by Jax Garren
Emma frowned at the waste of food in a too-small body. “It’s worse for her,” she said softly, hoping to forestall Javier’s ire. “It’s her species what got killed.”
The hand that he’d been stroking through his sister’s hair stopped. “Her…” He took a breath. Then nodded, and his hand went back to petting. “I’ve noticed something’s different. I thought I’d be a worse doctor after the change. I’ve been a better one. Emotion doesn’t get so much in my way.” He glanced at her, then back to his sister. “Would I be upset over a vampire? It’s unsettling, not caring so much. Even if it’s useful.”
Emma patted his shoulder, awkward in this kind of comfort. She’d thought she’d be useless, because Javier could learn all the things he needed—feeding, sun-sleeping, CoVIn rules—from others far more skilled than she was. But little questions like this, asked in an achingly hopeful voice, were the sorts of thing a sire was for. They were connected, personally, in a way he’d never be to another vampire. He needed her to tell him he was normal.
Shit. When someone needed her to define normal, the world truly was screwy. But she did her best. “Yeah. It’d get to you more. It’s easier with us, though, because you know we can sustain a lot of damage and keep going. Injuries aren’t so horrible to see. A pile of ash, though, you feel it in your gut. Watching a vampire dust brings the bile roaring and makes your skin itch.”
He relaxed just a hair, glanced at the mutilated corpses, and grimaced. “Rhi shouldn’t be here.”
The girl in question gasped and clung to Javier’s leg. “Sorry.” She wiped her mouth. “That was…”
“I tried to keep you from seeing it, but no. You had to look.” His words sounded more petulant than teasing, sibling devilry at its best.
“Yeah, well, maybe tell me what’s going on and don’t just make noises and go all anaconda on me. Of course I want to freaking see. Human nature, idiot.” She stood up, glaring at him even as she clung to his arm. She motioned at the corpses but didn’t look at them. “We should, like, study them. Clues.”
Javier’s jaw set. “I got this. Stay with Emma.”
He turned away, face pinched, but Rhiannon pulled him back around, angry. “Why? Because you’re the man?”
Javier’s sigh was exasperated. “You want to examine the bodies? Be my guest. But you vomited at the sight from fifteen feet away, and we don’t need everyone clambering over the corpses and puking. Of the three of us, I’ve got the best chance at discovering something from a broken body. Not because I have testicles but because I have seven years of college and three years of residency focused on the human body and how it breaks.”
“Fine.”
“But hey, maybe your vagina gives you superpowers, and you can do a medical examination without college.”
“I said fine. Gods, be a dick already. The ignorant lady folk will stay here and take up knitting.”
Javier stalked toward the bodies. “Ignorance is a choice when you’re as smart as you are.”
Behind his back, Rhi flipped him off, and not in the friendly way Cash usually did it.
Emma bumped her shoulder and tried to make her laugh. “But it ain’t when you’re dumb as I am.”
Rhiannon huffed a tiny laugh and turned away from the bodies. From the way she kept starting to look at the massacre and jerking back away, Emma figured she could use conversation to keep her mind off them. Before she could come up with a topic more scintillating than brutalized dead people, Rhiannon started speaking. “Mr. Straight As has an elevated opinion of my academic potential.” She rolled her eyes. “I think he just wants to believe we’re better than her, than Danielle. So I have to be smart and all these other things because then he can be too.”
Emma’s brow lifted in surprise. “He ain’t proved himself yet? Boy’s made it. Big time.”
“Javi could be a billionaire secretary-general of the UN who stops climate change, brings about world peace, and ends global hunger, and he’d still think he had something to prove.” Rhiannon shot her a sideways look, frowning like she was trying to make a decision.
“What?”
