Three Days To Dead (23 page)

“Get back inside,” I said.

Alex blanched. “What—?”

“Just go!” I gave him a shove. He started running, and I followed, Isleen somewhere behind me.

The helicopter rose up over the west side of the mall, ten times louder the moment it was in sight. The pavement exploded by my feet. Alex shouted. The trail of automatic gunfire followed us like a shadow, marking our trail until we burst into the safety of the mall’s interior.

We came to an ungraceful stop near the fountain, panting and red-faced. Even Isleen seemed ruffled, disturbed by the change in events. Through the entrance, we watched the helicopter land in the middle of the U-shaped parking lot.

“Who the hell are they?” Alex asked.

“No idea,” I said.

Isleen raced back to the car, as light as a shadow. She ducked into the car’s interior and withdrew almost immediately, gun in hand. She rejoined us at the fountain. Past the bulk of the ruined car, two familiar faces leapt from the helicopter.

Tully and Wormer, decked out in flak jackets and carrying enough ammo for six men, once again opened fire on the mall’s fake wall. Bullets pinged off the car bumper. Surprise colored their faces even from a distance.

“Christ,” I muttered.

“Aren’t those the guys from my apartment?” Alex asked. He’d gone pale, mouth tight. “They look pissed.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“You know them?” Isleen asked. She aimed at her targets, but didn’t fire.

“Triads,” I said. “Wyatt kidnapped and tortured their Handler for information. How the hell did they track us?”

“It may be chance. We created a sensation down the street. Perhaps they were patrolling at precisely the right time.”

“Or the wrong time.”

“Indeed.”

A few more random shots preceded their flight toward the mall. And us.

“Shall I kill them?” Isleen asked, keeping someone in her sights. “Or merely slow them down?”

“What rounds?”

“Regular bullets.”

“Slow them down.”

She tilted the gun barrel down a few degrees. She squeezed the trigger. Tully dropped, blood spurting from his left thigh. Wormer faltered, concern for his comrade overwhelming his instincts. Isleen shot the back of his right thigh, and down he went with a cry. Both were a foot shy of the hidden entrance.

“What about the guy in the helicopter?” Alex asked.

Our collective heads turned. Air hissed and squealed, even above the din of the rotating chopper blades. Smoke, a flash of metal, and then the helicopter exploded in a cacophony of flame and heat and thunderous noise.

The concussion flattened Tully and Wormer to the pavement. Their cries were lost to the roaring fire. Heat rippled the air inside the mall, scorching and thick. Debris pinged against the building and car like hailstones. Flaming bits rained down on the injured
men outside. The back of Tully’s shirt caught fire and spread fast, like a match to flash paper. He began to scream.

I was on my feet and running to the tune of Alex’s surprised shouts. Wormer was out cold, unable to help his companion. They may have been my enemies that day, but I couldn’t watch a former colleague burn to death. I tackled Tully and slapped at the oil-fueled flames eating his shirt and scorching his skin. My hands blistered and wept, but I didn’t stop until the fire was out. Tully was whimpering, facedown, un-moving.

I felt for Wormer’s pulse and found it strong. Good. I pulled my hand back. A red-feathered dart pierced Wormer’s shoulder where my arm was less than a second before. I toppled sideways. A second struck the pavement by my foot. Shit. I crabbed backward, driven by pain and surprise, followed by more darts, until the shadows of the mall enveloped me.

Alex was there, trying to look at my hands. The top of Wormer’s head exploded from a gunshot I didn’t hear, see, or expect. Tully tried to sit up and flee. He collapsed a moment later, half his face gone. I gasped, choking on bile.

“Who did that, Evy?” Alex asked. He looped one arm around my waist and hauled me to my feet. I let him drag me back to the cover of the fountain, still stunned by the rapid-fire change of events. In less than five minutes, things had gone from bad to completely fucked.

Another dart sailed over my shoulder and pinged off the front of the fountain. I dove for cover. Rough
tile scraped my elbows. Alex landed next to me, on his stomach. He turned his head, looked right at me, and said, “Damn.”

“What?”

His head dropped to the floor and lolled. My heart nearly stopped. One of the darts was lodged in his hip. I pulled it out and threw it. The dart shattered against the far wall. The sound brought no satisfaction. Whoever was out there wanted us alive, and they were willing to murder Triads to get us.

