Another Kind of Dead

His puke-yellow eyes swirled as I stared into them. A soft nudge in my mind startled me, like a tiny hand knocking on the inside of my skull. His eyes flashed briefly black and red, before changing back. I blinked hard— those had been goblin eyes.

“Pleasure in mayhem,” he said. “Pleasure in chaos. Opportunity presents itself, I am compelled to take it. It is in me.”

“Phin, can you translate that for me?”

“It’s in a pùca’s basic nature to create havoc, to play tricks on others and manipulate them. It’s what he is and how he finds pleasure. It wasn’t enough to simply betray your emotions by posing as Truman when he stole your blood.” Phin’s voice was ice-cold. “He knew how to take it further.”

A tremor stole up my spine, and I contemplated my earlier threat to go excavating for kidneys.

“The desire to inflict mayhem and play tricks is infused in his being,” Phin continued. “In the same manner gremlins sneak around and steal, or goblins crave havoc, he sensed an opportunity and had to seize it.”

I shot Phin a withering glare, in no mood for one of his civics lessons. “I don’t need a conscience, Phin, and I really don’t fucking need you defending him. He made a choice.”

“I don’t believe he did.”

A flare of frustration lit in my belly. I stood up, left hand on my hip, knife tucked sideways so I didn’t stab myself. “So what you’re saying, Phin, is since he was already impersonating Wyatt in order to sedate me and get my marrow, he saw an opportunity to get his nonexistent pùca rocks off and had to do it, because it’s what he is? He had absolutely no choice in the matter? He had to attack me with Wyatt’s face on because of the orgasmic pleasure he’d get in screwing with my head? He had to?”

He didn’t flinch away from my anger or my sarcasm. “It was instinct.”

“Yeah?” Heat rose in my cheeks. “Well, my instinct is to kill the piece of shit, so he can’t run around inflicting his practical jokes on anyone else. What happened to ‘He tried to steal from you, and for that he deserves death’? You taking that back?”

His head cocked sideways in that perfect down-my-beak-at-you look he seemed to use only when really frustrated. I brought that out in him a lot. “The sentiment stands, Evangeline. I don’t take it back. If I believed he had tried to steal from you out of calculated malice, I would tear his neck from his shoulders for you.”

“You just don’t believe it.”

“No, now that I understand what he is, I no longer believe it. However, he isn’t my prisoner to punish. He’s yours.”

Irritation prompted an instinctive reaction, and I clenched both fists. White-hot needles shot up my right wrist. I stumbled away from the interrogation scene, tears sparking again, trying to relax my hand and ease the hurt. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I dropped the knife on a small handmade side table and held my bandaged wrist up, closer to my chest.

“Evy?” Wyatt asked.

“I’m fine,” I snapped, harsher than I’d intended.

I pivoted toward Phin, my mind churning with indecision. Since I’d first met him, he had made a point of challenging all my preconceived and training-ingrained notions about the nonhumans in the city—and the rest of the world, by extension. My prejudices had kept me alive for a long time in a profession that left good people dead in a matter of years, sometimes months. Dregs were bad, so if they stepped out of line, they died. No jail, no reformation, no penitence—just death.

He’d shown me layers of a world I’d always viewed as flat, and in that cabin in the middle of the forest, when the irrational, passionate side of my brain was screaming at me to kill the thing that had hurt me while wearing Wyatt’s face, I hesitated. Because I saw the damned layers, and all I really wanted to see was the pùca’s blood splattered across the floor.

Goddamn Phineas for doing this to me.

“Okay, new deal,” I said, moving back to my previous position. The pùca watched me carefully, less tense now that I was without the knife. “You’ve got one minute to convince me you’re worth saving. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“I failed,” he replied. “I will die for this. At your hands or at his.”

“You seem pretty capable. If you escape us, what’s to stop you from running from Thackery?”

“Compelled to return.”

There was that damned word again. “What compels you?”

“Failure brings death to my enisi.”

“Phin?”

“The closest human translation,” Phin said, “is ‘grandfather.’ ”

My mouth fell open. A human was blackmailing a Dreg by threatening a family member—and here I’d thought nothing else could surprise me today.

Chapter Eleven

An hour’s discussion around the sofa kept leading us in frustrating circles. The trickster, whose preferred name was Axon, had met Thackery in a neutral location to receive the syringes, instructions, and verification of his enisi’s capture. Axon had been unable to “taste” Thackery during the meeting—his word for how he knew if someone was ripe for tricking—and that was unusual. His people had targeted humans throughout history because we were so “delicious.” His word.

As my adrenaline rush cut off and my body settled in to heal itself, I’d curled up on one corner of the sofa with a mug of instant soup and tried to be useful in the discussion. Mostly I listened to Wyatt and Phin bat around ideas on how to find Thackery, ways to use Axon against him, the merits of letting Axon help us versus locking him up good and tight, and who we should include in the current problem.

The latter interested me the most. Kismet hadn’t reported me as alive, so her original report on the factory fire and my demise stood on record. Her Hunters were sworn to secrecy. If we needed backup muscle, her team was the only real recourse. Willemy’s murder was unsolved. For now. The theory that a powerful Fey was helping Thackery created a good argument against involving Amalie yet—if we could even reach her to do so.

The only thing we knew for certain was that Thackery wanted my blood, and he was going through a hell of a lot of trouble not to kill me for it.

“The Assembly will assist if you ask them,” Phin said, nearest me on the sofa. “They have great respect for Evangeline, and I can curry much support from the Clans.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to have more than just humans on the lookout for him,” I said. “But I don’t want to see more innocents dragged into this, and he’s been off the grid for this long. I can’t see him slipping up and getting randomly spotted on the street.”

“And when Axon doesn’t return on time with your blood, Thackery will send someone else to find you. Perhaps we should use that to our advantage and try trapping him?”

“The trouble with sitting around and waiting is that the enisi dies. If he’s just as irritating as his grandson, I can’t say I care much in the long run, but I’m not fond of letting hostages get killed.”

“Which gives us about three hours to devise an alternate solution.”

I glanced at the only clock in the room—an old cast-iron skillet modified with clockworks and numbers—and verified Phin’s time frame. Axon had been told to return to a specific phone booth at three o’clock today in order to verify he had my blood and receive further instructions. We’d already shot down David’s suggestion to use Axon as bait and coax Thackery out of hiding. Axon was intellectually incapable of participating in subterfuge on the level required to pull that off.

Fucking literalism.

“I just can’t believe Kismet hasn’t turned anything up,” I said, more to myself than the others, since we’d already covered the topic forty minutes ago. “How has Thackery managed these experiments for years without leaving a paper trail for us to follow?”

Phin shook his head. David huffed from his spot on the far end of the sofa.