Xenofreak Nation (18 page)

“There’s a washer and dryer around here somewhere. These should do for now,” he handed Bryn a bundle of clothing and ignored her perplexed look.

“Are you sure your friends won’t mind?” she asked.

He grabbed her shoulders from behind, careful of the quills, and turned her toward the bathroom. “You want first shower or do you want a cold shower after I use all the hot?”

She disappeared behind the bathroom door. It was chilly in the house, so he found the thermostat in the hallway and set it to seventy degrees. The house had a secure, old-fashioned land-line telephone in the kitchen. He called Shasta.

“All set?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Pizza’s coming.”

“Good. What about the panda?”

“The ARA has it stashed at a farm upstate. I’m sending the coordinates in case you need them.”

“Word on how they knew?”

“None.”

“Dundee?”

“A blood-spattered Wavecruiser turned up at Bensonhurst Park. Fingerprints belong to one Duane Walker, native of Sydney, Australia. No body. No witnesses saw him come ashore—that have come forward, anyway.”

“Can they tell from the blood if he’s the carrier?”

“In the lab now.”

“Do they know what to look for yet?”

“It’s been tentatively identified as a typhoid mutation, completely resistant to antibiotics. Still can’t convince the frickin’ CDC that it might be airborne.”

Scott had seen holos of security tapes from the bank that had been robbed by a group of XBestias. According to Abel, they’d done it without Lupus’ sanction, but that was irrelevant. Abel only knew one of the perpetrators: Dundee. The holos showed the xenos lining the patrons and employees of the bank up, while Dundee forced the manager to open the safe. There was limited physical contact between the xenos and the hostages and no resistance. Cooperation had been coerced through intimidation; big guns and a lot of shouting in the hostage's faces. Within seventy-two hours, all seventeen victims had gotten sick and died. Until today, the XIA had only unconfirmed reports of the whereabouts of the perpetrators. They knew none of the xenos seemed to be affected by the pathogen. Scott’s report on Dundee’s robust health prior to his gunshot wound now confirmed it. One or more of those xenos appeared to be a carrier. If the typhoid mutation was indeed airborne, the XIA feared another Typhoid Mary was on the loose, but on a potentially more deadly scale. Since then, isolated non-xenos all over the city had turned up in the morgue with the infection, but none of them were linked to any other deaths—they caught it, but didn’t spread it themselves.

Fournier’s role in all of this was uncertain. It was known that in addition to his increasingly audacious xenoalterations, he had experimented with cloning and cross-species in vitro fertilization. He had a monstrous God complex. Scott wanted nothing more than to topple him from on high.

“Fiske?” he asked Shasta.

“Rikers.”

“Nosferatu?”

“Creepy bastard. Beat cops rounded him and his crew up. It’ll be high-profile. The girl was snatched on her way home from school.”

“How’d they get to Abel in Rikers?” he asked.

“That was a heart attack. Yang got him into the interview room and the guy went nuts. You never saw anyone so scared. Didn’t seem natural.”

Scott had a half-formed question at the back of his mind about Bluto’s, but he heard Bryn call, “Scott?” To Shasta, he said, “Gotta go, boss.”

“Burn phone’s in the pizza box,” she said. Then, uncharacteristically, “Take care of her.”

“I will.” He placed the handset in the charger and went back to the bedroom.

The bathroom door was cracked and flowery-smelling steam curled out towards the ceiling. He heard Bryn cursing. “You okay in there?”

“No.” She sounded tearful.

“Uh…anything I can do?”

She came out wearing the clothes he’d given her, black stretch pants and a long, soft sweater. Or she was partially wearing the sweater—it had gotten hopelessly stuck on her quills and only one eye was visible through neck hole.

It took a monumental effort not to smile. “Sit.”

He stood over her, easing the sweater away from a few stubborn quills, self-conscious now that she was clean. He must smell like a wet dog in comparison. The quills seemed to want to cooperate with him as he worked; they lay down close to her skull and made the job easier. He slid his hands around her neck to reach underneath and lift them so he could adjust the sweater to rest properly on her shoulders, but he pricked his index ‘finger.’

“Ow!” Instinctively, he stuck it in his mouth. He’d had the xenoalteration for seven months and still the fur felt foreign against his lips, the pad rough against his tongue.

“Sorry,” she said. She looked positively morose as she went to pick her leather jacket up off the bathroom floor. When she began shrugging into it, he asked, “What are you doing? That jacket’s ruined. And it’s still wet.”

“I don’t have a choice. It protects me from the quills.”

“No, take it off. We’ll think of something else.”

She gave him a grateful look, almost a hero-worship kind of look. For the first time, he wondered how she was going to look at him when she found out the truth.

Chapter Thirty-three

While Scott was in the shower, Bryn explored the house. It was small and neat—and about as impersonal as a hotel suite. Each room had exactly one framed print on the wall; sober still-lifes from artists she didn’t recognize. The furniture was utilitarian; a sectional in the living room with firm, unyielding cushions and a plain wooden table with four chairs in the kitchen. The cupboards were empty except for one, which had a four-piece dinner set in boring beige stoneware and eight clear drinking glasses. One drawer held an eight-piece set of silverware with no pattern whatsoever and another had three striped dish towels that looked as if they’d never been used.

She had just decided the house must belong to a man who brought his mistress here when she opened the refrigerator and revised that thought. Inside were one bottle each of ketchup and soy sauce, a squeeze bottle of mustard, a jar of mayonnaise and an unopened twelve-pack of bottled water. No way a cheating dog could properly entertain a woman here, not without alcohol.

