The Taste of Night (22 page)

“I didn’t. I lumped you in with the other person Warren loved and still killed out of duty.” His eyes were half shut with fatigue and drink, but what I saw of them was calculating and too knowing for my liking.

I looked away, staring at the storm flailing at his false window. It suddenly felt like I was out in it. Warren wasn’t doing that. Was he? Look for faults, waiting for me to screw up?

“Look.” Hunter sighed. “I want to help you. I’ll keep your identity, your daughter, and your moves against Joaquin hidden. I can do that, you know. I can be your secret keeper.”

He said it like he meant
love slave
. Damn those lips, that voice…

“In exchange for what?” I managed, falling back on my trusty sword of sarcasm. “My bed?”

Because the mention of Warren’s rogue father had been a veiled threat. So had the reference to Ashlyn, whom Hunter knew about because of the aureole, but Warren did not. Venom coated my words, anger boiling in my core. I thought my Shadow side must be peeking through; there was just a hint of smoke rising in the thundering air, possibly a deepening of my eyes, though I’d have to look in a mirror to
know for sure. I didn’t want to do that.

And I didn’t want to admit Hunter would be a great ally. He had more patience with me than Warren, and seemed able to face those black holes in me that even I could not. Like now, I thought wryly, watching him stare at me. Even at a time when I was afraid to face a mirror.

“I didn’t say you should barter your body,” he said carefully, reading my mood. Then he licked his lips. “Just…share it with me.”

Don’t you just love semantics?

I studiously kept my eyes off his lips…and his hands, and his eyes. And the rest of him too. Because even though I could use an ally, what I didn’t need right now was a lover. Unfortunately they were being offered as a package deal. I lifted my chin and steeled myself against the offer, the need. The understanding.

“I still love him,” I said flatly, and had to watch Hunter wince. He didn’t recover as quickly as he would’ve were he sober—a stab of pain, then disappointment blazing in his eyes as the next arrow of lightning flashed through the room—but eventually his expression closed.

“Which is why you should let him go.”

He knew all about Ben, of course, had learned about him and more when we’d swapped memories and emotions through the magic of the aureole. And I could see why he wanted to feel it again. I’d never felt more understood than in those brief moments. I’d never been less alone than when Hunter had seen the Shadow in me and hadn’t shied away, but accepted it and my thoughts as his own. I knew, in exchange for helping shoulder his own mental burdens, he was offering to do the same now.

But he was in a self-destructive mood.

“And letting you into my body as well as my mind is going to help with that?” I said, forcing a note of detachment into my voice that I didn’t really feel.

He shrugged, offered me a rare if lopsided grin. “Can’t hurt.”

“You know
that’s
not true.”

But I swallowed hard. I’d enjoy having him inside me, that much was true. You didn’t have to know Hunter when he was sober, and in save-the-world superhero mode, to know there was a world of possibilities waiting in those arms. Even now, with him smelling of booze and staggering slightly, his focus was like the sun through a magnifying glass.

And me, I thought, shifting my feet, just a little ol’ bug.

“Sleep it off, Hunter,” I said, my voice more callous than I intended as I turned from him and opened the door. I escaped into the light and sterility of the hallway, blinking hard, because this was what felt unreal. It was a too-abrupt end to the violent music of the thunderstorm, and the heated tension between Hunter and me as we faced off in the near dark. I turned back a second too late. He had followed me to the door, and when I looked up the lust in his gaze had been shuttered, and all that remained was the cold depths of the emotions he was trying to escape.

“Look, I’m sorr—” I started, but the door clicked firmly shut in my face, and the silence of the hallway rose to a buzz in my ears. I finally got my feet moving, my footsteps filling the silence. By the time I reached my room, I was breathing in time to them, a steady beat despite my own erratic heart, as the possibilities Hunter had spoken of died around me.

I made my move on Joaquin the following night. I’d have gone the previous dawn, but I slept badly after fending off Hunter’s advances, dreaming of making love with Ben while another man watched through a rain-streaked window. I dreamed I was back in my old body, which would’ve made me happy if I hadn’t realized someone else was inside my dreaming flesh as well, curled around Ben, sharing it—and him—with me.

It also seemed poetic to attack Joaquin in the hours he’d first attacked me. It was the same time of year, and the same
desert sage rose to perfume the air in the predawn hours, when decent people were still sleeping off the hangovers of the night before.

