Three Days to Dead

Chapter 27

2:10

Twenty feet from the Center, the three groups of Blood forces engaged a force field that knocked four of them backward onto their well-armed asses. The field shimmered briefly—a flicker of blue light. Someone called out an order, and they retreated en masse to the porch of the museum.

The Center remained quiet. No lights came on; no alarms blared. The Bloods didn’t open fire, but simply formed a protective circle, weapons still trained on the other building.

A slim, black-clad figure stepped from their ranks and into the open. It was impossible to tell if the Blood was male or female. My best guess, based on the walk, was male. He hefted something in his left hand, wound up, and hurled it at the Center. The object shattered against the barrier, which fritzed and snapped like water on an electric fence. Blue light sparkled. The stink of ozone filled the air. In seconds, the blue field dissolved and blinked out of existence. The Bloods surged forward again.

This time, an upstairs window opened and gun-fire rained down on the advancing Bloods. Several faltered and jerked. Blood splattered the pavement, but they pressed onward. Had to be regular bullets if the Bloods weren’t staying down. Two stopped in mid-advance, dropped to one knee, and concentrated return fire on the window. Wood and glass shattered. The onslaught stopped.

Isleen’s people were well trained, I had to give them that.

They had advanced within twenty feet of the Center’s front door when they faltered again. Many bent, hands clutching their ears, screeching in pain. Something tickled the very edge of my hearing. The back of my neck prickled.

“Dog whistle,” Wyatt said.

With the Bloods distracted, the opposition enacted a rear attack. The front door of the museum building opened. Halfies poured out, armed with knives and hatchets and their teeth. They moved too fast for recognition, surging toward the Bloods, thirty or more with one goal in mind.

I shouted for them to look out, but my voice was lost in the Halfies’ echoing battle cry. The crash of bodies was thunderous. The Bloods reacted immediately, overcoming the squeal of the dog whistle—if it was still being blasted, which I doubted, because it should have affected the Halfies, too—and turned weapons on their attackers.

Every single gun possessed by the Bloods flew into the air, lifted by invisible hands. Shouts of surprise mixed with screams of pain.

“What the fuck?” I asked.

I saw him then, standing on the second-floor balcony above the Center’s front door. Instinct told me it was Tovin, even though I’d never met him. He stood almost five feet tall, the tallest Fey I’d ever seen. His lean body seemed too thin, like pulled taffy, something a stiff breeze could knock over. Silver hair stood in short spikes, reaching high to the sky like his sharply pointed ears and eyebrows.

Small like most Fair Ones, he overcame that by radiating power. Even from where we stood in the cover of the forest, Tovin dwarfed everyone in front of him. I felt the power of the Break all around me, but Tovin lived it. He was born part of the Break. He was power. For the first time since I discovered his plan, I was genuinely afraid of him.

He levitated the weapons into the sky. The Bloods compensated by pulling blades, and the surface attack became more vicious, almost feral. The weapon cloud began to coalesce and spin. Each individual gun melted into the one next to it, until all that remained was a ball of metal the size of a washing machine. It fell and crushed two battling Bloods.

Wyatt had his gun out and aimed at Tovin before I could stop him. He squeezed the trigger, and for one brief, shining moment, I thought it would work. Tovin was watching the battle. The bullet roared at its target.

The world seemed to slow down, each second taking thirty. The bullet telescoped forward. Tovin turned his head and seemed to look right at me. I was certain he saw me. I felt deadly cold under that hateful gaze. He smiled, raised his hand, and plucked the bullet from the air.

Sound and action roared back to normal time. Tovin was gone. The balcony doors slammed shut behind him.

“Oh my God,” Wyatt said.

“He knows we’re here.”

“I’ve never seen that kind of power.”

I squeezed his bicep, trying to offer comfort and calm my own nerves. I could kill mortal creatures, and I never had a problem with the morality or with the actual task. Killing something that plucked bullets from the air? Not exactly within my realm of experience, Gifted or not.

“Should we help them?” I asked, tipping my head toward the battling Bloods.

“They seem to be doing okay.”

They were. I spotted Isleen in the fray. She’d removed her protective headgear, and her brilliant white hair flashed in the moonlight. She moved with the speed and grace of a dancer, each motion calculated for maximum damage as she spun through the battle bearing twin blades. Cutting and slicing, drawing blood from her most hated enemies. Dead or dying Halfies littered the pavement, but the battle was far from over.

In chess, you sent in the pawns first. We hadn’t yet seen the big guns.

“We need to get inside the Visitors’ Center,” Wyatt said.

Headlights flashed across our position. Vehicles approached from the access road. They’d turned a curve and would enter the open parking lot in moments.

“What now?” I asked, more to myself than to Wyatt, and took off.

