Eater of Lives(SPECTR #4) (5 page)

He takes a deep breath as they pass by a
small open alley, barely a slot, sifting the wind to determine
which path the demon took. It reeks of frozen meat and snow crusted
with blood, underlain with the sour stench of hunger. But the scent
is oddly faded.

No matter. Perhaps it has gone to ground and
they will find it in its lair and eat it.

“
If she can still be exorcised—”

Yes. I know this. You do not have to remind
me yet again.

In the past, he would not have considered it.
Demons were food, which made anyone possessed by them food as well,
whether they could be exorcised or not. But Caleb sees them as weak
and pitiable, hurt and made victims once already by the demons, and
now Gray does as well, and he cannot bring himself to eat them.

The trail leads out of the alley, onto the
main street, but there are still too many mortals about. He takes
to the rooftops, finding easy handholds in the crumbling brick. The
scent still carries from below, faint but clear enough, and he
breaks into a run, relying on speed and the propensity of mortals
not to look up. The shop roofs are flat, easy to travel on, despite
the obstacles of ductwork and air conditioners.

There, in an alley below, scrounging amidst
the trash. The scent is still strangely faded, but it comes
undeniably from the figure below. He gathers himself and drops to
the ancient bricks, claws out and ready to fight—

The figure turns at the sound of his landing
and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The rankness of sweat and
urine washes out from it, almost eclipsing the delicious odor of
the demon…which makes no sense. The demon should be moving to
defend itself; its scent should get stronger, not weaker.

“
Are you fucking blind? We’re supposed to
be after a woman!”

Oh. He had not noticed the mortal’s
gender.

“
How could you not notice?”

It did not seem important
. And if
Caleb is so annoyed, perhaps he should be the one to handle the
situation.

It isn’t as if there is anything to eat here,
anyway.

* * *

“Shit!” Caleb stood in the middle of the
alleyway, feeling like a fucking idiot, while some poor homeless
bastard cowered against the dumpster, screaming his damned head
off. “Dude! I’m not going to hurt you, okay?”

The guy didn’t seem to believe him and just
kept screaming. Given the way other people reacted, Gray must look
pretty damn scary. Maybe Caleb shouldn’t have expected anything
else.

Then again, NHEs generally meant death and
mayhem, so the average person would probably run the other way even
if Gray had rainbows coming out of his butt.

“
You are very strange.”

He heard running feet and looked up to see
John, Sean, and Forsyth rounding the corner. They must’ve followed
the screams. Sean’s face flushed red with exertion, but John
managed to look like he hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Wrong, uh, suspect,” Caleb said, his cheeks
getting hot. “He’s not even possessed.”

A frown crossed John’s face as he drew near.
“Why did you follow him?”

“Well, he smells…huh.” Caleb looked down at
the man, who kept howling. People had started to come to see what
was going on; Sean hurriedly pulled out his badge and yelled at
them to stay back.

The poor guy looked homeless, covered in
grime and wearing five layers of clothes, including an
expensive-looking silver parka trimmed with fur. A pile of cans,
bicycle parts, and broken toys overflowed a nearby shopping
cart.

But the meat-locker stink of a demon still
wafted faintly from him.

“Sir,” John said, using his
calm-but-authoritative voice. “Sir, look at me, please.”

The man’s howls faded, and he blinked rheumy
eyes at John. Then he looked at Caleb, flinched back…and frowned.
“What the hell? I thought you was some kind of monster. Damn,
must’ve been some bad shit I got into.”

“Must’ve been,” Caleb agreed, deadpan.

“Why you dressed all funny? You going to one
of those, wha’d’ya call ‘em, raves?”

“Sir,” John said, capturing the man’s
wandering attention. “I’m Special Agent John Starkweather, with
SPECTR.” He flashed his badge. “Do you mind if I ask some
questions?”

“His jacket,” Caleb said abruptly. He grabbed
the man’s arm; the guy tried to pull away, but Gray leant him a
strength even a bodybuilder would have a hard time overcoming.
“It’s been in contact with the demon. Um, NHE, I mean,” he
corrected, with a nervous glance at Forsyth.

“Interesting,” Forsyth said. “Perhaps our
friend here would like to come back to headquarters for a little
chat.”

