Requiem for the Dead

Chapter Twelve

Wyatt and I probably could have divided our collective knowledge and resources better by partnering with other people, but we worked best as a team. Plus Wyatt was still getting to know his Lupa side, and since Lupa society used to be matriarchal, as his mate I was the only person who could get him to stand down if his temper started to get the best of him. I think he also wanted to keep an eye on me, even if he'd never admit it out loud.

Goblins still make my stomach hurt.

Our search grid was the north side of Mercy's Lot, near the old Anjean River waterfront that was slowly being renovated and brought back to life. Goblins had been spotted there pretty frequently until the disaster that was Parker's Palace, and it was one of Alejandro's sighting spots. I hadn't been back to this particular area of the city since a bunch of half-Bloods tried to murder a theater full of humans during an Arts benefit. The evening was topped off by a four-story drop out a window in an attempt to save Phineas's life.

That had hurt like a son of a bitch.

It was the same night Tybalt had lost his hand.

We dropped two pairs (Marcus/Kismet and Paul/Autumn) off in their search grid on the way to ours. Wyatt parked in an alley at the edge the grid, and then we hit the pavement. Sometimes this sort of covert work was boring as hell—a lot of walking, watching and waiting for what could amount to absolutely no payoff. In my Hunter days, no payoff meant I was going home alive and sans injury. With the slaughter of the gremlins so fresh in my mind, tonight I was craving a little mayhem.

We moved through the streets without speaking, our actions communicating for us. A head tilt here, a jacked thumb there. I'd developed that sort of thing with Jesse and Ash back in our Triad days, and I loved having it with Wyatt. I loved everything about him, as a matter of fact, and it still startled me when thoughts like that bubbled up. I wasn't used to this kind of total love, and I wanted it as long as I could have it.

Older brick and stone buildings were mixed with steel and glass. Some were homes, other businesses and restaurants in what was as close as the city got to an historic district. We were still a good eight blocks from Parker's Palace, and a big system of sewer tunnels existed below us that had once housed goblins and allowed them to travel freely in daylight. As Hunters we'd avoided going into those tunnels. Entry points were difficult to find, the quarters were too close for fighting, and the chances of getting lost were high.

Still, it was tempting me tonight.

Over an hour passed with three check-ins from all the teams. No leads and no goblin sightings, although Carly and Shelby did kill a pair of Halfies.

Score one for us, I guess.

Around two a.m. my energy was starting to flag, and I briefly entertained the idea of sneaking into a nearby all-night coffee shop for a caffeine boost. Food wasn't a horrible idea, either. I bit back a yawn, and Wyatt noticed.

Before he could say anything, our phones vibrated with text messages.

Parker's Palace. Engaged. Backup now!

The text came from Paul's phone. We'd dropped him and Autumn off a few blocks north of our area. The car was in the opposite direction and too far away, so Wyatt and I ran. The streets were quiet enough that we avoided any collisions with traffic or pedestrians, and the noise of the fight reached us before we saw it.

The street in front of the Parker's Palace theater was swarming with about three dozen goblin warriors, all in various states of battle frenzy. Goblins are nasty looking creatures on their best days, but add in a little blood lust and they are the stuff of nightmares. About four-feet tall, they hunch at the shoulders, have sharp claws on their bony hands, ruby red eyes, scaly black skin, and mouths full of cone-shaped teeth that like to bite. They also tend to run around nearly naked, wearing little loincloths that don't hide anything during a real fight—especially when the beasts get aroused by battle lust.

They were lusting all right, with four of ours in the middle of it all. Marcus and Kismet had somehow gotten there before us, and they were as engaged as Paul and Autumn. Marcus had shifted, which gave our side a good advantage. Autumn's true form was a Bengal fox, only she hadn't changed. I figured out why pretty fast.

Autumn swung at the goblins with a short sword clutched in her left hand—probably given to her by Paul because I'd never seen her with a weapon like that before—and swinging poorly. Her right arm was tucked close to her body, her face pinched and pale from pain, which meant something was broken or dislocated, and preventing her from shifting. Paul stuck close, protecting her as best he could. He'd forgone his usual weapon of an aluminum baseball bat in favor of butterfly knives that stabbed and cut with amazing precision.

