Deadly Lover (2 page)

Dead.

No longer a threat.

She studied the faint pattern of light and dark bands decorating the Ormney’s face and decided he was fully mature, middle aged even.

Six months ago she hadn’t known those patterns were unique to each individual Ormney or that the bands faded with maturity. Six months ago she hadn’t known how to counter their ability to
slip
. Six months ago she hadn’t known the agony of those claws digging into the soft flesh beneath her ribs, carving out a path to her vital organs.

Kiq had taught her well. This time she knew. And this time she hadn’t hesitated to go for the kill.

The rush. He gloried in it. The sweet, addictive pleasure. So...unexpected.

He studied the alley below, admiring his handy work. This kill had been necessarily hands-off. A means to an end.

He’d been prepared to accept the lesser gratification of a well-executed plan.
She
had been meant to serve a purpose. With her family connections to the police and her personal history with one of the animals, she’d been meant only to be a witness. Someone to help the idiot Metro cops see his brilliance—the service he was doing for the community. They needed to wake up and see what was happening behind closed doors.

He rolled his shoulders to shake off the anger. How could they be so oblivious?

In the alley below
she
moved, tried to straighten, then stilled. He could see pain etched on her face. A weighty pleasure settled in his chest as he remembered the thud of her slim body hitting the wall. The sound reminded him of the day he’d been strong enough to throw a rat against the wall with enough force to smash its filthy head. But the Ormney animal’s blow hadn’t broken
her
. No, she’d surprised him. Not the uninteresting girl he remembered. Not merely the damaged woman he’d expected.

No. She was exquisite.

Strong. Fierce. Pale and blonde, subtly pretty. He pressed a hand to the cool glass, wanting to touch her creamy skin.

No, he didn’t mind sharing the kill with her. She’d brought down the big ugly animal with nothing but a pulser. She’d done it where he’d been able to see every glorious detail. With the others, he’d had to let his kill go off to meet its inescapable fate alone. But she’d brought the animal down, right there, in plain sight.

He envied her the freedom to kill out in the open. But his way was more of a challenge. She’d never be able to match his cleverness. Last time, the cops hadn’t been able to understand his kills, let alone trace them back to him.

She might not be as clever as him, but she was smarter than the cops. She’d figure out exactly what he wanted her to know and no more.

She was perfect in every respect. Perfect because he’d made her what she was. And he deserved perfection.

He deserved her.

Facing her cousin across a dead body wasn’t exactly the best way for Lily to reconnect with the O’Leary side of her family. Even before Metro had set up the bright mobile lights in the narrow alley, she’d had no trouble seeing the distance in Sean’s familiar green eyes. When he’d assigned Detective Newman to question her, she hadn’t expected he’d let her return to the alley. She’d been wrong.

Now, she stood out of the way and watched Sean work the scene. She’d heard he was a good cop, a good detective, but she’d never seen him on the job before. She soaked up the sight of her kin. With his cropped blond hair, a shade darker than most of the O’Learys, he looked so much like her memories of her dad that it hurt to look at him. It hurt, but she craved the sweet pain.

Lily smiled grimly. Sean would make Captain soon. He took in everything and his body language broadcast calm discipline as he instructed the patrol officers and evidence technicians. Experience and responsibility sat easily on his shoulders.

One of the med units had already transported the female victim. Lily had been grateful to be in the alley when she heard them come and go. She didn’t want to see the victim. To remember herself torn and bleeding.

“Lily?” Sean’s voice pushed away the dark memories. Eyebrows raised, he waited for the answer to a question she hadn’t heard. That he expected her to answer was a welcome bridge across the expanse between them.

The Deepwater duty officer had already been on her com-link, ordering her to avoid the local authorities and get clear of the scene as quickly as possible. But this time she couldn’t avoid them. Metro employed way too many members of her family. Might as well get the questions over with and on the record.

Sean stepped closer and leaned in, subtly blocking her from the view of the officers and techs. “You sure you don’t need the medics?”