* * *

The scent drifted to Valerie as she crossed
Broad St., not far from the bar. Normally, the street smelled like
the nearby ocean, spiced with whiffs of cooking food, human sweat,
and restaurant trash. This perfume didn’t belong: ozone and
incense, mingled with the exhalation of earth touched by rain, and
she instinctively took a deeper breath to savor it.

Revulsion twisted her stomach, even as fear
sent little spikes of ice into her veins. Every muscle threatened
to lock, the cold place in her chest twisting and clawing for
escape, her hindbrain screaming at her to run. There was something
here, something big, something which wanted to
eat
her.

She took another breath, fighting for calm,
but that only intensified the scent. Faded, gone—but it had passed
through here not long ago. If they’d woken up just a little
earlier, started on the day too soon, it would have found them.

What is it?
Fear had become alien to
her, after finding the cold voice. She wasn’t scared of anything
anymore: not men, the mirror, her own body, or food, but this…she’d
almost peed herself. Like she’d turned a corner and suddenly found
herself face-to-face with a tiger, or a polar bear.

“
It is danger.”
An indistinct image
accompanied the warning, just the impression of something vast and
dark. It hadn’t seen them, not yet, but when it did…

Valerie found herself walking quickly away,
back in the direction she’d come. Away from the man who’d arranged
to meet her there later, and damn it, the hunger gnawed at her
belly, her spine…

“
We must leave. Run. Get far away from
here.”

No
. She forced herself to slow, her
heart pounding madly.
Not yet! I’ll lose everything!

Images sparked through her mind, the cold
thing inside her trying to find some way to make her understand.
The thing they scented wasn’t just some guy who handcuffed her to a
bed and beat her up while they fucked, because she couldn’t feel
anything unless it hurt.

This was the Wolf from Little Red Riding
Hood. This was Charybdis, sucking a thousand sailors into her open
maw. Something primal, something of unending hunger, something
inhuman which couldn’t be reasoned with.

For the first time in her life, she
understood the fear of prey for its predator.

But she would defeat even this.

Just a few days more, and we’ll go—to
Milan, or Paris, or wherever you want. We can’t let it take our
only chance away from us. We won’t.
I
won’t
.

“
But—”

No.

Consideration.
“As you wish. We are
strong. Perhaps strong enough to fight, should it come to it. But
better to be quick and clever, to escape it in the first
place.”

Yes
. On that they agreed—she didn’t
want to be anywhere near the monster they’d sensed.
Come
Saturday, we’ll be booking our ticket. Anywhere we want to go. But
we have to get through Friday first.

Fear receded, giving way to glorious
numbness, as if someone held an ice cube against her emotions.

“
Agreed.”

Almost crying in relief, Valerie hurried back
toward her apartment.

“Here.” John put a big cup of soup and a mug
of coffee in front of the homeless man from the alley. He refused
to give any name besides “Ray,” and as he didn’t have any
identification on him, John figured it would do. Sure, they could
run his prints, but in the long term it didn’t matter.

Ray eyed him suspiciously. They sat in one of
the interrogation rooms, along with Sean and Kelly Rand, the
empath. “This some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine? I know how
this goes. I seen it all on TV.”

“Well, we aren’t cops, and we’re all good,”
John said with a reassuring smile. Sean rolled his eyes. “We just
have a few questions about your jacket here.”

The item in question lay on the table in
between them, already tagged and admitted into the evidence chain.
Ray slurped his soup and looked at it forlornly. “Y’all are going
to keep it, ain’t you?”

“I’m afraid so.” John had brought the spare
coat he kept in his office against unexpectedly cold days in the
spring. He handed it across the table. “You can have this one
instead, if you’d like. It only seems fair.”

Ray took the coat and inspected it. “I liked
the other one better. Flashier.”

“Take it back, John,” Sean suggested with a
scowl.

Ray glared at him. “He gave it to me,
asshole.”

“He didn’t have to. Show a little
gratitude.”

“Dude is stealing my fucking coat, and I’m
supposed to be grateful?”

