Patient Darkness: Brooding City Series Book 2 (2 page)

Feeling good and at one with the universe, Brennan stepped onto the shuttle and sat heavily in one of its lightly padded seats. The window was cool to the touch and felt good against his skin. Maybe he was more buzzed than he cared to admit, but the shuttle ride would give him time to clear his head before he got back to the apartment. They were deep into autumn, and leaves weren’t the only things falling in the city of Odols.

He had a serial killer to catch.

Alex Brüding calmly
listened to the voices of her neighbors.

It had nothing to do with thin walls or shouting matches. To anyone else, the building was perfectly quiet. The doors were basically slabs of honeycombed reinforced steel, and the soundproofed walls were second only to those of an anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. That absolute ability to close off the outside world was one of the very reasons she lived in the most expensive apartment complex in the city.

However, nothing on this earth could stop her from listening in on the private thoughts of those around her. It was a sixth sense of sorts, but one that seemed more real than the other five put together. It hadn’t always been a gift to her. When she was just a girl, Alex had thought she’d been cursed with madness, hearing voices that nobody else could. Now, though, she had accepted and embraced who she was. Without effort, she stared up at the raised ceiling of her bedroom and sifted through the cacophony of resentful grumblings, distrustful suspicions, and lusty daydreams.

This last collection fascinated her the most. She herself had been the focus of wandering eyes more than once, and knowing the intimate thoughts that accompanied them did wonders for her self-esteem. More than that, every casual flirt or lingering touch she observed carried extra meaning, given the proper context. Knowledge was power, and she intended to amass as much power for herself as she could.

Satisfied that she had caught up with her neighbors’ generally mundane lives, she rose from the queen-sized bed and set about preparing herself for the evening. While her neighbors might have been winding down from the day, her night was just getting started.

She had been ready for the past half hour, ever since she’d texted her date for the evening. A silky cherry-red chemise clung intriguingly to her chest while hanging just long enough to give teasing glimpses of her thighs. At just over five-nine, she had plenty of leg to work with, and she could look down on most people when wearing heels.

Alex frowned at her strawberry hair, which was slightly mussed from lying on the bed. She took a fine-toothed comb to it, drawing out the slender strands until she was satisfied. She considered adding lipstick, but settled on a clear, flavored gloss instead. Knuckles rapped lightly against the steel door, and Alex glided out of her bedroom and down the hallway. She passed the bathroom, guest room, kitchen, and living room before reaching the door, and her lover’s hand was raised to knock again when she opened it.

“Hi there,” he said, his lips spreading in a vulpine smile. The red curls of his hair stood out sharply against his black clothes.
You look fantastic
, she heard him rehearse in his head. A moment later, his mouth caught up to his brain.

“Thank you, Sam,” she said, smiling at the compliment. “You’re always such a sweetie.” She stood in the doorframe another moment, letting his eyes drink in all that they could, before stepping aside and waving him in.

“Sorry I’m late,” he explained, walking as far as the kitchen before turning to face her. “I was having drinks with a friend and—”

Alex cut him off as she planted her lips upon his. They were still cold from being outside and tasted like cheap beer, but she didn’t care. His body, too, was cold, but she would soon fix that. Sam’s brain was still processing the comment about his friend, but she pushed away the name and the thought from her mind. It was background noise that she didn’t need to hear right now. A second later, she felt his primal urges rise to the surface, and she found herself pushed up against the wall.

“I needed this,” she sighed, moving to work the leather jacket from his shoulders.

“What kind of gentleman would I be to keep my lady waiting any longer?”

He thinks he’s terribly clever, doesn’t he?
She pushed him away, down the hallway toward her room. “Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?”

True to his
word, Greg had left a Coke in the freezer.

Unfortunately, the timing had made it so the bottle was fully frozen by the time Brennan was able to recover it. “Hey, Greg,” he called out, putting the plastic bottle on the counter to thaw.

“Yo,” came the dignified response from, of all places, the bathroom.

“I can see you’re busy.” Brennan opened the bottom right cupboard, one which wasn’t casually accessible, to see which of his bottles had been pilfered by his underage nephew. If Greg throwing up in the toilet was the worst of Brennan’s concerns, he could count himself a lucky man.

Oddly, though, nothing seemed out of place. Two dozen bottles of locally brewed beer were still in their unopened box. The bottles of Stoli and Belvedere, both gifts from Sam, still had a fine layer of dust coating their unbroken seals, and the Captain, usually mixed with Coke, was more or less in line with the volume he remembered.

