Prey (55 page)

“Did you infect someone accidentally, Mia?” he asked, going back to what she’d said previously. He’d already searched the car, she didn’t have 344

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a weapon, but it was possible she had one in her purse. “Is that why you hate yourself?”

“I never infected anyone!” she roared. Her face was red, flushed with blood, and she was starting to sweat, cords standing out in her neck. She no longer looked barely legal; she looked every single month of her twenty-six years. “And I won’t! Not like Patrick, not like that fucking bitch Kelly, and they won’t infect anyone else either.”

“Kelly? Who’s Kelly?” She knew Patrick? Was that why he was on the list? “Did Patrick infect you?”

“That fucking son of a bitch!” she screeched, her voice raw with rage. “You men just can’t keep it in your fucking pants!”

“It’s a genetic flaw,” he replied, trying to calm her down. But he sensed the tipping point had been passed; there was no pulling her back down to earth now. He’d pushed her too hard, too fast; he hadn’t realized how fragile her sanity was. He knew from the profilers that there was an actual term for this, when a killer who had previously been slick and together started to lose it—it was called decompensating. And Mia was decompensating right before his eyes.

Wow. Eli really knew how to pick women, didn’t he?

She kept casting furtive glances at him in the rearview mirror, looking between him and the road. “You have to be stopped. You know that, don’t you?” She had lowered her voice to an almost calm register, which he knew was bad. She was probably totally disconnected from reality now.

He had no choice but to ride this, see where it landed him. He could take her if he had to, but he imagined she’d go down hard. She was crazy, after all. At least he wasn’t human. “I know. Are you gonna be the one to do it?”

She didn’t answer that, just swallowed hard, sweat running down her cheeks like tears, flesh colored from her foundation. “You know what I like about this car?”

Yeah, this couldn’t go anywhere good. “What?”

“It has an airbag.” And with that, she turned the steering wheel hard, too suddenly for him to reach over the seat and grab it, and crashed them head-on into an SUV in the oncoming lane.

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16

The Animal I Have Become

ROAN knew what was going to happen, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it as the wide, red front end of the SUV filled the windshield at a frightening speed. He knew enough to throw himself down on the seat—it was his best chance at surviving without serious injury—but even as he did so, impact reverberated through the car, a shudder like an explosion, safety glass shattering and flying around the car like a sharp whirlwind as gravity seemed to shift violently, throwing him forward into the seat that was also shoved back, and he was vaguely aware of hitting leather-coated metal with his face.

It hurt as gravity threw him back again and the world seemed to slew violently around, and another impact slammed the car, making gravity jump elsewhere once more.

The problem was he could feel the adrenaline spike through him, and he decided to let it ride, letting the partial transformation take care of whatever injuries he acquired. But he never considered the fact of what might happen if he lost consciousness mid-transformation, as his head slammed hard into the door.

THE Audi hit the Ford Explorer at somewhere near forty miles per hour.

The front ends of both vehicles crumpled, but the Audi nearly accordioned while the Explorer lost its fender and headlights, and the Audi was hit from behind by a Civic that was going far too fast and sent the Audi into a spin that ended with it crashing into a parked car on the opposite side of the road. The Explorer was nudged from behind, but the Nissan behind it had managed to turn away and only gave it a love tap, taking out a brake light and one of the Nissan’s headlights.

It was still a fucking bad wreck, and broken glass was scattered 346

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across the middle of the street like rock salt in winter. Darinda Murphy was already calling for paramedics and a black and white for traffic control as she pulled her unmarked sedan off into the parking lot of a fondue restaurant. (Jesus, who went to fondue restaurants?) Was Roan in the Audi? If she could believe a hooker, he was. And she rather hoped he wasn’t, because if he was actually hurt, she couldn’t beat the shit out of him.

Paris had called her ten minutes ago, clearly worried about Roan, who was staking out someone named Noah Hammond. Paris admitted they were investigating the killings and he was afraid that Roan, since he’d been identified, might be in immediate danger, and he couldn’t get a hold of him. She started to read Paris the riot act, but saved it. He was just following Roan, and Roan knew better than to delve into an open case.

