Bestial (31 page)

“This is bad,” Gavin whispered, watching Eckhart in the rearview mirror.

Karen snatched up the phone. “He says he’s calling this in,” she said. She looked over her shoulder and saw Eckhart getting into his cruiser. “I think it’s pretty clear he knows who we are. He’s calling someone—probably the sheriff—for further instructions.”

“I’ll have people in Big Rock this afternoon,” Burgess said.

“Do that.” She watched Eckhart through his windshield as he held the radio microphone to his mouth and talked, his eyes on Gavin’s license.

“Leave the line open,” Burgess said.

Karen placed the phone back on the console.

“We can make a run for it,” Gavin said.

“Where would we go?” Karen said. “He’ll follow us and it’ll only be minutes before he’s got backup.” She thought a moment, watching Eckhart. “Of course, we can always shoot the son of a bitch.”

Gavin thought about that a moment. “So far, everything we’ve got is mostly speculation. You want to shoot a law enforcement officer and take the chance that we’re wrong?”

Eckhart got out of his cruiser and started toward them again.

“Here he comes,” Gavin said.

“Fuck speculation,” Karen muttered. “If he goes for his gun, I’m going for mine, and he’s going down.”

At the window, Eckhart smiled and said, “I’m gonna have to ask you both to get out of the vehicle. And ma’am, if you’d come around to this side of the vehicle, I’d appreciate it.”

For just a moment, Karen was unable to inhale. She remembered her experience in Los Angeles with the vampires—the beating and torture and rape—and it turned her lungs to ice.

Gavin glanced at her and whispered, “Let’s go.”

They got out of the SUV. As Karen walked around the front to the other side, she felt the weight of her 9mm under her light jacket. She wondered if she would have to lose it... or if she would have it much longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lupa

“We have a bit of a mess, and we need to decide how to clean it up,” Taggart said. He sat at a desk in the room he was using as an office in the house that once had belonged to Marvin Cooper. It was a large old scuffed-up desk of pale wood. He’d cleared the cluttered mess off the top and now it held only a telephone, a lamp, and the notebook that was open in front of Jeremiah, who sat opposite him.

“There aren’t that many alternatives,” Jeremiah said. “We have people who have seen things that could be... problematic. We can either turn them or kill them. That about covers our options.”

Taggart sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “We don’t want to do anything that would cause
more
problems. I have no problem with killing them, of course, as long as we can cover it up easily enough. Turning them is an option, but we’ve got our hands full right now. We don’t necessarily want to add new ones to the pack unless we absolutely have to at the moment.”

“What about—” Jeremiah consulted his notebook. “—Dr. Abel Dinescu?”

“Who?”

“I believe Dr. Rodriguez mentioned him to you. He was the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room when the infant was born.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. What about him?”

“He’s been making phone calls. He’s been trying to reach the hospital administrator, who’s on vacation, and he’s been calling other doctors, as well. He’s also called the department a few times wanting to do know what the sheriff intends to do about what happened last night. He’s telling people some kind of mutant infant was born that killed a patient and injured two other people, himself included.”

Taggart frowned. “Is anyone believing him?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s a troublemaker.” He cracked his knuckles as he gave it some thought. “If he’s calling around, then he’s told his family. I don’t want to take any chances with him. Send a couple of deputies to his house. Kill the whole family. Make it look like Dinescu did it. Like he snapped, or something, I don’t care, as long as it’s done.”

“You want this done tonight?”

“No, I want it done
today
. Right away.”

“I thought the cover of night might be helpful in—”

”They’re sheriff’s deputies,” Taggart said with a shrug. “Nothing to hide. We’re the good guys, remember?” He grinned. “Just make sure the deputies mention to neighbors that they came to the house answering a domestic violence call. In fact, send Olbermann. He’s good with people.”

Making a note in his notebook, Jeremiah said, “We should deal with each problem individually like this. I have a list of all the other names here.”

“How’s our new baby boy, by the way?”

Jeremiah smiled. “Doing very well. Dr. Rodriguez says he’s quite healthy. He’s upstairs right now. Carmen is caring for him.”

Taggart smiled and nodded. “Good, that’s good.” He leaned forward, joined his hands on the desktop. “My conversation with Pastor Edson went very well this morning. I think he’s properly... submissive.” He smiled and added, “To be honest, I scared the piss out of him.”

Jeremiah chuckled.

“I’m serious. He wet himself like a little boy. I calmed him down and convinced him I meant him no harm as long as he... went along. He’ll do anything I ask now. He thinks I’m a messenger of God. Just like Ellen White, their crazy prophet. Except what took Ellen years of copying other writers and lying about visions from God to accomplish I was able to do in a few minutes.”

“What did you tell him to do?”

“Wait for instructions. Now that we have a good place to meet, I want to get everyone together in the church this evening. It’s time we had that meeting I’ve been talking about. Everyone you can pull together. The entire pack, if we can manage it. Get the word out and tell everyone that it’s important. I’ll give them all a little mental nudge, too. That’ll let them know this gathering is not optional. Tell them they’re finally going to get to meet the First Born.” He smiled. “She’ll finally be able to have her debut. Make sure Cynthia is there, too—awake and alert.”

As Taggart spoke, Jeremiah wrote in his notebook.

“What time?” Jeremiah said.

“Whenever you can get the biggest number together. Just let me know as soon as you’ve got it nailed down. And let Beth know right away. She did some shopping the other day, bought some nice clothes for our girl. Beth will need to make sure she’s dressed for her debut. We want her to look nice.”

“Will do.”

