Another Kind of Dead Read online

  His glare didn’t dissuade me, either. I was tired, hurt, mentally wrung out, and bordering on a nervous breakdown. I was so sick of bullshit I could scream. “Look, whatever the hell you did that was so awful? Get the fuck over it, Rufus. Most of us don’t get forgiveness, and we don’t get punished by the people who deserve a shot at us. Life’s unfair, but we keep going. There’s no other choice.”

  He managed to keep his expression neutral, but his voice dripped with sadness as he replied, “Evy, you have survived more hurt and pain in the last two months than any of your crimes could ever demand, and you haven’t stopped fighting. I admire that, and I admit that it shames me, too.”

  “So do something about it.”

  “Easier said than done, believe me. I joined the Triads to give my life purpose and focus, and I’ve tried to atone for my mistakes.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair and heaved a deep, resigned sigh. “But even if I found a way to forgive myself, he’d never forgive me.”

  “He who?”

  “Wyatt.”

  If I hadn’t already put my mug down, I would have dropped it. He looked away, and I studied his profile, as if the slope of his nose and jut of his jaw would tell me everything I needed to know. It didn’t. Maybe if I weren’t coming off a three-week torture binge, half-starved and emotionally crushed, I’d be able to figure out the reference on my own. It couldn’t have been recent, and except for our mutual outpourings of pain in a motel room last month, Wyatt didn’t talk about the early days of the Triads.

  “Rufus, you’ve known Wyatt for ten years,” I said. “What unforgiveable thing could you possibly have done?”

  Rufus snapped his head up, hazel eyes lit with a fire I’d never seen before—more emotion than he’d ever displayed in my presence. For an instant, I expected him to leap from his chair and attack. Then the fire flickered out, replaced by the familiar hardness he’d had in place since his Triad died. His eyebrows furrowed together, and he seemed torn between a desire to shut up and to finally get something off his chest.

  I didn’t want him to tell me, but I also couldn’t let him not. Not if it was about Wyatt.

  “He told you how his family died.”

  It wasn’t a question, and my mind flashed to Wyatt’s brother. Nicky and Wyatt had been two of the first Hunters trained by the Fey. Nicky’s death had been an accident, but I knew it still haunted Wyatt. He felt responsible, and he’d said nothing about Rufus being present during the fight that led to Nicky’s death. Wyatt pushed, Nicky tripped, end of sad story.

  No, not that family. Their parents and sister died months before that incident, when a group of half-Bloods invaded their family-owned restaurant and proceeded to torture and kill everyone there. Two out-of-state bounty hunters had come in, killed the Halfies, then killed everyone else to eliminate witnesses. Wyatt said he’d caught and killed one of the bounty hunters.

  Cold fingers raked down my spine. Acid churned in my stomach. My mouth dried out, and it took several tries to get my tongue moist enough to speak. “You know who the second bounty hunter is, don’t you?”

  He flinched. Nodded. Misery and relief made a peculiar combination on his face as he prepared to hoist a years-old burden onto someone else. I wanted to flee the room before he could say anything else. One of Wyatt’s biggest regrets was never learning who that second bounty hunter was—a regret that still gnawed at him a decade later.

  Indignation and anger on his behalf began to heat my chest. “How the hell could you keep this from him, Rufus? You have to tell him who.”

  Another nod, this one resigned. “He’ll kill me.”

  “He might beat you up, but he won’t kill—” Holy. Fucking. Shit. My brain stuttered and my vision grayed.

  Rufus never looked away, and the depth of misery in his gaze reached into my chest and squeezed my heart into bloody pulp. “I couldn’t possibly tell him, Evy,” he said. “At first it was survival. Then over the years we actually became friends. After that it was impossible. How do I tell him the second bounty hunter was me?”

  A dull roar in my ears blocked out all sound. The words I hadn’t wanted to hear rocketed through my mind and heart, and I was crushed under the weight of the secret I’d just been handed. Did I tell Wyatt when I finally saw him again? Did I force Rufus to? Did I keep it a secret, even though lying to Wyatt was the last thing on Earth I ever wanted to do?

  Goddammit!