I ran down the tree line, sticking to the shadows and dodging underbrush, Wyatt close behind. Four Jeeps were on the road. The first one crashed through the closed gate and turned sharply to the right. Three more followed, each tailing the other until they formed a wall of trucks by the gate, a good hundred feet from the actual fight. Men and women, armed for a fight, flooded out the passenger-side doors.

“Triads,” Wyatt shouted.

We had backup after all. No sense in waiting for three o’clock if they thought we’d died in the fire with Nadia or if they thought we’d set it and run. No way to know which they thought was true without asking, so I blundered forward and burst through the trees just behind the last Jeep.

Two familiar faces stood out among twenty-odd strangers.

“Tybalt,” I shouted, hoping to catch his attention. Tall and lean, Tybalt Monahan always seemed better suited for the pro-basketball court than our down and dirty job. He heard his name, turned, and saw me. Suspicion and confusion flared, and I realized my mistake too late. He didn’t know me as Chalice.

None of them did.

Wyatt put himself in front of me, but even his familiar face didn’t stop someone’s itchy trigger finger from twitching. The gun of a fresh-faced Hunter—probably a week out of Boot Camp—roared. Wyatt stumbled backward into me. Air hitched in my lungs.

“Hold your fire, goddammit,” Tybalt commanded.

Wyatt gained his balance. I ducked around to stand in front of him. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the blood on his shirt, with more oozing between his fingers. It was all I saw, hot and crimson—something meant to be inside of his body, not outside.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It went straight through, it’s fine.” His voice startled me back into breathing. He’d been shot in the bicep—not a mortal wound. Our eyes met. Pain had glazed his, and I could only imagine what he saw in mine.

Gina Kismet appeared, with Milo and Felix—the rest of her Triad team—in tow. Kismet was the only female Handler I’d ever met. She was built like a gymnast—short, muscular, and not an ounce of extra fat anywhere—but looked like a pixie, with short red hair, angry green eyes, and a voice like a Marine drill sergeant. She seemed more suited to being a Hunter than a Handler, but I’d never bothered to ask her story. It had never mattered.

“We thought you were dead,” Kismet said to Wyatt.

“Not for lack of trying,” Wyatt said through gritted teeth.

“Rufus?”

“We saw him taken away in an ambulance, but Nadia never got out.”

She nodded, then gave me her full attention. A quick sweep with her eyes preceded a terse, “Stone?”

“In someone else’s flesh,” I said.

“When Rufus called and asked for our help, he said you’d … ah, changed.”

“He’s a master of understatement.” I had to get their brains back on the continuing bloodbath on the other side of the Jeeps. “The Bloods are on our side right now. We know Tovin is inside the Visitors’ Center. Goblins are here, too; we just haven’t seen their numbers yet. Anyone got a bandanna or something?”

A nameless Hunter whose face I barely remembered handed me a red-checked cloth. I pulled Wyatt’s hand away from his still-bleeding arm and tied the bandanna around the wound. I tightened it, until he hissed.

“Big baby,” I said.

“We need to form a perimeter around the Visitors’ Center,” Kismet said. “Just in case Tovin gets any ideas about leaving. Morgan, Willemy, take your teams to the north side of the Center. Nothing gets past you.”

Eight people tore away from the group. One of them was the baby-face newbie. I tapped him on the shoulder as he passed. He looked up. I punched him square in the mouth. Teeth cut my knuckles. He yelped and stumbled back, blood seeping from his lip. Someone snickered, but no one reprimanded me.

“That’s definitely Evy,” Tybalt said.

“That idiot could have killed him,” I said. Maybe ended the fight sooner, rather than later, but I was not giving up hope of an alternate solution to one of us dying. Not yet. We had time, dammit.

“Once Morgan and Willemy are in place—” Kismet started, only to be cut off by a raucous war whoop that started as one voice and rose into dozens. Screeching and inhuman, it signaled a fresh attack.

Goblin warriors streamed from the cover of the trees behind us. Too clumsy for guns of their own and too fast for us to shoot them down, they swarmed over and around the Jeeps. The sight of them, barely clothed and aroused by bloodlust, flooded me with fury. Hatred pushed pure adrenaline through my veins, and I found myself looking forward to the carnage.

“Use your blades!” Kismet ordered, barely audible above the din of the war cry.

Claws swiped; teeth gnashed. Serrated knives in hand, I dove in.

Movement blurred around me as I searched for the hunched shapes of goblin males. They were faster than they had any right to be and outnumbered us four to one. I still heard scattered gunfire as I plunged one knife into the back of a goblin. Fuchsia blood spurted in stinking jets. Thoughts of anything but slitting throats and spilling blood fled with my first kill.