For a few moments she said nothing, then, “When Javier lived with his dad, he spoke only Spanish—even though his English was perfectly fine—he learned how to plumb a sink, and he had a Mexican flag in his bedroom. He was seven. When he lived with the Hunters—this foster family he really liked—he dressed in Gap jeans and learned to quote Star Wars and spelled everything out correctly in text messages. He was thirteen. When he went to college, he stayed out of the sun to keep his skin whiter and wore khakis and shopped thrift stores for label clothes and kept his hair a little shaggier, like all the frat boys. He never joined a frat; scholarships don’t cover that kind of thing, but you couldn’t tell the difference between him and the Delta Whatevers from the way he spoke and dressed. I’m not sure whose idea it was for him to be a doctor, but I doubt it was his.” She put a hand up. “Don’t get me wrong. He genuinely enjoys his work, and from everything I hear he’s really good at it. I’m sure all sorts of things, from garbage collector to lawyer, have been suggested to him, and doctor was the one he took to heart. It was his choice.” She shifted her feet, pausing again, like she wasn’t sure she should continue. Emma wished she would. “But one of the few things I’ve seen him want no matter what it looks like to others, and without anyone suggesting it to him first… is you.”
Emma’s breath caught. “That’s a sire-fledgling thing.” Then why was her heart squeezing in equal parts fear and longing?
“Oh yeah? Javi doesn’t do one-night stands, too afraid of disease or getting someone pregnant, and yet he took you home. I bet he asked for your phone number. Or he would have, if there’d been time before the whole attack-turning-kidnapping thing happened.”
He had asked. Emma looked out at the devastation in the old lot, and the bodies seemed to disappear. All she saw was Javier, leaned over in study, a frown crunching his features and making him look so serious.
Well, more serious than usual, anyway.
“No offense,” Rhiannon continued, “but you aren’t exactly doctor’s wife material. Trust me when I say that’s a compliment. If he’s pursuing you, despite what his colleagues would think when they met you… that’s not something he’d do unless he wanted you so badly he couldn’t help himself, like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. You know, if Mr. Darcy came from a poor, mostly Hispanic family in Texas.”
“I ain’t read that.” Emma had never wanted anything like “doctor’s wife” for her life. Too pretentious.
No, that wasn’t true. Even ignoring the whole prostitution issue, she was an illiterate farmer’s daughter. She’d just make a fool of herself. “Why are you telling me this?” She thought maybe she and Rhi had gotten to be friends this morning, or at least started down that road. But this was more serious than a morning laugh over coffee.
Rhiannon shuffled her feet, keeping her back to the corpses. “Javier and I fight, but he’s my brother. I want him happy. I guess what I’m trying to say is, he’s a people pleaser, but as smart as he is with textbooks, he’s can be a dumbass when it comes to dealing with people. If you’re not interested in him, he won’t bother you—just make sure you spell it out and stay consistent or he won’t get it. But if you are interested, tell him. Hooking up with my brother would be a smart move for someone in the long run. He’d be a good boyfriend, the kind that’s loyal and will work to make you happy. Just, if you do hook up for real, make him happy in return, or I’ll magically kick your ass.”
Emma’s breath caught sharply at the words long run. She never thought long term, always living with the best decision of the moment. “I ain’t never even had a boyfriend. I can’t fathom—”
“You’ve never had a boyfriend?” The appalled shock in Rhiannon’s tone made her want to laugh.
“Funny how guys don’t want to go steady with a former whore.”
“Yeah, well, my brother does.”
Further conversion wa
s interrupted, thank heavens, when Javier jogged back to them, expression grim. “They have no brains.”
Emma tried to shift gears to the mission at hand, but even with his face scrunched up in disgust, Javier looked good in his fitted T-shirt and low-slung jeans. He’d make a fine-looking boyfriend, and very respectable—not the kind of guy she’d ever thought she could have. “Their brains are missing?” she managed.
“Yeah. Every one of them has their head bashed in, and an unreasonably clean skull. Like their brains were…” He gritted his teeth.
“Eaten?” Rhiannon asked. “Like zombies ate their brains?”
Javier’s shoulders bunched. “And licked the skull cavity clean.”