  The front doorbell rang with a deep chime. I jumped, sloshing my coffee. Rufus frowned. He didn’t ask me not to tell, didn’t make me promise him anything about his confession. He just motored out of the kitchen to the front door. It creaked open. The voices were muffled.

  I stared at my spilled coffee, willing my brain to function. I hadn’t wanted to know this, but it was too damned late to take it back. It certainly explained Rufus’s tendency toward self-loathing and punishing himself by pushing away external comforts. He said he didn’t deserve the luxury of this apartment, and the petty, vindictive side of my mind agreed with him. The rest of me didn’t know what the hell to think.

  Moments later, Rufus returned with Kismet in tow.

  “You’re up and about early,” she said to me as she put a box of bakery doughnuts on the counter.

  “I’ve spent the better part of a month sleeping, so I’m not very tired,” I said.

  “Touché.” She poured herself a mug of coffee and added milk from the fridge, seeming very at home here. Rufus helped himself to a glazed doughnut. He offered one to me. The sugary, fried ring made my stomach gurgle unpleasantly.

  “You need to eat, Evy,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not eating that. You eat those every morning?”

  “Just Sunday.”

  It was Sunday? Good to know. I sipped at my coffee, keenly aware of how strange my situation was—having Sunday-morning coffee and doughnuts with two Handlers who had each, in their own way and for their own reasons, tried to kill me in the not-so-distant past. And now they were among the people I trusted most with my life. They’d also both recently experienced tremendous loss. Rufus’s entire Triad had been killed. Kismet had lost two long-term Hunters to crippling injuries. Add Wyatt’s losses to the list, and they were the Three Musketeers of Grief.

  I stayed quiet while they ate their doughnuts and chatted about nonsensical things. Nothing work-related or even borderline important. A song she’d heard on the radio that made her laugh. The television movie he’d watched last night and made fun of out loud. It was so normal I wanted to scream.

  “What are the Triads doing to find Thackery?” I asked when I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Kismet put her half-eaten doughnut down and steepled her fingertips, elbows on the counter. “His photo is out to the Metro Police. He’s regarded as a dangerous suspect, wanted for kidnapping and attempted murder. From what I hear, the Clans are still looking, and I’m going to assume so are the gargoyles. Everyone’s doing what they can.”

  The response should have placated me. Instead, I got angry. “Doing what they can like before, when he had me?”

  She bristled. “He was keeping you on the move outside the city, Evy. We did what we could. We can’t search the entire world. Thackery made it impossible to find you, and now that his mobile laboratory is destroyed, he’ll probably lie low for a long time.”

  “Don’t count on it. Thackery’s entire life for the last five years has been dedicated to curing vampire infection in humans. It’s his driving force, and he won’t just curl up and hibernate until it’s safe to start over. He’ll resume as soon as he’s able.”

  She stared, but my gaze never wavered.

  “What do you suggest?” she asked.

  “Don’t underestimate him.”

  An awkward silence stretched out over the next few minutes as we sipped our coffee and avoided looking at one another. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “So tell me more about James Reilly,” I said. “You said he got a heaping helping of truth. Does that me
an he’s working with us now?”

  “Pretty much,” she replied. “We haven’t gotten an official okay from the brass yet, but most of the other Handlers are on board. We can’t keep Reilly quiet unless we kill him, which we aren’t going to do, so—”

  “If you can’t kill them, recruit them?”

  Her lips quirked. Rufus chuckled.

  Kismet’s cell phone rang. She checked the I.D., then snapped it open. “Kismet.” Her eyebrows puckered. “Adrian, slow down, I—” She went perfectly still, her already pale skin taking on a frightening pallor. Her mouth slowly fell open.

  I exchanged a look with Rufus, whose face reflected the concern and confusion that was ripping through my body.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, and hung up. “Fucking hell.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Boot Camp is being attacked.”

  “Attacked?” Rufus and I squawked in stereo. Again?

  “I’ll call you with details,” she said, already on her way to the door.

  Hell no.

  I chased after her.

  No way was I sitting this out.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  She didn’t protest, and I waited until we were in her Jeep and on the road before demanding to know what the fuck was going on.

