Another Kind of Dead

Fabric whispered behind me. I twisted my neck to look at Wyatt. Intense concentration creased his forehead and deepened the lines around his mouth. The look was similar to when he was summoning something difficult—far away or too large to move without serious effort. Energy crackled around us. I started to ask what he was doing but didn’t want to break his focus.

The hybrid shrieked. A dark bruise appeared on its neck, to the left of where its Adam’s apple should be. I blinked. Wyatt grunted. On his outstretched palm was a tiny square of metal, barely half an inch wide.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Tracking device, I think,” Wyatt said.

I watched, flummoxed, while Wyatt dropped the device into the sink, turned on the water, and then flipped the switch on the disposal. Metal gears ground it with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. When he turned it off, I asked, “How did you know?”

“I guessed. I couldn’t see it, but I felt something inside its body that could be summoned, something small. I wasn’t sure what it was until I had it in my hand.”

“I thought you needed line of sight to summon something.”

He blinked. “I always have before,” he said slowly, speaking while turning the realization over in his mind. “But it was just under the skin. Practically line of sight.”

Neither one of us said it, but we had to both be thinking it—had Wyatt’s death and resurrection-via-magic last week altered his Gift?

“Guess this master likes to keep track of his toys,” I said, dragging the conversation back to our prisoner.

“Looks that way.”

Still out of reach, I squatted eye level with the sobbing creature. It seemed to know it had lost its last advantage. “So,” I said, drawing the single syllable out into three, “now that backup isn’t going to find you, how about you make a choice? Long, slow death, or fast and mostly painless?” Part of me begged it to say long and slow.

Too-human eyes gazed at me, full of very human tears. How did a goblin get eyes so human, ears so much like mine? Its skin was smooth, unmarred by age, almost young. Colored oddly, but not slick and oily like a goblin’s normally was.

My stomach twisted as a frightening idea burrowed into my brain and didn’t let go. This hybrid was not, as I first assumed, a goblin with human traits. Worse than that, it had once been human, and a very young human, given its size. I was certain of it, and grew more certain as the seconds passed—so certain I nearly vomited. I did drop the knife.

“Evy?” Wyatt was beside me instantly. I couldn’t look away from the creature, but he must have seen something in my expression. “Evy, what is it?”

Ignoring him, I pierced the hybrid with a stare. “You were human once.”

The creature cocked its head, a picture of perfect agony. It wetted its lips with a pink tongue—not the thin sandpaper strip of a goblin. “Toe … kin,” it said. Raised its broken hand toward its chest. “Token.”

“Your name is Token?” Wyatt asked.

No, no, no. I didn’t want to know the thing’s name. Not when I was about to put it out of its misery. We weren’t friends, or allies. It was an abomination of nature. A creature that had no business existing, much less having a name.

“Name,” it tried out the word. “Yes.”

“Okay, great,” I said, snarl indicating it was anything but. “So, Token, what’s your master’s name?”

Token crunched up his face. “Token … good.”

I snorted. “Good? You murdered a man!”

Wyatt wrapped his hand around my forearm, a silent comfort and an attempt to control me. My temper was spiking, and he knew it.

“Master told … me.”

“Your master was wrong.”

Token’s face reflected utter disbelief. He’d stopped crying, but a river of clear snot trailed from nose to chin. He looked like a chastised child who’d been told Santa Claus was dead. “Can’t be,” he said. “Is master.”

“Even masters can fuck up.”

Wyatt made a sound—something between a grunt and a snort. We knew all too well how people in charge could make blind, dumbass decisions that got people under them killed. Me, for example.

Token stared at me, long seconds ticking away while his childlike mind tried to puzzle things out. Something sparked in his brown eyes. I braced for an attack. He surprised me with “You … master?”

I shuddered. “No, I’m no one’s master.”

“Token’s master.”

“Fuck you, you piece of shit.” I shot to my feet too damned fast and my left knee buckled. Wyatt caught me before I fell. I pushed him away, harder than I intended, and he almost tipped backward over the sofa.

I wheeled around and stormed into the kitchenette, hands fisted, fuming. Angrier for the uncontrolled outburst than at Token’s actual statement. “Hate” wasn’t a strong enough word for how I felt about goblins. Experience had taught me everything that training hadn’t, and I’d put all that information to good use over the last four years, hunting and killing any I could find. Enjoying it when I knew they’d broken the law and harmed a human. And I’d done my job well.

If I’d done it too well, I had paid for it and more ten days ago, when a goblin queen had kidnapped me and tortured me to death. She’d enjoyed it, returning every injury I’d inflicted on her kind and then some over the course of two and a half days. I’d hated goblins before that; now my gut desire (right or wrong) was to see the entire race wiped off the face of the Earth.

Genocide wouldn’t make the pain go away, but the illusion did tend to brighten my day.

I slapped my open palms flat against the counter, frustrated at my inability to control myself. My former partners, Jesse and Ash, had taught me what Boot Camp never could—how to put a safety on my hair-trigger temper. How and when to unleash that anger upon the Dregs I hunted. All that training had been destroyed by my first death, and I was constantly struggling to keep it in check. I’d be ineffective if every goblin I stumbled across set me off into a rage.

Wyatt appeared on the opposite side of the counter. He slid his hands over mine. I looked up, into warm black eyes. No sympathy, no annoyance—just understanding, colored with an unspoken command to get ahold of myself.

“We should have suspected this,” he said.

I quirked an eyebrow. “What? Me blowing up?”

“No.” The corner of his mouth pulled into a half smile. “We should have expected more hybrids. The lab we found at Olsmill probably wasn’t the only one. It was just the only one we found.”

The horror movie laboratory I’d discovered in the basement of a defunct nature preserve had held monsters from nightmares—genetic mutations of all sorts, caged in cinder block and steel. Things that shouldn’t have existed, much like the boy-monster impaled to my apartment wall.

“If there was another lab,” I said, “then who turned Token loose?” A chill niggled its way down my spine. “A third partner?”

“Possibly. We know that Tovin was the brains of the operation, and we know that Leonard Call provided the muscle to get it all done.”

“But neither one of them were scientists, capable of combining and manipulating the DNA of such disparate species.” I tried to recall my conversation (if it could be termed that) with Call the night I’d put him into a coma. He’d admitted to working with Tovin, to providing brawn in the form of cooperative goblins and Halfies, in return for Tovin’s help in his own personal quest for vengeance. Vengeance against Wyatt specifically, and humanity in general, for the murder of Call’s lover.

Motives that I understood but couldn’t support—for obvious reasons.

“Following that train of thought,” Wyatt said, “we could also assume that whoever organized the attack on Boot Camp wants their science projects back.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the creatures we’d found at Olsmill. I’d only gotten a good look at three of them. One had been a teenage boy. Half his body was stone, as though he’d been split down the middle and