Requiem for the Dead

Chapter One

I don't like morgues. Never have, never will. My life started over again in a morgue, so naturally I have a pretty negative association with them—and with this one in particular, since it's where I was reborn. In the basement of St. Eustachius Hospital, not twenty feet from where I was standing, right behind that solid metal door.

Plus morgues smell to high hell and that's just never pleasant for anyone, especially a half-human, half-werewolf with an extra-sensitive sense of smell.

Not me. I'm completely human (well, kind of). The half-and-half I live with (he despised the word half-breed, so I gave him a nickname he despised just a little bit less) would be Wyatt Truman, my boyfriend, work partner, and also the guy creeping into the morgue with me late on a Saturday night. We never seemed to manage anything normal couples did together, like dinner and a movie, or even just a long walk in the park on a sunny afternoon. Our "dates" usually included any combination of hunting, capturing, questioning, killing, and breaking-and-entering. Normal has never been in our relationship description.

This particular morgue wasn't providing us with much of a challenge in regard to breaking and entering. The lower level of the hospital was nearly deserted at this hour, the corridor barely lit, and the only way I imagined we'd be interrupted during our little job was if a pileup on the city bypass resulted in a mad rush of casualties into the ER. And even then, our eyes and ears on the outside would give us ample warning.

Getting access to our objective was as easy as using the keycard we'd had copied for us the day before. In the dim corridor of the hospital basement, I slid the card down the door lock while Wyatt waited behind me, every muscle in his body tense and alert. Shadows made his black hair seem impossibly darker, and the telltale ring of silver around his otherwise black irises glimmered in the light of a nearby overhead. The silver was the only outward sign that he was no longer human—hadn't been for five weeks.

The lock light turned from orange to green, and something inside the door popped. I grabbed the handle, but didn't pull.

"Evy?" Wyatt said softly, his voice strangely loud as it burst the silence.

"Just reflecting," I said. "A few months ago, I was sneaking out of this place in sweats eight sizes too big and with every intention of stealing a lab tech's car."

"And now you're breaking back in."

"Yeah. Funny how life comes full circle." Usually right before it turned around and bit you on the ass, but I was trying to stay positive about tonight's adventure.

I pulled the door, and Wyatt and I slipped inside. The familiar smells stung my nose—formaldehyde and industrial cleaner and a deeper, darker scent of death. I felt along the wall to my right until I found a switch, then blinked as my eyeballs were assaulted with light. It took a minute for the room to come into focus.

Same plain gray walls and yellow tiled floors, with two beds on either side of a floor drain. Instrument tables stood clean and organized, waiting for their next victims to be brought in for autopsy. Just past those tables was the wall of doors that held individual trays, and some of those trays held bodies. My body had been in one of those for a few hours, until being put out for autopsy. Fortunately, I came back to life before they could cut me open, and I scared the hell out of a lab tech named Pat.

I was forever grateful I hadn't woken up still locked in one of those little cubicles; I'd have probably lost my shit completely and never adjusted to life in someone else's body. Or simply frozen to death before anyone knew I was back, and then Wyatt's sacrifice would have been for nothing.

The mental image of me, blue and cold, zipped up in a black bag, burrowed into my brain like a tick and refused to let go. I took a deep, steadying breath so the macabre thought didn't show on my face.

Keep it together, Stone.

"It's in number four," Wyatt said.

He crossed to the wall of doors and stopped near the top one, far right. He pulled the door lever and it creaked open with a hiss and burst of cool air. I waited a few feet away while he pulled the tray out, along with the black bag on top of it. It put the body at about chest-level.

"Evy, is this freaking you out?"

A snappy "no" resisted passing my lips. Wyatt would know I was lying. Even before he was infected by a Lupa bite and gained a few enhanced senses, it had been hard to lie to Wyatt. He knew me better than anyone, and despite all of the bullshit we'd dealt with in the last few months, he still loved me. And I loved him back in the best, fiercest possible way, so I decided to go against type and be honest.

"Yeah, a little bit," I said.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there when you woke up."

"I know. You've apologized for that already, and you're forgiven. It's just seeing everything again is giving me this bizarre sense of déjà vu."

"We didn't have to take this assignment."

