Duke eyed me like a furious bull: the whites of his eyes showing, erection raging, body pouring sweat. He turned back and sprinted to Vanya’s side, too fast to be human, and swung the ax into the chain of the cuffs. Vanya dropped to the floor like a plate of blancmange. I was only just getting to my feet, too dizzy to run, by the time that Duke was chasing ahead of Vanya and out the door.
I swore and fired after them. One bullet caught Duke in the shoulder, but it didn’t even slow him. Vanya was pumped with adrenalin and Duke was… whatever he was. He’d caught the same infection as Mason, Lily and Dru. It hadn’t even been five hours since he was stabbed.
I floundered up the stairs as quickly as I could, but not in time. There was a high-pitched scream from inside the parlor. It was too high to be Jenner’s smoke-and-whiskey voice. Talya was still here.
The raw cry of pain spurred me on to greater speed. I staggered up the stairs, jamming the pistol into my belt and pulling the knife. If Duke was infected with Morphorde, the last thing I wanted to do was shoot him somewhere vital. I turned the blade as I rounded the corner to see…. Blood. A lot of blood, spattered and oozing across the floor from the two dead bikers and Talya. The men had been hacked to death. Tayla was sprawled against the cash counter in her sundress and cardigan, panting with an awful wet rasp. Her fingers hovered and twitched around the ax handle buried in her chest.
“Talya.” I limped towards her as a whine grew in my ears, drowning out the sound of the street. Duke had buried the weapon so far into her body that I could only see a hint of metal. “Hang on… just… we’re going to count through this. We will count together and relax your chest.”
The girl shuddered. Her warm brown skin was milk white with shock, her lips bubbling with dark red blood. Her eyes met mine from across the room, startlingly gold through the wet mess of her silverish hair.
“G-go,” she rattled. She warded me back with a trembling, bloody hand. “Get… out… run… RUN!”
Confused, I backed up towards the entry to the parlor. I ran for the door and flung it open, just as the Buick tore past and gunned for the main road. Duke was white-knuckled on the wheel, his face an expressionless bloody mask, and Vanya was laughing. Even at high speed, I heard it in passing: the same horrible, forced, ‘HAH HAH HAH’ he’d made in the warehouse.
There was no stopping them now. I couldn’t run. I pushed my hands back over the stubble on my head, bleakly watching on as the car turned the nearest corner and vanished.
And then, from right behind me, came the impossibly deep-throated snarl of a huge, angry animal in pain.
For the first time in many years, I froze. Truly froze. I froze because I realized, in that moment, that I needed to run. Leave. Leave Angkor, who I didn’t even know, and Talya, and the Tigers, and the faceless horde of idiots gathering in the sidewalk across from the store, their voices burbling static. I could jump ship and never be seen again.
A shadow fell over me from behind, and I turned and looked up to see a cat the size of a small bus looming over the parlor.
Talya’s Ka was strange, primitive looking lion with a short, stiff, bristly mane. She staggered up to her feet with damp fur, but no excess Phitonic jelly rolled down her flanks. She was gray and white, with a taller, leaner build than any African Lion in the world, but the square face and heavy jaw were unmistakable, as was the blindingly loud roar she made as her flesh rejected the ax still buried in her chest. There was no humanity in her blazing yellow eyes. No control.
“Talya… Talya, it’s Rex…” I circled slowly towards the entry to the apartment stairwell, the knife held up, hand outstretched. Against a DOG, a knife worked just fine. Against this? This lion was at least two thousand pounds of muscle and claws. “Kitten, remember Rex? Zane?”
She dropped her head between her shoulders, and began to pad towards me in a slow stalking crouch. Just before she leapt, I threw the knife at her, end over end. It hit her in the shoulder, point-first, bounced, and clattered to the concrete floor. Fixated on my movements, she didn’t even seem to notice.
“Very well then.” I said aloud. And then I ran for my life.
Talya charged me in perfect silence, and however fast it was she was moving, thirteen feet to a second seemed fairly apt. I made it to the door of the stairwell just as she smashed it in behind me with a paw the size of a dustbin lid. Dodging claws, I charged up the stairs, driven by primordial fear so deep and so innate that pain became meaningless. Talya’s size was advantageous outdoors, but a liability in closed spaces. As I careened off the wall and ran, hopped and crawled to the landing, Talya clawed and swiped the spot I’d been seconds before, roaring in frustration as her head and shoulders got jammed between wall and door. She lunged up at my heels, only barely able to fit in the narrow stairwell.