“This isn’t Vodou,” Rhiannon said. “This isn’t anything on record. I’ve been researching the hell out of this, and as far as I could find, brain-eating, mindless shamblers don’t exist as a monster or a spell.” Her gaze shifted to the bodies, then quickly back. “Except apparently they do.” She held a finger up and her smile turned saucy. “Make fun of my crystal ball now, Javier.”
“But wasn’t it leading to something inside?”
Emma looked from the scene of carnage to the shell of a shopping center with its black windows and broken sidewalk.
“Yeah,” Rhiannon said, voice less sure. “I guess whatever happened in there resulted in…” She motioned at the dead people.
“How old are the bodies?” Emma asked.
Javier shook his head. “Not really my area of expertise, but I’d guess a couple days. This definitely happened before Ramsey changed last night.”
Emma caught his meaning. “So we’re not talking about something that went out all at once. This is rolling changes. Oscar first, then this, then Ramsey.” Unsettling thought: “And who knows who before, between, and after. Somebody could be turning into one of those things right now.”
Rhiannon strode forward. “We can conjecture all night or go inside and see if there’s anything we can use.” Javier scurried to take her arm. Emma turned a last look back at the dead and said a prayer for their souls. Not that her prayers did much good, but everyone deserved a prayer at death, and she might be the only one to do it.
The woman and child had been attacked with equal brutality to the men. Nobody did that; not even the insane Liberi vampires were so indiscriminate. “An insane person could delight in disfiguring the innocent. On the other hand, a murderer with at least some sanity would hesitate before hurting a child. Who treats them identically?”
“An animal,” Javier said as they stepped under the shadowy walkway. “An animal with no claws or teeth to do easy damage. These zombies started as humans, not shifters like Oscar.” He pulled into himself physically, and a shadow crossed his gaze, like he was reliving a bad memory. “A man killing another with his fists can be excruciatingly slow.”
Emma tried not to think of Javier’s story about how he’d nearly been beaten to death. Fists and cigarette butts and the terror of knowing no one—not even your mother—would help you, these things were more horror story than the monsters.
“They didn’t even use rocks for the skulls, from what I can tell. Just bashed and bashed until they broke through. There are also blunt teeth marks on the bodies. I didn’t have the right tools to really look at them, but my guess is there’s at least two different sets, so at least two attackers.” He pursed his lips and looked at Rhiannon. “Where does the, uh, crystal ball tell us to go next?”
Emma had to smile at the sourness in his tone. “That killed you to say, didn’t it?”
His eyes lit up, a glimmer of humor in a dark place, and he held his fingers up close together in a sign for “just a little.”
She smiled back, and their gazes caught for a moment. Javier was a serious person, but he had a sense of humor, and a good one at that, if he could smile in a time like this.
Rhi couldn’t sound any smugger than she did when she said, “Inside.”
Javier stopped next to a broken-out window. “All right then. In we go.”
It was ridiculous to watch his taut backside as he bent over and stepped through the jagged opening; there were far more important things to think about. But ridiculous had long been Emma’s middle name. A burst of longing heated her chest, not for the mundane transaction of sex, but for closeness. Waking up next to Javier this morning with no expectations or demands had stayed with her, messing with her head. It would be nice to start every day with the feel of his body, the clean smell of him, wrapped around her.
Rhiannon poked her in the stomach and shot her a knowing look.
Busted by the not-so-little sister. Yeah, she liked looking, which was odd but nothing she had to do anything about. Touching was where things got tricky. No man in his right mind would take a girlfriend who wouldn’t put out.
Girlfriend. What a weird notion Rhiannon had stomped into her head.
Javier held out his hand to help her through. Not that she needed assistance. If it had been Cash offering out of manly courtesy, she’d have flicked his hand until he moved it and barreled through, showing him she wasn’t the damsel-in-distress type. Cash would think it was funny, and they’d continue through the strip mall like brothers-in-arms, ready to fight whatever came at them. Cash would feel better because she’d rejected his help.