“I thought you didn’t want any of the hard stuff,” Greg said from behind, stepping out of the bathroom. Brown hair threatened to sweep down over his eyes, more representative of a much-needed haircut than any particular fashion choice. He wiped his mouth with one hand, and he shivered in spite of the long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants he was wearing.

Brennan’s knees popped as he rose to his feet. “Just making sure you didn’t get into my stash.”

“You have a stash?”

“Like you didn’t already know,” he said. He raised a skeptical eye and looked pointedly at his nephew’s sweaty brow and wobbling stance. “But you haven’t touched any of these, so what’s up? Are you getting sick?” He reached forward to feel Greg’s forehead, but the younger man retreated.

“I’m fine,” he said. “You know how it is when the temperature starts to drop. It’s probably just a flu or something, and I’m the first to catch it.”

False
.

Brennan grunted noncommittally. His nephew was a recovering addict. Chamalla copycats had flooded the streets at half the price. Brennan was rarely home to keep watch over him. It didn’t take an enormous effort to connect the dots, and he knew an easy way to confirm his suspicions.

“Sam mentioned he might be catching something, too,” Brennan said, rubbing his chin. “He said his body was burning up; he could barely stand to keep his jacket on, even when we were outside.” The words followed each other like ducklings in a row, the lie coalescing as easily as dew drops on a cool morning.

“I feel the same thing,” Greg said. He was rubbing at his arm, same as he had been coming out of the bathroom.

“You should get out of that long-sleeved shirt, then, and put something lighter on.”

Greg shook his head. “No, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” His eyes darted up; they were bloodshot, with a hint of dark bags starting to form beneath the heavy lids. “It’s still cold out, you know. I don’t want to catch something worse by being exposed like that.”

Brennan sighed. “All right, look, here’s the deal. I know you’re using, and I know you’re hurting from it right now.” He extended a hand. “Let me help you.”

Greg continued to shake, but it seemed beyond his control. He nodded jerkily and moved to sit down on the couch. Brennan sat next to him and rolled up Greg’s right sleeve; the skin was clear, except for an extremely faded square-shaped scar that was only really visible because he knew where to look. When Leviathan had been active, their Chamalla patches had produced hallucinations and a strong addiction to the drug, but some other ingredients had been responsible for slowly burning away at the skin of the application zone.

Hesitantly, Brennan moved on to the other sleeve. Three-quarters of the way up, the shirt material peeled rather than rolled away from the skin, and he had to force his stomach not to rebel. The skin all around the patch was like an open sore, oozing clear pus and blood even as the patch pumped something black and toxic into Greg’s system. Brennan started to lift the patch away, but Greg yelped out in pain; Brennan had to hold his arm to keep him from recoiling away entirely.

“I can’t get it off!” Greg sobbed. “That’s what I was trying to do in the bathroom, before you got home. This thing, it’s—it’s bad, real bad.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Brennan was more exasperated than angry. Clean for just over three months, somehow his nephew had fallen off the wagon, this time with an even worse concoction flowing through his veins.

“It’s going to sound stupid,” he mumbled, looking anywhere else but Brennan’s eyes.

“You can trust me. Whatever it is, I won’t get mad. I just want to help.”

“It’s like—” He stopped to rub at his eyes and wipe across his nose with his free hand. “I just wanted to feel it again, you know?”

“Feel what again?”

“The fever dreams,” Greg said wistfully. “I felt like I could do anything, because I could see
everything
. The past, the future…it’s hard to explain. Did you ever wish you had a superpower as a child?”

Brennan shook his head. If he were honest with himself, he might admit that he already
did
have a superpower. But these days, it was beginning to feel more like a curse than a blessing.

“To have that kind of sureness about something,” Greg continued, “is so liberating. And I can do some good with it, too! I helped find Detective Bishop, right? You couldn’t have solved it without me!”

That was exactly the problem. While Bishop had been grateful for the rescue attempt, just exactly
how
Brennan had learned of her location was still suspect. He had reported it as an anonymous tip, but he knew Sam suspected something, his outward nature notwithstanding. It seemed everyone was playing it close to the vest these days.

“So you were thinking…what? You’d get the visions again if you relapsed into patches?”

“Relapsed,” Greg scoffed. “You make it sound like I did it for the fix.”

“Didn’t you?” Brennan asked. He gingerly lifted a bit more of the patch, exposing more afflicted skin in the process. His nephew inhaled sharply. “I wouldn’t blame you if that’s the case, but I need to know.”