“This coat belonged to a woman suspected of
killing and cannibalizing at least two men, while under the
influence of an NHE,” John said, cutting him off. He pointed at a
dark stain on the silver fabric. “This looks like blood. If it
matches one of the victims…”

Ray paled. “Shit. Keep the fucking thing. I
don’t know nothing about it.”

“I believe you. Just tell us how the coat
came into your possession.”

“Found it.”

“Where?” Sean asked sharply.

“I’m thinking, okay? Give me a goddamn minute
here.” Ray wrapped his arms around himself and shuddered. “I found
it kind of stuffed in between a couple of bags of garbage by a
dumpster. Somewhere off East Bay St. I don’t remember more, okay?
Not like I figured I’d get hauled in for it.”

Damn. Not much to go on. “How long ago?”

Ray shrugged. “I dunno. One, maybe two weeks
ago?”

John glanced at Rand, who gave him a small
nod. Ray had told the truth, which meant they probably weren’t
going to get anything more out of him.

“Finish your soup,” John said, rising to his
feet. “Then you’re free to go.”

“There a reward, maybe?” Ray asked
hopefully.

“Sorry.”

“Cheap-ass mother fuckers.”

“What a waste of time,” Sean said, as soon as
they were out of the interrogation room.

“It didn’t live up to my hopes,” John
admitted. “But we had to try. I’ll take a few pictures of the coat
for the file, then turn it into evidence and let forensics take a
whack at the blood stain.”

Caleb waited in John’s office, his heavy
boots propped on the desk. Forsyth had left to answer emails and
make phone calls, without saying whether or not he’d be coming back
before the end of the day.

“Boots off the desk,” John said automatically
as he walked in.

“Wolves raised me. In a barn,” Caleb said,
but he did as asked. His gaze tracked the silver coat as John
carried it around the desk, nostrils flaring slightly. “Any
luck?”

“Nope. Found stuffed between garbage bags in
an alley, suggesting the perp wanted to hide it. I’m amazed you
picked up anything on it, after what it’s been through.”

“Yeah.” Caleb’s mouth quirked wryly, and he
looked away from the coat, as if realizing he’d stared at it for a
little too long. “What sort of NHE are we dealing with here,
anyway?”

John sighed and ran his fingers lightly over
the slick material of the coat’s outer shell. If he concentrated
hard enough, he felt a tiny vibration in the skin of his
fingertips, a whisper of etheric energy soaked into the coat but
now faded to almost nothing with time. “Given it’s killing and
cannibalizing, we could be looking at a couple of different things.
Possibly a therianthrope, although usually they have to be pretty
far gone by the time they start actually eating people.”

“No,” Caleb said with a shake of his head.
His long hair tumbled into his face, and John resisted the impulse
to sweep it back and sink his fingers into the soft locks. “It
doesn’t smell anything like the werewolf.”

John glanced at Sean, who responded with a
frown. “They have different scents?” John asked. “The various kinds
of NHE?”

Caleb blinked. “Um…yeah? Didn’t I mention
it?”

“No. Just that Gray found
them…appetizing.”

“Oh. Well, yeah. The werewolf reeked like
mange and wet fur, and ghouls are like rot, and the incubus stank
of sour roses. Gray says it’s because they’re different kinds of
demon.”

Sean shifted uneasily. “You know what this
thing is?”

“No.” Caleb looked confused a moment.
“They’re all demons as far as Gray is concerned. He doesn’t care
about labels. They’re just ‘mortal nonsense,’ he says. But he can
name some of them, if his past…hosts…had a word for them.”

John sank into his chair and rolled it
around, bringing himself knee-to-knee with Caleb. Goddess, this was
all fascinating. Gray offered such a window onto a whole different
order of being…

Damn. He sounded like Forsyth now. Nothing
wrong with that, if his interest in the drakul had been purely
academic, and not…well. “And Gray doesn’t recognize this one?”

“No. Or just, you know, as
food
.”
Caleb swallowed convulsively, his gaze focused on his hands,
wrapped around his knees. “I can tell you it smells like a fucking
meat locker, though.”

John frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I used to work at a grocery store as a teen,
one of those really upscale ones which make their own cuts of meat.
They stored the carcasses in this huge room in the back. Had this
really distinctive odor to it. And a sticky floor. Ugh.”