Someone had been practicing.

The four of them should have been overwhelmed by the size of the goblin horde surrounding them, but the warriors weren't attacking en masse. They moved in waves, snapping at heels like rabid dogs, then backing out again. They were teasing, trapping, only occasionally trying to draw blood, but why?

Wyatt had bi-shifted as we ran, and his horrifying half-Lupa form barreled into the fight with a furious snarl. Some of the goblins actually shrank back from the sight of him, a brand-new monster to their very limited minds. Wyatt ripped two throats out with his clawed hands before they snapped into action. Instead of scattering, though, eight of them pounced on Wyatt at once.

Something slammed into me from behind before I could help him, and I rolled across the pavement. Got a knife out of my ankle sheath as I went. Came up on my knees in a half-crouch and shoved the blade into an advancing goblin's gut. Fuchsia blood spurted out, spattering my hand and arm, filling my nose with the stink of old seawater. The goblin hissed as it died.

Bitter fury filled me as I launched to my feet. Fury directed blindly at the goblins around us—soulless killing machines that existed for no other reason than to destroy and cause pain. Bits of old hurts bubbled up too, feeding that fury, and I launched myself into the fight. I rarely found any glee in killing these days, but this battle brought all those old feelings back to the forefront. Brought back old hates and prejudices I'd long thought buried.

The nasty little monsters deserved it. So I did my very best to protect my friends and kill every last one of the goblins.

A flash of golden fur caught my attention. Kyle, in his true dingo form, ran head-first into the back of a goblin and sent the creature flying into the side of a light pole. A glance to my left found Tybalt in the street, his face perfectly blank as he swung his prosthetic attachment at the goblins, eviscerating two with one solid stroke.

Paul shouted, then cursed, his voice practically in my ear. I turned. A goblin had latched onto Paul's back like a child getting piggy-backed, and its teeth were deep in Paul's shoulder. One of Paul's butterfly knives was already lodged in the goblin's side, and Paul couldn't seem to get a good shot with the other.

"Knees," I shouted.

He dropped immediately. I yanked the butterfly knife out of the goblin's side, then slammed it into the base of its neck. Severed the spine. It went limp. I pulled its teeth out of Paul's shoulder, and the body slumped to the street. Paul looked up at me, panting and pale-faced, his eyes glazed with pain.

"Thank me later," I said.

Kismet moved in to help protect Paul and Autumn, while I jumped back into the slaughter. My skin was smeared with goblin blood, and I was a sweaty, sticky mess, but I still managed to laugh when I stabbed another goblin in the eye. I think it was a slightly hysterical laugh. No one here would blame me for it.

The goblin bodies were piling up. Half a dozen took off for an alley. Dingo Kyle raced after them. We quickly cut down the last few standing targets, until all that was left was the carnage.

Wyatt stood apart from the group, his bi-shifted body heaving from exertion and battle lust. His eyes were perfectly silver, his canine teeth flashing in the streetlight. He looked very much like an ancient predatory beast—and like he could do this for hours yet. Personally, I was exhausted. He started growling. Jaguar Marcus hissed.

Oh hell no.

I moved to Wyatt's side and yanked his chin down so he was looking at me instead of over me. Our height difference in this state was a pain in the ass, but I'd be damned if I'd let him lose it. Ever. A small red pupil appeared in his silver eyes. Good, he was seeing me.

"Eyes on me, Truman," I said. "Fight's over. All that's left here are friends."

He blinked hard. It took a minute, but he worked himself down from the bi-shift and back to his regular self. "Are you hurt?" he asked as soon as his teeth were back to normal.

"For a change, no. You?"

"No."

We rejoined our people, who'd gathered around Autumn and Paul. Both looked a little shocky from their respective injuries. Tybalt had sacrificed his shirt as a bandage for Paul, whose own shirt was soaked with blood.

"—out of nowhere," Autumn was saying. "I didn't even smell them until after I'd been pushed."

"Pushed?" I repeated, since I'd missed the start of the story.

She nodded at the roof of a three-story building across the street. "Pushed. I damaged my arm in the fall. Think I dislocated my shoulder. Paul got down to me fast, and by then the goblins were swarming us."