I twisted the handle on the front door and shot inside, slamming it behind me. It wasn’t going to do anything to help me, but I felt slightly safer as I limped and ran down the hall, around the corner, and began to throw things in the desperate search for the Glock and a fresh clip. There was no way the 9mms in the Wardbreaker would bring Talya down, but the frag rounds stood a chance.
I could hear Talya ploughing through plaster and mortar on her way up the stairs, and emerged back into the hallway just as she tore the door off its hinges and lunged through half-way, bellowing in rage. She pushed forward with a snarl of frustrated hunger and struck the ceiling overhead, sending a rain of plaster into her own eyes. The bedroom door was open. I caught the jamb, spun around, and slammed the door closed with my back against the wood, until I thought better of it and stumbled away, as far from the entry as I could get.
“Ikun mohya?”
I jumped so hard that I gave myself whiplash, gun pointed at the ready. Angkor was sitting upright, bare-chested, his blanket pooled in his lap. His face was a pale mask of shock.
“What the Hell?” he said.
“LION,” I blurted.
Talya’s bulk struck the door and nearly rattled it from its frame. I scrambled up, and with a flush of manic strength, seized the legs of the nearest bed and dragged it across. Then the dresser, then the wardrobe. The door banged in a second time, the hinges straining. Angkor staggered out of bed, barefoot and in shorts, and crossed the distance to help me pull anything and everything across to block the door.
“Lion? Who?” Angkor’s voice was thick with fatigue. He looked like death warmed over. “What?”
“Talya. It’s Talya.” I retreated to the back of the room and slammed the new clip into the Glock as Talya began to strop the door with her claws. Wood splintered, and the junk pile swayed. “Can you use a gun?”
“Yes… NO! We can’t kill her!” Angkor withdrew from me and flopped to the bed with his face in his hands. “Wait wait wait, let me think of something…”
“Think quickly!” While he wracked his brains, I racked a bullet into the chamber and set a second clip just beside me. “We have about five seconds.”
“Okay! I’ve got an idea!” Angkor flapped his hand, leaning against the leg of the bunk bed as it jolted and shuddered behind him. “Can you piss?”
“What is… the hell kind of question is that?” My accent was bleeding through with stress.
“We need urine. Scent-marking. If he smells a lion bigger than he is-”
“She. Female lion.”
“-No, freaking listen to me. Talya’s Ka is a male lion, trust me. I know lion spunk when I smell it. If we create a territorial scent, he will cut and run. So can you piss or not?”
The man was insane, too screwed up from concussion to think clearly. “No, I can’t fucking piss on command. Get out of way.”
“GODunderfoot.” Angkor groaned, backpedaling, and sniffed. Then he sniffed again. “Hey, I smell cat shit. Is there a cat in here?”
“Yes, there is cat in here, and there is cat out there,” I snapped. “Now get fucking gun and shoot fucking lion before we die, please.”
“Hang on.” Angkor scrambled out
of sight, just as the bunk bed toppled over and a gray paw shot through the gap in the door, patting around, then flexing in and tearing the wood like paper.
Angkor whooped behind me. I glanced back to see him lift his hands, poised like a dancer or a stage magician, and then refocused on the lion’s groping paw, sighting down. Breath in, breath out, breath in…
Gravity in the room sucked backwards for a moment, a gathering rush of power, and then one of the worst smells I had ever experienced in my life flooded the room.
I’d smelled a lot of awful things over the years. I’d smelled bodies when they dumped their bowels and bladder after death. I’d smelled the unnatural reek of DOGs and places of corruption. This wasn’t a DOG-stench: it was cat feces concentrated a hundred times more than whatever the human nose was made to stand. It was the Platonic Ideal of cat shit, the distillation of rotten venison, putrid and tarry, mixed with bile, musk, and ammonia.
Retching, eyes streaming, I locked my jaws and sighted down again, this time on the huge face pressed against the hole in the door. The nose was flaring as Talya sniffed, and sniffed, and as I tried to shunt myself into the killing trance.