“No, Uncle Arty.” To his credit, Greg looked him straight in the eye as he answered. “I only wanted to be special again, to have visions like I did before. Without that, I don’t want the patches.”

Truth
.

Brennan grunted. “Here, hold this up,” he said, passing the lifted side of the patch to Greg. He went to the kitchen and soaked a washcloth under warm water, then returned to the couch. “You said ‘patches,’ plural. Where did you apply the others?” he asked, pinching the raised patch between his fingers again.

Greg reached to the hem of his shirt. “Mostly on my chest and—” He cut off in a howl of pain as Brennan ripped the remainder of the patch from his arm and quickly pressed the damp cloth against the open wound. Greg swore a steady stream of expletives as Brennan went to toss the toxic patch in the trash.

“Just like ripping off a Band-Aid,” he said, cleaning his hands thoroughly in the sink. His fingertips just barely started to tingle where they’d brushed the patch. “I want to get you in to see a doctor tomorrow, too, and have him look at that arm.”

“Whatever.”

He shut off the tap and dried his hands. “Greg, listen to me. Maybe the patches were responsible for what you saw, but maybe they weren’t.”

“You think people are just
born
special?”

Brennan couldn’t reveal his own power. Not yet, at any rate. He had already told Greg about his past experience as a Sleeper, and his nephew had taken it surprisingly well. He could count the number of confidants privy to that secret on a single hand, and those others had all been Sleepers themselves. But the gap between being a Sleeper and being…well, something else, was still too big to bridge. Sleepers were generally accepted as boogeymen in Odols, walking the fine line between covert operatives and figures from folklore. He had been one of them, too, a long time ago. As far as Brennan knew, he was the only person who possessed a talent above and beyond a Sleeper’s standard set of skills.

Until Greg, that is.

“I think you might have a gift,” he said. He carefully kept excitement from creeping into his voice. “It’s not unheard of, after all. They have all those shows now about superhuman strength, endurance, telepathy—”

“Yeah, but all of those people are fakes. It’s scripted, everyone knows that.”

“Really? The psychic boy wonder is now arguing against the existence of psychics?”

That got a grudging smile out of his nephew. “I’m not—No, I’m not saying that they don’t exist, necessarily. But what are the odds, really, that
I’m
one of them?”

If it’s genetic, the chances are far greater than you think.
“Anything’s possible,” Brennan said with a shrug. “How is your arm looking?”

Greg peeked under the washcloth; his face paled a few shades. “It’s, uh, not pretty.”

“Do you feel
anything
from the patch?”

“Nothing good. Next to Chamalla, this stuff is shit.”

“Eloquent,” Brennan said dryly. “Watch that mouth of yours.”

“But you curse all the time!”

“Yes. Yes I do. I also hunt down killers and spend more nights awake than not.”
I also used to stalk the sleeping minds of nightmarish criminals. I was a hero—and a monster.
“How much do you really want to be like me?”

Greg swallowed hard and looked away. His nephew didn’t know all of the details of his past work, but nobody on the street had anything good to say about Sleepers. If Odols was a city of legends, Sleepers were the demons who hunted in the shadows.

“I’m going to bed,” Greg said. He moved quickly to the bathroom and shut the door behind him, leaving Brennan alone with his thoughts. And his phone. He felt the lure of sleep tugging on him, but he had to make a couple calls first.

First, he dialed the precinct, with an extension code to the basement. It rang eight times before he hung up. Apparently, Wally didn’t believe in keeping voicemail. His apartment was less than a block away—practically across the street. But if Wally wasn’t picking up, he wasn’t in the office.

Probably sleeping, like a normal person,
he thought, scrolling down through his contacts list.

The second number also went unanswered, but he didn’t expect his doctor to be in this late at night. However, she at least believed in voicemail, and he left a message to schedule a morning appointment tomorrow for Greg.

He could hear the water stop flowing as Greg finished brushing his teeth; it wouldn’t be long before his nephew reemerged to go to sleep on the pullout sofa bed. Brennan didn’t need an awkward, pre-sleep conversation about his boogeyman past. He nearly had his bedroom door closed when Greg appeared, his face peeking out from the bathroom.

“Uncle Arty?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you,” Greg said, looking slightly uncomfortable. “God, that sounds corny. But you’re all I’ve got now, you know?”

Brennan smiled. Despite the upbringing he’d had and the dangerous road that he occasionally walked, his nephew was still a caring young man. “Love you too, kid,” he said. “Get some sleep.”