“Evangeline,” Isleen said. “You must run.”

I glared. Her lavender eyes gave nothing away. Footsteps echoed around us. Small, many, and closing in fast.

“You must. They want you, child.”

“Alex—”

“You have no friends, only duty.”

A familiar line, one that Wyatt had tried on me once upon a time, back when I was new to the Triads and just learning the ropes. It didn’t work back then, and it wasn’t working in the mall. I did have friends. Friends I could no longer protect.

Isleen handed me the gun. I took a breath, turned, and bolted back down the mall corridor, toward the Sanctuary, firing over my shoulder as I went, hoping to get a target. No time to look, no time to see who was hunting me.

The only thought in my head was escape. Live to fight another day. I was completely alone. The Sancutary seemed to call to me, beckon me toward its powerful center. Everything blurred and, for an instant, I was sure my feet left the ground. I saw the
interior of the Sanctuary, smelled the incense. Felt the warmth. Two places at once.

One … two … three stings in my lower back. Cold permeated my legs, my arms, my chest. I fell toward blackness, even as the floor rushed up to meet me.

Consciousness returned like an anvil. A headache and queasy stomach dropped out of nowhere and knocked me back to the real world. The dim room and stark ceiling sent a bolt of panic through my abdomen. Adrenaline set my heart pounding. I jerked my hands. Instead of finding them bound above my head, they moved easily at my sides. My back was on something hard and cool.

It still smelled of waste and sweat, but I wasn’t in that damnable closet again.

“Evy?”

The familiar voice startled me. I rolled onto my side and drew my knees up, prepared to spring. The sudden movement sent my stomach churning. My vision darkened. I swallowed against the overwhelming need to vomit.

I was in a jail cell of some sort, five-by-eight maximum, with no cot and a bucket in place of a toilet. Iron bars made up three of the walls, with cement blocks the fourth. A bare orange bulb glowed from an open
fixture just outside of the cell. Others dotted the corridor every ten feet or so. I could see straight through to the other cells. The two on my left were empty. The one immediately to my right was not.

Wyatt knelt on his side of the bars, hands clenched around the slim poles. I blinked, certain the apparition would disappear. It didn’t. A purple bruise colored his left cheekbone. His nose was red and slightly swollen, and his knuckles were flecked with dried blood.

“You’re alive,” I said.

“So are you.”

He smiled, and I nearly broke my nose trying to hug him through the bars. My arms were slim enough to make it through, but he could only squeeze my shoulders and touch my face. I pressed my lips to his forehead, inhaling his familiar scent.

“I didn’t think I’d find you again,” I said.

“It’s not quite the rescue I was hoping for, but I’ll take it.”

Rescue. Shit. “I screwed up, Wyatt. I let myself get caught.”

“Doesn’t matter, Evy, we’ll figure this out. We always do.”

I looked past him, at the cell on his other side. It was empty. “Did they bring Alex and Isleen here, too?”

“You met Isleen?”

“We ran into each other at the train station earlier today.” Or yesterday, depending on how long I’d been unconscious. “She’s been helping us. She was there when we were captured.”

“I haven’t seen her.” His frown hardened. “Another guy was here for a while. They took him about an hour ago, while he was still unconscious.”

Fear twisted my stomach. I grabbed my throat and found bare skin. I gazed at the floor of my cell, even down the front of my T-shirt. The cross necklace was gone. God damn me for losing it. “They? Who’s doing this, Wyatt? It can’t be the Triads.”

“It’s not them, Evy. After they picked me up at the burger place, they took me to one of our holding stations near the Anjean. It was mostly Kismet and Willemy, and I spent an hour or so not answering their questions. Rufus showed up and said he wanted to talk to me. The door opened again, and suddenly he was shot….”

He looked down. I squeezed his hands, urging him to finish.

“I remember a flash grenade and a lot of shouting, and then I woke up here. Broad daylight and they’re running around like it’s nothing.”

“Vampires?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Halfies. I didn’t even see them until they brought you two in a few hours ago. No questioning, no talking.”

