Another Kind of Dead Read online

  A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “That would make things too easy.”

  “Yeah, and God forbid anything ever be—” A heavy thud rattled our front door. For a brief moment, I expected the world to start shaking. Instead, whatever had thudded slid down the length of the door until it hit the ground.

  I reached under the coffee table and pulled a knife from its hiding place. Weapons were stashed all over the apartment, and this one was the most immediately accessible. Wyatt didn’t try to stop me; he didn’t tell me to be careful. I approached the door on silent feet, glad for the cement floor, and checked the peephole first—nothing in sight except the opposite wall.

  Pressing my ear to the door, I listened. Heard the faint, muffled sound of heavy breathing. By my feet, something dark red caught my attention. It glistened on the floor, just under the door’s edge. Blood. I curled my fingers around the knob and snicked the lock back. Twisted. Yanked.

  And leapt backward as a man’s body tumbled halfway into the apartment, landing flat on his back. Blood oozed from multiple wounds in his abdomen and had soaked through his once white shirt.

  “She knew you were alive,” the man croaked, and I finally took a good look at his upside-down face.

  It was Jaron, another sprite and Amalie’s most trusted bodyguard. And s/he was dying.

  Chapter Three

  Sprite-Jaron was an orange crystal-encrusted woman who barely came up to my waist. Jaron’s human avatar, besides being male, had the height and bulk of a professional wrestler, which made him an ideal bodyguard for Amalie’s avatar. It did not make him ideal for being dragged across the floor to the sofa. Even with Wyatt and me, it took several minutes to get him there. Jaron stayed quiet, grimacing but making no noise, even though he had to be in agony.

  We finally gave up on the couch and left him on the rag rug that covered the area nearest the sofa. While Wyatt closed and locked the door, I fetched a couple of towels from the bathroom. I put one beneath his head and pressed another over his wounds. That’s when he cried out.

  “Who did this?” I asked, trying to ignore the streak of blood that stretched from his feet to the door.

  “Goblin,” he rasped. “I think.”

  He thinks? Goblins were pretty damned easy to pick out of a crowd. “Why did it attack?”

  “Don’t know.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. His brown eyes were wide, pained, unfocused. “Earth Guardians attacked. I left First Break. Situated myself here. Left my apartment. It stabbed me with … its hand.”

  “Its hand?” Goblins had sharp claws, but not long enough to inflict the kind of damage done to Jaron’s abdomen.

  “Fingernails, like small knives. Too long.”

  Just the mental image of that made my stomach roil.

  “Why come here?” Wyatt asked, kneeling on the other side of Jaron. “How did you know Evy was alive?”

  Jaron rolled his eyes toward Wyatt. “Amalie knew. Gifted who are in her true presence … she can sense their aura. Their tether to the Break. She can sense you both.”

  Creepy and cool. Wyatt and I had both spent time in Amalie’s true presence, seen her as she really was and not just in her human avatar. The aura thing was new information, but I really knew little about sprites and their ways with the Break. She knew I hadn’t died last Saturday, and she also, apparently, hadn’t shared that intel with the Triads. Interesting.

  “But why here?” Wyatt persisted.

  Jaron groaned. Blood gurgled up his throat, into his mouth, and down his cheeks. He coughed, dim eyes searching. I squeezed his shoulder and leaned in, desperate to know what had driven the sprite to drag a dying man to our little corner of Hell. His head listed toward me, but he didn’t seem to see.

  “Jaron, please, tell us,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not … betrayal.” The words were barely intelligible. I leaned closer, missing most of his whispers. “Don’t … trust …” His eyes flared white, the briefest flash of the power of the Fey possessing his body. Then the light went out. His body stilled.

  “Jaron? Fuck.” I rocked back on my heels, stunned. Why did they always die before they finished saying what needed to be said?

  Wyatt checked his pulse and found none. We didn’t even know the man’s real name—the man who gave his body over to the will of a powerful sprite whenever she needed to walk among humans and was none the wiser. The man who died because someone had been sent to kill Jaron in her most vulnerable state.

