by Lyn Gala
“You have to help me. I don’t—I don’t know what to do.” He looked at her with the same sort of anxiety he’d had on his face the first time he’d been face-to-face with a real victim. She stared back. “Please,” he asked softly. Taking a step back, he leaned against the wall and started to slide down until he was hunched on her living room floor. Dead. She had a dead man in her living room. Well shit.
Chapter Two
“We could still call this in,” Paige said, even though she knew it was wishful thinking. She liked Brady and she was still having some very panicky, unpleasant thoughts. If anyone found out about his sudden case of dead, he was either going to get vivisected by some secret government conspiracy or burned at the stake by the local church.
People in this part of the country did tend to take witchcraft a little more seriously than in the bigger cities up north where kids could proudly claim to be Wiccan. Around here, that got you a prayer-in and a whole bunch of church ladies showing up to talk to you about God and hell and burning alive for all of eternity.
Yeah, no one in this town was going to be reasonable about the walking dead.
She looked at the paper towel she’d used to wipe the blood off her arm. And she’d be right there in the middle of the panic. An uncharitable little part of her brain suggested that she shove Brady onto one of the freight trains that ran through town—just tell him to start running and keep right on going. However, she figured that was fear talking. She wanted to break down in total and complete terror, but she wasn’t going to let herself get lost in that feeling. Brady was her partner, and whatever happened to him, he was still her partner.
Paige shivered as a new thought occurred to her. The rape case they were working—more women had been raped than reported it. Crime was like that. If you had one pedophile case, you had a dozen hiding in the shadows. If one person complained about vandalism, you probably had five more in the same neighborhood.
Just because Brady was the first walking, talking dead person she’d met didn’t mean he was unique. Somewhere out there, there were more. Hell, there might be whole government labs full of them. Churches might be having private burnings where only the faithful came to see the walking dead sent off in a blaze.
Maybe she was having a moment of total irrational stupidity, but her brain started coming up with all sorts of unpleasant thoughts. A shiver traveled her spine and Paige clutched the bitemark in her arm as she wondered how deep she’d been pulled in.
“I’m sorry,” Brady said for the hundredth time. “You smelled good.”
“Sadly, that’s the best compliment I’ve gotten this month,” Paige joked, even though her heart beat painfully in her chest.
“I won’t do it again.”
Paige looked over at him. He was still huddled on her floor, his misery visible in every tightly hunched line. Under normal circumstance, Brady was a handsome man who had his Italian mother’s dark good looks, but right now he looked terrible. Paige’s blood had dried into a brown streak that ran down his chin. Whatever was going on, Brady wasn’t the threat. He was the victim. Paige gave him a lopsided grin. “You’d better not. I’m still pissed about this time.”
He hunched in a little tighter.
“Shit.” Paige hadn’t meant to make him feel worse. Clearly, her humor was a little rusty. “Okay, so we have to figure this out. The first step is to get you cleaned up. If we aren’t going to call for Forensics, then you don’t need to stay in those clothes.” Paige tossed the paper towel at the counter and stood up.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” He whispered the words and Paige wished she could just call in one of the victim advocates and let them deal with the grief. However, he was her partner and he’d come to her.
“Bathing would be a good first step. You stink.” Paige went down to one knee in front of him. “Come on, Brady—you’re the one who complained for a week after we had to go into that dumpster. Would you really put up with walking around in dirty, stinking clothes? That’s not you. So we start by making you look more like you and less like a homeless man.” Paige smiled at him, teasing him about his sheer horror at having to get in the trash.
“It was slimy,” Brady said with just a hint of his old personality peeking through.
“Yeah, it was slimy. No offense, but you’re looking a little slimy now, so either we get you cleaned up and deal with the whole—” Paige stopped. She just couldn’t bring herself to say out loud that Brady was dead. Did that make him a zombie or a vampire or something? She looked down at her arm. Zombies went for brains and vampires went for blood. What went for arm?
“Either we get you cleaned up or we preserve the evidence and call Forensics. Shit or get off the pot, Brady.” It might not be the most emotionally supportive comment ever, but he was a cop. He was a good cop, a man who had been dealing with one of the nastiest serial rape cases Paige had ever seen. He didn’t need coddling; he needed to remember who he was.
Brady looked up at her with bloodshot eyes. “Shit or get off the pot?” he asked.
“Yes.” Reaching out, she laid her hand against his knee. “Brady, I will back you whichever choice you make, but you have to do something. You can’t just sit in my living room forever.”
“I should be dead.” His eyes lost their focus and Paige suspected that he was remembering what they had done.
“Hey, I’ll call Forensics and they’ll help us track these bastards down. If we’re lucky, maybe they won’t even notice that you’re—”
She went to stand up and Brady leaped up and reached out for her. “No! No, don’t call them. They…” His voice trailed off. “No, I’ll clean up.” He looked around like he expected a bathtub to magically appear. Hell, the way her morning was going, maybe one would. A little magic would just be the cherry on the shit sundae.
“The guest bath is torn up. Tiling and I are not the friends I thought we’d be,” Paige admitted. “You can use my bathroom. It’s that way,” she said, gesturing down the hall. Morning was coming and faint light was starting to stain the curtains. “Are you going to turn to dust or something if the sun comes in?” She was pretty sure that happened in movies.