But she didn’t think Javier would prefer disdain. In fact, she was pretty sure that would hurt his feelings. Not because she challenged the man code by asserting herself—he’d made it pleasantly clear he wasn’t that type of prick. Then why?
His brown eyes turned up to hers from his bent-over position, a question in them. Maybe he just wanted to touch her, like she had wanted to touch him this morning, and this was an excuse.
He started to pull away, eyes dropping to the floor before coming back with a smile that didn’t seem real. “You don’t need help. I didn’t mean to—”
She reached out, clasping his hand beneath the jagged glass. He looked at their physical link, then back at her face, the fake smile wiped away.
Now what? This was so terribly awkward, like they were holding hands. On a zombie quest. So. Fucking. Awkward.
He smiled brilliantly at her, lighting up the dark room, and tugged. “Let’s get going.” His fingers squeezed hers, friendly and warm. He really was handsome, with his high cheekbones and lush mouth. She gulped, more afraid of him than the building and whatever monsters it contained.
Emma looked like a cornered animal as she scrambled through the window and into the strip mall. Javier had no idea why; she’d shown she was more than a match for these things when she’d rescued him with two bullets. He squeezed her hand again in a show of support and slid his fingers between hers.
His sister snorted. “This moment of awkwardness brought to you by the letters J and E.”
He ruffled Rhi’s hair, feeling a little too on top of the world for someone about to explore a potentially zombie-infested strip mall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Maybe he should drop Emma’s hand before she thought he was hitting on her again.
Maybe he was hitting on her. After exploring the zombie leavings, he wanted to touch somebody, to be held, to lose himself in the comfort of another person—possibly while drinking a lot of tequila. Anything good, or at least distracting, to balance out the savagery.
Emma didn’t let go, and he would hold on as long as she let him.
She took off down the hall, near dragging him with her, like she was eager to get away… except she didn’t let him go. He followed her through the room and into a back hallway, slowing her down with a firm tug when Rhiannon couldn’t keep up. She wouldn’t look at him, but her hand held tight to his, fingers intertwined with a lock-tight grip.
He’d spent his life working with far less encouragement. Hope flared, warming him.
“What is that foul smell?” Rhiannon said.
“Piss and death,” Emma answered. “We been smelling it since we parked the car.”
Javier slowed down. “
Sickness.” Someone was alive and ill in the fetid air. He needed to get the person out and into a hospital. He sped up again. “This way.”
He turned into what used to be a clothing store. Broken racks littered the cramped space, and a cash wrap still dominated the back wall. Space had been cleared for eight pallets on the filthy floor. Young women occupied two of them.
Javier dropped Emma’s hand and rushed to the first one’s side. She lay so still he could barely see the breath entering and exiting her body. Purple lesions dotted her skin, her lymph nodes were swollen, and she was thin—so very thin. Her forehead was burning to the touch. “Fuck. Rhi, stay back. She’s bleeding.” He hadn’t seen a full-blown case of AIDS in, well, ever. HIV was too easy to control if you just got a damn test. It usually took a decade for the disease to progress this far, and she looked about twenty. He didn’t want to think about that. “We have to get her to the hospital.”
Beside him, Emma started crying softly, muttering, “No, no, no,” over and over.
He pulled out his phone to call work; he could drive the women himself, but this way a team would be ready to receive them. He turned to the second person to see why Emma was crying. The woman she kneeled over had been severely beaten, her dark face so purple and red he didn’t recognize her until he noticed the dreadlocks with the telltale purple woven in. His breath stopped in angry shock. “Dez’rae?” A cut on her arm already looked infected.
No shit it had gotten infected. Living here was sleeping in infection and decay. Who did this to another human? “Dez’rae? Can you hear me? It’s Javier—Dr. Reyes. Do you remember me?”
She moaned and blinked at him with pain-dazed eyes, then closed them again. They weren’t getting anything out of her right now. He left a quick message with the staff as he checked Dezi over for any reasons he shouldn’t move her himself. She’d been beat to hell, her clothes stained with semen and blood, but he found no injury that would stop him from picking her up.