  “Betrayal,” Wyatt said. “But who’s betraying who?”

  “She said she came here after the trolls attacked.” Or were attacked—either way, she had to be referencing the earlier earthquake. “Could they have turned on the other Fey? Maybe she was going to give that information to the Triads.”

  He shook his head. “Then why come to us after being stabbed? Why not call the brass or one of the Handlers?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought of how the avatar’s eyes had flashed, glowed that brilliant white at the moment of death. Just the avatar’s death, or … “Wyatt, if a sprite’s avatar dies while the sprite still possesses it, what does that do to the sprite?”

  His eyes widened. “I have no idea. I don’t know enough about avatars to even guess.”

  My stomach twisted as the implications caught up with me. Had Jaron come to the city to tell us something important about a betrayal? One so big she’d dragged her wounded avatar across town to find us, only to die before giving up anything useful? Possible. Horrifying, but possible. And who the hell was the man/goblin/thing with the clawed hands? Except for certain shape-shifters, I didn’t know of any other nonhuman species capable of manipulating their bodies like that.

  “Amalie knows I’m alive,” I said. “She must have sent Jaron to contact us, which means that whether Jaron’s alive or dead, Amalie will know something went wrong. Maybe she’ll try to contact us again, some other way.”

  “Let’s hope.” He dug beneath the dead man’s behind and retrieved a billfold. Some cash fell out when he flipped it open. “Jed Peters is the name on the driver’s license. He lives five blocks from here.”

  “I would have pegged Jaron for picking a Parkside East type for her avatar.”

  “They need humans with open minds, who willingly believe. They’re probably a lot more cynical on the other side of the river.”

  “Good point.” I pulled the folded towel from beneath Jed Peters’s head and draped it over his face, then stood up. “So a dead body decorating the living room certainly adds a new wrinkle to today’s plans.”

  “I’d say it’s less a wrinkle than a big damned bump.” He snagged one of the other towels and started wiping the blood off the floor, cleaning up the smear that led to the door. There’d be blood in the hall, too. Peters/Jaron had probably left a trail of it all the way from his apartment. Five blocks to here.

  Wyatt mopped closer to the door. I watched him, uneasy, instinct telling me what my mind wouldn’t.

  “The goblin with the claws he told us attacked him,” I said, trying to process it out loud. Hoping for a clue.

  “What about it?” He reached up from his half crouch and flicked the door lock open.

  “Jaron didn’t say she fought it off, just that it stabbed her and she came to us.”

  He paused, turned his head, and looked at me. Understanding bloomed like a deadly flower. The knob turned under his hand. Wyatt slammed his shoulder into the door, but someone pushed from the other side. Someone a lot stronger. Wyatt went sprawling onto his left hip and continued to roll, clearing the door, which had just been kicked completely open. Jaron hadn’t managed to describe her attacker beyond the claws and thinking it was a goblin, but what stood in the open doorway wasn’t what I expected.

  It was a goblin—or had been, at one time. Maybe four and a half feet tall, it stood up straight rather than hunched as other goblin males did. Skin that should have been slick and oily was dull, as if powdered with starch. Black hair tufted out from in an
d around its ears—ears that should have been wide and pointed but instead were round like a human’s.

  I looked in its eyes, and my stomach lurched. Not the lusty red eyes I’d grown to know, but watchful brown that were completely human. The mismatched features, combined with the clothes—jeans and a black T-shirt, for Christ’s sake!—sent a shock wave of cold through my body. My insides quaked. This wasn’t right. I couldn’t possibly be seeing it.

  Until it stretched out a decidedly goblinesque arm in my direction, as though pointing with its entire hand. Goblins had long, sharp fingernails, good for rending flesh and getting a grip. This creature had them, too, and before my very eyes, they grew to the length of four inches each. Tiny daggers, four in a row. Only the thumbnail didn’t grow.

  It looked past me, at the body by my feet, and snarled. Dry lips pulled back, showing off a single row of sharp, jagged teeth. Bile scorched the back of my throat. It still didn’t attack. Good for us.