So I used my daylight hours to rest, and to plan. There were detailed maps of the city archived in the record room adjacent to Tekla’s astrolab, and I spent half the day there, poring over photos of street maps, imagining and reimagining scenarios of approach, infiltration, and escape, and staring at the home of the man who’d affected my life more than any other since the one who spawned me.

I used the photocopier to make duplicates of the residential streets and his home, and sat down to study them, thinking I really should make more use of this room. I knew the arteries and thoroughfares of Vegas as intimately as I knew the veins webbing my wrists, but there were other Vegases in the journals and books and registers here—line-drawn depictions of the original settlements—Indian, Spanish, Mormon—and those primitive roads lay like ghosts beneath the alternately beautiful and stark streets I knew. Someday I’d like to know them all.

“Later,” I said aloud, and shut off the lights as I exited the room. First I had another man to make into a ghost.

If you head away from the Strip on the I–95, past the old wash and the clusterfuck known as the Spaghetti Bowl, you’ll end up in a tony and relatively new suburban master-planned community, where housing prices reflect the desirability of the area, and residents make sure the distinction is known. As you make your way up Summerlin Parkway, the mountain ranges that once lay so far from the center of town begin to butt up against rows of communities plotted to provide developers with the greatest return per square foot. The uniformity of the houses also provides neighbors with added anonymity; nobody knows exactly who’s being rude when they drive directly into the garage of the house looking much the same as theirs, closing the door with nary a how-dee-do.

It was in one such neighborhood, pressed against a mountain—a hill compared to the ranges hovering over the valley, but mountainous nonetheless—that Joaquin’s nondescript home rested. Of course, Joaquin would like that. The blending, I mean. Physically he was that way as well. Most people would pass right over him; just a tallish man with shadowed eyes, pale skin, and hair a bit too long
to be fashionable. But just as the bones beneath that benign exterior were blackened with decay, what lay in that house was coiled and waiting to strike.

I pulled up half a block from his lot to study the darkened windows of a detached home, light beige and single-story, with shuttered windows and a security gate over the front door. The front yard was xeriscaped—what a good little environmentalist our Joaquin was—and it blended perfectly with the houses on either side of him. I’m sure he enjoyed walking among the mortals he stalked, waving to a future victim on his way back from the mailbox, or petting the dog of a man whose wife he’d already marked as his own. I winced to see a tricycle trapped next to his mailbox, the thought of Joaquin living next to children instantly icing me over.

Stepping from my car, mask fixed firmly over my eyes to conceal my identity as Olivia, I had an arrow already notched in my conduit, held ready at my side. The street was deserted, but I’d already decided my approach would be from the hillside. The desert side, I thought, peering into the darkness. Just as he’d once approached me.

Nothing smells as fresh and clean as the night-laden desert air. The dusty floor was packed solid under my feet, the star-flecked sky swung wide overhead, and I moved lithely among bramble, boulders, weeds, rocks, skirting the jutting cacti poised like spiny sentries all along the hillside. As a kid I’d taken many such forays into the desert night, the complete dark and stillness adding to the thrill of the illicit outings. Joaquin probably thought of this hillside as his own, but that didn’t faze me. I’d always considered the whole of the Mojave my home.

The brick wall separating his house from the untamed desert was my first hurdle. I vaulted it in a quick, single motion, watched only by the half cast eye of a slivered moon. Landing in a worn patch of grass, I darted beneath an overgrown pepper tree, where I remained for another minute to temper my thumping heart. I’d dreamed of this day too long to let my emotions overtake me now.

I approached the house cautiously, struck by the complete stillness. It was summer, and though the birds had retired for the night, chirping crickets should have softened the silence. Yet not even a blade of grass rustled in the breeze ferried from the hillside behind me. It was like the air too had abandoned this lot, run off by Joaquin’s predatory scent in the same way pesticide kept insects at bay.

Or killed those who didn’t obey their instincts, I thought, swallowing hard as I slid up the back porch. Reaching into my utility belt, I opened a compact mirror and peered into it to gauge the angle needed to reflect the home’s interior. Even in baggy black fatigues, my face half covered by my mask, I had to admit I looked fabulous. Whoever it was who said, “Die young and leave a pretty corpse” was probably a fan.

Flicking my wrist toward the window, I did a swift sweep to detect any movement inside. There was none. So I tilted the compact slowly, making out a couch and coffee table in the dim room, a television perched on a small rectangular stand, and shadows—the normal kind—layering one another in varying degrees of density, banished near the left corner where a dim utility light, probably the bulb over a stove in the kitchen, had been left on.