It was still the same day, probably evening. Not as much time had passed as I’d thought, but that still didn’t explain—“What do Halfies want with us?” They’d gone through a lot of trouble to capture us alive—just a little more proof that they had, in fact, been targeting my partners at the train bridge. Not me.

“I’m not sure, Evy. The Halfies aren’t organized enough to be the brains of this, whatever this is. They’re following someone else’s orders.”

“Orders like setting me up, getting me hunted down, and keeping us locked down here for God knows how long?”

“Something like that.”

“What about your Gift, Wyatt? Why haven’t you used it to summon a key or something?”

He pointed toward the far wall of the corridor. At first, I saw only more cement blocks. But dangling from a nail, wrapped in twine, was a slender orange crystal. “It’s blocking me,” he said. “Every time I try to do something, it zaps me like a cattle prod. I’ve never been cut off from my power source before. It’s so strange, like I’m missing an arm or something.”

I realized the distant sense of static I’d felt since my rebirth was, likewise, gone. The crystal cut us off from the sources of magic—what Isleen referred to as Breaks—but how in the blue blazes did a Halfie get hold of one?

“Well, if they haven’t questioned you, why take Alex?”

“Dinner?”

I slapped him harder than I intended. He stared, hurt sparking in his black eyes.

“I’m sorry, Evy,” he said.

“He’s a nice guy, Wyatt. He didn’t have to help me, but he did.” The idea of Alex surrounded by Halfies, each one taking a bite out of his arm or neck or leg, enraged me. “So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. Have you remembered anything new?”

“Boy, have I.” I fed him the details of my
Mo’n Rath
experience, complete with visuals on Kelsa and the reason behind Max’s strange reaction to me. I left out some of the torture details, not wishing to relive them or inflict them upon Wyatt, but I saw the anger
spark in him—fury at what I didn’t say, horror at what I did.

“When you didn’t come back to the hotel by noon,” he said, “I knew something was wrong. I should have started looking for you sooner.”

“You wouldn’t have found me. Wyatt, is it possible that the alliance we’ve heard about isn’t with the ruling vampire Families, but with the Halfies? They’ve always been outsiders, hunted by us, and treated like shit by the Bloods. It makes sense that they’d try for a power shift, if they made out good on the deal.”

“I’ve considered that, too. It certainly puts Ash and Jesse’s deaths into perspective. The Triads are too busy chasing you to see what else is happening.”

“Something still doesn’t make sense.”

He tilted his head. “What’s that?”

“Me.”

“What do you mean?”

“They could have picked any Triad to attack, Wyatt, but they chose yours. They chose me. Kelsa said someone was paying a lot of money for me, but not in the way I assumed. Whoever wanted me paid her to do what she did, and to ensure that you were the one who found me. But why? All they had to do was kill me and hide my body. You would have kept the Triads looking for me for days or weeks until I was found. Why set it up the way they did?”

“I don’t know. I really wish I did, but I don’t. And it isn’t the only thing that doesn’t add up.”

“Like why keep you down here, alive, and not torture you?”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Are you advocating violence against my person now?”

“No, jackass, just a logical ordering of events. They killed Wormer and Tully this afternoon while they were capturing us. Shot them dead. But they used tranqs on us. Why do they want me alive?”

Aggravation mounting, I stood up on shaky legs and started pacing the narrow length of the cell. Confusion, anger, and remnants of despair all bubbled up through my mouth before I could censor myself. “Why the fuck did you bring me back, Wyatt? Why didn’t you just let me rest in peace? Hell has to be better than this.”

He wilted in front of me—every bit of light, every scrap of fight in him fled. I didn’t regret the words. I only hated that they were true, and how precisely they reflected my feelings. Overwhelmed and frustrated, I took it out on my only available target—a man who’d given up everything for me.

“Why?” I grabbed the bars separating us. He had to say it. I had to hear it.

He retreated to the corner of his cell, as far from me as he could get. Worse still, he turned his back. I had no way to make him face me. He couldn’t disappear behind a bathroom door, but he could still escape.

My knuckles ached. I loosened my death grip on the bars—a wall that might as well have been solid rock. I was livid, but not at him. I was furious at myself for not mounting the rescue I’d hoped for. For failing at the happily ever after he so desperately needed to believe in.