Another Kind of Dead

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 and 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.