I moved back from the window and followed the wall until I reached the sliding glass door. Putting the compact away, I gripped my conduit in one hand and a heavy-duty flashlight in the other. Something told me Joaquin was so confident nobody would dare enter his private domain that he didn’t bother with an alarm system. What I didn’t expect was for him to neglect locking the door as well. Surprise, then wariness, held me back when the door slid smoothly open, not even a squeak to break the oppressive silence.

Arrogant bastard
, I thought, widening the gap. In one quick movement I’d breached the threshold and whipped my flashlight over the room like a spotlight arching over the night sky. There was nothing here but the objects I’d seen through the window, so I clicked the light off and let my
eyes adjust to the interior, sliding the door shut behind me.

On closer inspection I saw the flotsam and jetsam that occupied Everyman’s household—newspapers stacked neatly to one side of the sofa, four different remotes to operate one TV. Typical man. Next to an oval glass-top table I spotted a large water bottle, like the ones delivered door to door in big green trucks, brimming with coins.

How about that? Joaquin saves his pennies
.

Another smaller jar rested on a wooden chair that looked to be sized for a child. At first I thought it contained the overflow coins from the first, but these weren’t the right shape or size, and coin didn’t gleam in the moonlight like broken seashells. I reached into the jar.

I knew even before touching them that they weren’t seashells. Running my tongue along my top row of teeth, I paused over the smooth surface mirrored in my hand, minus the root. At least he’d washed the viscera from each tiny trophy before depositing it inside. Fastidious, I thought, clenching my jaw. Then I wondered which of the hundreds was mine.

“Stop it,” I ordered myself, depositing the tooth back with the others. I wasn’t going to start playing victim just because I was finally facing the man who’d tried to make me into one. But I wondered what he planned to do when the jar was brimming. Something significant, probably. Something to mark the occasion. Or maybe he’d just start another jar. Maybe he’d simply go on killing.

“Not after tonight,” I swore, and turned with more determination, if less care, to search the rest of the house. “Not ever again.”

Thirty tense seconds later I had the kitchen canvassed, as well as the laundry room leading to the empty garage. That half of the home searched, I turned my attention to the hallway, and the bedrooms I knew lay beyond. My feet were silent on the living room carpet, and I paused only long enough to affix a bugging device beneath the cheap metal coffee table, placing the bug to track it in my inner ear. I
wanted to know if he entered the living room while I was in another part of the house.

Away from the kitchen light, in the pitch of the darkened hall, the scents of charred candy and rancid flesh grew stronger. I caught myself breathing shallowly through my mouth, trying not to let too much of the stench in. The front rooms had been for show, with all the charm of a third-rate sitcom set. This, though, was where Joaquin lived. His stench was imbedded in the walls.

Inching along until I came to a trio of closed doors, I studied them all, then raised my conduit to the door on the right.

Let’s see what’s behind door number one
, I thought, swinging it open. I crouched, prepared to blow the shit out of a secondary bedroom that had bare floors, naked concrete lying in spotty patches of light from the streetlights leaching through the vertical blinds. It was a workshop of some sort, I saw, straightening. All the tools were normal enough; jigsaws and cordless drills, pegboards anchored across an entire wall filled with hammers and wrenches and screwdrivers, aligned according to purpose and size. Drill bits lined the workbench in neatly arrayed plastic boxes, and I was willing to bet the locked drawers were equally well kept.

So, I thought, the anal freak liked to do his work away from the prying eyes of neighbors and passers-by. Interesting, as it didn’t appear he was much for home improvement.

I returned to the hallway, leaving the room open. Door number two was positioned on an interior wall, too small to be anything but a utility closet. I told myself I was being thorough as I moved toward it, and that I wasn’t avoiding what could only be Joaquin’s bedroom directly across from that.

I whipped the closet open to find nothing but a bare light-bulb, the string used to turn it on swaying from the ceiling. I pushed that door open as far as it would go, just as I had with the first, then turned to door number three. Joaquin’s
bedroom. God, I did not want to go in there. But if I could catch him unaware, blow off his head in his sleep while he dreamed of murdering little girls in the desert and taking their eyeteeth home as a prize…well, isn’t that what I’d come for?

The memory of the jar in the living room mobilized me, and I took a deep breath of Joaquin-soaked air, filled my lungs with it, and held it as I reached for the handle.

