It looked past me, at the body by my feet, and snarled. Dry lips pulled back, showing off a single row of sharp, jagged teeth. Bile scorched the back of my throat. It still didn’t attack. Good for us.
I had a small knife strapped to the side of my right boot, an easy grab, but the goblin-thing would be on me the instant I reached. The knife I’d taken from beneath the coffee table was still on the floor where I’d dropped it minutes ago, halfway between me and the monster. More weapons were in the kitchenette, another beneath the sofa, others in the bedrooms. If I went for any of them, it could attack and kill Wyatt.
Its too-human eyes flickered around the apartment, as though calculating its surroundings and various threats. It was a predatory thing to do, a hunter’s trait. But goblins were scavengers. The males didn’t assess threats; they followed orders given to them by their queens.
That observant gaze swung back to me, and I realized I’d whispered out loud. Our gazes locked. I thought I saw a spark of emotion, some distant cousin to regret—which was impossible in a goblin, so it had to be something else—then it snarled again.
“Kill,” it growled.
My brain stuttered to a halt as the full implications of that single word sank in. I gaped, my chest tight, breath frozen in my lungs. Goblin males didn’t speak English. Females can barely manage the language in their harsh, guttural voices. It couldn’t have spoken.
“Kill who?” Wyatt asked.
It pointed one sharply clawed finger at Peters’s body. “Whoever … went to.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d faced down a creature that had traits of more than one species. The first had been right after my resurrection, when I was attacked by a monster from a horror movie. Part vampire and part beast, the thing had been one hundred percent predator. Engineered by whoever had been helping Tovin, it was a prototype to house the other demons the mad elf hoped to bring across First Break. We’d found even more hybrid monstrosities in Tovin’s underground lab.
Only this one seemed mildly intelligent.
“Why?” I asked.
It swung its hateful stare back at me. Mixed with its need to attack and kill was a bit of confusion. I latched onto that as its best weakness. “Master … said,” it ground out.
“Who’s your master?”
Wrong question. It moved at a speed I didn’t expect, in a direct line for my guts, clawed hand slashing and hoping to spill them all over the floor. I dropped at the last possible moment, hips twisting, and brought my right heel up to crack it in the chest. It tumbled sideways, stunned by the blow. Claws ripped the hem of my pant leg, missing skin.
I rolled out of its way, already reaching for the knife at my ankle. My fingers closed around the handle just as a body slammed me sideways into the sofa—thing was fucking fast. The knife clattered to the floor, out of reach. Dammit. I jerked to my right, throwing all my weight down, smashing the creature against the cement floor. Its claws ghosted the skin on my neck, too damned close.
“Evy, left,” Wyatt shouted.
I moved without thinking, tumbling to my left, barely missing the couch a second time. A dark blur passed—it had to be Wyatt. His target let out some sort of grunt. I twisted around, rolled to my feet, and sought the nearest weapon handy, which just happened to be a ten-dollar thrift store table lamp. I yanked off the shade, ripped the cord out of the wall, and pulled it back like a baseball bat.
Wyatt and the goblin-thing were tangled together on the floor, wrestling for dominance. Both of Wyatt’s hands were wrapped around the creature’s wrists, keeping those claws at a distance, but what Wyatt had in bulk, the goblin had in speed. It wriggled like an eel on a fishing line. I looked for an opportunity to hit it with my lamp, but it just wouldn’t stop moving.
Screw this. I shifted the lamp into my left hand and scooped up my discarded knife in my right. I turned back to the flailing pair and took aim, ready to drive my knife straight into the middle of the goblin-thing’s back.
“Don’t kill it,” Wyatt said.
“Why not?” But I stabbed it in the back of the thigh instead—no easy feat with a moving target—and for a brief moment of panic, I thought I’d missed and hit Wyatt.
Then the goblin shrieked and lurched away, tugging at the knife stuck in its leg. Wyatt sat up quickly. The front of his shirt was torn, four equally wide slash marks. “We need to question it.”
Oh, right, a talking goblin-hybrid. As much as we needed to pick answers out of its brain, killing was so much simpler than taking prisoners.
The creature was crouched near the kitchenette counter, blood running down its leg. It looked at the knife I’d stuck it with, then tossed it over its shoulder. It snarled at us, this time less angry and more … fearful?
“Don’t like being ganged up on?” I asked.
It bared its teeth.
“You’re not as impressive as your big brothers.” Taunting an unknown element wasn’t the smartest trick in my arsenal, and Wyatt gave me a withering stare.
It growled something that could have been any number of garbled cuss words and lunged—
The splat was punctuated by a pained roar. Wyatt bolted past me. I curled onto my knees and pulled up in a crouch just in time to see Wyatt spear the critter’s left hand to the wall with a knife. It squealed and slapped at the knife’s hilt with its useless, broken right hand. It tried its teeth, but Wyatt kicked it in its jeans-clad groin. The thing shrieked.
“I think that was a two-base hit,” Wyatt said without looking away from our quarry.
“Three at least,” I said. “Maybe even a homer.” I dropped the lamp on the sofa and circled, giving the wriggling creature a wide berth. Actual tears streaked its cheeks. Amazing.
I took the brief respite from attack to remove the knife from my ankle sheath. As soon as I got what I needed, I intended to kill it quickly—which was an odd realization. I should have wanted to take my time, use the captured goblin for a little therapeutic payback for all the hell I’d been put through by one of its queens, but I didn’t. Something in its too-human eyes, as brown as my own, quelled that need. Produced just a little bit of mercy.
And let’s face it—mercy and I were not good friends.
The hybrid kicked out with one foot, slipped on its own blood, and fell. Its hand was knifed to the wall above its head, and the jerking stop produced another bellow of anguish. Wyatt had the sense to dash back across the apartment and shut the door. No need to arouse the neighbors any more than we already had.
“Who sent you here?” I asked, staying out of the wailing creature’s reach.
“Master,” it snarled.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, we’ve been over that. Who is your master?”
“He.”
Okay, that narrowed my suspect list down to the entire male population of the city, maybe even the state. “Do you know his name?”
It snarled and tried to stand. I kicked its legs out from under it, eliciting another shriek as its hand ripped against the knife. Blood ran down its arm and pitter-pattered to the floor. The color was off—some dusky shade of mauve that wasn’t goblin-fuchsia or human-red. I sniffed the air. Goblin blood had a very distinct seawater odor. All I smelled was sweat and, from the dead body behind me, the faint metallic scent of Peters’s blood.
“What is your master’s name?” I asked again. It didn’t reply. I dangled my knife in front of its face. “Want me to nail your other hand to the wall?”
A whimper hid behind its growl; it understood my threat. “For … forbid … den.”
“You’re forbidden from saying his name?”
Nod.
