Max shifted, fired. The bullet smashed into the dead woman’s head. The head jumped in Lee’s steady grip, bone and gore spraying from the back of the skull. Blond hair bounced with newfound life. The Beast screamed in frustration at Lee’s survival, then roared in triumph as it relived the consummation of her death. But its joy exhausted itself in another moment as it dry-humped the memory, and its passion blew away like dust.
“That’ll wake the neighbors.”
“The trees won’t tell.” He knew the stand would act as a sound barrier, and he doubted anyone beyond the trees in the village of Tuckahoe knew or remembered what gunfire was like, or would believe it resounding dimly in their haven.
The Beast rattled in his head, demanding hot, wet satisfaction. Max’s hunger rose in response, as if he had never touched the woman, never heard her screams, not done the things he had done over the past few hours before meeting Lee.
“Had you going there, didn’t I?” Lee asked, getting up and dumping the head in the hole. “Thought I got the fever, didn’t you? Broken old man, shaking with the guilts?” Lee’s high-pitched laughter drifted to the stars.
Max threw the shovel at him. “You clean the mess up.” He put the gun back in the holster, started back to the Lincoln.
“Do you want me to lay some dirt over the bodies so they don’t look so obvious?” Lee called back, shovel scraping against gravel.
“Don’t bother, the contractor is expecting them. He has a permit to start at dawn, so no one should stumble across them.”
Lee carefully looked the ground over, tossed the shovel in the pit, then walked to the house door. He looked at the movie poster and said, “I remember this piece of made-for-TV shit when it came out. They wouldn’t know a psycho killer if he bit them in the ass. And I sure as hell felt like biting them after watching that crap.” Laughing again, he unscrewed the bulb and threw it toward the grave. “Let the dead rest in peace,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat.
Max backed out of driveway, checked the woods on both sides with a small night-vision scope. A car rounded a corner, sped past, leaving a crescendo from Beethoven’s Second Symphony reverberating in its wake.
Max waited until it was gone, turned on the headlights, and headed back toward the city. The Beast would not rest. It roamed the emptiness he created for it in his mind, scraped the walls of the body he kept calm and in control. He did not give the Beast the reins of his self, as he had done in times past, as he did when he hunted. He focused on the mission, on maintaining discipline. He almost let himself smile as he thought of how pleased the latest of his martial teachers, the old Chan woman, would be if she could sense his discipline now. How much greater would her pride be, he wondered, if she knew the nature and powers of the monster that lived inside him? Would she try to kill him, as other masters had done, when they discovered what he truly was? Would he have to kill her when she came for him?
He pulled up behind a black Lexus parked in front of the Buddhist Temple on Albany Crescent off the Deegan. Lee stepped out, went to the car, spoke to the driver. The doors of the Temple cracked opened, revealing a flash of saffron. A group of men and women walked out, mostly Asian, laughing and talking. Lee stood, scanned the buildings and roofline, glanced at Max. Max got out and walked into the group, joined in their laughter as they drifted to the Lexus. Max identified the gathering’s leaders as Khmer, immigrant survivors of the Cambodian killing fields.
A whiff of sweet incense accompanied subtle drumming spilling out of the Temple. A huddle of bald, painted heads gathered in the dark slit of the Temple door’s opening. By manner, color, and spirit, Max knew them as foreign monks dragged from their isolation to reluctantly play a role in the game being played. The Beast’s growl gave sympathetic accompaniment to their desperate, hungry eyes fixed on the Lexus. Max thought it was not the car, nor the superficial Western wealth of the surrounding city, that challenged the discipline of their faith. They were not a threat to the exchange, Max thought, only some of its victims. Unlike the immigrants, Max was not certain they would survive.
Lee opened the back door. A woman poured out, graceful, sure, resigned. Max and the Beast catalogued her attributes. Asian but not easily sorted into one of the modern nationalities, as if a primal root of the current subtle genetic divisions had survived millennia of tribalization. Short and slim, dressed in black: beaded slippers, Capri pants, quilted silk jacket with red brocade. Her hair was a jasmine-scented waterfall of midnight oil drawn from the world’s heart. Her face was a pale reflection of another world, her lips an oracle, her eyes pits deeper and more deathly than the grave in which he had just dumped two bodies and nearly a third.
