The Taste Of Night

14

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 neighbors, 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.

“I protected you,” she corrected, and when I opened my eyes she smiled again. “I gave you immunity. Looks like you owe me another one.”

“I owe you?” I asked incredulously. “For setting a deadly virus loose on the valley?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Only a small percentage of the population is susceptible to this strain, and even they had to be in the infectious range when the spores fell.”

So the agents below couldn’t contract the virus by touching the corpse…and they’d all been safely ensconced in the sanctuary the night of the fireworks. So that was a relief. But still. “The valley’s almost two million strong!”

She winced, seemingly sympathetic. “Urban living’s a bitch.”

I looked back down at the woman on the ground, knowing that whatever her occupation, whatever her reasons for being out on these streets, she didn’t deserve this. No one did.

“They don’t appreciate you, you know,” Regan said, mistaking my pained expression for the agents, who were packing up and getting ready to move out. “You should be down there with them, not up here squatting, having to do your job from afar.”

A small flicker of resentment stirred in me at those words, but I smashed it down, refusing to open my mind to it. “They’re just doing what they think best.”

She made a falsely considering note in the back of her throat. “And look where it got them. Had they been more proactive in the past six months, like you, this might have been stopped.”

I looked at her sharply. “Could it have been?”

She shrugged. “We’ll never know, will we? You should cut your losses, Joanna. Come with me and I’ll show you all that’s truly possible. As your ally I’ll make sure you’re never lacking in knowledge, assistance, or friendship. We’ll be the best in generations, you and I. The strongest, the most powerful.”

“The most evil.”

“Tomato, to-mah-to.” She flicked a pebble she’d been toying with over the ledge, then grinned. “At least come and see how much fun we’re having watching your buddies chase their own tails. We have a pool going…how many mortals will die before the first agent of Light figures out how to stop it? I’m taking the over.” She laughed again, this time louder, and I knew the sound had been heard because there was a tensed shuffling below us, then dead silence.

I didn’t care. I was ready to haul her giggling ass over the side of the ledge-discovery and punishment be damned-and she must have sensed it, because before I found my feet she was away, positioned in the middle of the rooftop, the ancient air-conditioning unit safely between us. From there she pulled a slip of paper from her bosom and held it aloft.

“What is it?” I whispered sarcastically. “More protection?”

“Joaquin’s home address.”

My eyes went from hers to the paper and back again. She stared at me knowingly. “Gotta protect myself as well, don’t I? You stay there long enough for me to put it on the ledge behind me, and it’s yours. Deal?”

I didn’t want to make any more deals with this psychopathic bitch, but I didn’t have long to make a decision. The agents were active again below, disposing of the body, dispersing to their next locations, most likely heading back to the sanctuary. I had to get there first…but what to do about Regan? I’d let her live once already, and look what had happened.

Then again, she’d let me live twice. I bit my lip, thinking fast. I’d already be in a heap of trouble when my deeds in the aquarium were found out, but that wouldn’t be until next Wednesday, another five days. The question was, could I find Joaquin and exact my revenge before Warren read the new manual? Because one thing was certain: once he found out what I’d done, he’d never let me exit the sanctuary again.

I glanced back at the paper between Regan’s fingertips. An address. Well, it didn’t get much easier than that, did it?

A shout sounded below me, and I knew I had to move quickly. I nodded, then settled back into a docile crouch. Regan backed up, scooping up a shard of glass without taking her eyes off me, and secured the note with it on the opposite ledge. Then, without glancing, she stepped backward, dropping from view.

Her gleeful yell followed her descent.

I launched myself forward as alarm rose in the alley, yanked the paper from beneath its weight, and vaulted to the rooftop across from me. Somersaulting out of my landing, I kept sprinting until I ran out of rooftops, then leaped to the ground in a blind freefall, feet bicycling madly in the air. I landed in a crouch and took off from there. I didn’t dare look back, or stop, and by the time I reached my car I knew no one had followed.

Sliding into the seat, I closed my eyes and took a moment to catch my breath. Then, under the feeble light of a flickering lamp, I opened the slip of paper. No name…just an address I memorized immediately. After burning the note with the car’s cigarette lighter, I smiled to myself and gunned the engine. All I had to do was help the troop realize the second sign of the Zodiac had come to fruition, that it was a virus plaguing the valley, and do so without letting on how I knew. Then I’d go after Joaquin.

And after that I’d turn my attention to Regan.

Because she was wrong, I thought, heading back to the sanctuary through the dark web of decaying streets. I didn’t owe her shit. Hundreds of innocent lives lost made us more than even.