Collision Course Read online

  “Like what?”

  “Like putting the females of the pack into semi-regular heat.” It was easier to say if she just blurted out the words, if she didn’t stop to let Neil digest what they meant. “Point is, don’t take it personally. We did what we did because I wasn’t myself.”

  She could sense the shift in Neil’s mood as if it was her own. “You weren’t yourself… What does that mean?”

  Eve shrugged. “Exactly what it says on the tin. Sometimes hormones get the better of me.” She smiled thinly. “You want some coffee? I think I have a bag somewhere around here—”

  “No, thanks.” Ten years on, Neil was still the same vain little boy she remembered. He didn’t take well to being handled, much less treated like a piece of meat. They had argued loudly and often about his family’s use of animal horns and skin and hide. To him, they were just props in a long line of peculiar items necessary to this or that other spell. Eve, for her part, couldn’t cut off her ties to the Earth and the trade sickened her. Now he knew what it felt like.

  “Suit yourself.” If she turned her back to him fast enough, maybe he wouldn’t see her face crumple. She donned her housecoat, cinching it in place with an easy twist, as though she routinely had men over for a quickie. It would be best if Neil believed that. Fewer complications.

  He dressed quickly, too, as though eager to get away. But then hovered in the doorway, looking haggard and awkward. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could try I had a good time,” Eve suggested airily. She had always been a coward when it came to matters of the heart and try as she might, she couldn’t seem to persuade herself that this was purely physical.

  There was enough heart and history between them that their connection could still summon Neil to a strange neighborhood when he didn’t even know his destination.

  “I had a good time,” he echoed bitterly.

  “Good. Me too.” Eve hitched up her shoulders into a shrug and flashed him a smile. “Maybe we can do it again sometime.” There, that was suitably cold.

  Neil said nothing, retreating down the hall with soft, sure steps. He turned just as he reached the bare cement stairs. “Oh, Eve?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you actually think I can’t read a summons when I feel one, you don’t know me at all.” He trooped out of sight before Eve could think of a worthy comeback. As parting volleys went, that one left her cringing.

  * * * *

  It took Eve two hours to get to sleep after Neil had left. She slept fitfully, her dreams a jumble of gaping, toothless mouths snapping away at her and enough bodies in black bags to fill a stadium laid out on cold, impersonal white tile while men and women in hazmat suits did the rounds between the aisles of corpses.

  She woke up in a pitch-black room and couldn’t immediately place her surroundings. A shiver crept through her as she fumbled in the dark for the bedside lamp. Once it switched on, the shapes she could only sort of make out in the shadows resolved into the familiar lines of an ancient wardrobe and an ironing board, both of which had come with the apartment. Her bed was a mattress on the floor—and even that was an improvement to the first couple of weeks after she’d rejoined society, weeks she had spent sleeping in the bathtub because it was the only place that felt right.

  Her mood improved as soon as she peeled the curtains aside and opened the squeaky sash windows. The scent of the city—rotten and metallic, like a bleeding wound seeping with pus—slithered in reassuringly. She could get her bearings like this. It didn’t hurt that the moon was looming fat and yellow in a cloudless sky.

  Not so long ago she might have dreaded its pull and feared the effect it could have on someone like her. That time had passed. She was stronger now. She had paid the price.

  Her stomach rumbled loudly as she stood watching the silent streets. A car honked somewhere in the distance, a familiar, stretched-out noise in a part of town where drive-bys weren’t at all uncommon. She almost missed the police sirens that would follow the report of gunfire. There hadn’t been many since news had gone out that St. Louis was in the blast zone—cops were people, too, and they had given enough of their lives to this town. They didn’t need to die here.

  They had the right idea. It was foolish to remain and try your luck with celestial bodies that killed indiscriminately. Two years ago, when the Luw asteroids had hit Asia, they had struck buildings in Hong Kong, Macau, and huts in the Siberian tundra alike. It would be the same here.

