Lover Mine(142)

When it came to people? Former was packed with the productive and the purposeful. Latter was lucky if it could pull together more than a couple of bums at this hour.

Which was precisely what he was banking on.

Heading for Caldwell's twin bridges, he passed by a vacant lot that had a chain- link fence around it and had to slow a little. Christ . . . that was where ZeroSum had been before it was reduced to a pile of rubble. And the real estate sign that was in front had a Sale Pending sticker slapped on it.

Wasn't that how things worked. Nasty, like nature, abhorred a vacuum--so if the new club going up on the site met a similar MacGyver end as Rehv's had, another would take its place just as fast.

Kind of like the sitch with his father. In no time at all, Lash had been replaced by something right up his own alley, so to speak.

Made you feel fucking dispensable. It really did.

Down under the bridges, it didn't take long to find what he was looking for, but wished he didn't need. His trolling beneath the overpasses quickly brought out the raggedy humans who slept in cardboard boxes or burned-out cars, and he thought of how similar to stray dogs they were: drawn by the hope of sustenance, suspicious from experience, riddled with disease.

The mange parallel worked, too.

He wasn't picky and neither were they. Soon enough he had a female in his passenger seat, oohing and ahhing not over the AMG's leather, but the plastic Baggie of coke he gave her. While she pinkied some up and went Hoover on it, he drove her over to a dark cave formed by the massive concrete foundation of the incoming bridge.

One snort was all she got.

He was on her in a flash, and whether it was his need or her physical weakness, he was able to completely subdue her while he drank.

Her blood tasted like dirty dishwater.

When he was finished, he got out of the car, went around, and yanked her out by the collar. Her color had been pale to begin with; now it was the gray of the concrete.

She would be dead soon if she wasn't already.

He paused and looked down at her face, measuring the thick lines in the skin and the busted capillaries that had given her an unhealthy blush. She had been a newborn once. She had been fresh to the world years ago.

Time and experience had certainly battered her, and now she was going to die like an animal, alone and on the dirt.

After he dropped her, he reached forward to shut her eyelids--

Jesus . . . Christ.

Lifting his hand up, he looked through his palm out to the river.

No longer rotting flesh, but dark shadow . . . in the form of what he used to write with and punch with and drive with.

Dragging the cuff of the raincoat up, he saw that his wrist was still corporeal.

A surge of strength powered through him, the loss of skin no longer something to mourn, but a source of rejoicing.

As is the father . . . so be the son.

He wasn't going to end up like that whore he'd just stabbed back to himself. He was heading for the Omega's territory, not rotting . . . but transforming.

Lash began to laugh, great belly rolls of satisfaction percolating from his chest and boiling up his throat and leaping out of his mouth. He fell to his knees next to the dead woman and let the relief--

With a sudden surge, he jacked to the side and threw up the spoiled blood he'd taken in. When there was a pause, he wiped his chin with his hand and looked at the glossy red as it covered the shadowy outline of what had once been flesh.

No time to admire his nascent new form.

Violent vomiting racked him so hard he was blinded by the stars exploding in his vision.





FIFTY-ONE





Sitting in her private quarters, Payne stared out over the Far Side's landscape. The rolling green grass and the tulips and honeysuckle reached only so far before they were cut off by a ring of trees that encircled the lawn. Above it all, the arching milky sky stretched from fluffy treetops to fluffy treetops, the lid on the wardrobe trunk.

From personal experience, she knew that if you walked to the edge of the forest and penetrated its shadows, you ended up emerging . . . right where you entered.

There was no way out, except through the Scribe Virgin's permission. She alone held the key to the invisible lock and she wasn't going to let Payne go--not even to the Primale's house on the Other Side, as the others were allowed to do.

Which proved that female knew well what she had birthed. She was very aware that once Payne got loose, she was never coming back. Payne had said as much--in a yell that made her own eardrums hum.

In retrospect, her outburst had been a victory for honesty, but not the best strategy. Better to have kept that to herself, and perhaps been allowed to traverse to the Other Side--and stayed there then. After all, it wasn't as if her mother could force her back to the land of the living statues.

Well, at least theoretically.

On that note, she thought of Layla, who had just returned from having seen her male. The sister had been glowing with a kind of happiness and satisfaction that Payne had never felt.