Wrong Side Of Dead (19 page)

At least half the civilians are out.

Marcus throws his Halfie male halfway across the bus, knocking down several other freaking-out passengers
like a hellish bowling ball down a lane of human pins. The Halfie lands and rolls, coming up next to Stupid, who’s helping a woman climb out a window. Halfie lurches at Stupid. Milo grabs the Halfie’s leg and yanks.

The Halfie growls and reaches for Milo. Felix tackles the Halfie with a shout, and the pair goes tumbling over a seat and out of sight.

Lacking other weapons, I select another large shard of glass and give Red Lipstick the same tracheotomy I gave her late boyfriend. The thick odor of blood sours my stomach. Gross.

Familiar voices shouting outside—our backup has arrived. Awesome.

Stupid once again tries to be a hero by jumping onto the back of the Halfie who’s fighting with Felix. He latches on like a monkey, arms around the Halfie’s throat, and the two tumble sideways onto the glass-strewn floor/side of the bus. All I can see of Felix are his legs.

Apparently finished with his Halfie, cat-Marcus lopes over and hisses in Stupid’s face. Stupid smartly lets go of his hostage. Marcus clamps bone-crushing jaws down on the Halfie’s throat, finger-thick teeth piercing skin. He snaps the Halfie’s neck with a jerk of his own.

I stumble over to Milo, who’s twisted halfway around trying to get a look at Felix. “Hold still and keep pressure on that,” I snap. The sound of my own voice startles me. It was a strangely silent battle, save the shrieks of the civilian passengers.

“Felix,” he says.

“I’ll check on him, just stay.” Adrenaline has me shaking. My heart’s pounding hard enough to crack a few ribs. I grab Stupid’s arm and yank him down. “Put your hands on that wound and don’t you fucking let go, you hear me?”

Stupid nods, and he puts enough pressure down to
make Milo cry out. He’s losing blood, but not life-threatening amounts, and I want it to stay that way.

Marcus is making the rounds, sniffing the bodies. I’m positive that whoever’s outside is making sure none of the escaped passengers was bitten. I haul ass to my feet and pick my way over to Felix. He’s curled on his right side between the seats, arms tucked beneath his chin, eyes shut. His jaw muscles twitch, eyes moving beneath the lids. The pose sends a chill racing down my spine.

“Felix,” I say, shaking his ankle. “Felix, are you bitten?”

“Fuck.” The single word is as much an answer as a prayer. “Fuck, fuck, fuck …”

Bile scorches the back of my throat and I swallow it down, suppressing the rising tide of panic. Not again. I can’t watch someone else I care about turn into one of those fucking things. I won’t. “Let me see, Felix.”

“Evy?” Milo shouts. “Is he okay?”

“Felix, let me see,” I say, ignoring Milo.

The eye I can see rolls again, then the lid peels open. I don’t remember what color Felix’s eyes were, but they shouldn’t glimmer with an opalescent sheen. And it cements my greatest fear. My stomach flips and threatens to empty. Tears sting both of my eyes.
Shit
.

I choke. “Goddammit.”

“Evy! Is he—?”

Felix snarls and lunges.

Voices drew me out of a nice, quiet place, and I wanted to tell them to shut the hell up, only I couldn’t. My mouth felt dry, stuffed with cotton, and getting it moving took way too much effort. I considered going back to sleep for a while and ignoring whatever urgent crisis was likely unfolding around me, but someone squeezed my hand and said my name.

No one ever let me sleep.

I peeled one eye open, then the other, blinking up at Milo’s concerned face. He leaned down, staring so intently that I croaked out a “What?”

“Just checking,” he said.

“For?”

“You were, uh, drenched, Evy.” He blanched, a little green around the edges. This close, I saw the red lines webbing his eyes and their general puffiness. “We had to make sure it didn’t infect you.”

Drenched in what? I tried to sit up, only to find my wrists restrained. Panic hit like a cold slap, and I lunged, nearly clipping Milo’s chin with my head. I was on a cot somewhere, handcuffed to the frame, my clothes soaked, and I had no idea what … 
Felix. He exploded in our jail
.

“Get these damned things off me,” I said.

“Calm down, I’ve got the key.” Milo unlocked my wrists, then scurried back away.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the cot. The room tilted. My head spun a little and I gripped it in both hands.

