The Taste of Night (19 page)

Backlit in the approaching dawn, perched on the highest sign in the boneyard, I was now at the greatest risk of discovery. All any member of the troop had to do was look behind them, and that they didn’t revealed how much they trusted me, or how little they really knew of me. I was about to set them straight, though if all went well they’d never know it. Vaulting the fifteen feet to the dusty ground, I charged ahead, careful to keep silent, downwind, following their lead.

The exact moment when night and day split isn’t a palpable thing. I don’t know how to explain it, except to say it’s like entering the embrace of a familiar lover. At some point you’re able to anticipate timing and touch, melding the new sensation in with the familiar experience, so that your movement from one side to the other is sure, smooth, and relaxed. So at the moment Gregor gunned his engine, wheels spinning madly against gravel and broken glass, and just before the cab shot forward like a greyhound out of the gate, I lowered myself into a runner’s crouch.

He barreled ahead, and I bolted across the remaining acreage of the boneyard, eating up the ground with long, sure strides. Metal screamed through stone as the cab hit, the high-pitched tearing of the car’s body muffled by the explosion of disintegrating concrete blocks. When the ripple came around the final wall—the one I’d breached before—I fired another full round into the congealing concrete, then plunged headlong into the chasm. I knew it’d be close, but when the shockwaves shuddered around my frame, and concrete pressed in, pressuring my skull, I could only hold my breath, keep my eyes shut, and work my way through what felt like a mile of concrete. The wall was solidifying at my heels so quickly it would swallow me if I stopped. My satchel took on drag, like a parachute opening after a diver, and I had to fight it—limbs wheeling
madly—to power through to the other side.

The wall suddenly released me and momentum thrust me forward, so I ended up on hands and knees, concrete dropping from my face in wet chunks. It took a moment of wracking coughs, but eventually I was able to reach blindly behind into my backpack. I washed my face with a wet towel, then my hands, the towel quickly stiffening as I blew my nose and started digging out the concrete in my ears.

Senses restored, I stripped off the bandana protecting my hair and dropped it to the ground. It fell like a rock. My jeans crackled as I stood, and I glanced behind me to see a splinter in the newly formed wall, an opening, if one knew where to look. I pushed away my unease at leaving the barrier compromised yet again, and reasoned that the Shadows had to know we were looking everywhere for them. The last thing they’d do was come knocking on our front door, and I’d return and mend the small fissure before it was found…by Shadow
or
Light.

So, mentally apologizing to the God of Fine Vehicles, I clicked open Olivia’s Porsche and climbed into the driver’s seat with brittle chunks of cement falling off me everywhere. First stop, home to change. It didn’t matter how fast Gregor and the rest were. They had seven stops to make before they could begin their investigation. I had two. And in this car, I’d make them both in record time.

If you don’t count the traffic, Vegas is an easy town to get around. It’s laid out like a grid, one flat street bisecting another, north to south and east to west, with a swirl of interstate looping psychotically about the middle. There wasn’t much traffic this early in the morning, and I reached my second destination in five minutes flat.

This time I drove my other car. I’d bought the old clunker last winter, and nobody knew about it, not even Warren. This was what I used for my late-night hunts, when taking a Porsche into the city’s underbelly would be like taking Pam Anderson into a high school boys’ locker room. I kept it in a remote corner of my high-rise’s garage, where the shadows ate up most of the chipped paint and dented bodywork, and while the community board didn’t like it, I paid them enough in association and parking fees to keep them quiet. Besides, I always kept it covered.

As manic and peopled as the site of the first attack must have been a dozen hours ago, it was deserted now, all the cops back in the shop typing up their reports, all the curious onlookers locked safely behind closed doors, thanking their lucky stars that whatever ill fate had befallen their neigh
bors, at least it hadn’t visited two doors down. I sat in my beat-up two-door, dressed in black fatigues, a dingy wig covering my hair as I waited for the others to make their way into the core of the city.

As I waited, I listened to the scanner I’d had installed in this car, a page out of Gregor’s book, though this one was tuned to the station the troop used to communicate. Even expecting it, I jolted when the static burst into syllables, straightening from my slouch so quickly, Wild Turkey sloshed over the scarred leather seat. It was Gregor’s voice, and I upped the volume to make out his words and code.

“There’s been a mix-up at Sky-Chem, Inc. Two tests have been tampered with, though one has gone missing.”

Warren’s voice returned immediately. “Has the technician made contact with the other concerned party?”

“Affirmative. Second party is not currently in residence, but en route from California. Expected at Sky-Chem’s downtown office, First and Ogden, ASAP.”

In context, the dialogue made sense. Chandra worked at Sky-Chem laboratories doing drug tests on city employees. She had found another victim. She’d moved the body and was now a short distance from the California Hotel. The crossroads had been given as a reference point. The remaining agents would scent her out from there.