  In other words, Eve mused, Neil Riccard is an idiot.

  She had gone to sleep with his name on the tip of her tongue and she woke with it still perched there, immovable. A hasty meal of carrots and peanut butter with a bowl of cereal—sans milk—wasn’t enough to banish the thought of him from Eve’s mind. He could play know-it-all if it made him happy, but he was still an idiot. He need not have come. For her part, Eve need not have lied—although strictly speaking, she’d only lied about the incidence of her heat cycle, not its existence.

  The truth was always more complex than it first appeared.

  With nothing to watch on TV other than the looped emergency broadcast, and not enough power stored in her solar cells to risk running the radio, Eve donned a pair of jeans and a tank top, picked up her Taser and her Beretta and filled a backpack with basic necessities. Might as well make the most of a quiet night.

  There wasn’t much in the apartment that was hers and even less that carried any sentimental value. She had lost most of her personal effects back at the Briars, which made it easier now to give up the rest.

  She tugged on her steel-toed boots and eased the door shut behind her without a second thought. When the looters came, and they would, at least they’d find the place looking tidy. That there was no sound all along the landing didn’t surprise Eve. She had heard her neighbors taking off in waves. First had gone the drug lords—or the people who knew back alley kingpins and could count on cashing in a favor or two—followed soon after by the wives and parents of GIs lucky enough to be stationed on home soil. Only last had come the intrepid crooks, the small-time offenders with a record and the ambition to make it out of the city in spite of the law. Only old folks were left.

  A Jewish Orthodox family living two floors down had made their choice a couple of days back, before the gas mains were shut off. Eve had gone around the fire escape to open a window to let out the stench. It was already too late to do anything for the family. She banished the memory as she pushed open the glass and steel door of the building to emerge into the street.

  There was no sign of the hulking gangbangers that occasionally passed through to harass the locals. Eve had never found them particularly worrisome. Their efforts to terrorize aside, they were easy to track down if they trod on her turf and they understood her brand of justice better than local police. Their absence was telling.

  Her first stop was two streets down, in an alley behind the local mosque. She knew the cash machine wasn’t often used because of its location and the last time she had swung by, she had dragged a couple of dumpsters in the way to conceal it further.

  The illusion was nearly complete, but if somebody was desperate enough to go urban exploring, they were sure to find it. In a few days, they’d be welcome to it.

  With all her preternatural strength, Eve still had to strain to move the dumpsters. She grimaced as the foul scent of rot rose from the grimy black containers, but it was the noise she dreaded most. The squeak of wheels grinding down on potholed pavement was loud enough to frighten a cat out of its hiding place. It mewled as it jumped out of reach and hissed menacingly at Eve from the safety of a high brick wall.

  Eve, naturally, hissed back.

  The cat scrammed, leaving her alone with the unenviable task of having to trudge through a murky runoff emanating from the overfilling gutters. Assorted debris floated nauseatingly on its surface, mostly used condoms and paper cups, but here and there Eve spied a syringe or a rotten apple pockmarked with rat bites.

 
; It was all worth it when Eve slid her bankcard into the designated slot and found five grand sitting pretty in her account. As crazy as it seemed for anyone to put value in paper money at a time like this, she didn’t hesitate to withdraw the maximum the machine could handle. The militia pulling border patrol wanted money to stay off her back? They’d get it. There was nothing else Eve could fathom doing with her cash these days anyway—there were no shops, no restaurants open anymore. Only the subway still ran, but eventually power would die and the automated trains would stop dead in their tracks.

  She was hoping to be far away from St. Louis by then.

  A pang of remorse flitted through her as she thought of Neil, alone in a ghost town. That was the optimistic version of his situation in a fortnight. Realistically speaking, he was far more likely to be dead by that date. Not my problem.

  Eve pushed the thought aside and made her way back into the street. She felt hyper-vigilant now, with five thousand dollars in cash in her backpack. Money may have lost its value as currency in all other respects, but it could still buy hope.