Her gaze caught his. She stopped short. Lee bumped into her from behind, shook his head in irritation, became distracted by a young immigrant’s insistent whispering. The woman looked Max up and down.
A warning, born from the Beast’s instinct, shivered through Max. She smiled.
Vertigo swept Max up in a spinning vortex. Heart pumping madly, stomach lurching, a cold sweat breaking over his skin, Max sank into a slight crouch and let training take over. Through the assault, he checked for gas, a drug-tipped dart, the fading touch from contact poison.
Before he found the source of the attack, the world shifted again and he was lost in a sensory flurry. Perspectives merged and warped until Picasso images of people’s faces filled his vision, and the exact same inane snatches of conversation punctuated by empty laughter sounded from different directions, out of synch. Max floated above his body, over the street. The Beast scrambled to hang on to him.
The world settled, but was different. It took a moment for Max to recognize himself standing as the Temple crowd bumped into him, flowed around him, puzzled, disturbed. He viewed himself with curious detachment. He should have shaved that morning, or perhaps his dark beard and close-cropped, black hair stood out more under the garish street light among the clutch of innocents. A breeze picked at his duster, and he noticed his waist was thicker than he thought it should be. His black jeans were dusty, and he automatically reached down to brush himself off.
Touched a firm, round thigh in Capri pants.
From a distance, he heard the Beast roar in protest. And arousal.
He found himself in the body of the woman he was supposed to protect. New feelings crept in a quiet current though his awareness: cold nipples eager for sharper sensation; a hunger between the legs needing to receive rather than deliver passion’s stroke; a hollowness in the belly yearning to be filled by a seed’s blossoming. Life mingled with the death he always carried close to his heart. He glimpsed a blinding moment of what he was accustomed to snuffing out, and felt himself drowning in its glory. His impulse to kill rose like a plume of fire, and he aimed its power at the tide rising to consume him. But though his rage burned and his appetite demanded fulfilling, there was no killing to be done. His tools—the Beast, his body—did not answer his call.
A woman’s laughter washed over him like rain.
Max looked out through alien eyes and searched the real, for something true to use as a weapon.
He stared at himself, reaching for contact with his flesh and the Beast. The remoteness of his own face shocked him, but the plainness of his visage drew him out of his instinctive madness. It was as if another mind, with another set of values, suffused his thoughts, calmed him, showed him a new way to perceive the world.
He studied his face. He was used to seeing it close-up in mirrors as he sometimes applied cosmetics and appliances to preserve the anonymity of his work, or brushed his teeth, or stared at the blood that had been sprayed back at him during the course of his pleasures. His hands—his true hands—fluttered by his sides, thick fingers moving restlessly with the speed and delicacy of a concert pianist. He looked lost. Steps from himself, he felt helpless.
Like a distant shadow, the Beast rose to the vulnerability it sensed across the fading channel of their bond. A shimmering black aura surrounded Max’s form, as if the woman posses
sed special lenses that could pick out the Beast, like infrared gun sights sensing body heat. The Beast shaped his true lips into the beginnings of a sneer. But another shade flew across the face, looked out at Max in the woman’s body. Smiled.
And in the body in which he found himself, another spirit, ancient, obsessed, flickered like the reflection of something unreal caught in a mirror. Its presence stunned Max, knocking him off balance as he struggled for control in an alien environment.
She carried her own Beast, though it did not boil with passions as his own did. Rather, it was a piece of something that had once touched her, leaving an imprint like an obscene cave drawing that influenced thought, shaped emotion, fired up drives. Poisoned the well in which her young soul had resided. Tainted the vision through which she perceived the world. Tangled the infant web of power, full of dance and music invoking water and fire that had been cultivated within her when she was young.