One of them jumped on my back, its razor teeth sinking into the flesh of my left shoulder. Muscle and skin ripped. My right hand swung sideways and buried a blade into its skull. It dropped away, taking some of my shoulder with it, and two more goblins quickly took its place. I killed them with fast slashes across their throats.

“Don’t kill her!”

My head snapped toward the familiar, tingle-inducing voice. Kelsa stood on top of the last Jeep, hands on hips, like the battle had already been won. She seemed unconcerned with the rate at which her warriors were falling. She bared her teeth and held out her hand. Light glittered off a silver chain and cross. I dropped one knife and reached for the gun still tucked in the back of my jeans. Bitch had my necklace.

I hadn’t seen it since the mall. I’d written it off as lost during capture. But Halfie-Alex had said Kelsa was at the jail while I was unconscious. She may have taken it then. One of the Halfies who captured me may have given it to her. The details didn’t matter. I wanted it back.

Teeth clamped around my right ankle like a bear trap. I shrieked, pulled the gun, and fired, splattering the goblin’s head against the pavement and my jeans. I yanked my leg free. A red-tipped dart struck the ground, barely missing me. Hell, no, I was not going to sleep again. Not this time.

Loneliness, that’s what I needed. Wyatt was shot. He could have died. That fear remained fresh and close to the surface, and I latched on to it. Focused on Kelsa atop the Jeep, and felt the familiar tingle of the tap. The power of the Break. Dissolution. Movement.

The pain was duller this time, likely due to the shorter jump distance. I gained my bearings quickly. On the Jeep roof, right behind Kelsa—exactly where I wanted to be. She was still staring at the fray, dart gun in hand, seeming unsure where I’d suddenly gone.

I smashed the butt of my gun against the back of her head. She dropped like a stone. The necklace fell from her hand and clattered to the Jeep’s roof. I rolled her over and knelt down hard on her arms, knees against elbows, until I heard one snap. She shrieked. Gleaming red eyes glared up at me, pained and slightly unfocused.

“You’re not so tough when I’m not tied down,” I said.

“I killed you once. I can do it again,” she snarled.

I popped the anticoag clip out of my gun and replaced it with the fragmenting clip. Snapped one into the chamber. “This isn’t going to be fast. You aren’t going to enjoy this, but you will remember it in whatever hellish afterlife your kind goes to.”

She spit in my face. Her saliva smelled like sea-water. I wiped it away, but the stink lingered. I reached back and placed the barrel of the gun against her foot. Her eyes widened. Lips parted in a fang-baring snarl.

Two goblin males slammed into me sideways. I tumbled over the roof of the Jeep and hit the blacktop on my back. The impact exploded oxygen from my lungs and left me dazed. A dark blur leapt from the Jeep. I rolled sideways, barely missing Kelsa’s landing — precisely where my head would have been.

I tucked and came up on my knees and fired a wild shot. It glanced off her right arm and took a chunk of flesh with it. She kept coming, too fast to shoot again. She kicked the gun out of my hand and followed through with a serious swipe with her left hand. Sharp nails furrowed across my ribs and belly. Agony flared hot and immediate. Blood flowed.

My high kick connected squarely with her nose. The crunch rang out, mingling with her scream. Her head snapped back, but she refused to go down. I dropped to one knee and thrust upward with my knife. She blocked it and her good elbow smashed into my ear and set my head spinning. She had my wrist in her hands and was trying to turn my knife against me. I fought, but I had lost leverage.

She hissed, baring her bloody incisors, and snapped at my face. I gave her a well-deserved head-butt that drove her broken nose a little deeper into her snarling face. She faltered; I wrestled the knife away and plunged it into her stomach. Putrid blood pumped over my hand. She slashed again with her claws, catching me across the left cheek. Pain ripped open with the soft flesh. I shoved against the knife handle, and she fell backward.

I was on top of her again, ignoring my own pain, operating on fury and adrenaline and a very selfish need for personal vengeance against this monster who’d held me captive for days. Who had tortured me mercilessly. Ordered me raped. Allowed me to die.

I yanked out the knife and ground down with my knee until her other elbow popped. She squealed—a sound unbecoming a leader. Blood coated her face, but wild, animal eyes still shone brightly through the mess. I pressed the tip of the knife against the underside of her chin.

The air shifted behind me. I slashed sideways with the knife and cut an approaching goblin male straight across the belly. It screamed and ran the opposite way, past where my gun lay, lonely on the pavement. Too far to reach. I wanted it so badly I thought the desire would rip me to pieces. I wanted to press the barrel against her foot, pull the trigger, and shatter it into blood and bone and muscle and goo. I wanted to do it with her other foot and with both hands. I wanted to take her a piece at a time, just as she’d taken me.

Only I didn’t have the time. Bloods and Halfies still battled in front of me. Humans and goblins battled behind me. At some point, the twin fights had mingled into a single war zone. And time was running out.