She probably did. The pain in her lower back throbbed and she’d had enough concussions to know what her dizziness and nausea meant, but she could get medical aid on her own when this business was done and there weren’t a dozen cop eyes watching. “You have no idea how sick I am of being poked and prodded.” She grinned in an attempt to sell the non-answer.

 “I heard you were in a training accident.” His back to the others, he let his concern show on his face, but he kept his tone light and casual. “That’s what the military says when the incident is black ops.”

Lily clenched one fist behind her back and straightened her posture. “I’m not military,” she reassured. “It really was a training accident.” Fatigue and pain ate at her, but she kept her breathing shallow and even, avoiding the sharper stab of what might well be broken ribs. Despite her injuries, she hadn’t reached her body’s limits. She could and would push through.

Sean hesitated. “This was a clean kill, Lil. You’re in the clear here.”

It was the use of the nickname more than his reassurance that chased away some of her worry. “Thanks, Sean.”

He slipped back into his cop face. “I hadn’t heard you were in town. Are you on the job here?”

Her family knew she worked for Deepwater, but they had no idea she’d been in the Special Tactics Unit. STU rarely worked in the US. She spent most of her time doing hostage recovery in countries most people couldn’t place on a map.

Lily shook her head. “I haven’t been cleared for duty. I was on the way to an evaluation appointment when I heard her scream.”

Eyebrows that matched his hair drew together. “Your appointment was in The Mixer?”

“No.” Lily kept her answer brief by rote. “The appointment was downtown at the regional office.”

Sean let her statement hang in the space between them, letting silence ask for more than she wanted to give. He was good, but she knew all the interrogation techniques and how to resist them. Still, she wasn’t on the job here. This was Sean. Family.

And if there was a chance that she could have her family back...

“I was on my way to the Clinton Street rail station.” Lily took a moment to breathe and brace for his reaction. “I have an apartment a few blocks down.”

“Shit, Lily. An apartment? How long…?” He fired the questions at her like bullets then stopped, putting up a hand. “No, wait. Don’t answer that. I want plausible deniability when Mom finds out you’ve been living in town without coming to see her.” Sean shook his head and met her gaze directly. “Damn, Lily, you sure know how to pick a neighborhood.”

Lily shrugged. She had no intention of trying to explain her reasons for being back in the city or what had drawn her to The Mixer—a neighborhood plagued by street gangs, home to the good folks too poor to move up or out, and the one neighborhood where Earthers and Ormney mixed on a daily basis.

Sean hesitated. “We thought you were staying up in DC with your mom.”

Lily shook her head, then fought down the resulting wave of nausea. She tried to keep her tone light. “She hasn’t forgiven me for my career choices, Brian has roommates, and no way would I stay with Rose and Bradley.”

“Yeah, Bradley’s been in town a lot lately, I thought maybe he was here...”

“Avoiding me?”

Sean nodded. By any rights, when her longtime boyfriend dumped her, he should have been given the cold shoulder by the whole O’Leary clan. But Bradley Rubiero had married her twin sister and that made him part of the family. What choice did any of them have? Lily had made it easier on everyone and made herself scarce, courtesy of Deepwater.

Lily brushed past Sean and the techs to get closer to the corpse. Splattered in blood, death stealing the color from his skin, the dead Ormney looked every bit the monster. What had he looked like before? Before he’d turned murderous? And why…or when…had that been?

Sean followed Lily, signaling the others to clear the area. He stood by her side and waited until she met his penetrating green stare. “Do you want to add anything to the statement you gave Detective Newman?”

Lily squatted next to the body, thinking. “Yeah. There was something off about the Ormney’s behavior.”

“You mean other than him ripping up an unarmed woman?” There was no humor in the question.

“Yeah.” She remembered the Ormney’s eyes. They’d been wild. Like Kiq’s had been that day. Wild, then empty and dead. But she couldn’t tell Sean about that. “He ran when he should’ve fought. Fought when he should’ve run.” She met Sean’s intent stare. “Have them check him for chemical influence.”

“Street drugs don’t work on
stringers
the way they do on us.” He used the street slur for the Ormney without any apparent malice. Maybe he didn’t realize the disrespect of using it while crouched over the corpse.