  I had a small knife strapped to the side of my right boot, an easy grab, but the goblin-thing would be on me the instant I reached. The knife I’d taken from beneath the coffee table was still on the floor where I’d dropped it minutes ago, halfway between me and the monster. More weapons were in the kitchenette, another beneath the sofa, others in the bedrooms. If I went for any of them, it could attack and kill Wyatt.

  Its too-human eyes flickered around the apartment, as though calculating its surroundings and various threats. It was a predatory thing to do, a hunter’s trait. But goblins were scavengers. The males didn’t assess threats; they followed orders given to them by their queens.

  What are you?

  That observant gaze swung back to me, and I realized I’d whispered out loud. Our gazes locked. I thought I saw a spark of emotion, some distant cousin to regret—which was impossible in a goblin, so it had to be something else—then it snarled again.

  “Kill,” it growled.

  My brain stuttered to a halt as the full implications of that single word sank in. I gaped, my chest tight, breath frozen in my lungs. Goblin males didn’t speak English. Females can barely manage the language in their harsh, guttural voices. It couldn’t have spoken.

  “Kill who?” Wyatt asked.

  It pointed one sharply clawed finger at Peters’s body. “Whoever … went to.”

  Oh God, it’s talking. I was in the middle of a nightmare and I couldn’t wake up. Not an unusual state for me of late, but unsettling nonetheless. Downright nauseating. Almost terrifying, in so many ways.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d faced down a creature that had traits of more than one species. The first had been right after my resurrection, when I was attacked by a monster from a horror movie. Part vampire and part beast, the thing had been one hundred percent predator. Engineered by whoever had been helping Tovin, it was a prototype to house the other demons the mad elf hoped to bring across First Break. We’d found even more hybrid monstrosities in Tovin’s underground lab.

  Only this one seemed mildly intelligent.

  “Why?” I asked.

  It swung its hateful stare back at me. Mixed with its need to attack and kill was a bit of confusion. I latched onto that as its best weakness. “Master … said,” it ground out.

  “Who’s your master?”

  Wrong question. It moved at a speed I didn’t expect, in a direct line for my guts, clawed hand slashing and hoping to spill them all over the floor. I dropped at the last possible moment, hips twisting, and brought my right heel up to crack it in the chest. It tumbled sideways, stunned by the blow. Claws ripped the hem of my pant leg, missing skin.

  I rolled out of its way, already reaching for the knife at my ankle. My fingers closed around the handle just as a body slammed me sideways into the sofa—thing was fucking fast. The knife clattered to the floor, out of reach. Dammit. I jerked to my right, throwing all my weight down, smashing the creature against the cement floor. Its claws ghosted the skin on my neck, too damned close.

  “Evy, left,” Wyatt shouted.

  I moved without thinking, tumbling to my left, barely missing the couch a second time. A dark blur passed—it had to be Wyatt. His target let out some sort of grunt. I twisted around, rolled to my feet, and sought the nearest weapon handy, which just happened to be a ten-dollar thrift store table lamp. I yanked off the shade, ripped the cord out of the wall, and pulled it back like a baseball bat.

  Wyatt and the goblin-thing were tangled together on the floor, wrestling for dominance. Both of Wyatt’s hands were wrapped around the creature’s wrists, keeping those claws at a distance, but what Wyatt had in bulk, the goblin had in speed. It wriggled like an eel on a fishing line. I looked for an opportunity to hit it with my lamp, but it just wouldn’t stop moving.

  Screw this. I shifted the lamp into my left hand and scooped up my discarded knife in my right. I turned back to the flailing pair and took aim, ready to drive my knife straight into the middle of the goblin-thing’s back.

  “Don’t kill it,” Wyatt said.

  “Why not?” But I stabbed it in the back of the thigh instead—no easy feat with a moving target—and for a brief moment of panic, I thought I’d missed and hit Wyatt.

  Then the goblin shrieked and lurched away, tugging at the knife stuck in its leg. Wyatt sat up quickly. The front of his shirt was torn, four equally wide slash marks. “We need to question it.”

