Stray

by Rachel Vincent

  Eric was oblivious to my efforts and to my mounting frustration. He shoved his tongue into my mouth, deep enough to make me gag. The intrusion shattered the vestiges of my concentration like an ax through a thin sheet of ice. I barely resisted the urge to bite his tongue off. I could have done it, even with blunt human teeth, but I didn’t, because it wouldn’t have killed him. Not fast enough, anyway. It would damn well have pissed him off, though.

  He walked me backward, his mouth still sucking at mine, until I was trapped between his body and the bars. His hands roamed, squeezing and prodding. His tongue trailed down my neck. I closed my eyes, again trying to force a Shift. His teeth pinched my earlobe, not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to leave indentations. He was marking me. I hate being marked.

  But the worst by far was the hard lump in his jeans. It throbbed against my stomach through the denim, a warning of worse things to come.

  Eric unzipped his pants, and that tiny whisper of a sound thundered through me like the roar of jet engine. My eyes flew open. He pushed his jeans down without ever taking his mouth from my neck.

  This was going too far. If my moment didn’t come soon, it would be too late.

  Angry and beyond mortified, I stared at the back of Abby’s head, trying to keep in mind the reason I was submitting without a fight. It didn’t help. Pain, I could take. I understood pain and knew how to deal with it. But I didn’t understand this. This was absolute degradation, with no purpose but to humiliate me and break my will. And it pissed me off.

  My hands curled into fists at my sides. My nails bit into my palms. I was losing control, in spite of my determination to do whatever it took to keep Abby safe. I needed to concentrate, or I was going to make things worse for both of us.

  A familiar jolt of pain shot through my jaw. My heart jumped, and I stiffened. I ground my teeth together against the pain, but my lips curved into a smile. It was happening. The partial Shift. I was going to have my moment after all, so long as he didn’t notice until it was finished.

  “Relax,” Eric whispered into my neck. “You’re tensing up.”

  You have no idea, I thought, privately tickled to have finally found the key to the partial Shift. Flaming anger and intense concentration. Good to know.

  Eric pushed his briefs down with one hand. His fingers slid up my bare thigh. I clenched my fists again, drawing more blood from my palms. It took everything I had to keep from shoving him away and ruining my best shot yet at taking him out.

  The pain was worse than it had been the first time; this Shift was more complete. The throbbing in my face grew to a screaming, blinding agony. I had to unclench my jaws, had to open my mouth. But I was grateful for the pain. It demanded attention. It kept my mind off Eric’s hands and mouth.

  I felt several tiny cracks, as the bones of my face Shifted, and—from my perspective at least—gunfire couldn’t have been any louder. Another crack ripped its way through my jaw, and Abby stiffened where she sat. She started to turn toward us, then seemed to think better of looking and buried her face in her arms.

  Oh, shit. What if Eric heard that? He was much closer to the source than Abby was.

  And he must have heard it, because he started to glance up. I did the only thing I could think of to distract him. I shoved my chest forward. He purred and his mouth traveled down to engulf my nipple. I cringed, but he mistook my shudder for one of pleasure.

  Boy, are you delusional, I thought, taking short, shallow breaths as the pain in my face reached its apex. Why are guys always so willing to believe in the power of their own sexual magnetism, even when all evidence points to there being none? I think some men are born with big egos, to make up for the lack of certain necessary equipment. Like a brain.

  The aching subsided, and I ran my tongue over my teeth. I gasped, feeling full-length canines and an entire mouthful of pointed teeth, both top and bottom. Eric moaned around my nipple, mistaking my gasp just as he had my cringe. I resisted the urge to smack him. I didn’t need to hit him anymore. I knew just what to do with him.

  Eric tucked one hand beneath my left knee. He lifted my leg, curling it around his waist as he pressed himself against me.

  Now, I thought. My moment had finally come.

  I growled in warning. Eric froze, my nipple still in his mouth. My leg slid back to the ground. He rose slowly. Our eyes met. I have no idea what mine looked like, but his would have comfortably seated several little green men apiece.