  There was nothing now that could keep her in St. Louis. From this moment on, she could make for the highway and hand over the five grand at the nearest military outpost.

  You could’ve said goodbye.

  The reprimand came from a place of self-flagellation, but it wasn’t easy to ignore. Eve gritted her teeth, pulling against the fishhooks of regret. Wasn’t it enough that she had seen Neil one last time before their paths diverged for good?

  Short answer—no, it wasn’t.

  She didn’t know where she was going until she found her footsteps leading her briskly toward the gaping black mouth of the nearest subway stop. A gust of warm wind slapped her cheeks as she trudged down the stairs. The quickest way out of the city was to head north and keep heading north until she hit the freeway.

  Yet Eve took the metro line heading south. There was no tether to blame, no pull on her loyalty. He’s not even that good of a lay, she told herself, though that wasn’t true.

  He saved my life at least had the virtue of being accurate.

  She got off the train a couple of blocks from the bar Neil had told her about, figuring that there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d be spending his last nights boozing his cares away rather than curling up with a good book at home. It didn’t seem like much. For a moment, Eve considered not going inside at all. It certainly looked like a dangerously private hole in the wall of the sort that were usually run by mobsters and frequently needed someone to mop the blood off their floors.

  Anxiety itself wasn’t enough to keep her from pushing past the red-painted door and stepping over the threshold. Her fight or flight instinct clearly needed recalibration.

  It was like a scene from a spaghetti western—music coming to a screeching halt, all eyes turning to glance warily at the new arrival. The barkeep froze with bottle in hand, forgetting that he was refilling someone’s drink and letting the whiskey run over the rim to spill across the counter.

  All that was missing was the tumbleweed rolling slowly through the frame.

  Eve fought to conceal a smile. In this company, it might be considered an invitation. There was no sign of Neil anywhere in her field of vision and she couldn’t scent him over the thick miasma of stale sweat, leather and warm vinyl—she tried not to think too much about the latter.

  She made her way to the bar slowly, keenly aware of eyes boring into her back. “Hi, I’m looking for someone. Guy named Neil?”

  The bartender blinked and the spell was broken. “I know a couple of Neils. Young? Old?”

  “About my age,” Eve said.

  “Tall or short?”

  Eve scowled. “Tall enough.” She couldn’t help but wonder if the bartender was pulling her leg. He looked like an approximation of a turn of the century barkeep in the Wild West. His thick mustache was well on its way to graying and he seemed a shot glass shy of utterly inebriated.

  This wasn’t a western, Eve realized, it was closer to an end of the world party where skinheads and mullahs rubbed elbows with showgirls and historical re-enactors. No wonder Neil liked the place.

  Still, it didn’t explain how they were still in business and selling liquor when almost all other bars not under mob protection had suffered the inevitable consequences of business in a town where the law had been abolished.

  “You’re not a mundane,” Eve said, the penny finally dropping.

  The bartender snorted. “Neither are you, sweet pea.”

  Touché. “Are you fucking with me?” A brisk hand worked better with her fellow Others. Eve had always liked to keep her interactions with their kind to a bare minimum, precisely because they were so finicky, but come hell or high water, she wasn’t leaving this bar without answers. “Do you know Neil or not?”

  The bartender flashed a toothy grin, showing off gold-plated teeth. Fucking fae, Eve found herself thinking. Or maybe leprechaun. The last one she’d met had tried to sell her a piece of land at the North Pole. Rumor had it their kind had infiltrated Wall Street pre-financial crisis.

  “Sure I know him,” he said, not quite a sing-song, “but that kind of information’ll cost you.”

  Eve bared her fangs. “No, it won’t.” First, because she didn’t have any cash she could waste on trading with a creature that lived for profit, and second, because Eve’s patience was already running thin. In a flash of movement, she grabbed the barkeep by his necktie and dragged him across the bar. Partial shifting was hard work for little gain, but just to make sure the message went through, Eve let her fangs elongate a little further and her eyes change color.