"Yes, we did."

In the last two weeks, we'd been monitoring and investigating a sudden rise in goblin-related attacks—not only on innocent humans, but also on the occasional Therian and half-Blood vampire. The goblin Hordes hadn't been a threat for months, not since a mountainside battle at an old nature preserve killed one of their queens and a huge chunk of her forces. No one expected them to go underground forever, but we hadn't been prepared for the sheer number and viciousness of the new attacks.

With the loss of the vampire Families and their support of the Watchtower, our combined forces had been drained by nearly a third, and we had a difficult time finding new humans and Therians to join our ranks and help protect the city. Adding humans meant finding trustworthy people who could keep their big mouths shut about the existence of shape-shifters, vampires, goblins, gremlins, and various kinds of Fey. Not to mention possessing the necessary skills to track, fight, hunt, and kill.

The Therians…well, they were dealing with a few internal crises of their own, which made it hard to get support from more than half of the thirteen Clans on the Assembly. And without Clan Elder approval, an interested shape-shifter wasn't allowed to join.

Assembly politics made my head hurt.

So what had once been five-person squads (four members and a squad leader) were shrunk into four-person quads, managed from the Watchtower by three people who'd become the brains of our operation: Astrid Dane, a were-jaguar and granddaughter of the Felia Clan Elder; Adrian Baylor, a former Triad Handler with the build of a linebacker and the temper-control of a Buddhist monk; and Rufus St. James, another former Handler who'd finally agreed to work with us instead of sulking over an injury that had left him unable to walk without assistance. The three of them handed out quad assignments, and they made decisions based on the intel we returned to them.

So far the system was working. A few of us referred to our three esteemed leaders as Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gate to Hades. Considering we basically worked to keep hell monsters from taking over the city, it fit. We just didn't call them Cerberus to their faces.

Quad Two (us) and Quad Four (not us) were assigned to the goblin issue, even though what I really wanted to be doing was looking for a cure for the illness plaguing our vampire allies. But I was a soldier, not a general, so goblins it was. Our two quads were chosen because between the eight of us, we had the most experience dealing with goblins. Wyatt, Milo Gant, and I had all partaken in the massive nature preserve battle in May that pitted us against a shit-ton of goblin warriors—plus all of our combined Triad-related experience in hunting and killing the nasty beasts. The fourth member of our quad, Marcus Dane, made up for his lack of goblin slaughtering hours with his sharp senses, strength, and the two-hundred-pound black jaguar he shifted into.

Marcus and Milo were waiting at different places in the hospital, acting as lookouts so Wyatt and I didn't get caught by any of the hospital staff. Marcus hated playing lookout, though, so thinking of him standing in a corridor somewhere, bored out of his mind, made me grin.

"What?" Wyatt asked. He was still watching me, one gloved hand poised to pull down the zipper on the black bag.

"Nothing." I moved to stand on the opposite side of the tray. "Let's do this and get out of here."

"Good plan." He pulled the zipper tab, its teeth snicking open with an ominous staccato, then pushed the sides of the bag out of the way.

The police report we'd intercepted said the teenage boy had died of an animal attack—like so many of the others. Sooner or later the explanation wasn't going to fly anymore, because we lived in a big damned city, not the middle of the Everglades. Cities had rats, pigeons and alley cats, not carnivorous beasts who could rip a human to pieces half-a-block from a busy street without a single pedestrian hearing the fight.

Unless you lived in our city. Then there was a good chance your neighbor could shift into an animal, that the tall, pale-skinned woman with the white-blond hair was actually a vampire, and that a gremlin really did screw up your wireless internet last night.

The body in the bag definitely looked like it could have been ripped apart by a wild animal. Or in this particular case, a couple of goblins. The teen's face was mostly gone, torn to ribbons of flesh and muscle, some down to the bone. His throat was slashed in several places. The majority of his T-shirt was gone, exposing a torso that looked like cubed steak, and a slashed abdomen with hints of exposed intestine.

And it only got worse the further down Wyatt pulled the bag's zipper. The teen's groin was covered in bite marks—too small to be a dog, but just the right size to be goblin teeth, which was our first big clue. Except for the deep bruising and scrapes on his knees, the front of his legs were mostly unscathed. Wyatt checked the backs of his legs.