He stopped two steps into the hall. “I don’t know.” He looked her. “Do you think I will?”
Paige made a face and just didn’t answer. She had no idea what was going on.
“What if I do?” Brady was starting to sound a little panicked now.
“I will not let you get turned into dust,” Paige said firmly. She put her hand on the small of his back and urged him toward the bathroom. It was odd, comforting someone who was a good six inches taller and who looked physically much stronger than she was, but he went as docilely as any victim. He might be a vampire or zombie or something, but he was still Brady—a man traumatized by a horrible crime. Getting rid of the bloody clothes would help him feel more human.
She stopped and Brady went a couple of steps on his own before he turned to look at her. “What?”
“I don’t have clothes for you.” Paige’s shirts wouldn’t even fit over his shoulders and if he tried wearing her shorts, he was going to castrate himself.
“I’ll live.” Brady said that in the same sort of wry tone she’d heard from him a thousand times, but then he flinched. “Or not,” he added quietly. With a sigh, he shrugged. “A sheet will be fine. I can pretend I’m a ghost. I have the dead part down.” Paige wanted to say something comforting that would make him feel better, but the police training on working with victims had never covered this situation.
“I can go to your place—get some clothes.” Paige closed the distance between them and starting urging Brady toward the bathroom again.
“I don’t have my key. I don’t think so, anyway.” He started patting himself down. “I think someone was there—at my house. My keys should be on the kitchen counter still.”
“They grabbed you in your house?” He didn’t answer her, but the pain on his face made it clear he was still remember
ing. He rubbed his right arm, fingers finding a rip in the shirt. “No biggie. You get the water going and I’m going to find a towel and some duct tape for the window. You are not allowed to turn to dust, okay?” Paige said as cheerfully as she could. She suspected she didn’t sound all that cheerful.
She gave him a shove toward the open bathroom door, cringing at the old underwear with almost washed out bloodstains hanging from the towel rod. However, he didn’t seem to notice. He just started stripping off layers of crusty, torn clothing, letting it fall to the ground.
Paige headed for the bedroom where her nightstand drawer stood open, the empty gun safe still waiting. If someone had been chasing Brady, they would have broken in by now.
Whoever had killed him either didn’t know he was gone or hadn’t been able to follow. Maybe the sun was a danger. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she put her weapon away and double checked that the box had locked. The clock said 4:23. Paige rubbed a hand across her face and slid the drawer closed. In about a half hour, she was going to have to get ready for work and then…what?
She got up and headed for the garage, but Brady had left the bathroom door open and her eyes searched him out when she passed. Even though she didn’t mean to invade his privacy, Paige watched, horrified at the sight of white scars across his pale back. It looked like some sort of curly writing had been carved into his flesh, but the wounds looked weeks old. Surely he would have mentioned an earlier attack.
“Brady, did you hurt your back earlier?”
He turned and twisted to try to see his back in the mirror. “Okay, that’s not good.” Reaching around, he stretched and watched the scars move with the skin. “Did someone write on me?”
Paige stepped into the bathroom and reached out to trace the curve of a line. “No, they’re scars.”
“But they only did this last night.” He looked over at her. “I remember an old house and a room and I could see the letters in blood on my back. How could they be scars? Paige?”
She didn’t have an answer. Ignoring her own emotions, including the horror of someone carving into her partner, she tried to focus on it as if it were a case. “Maybe we can use the writing to figure out what’s going on.” Paige headed out of the bathroom and grabbed a notebook out of the bedroom. When she came back, he was still studying himself in the mirror.
“It’s not me,” he whispered.
Right now, his back didn’t look like him. “We just need to figure out the letters,” Paige pressed on Brady’s shoulder to get him to turn so she could see it better. It was hard to tell where the writing started because it seemed to be in two circles, one inside the other. “This might be a clue.”
“Of what? Are they even letters?”
“Some of them are,” Paige said. She raised her hand and traced an oddly formed X on the small of Brady’s back. A shiver went through him, and Paige pulled her hand back. “I can write them out. Maybe they’ll mean something to you.”
Paige cleared her throat as she grew uncomfortably warm. She thought about taking off her robe, but her nightgown was a little ratty, so she decided to suffer through. Working quickly, she sketched out the symbols in a rough circle.
One of the Os seemed to be more faded than the others, and before Paige realized what she was doing, she reached out and traced the edges of the circle with one finger. The other symbol she’d touched felt almost sharp as the thin ridge of scar rose up out of Brady’s back. But this O was a dull bulge, almost like a swelling under the skin. When she traced the O for the second time, Brady hissed.
“Sorry.” Paige jerked her hand back and turned away from him. She seriously did not have her head screwed on straight. Focusing on the page of symbols she’d drawn, she studied it. It wasn’t the prettiest sketch ever, but it looked roughly like the original on Brady’s back.
“Look familiar?” she asked as she turned back and offered him the notebook. Brady studied the symbols, his eyes more red than ever. With him distracted, she grabbed the panties and tossed them behind the door.