  I took a millisecond to enjoy his shock and fear. Then I lunged for his throat.

  Twenty-Five

  Blood never tasted sweeter to me than Eric’s did at that moment, pouring into my mouth from his neck on its way down from his brain. Or maybe that was the taste of carnal justice. Whatever it was, it was wonderful.

  Eric tried to scream but could only manage a bubbly gurgle. He floundered for several seconds, his arms waving wildly, bumping against my sides and hips ineffectively. Though I’d broken the skin, actually puncturing his jugular vein, I hadn’t ripped his throat out. That would have been an almost instant death, and he didn’t deserve my mercy. Instead, I crushed his windpipe with my jaws, slowly suffocating him as he bled.

  During my first partial Shift two very long days earlier, my mouth wouldn’t have opened that wide. Luckily, this transformation was much more complete. I couldn’t see myself, but my best guess was that I had a hairless muzzle and cat’s nose, protruding from an otherwise human face. It couldn’t have been a pretty picture, combined with my already battered cheek. Fortunately, being pretty mattered even less to me then than it ever had. I was interested in efficiency, and my new monstrosity of a face was very efficient.

  Eric spasmed one final time, and by then I was supporting his weight with my arms around his rib cage. When I was sure he was dead, I opened my mouth. His head flopped backward, bobbing for a moment under its own inertia. His limp weight was grotesque and faintly nauseating.

  Heaving him up, I tossed him onto the mattress at my feet. I stared at him, listening to the sound of my own breathing. Shock hadn’t set in yet, but I was thinking clearly enough to know that it might at any second. I’d never killed anyone before. Deer, yes. Rabbits, yes. And once, a cow that somehow wandered onto my father’s property and into the trees. But I’d never taken the life of anything with the ability to reason, however poorly that ability was used, and I was not naive enough to think I would suffer no consequences from it.

  Short, gasping breaths caught my attention. I squinted at Eric’s chest, waiting to see it rise. It didn’t. I looked up gradually in the direction of the sounds. Abby stared at me through eyes wide with fright. When my eyes met hers, she gave a startled yip and jumped back from the bars, turning her head slowly from side to side, in denial of what she saw.

  “Abby.” But I couldn’t enunciate with my cat’s jaws, so it came out as a short string of vowels, inarticulate nonsense that had little in common with her name. Ah, yes, now I remember the downside. Cat’s jaws isolated me from the more verbally gifted of Earth’s inhabitants.

  Running my hands hesitantly over my face, I began to share her horror. I was grateful for my new ability, since it had saved me from what would surely have been the most humiliating, demeaning experience of my life. Even so, I had no desire to ever see my in-between face for myself.

  I turned my back on Abby and concentrated, forcing my face to Shift back. The pain was worse without the rest of my body to sympathize with agony of its own, but it went quickly. When it was over, I verified the results with my hands and my tongue. Everything felt right. Sticky with blood but otherwise normal.

  Turning, I wiped blood from my mouth with my arm, which really wasn’t much of an improvement. “Abby, it’s me.”

  She squinted at me in the dark and sighed in relief, as if she thought the shadows had been playing tricks on her eyes before. “Are you okay?” she asked, wrapping her hands around the bars again. It’s amazing how fast that becomes habitual.

  “
Yeah. Messy, but okay.” I glanced at my pile of clothing, then down at the blood drenching my chest. I’d have to clean up before I could get dressed.

  “Eric?” Abby asked.

  “Dead.”

  She burst into tears for the second time in less than an hour, but these were tears of relief and I was glad to see them.

  “Give me just a minute, and I’ll have you out of there,” I said. She nodded, and moved down to the door to wait.

  I sat on the mattress by Eric’s corpse, doing my best to ignore the blood staining his shirt and my own bare flesh. I stuck my hand in his right pocket and came out with a key. But only one. Mine.

  My key clasped in my left fist, I dove into his left pocket, searching frantically. I turned it inside out in my haste to find the other key, but the pocket was empty. No loose change, no lint, and definitely no key.

  “There’s only one,” I whispered.