“No,” Lily agreed. “Not street drugs.”

“Then what?”

Lily weighed the backlash she’d weather from Deepwater for what she needed to tell him. It didn’t measure up to the dead man at her feet. “There are things that mess them up. I’ll get you a list.”

Jolaj stopped in the shadows just inside the alley and watched the two Earthers crouched over Lanyak’s body. He’d met Detective Sean O’Leary several times and judged the man to be honorable and fair, but trapped by the strictures of a system that was seldom fair to the Ormney people. The woman didn’t wear Metro ID, but she seemed at ease with the detective. Their knees brushed against each other as they talked and leaned into one another like allies.

Her slim legs were encased in denim but her hips were hidden by an ill-fitting black leather coat that hung low to the curve of her bottom. It did nothing, however, to hide the swell of her breasts. Her wrists and neck were almost delicate in their thinness—cream skin wrapped over bone and sinew. Her golden hair lay in silken sheets against her head, ending in a knot at her neck. Her frowning lips were wide and full. Her eyes, a piercing green, shone with sharp intelligence.

As they pushed to stand and stepped around his dead friend, he noticed the stiffness of her movements. Barely discernible, but clear in the careful way she breathed, the rigidity of her posture, the subtle hesitation before each move. His hunter’s instincts screamed she was either weak prey to hunt or an injured member of the flock to be protected—instincts better suited to survival on a primitive planet. It was what his people had expected when they’d left behind their dying world in search of a new home. They’d planned and worked, sacrificed and engineered themselves to give their descendants the best chance of coming into being.

Now any chance for Lanyak’s descendants was lost. They would never be born. Never exist. The ache of the loss touched a familiar cord and roused a grief that had become thick and layered like an earthy strata of rock and silt.

Lanyak lay dead in an alley, and Jolaj had to find a way to keep the others who’d made the same choice from coming to the same fate.

The smell of waste, blood, and burnt flesh threatened to bring up the Ready-Meal Lily had eaten for lunch.
She swallowed slowly, deliberately, as if focusing her attention on the movement of tongue and throat could force down the guilt that had been building as she thought about the drug angle. She let the sickly, wet ball of emotion settle in her belly then caught Sean’s eye and coughed up the more useful bits of hard-won knowledge. “You know that list?”

Sean’s face stayed calm, but curiosity crept into his green eyes like a cat slinking through tall grass. “The list of drugs that might have made this guy go Frankenstein?”

Lily dipped her chin. “Nothing on that list is something he’d be exposed to accidentally.”

Sean’s jaw tightened as he absorbed the information and Lily knew he understood the implication. Someone had drugged the Ormney intentionally.

“Who else would know about this list?” Sean spat the words out as if the criminal intent left a vile residue in his mouth.

“Ormney med researchers. A handful of people at Deepwater. Beyond that? Hard to say.” Lily considered the reasons she’d chosen to live in the Mixer. “You’ve been working cases in this neighborhood awhile, right?”

“Sure.” Sean shot her a look that reminded her she’d confessed to living down the block. “Not exactly a low crime neighborhood.”

She suspected she’d get a call from Aunt Jane. Sean was too smart to lecture her himself.

“Yeah, we have our share of trouble. We have property crimes and even violence more than other neighborhoods.” She let her gaze slip down to the body lying on the ground. “The other thing we have more of is Ormney. If someone wanted to start trouble with them, this would be a damn fine place to start.”

The Ormney’s natural ability to
slip
out of phase by changing the rate at which the tiniest particles of their bodies vibrated hadn’t earned them any friends. It made most people nervous and insecure behind their locked doors. Ormney were said to walk through walls and that had kept them living in a restricted area and earned them the
stringers
slur, a reference to the outdated physics of string theory. For some people, the restrictions didn’t go far enough.

Sean straightened and gave her a hand up. A muscle in his jaw twitched as he considered her comment, then his lips tightened for an instant, a brief flash of a smile. “Everyone in the family says your father was born with cop instincts. Right from the crib. He’d have been proud to know he passed that on to you.”