And with a body to examine, there was a biological template to work from. Since said body was also just four blocks from here, I yanked my keys from the ignition and immediately took off in that direction. If I waited, the others would close the perimeter, and I wouldn’t get close enough to see or learn anything at all. So I needed to get there first using a route none of them would use, remotely possible only because I’d already legged countless hours on these streets.

Most of the roadways in this area were short but wide, trapped between railroad homes built in the early 1900s, now renovated office buildings, with a spattering of new construction. A few blocks over, downtown Vegas teemed with slot machines, dollar-ninety-nine breakfasts, and a
multimillion-dollar canopy of lights, but on this side of the metaphorical tracks, cheap thrills were the thing of dreams. As was, it seemed, indoor plumbing. There was so much urine on the walls of the alley I veered through that I could see the stains even in the moonlight.

I paused when I reached the alley’s end to peer around the corner, covering my nose as I studied the building across the street. A brick affair that’d seen its best days about three decades past, it was shrouded in darkness, its business day long concluded. The building adjacent to it had been renovated into a bank, which meant security, sensors, and cameras. In comparison, this one looked like a neglected dog. Even a break-in would be welcome attention. Happy to oblige, I skirted across the street.

There was a dim alcove with dual glass doors, and I peeked through them into the lobby, redesigned to look edgy and modern, though stripping the yellowed linoleum had apparently been beyond the budget. Black tape along the floor showed where the cattle—or customers—were to line up, and walls of half brick, half glass, probably bulletproof, held cages where clerks served their time. The place was otherwise windowless.

Only one place to go, I decided, sticking my head out from beneath the portico to survey the rest of the building, and that was up.

A good rock climber can wedge fingertips and body parts into the smallest of crannies, stem from the most unlikely of places, and defy gravity with nothing more than flexibility, confidence, and strong thighs. I wasn’t a good rock climber…but I was a heroine, and if I wanted to hang on to a measly piece of brick, I could. It helped that I had no fear of falling, but it would have helped more if I could’ve just leaped the thirty feet to the roof, which I
hypothetically
could. Hypothetically being the key word. Down was one thing; you just aim and let gravity do most of the work. Up was quite another.

All in all it took me a little over a minute to scale the wall,
long enough to be spotted if someone had been approaching from a westerly direction. I still had the presence of mind to glance around before swinging myself onto the crackling, dilapidated rooftop, sidestepping broken tiles, bottles, and newspapers in a crouch, wondering how so much litter found its way onto the rooftop.

According to my calculations, and the death scent growing stronger with every advancing step, the opposite wall should look down on the alley where Chandra had stashed the body. I took a full minute to center myself, making sure my breath was even, then peered over the side.

It took a moment for me to spot them, eyes running over the various bumps and shadows protruding from the alley floor, but then Chandra’s bulky, loathsome silhouette lumbered into view. She bent over what I assumed was the body, examining it with careful attention until softly running footfalls caught her attention. She tensed, shoulders squared, then relaxed as Micah rounded the corner. They whispered in half sentences and medical jargon, a conversation born of familiarity and long hours spent together in the lab, and the few words I caught were difficult to follow.

Half a minute later Warren stumbled up the opposite side of the alley, still immersed in his character. His walk gradually straightened, though he still possessed the authentic limp, and his head came up, scouring their faces before moving on to the rest of the surroundings.

I jerked back from the ledge, because if anyone was going to discover me, it was Warren. He had an uncanny sixth sense, especially when it came to me. We’d been linked with a binding agent months before, and though he swore the compound had been dissolved, I sometimes felt twinges in my breastbone when he was near, like a second heartbeat. And if I felt that, I’d decided, Warren probably did too.

I waited another minute, then chanced another look over the ledge. There were six silhouettes now assembled around the body as if about to perform some sick act of satanic worship…or as if they’d just finished. Jewell arrived just
then, moving quickly, and the others made room for her, falling back to allow her in, and giving me my first good look at the ravaged body.

It was a woman, painfully ordinary in every way. Height, weight, hair color…even her state at the time of death could be termed average. After all, plenty of people died naked. Some even died with a horrific and pained expression on their face, eyes sealed wide in the final throes of fighting off the Reaper. But I doubted many others died with burn marks blackening their lips, shriveling their skin so that their death mask was frozen in a grotesque parody of a grin. I also doubted too many people had the same burn marks charring their fingertips, incinerating skin and tissue all the way down to the bone.

But this woman had pulled a triple-hitter. The burns extended to the entire area nesting between her spread legs, a charred and blackened void now, still smoldering and unrecognizable. The rest of her body was marble white, pristine and untouched against the filthy ground.

“What the fuck?” I pulled back, unable—indeed, unwilling—to process what I’d just seen. It looked like nitric acid had been poured over her body. Except there were no splash marks. And who burned only in three distinct and entirely separate areas of the body? And how had her attacker gotten away without discovery, without the victim—who looked like she’d died in intense agony—even making a sound?

Worse, was this what all the victims looked like?