What made it so much worse, and so deeply infuriating, was that Roan and his ever-tolerant boyfriend had gotten so much farther on the case than they had.

She was glad that she had just finished up at a crime scene at Blair and 43rd, putting her only a few blocks out from Jefferson Avenue. It allowed her to get down here and find the rental car that Roan had hired for the stakeout. She knocked on the tinted windows in increasing frustration, warning him she was going to bust out a window if he didn’t act like a goddamn man right this second. That was when a hooker across the street piped up and shouted, “You lookin’ for Officer Roan? He just left in that silver car down there.” And she pointed at an Audi that was just rounding the corner.

It was possible that the hooker was just fucking with her because her badge was visible on her belt, but calling Roan “Officer Roan” was such an odd thing to do, Murphy believed her. Must have been one of Roan’s skid-row friends from his days on the force. Roan was known as “that”

cop, the one who seemed to make friends among the junkies and whores, sad sacks and losers that you ran into more often than not on your rounds.

Each precinct had at least one, and she couldn’t say she was surprised that the ex-abused foster kid/gay/infected guy was a friend of the outcasts.

That was kind of a natural fit, wasn’t it? It was a sure winner in the office pool. (Although she’d lost the bet that he was a fan of musical theater —

apparently he “loathed” it. So much for that stereotype. Then again, she didn’t like it either, but no one went around saying lesbians did. But she didn’t like the plaid flannel/she-mullet look, so maybe that was an Infected: Prey

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equivalent.)

Paris hadn’t told her much, just given her the bare bones of what they had, and she chewed it over as she followed the car, three cars removed. A group usually wasn’t great at killing unless they were terrorists, but would Humanity First be considered a domestic terror group? Admittedly they simply targeted the infected, which put them in the realm of hate crime, but when you went around killing people, hate was generally implied. They seemed to be going forward on Roan’s hunches, but Roan’s hunches were another thing that could win you big bucks in the office pool. Maybe it was because he was a virus child—he did have that whole “smelling” thing (a dubious super-power if there ever was one)—but he often picked up on very subtle things that would later break a case. He was scary-good at times, which is why it kind of figured that being a beat cop would be the end of him.

But she needed more. If she was going to get warrants and start running people in, she needed something a bit more concrete, something she could put in front of a judge and not have laughed out of court. She wasn’t sure they had anything yet, except for Jordan DeSoto and his gun, and that all depended on how the ballistics tests came out.

But if anyone asked her if she thought Roan was on the right track, she would have said yes. Okay, legally proving it was one thing, but if Roan said the wheel was going to come up twenty-six red on the next spin, that’s where she’d put her money. Not that she’d tell him that; he didn’t need a big head. Besides, so far, what little she’d dug up on this case made no sense. It had the hallmarks of a random crime while clearly being deliberate, and frankly, a specific group working together would make more sense than a single person. It was just so unusual that it was hard to credit.

And didn’t she know, in the back of her mind, that Roan wouldn’t let this die? That if she asked for help finding the connections between the victims, he wouldn’t just do that and pull back. She knew he’d pry, and she was hoping that with his access to the infected community, he’d get something they couldn’t. She set him up, and she did it deliberately. Roan couldn’t fight temptation any more than she could and she knew it.

Then the accident occurred, without warning. The car didn’t swerve, it seemed to lunge across the white lines as if bound on committing suicide. It happened so fast she couldn’t be perfectly sure, but her instinct was that there was no way what she saw was an accident. After calling it 348

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in and parking, she quickly went out to the street to try and get some semblance of order imposed before backup arrived.

Already crowds were gathering, because that’s what they did at horrific wrecks, so she began shouting for people to get out of her way and holding out her badge, which allowed her to shove through and be as rude as possible. Of course, being a plain-clothed homicide cop should have given her no special access to the scene, no actual authority, but people were usually glad to hand over control when people could actually die.

