys,” I said. Phin’s explanation made sense up to a point. If the only thing Thackery wanted was my blood, why take the time to feel me up? The improvisation of the plan demanded answers. “Phin, do pùcas have anatomy similar to humans?”

  “Basic humanoid shape, yes, as well as brain stem functions and—Oh.” He got it a few seconds too late. “No, they do not reproduce sexually or maintain organs for a similar function.”

  So it hadn’t been horniness. That didn’t leave a lot of other options. I snatched the serrated bread knife from Wyatt’s hand with my left and crouched in front of the trickster. With the crystal gone, that same sour smell I’d detected earlier was wafting off him. “I’m guessing you were warned about my healing ability,” I said, running the tip of the knife across his abdomen, scoring the shirt. “Which means you had to be very careful about dosing me. Too much and I’d probably go into cardiac arrest or something, too little and I’d do what I did, which is snap out of it and get away. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

  He said nothing, horrid eyes fixed on me. I skimmed the same trail a second time, hard enough to slice the shirt and reveal pasty, translucent skin. I flicked my wrist, and dark blood welled up from an inch-long cut. “So consider your answer to this question carefully, because if I don’t like it, I’m going to see if you have kidneys in the same place as humans. Understand?”

  A nod.

  “Why did you try to rape me?” I felt, rather than saw, Wyatt start at the blunt question. He still sat behind me. Phin stood behind the trickster. All attention was on the interviewee.

  “For pleasure.”

  I dragged the blade across pale skin, deep enough to create a steady flow of blood and a high-pitched shriek. More glass shattered. My legs started to tremble, but I kept the knife steady. “What kind of pleasure can a dickless Dreg like you get?”

  His puke-yellow eyes swirled as I stared into them. A soft nudge in my mind startled me, like a tiny hand knocking on the inside of my skull. His eyes flashed briefly black and red, before changing back. I blinked hard—those had been goblin eyes.

  “Pleasure in mayhem,” he said. “Pleasure in chaos. Opportunity presents itself, I am compelled to take it. It is in me.”

  “Phin, can you translate that for me?”

  “It’s in a pùca’s basic nature to create havoc, to play tricks on others and manipulate them. It’s what he is and how he finds pleasure. It wasn’t enough to simply betray your emotions by posing as Truman when he stole your blood.” Phin’s voice was ice-cold. “He knew how to take it further.”

  A tremor stole up my spine, and I contemplated my earlier threat to go excavating for kidneys.

  “The desire to inflict mayhem and play tricks is infused in his being,” Phin continued. “In the same manner gremlins sneak around and steal, or goblins crave havoc, he sensed an opportunity and had to seize it.”

  I shot Phin a withering glare, in no mood for one of his civics lessons. “I don’t need a conscience, Phin, and I really don’t fucking need you defending him. He made a choice.”

  “I don’t believe he did.”

  A flare of frustration lit in my belly. I stood up, left hand on my hip, knife tucked sideways so I didn’t stab myself. “So what you’re saying, Phin, is since he was already impersonating Wyatt in order to sedate me and get my marrow, he saw an opportunity to get his nonexistent pùca rocks off and had to do it, because it’s what he is? He had absolutely no choice in the matter? He had to attack me with Wyatt’s face on because of the orgasmic pleasure he’d get in screwing with my head? He had to?”

  He didn’t flinch away from my anger or my sarcasm. “It was instinct.”

  “Yeah?” Heat rose in my cheeks. “Well, my instinct is to kill the piece of shit, so he can’t run around inflicting his practical jokes on anyone else. What happened to ‘He tried to steal from you, and for that he deserves death’? You taking that back?”

  His head cocked sideways in that perfect down-my-beak-at-you look he seemed to use only when really frustrated. I brought that out in him a lot. “The sentiment stands, Evangeline. I don’t take it back. If I believed he had tried to steal from you out of calculated malice, I would tear his neck from his shoulders for you.”

  “You just don’t believe it.”

  “No, now that I understand what he is, I no longer believe it. However, he isn’t my prisoner to punish. He’s yours.”

  Irritation prompted an instinctive reaction, and I clenched both fists. White-hot needles shot up my right wrist. I stumbled away from the interrogation scene, tears sparking again, trying to relax my hand and ease the hurt. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I dropped the knife on a small handmade side table and held my bandaged wrist up, closer to my chest.

  “Evy?” Wyatt asked.

  “I’m fine,” I snapped, harsher than I’d intended.


  I pivoted toward Phin, my mind churning with indecision. Since I’d first met him, he had made a point of challenging all my preconceived and training-ingrained notions about the nonhumans in the city—and the rest of the world, by extension. My prejudices had kept me alive for a long time in a profession that left good people dead in a matter of years, sometimes months. Dregs were bad, so if they stepped out of line, they died. No jail, no reformation, no penitence—just death.

  He’d shown me layers of a world I’d always viewed as flat, and in that cabin in the middle of the forest, when the irrational, passionate side of my brain was screaming at me to kill the thing that had hurt me while wearing Wyatt’s face, I hesitated. Because I saw the damned layers, and all I really wanted to see was the pùca’s blood splattered across the floor.

  Goddamn Phineas for doing this to me.

  “Okay, new deal,” I said, moving back to my previous position. The pùca watched me carefully, less tense now that I was without the knife. “You’ve got one minute to convince me you’re worth saving. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  “I failed,” he replied. “I will die for this. At your hands or at his.”

  “You seem pretty capable. If you escape us, what’s to stop you from running from Thackery?”

  “Compelled to return.”

  There was that damned word again. “What compels you?”

  “Failure brings death to my enisi.”

  “Phin?”

  “The closest human translation,” Phin said, “is ‘grandfather.’ ”

  My mouth fell open. A human was blackmailing a Dreg by threatening a family member—and here I’d thought nothing else could surprise me today.

  Chapter Eleven

  An hour’s discussion around the sofa kept leading us in frustrating circles. The trickster, whose preferred name was Axon, had met Thackery in a neutral location to receive the syringes, instructions, and verification of his enisi’s capture. Axon had been unable to “taste” Thackery during the meeting—his word for how he knew if someone was ripe for tricking—and that was unusual. His people had targeted humans throughout history because we were so “delicious.” His word.