"Thighs are pretty cut up," he said. He glanced up higher and his eyes narrowed. "Dammit."

I knew his tones too well. A surprised "dammit" would have prompted me to ask what he saw. The resigned, almost sad way he'd said it told me what he'd seen. I didn't need him to say it.

In goblin society, females are both rare and revered, much like the queen ant of an ant colony. It means only the most elite goblin warriors get to mate. And human bodies are not designed to handle hooked appendages of any kind. It was the worst kind of agony any human being could endure before they died, and I could say that from my own goddamn experience.

I closed my eyes against the visual and mental assault. Six months ago, I'd have shrugged at the torture and gone about my job hunting and killing the goblins responsible. But I'd been through too much this summer, changed too much to be so unaffected by the violence that permeated my life. Empathy for this boy—someone I didn't know, but who'd died so horribly by the same monsters who'd tortured and killed me once—choked me.

Warm arms wrapped around me from behind and I leaned against Wyatt's chest, hands coming up to squeeze his where they clasped over my heart. A heart that was pounding too damned hard. He pressed his chin to my left shoulder, and I inhaled the familiar scent of him—coffee and cinnamon, and the new earthiness of his werewolf half.

"I can finish this up," he whispered.

"I'm fine, I just need a second."

I could hear all of the things he wasn't saying: You shouldn't have come in here with me, I should have brought Milo, I hate that you're reliving this, goddamn fucking goblins. It was all in the way his arms tightened, as though he could hug away all the painful memories. And I loved him for it. I loved him for a lot of reasons.

"There's more than enough proof that this was a goblin attack," I said, opening my eyes and straightening up.

Wyatt let go and shifted to stand next to me, the concern still plain on his face. "Agreed," he said. "The goblins are getting bolder. Estimated time of death was five o'clock this evening."

And considering it was late August, that meant broad daylight. Goblins used to only come out at night, preferring to spend the day down in the sewers. This was seriously bad news.

He reached for the zipper and started tugging it up. Just past the dead boy's knees he stopped. Leaned down to peer at something. "Evy, look at this."

I stepped around him and followed his gaze to a spot on the body's inner thigh. At first, all I saw were a bunch of deep cuts, like razor slices. But as I stared, they turned into letters. And then a word.

Kelsa.

"Fuck me," I said.

Kelsa was the goblin Queen who'd ordered me captured, tortured, raped and left to die, all at the orders of an elf whose grand plan included stealing Wyatt's free will. I killed her a few months ago, at the same time the rest of the goblins went underground. Seeing her name carved on the leg of a dead human said one clear thing to me: this was fucking personal.

After Wyatt took a few pictures of the carved name with his phone, we put the body back and then got the hell out of there. I texted Milo and Marcus that we were leaving, so they'd meet us at the arranged location.

They were already waiting when we arrived, leaning against the metal barrier that protected one side of the sidewalk from a steep drop into the Anjean River, as though they had every right to be loitering there at one-thirty in the morning. The rush of the river below us was the only real sound as Wyatt and I made our way toward them.

I was still a little shaky after our morgue trip and had broken a sweat the instant we stepped outside into the humid late-summer air. Usually I'm better at hiding my immediate need to vomit, but I must not have been doing a very good job on approach because Milo stood up straight as soon as he got a good look.

"Evy?" he said.

"I'm okay," I replied.

"That bad?"

"Worse, but it was definitely goblins."

"This behavior is extremely unusual," Marcus said. He hadn't moved from his casual lean against the rail, and the female in me appreciated the way he could make such a simple stance look sexy. Marcus was tall and muscular (but not muscle bound), with tan skin and long, black hair he liked to wear in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. A little bit of scruff on his chin—not quite a goatee, but more than a soul patch—gave him a look I could only describe as "pirate."

Contrast to Milo Gant, who was about my height of five-foot-seven, and lean enough to occasionally appear scrawny, despite his speed and strength. He had sandy brown hair and brown eyes that, once upon a time, I'd have described as kind. Nowadays they were mostly cold. Mostly, depending on the company he kept. Lately Marcus was one of the only people who could make Milo smile.