And in the imprint was the residue of power, like a layer of fine, fallen hairs and dead skin. The power was grave cold and resonated with cries of pain and despair. As if answering Max’s struggle to understand, a voice rose out of the depths of the woman’s memory. Foreign thoughts intruded on his own, weaving understanding from his confusion.
It was the sliver of a victim’s spirit left behind in the body, too small to live on its own or exercise control, surviving on the grief of its host. It was the heart of the woman’s Beast. Ghost hands swiped at him, phantom teeth snapped. Angry at being murdered, the thing reached out to him because he was alive, because he could still breathe perfumed air and taste spiced meat.
Images of his fresh kill enraged the shade as it recognized him as a murderer, a victimizer. But in the spirit’s partial state it was powerless to seek retribution. Its glacial hate, inexorable and endless, bore down on him, sending a shiver of fear and excitement through Max. Immune to his own and even the Beast’s rage, its appetite for what it had lost fed on Max’s awareness and grew stronger.
It was as if the soul of one of Max’s victims had returned to share the journey of its fate with him. But he had no hand in the cause of this spirit’s pain. He was not the murderer of its original house of flesh. The thing did not care. Like the Beast, like Max, it was appetite, and though it did not hunt as Max and the Beast did, it was as capable of rage and destruction if its hunger was not appeased.
Max wondered what pursuing and consuming such a power might be like. Even without the Beast at his call, he wished the full spirit had resided within her, and not as the corrupting reflection of a ghost caught in meat.
But without the Beast’s reassuring savagery or the comforting rhythms of his own body, Max’s confidence wavered. Separated from his tools and weapons, was he still a hunter, a killer? As whatever he was, a spirit, a soul, a wisp of imagination, could he still find a way to kill a thing accustomed to such an existence?
The woman’s voice rose again, offering ways for him to handle the spirit. What he was being offered, he realized, were paths to becoming someone else and forgetting who he truly was,
The hollow, mocking roar of the Beast, itself a memory, offered another way to escape.
Before Max could feel the chill of fear over losing himself to the vengeful spirit, the woman, or in his own killing fury, he was torn out of his exile. The world spun as he landed back in his own body, as if pulled home by an elastic band’s tension. A hurricane of sensations and emotions ripped through him, and for a moment he blacked out, overwhelmed by the force of the change. But only for a moment. The Beast rose from unknown depths to envelop him in its strength. His body fit like an old, comfortable coat, and responded willingly, though with a hint of sluggishness, to his will. He was Max again, stumbling, dizzy, skin cold and prickly, but a single weapon once again. One force, out of nature, with a single, insatiable appetite.
The Beast whined in confusion, but quickly snapped with joy, eager to welcome its familiar. Heart racing, Max embraced the monster. The darkness within deepened. People in the Temple group eyed him suspiciously.
“Mani Kalliyan Chea,” Lee said, bringing the woman to Max. Closer to Max, Lee whispered, “Straighten out, buddy. You’re looking like shit and you’re freaking everybody out.”
She tilted her head to the side, met his gaze, and gave him the same smile she had given him when he was in her body. The Beast reared, ready to pounce on the challenge. But then it hesitated in its routine headlong pursuit of prey, recognizing something in her. So did Max. Together, they felt the same rush of surprise and excitement in encountering a fellow traveler. Not since Paris, when the twins had captivated him during one of their murderous hungers, had he felt the same conflict between desire, dread, and rage. But the twins had been children, evoking a previously undiscovered and overruling instinct for protection. Seeing himself in them, he had not wanted their young years to be lived like his, alone and unprotected on unforgiving streets.
She was not a child. What she provoked did not fit the assignment parameters. Appetites collided. He did not know whether to kill her or fuck her.
And there was the hint of her inside him: an impression of her sinuous body pressed into the walls of his mind; a warmth permeating his senses, like a lover’s body heat smoldering in the bed long after they are gone. Max understood who had smiled at him from his own body.