“You don’t deserve this,” I said. I gripped the knife with both hands and held it high above her throat. “You deserve a hell of a lot worse, you bloodsucking bitch.”

I plunged; she gurgled. Blood pooled from her mouth, down her cheeks and throat. I pulled the knife out and wiped it on her clothes.

I’d heard people say revenge is a dish best served cold. I had no idea what that meant, but I doubted it was meant to describe the chilly emptiness I felt at what I’d done. There was no satisfaction, no joy or sense of closure. It was just another kill. A notch on my belt.

“No!” Isleen ran toward me, easily dodging the few senseless goblins who tried to stop her. Rage painted her pale cheeks with orbs of crimson. Lavender eyes snapped and flashed.

I stood on shaky legs. My wounds ached and smarted. I didn’t back down from Isleen as she closed the distance between us.

“She was mine,” Isleen snarled. “She killed my sister.”

“And she killed me, so I killed her. Get over it.”

Bad move on my part. Covered in blood and trembling from head to toe, Isleen was so tightly wound from the battle raging around us that she was one pull from snapping. And it turned out my little retort was that final pull. She tried to punch me, but was sloppy about the windup. The blow glanced off my temple, more annoying than anything. I raised my knee and caught her square in the stomach. She doubled over. I jammed my elbow into the small of her back, and she dropped.

“Sorry about that, but I’m too busy to fight my allies,” I said.

I retrieved my gun and stuck it down the back of my pants. The second knife was lost. It didn’t matter; I still had one left.

The tide of the battle had shifted in our favor. With their leader dead, some of the fight had gone out of the goblins. They attacked with less fury. Small groups had pulled away toward the trees, wounded and bloody and lost. I spotted Wyatt on the edge of the fray, unharmed beyond the preexisting gunshot wound. His shirtsleeve was stained red, a severe contrast to his pale, sweaty complexion. He shouldn’t have been out there fighting, but he was on his feet. Tybalt stood close by, surveying the battlefield and speaking into a walkie-talkie.

The remaining Halfies, maybe a dozen, were in the process of retreating to the entrance of the Center. The Bloods followed at a distance, apparently not keen on chasing them into close quarters. The Halfies, however, stayed on the porch and made no move toward the door.

I had a bad view over the sea of bodies between me and the Center, some standing, most not. The Bloods surged forward. Something silver was lobbed into the air from the porch. The Bloods scattered—too late. It exploded on impact. A ball of fire billowed into the sky, consuming everyone within ten feet of it. Bloods shrieked in agony. Flames beat against a brand-new force shield that sparkled aqua blue.

The heat blasted across the paved lot. I raised my arms to shield my face. The actual fire dissipated quickly. Melted pavement and scorched bodies marked the blast zone. The handful of surviving Bloods retreated, joining the ranks of the Triad teams regrouping by the Jeeps.

I climbed atop the last Jeep, its roof a colorful palette of blood smears and skin bits. In the mess, I found the cross necklace, its delicate chain somehow unbroken—a small reminder of everything Alex had given up for me. I tucked it into my pocket, glad to have it back, and jumped to the ground.

Kismet appeared by my side. She was bleeding from a deep gash in her left leg. The rest of the blood on her clothes was fuchsia. She gave me a once-over and quirked an eyebrow at my impressive array of wounds.

“I’ve had worse,” I said.

Tybalt jogged over. “The rear teams report killing half a dozen goblins that tried to run,” he said, “but no other activity on that side of the building.”

“We’re picking them off as best we can, too,” Kismet said. “With their leader dead, they don’t know what to do. Goblin males don’t traditionally do much thinking for themselves.”

“And Tovin’s still got himself locked inside,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s just biding his time until my clock runs out, or if he’s daring us to come in. What time is it?”

“Quarter till three.”

An hour left. I looked around for Wyatt, keen on getting his advice. He wasn’t mingling among the battle-worn. My heart skipped a beat. Kismet was speaking, but I walked away. Pushed past people, worry planting its icy seed in the pit of my stomach.

I found him on the other side of the Jeeps, standing amid a grisly scene of dead bodies and noxious blood fumes. Back to me, I saw weariness in the slump of his shoulders and bend of his knees. He trembled—barely noticeable if I wasn’t looking for it. Above the hiss of his ragged breathing, a steady plopping sound stood out. I followed it to the red-stained tips of his fingers. Blood dripped in a steady stream from his wounded arm.

Fear and bald understanding almost knocked me to my knees. The bullet may have gone right through like a normal round, but it hadn’t been normal. Not even close. Triad teams heading into an unknown situation involving Halfies or Bloods always entered with anticoag bullets chambered and ready.

Wyatt had been bleeding to death for the last half hour.