"There was more," Wyatt said and held out his phone. "They're making this personal for Evy."

Marcus studied the image, while Milo blanched and looked away—the photo did have an unfortunate angle of the dead man's mangled testicles. "What's your assessment?" Marcus asked.

"That whatever's happening isn't random," Wyatt replied. "We know the goblin warriors can't plan for shit, so at least one of the Queens has been cooking this up for a while. Maybe since Kelsa died."

"Could it be tied to the Fey?"

"Possibly. They followed orders from an elf once, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility for them to follow the orders of a sprite."

My temper began a slow burn, as it always did when I thought about Amalie and how the Fey Council had betrayed and lied to us since first contact more than ten years ago. The Triads had been duped and manipulated to serve their whims, and while the Fey were pacifists who couldn't attack us directly, they'd put a lot of other enemies directly into our path. Sending the goblins against us was not beneath them.

"It definitely gives them a more controllable way to hit us than with the Halfies," Milo said. "Even the Halfies that are still partly sane." He said the word "Halfies" like it was a vile taste in his mouth—the way he'd said it for the last five weeks. Since Felix died.

Instead of dropping off with the death of Walter Thackery and the loss of his Happy Serum—meant to make typically deranged half-Bloods act in a rational manner—the Halfie population had seemed to increase. It was as if the handful of sane Halfies we hadn't managed to execute had gone forth and multiplied, and created more sane Halfies.

You might think sane Halfies would be preferable to crazy ones, but not for me. Crazy means they don't plan ahead, and they almost always screw up in some way or another. Sane means higher thought and the ability to formulate a plan of action. Halfies with plans scared the hell out of me.

"I just wish they'd man up and come at us head on," I said, referring to the Fey. "All of this puppeteer bullshit is getting old."

"Agreed," Marcus said. "The Fey are irritating and cowardly. Therians fight for what they want. We don't have the luxury of living for millennia, as the Fey do."

Milo glanced at Marcus, and the pair shared a look I couldn't decipher. They'd become good friends in the last few weeks, and they spent a lot of their free time sparring in the Watchtower gym. Physically, Marcus looked like he was in his mid-thirties, but he was only ten calendar years old—which put him at the halfway point of his life. And even though I'd seen a were-osprey grow from newborn to toddler in only a few months, a twenty-year life expectancy wasn't an easy thing to remember daily.

"The Fey are cowards," Wyatt said in a deadly voice. "We'll find a way to make Amalie accountable for the things she's done and the suffering she's caused." Including his own suffering. Putting every betrayal of the Triads aside, Amalie had protected the Lupa pups who'd infected Wyatt, which made her responsible for his change. Every time I saw Wyatt struggling to control his wolf, to maintain his humanity when the animal seemed stronger, I renewed my vow to be there the day Amalie paid her dues.

Unless we all died before that happened, which was entirely possible.

"So we got what we needed on the body," Milo said after a moment of awkward silence. "Assignment complete?"

"Assignment complete," I said. "Can we hit a drive-thru on the way back? I need a burger."

"It's one-thirty in the morning."

"So?" After inheriting a new, untrained body and then suffering three weeks of hideous torture (and a fifteen pound weight loss) less than two months after that, I was now finally (finally!) at a healthy weight and had some pretty awesome muscle tone going on. I deserved a big, greasy burger once in a while.

"I could eat," Wyatt said. "We'll swing by that place on Tenth. It's open all night, I think."

We split up for the walk back to the car, making two potential targets instead of one. Wyatt and I went west up the block, toward the hospital, while Marcus and Milo went east. We'd all turn north at the next respective street, go up a block and double back to where we'd parked.

It was a short, quiet walk. Wyatt and I had gotten to a place in our evolving relationship where we didn't need to fill silences with idle chatter. He knew that if I wanted to talk about the body we'd seen tonight, I'd bring it up in my own time. Forcing me to do anything only made me kick back in the opposite direction. It was a fatal flaw that had gotten me in trouble almost as much as it had saved my life.

We reached the car first, which set off internal alarms immediately. Marcus and Milo should have at least been visible on this side street, with its random parked cars and overflowing trash cans waiting for an early morning dump.

Somewhere down the block a large cat snarled. Wyatt and I took off running.