“Sorry, but we had to,” he said.

“I know.” My back ached, probably from being thrown by the explosion I only vaguely remembered. And I was moderately grateful that I’d been hosed down. I’d never seen a person explode from the inside out and did not want to see the gore left behind in the interrogation room.

We were in one of the infirmary patient rooms, and the sounds of nearby voices hadn’t diminished. People were talking, lots of them, but too far away and too many at once to distinguish individuals or actual words.

“Was anyone hurt?” I asked.

“You and Marcus took the brunt of it,” Milo said. His voice was cold, emotionless, like he was trying his damnedest to not lose his shit. “Dr. Vansis pulled some shrapnel out of your back, and Marcus took a big chunk in his left ankle.”

“Shrapnel?”

“Mostly wood from the chair. Some, uh, bone.”

I twisted my arm backward, poking at the source of the ache, and found a taped-down square of gauze. “Marcus is okay?”

“Stitched up and grumpy as ever. He saved your life.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him. How are you?”

He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I was in the outer office. I wasn’t hit.”

“Not what I meant.”

His expression cracked and a flash of grief and horror made it through. Then he blinked, and a perfect mask of anger settled back into place. “A half-Blood exploded in
front of me. Not an image I’ll soon forget, but we’ve got way worse problems now.”

“Such as?” Hey, wait a minute—“How’s Wyatt?”

Milo frowned. “Sedated, I think. You were out for only about twenty minutes, so I don’t think Dr. Vansis knows anything about his condition that you don’t already know.”

“Condition? What’s that mean?”

Dr. Vansis stepped into the cubicle, his customary scowl in place. “It means I still don’t understand the reason for Mr. Truman’s rather violent reaction to the Lupa blood and/or saliva,” he said. “I’ve made a formal request to the Assembly for information. Hopefully, they’ll have something more useful for me than speculation and hearsay.”

“So he’s still sick?”

“Extremely sick, unlike you.” He took a penlight from his lab coat pocket and flashed it in my eyes as he spoke. “He’s running a one-hundred-and-four-degree fever, has the shakes, complains of flulike aches all over his body, and both wound sites show signs of serious infection. I have him on IV fluids and a broad-spectrum antibiotic, but I don’t know that the antibiotic is helping.”

I followed his finger with my eyes, feeling like an idiot but understanding the reason for the little tests. I’d taken yet another blow to the head and, healing ability or not, he was a studious doctor. “All that from werewolf bites,” I said, once he seemed satisfied with my condition.

“The bites or the blood, I’m not sure yet,” Vansis said. “All of our knowledge of the Lupa is carefully guarded by the Elders. Hopefully, I’ll hear from them soon.”

“What about the vampires? They’re old. Isleen is centuries old. Maybe they know something.… What?”

The look Milo and Dr. Vansis exchanged set my teeth on edge.

“All the vampires in the Watchtower are being quarantined in their quarters,” Dr. Vansis said.

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said they were staging a musical production in the cafeteria. “Why?”

“Because the purpose of detonating that half-Blood you captured wasn’t to cause internal structural damage to the facilities, or to necessarily try to kill whoever was standing closest to him at the time.”

“So why, then?”

“The half-Blood was used as a delivery system for some sort of pathogen,” Dr. Vansis said. “It was aerosolized during the explosion, and many of the vampires have become infected.”

“How many were exposed?”

“All of them.”

Oh God. The sun rises around 5:45 in the summer, and the majority of our vampires patrol at night. Even the vampires who used that fancy UV-blocking sunscreen preferred nighttime, as it enhanced their vision. They were always back by 5:30. Felix had known that. He’d known exactly when the most vampires would be in the Watchtower because he’d once been part of this, which meant that Thackery would have known the perfect time to blow his little present.

Walter Thackery and his hatred of all vampires strikes again. “Isleen?”

“She’s sick, as is Eleri and at least twenty more.” At least twenty out of the forty-five or so who worked here on any given day.

No, no, no, no!
“Quince?”

“Fine, so far,” Milo said. “It’s affecting them randomly. So far there’s no way to know if they’ll all get sick, or if some of them are immune.”