  “Adrian got a call from one of the trainers,” she said, voice shaking. “She said the creatures we’d collected from Olsmill started going berserk. They were enraged like nothing she’d ever seen before, some of them bursting out of their cages. The six hounds got loose, too. No one realized it until they got out of R&D and started tearing through the compound.”

  I bit my lower lip hard. Six hounds, plus fourteen other inhuman beasts, loose in an enclosed compound full of trainers and half-skilled rookie Hunters. It would be a slaughter.

  “Thackery,” I said. “He created those things; it makes sense he’d have some method of controlling them. Some switch we couldn’t see to set them off. A fail-safe.”

  As far-fetched as it sounded, given what I now knew about Thackery, it also seemed perfectly reasonable. He could control his newest breed of hounds. He had a trained fucking wolf. Who was to say he couldn’t also control the other creatures in his menagerie? We’d taken them into our most protected, private facility, and now he was attacking our heart.

  Bastard!

  Kismet tossed her phone at me. “Call the apartment. Tell Milo and the rookies to get weapons and be ready for us to pick them up in five minutes.”

  I did, not even bothering to explain, and points to Milo for not asking. At Kismet’s direction, I called four other Handlers and repeated an emergency code. Two teams were remaining in the city, just in case. Everyone else was scrambling to Boot Camp. She repeated the message to her team after we picked them up. Her rookies were all teen boys, fresh-faced and completely forgettable, and probably about to become cannon fodder.

  God, did I ever look that young?

  They passed out weapons. Apparently, Milo remembered my fondness for knives, because I was given three—one for my ankle and one on each hip, plus a gun loaded with frag rounds and two extra clips. Kismet’s gun and various rounds went on the seat between us.

  No one talked, each of us absorbed in our own thoughts. I kept imagining the trainees being cornered and slaughtered by those creatures. Being hunted in their own safe haven by monsters that shouldn’t exist. As a trainee, I’d been able to reconcile the existence of vampires and shape-shifters and Fey because they’d been here long before humans. But the hounds? That thing with the fish fin? The skeleton cat? Nature had been raped and abused to create them, and now we were paying the price.

  The city fell away, and a black sedan appeared behind us on the dirt road that wound up to Boot Camp. Kismet raced along the bumpy path, and I swear I heard a tire pop. At a bend, the road was blocked by a second Jeep. She slammed on the brakes. I braced against the dash, my seat belt snapping me back. Tires squealed behind us. Just beyond the first vehicle was the gate.

  We tumbled out, joined from the rear sedan by Morgan’s team. Four figures had gathered next to the front Jeep—a Triad I didn’t know. They waved at us to take cover, and I finally realized why.

  Three creatures prowled the front gate, on our side of the barrier. The familiar hulking shapes of two hounds walked on their hind legs, darting in and out of the decimated guard hut, daring us to try and get inside. Both of them were bleeding in half a dozen places, but seemingly unfazed by the wounds. The third shape was the oversized gray wolf—Thackery’s wolf, with the intelligent silver eyes. Silver eyes seemed to be a theme with his sidekicks.

  The wolf watched me from the safety of the hounds’ shadows, ears perked. Surprised to see me alive, maybe?

  None of them were attacking. Shit. They were stalling us. Keeping us out. I said as much to Kismet.

  “Kis, Morgan,” the oldest of the unfamiliar foursome said. Had to be their Handler. “How much firepower do you have?”

  “Plenty,” Morgan said. He and Paul were lugging a trunk forward.

  “Mix up the frags and a-c’s,” Kismet said. “It kills them faster.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” I said, and gave her a hard look. “There’s no barrier spell that I can sense, so I could try three.”

  “Take Milo.” To the Handler, she said, “Sharpe, I need two of yours.”

  Sharpe shot her a sour look. His close-cropped brown hair and deep-set eyes gave him an Italian mobster air that wasn’t dispelled by the way he drew out some of his vowels. “Greg and Scott, do what she tells you. Everyone else, switch out your ammo.”

  I rolled my eyes. Fools must have been using regular rounds. Then I surveyed my temporary partners.