“Hold off,” Angkor said breathlessly. He lay a hand on the pistol and pushed it down. “Look.”
Talya moaned, a short, almost solemn sound, and pulled her muzzle back in a shower of shattered woodchips and paint. She began to paw at the threshold to the room, stropping her claws on it, but gave up after a few seconds with a snarl. The spotted gray flank swished by the hole in the door again, and I recupped the grip and re-aimed. But she passed by, chuffing with agitation.
“Oh wowww. That’s a North American lion,” Angkor said. He had turned an interesting shade of bronze-green. His eyes were watering, his voice thick with mucus. “A real life Panthera atrox. There hasn’t been one of those for at least eleven thousand years. Holy shit. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Sure, wonderful. But Super Govno isn’t going to hold her off forever,” I said. “He, she… IT can still hear us.”
“Hey, don’t be rude. She’s a woman when she’s human, male when she’s not.” Angkor nearly collapsed to his knees beside me. Up close, he was pouring sweat. Sweet, floral sweat that chased the stench of what I assumed was prehistoric lion shit out of my nostrils. “My GOD, that is amazing.”
“Cover ears.” I put the Glock down and pulled the Wardbreaker instead.
“What?”
I tucked my ear against my shoulder, pressed my hand to the other, and fired. The Wardbreaker was usually quiet – part of its enchantment made it nearly silent when activated with a suppressor – but I couldn’t activate it, and so the shot still rang out like a cannon, loud enough that my ears popped. Angkor winced, covering too late. Binah, terrified, shot out from her hiding place and began to flail uselessly at the walls and window in her efforts to find a way out.
The lion outside bolted in alarm, squeezing herself back towards the front door as the bullet zinged. I let out a tense breath, and lowered the pistol.
“Ow, shit...” Angkor let go of his ears, slumping into a wilted kneel on the floor. “You could have warned me.”
“I did.” I turned to glower at him, still tense. Talya had retreated, but it wasn’t over. “You were busy admiring the wildlife.”
“Okay, fine. You got me there.” Angkor rubbed his face. His eyelids were heavy, skin ashen and damp with sweat. “GOD, I feel awful. I was… uhh…”
He was staring at me: First in consternation, and then, with recognition and what even might have been awe.
“What?” My eyes snagged on twin crescent-shaped scars on his chest, cuts about an inch across just below the areola on both sides. They had thick keloids, as if someone had cut around his nipples or tried to take them off. Angkor didn’t say anything. Instead, he licked his lips, nose working like a dog’s.
“What?” I was louder this time, more peevish.
“I’m sure I’ve met you before.” Angkor slid in closer to me, far too close for comfort.
I blinked twice, glanced to the door to see if we were still likely to be eaten within the next thirty seconds, and then turned back. I extended him a gloved hand. “Well, now that we’ve established that our relationship is likely to be both brief and awkward before Talya eats us, perhaps we should start with our names. My name is Alexi. I believe you are Angkor.”
Angkor was in no way put off. He grasped my hand in his and shook, his grip surprisingly firm and steady. I held his hand a moment. He was not shaking. He had the air of someone who was used to working under stress.
“Seung Min-Joon,” he replied, eyes alight with inner fire. “But yes, call me Angkor. And no, it’s not a Korean name.”
“The more you know.” I let go, and used the wall to pull myself to my feet, wincing. My head spun, and for several long moments, every sound was muffled by the cotton-thick pounding of my heart in my ears. Blood had seeped to the surface of my dressings. Woozily, I staggered across to one of the beds and chirruped, seeing if I could coax my terrified familiar from her hiding place.
“You’re really badly hurt, Alexi. Can you lie down for a minute?” I heard him get up behind me. Weak as he was, he was still moving easier than me.
“Why?” Lying down was the last thing on my mind. All I had to do was get Binah, but I had to crawl onto the mattress to do that. Get the cat. As soon as I tried to look down between bed and wall, my vision and temples throbbed alarmingly.
“Trust me, okay? I’m a doctor.”
I turned on hands and knees, glowering at him. “I have to get my cat.”