I leaned back over the ledge to hear the other agents wondering the same thing. Hearing the word
prostitute
gave some clue as to how she’d gotten naked, why she’d been vulnerable to attack, but no one could guess at what had caused such painful mutilation. “How does a person burn to death with most of their body untouched?” I wondered aloud.

“They don’t,” came a voice from behind. I whirled, blood pounding in my ears because suddenly I smelled her—smelled the lack of her—and it was too late. Regan stood a handful of feet away in a flowered summer dress, looking
young and completely out of place on a dilapidated rooftop in a neighborhood that looked and smelled like it needed to be flushed. For someone with supersenses, I sure was getting snuck up on a lot lately.

“How did you—?”

“Evade your detection? Again?” Her face was guileless, but her voice teased. Seeing the way my eyes narrowed, how my shoulders squared defensively, she answered her own question. “I’m an initiate. I’m losing my human odor because I’m no longer mostly mortal. I haven’t metamorphosized yet, so the Shadow pheromones can’t be scented on me. Basically I’m in an olfactory no-man’s-land. We often send out older initiates to do reconnaissance work because of that. It’s good training, and we can’t be tracked by the agents of Light. Didn’t you know?”

I hadn’t—
we
hadn’t—and I was peeved to find it a good idea. Warren would never go for it, though, in part because he’d have to get through Rena to do so. Shit, I thought wryly, they didn’t even allow full-blown agents to leave the sanctuary if they thought it unsafe. Thus my position on the rooftop.

“That’s another opportunity you had to kill me,” I said in a whisper. “And you didn’t.”

Regan shrugged the words away and crouched beside me like we were longtime bosom buddies. “You’re starting to owe me big time.”

And my sense of right and wrong was just fucked up enough to believe that. Almost. “You’re not going to kiss me again, are you?”

“Believe me, once was enough.” She leaned forward to study the drama unfolding below.

“What did you do to that poor woman?” I finally asked.

“Nothing.” She tilted her head prettily. “She did it to herself.”

“Because she was a prostitute? Because she made her living off the streets?”

“Now, Joanna,” she sang—she seemed to love saying my
real name. Shooting me a sly smile, she blinked twice. “You know we don’t play favorites when it comes to harming mortals. Besides, how could we be in this alley as well as at the other hundred and eighty-seven places at the same time this brutality was occurring?”

“A hundred and eighty-seven?” I repeated faintly. That was more than in the past…what? Five years combined?

“That’s what the preliminary reports have confirmed,” she said, and I was sickened to hear a note of pride tinge her voice. If there was any doubt she was Shadow, it was gone now. “Who knows how many have yet to be found.”

All I could think to ask was, “Why?”

That little laugh tinkled out of her, subdued given the other agents, but infused with delight. “Chalk it up to collateral damage, Joanna. We had to cast our net far and wide. I told you we had something big planned for the agents of Light. The real question is
how.
”

I didn’t know. How
did
a person burn to death with marks on only ten percent of their body, at most? How did it happen all over the city at approximately the same time? How were the Shadow agents doing it seemingly from remote? And how was this to affect the troop? The same gnawing sense of anxiety I’d had when talking to Regan on the phone came over me, that unease as I’d watched the fireworks from the boneyard, feeling I was missing something so obvious it was staring me right in the face.

I gasped and looked up to find Regan doing exactly that.

“It’s a virus,” I said softly, and watched recognition dawn mockingly on her face. She tilted her head slightly, a silent indication to go on. “It’s airborne, released with the fireworks from atop Valhalla. The spores needed time to drift, to settle, to infect. That’s it? That’s the plan? To make thousands of people sick just so you have a chance of infecting one or two agents of Light?”

I couldn’t think of anything more heartless and inhumane. I recalled the way the gunpowder had possessed a peppery note, how the sky had filled with smoke—God,
with disease—and the ground in the boneyard had disappeared in a haze of filmy, infested clouds. A cursed battlefield.
The second sign of the Zodiac
.

I swallowed hard, pressing a hand to my lips. I knew my thoughts were flashing across my face like a ticker on television, but I couldn’t stop them. I’d stood in that boneyard, breathing deeply, trying to scent out the irregular notes on the wind…and that had been just what the Shadows had wanted.

I imagined myself in the place of the woman sprawled carelessly and obscenely on the ground below me, imagined what had to occur inside the body to end up that way, and I couldn’t help but shudder.

“Don’t worry, Joanna.” Regan leaned forward until her eyes found mine, and she smiled reassuringly. “You’re immune.”

Then she blew me a kiss, and lifted her brows as if to say,
See what I mean?

I didn’t…and then I did. The ground swayed beneath me so suddenly, I had to grab on to the ledge to steady myself. The air left my body in a relieved and astonished whoosh, and I closed my eyes, remembering the way Liam had reacted in the aquarium when Regan had kissed me.

“You infected me,” I said, faintly.