  Greg and Scott were perfect opposites as Hunters. The former was short and stocky, with the bulk of a midget wrestler, while the latter was tall and lean and tight sinew. They were also armed to the teeth. Scott even had a short sword in a sheath across his back. Nice.

  Only Milo seemed to have some inkling of what we were about to do. I grabbed his hand, then took Greg’s. Milo reached for Scott’s. The other two men frowned.

  “Take his fucking hand,” Kismet snapped before I had to.

  “Don’t break the circle,” I said when they finally got over holding a man’s hand. “No matter what, because this is going to feel weird.”

  I closed my eyes and ignored the sounds of clips sliding into place and Handlers shouting orders. I reached out to find my tap, then sought loneliness. With Wyatt gone, unreachable, untouchable, it wasn’t hard. The emotion flooded me, bordering on grief, and the Break snapped all around me. Around us. Someone shouted as we dissolved. I guided us through the familiar crackle of energy, toward the road just past the gate. A sharp stab of pain hit between my eyes. Warm wetness stained my upper lip.

  And then we were out. Milo caught me before I fell, and I sagged against his chest, dizzy and nauseated.

  “Holy shit, that was awesome,” either Greg or Scott said. The other asked, “She okay?”

  A high-pitched shriek bounced off the trees from the direction of Boot Camp. “Go!” I said, and pushed Milo away.

  The three took off down the road and disappeared around the first bend. I stumbled after them. Wouldn’t be very good in the battle today, but at least I’d gotten a few extra hands into the fray sooner.

  An out-of-place whirring sound approached from the west, high above the trees. I gazed up at the sky as I half walked, half ran. A helicopter buzzed aloft, heading toward the heart of the compound. Airborne backup—that made me smile. Behind me, an eruption of gunfire added to the cacophony.

  The trees parted. The smoking ruins of R&D lay straight ahead, burning from the inside out. Smoke stung my eyes. Two twisted, bloodied bodies decorated the sidewalk. Gunfire and screams still echoed from the rear, closer to the recruit barracks and training facilities. The helicopter was gone, and I hoped it had at least dumped a couple of capable bodies before flying away.
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br />   I dug up some energy reserves and ran. Rounded past R&D and tripped over another body, scraping my palms on the ground as I ate dirt. In times past, I would have used the momentum to tuck into a roll and come up gracefully on my knees. Instead, I belly flopped and looked back.

  The girl was probably just eighteen. Her blond hair was streaked crimson, blue eyes wide and unseeing above a gaping throat. Her chest was likewise torn open, one of her arms missing. Strike that, not missing—lying a few feet away. She could have been me four years ago.

  People were still screaming. Engines roared as the rest of our backup made entry. I hauled myself up and ran toward the gymnasium a dozen yards away. The doors were gone, and the bulk of the screams were coming from inside.

  The interior of the gym was the size of a pro-football arena, divided up into smaller sections designated for specific activities. The largest of these was an obstacle course, and I turned in that direction. Past two more ripped-apart bodies of young trainees. Kids who’d come here for a chance at a meaningful (albeit brief) future and had died gruesome deaths.

  Grief for them hardened into anger, and I latched onto it for fuel. It was all I had. Someone darted out of an intersecting corridor and slammed into me. Milo and I went tumbling to the ground. His shirt was coated in blood, but he didn’t seem wounded.

  “I think we’re too late,” he said, panting, as we helped each other stand.

  “No.”

  He followed me into the obstacle arena. We were on a balcony overlooking the course, where our instructors had watched as we failed test after test. Below and halfway across the stretch of space, three battered trainees were high up on the climbing ropes. A single hound stalked them from the ground, swatting at the ropes, seeming not to know how to climb them.

  Small favors.

  Milo and I pulled our guns at the same time. “Frags,” I said, to which he answered, “A-c’s.”

  Good. We opened fire on the hound. Its inhuman howl sliced through my eardrums. Four shots hit home before it dove for cover, but none on its soft underbelly. I bolted for the ladder that led down. The trainees had seen us and were shouting for help. I wanted to scream back to shut up, it’s what we’re doing.