  Oh, right, a talking goblin-hybrid. As much as we needed to pick answers out of its brain, killing was so much simpler than taking prisoners.

  The creature was crouched near the kitchenette counter, blood running down its leg. It looked at the knife I’d stuck it with, then tossed it over its shoulder. It snarled at us, this time less angry and more … fearful?

  “Don’t like being ganged up on?” I asked.

  It bared its teeth.

  “You’re not as impressive as your big brothers.” Taunting an unknown element wasn’t the smartest trick in my arsenal, and Wyatt gave me a withering stare.

  It growled something that could have been any number of garbled cuss words and lunged—okay, so stupid question—at my throat. I swung hard with the lamp, aiming for its slashing hand, and heard bone crunch as I connected. Its body slammed into mine and knocked us both sideways. I tripped over the lamp cord, hit the floor on my ass, and kept rolling. Momentum threw the goblin-hybrid over my head and into the far wall.

  The splat was punctuated by a pained roar. Wyatt bolted past me. I curled onto my knees and pulled up in a crouch just in time to see Wyatt spear the critter’s left hand to the wall with a knife. It squealed and slapped at the knife’s hilt with its useless, broken right hand. It tried its teeth, but Wyatt kicked it in its jeans-clad groin. The thing shrieked.

  “I think that was a two-base hit,” Wyatt said without looking away from our quarry.

  “Three at least,” I said. “Maybe even a homer.” I dropped the lamp on the sofa and circled, giving the wriggling creature a wide berth. Actual tears streaked its cheeks. Amazing.

  I took the brief respite from attack to remove the knife from my ankle sheath. As soon as I got what I needed, I intended to kill it quickly—which was an odd realization. I should have wanted to take my time, use the captured goblin for a little therapeutic payback for all the hell I’d been put through by one of its queens, but I didn’t. Something in its too-human eyes, as brown as my own, quelled that need. Produced just a little bit of mercy.

  And let’s face it—mercy and I were not good friends.

  The hybrid kicked out with one foot, slipped on its own blood, and fell. Its hand was knifed to the wall above its head, and the jerking stop produced another bellow of anguish. Wyatt had the sense to dash back across the apartment and shut the door. No need to arouse the neighbors any more than we already had.

  “Who sent you here?” I asked, staying out of the wailing creature’s reach.

  “Master,” it snarled.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, we’ve been over that. Who is your master?”


  “He.”

  Okay, that narrowed my suspect list down to the entire male population of the city, maybe even the state. “Do you know his name?”

  It snarled and tried to stand. I kicked its legs out from under it, eliciting another shriek as its hand ripped against the knife. Blood ran down its arm and pitter-pattered to the floor. The color was off—some dusky shade of mauve that wasn’t goblin-fuchsia or human-red. I sniffed the air. Goblin blood had a very distinct seawater odor. All I smelled was sweat and, from the dead body behind me, the faint metallic scent of Peters’s blood.

  “What is your master’s name?” I asked again. It didn’t reply. I dangled my knife in front of its face. “Want me to nail your other hand to the wall?”

  A whimper hid behind its growl; it understood my threat. “For … forbid … den.”

  “You’re forbidden from saying his name?”

  Nod.

  Fabric whispered behind me. I twisted my neck to look at Wyatt. Intense concentration creased his forehead and deepened the lines around his mouth. The look was similar to when he was summoning something difficult—far away or too large to move without serious effort. Energy crackled around us. I started to ask what he was doing but didn’t want to break his focus.

  The hybrid shrieked. A dark bruise appeared on its neck, to the left of where its Adam’s apple should be. I blinked. Wyatt grunted. On his outstretched palm was a tiny square of metal, barely half an inch wide.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Tracking device, I think,” Wyatt said.

  I watched, flummoxed, while Wyatt dropped the device into the sink, turned on the water, and then flipped the switch on the disposal. Metal gears ground it with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. When he turned it off, I asked, “How did you know?”

  “I guessed. I couldn’t see it, but I felt something inside its body that could be summoned, something small. I wasn’t sure what it was until I had it in my hand.”