Lover Mine(172)

SIXTY-TWO





When Lash woke up at his hideaway ranch, the first thing he did was look at his arms.

Along with his hands and wrists, his forearms were now shadows as well, a kind of smog- like form that moved as he told it to, and either be nothing more than air or could bear weight at his command.

Sitting up, he shoved off the blanket he'd pulled over himself and stood. What do you know, his feet were pulling a disappear, too. Which was good, but . . . shit, how long was the transformer bit going to take? He had to assume that if his body still had physical form, with a heartbeat and needs like food and drink and sleep, he wasn't completely safe from bullets and knives.

Plus, frankly, given all the pieces that had fallen off him, bio-waste management was really fucking messy.

He'd turned the mattress he'd slept on into the biggest Depends on the planet.

A squeak from outside drew him over to the blinds and he parted a seam with his nonfingers. Through the crack, he watched humans going along their lame-ass days, driving by, biking along. Frickin' morons with their simple little lives. Get up. Go to work. Come home. Bitch about their day. Wake up and do the same thing again.

As a sedan went by, he implanted a thought in the driver's mind . . . and smiled as the Pontiac swerved out of its lane, bumped up over the curb, and gunned right at the two-story across the street. The fucking POS powered straight into a bank of windows, smashing through the glass and the wood framing, air bags exploding inside the car.

Better than a cup of coffee to start the day.

He turned away and went to the shitty bureau, firing up the laptop he'd found in the back of the Mercedes. The drug deal he'd interrupted on the way home had been worth the effort. He'd grifted a couple thousand dollars as well as some OxyCs, some X, and twelve crack rocks. More important, he'd thrown the two dealers and the one customer under a trance, gotten them back to the AMG, brought them here, and turned them.

They'd trashed the hall bath by throwing up all night long, but frankly he was about done with this house and was thinking of burning it down.

So . . . he had a team of four. And whereas none of them had been volunteers, once he'd drained them and brought them back to "life," he'd promised them all kinds of shit. And what do you know. Junkies who dealt to supply their own habits would believe just about anything you told them. You just had to sell them on a future--after you'd scared the colons out of them.

Which was a no B.F.D. for him. Naturally, they'd been shitting themselves when he'd unmasked his face, but the good thing was they'd hallucinated so many times on acid trips, it wasn't completely outside their experience to talk to a living corpse. Plus he was persuasive when he wanted to be.

Damn shame he couldn't brainwash them permanently. But that parlor trick with the Pontiac driver was as far as he could go with the influence: brief and unsustainable for longer than a couple of seconds.

Fucking free will.

After the computer booted up, he went to the Caldwell Courier Journal site. . . .

Hello, front page. The "Farmhouse Massacre" was covered in a number of articles--the blood and the body parts and the strange oily residue garnering all kinds of Pulitzer-light description. Reporters also interviewed the police who'd been there, the postman who'd called 911 in the first place, twelve kinds of neighbors, and the mayor--who was evidently "calling upon the fine men and women of the CPD to solve this terrible crime against the Caldwell community."

Consensus was: ritual deaths. Perhaps tied to an unknown cult.

All of which was just background chatter obscuring what he was really looking for--

Bingo. In the last article, he found a short two-paragrapher reporting that the crime scene had been broken into the night before. The "fine men and women of the CPD" had grudgingly allowed as how one of their late-night patrol cars had done a drive-by and found that person or persons unknown had ransacked the scene. They were quick to point out that relevant evidence had already been removed and they were putting a black-and-white there full-time from now on.

So the Brotherhood had followed up on his little message.

Had Xhex gone there, too? he wondered. Maybe waited to see if he'd show up?

Shit, he'd missed a goddamn shot at her. And the Brothers.

But he had time. Hell, when his body went full- on shadow? He had an eternity.

Checking his watch, he got his hustle on, changing quickly into black slacks and a turtleneck and that hooded raincoat. Drawing on his leather gloves, he slid his black baseball cap on and gave a gander in the mirror.

Yeah. Right.

Rummaging around, he found a black T-shirt that he ripped to ribbons and wound around his face, leaving room for his lidless eyes and the cartilage that was left of his nose and the gaping maw that was now his mouth.