“I’ve taken blood samples from a dozen, both sick and healthy,” Dr. Vansis said, “but contagious diseases
is not my area of expertise. And seeing as how you’re fine, I need to get back to work.”

He left without further information. I hauled ass to my feet, and my very wet shoes squished on the floor. Pink water oozed out.

“Have any humans or Therians been affected by this pathogen?” I asked.

“Not so far,” Milo replied.

“What’s it doing to the vampires?”

“Hypersensitivity to light and sound, shooting pains in the extremities, and they bruise if you touch them too hard.”

Sounded like the vampire version of a migraine—except for the bruising thing. “And these are just the early symptoms?”

“Yeah. Like I said, it’s only been about twenty minutes, but the first ones infected got sick fast.”

“If they aren’t all sick, is putting them in one confined space a good idea?”

Milo shrugged. “It was Isleen’s decision. She called her Family’s royal Father and he agreed with her. I guess they don’t want to risk exposing any vampires outside the Watchtower until they know what this is.”

The choice was understandable, from the vampire’s point of view. We didn’t know what was affecting them, what else it would do, or how far it would spread un-contained. Still … “Are we allowed to leave, or are we confined, too?”

“I really don’t know, Evy.” A flash of distress creased his forehead, and he looked lost. Young. “I mean, I just saw Felix blow up and I’m really not sure … I don’t …”

“I’m sorry.” I took a step toward him, then stopped when he flinched away. “It’s not easy to reconcile the thing you saw die with the person you knew.”

“Yeah. He seemed surprised.”

“That he’d been rigged to blow?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he was. He said something about his tracker not being a tracker. And I don’t think he expected to be caught last night.”

“Thackery sure did. He had to know we’d be at the rave.”

“Well, Thackery likes to have backup plans in place.” Hell, he could have the Lupa set to explode somehow, too, and the thought made me doubly glad we hadn’t brought our prisoner back to the Watchtower.

Milo ran a hand through his short hair. “How do you not know someone’s planted a bomb on you? Or in you?”

I had no answer.

“I just …” Milo sighed. “I can’t believe so much has gone so wrong so fast.”

No kidding. In just the last six hours, we’d captured Felix, had half a dozen Therians kidnapped, Wyatt was attacked by a werewolf, Felix exploded, and now the vampires were getting sick. Somehow everything connected back to Thackery, but I hadn’t yet drawn all the lines between the crazy dots.

“Did we save any samples of Felix’s blood?” I asked.

“I think so. Why?”

“Because something besides willpower was helping Felix, and we might find a hint in his blood.”

Determined to do something, I circled past Milo and stepped into the short hall. My room was at the end of the row of four, with all the noise activity happening farther down in the main infirmary area. The next door down was half-shut, and Marcus was arguing with someone about being allowed to use a cane. I made a mental note to thank him later.

The third room was empty. Wyatt was in the fourth. The conversation just a few yards away had my attention, but I went into Wyatt’s room anyway. He looked awful, like someone fighting a losing battle with a deadly
disease—all fevered, blotchy skin and labored breathing. The bandages on his neck and arm were stained red and yellow, hinting at the infection raging below the surface.

Frail came to mind, and I despised using that word to describe Wyatt Truman. Once again, the people I cared about were at the mercy of Walter-fucking-Thackery and his diseased whims.

I stepped toward the bed. Froze. I wanted to find a chair and sit next to Wyatt, hold his hand until he woke up. Be there so he wasn’t alone if he died from whatever ravaged his body. I needed to be there for him, like he’d been there for me countless times in the very recent past.

Only I couldn’t. There was too much to do, and if I could get to Thackery, maybe I could beat an antidote out of him. As much as my heart wanted me to stay with Wyatt, logic told me I’d help him best by being out in the city. Doing something.

I brushed his cheek with my knuckles, noting how the damp skin radiated heat. The last time I’d seen him in a bed like this, he’d just shielded me from another exploding Halfie and taken a piece of shrapnel in the back for it. The perfect alignment of it made me smile in spite of the situation.

“You keep fighting, hear me?” I said. “Fight for me.”

He slept on.

Milo trailed me into the main part of the infirmary, where I nearly walked into Astrid.

She gave me a quick, assessing glance. “Nothing keeps you down long, does it?”

“I’m contrary. What can I say?”