Taggart stood. “I’m going down to the basement. If anything comes up, just come get me.” He smiled. “But, uh... knock first, okay? I want to spend some quality time with her.”

He left the office, went down the hall to the stairs, then went down to the basement door. He knocked gently. “It’s me,” he said.

A female voice from the other side said, “Come in.”

He opened the door, stepped through it, then stood there and silently looked at her for a moment, drank her in with his one good eye.

“Hello,” he said, his voice low, deep in his throat. All he had to do was look at her to feel heat between his legs.

She was sitting up at one end of the couch, her legs stretched out over the cushions, a hardcover book open on her bare thighs. The glow of sunlight coming in through one of the three small rectangular windows high on the western wall behind her shimmered in her long deep-golden hair, creating a soft halo around her head. She had been given clothes, but she preferred to be naked. Her trip to the hospital the night before had been her first expedition out of the house to mingle with humans—before that, she had gone out only to feed. It had been the first time she’d put on clothes, as well, and she had agreed only to wear the loose-fitting satin robe.

Normally Taggart had an endless supply of confidence. That had been the case before he was turned—back then, nothing and no one had made him flinch and he’d been able to handle himself in any situation. Now, bolstered by the knowledge that he was much more than he’d been before, much more than most of the people around him at any given time, he often felt invincible, and sometimes had to remind himself that he was not—no, not quite. But when he looked at her, all of that confidence and strength seemed to crumble. The steel he liked to think he had in his bones melted into a bubbling liquid. Something about her reached inside him and squeezed his internal organs—and she was only four months old. Four months... in which she had absorbed everything around her, especially the language and all its nuances, both spoken and written. Her eyes and ears missed nothing, and once observed, nothing left her memory.

“Am I interrupting anything?” he said quietly, taking a couple of tentative steps toward her.

She smiled. “You’re not interrupting anything.” She closed the book on her lap.

Her voice sounded the way satin felt against flesh. Nothing about her was haughty or arrogant or in any way unpleasant. Her appearance was that of a beautiful teenage girl—no pretensions or affectations, a face that exuded innocence. But her eyes—those startlingly pale-silver eyes—held behind their mesmerizing beauty a paralyzing authority. He had taken her several times over the last couple of weeks, once she’d finally matured, had rutted with her passionately, noisily, hard. And yet she possessed something, projected something he could not yet define, something that he suspected might be entirely new under the sun. Something about her made him... cautious. He jutted his chin a little and tried to assert himself, returning her smile.

“What are you reading?” he said, moving closer.

She picked up the book, looked at the cover. “Oh, some book I found on the shelf over there.
Gone with the Wind
by, uh—”

”Margaret Mitchell.”

Her eyes widened a little. “Yes. Have you read it?”

“No, but I saw the movie,” he said as he went to the couch and dropped to one knee beside her.

“It’s very good. I just started it this morning, but I think it has real—”

He bent forward, took the book from her, and dropped it onto the floor. Her sentence remained suspended in mid-air as she watched him. He pressed his nose into the triangular patch of honey-gold hair between her legs and inhaled deeply. Breathing in her scent was like sucking fire into his lungs. It made him hard instantly, of course, but caused other changes in his body just as fast, changes he’d grown accustomed to controlling but which slipped from his grasp when he smelled her. He felt the sting and tingle of rapid hair growth on his skin, the stirring under his fingernails of the long curved claws that were on the verge of jutting from his fingertips. A pressure began to build in his gums in anticipation of the changes in his teeth. Soon his body would shift noisily beneath his flesh as his muscles transformed, a part of the transformation that had been painful in the beginning but had since become exhilarating.

She pulled the strap of his eye patch over his head and tossed the patch aside, revealing his empty eye socket. She placed a hand on his head, slid her fingers into his hair, and closed them into a fist. With the authority of a dominatrix and the playfulness of a child, she pulled his head back so his face was looking up at hers. Her lush breasts rose with a deep breath and slowly fell as she smiled slightly, lips pulling back to show the tips of her fangs.

When he spoke her name, his voice was different—thicker, deeper, with the sound of something not quite human: “Lupa.”

He had named her after the she-wolf that had nursed Romulus and Remus—the infants who would become the founders of Rome—and kept them safe from harm on the Palatine Hill after they’d escaped their deaths, ordered by Amulius the king. Taggart had chosen the name because, as he’d looked into her beautiful silver eyes when she was only an infant, he could see her nurturing a newborn species—something that was more than human, more than wolf, and even more than the werewolf that combined them both.

Lupa pulled his face to hers. Their writhing tongues met before their lips, then their fangs clicked together thickly. Taggart’s hands went to work removing his shirt as he kicked off his shoes. She slid one hand over his bare back, which was rapidly becoming thick with hair. He slid a hand over the hair growing fast on her breast and squeezed, rubbed a thumb back and forth over her hard, dark nipple.

As they both grew hairier, his body popped and crackled with the changes taking place within it while hers changed smoothly and quietly. He pulled her down onto the floor and their bodies writhed over one another as hands groped and clawed. Each inhalation was a gasp, each exhalation a throaty growl.

Taggart turned her over roughly so that she was face-down on the floor. He reached under her and pulled hard until her ass was in the air. Using his knee to shove her legs apart, he clutched the cheeks of her ass, squeezing them hard. Then he plunged into her.

Their growls and pants filled the room and grew louder as Taggart pounded into her repeatedly, his rhythm picking up speed. The room took on their gamey, carnal scent as she writhed beneath him and dug savagely at the floor with her hands, claws tearing through the carpet.

Four knocks sounded at the door.

“Sheriff?” a voice said.