  “Maybe it works on both locks,” Abby said, her voice shrill with desperation.

  I thought back but couldn’t rule it out. The first time, Eric had unlocked her cage but not mine. Miguel had unlocked mine but not hers. Sean and Ryan claimed not to have keys. And this time Eric had only opened my cage, so maybe she was right.

  Key in hand, I stuck my arms through the bars and opened the lock. I pulled it loose from the latch and clenched it in my fist. Holding my breath, I pushed the door open. Then I stepped across the threshold.

  I felt like something should have happened, like an alarm blaring or fresh air blowing my sweaty, sticky hair back from my face. Or maybe theme music playing from some cheesy prison-escape movie. But nothing happened. What a letdown.

  Abby’s eyes were glued to the key as I pulled it from my lock. I tried it on hers, but it wouldn’t even go all the way in. The light in her eyes died, replaced by a look of confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Where’s the other key? He had to have it if he came down here for me.”

  I understood all too well. “He didn’t come for you. Not this time.” Eric had set me up, and I’d fallen for it completely. Outsmarted by a Neanderthal. Faythe, you idiot! I wanted to smack my own forehead but settled for staring at my feet instead. Until the blood trailing down my torso caught my attention, and I had to close my eyes.

  “What?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “He used you to get to me. He didn’t bring your key because he wasn’t after you this time. He only acted like he was so I’d try to protect you and he could offer me his little trade.” Eric was a moron. A truly substandard intellect. So what did it say about me, that I’d fallen for his performance? Not as much as his death at my hands said about him.

  Back in my cage, I glared at his body. I would have kicked him in the head, if I wasn’t completely creeped out by touching a corpse, even one I’d created. So, I walked around him on my way to examine my clothes. I’d blocked most of the splatter with my own body, so my shirt and shorts were pretty clean, other than the thin, dry trail of Miguel’s blood. Best of all, the shirt still smelled like Marc.

  Careful not to let it touch my soiled skin, I held the material up to my nose, inhaling deeply. Marc’s smell made my heart pound and my blood rush, not all of it to my head. For the first time, I realized that there was a chance, a teeny speck of a possibility—microscopic, really—that sleeping with him might not have been a complete mistake. Because while a mistake might be fun, might even be worth repeating a couple of times, people don’t have physiological responses to a reminder of said mistake thirty-two hours later. That just didn’t happen. Did it?

  I rolled my clothes up and carried them to the bathroom under the stairs. “What are you doing?” Abby asked, still clutching her bars.

  “Cleaning up. Then I’m going to get dressed and go find your key. Or a hammer. If I go up there without cleaning off the blood, Ryan will smell me the minute I open the door.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  Grinning, I shrugged. “I could take him as a kid, and I’m a lot stronger now.”

  She smiled hesitantly, clearly skeptical. I nodded toward Eric, as a reminder, then closed myself into the restroom beneath the stairs.

  The bathroom was nothing but a toilet and a low sink, crammed into a space too small to hold two people. A damp hand towel sat on the back of the toilet, and it looked clean. I put down the toilet lid and set my bundle of clothes on it, then turned on the faucet.

  I ran as little water as possible, afraid Ryan might hear it and know something was wrong. But I was determined to wash away all of the blood, in spite of the risk. There was no mirror, so I did the best I could without one. I lathered my hands with the vanilla-scented soap and scrubbed my face over and over, until my hands came away clean. My body was easier, because I could see the blood.

  When I was finished, and smelled overwhelmingly of vanilla, I blotted myself dry with the hand towel and got dressed. Abby was staring at me when I opened the door. I could almost taste her anxiety.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, glancing around for the source of her concern. Eric still lay dead in my open cell, which was good, because I don’t do walking corpses. There was no one else in the basement.

  “Don’t leave me,” she begged. “Please.”

  I reached through the bars to hug her. “I wouldn’t leave you here for anything in the world, Abby. I’m just going to find the other key, and a phone, so I can call my dad. I’ll be right back.”

  She clutched me, clasping her hands at my back. “Promise?”

  “I swear.”

