Wraith (Debt Collector 10) (2 page)

I reach the bed without him waking. His bio says he’s ten years older than me, but thanks to a steady supply of life energy, he looks about my age: twenty-five, if you count the years, not the mileage. With all that life energy in store, he would outlive me by a long shot, if he kept everything he has taken.

I’m about to fix that.

Getting into position without waking him is a little tricky. I reach my palm toward his forehead. Just as I make contact with his skin, I climb onto the bed in one swift motion and trap him under the blanket by straddling his body. I keep one hand free, but I don’t have a gun or a knife or anything like that. My bare hands are far more dangerous weapons.

Odel flinches, reacting to the sudden weight, even from the depths of sleep. My hand is aching with need, so I take a taste—it looks like I’m giving him some kind of blessing, hand-to-forehead, but I’m actually sucking the life energy right out of his body. It starts as a trickle, but even that small amount rushes the liquid gold feeling I’ve been craving. A little gasp escapes me with the relief. Odel arches his back, frozen by the death-feeling that’s flooding his body. The contact point on my hand heats with the hit, and I want more. So much more. I want to suck down every last drop he has. But I fight the urge and manage to slow the pull… and eventually stop. Odel gasps air back into his lungs, his eyes now wide-awake and staring in horrified surprise.

Nothing quite like waking up to find your nightmare is real. 
And sitting on your chest, ready to deliver more.

“Adrien Odel,” I say with my best judge-and-jury voice. This part is important. I want him to know why I’m here. I’m not a debt collector for the mob or some rogue collector out for juice on the side. I’m not the government’s grim reaper, cashing out the destitute to feed a corrupt life energy supply system. I’m something he’s never heard of: a debt collector who will make him pay for his sins. A vengeful angel brought to his bedroom by his own foul actions. At least, that’s what I want him to think. 
The suit usually helps, along with the wild-flowing curly black hair.

“I… what…” He’s still breathless. But he’s smart, too, and quickly figures it out. His legs are trapped under the blanket, but his arms are free, so he lunges for me—the typical response. If he tried to twist away, making me lose contact with his bare skin, I might actually get into trouble. But my targets almost always go for my throat, especially the men. And most of them
are
men. I’m not biased—I’ll hunt down anyone who trafficks in life energy—but while the occasional socialite, movie star, or female corporate executive might make my list, it’s usually the men who think they can make deals with the mob and get away with it. And when they see a woman in a skin-tight suit perched on their chest in bed, they automatically assume
they
have the advantage.

I pull another hit from him.

Odel’s back arches again, but the pleasure is all mine.

I let it go longer this time, closing my eyes and drinking it in. I’m careful not to pull too fast—I’ve still got a few scars from those early trial-and-error lessons in how to collect, and I don’t need any more angry red marks across my palms. Plus I’m not ready to do the full collection yet. Odel still needs to learn his lesson. But I take a drink and let the energy seep out to every living cell in my body.

Damn, I’ve missed this.

Not sure why I thought I could resist in the first place. And my targets
do
deserve everything they get. Any “high potential” who steals the life energy of someone “less deserving” needs a taste of what that kind of dying feels like. But I’m fooling myself if I think it’s only about the justice. I’m an addict, through and through. Really no better than the government’s debt collectors who do it for a paycheck and their ten percent cut of the hit.

Might as well get used to that, too.

I breathe out a deep sigh and stop the pull. I’m almost dizzy with the high. Too much. Need to be more careful. By the time I lazily open my eyes, Odel’s body is slack against the bed, his arms lying where they fell once I started the transfer. His chest is heaving, and the gray pallor is starting to show in his face. It’s hard to tell with all the creepy red glow-light in his room, but he’s definitely looking more like death than when I came in.

“What do you want?” His words are wheezy.

I lick my lips, already dry from the take. “You took something that doesn’t belong to you,” I say. “I’m here to take it back.”

“I can… I can pay you,” he says, already reaching the desperate, bargaining stage. That was fast. “Anything you want.”

“I don’t want your money, Odel,” I say, chastising him lightly. The high is making me want to play with him, and that’s not a good sign. It’s been too long. I should have known it would be hard to come back. “I want your life.”

“Please.” God, he’s starting to tear up now. These pampered high potentials can be so soft once you get them out of the boardroom. “Please don’t kill me. I’ve… I’ve got a family.” He doesn’t try to escape my hold on his forehead this time, like he’s finally figured out my palm is a gun barrel pressed against his skin. But he flails his arm to the side, reaching for something.

I shove down against his forehead, and his head sinks into the pillow. His hands go up in surrender.

“Is there something you need?” I ask.

“I just… I have… a picture…” He’s trying to look with just his eyes for whatever he was reaching for. Sometimes I forget how smart these high potentials are. I should know, I’m one of them. And a smart animal trapped in a corner becomes even smarter as the panic brings out every instinct for survival they have, including using all their brain cells at once. And sometimes they figure out my one weakness really fast.

I lean back and look, even though I know better.

He blindly reaches for the slick black photo cube. It’s the kind you tap and a holographic projection pops up whatever you’ve programmed: slide shows, video snippets, the slice-of-life stuff everyone has. It reaches in and stabs me in several different ways: because he has a smiling mother and a cute younger brother and a shiny-coated dog who adores him; because all the people whose life-energy he stole lost all of that and more; and because I have a cube just like it at home. Only the people on it are dead, and my empty apartment will only ever house me, my debt collector suit, and a haunting memory of a life that could have been but wasn’t. Because I do
this
instead.

I hold my free hand out to him. “Give it to me.”

He hands it over, a slight tremble in his fingers.

My palm is still plastered to his forehead, but I ease up on the pressure a little. It’s starting to sweat, making the contact slick. I need to move this along.