The woman in the Explorer, a bottle blonde who looked like she’d just stepped out of the Anne Taylor catalog, was already on her cell phone, loudly explaining that she couldn’t be somewhere because some lunatic had just hit her, so Darinda dismissed her as okay—if you could bitch and moan like that, you were in great shape—and headed for the Audi.

There was a tall, slender Arab man with a strangely short mustache and a baseball hat by the Audi. He had opened the driver’s side door and was talking to the female driver, who appeared passed out on her airbag. If the sheer violence involved in the crash hadn’t made her pass out, it was possible the explosive release of the airbag had—they could do that, especially in smaller people (and this woman was a petite thing). She appeared to have a trickle of blood coming from one nostril, but it was just a smear.

The man was taking her pulse from her neck when Murphy moved up to him. “Sir, I think it’s best you step back,” she advised.

He looked at her, his brown eyes wide and curious. “Should we move her from the car? In case it, you know, catches on fire or something?”

She glanced up and down the length of the car. The engine wasn’t smoking, and she didn’t smell gas, so she shook her head. “It doesn’t appear she’s in immediate danger, so it’s best to leave her where she is until the paramedics arrive.”

He seemed reluctant, but he was only the good Samaritan and she had the badge, so he nodded and stepped back. Darinda found her eyes drifting back to the woman though, who, save for the blood coming from her nose, could have simply been asleep on a wide white pillow. Didn’t she look familiar somehow? She did, she just couldn’t place her face at the moment.

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“Murphy?” a familiar voice asked quizzically. She looked over her shoulder and saw Paris standing at the edge of the gathered crowd, with a short but powerfully built black man in a gray suit and tie. He had a shaved head and a trim goatee, and also looked familiar. Something about him screamed “hired muscle”, but she assumed it was some detective/executive security friend of Roan’s—at least he had contacts outside the police department. Paris looked pale and drawn in the quickly dying light, almost like a ghost. “What the hell’s going on?”

Traffic was stopped on both sides of the wreck, so their car was probably somewhere in the mess beyond the Explorer. He couldn’t have known where Roan was, so she assumed they’d gotten out and gone to see what the commotion was about, and saw her. Or at least she hoped, because she suddenly realized she hadn’t seen Roan in the front seat.

Where the fuck was he?

She was turning back when she heard the growl.

It was funny how you were never prepared for it. In the back of your mind, you expected something from a movie, something deep and ominous, but a big cat’s growl in real life usually didn’t have the same bass notes and wasn’t that loud. Usually. The growl she heard inside the car was faint but definitely deep; it was almost like a well-tuned engine in the distance, roaring as the throttle was released and the car tore off into the night. She saw a shadow of movement in the backseat, and instinctively started retreating from the car. “Everyone back!” she shouted as the lion jumped through the shattered passenger window, and some people screamed and instantly fled the scene. At least it did make the crowd move away.

The lion was as large as Roan was, a bit shorter in vertical height but slightly longer than your average lion, although it had the same tawny coat, large paws, and sleek muscles you would expect from such a thing.

But there was a difference here, one she had never seen before, and it almost threw her off for a second.

You could really never tell a real big cat from a transformed infected save for those slight height variations. Otherwise they looked just the same as their wild, more genetically “pure” brethren, and sometimes you didn’t know what you were dealing with until you got the autopsy reports. But this lion had eerie green eyes, ones she had seen before in a redheaded smart-ass, and his thick, large mane was shot through with the same, odd reddish-brown hair, fading into black in certain spots as the thick fringe of 350

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hair wreathed his neck and face and joined his shoulders. His head and face was that of a lion, his jaw protruding and full of jagged teeth that were by no means human... and yet she could almost see him, couldn’t she? It had to be her mind playing tricks on her, but she knew this was Roan in his transformed state beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the intellect wasn’t there; there was nothing in those slit-pupiled eyes but a nameless, shapeless anger. It was bleeding on its side from some shallow scrapes, probably from broken glass, but that could be enough to make it lash out.