The undead, p.1
The Undead, page 1
A CHILLING DISCOVERY
“What are you thinking?” Adam asked me. His voice startled me, but I couldn’t help but answer him.
“You look different.”
“I am different.” Adam looked at me another endless minute, then down at the floor. He shook his head. I got the impression that he was troubled and tired. “There’s always somebody who sees, eventually. I don’t know why it has to be you, though.”
“Adam?” I whispered. He looked up again, and a cold stab of fear, agonizing in its intensity, shot through my body. I pressed myself back, gasping, against the cushioned back of the chair.
Adam’s eyes had bleached to the color of old bone. As I watched in dumb horror, they edged through the spectrum to red. Red irises, black pupils. They were not human eyes.
“You’re a well-read man, Mike,” Adam continued conversationally, with that cutting edge of weariness in his voice. “Remind you of anything?”
Praise for Rachel Caine’s first novel:
“Fresh, intense, erotic, funny, and scary. Longstreet’s given us a five star winner. I couldn’t put it down and didn’t want it to end. Absolutely, do NOT let this one get away!”—P.N. Elrod, author of The Vampire Files.
The Undead
> Rachel Caine
To Cat. I love you.
Thanks to John Steakley, for the “introduction”.
It didn’t scare me off.
Thanks especially to P.N. Elrod, a gracious friend and gleeful partner in crime. Long may we scandalize.
And Mark Elrod, who’ll be here real soon.
Thanks, of course, to Holly Hitch and Rachel Scarbrough, patient and painstaking readers: I owe you guys.
Big time. As usual.
Thanks to these guys: The Greater Dallas Writers
Association, two real nice editors (Jennifer Sawyer and Alice Alfonsi), and Barbara Bennett in Contracts.
(Yes, Barbara, it’s you.)
And last, but hardly least, the gang at M&M.
Without whom this book would not have been, even vaguely, possible.
Chapter One
The Living
It was my eighth wedding anniversary, and I was late as hell for dinner. That wasn’t really surprising, since I could count on one hand how often I’d been on time for dinner, but I was eager to see my wife and perform some intimate apologies. I held the mail in my teeth while I juggled the wine in one hand and my keys in the other; I finally got the front door open, and kicked it shut behind me.
I dropped the mail out of my mouth and realized that the house was still dark. Damn.
“Maggie?” Echoes answered me. I sighed and lugged everything into the kitchen, which Luisa had left spotless as always. Some people, my in-laws among them, thought having a maid was a “yuppie extravagance.” I looked on it as a sanitary necessity: the way Maggie and I kept house, we’d probably have been the first private household shut down by the health department. I stuck the wine in the refrigerator and tossed the mail across the room toward the table. Half of it even made it.
While I was reaching up for a glass, the security alarm went off. I swore and ran for it; we’d only put the damned thing in three days ago, and I was definitely security-challenged, couldn’t seem to remember to punch in the code to disable it when I came in. Not only that, I couldn’t remember the damned code word to placate the alarm company. By the time I managed, I knew the cops were on the way. Well, it was a good excuse to call the station, anyway.
“False alarm,” I announced to the sergeant. He grunted as if he’d already known that. Word of my reliability with technical things had obviously spread. “Is my wife logged in, by any chance?”
“Yeah, Doc, she’s here. Hang on, I’ll get her—”
Click, buzz, a breathless and harried contralto hello. I closed my eyes and pictured her. It worried me when it was hard to do.
“Mike? Oh, goddammit, I’m sorry. Nick! Nick, I’ve got to—Nick!” A brief, fierce exchange on the other end of the phone, incompletely muffled. “No, I don’t want to haul in Angelo tonight. You take care of it! Nicky, it’s my anniversary, for God’s sake, have a heart—”
“Maggie, if you can’t make it, we can go out this weekend” I put in helpfully, if not honestly. She was silent for a moment, listening to her partner’s low rumble in the background.
“What? No, Mike, I’m on my way now. Really. Jeez, give it a rest, Nick, will you? I’ve got to go!” Maggie was really getting pissed. Her voice always got lower when she got mad. Right now she sounded like Katherine Hepburn’s meaner sister. “Angelo will wait until tomorrow. What’s he going to do, skip town? The little creep hasn’t got any money except what he cons out of us. Michael?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m on my way, hon. You go ahead and get ready, and it won’t take me thirty minutes after I get there, okay?”
I looked at my watch, raised my eyebrows, and contemplated the virtues of being fashionably late.
“I’m on my way to the shower now,” I hesitated for just a second. “Maggie? Are you sure you can get away? We really can do this later.”
“Yes, I’m sure!” She sighed loudly in my ear, which wasn’t nearly as sensuous as it should have been. “Hey! Dvorak! I’ve already got three homicides on my desk, give me a break, will you? Thus isn’t even my file!”
When I winced, it was both for the unfortunate Dvorak and for my ringing ear. I said something suitably loving that couldn’t possibly have been heard over the uproar on the other end of the line, hung up while she was still shouting, stared at the phone blankly, and then wandered off into the bedroom. I’d readied a state of exhaustion that in most people is accompanied by uncontrollable drooling and twitching; I had to make a recovery before my notoriously hyperactive wife got home.