"So no idea where they came up from?" Tybalt asked.

"No, just from the alley there."

The alley Kyle had gone down and not returned from. Kismet was missing, too. Before I could ask, Marcus (who'd shifted back) said, "Gina went for the car."

Kyle also appeared, limping out of the shadows of the alley. He shifted, as well, and winced as he put weight on his right ankle. "They disappeared into a storm drain behind the theater," he said. "It was too narrow to get down, and it reeked of goblin."

"Good thing you didn't try to squeeze in then," I said. "If it's a nest, you'd have been puppy chow."

He grunted. "I also found two human bodies in the alley."

Of course you did. I sighed in my head as Wyatt, Tybalt, and I followed him. The bodies were out in the open, unhidden, their skin and clothing flayed and torn. Eyes wide open. Both women, probably early twenties, but their faces were too damaged to be sure. They hadn't been dead long, maybe an hour.

One woman's leg had KEL scratched into it. Looked like our people interrupted another love note from Nessa.

"After we get the goblins cleaned up, we'll call the police," Wyatt said.

Despite the horrific way they died, those girls' families deserved to know they were dead. They deserved a chance to grieve.

Don't the Frosts deserve that chance too?

I shoved the voice of reason away. I had too many other things to worry about tonight, and the Frosts were nowhere near the top of my list.

Kismet returned with the SUV. Autumn and Paul needed to get back to the Watchtower for medical attention, while some of us stayed behind on cleanup duty. Wyatt was on the phone with someone at the Watchtower, reporting our activities of the last thirty minutes or so and requesting help with cleanup. The last thing we needed to do was leave a pile of goblin parts for the city police to find, and we only had about three hours before people started waking up around here.

Kyle was helping Kismet settle Autumn and Paul into the backseat. Autumn's phone kept buzzing, but she didn't seem in any hurry to pick up. I moved forward to answer the phone for her.

A warm body hit mine, and then I hit the bloody pavement. My right thigh shrieked with heat and pain. Something warm and wet spread over the small of my back. Wyatt was yelling my name from far away, so he wasn't the person flattening me. Bleeding on me.

Crap.

"The roof over there," Kyle yelled.

Sniper. Another fucking sniper.

The body on top of me rolled, and I turned my head to look into Marcus's pained copper eyes. I sat up way too fast, because agony seared down my right leg, blurred my vision, and I may have let out a little scream. Wyatt was suddenly behind me, holding me up, and I fell back against him.

Kismet knelt next to Marcus and pressed her hands against his right side, below his ribs.

"What the hell?" I asked.

"Saw a laser sight," Marcus said, voice strained. "Reacted."

"I didn't hear the shot," Wyatt said.

"Me, either."

Wyatt had somehow worked off his belt and was wrapping it around my upper thigh. I finally saw the hole. I'd been shot in the leg.

"How bad?" I said.

"Could have been worse." Marcus flinched when Kismet increased pressure. "Damn, woman, that hurts."

"It'll hurt worse if you bleed out," Kismet retorted.

"It's not that serious."

"You have two holes in your body, Marcus, it's serious enough."

Wyatt finished cinching his tourniquet, and I hissed through clenched teeth. "Evy only has one. The bullet's still in there."

"Oh goodie, evidence," I said.

"I meant you can't start healing until it's removed."

"Right." I knew that. The pain was messing with my head. "Did we get the shooter?"

"Tybalt and Kyle went after them."

"Who were they trying to kill? Me or Marcus?" I kind of knew the answer but still had to ask the question. He'd jumped in front of a bullet for me. I still got shot, sure, but that didn't negate the gesture.

"The sight was on the back of your head, Evy," Marcus replied.

"Great."

"Could it have been the goblins?" Kismet floated the idea while she helped Marcus lay down in the back of the SUV.

Wyatt went a little overprotective and carried me to the front passenger seat. He even fastened my seatbelt, which I found both irritating and adorable. "I doubt it," he replied. "They don't have the coordination or body type to handle rifles like that."

"A Queen could have hired someone."

"Or it's another of Vale's cousins," I said, "and completely unrelated to the goblins."