“This is your guardian angel, Max,” Lee said to her as they followed the press of crowd toward the Lincoln.
The Lexus drove off with a squeal of rubber, as if the driver was eager to escape his passenger’s presence.
“How did it feel?” Mani said, hips and shoulders swaying, watching him with the barest turn of her head. The sound of her voice resonated in his mind. A part of him was reluctant to let her go. The Beast hissed at the rival connection that had suddenly taken root in Max.
“Like death,” he answered.
“And yet you live. Life is a strange paradox, is it not?” She laughed as Lee opened the Lincoln’s back door and let her in.
Her body, the kaleidoscopic assault of memories and sensations, the separation from himself, returned in a play of shadows running through his mind. He shook his head to clear it. Something stuck in his mind, a feeling he had never experienced before. Not the web of her power or the remnants of an ancient spirit, but the hint of yet another thread of life and power inside her. Max tried to tease the memory from a mix of images and emotions.
The Temple group surged on, except for one young Asian man who thrust his chest out in front of Max, distracting him. “If anything happens to her, we will hunt you down,” he said, with intensity surprising for his youth and stature. A grief-stricken expression crossed his face when he saw Lee close the door behind Mani.
“You won’t like what you find,” Max said. The boy ran away, tears streaming down his face, before Max could snatch him and break his neck. The Beast howled, frustrated once again. But the Beast’s anger did not trouble Max as much as the sense that the boy had been so focused on Mani and whatever ruined emotions lay between them that he had blinded himself to the danger of the rage his provocation had raised.
Max remembered the monks peeking out from the Temple, his own near-loss of self. The woman’s power ran deep into those she chose to target. Subtle, brutal, seductive, she had more than one way of conquering. Having survived her direct tests of his strength, he had no intention of falling under her sexual or emotional spell.
Max went to the driver’s side and entered the car while Lee covered the area. As soon as he was inside, he turned to the woman and said, “I should kill you for what you did.”
“Some add to life, others take away from it,” she answered, settling into the backseat. She drew her legs up under her and hugged herself.
“Which do you do?”
“I take away from death.”
“Why did you do that thing to me?” Max asked, wanting even more to ask how she had managed the transposition he had just experienced. But what drove him was the need to establish his
territory, to warn her off, kill the bond between them she seemed to want to establish. Demanding explanations of how she did what she did only invited and prolonged unwanted contact.
The Beast paced restlessly, crying to vent its lust. She lingered inside him like a perfume. To Max’s shock, the Beast seemed to calm down just a bit from his body’s memory of her habitation.
Lee dropped into the passenger seat, slammed the door shut, and slapped the dashboard twice with impatience. “Do what?” he asked, checking his watch.
“To warn you,” Mani said. “And teach you that you cannot always pursue what you want by force, so we may both live to see this episode to its end.”
“Are you getting yourself in trouble with her already, Max? Damn, man, just relax, okay? We’re going to Mott Haven 149th Street. Take the Deegan to Third Ave. Oman’s picked up a city-owned place down there. He leased that nice little factory he had in Brooklyn to a floating club called Painfreak. You ever hear of it?”
Max let the question slide over him.
“Thought you had. They burned the place down the last time the club came to town, that’s why I figured you’d know them. I bet Oman’s having an orgasm with that upgrade to Nowhere House status. I’ve been recommending him for higher-level operations status for years. Glad to see he’s one of us, now. He deserves everything that’s coming to him, the son of a bitch.” Lee cackled. “He don’t know what he’s in for, do he? Fucker should waive his fee for the privilege of having Nowhere House vibe to soak into his walls. You know his usual customers. They’ll come running once word gets out. It’ll be even better than when you do your personal business in one of his places so he can get all that bad spirit and ghost vibe to sell. You never actually met him, right?”
“We never had the pleasure.”
“I bet. He does know how to stay out of the line of fire. Until now. But what are friends for, right, Max? Gotta love the guy.” Lee turned to the woman. “That’s an unusual name you have there, Ms. Kalliyan. You Cambodian?”
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