  “Okay.” She let me go, and I stroked her hair, pushing it back from her face.

  “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll have you out of there.”

  She nodded, and I headed for the stairs. I took them two at a time, with a cat’s easy gait and stealth. I was still tired and hungry, but adrenaline kept me going. It was even better than caffeine.

  On the top step, I flipped the light switch up and glanced at Abby one last time. She gave me a hesitant smile and a thumbs-up. I turned the knob, my heart pounding so hard in my ears that I couldn’t tell whether or not the hinges squealed as I pushed the door open. I paused, waiting for Ryan’s footsteps, but they didn’t come.

  My palm damp on the doorknob, I stepped onto faded linoleum and eased the door shut behind me. Beneath my feet, a flowering-vine pattern crept across the floor and under a cluttered pressboard table before disappearing beneath a wall of kitchen cabinets. Above the sink, directly across from the basement door, was a window, its thin lace drapes open to expose an eerily perfect residential street, complete with sidewalks, yard gnomes, and mailboxes in cute shapes like birdhouses and barns.

  I crept silently around the table, leaning over a stack of dirty dishes to stare out the window. As I watched, enthralled by an ordinary scene of suburban serenity, a car drove by, bobbing for a moment as it went over a yellow speed bump before passing the driveway out front. The empty driveway.

  My pulse jumped. The van was gone. Sean and Miguel had already left.

  Staring out the window, I looked freedom in the face, but my eyes were drawn back to the basement door. I’d promised Abby I wouldn’t leave her, and I never broke my promises. But even without a promise I could no more have left her than I could have let Eric hurt her.

  To my left was an arched doorway, leading into what had once been a formal dining room. It was empty now, and beyond it lay a small, tiled foyer and the front door. To my right stood an identical arch, leading into the living room. The couch faced away from me and the television was on, tuned to a morning-news talk show. Ryan was nowhere in sight.

  I scanned the table, searching for the key among sticky dishes and abandoned food. It wasn’t there, but I did find a cell phone, fully charged and receiving a strong signal. Mine, now, I thought, slipping it into the front pocket of my shorts as I turned toward the living room.

  The phone rang when I was inches from the doorway. A digital, polyphonic version of “Bad Boys.” Someo
ne had a really cheesy sense of humor. I slapped my hand over the phone in my pocket, then dug for it desperately. I got it on the second ring and jammed my thumb down on the End Call button. Nothing happened. Shit, wrong phone.

  In the living room, less than five feet away, Ryan moaned and sat up on the couch with his back to me. He rubbed his face with one hand while his other searched blindly on an end table for the ringing phone. I slid back from the door frame in case he turned around. And I listened, frozen in place.

  The song stopped. “Hello?” Ryan asked, still half-asleep. Then, sharper, “Why the hell didn’t you write it down the first time? Or at least wait ’til you got closer to call for directions. I could have slept for several more hours.”

  He paused, and I held my breath. It had to be Sean, because he wouldn’t talk to Miguel like that. Or Mom. And I was fairly certain no one else would call Ryan.

  “Okay, okay. But find a fucking pen this time.” Another pause. “You ready? Okay, the town is called Oak Hill. It’s eighty-five miles southwest of Saint Louis. You’ll be on I-55 until…”

  I quit listening; I’d heard all I needed. They were going after Carissa, but they wouldn’t be there for hours, so there was still time.

  A minute later, Ryan hung up the phone with a curse and a grunt. Classy. He fell back on the arm of the couch and was snoring in seconds.

  In a rush of relief, I released the breath I’d been holding for nearly two minutes. It was about time something went my way.

  I tiptoed, literally, back to the basement door and eased it open long enough to slip through, then closed it soundlessly.

  “Faythe?” Abby whispered.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Just a sec.” From the top step, I checked the reception on the cell phone. Two bars. Still watching the screen, I took the steps one at a time. On the fourth step, I lost one bar, and by the sixth, I had no reception at all. I ran the rest of the way to the basement floor and straight to Abby’s cage.

  “Did you find the key?” she asked, her face eager, eyes bright.