“Look. You need to lie down.” he said. The affable smile had left his face, and he did indeed look like a doctor: the kind of cynical, care-worn kind you found lurking in the ER. “Your blood volume is way under, you’re in full ketosis, your micro-nutrient profile has gone to shit, and if I don’t help you now, your blood pressure is so low that you’re going to faint the next time your head is higher than your knees.”
“How ridiculous. I just need my cat.” I knelt up, and then immediately fell back down.
At first, I thought I’d blinked and woken up somewhere else. I was flat on my back, stretched out on top of the covers. Binah was licking my face with a sandpaper tongue. My shirt was open, and Angkor was pressing around the now-visible sigil figure on my chest. My body felt as light as air, cavernous and free. I could draw deep breaths, but my hands, nose and feet tingled with pins and needles.
“You know, I don’t recall much about that one time I’m pretty sure we met,” he said, with a sigh. “But I do remember that the other you was way better at taking orders.”
“What did you do to me?” I made a valiant attempt to speak, but the words came out as a slurred word salad.
Angkor made a sympathetic sound, apparently understanding anyway. “Don’t worry about it. Who did this to you?”
My brain had to whir around for a while before I could reply. “Sergei. Old upir’.”
“A Feeder,” Angkor murmured. “Of course. Look, wait here and don’t move. I need to go and see if our kitty-cat has calmed down.”
Wait here? A fresh wave of fear stabbed through me. I was partly undressed and prone, and the lion was out there somewhere. I struggled to rise as Angkor left the bedside, flailing out to the side for my gun. Neither action was particularly successful. I knocked the pistol to the floor and ended up leaning on my face, tangled in my open shirt. Straining with effort, I could only watch as Angkor let himself out into the hall. Binah resumed her impromptu bath, grooming the frizz of stubble beside my ear.
For several breathless, spinning minutes, there was no sound outside. Then Angkor returned. He saw me trying to reclaim my dignity and scowled. “Seriously. Stay down, or you’re going to pass out again.”
“I don’t like to be undressed.” As he closed in on me, I fought his hands out of principle. Angkor efficiently pushed me down, and to my confusion and consternation, spooned honey into my mouth before I could do anythi
ng about it. The sweetness burned my tongue and I coughed, swallowing reflexively.
“Just eat the damn honey,” Angkor said. “Life is way too short for bad patients, okay? I’m going to heal you, and you’re going to let me.”
He put one hand on my head and held the other out behind him to the door, and for a moment, nothing happened. And then I felt an intangible wave of energy pass through my body. The honey abruptly dissolved into a thin liquid that ran down my throat and into my gut, burning with the warm fire of liquor. The stomach parasite stirred warningly, and I winced.
But I was healing. It wasn’t the horrific, invasive, cell-crawling healing that I’d gotten from Sergei’s blood: The lacerations from the glass almost seemed to sigh as they pushed out pus and other refuse, then perfectly clear plasma as they knitted and repaired. My hands tingled as the cut in my palm half-sealed to something manageable. The energy lingered in the nerves of that hand, which twitched and danced on the bed as Angkor, frowning with concentration, somehow repaired the damage the glass had done. It didn’t feel bad. It was the opposite of bad. It made my breath hitch and my skin stir. My gloves were still on, but no one had ever touched my hands like that.
“Stop,” I said. My throat was clotting with nebulous fear, and as my anxiety peaked, I felt the healing accelerate. As the cut sealed, a silver ripple of… pleasure?… passed up my arm, through my chest, and down. Parts I preferred not to think about stiffened under the covers, which hurt. The pain startled and refocused me.
“I’m nearly done. Nerve damage.” Angkor’s delicate face was pouring with sweat as the focus of his magic shifted from my hand to my thigh.
The mingled pleasure and discomfort did not abate. I tried not to look at him, my face burning hot. The taste of honey and Angkor’s clear floral scent cut through the lingering lion musk and chased it from the room. He really smelled like Zarya. Like a Gift Horse.
“Nearly done,” he murmured. “Hang in there.”
The thigh puncture didn’t close, but the cut was now shallow – perhaps half an inch deep. The smaller ones had disappeared without a trace, and when I lifted my arms and looked over them, they were free of scars. Angkor sat back, and a huge, lazy smile of satisfaction spread over his mouth. His pupils were huge, dilated like a junkie’s.
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