A noise on the other side stopped me.

It wasn’t a snore, or the rustle of bedclothes as someone shifted positions, but a pleading sound, a soft whimper followed by ragged breathing, and in the brief silence I was sure I could hear someone struggling to crawl across the bedroom floor.

Like I’d once struggled to crawl across the dusty desert floor.

Thinking of tiny bodies, crushed spirits, and airless desert nights—and all those goddamned teeth in the living room—I expelled the tainted air from my chest and yanked the door open. But there wasn’t another young girl looking up at me with bloodied limbs and pleading eyes. That was just me, my mind. A memory. Instead there was something else.

And boy, did it look happy to see me.

“Uh…good doggie?” I said, taking in the sight of an animal with the muscle of a bear and the angular ferocity of a wolf. He let a warning rumble loose in his throat, and the deep reverberation jarred through my immobile bones like a jackhammer through concrete. His ears were pricked forward, eyes bright, and I had no idea what kind of dog he was beyond “not friendly.” Those eyes narrowed as I took a small step back, flashing scarlet, though that could’ve been my imagination. One thing was sure. If dogs could speak, this one would be saying,
Yum.

No wonder the back door had been unlocked. Who needed a security system when Cujo lurked inside? Those hadn’t
been whimpers of pain I’d heard from the other side of the bedroom door, but cries of longing as the beast sensed an intruder. I swallowed hard, shifting my weight to take another step back, and pulled from my mind the only word I could remember from a long-ago documentary on the Discovery Channel.

“Stay,” I said in German. Or so I thought. I’d probably said
Puppy Chow
because he launched from his back haunches so fast my vision blurred.

I raised my weapon arm too late. I couldn’t clear the beast’s bulky weight, and his front paws—flashing wickedly sharp claws—sank into my shoulders, mouth open and snapping. It was all I could do to wedge my forearms between us as I bowled over backward, footing lost, the stench of matted fur and stale dog breath washing over me as I hit the hallway floor.

My head slammed into the baseboards, and black dots threatened to swallow my vision, but I squeezed my eyes shut, lowered my chin, and crossed my arms over my face. He was reaching for my nose, but found my left arm instead, and I cried out as dozens of razors punctured the skin, and again when he reared back, pulling flesh and tendon and muscle with him. If there’d been more room for him to angle himself in the narrow hallway, the bone would’ve snapped. As it was, the space created between us was only wide enough to get one knee up, and I rammed it into his midsection, turning feral growls into a savage howl.

Great. Now I’d pissed him off.

He lunged again, but this time I caught his throat, fisting the fur there to yank him toward me. As I scissor-kicked my legs simultaneously, he flew over the top of me like a vulture swinging over its prey, twisting in the air to launch another attack even before he’d landed. But I found my knees as he crashed to the ground, and when that great muzzle snapped open again, I centered my conduit in that throat and fired inside.

The beast jerked as if puzzled, his jaw snapping shut on a
bubbly whine. He shuddered as if he was swallowing the arrow, then blinked. Shuddered again. And his mass expanded by another foot.

“Shit,” I said, realizing too late what I’d done. This beast was to Joaquin what my cat, Luna, was to me, a warden. It couldn’t be killed, maimed, or reasoned with by an enemy agent. Wardens were trained from birth to defend their owners and territory, to recognize and attack whomever took the risk anyway. If it seemed like an unfair trade—the Shadows had dogs while we had cats—well, you hadn’t seen Luna shear the eyesight from a Shadow agent in one wicked swipe. Not wanting to see what this hound could do given the same opportunity, I leaped over him, batting clumsily against the narrow walls like a pinball machine on full tilt.

Instinct had me darting right, into the workshop, and I kicked the door shut just before the dog barreled into it with a jarring thud. The door shuddered under his weight, and I didn’t bother with the lock. A few more hits like that and the entire frame would split in two.

I raced to the window, shoving the blinds aside only to find a barred-up alcove. A fluorescent bulb burned down on me in a mocking echo of the streetlights outside, bricks plastering the frame where the window used to be. He’d rigged it, the bastard. No window. No exit.

Conduit ineffective, I searched the room for another weapon, and had just grasped the handle of a screwdriver when the door crashed in. I whirled to find twin rubies of hate fixed on me, a muzzle bared and rumbling, and teeth as sharp as pokers visible in an oversized jaw. Knees bent, I braced myself as the dog lunged again.