  She saw every twitch of movement on the barkeep’s wizened face as amusement turned to shock, turned to fear.

  “Where,” Eve snarled, “is he?” She registered the scrape of chair legs on the floor, heartbeats syncopating. “Tell your friends to sit back down. We both know I can rip your throat out with my teeth before any of them come close.”

  “That’s a threat. Isn’t that a threat?” The bartender swallowed hard, throat bobbing. “I think that’s a threat.”

  “Yes, it’s a fucking threat—”

  “That’s against the rules.”

  Eve growled. “What?”

  “See the sign on the door. See? Threats aren’t permitted. Lawman’s orders!”

  “I don’t fucking care—”

  “Don’t you?” a familiar voice asked, pitching low and calm from the other end of the bar.

  Eve felt her blood turn to liquid ice in her veins. She glanced up, gaze seeking out the speaker. It couldn’t be. It was.

  “You’re the lawman?”

  Felix Riccard had never been fond of Eve or her friendship with his brother, but the last time they’d talked, he’d been a seventeen-year-old pipsqueak with a wide brow and long, greasy hair. He’d looked more like a girl than a boy—he still did, but now the effect was helped along by a dash of lipstick on his thin mouth and a pair of gold studs in his ears.

  The pentagram inked onto his neck was enough to tell Eve that he hadn’t just embraced the family business, he was living in the shadow of its former glory. And doubtlessly, their ancient feuds.

  Eve released the bartender and righted herself. “I only came to say goodbye to your brother. I’m leaving town.”

  “Not a moment too soon, by the looks of it,” Felix drawled as he slid off his chair. “Unfortunately, your intentions are not my problem. Your actions are.”

  “No one got hurt.”

  “I beg to differ,” the barkeep interceded, straightening his necktie. He looked no worse for wear.

  Eve sneered. “You’ll live.”

  “I suggest you don’t make this any harder on yourself than it needs to be,” said Felix. The clinking, metallic notes of handcuffs being liberated from his belt had Eve’s claws jamming into the leather of her shoes. Felix must have noticed, because he bared his teeth in an awful, smug smile. “Now, now… We both know I’m the stronger. Think carefully b
efore you do something you’ll regret.”

  She had come here on a whim and she had roughed up the bartender because it was the only way she could get answers. Now the hope she’d had—of skipping town, of being free of the giant cage that had closed around her when she wasn’t paying attention—was slowly being blown to smithereens by a wicked eastern wind.

  “Bite me, Riccard,” she snarled, and made for the door. Neil would have to put on his big boy pants and deal with being left behind—twice, by the same woman.

  She almost made it. Her fingertips brushed the wood, claws chipping away at the cheap, flaking paint, before she was reeled back by an invisible leash.

  Eve hit the floor hard, backpack cushioning her from the worst of the pain. She tried not to think about her personal belongings getting banged up before she’d even made it a mile out of St. Louis.

  It’s not the wilderness that’s dangerous, she remembered someone telling her once. It’s people. She righted herself and this time, when she lunged, she lunged for Felix’s scrawny neck.

  Chapter Four

  St. Louis, thirteen days before

  The cell wasn’t all that small, but still Eve couldn’t help feeling as though she couldn’t breathe. She had given up banging her knuckles bloody against the durasteel door. The mechanism held fast against her attempts to jimmy it open and raising a whole lot of ruckus served little purpose. Felix hadn’t come back. What if he didn’t come back at all, ever?

  What if he stayed gone?

  Her juddering pulse echoing in her ears, Eve fought paranoia out of her snarling thoughts. He had to come back, to either free or kill her, and when he did—she’d kill him.

  Neil will never forgive you, she heard a voice whisper at the back of her mind. It might have been relevant information, if she could’ve spared a thought for anyone else’s feelings right then.