I hold up the cube. It’s still playing, so I freeze it. “Alicia Kentworth had a family, too. Only hers wasn’t rich. Trina Smith had two daughters she left behind. Matt Worthy was only twenty-five when they came for him, but he already had a beautiful baby girl. One who will never know her daddy.”

“I… I swear, I don’t know those people.” The desperation in his voice is inching up to hope, like he thinks he can talk his way out of this.

“No, of course you don’t.” I toss the cube aside, and it tumbles across the carpet. “You don’t think to ask about them when you’re getting your precious life energy hits, do you? You never say,
Hey, Mr. Mob Boss, who had to die so I can be a little more peppy for that upcoming board meeting?
Because then you’d have to think about it. And that might make it a little harder to sleep in this incredibly peacocky bed you have here.”

Odel has gone very still with my words, and I can see it on his face: he’s gotten to the stage where he realizes he’s not getting out of this. That anything he says will probably only make it worse. What he doesn’t know is that’s what I was waiting for: the look that says he understands what’s happening. And he knows he’s going to pay.

I lean forward. I always leave my hair unbound when I’m hunting—it adds to the effect—and now it falls like a curtain of curly darkness on either side of Odel’s face, closing us into an intimate space where it’s just him and me and my hand of judgment on his forehead. I feel his heart pounding under my palm. His eyes are wide, and his mouth gapes just a little. My face is close enough that I can finish this with a whisper.

“My name is Wraith.” My words float into his face. “I’m reclaiming what you’ve taken. Don’t give me reason to find you again.”

He frowns, but I don’t give him time to think about it—I pull his life energy through my palm, and his face twists in the agony of it. I take a good long stare at that expression of death in full bloom, then I slowly lean back, close my eyes, and revel in the pure rush through my body. I sense past the contact point in my palm and measure the deep well inside him. Years and decades of it. He was young to begin with, but Odel must have been getting regular hits for a long, long time to have this much in store. I open the tap a little and let it gush into me. It floods my brain and lights a fire on my palm, but the last thing I want is to slow down. In fact, I want to drink him all the way down. It would take a while, and it’d be one hell of a dangerous high, but my mind is already justifying all the ways he deserves for me to kill him outright.

My body begins to quiver with the overload. Too fast. Need to slow down. It’s been too long, and my body’s greedy for it. Hungry in a way that can’t ever be satisfied, but that doesn’t stop it from trying.

There’s a distant banging. Fists on wood. Or metal.

I pop open my eyes, dizzy at first, blinking to see in the low red-tinted light of the dark-slashed bedroom. The banging comes again. I whip my head around. It came from down the hall.

Someone’s at the door.

Shit.
I yank my palm away from Odel’s head and scramble backward off the bed. I belatedly notice his arm has flopped to the side, and his hand is curled under his bedside table. He’s pressing something there.
He’s called security.

God dammit.

I turn and run out of the bedroom, the high-sailing jitter-rush making me stumble halfway down the hall. I’m leaving Odel alive, for better or worse. Although he’ll feel like hell for a couple days, and I’ve shaved a good year or two off his lifespan. That’s what I intended from the start, so in a way, it’s just as well he pressed the secret alarm button before I got too carried away.

As long as I don’t get caught. That’s something I can’t come close to affording.

I skitter around the corner of the living room. The front door is jumping and rattling. Any second, the idiot security guard will figure out how to use the key instead of trying to bang the door down. I dash to the window controls, and my shaky hands press all the buttons at once. There’s a whirring sound, but nothing happens. I growl at the hapless controls, blink, try to focus, and finally see something in the dim light that looks like the universal sign for “open.” I press that.

Still nothing happens.

I turn my back on the windows and scan the living room for a place to hide or an alternate escape or something to get me out of the hot mess I’ve created by lingering just a little too long over Adrien Odel. The collection of ivory-handled daggers catches my eye, but holding a weapon will just get me shot. Better to appear defenseless, then pull the life energy out of whoever stands in my way.

The banging on the door stops. In the silence, I hear the wind whipping through the living room. 

The wind?
 

I twist around. The wide center window has rotated open, leaving a clear space just the right size for a woman in a skin-tight suit.

I grin and sprint for it. I hear the front door slide open behind me.

“Hey, stop!” A rough voice calls from the door, but I’m only two steps from the edge.

One. Two.

I launch myself into the night.

Arms flung to the side, head down, I’m riding the high of the collection straight toward the pavement a thousand feet below. The wind crackles away any sound that might float up from the ground or down from the apartment. The thrill of the jump and the massive excess life energy pound through my body. Exhilaration bleeds out my ears.

I should pull the chute… only I don’t want the rush to end. There are only a few moments like this when I get to feel truly alive. A few instants when life races through my body like an electrical fire, and I forget about all the death that surrounds me. All the collectors like me who are reaping the lives of the innocent. All the mourners at my father’s funeral who will go back to their full lives while mine remains empty. All the trafficking in life energy that belongs to everyone but me. And the very particular death that I’ve meted out with my own body, unknowing but still culpable. Because once you’ve killed, no matter how it happens, you’re no longer innocent. Not ever again.

The ground is rushing at me.

Someday, I will ride the high all the way down. Someday, I’ll live it out in a blaze, then let my sin spill out on the pavement and be done. Someday, I’ll pay for everything.

But not today.

I slam my fists against my sides, then fling my arms and legs wide to catch the wind. The chute flies free behind me. For one heart-lurching beat, I don’t know if it will open… or if I’m too late, and that day is today. Then the chute yanks me out of the fall like a god plucking me from the sky and saving me from my own folly.

I’m still falling. Fast. And I hit the ground hard.

But not hard enough to kill me.