“I don’t know how this is a clue. It’s not even English.”
“Well, maybe we just need to figure out what it is,” Paige said, but she had to admit that as clues went, it wasn’t that good. “You said they had you at an old house. Do you know where the house was?” Paige asked.
Brady shook his head. “It’s all in bits and pieces, flashes like these pictures.” With a grimace, he brought his fist down on the bathroom counter, punching it hard enough that it sounded like something cracked. Either Brady now had a broken hand or she had another repair to make. “I can’t remember anything helpful. I’m a fucking cop, so why can’t I come up with one helpful clue here?”
“Hey, it’s going to be okay.” He looked at her and Paige had to admit that sounded a little stupid. Normally, she called someone else in to deal with victims while she secured the perimeter, interviewed witnesses and called detectives when she found anything interesting. “That was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it?”
Brady leaned against the counter and hung his head. “Yeah,” Brady agreed. “It was.”
“We will get through this.” Paige was uneasy and overly aware of the fact that he was very attractive and very half-naked. With his bloodstained clothes off, he looked more like Brady than a murder victim, but having Brady in her bathroom in nothing but a pair of boxers was not really all that comfortable. However, it seemed rude to not offer some sort of reassuring touch.
He went to turn just as she went to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder and somehow she ended up with her palm resting against his chest. His hard nipple pebbled under her fingers and she sucked in a fast breath as she pulled away. “Sorry. Damn, I guess I should sign myself up for one of the harassment classes,” she joked as she backed out of the room.
“No, it felt good,” Brady said. “Different.”
“I’m not your type, so I’ll just go get you that towel.” Paige fled, horrified that she had done that. Brady had been attacked and she had not only touched him, but then joked about his type. She didn’t need one of the harassment classes—she needed the whole sensitivity curriculum again.
“Paige!” Brady called as he followed her. Even his boxers were streaked with blood with a huge tear over the right hip. “Don’t run.”
“I’m just getting a towel,” Paige said as she reached the front closet and buried her head in it. She needed a little time for the embarrassment to fade and the blood to leave her face.
“No, I mean literally. Don’t run.”
Paige pulled her head out of the closet and looked at him. “What?”
His hand was fisting the edge of her bookcase. “Don’t run. It makes me feel funny when you run.”
Suspicious now, Paige turned to look at him. “Funny how?”
“Like I really want to chase you,” he admitted. From the visible flinch, he didn’t want to admit it, but she gave him credit for having the balls to confess the truth. She wasn’t as thrilled with the idea that he wanted to chase her.
“Are we talking about chasing me in a way that would make me press sexual harassment charges or in a way that would make me bleed?” Paige glanced at her closet, looking for anything heavy enough to make a good weapon. She had an old hand weight that would hurt like hell if she could get in a good swing.
“Can I plead the fifth?” he asked. While Paige felt a flash of fear, she also noticed how miserable Brady looked. He might be feeling a need to chase her, but he didn’t want to.
“You try anything and I’ll knee you hard enough to make your balls swell up like melons,” she warned.
Brady looked up at her in surprise. “But—”
“But nothing. You try it and see what happens. You guys. You think if you’re taller and bigger that you’ll win the fight. But I’m older and meaner and I’ll bet on old and mean any day of the week.” She grabbed a red towel out of the closet and just about threw it at him. “Here. Since we don’t know whether the sun is going to kill you
, I’ll go get the duct tape out of the garage. And Brady….” He caught the towel and looked at her in surprise. “Don’t walk around my house half-naked. You’ll scare the chickens.”
He was still blinking at her in confusion as she turned and walked away, very careful to not run. She made it to the garage door without looking over her shoulder, and when she turned to check, Brady was gone from the hallway, so hopefully he’d gone to get cleaned up.
“Well, that was interesting,” she told herself as she headed through the laundry room and out into the garage. She’d grown up in farm country where the coyotes used to come in and try to grab the chickens and cats. Paige had a love-hate relationship going with those clever little predators. Sure, she’d chase them away from the farm stock, but sometimes she’d lie on the hill at dusk and watch them go after feral cats or squirrels or mice.
The second an animal spotted them and started running, the whole pack of gangly legged coyotes would be up and after it. Some genetic coding made them chase anything that ran.
She supposed it was those same genes that made their dog Chloe chase the cars that drove by on that old dirt road. Chloe knew she wasn’t ever going to catch a car, but she just couldn’t stop herself from chasing it. She’d come home with her tongue hanging out and her face gray with dust and she’d throw herself down in the shade of a pine tree, but when the next car came, she was up and running again.
Unless Paige was missing something, Brady had something like that in him right now. If someone ran, he was going to want to run them down. She was trying hard to not think about what he’d do if he caught that person, but growing up around those coyotes, she couldn’t ignore the truth. Fact was, part of Brady was a hunter now, even if he hadn’t killed. And part of him knew that and hated it.
Walking over to the workbench, she grabbed the duct tape and then spent a second just wondering what the hell she was doing. It might be that Brady could control himself. It might be that he was changing and the more he changed, the more he became like those coyotes—a prisoner of genetics and instincts that defined the world as predator and prey. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” she asked the universe.