No one had an answer to that.

Kismet drove us back to the Watchtower, and halfway there we got an update on the sniper. No sign once they got to the roof. Kyle said he smelled Bengal.

Fucking fantastic.

My leg wasn't bleeding heavily, but the wound hurt worse than most stab wounds I'd received. Made me worry the bullet had hit bone, especially since there was no exit wound. The city blurred around me during the drive home. Kismet made use of the rule that cars could only drive down the wide mall corridors when delivering seriously injured people to the infirmary, so we didn't have far to walk once we got there.

Once again, though, I didn't walk. Dr. Vansis was a were-bear and strong enough to carry me right into the infirmary and deposit me on an exam table. Paul ended up on one next to me.

"How come whenever you and me battle goblins together, people standing close to me get shot?" I asked. The last time had been a big battle at a nature preserve. Before the battle against combined Halfie and goblin forces began, Paul had accidentally shot Wyatt in the arm.

The comment seemed funnier in my head. Paul gave me a weak smile before Dr. Vansis pulled the curtain between our beds and went about his doctoring. I stared up at the ceiling and tried to ignore the agony in my leg, which seemed to get worse as my body's instinct to heal itself was thwarted by the piece of metal still stuck inside.

At some point, somebody gave me a couple of pills for the pain. My head got very swimmy after that, and by the time my system worked those drugs back out and I became aware again, Dr. Vansis was standing over me with a scrap of metal clutched in a pair of super-long tweezers.

"You're lucky this didn't shatter your femur." He dropped both bullet and tweezers into a basin, then reached for some bandages. "I already anticipate you saying that you'll heal so don't bother, but I'm bandaging you anyway. Deal with it."

I snickered and let the grumpy doc do his job. He might have been abrasive and abrupt, but he was a damned good doctor of humans for being Therian himself. After another mild dose of painkillers, he left my cubicle. I checked my phone and discovered two new texts from Wyatt.

We think Vale is the shooter. Still tracking.

The second text made me smile: Healing yet?

I texted back that I was bullet-free and healing, even though the familiar itching sensation of my body's healing power hadn't kicked in yet. It didn't always start immediately, though, especially with serious wounds. My tumble out that fourth-floor window had taken a few days of unconsciousness to finally fix. So I dozed until the itching began, and then it was so intense that laying there started making me crazy. Like a million tiny ants were crawling in and out of my leg, all at once, on razor-sharp feet.

Autumn appeared at the foot of my bed, her eyebrows furrowed with worry. Her arm was in a sling, and she was giving me a funny look. "Evy?"

"I need to get off this bed. Like, now."

"But your leg—"

"Is healing, which is why I need to get up and move around. Can you find me a cane or something? Please?"

She didn't look convinced, but she left in search of a physical prop so I could limp around without falling over. She managed to produce an actual crutch. We adjusted it to work with my height, then she helped me stand. Blood rushed downward as soon as I got vertical, and throbbing pain joined the itching. I let out a long, unhappy groan.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked.

"Yes." The infirmary seemed bizarrely quiet, considering how many of us were injured. "Where is everyone?"

"Joining the search for Vale."

"A lot of people are going to be looking for that cat today."

"True enough. Do you need anything else?"

"No, thanks. How's your arm?"

"I dislocated the shoulder. Dr. Vansis reset it."

"Ouch."

"Quite. I only need the sling for a few hours, though, until the discomfort passes."

After she left, I amused myself with a quick tour of the exam cubicles. Partly for the exercise and partly to see who else was still around. The beds there were empty, so I limped my way into the private area. Paul was asleep in the first room. An IV stand pumped blood and fluids into him, and while he didn't look like he was on death's doorstep, he still looked…fragile.

So often I forgot how young we were. Paul was only eighteen years old, and he lived with the cynicism and anger of someone twice that. He'd been badly wounded tonight, but he'd never backed down, never looked scared.

"You did good tonight," I whispered.

In the hall, I paused when a familiar voice rumbled out from the half-closed door two down from Paul's room. I shuffled over as quietly as possible just to make sure I was right.

"—blame yourself. I know you."

Milo. Awake.

Thank God.