She helped herself to a bottle of water, wishing the empty pantry had something in it, even a few crumbs to stave off the hunger pangs that had been gnawing at her for hours now. She was contemplating slurping down a couple spoonfuls of ketchup when someone knocked on the door, startling her so badly she almost dropped her water bottle. She scooted into the bedroom and, mostly because she still doubted they had a right to be in the house in the first place, opened the bathroom door and said in a loud whisper, “Scott! Scott!”

He looked around the shower curtain, wet hair dark and dripping. He’d shaved, the first time she’d seen him without his customary stubble. He looked much younger than she’d assumed him to be.

“Is the pizza here?” he asked. “Damn it.”

The shower spray stopped, so she shut the bathroom door, but it opened again almost immediately. Scott was hastily tucking a bath towel around his hips as he brushed past her, leaving wet footprints in the carpet. She’d seen his body before, on the day he fought The Viscount, but the circumstances had been far from intimate then. Now she felt her quills respond to the sight of his lean frame. She vowed never to tell a soul what it meant when they went flat like that.

He’d neglected to tell her about the pizza, but she didn’t chastise him when he came back into the room and set the box on the end of the bed. By the time he came back out of the bathroom again, dry and dressed in clean clothes, she’d tuned the holovision to a 24/7 cartoon channel and eaten an entire slice of pepperoni. He joined her on the bed, and in half an hour they consumed the whole thing between them.

After setting the box aside, he examined the tiny red quill prick on his finger-pad before giving her an assessing look.

“I have an idea,” he said. He went into the bathroom and she heard the sound of the shower curtain rings being drawn across the rod. After a few minutes, he returned with a section of torn plastic in his hand; the pattern of shells and swirls told her he’d scavenged a piece right off the curtain.

He handed her a tiny pair of manicure scissors, wiggling his fingers and saying, “I can’t use these.”

With his guidance, she cut a circle the diameter of her shoulders out of the plastic, cut a slit to the center and made a smaller circle in the middle. He helped her place the bib around her neck and then made a dissatisfied face.

“It’s fine,” she said, pleased that he’d made an effort.

“Not going to stay on very well. Too bad we don’t have any tape.”

Bryn thought of the duct-taped guy they’d left in the sand. With more finality, she repeated, “It’s fine.”

She sat back on her pillow while he switched channels. They watched a news story about the gun battle between “unknown perpetrators” on Coney Island.

“We’re famous,” he commented.

“Infamous,” she corrected.

After sports and the weather, her father appeared on screen standing next to Dr. Finnegan and a man dressed in a pressed, tailored suit. Instinctively, Bryn knew it was Manny, the ‘marketing guy’ her father had hired. Under the guise of making a public plea for her safe return, her father began his campaign to use her for his own purposes.

“My daughter is distraught after her traumatic kidnapping and mutilation,” he said, voice cracking on the last word. If Bryn didn’t know better she’d swear Harry Vega was devastated by this new turn of events. Maybe he was, but not for the reasons he’d like everyone to think. “She’s suicidal and making very poor decisions. If you see her, please contact the XIA at the special hotline they set up for us.”

An 800-number scrolled across the holo of Bryn her father had taken at the kitchen table. She did, indeed, look traumatized and suicidal. Manny finished the press conference with a statement that sent frissons of alarm down her spine, “There is a ten-thousand dollar reward for any information leading to the safe recovery of Bryn Vega.”

Through gritted teeth, she said, “My father doesn’t have ten-thousand dollars.”

“Well, you’re worth that much to someone.”

His words were uttered casually, but she looked at him out of the sides of her eyes until he said defensively, “I’m not going to turn you in.” Sounding like an afterthought, he added, “They’d arrest me if I tried.”

Bryn felt the comfortable camaraderie fade away. Scott grabbed the holo control and switched channels, finally settling on an old action movie made before holovision was invented. The movie had been holoized, but there was something a little off about it; a fuzziness that normal holos didn’t have. Still, it succeeded in distracting her. After awhile she realized she was on the verge of dozing off, so she turned to ask if he planned on sleeping on the couch or what.

He was lying on his back, eyes closed, mouth partially open, breathing evenly. The top half of his dark hair spilled across his pillow; the bottom portion that had been shaved when she met him had grown to about half an inch. She didn’t want to wake him, but she also didn’t want to sleep on that stiff couch herself, so she climbed under the covers on her side.

Sleep must have come quickly, because when she woke sometime later, she didn’t remember experiencing any of the host of discomforts and troubling thoughts that usually manifested in the intractable insomnia that had been plaguing her for weeks. The room wasn’t dark; she’d shut off the holovision but left the bathroom light on. Something had awoken her, though—a noise maybe. She lay still and tried to listen past the pounding of her heart. After awhile, when nothing happened, her pulse slowed. Scott said this was a safe house. She reached up to adjust her quills so she could roll to the side facing his direction, and began to doze again.

Somewhere between sleep and waking, her drifting thoughts coalesced. Her eyes flew open and she saw him staring at her.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?” she asked.

Chapter Thirty-four

He’d been thinking how beautiful she was, how much he wanted to get under the covers and touch her. In the lethargy of half-sleep, his body eagerly responded to the notion. It had been a very long time since he’d slept with a woman, with or without sex. His arousal subsided rapidly at her words.

It would be a risk asking how she’d come to that conclusion; if he allowed her to voice her suspicions, they might solidify in her mind. On the other hand, her insight might be valuable. Whatever he’d done to give himself away could get him killed. If he were to confirm the truth, tell her that, yeah, he was essentially a cop, he would put her in even further danger. Knowledge like that was worth more than gold to his competition—they wouldn’t hesitate to hurt her to get it. And if she were forced to tell, or if she let something slip in the presence of another XBestia, he was a dead man. He could only hope this was idle speculation on her part, easily deflected.

He held up his hand and extended his claws. “You ever see a cop with these?”