Midway through my shower (I take very long showers, as Maggie constantly complains), the shower door slid back and a long slender hand held out a tall glass of wine to me.
“Peace?” my wife asked, eyebrows arched and elegantly questioning. I took the glass and tossed the wine back without savoring it—it was that or watch it swirl down the drain along with the soap—and then grabbed her hand and pulled her into the spray. She gasped as the hot water hit her, plastering her blouse and skirt hard against her skin, but she didn’t look especially surprised—or displeased.
“Hi, Doc,” she said; her voice matched her smile, warm and welcoming. She put her arms around my neck. The kiss was long and warm and apologetic on both our parts, and I slid my hands up over her hips to the wet satin of her shirt; The buttons were tricky, but I eased them open and found the skin below. It tasted like rain.
“Happy anniversary” I murmured.
“What about the show, Romeo? I thought you were hot to see this thing.” Maggie’s smile reached her eyes, and the effect was luminous and beguiling. I shrugged and kissed her again. At length.
“Show? What show?” Now, as to the hot—Maggie opened her mouth to remind me, then changed her mind and finished opening the buttons on her blouse.
“How was your day?” she asked, which was kind of a silly question to be asking while arching her back like that. The water turned the tan nylon fabric of her bra into a transparent and very interesting display of smooth rounded flesh. I helped her peel the wet satin sleeves off her arms, then turned her gently around and began easing the zipper down on her skirt.
“Fine” I answered blandly. “How was yours?”
The zipper caught halfway, to my exasperation, but I wasn’t about to quit. With the application of a little force, it came free and slid smoothly down. I was distracted from the fascinating process of pulling the skirt down by Maggie’s hands, which slid up my legs and pulled me tight against her.
“Oh, it was all right. The usual, you know,” she said, and made a slow, torturous circle of her hips that made my heart—and organs coming into contact with those beautiful buttocks—receive a disproportionate share of blood pressure. “Kind of boring, actually. Nicky got all excited about busting Angelo, but—hell. Not much of a challenge, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” I replied. I had not the vaguest idea what I was replying to. Instead of pulling her skirt down, I reached for the hem and pulled it up. Ah, that was better. Maggie had the delicious habit of wearing absolutely nothing under her pantyhose, and today was no different; the silky feel of her hose against my wet skin was only bettered by the erotic sight of what was in the nylons.
“And how was your day?” Maggie purred. I slid my hands around her hips and down into the hollow between her legs. Her head fell back against my shoulder, and I felt her shiver convulsively. She was trying to keep her breathing steady, but she was breaking out into soft panting noises.
Funny, so was I …
“You already asked me that,” I whispered. She twisted around enough to brush her wet warm lips against mine.
“So?” she asked. Her hands, so clever, found what they were looking for. It was easy enough to find, considering the circumstances. “You want brilliant conversation at a time like this?”
“Hell, no—”
“Shh,” she interrupted, and stiffened against me. I lifted my head from her shoulder and listened.
Sure enough, the sharp annoying whine of a beeper filtered in.
“Oh, shit,” she snapped, and twisted to look at me. Her dark blue eyes were wide and more than a little wicked. “We can pretend we can’t hear it.”
“Hah,” I told her sourly. “Yours or mine?”
“It’s a B-flat,” she said after a moment o
“G-sharp. Yes, I remember.” I had the tonal accuracy of a deaf donkey, but Maggie’s life before becoming a cop included two years of graduate-level music study and an artist’s certificate in performance. “Great. Listen, hold this thought, okay? Five minutes, I promise.”
“Sure,” she said, unconvinced. I slid the shower door aside and grabbed a towel on the way to the bedroom where I’d dropped the damned beeper.
The LCD read off a number I knew all too well. I squished over to the bedroom phone and dialed, mopping at my hair with one hand and trying not to drip too much into the mouthpiece. There were five rings before somebody picked up— again, something I was more than familiar with.
“City Square Hospital.” If it hadn’t been for the telltale Virginia drawl, I wouldn’t have known Katy’s voice. She was usually slow and friendly—but not tonight.
“Hi, Irish, whatcha got for me?”
“About time you got your ass on the phone, buddy. Dr. Voorhees wanted to talk to you as the attending on the Julio Ramos thing. Hang on, he’s right here—no, Carl, it’s Mike Bowman—”
As soon as she said the magic word—Voorhees—I yanked the receiver an extra two inches from my ear. As usual, I underestimated; when Carl took the phone he was still loud enough to rattle my teeth. He really didn’t yell, everyone assured me, it was just that he had such a strangely pitched voice—but you couldn’t prove it by the speaker in the ear-piece. It jittered like water on a hot plate.
“MIKEY!” he roared. There was a flutter of noise at the other end, probably Katy Shaughnessy trying to tone him down. Whatever it was, his voice went from a sonic boom down to a nearly normal bullhorn level. “Mikey, I hope I didn’t interrupt anything—”
“Yeah, well, it’s my anniversary, so make it fast. I’ve got—ah—dinner on the stove.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the dish,” Carl said solemnly. “Tasty, very tasty. I wouldn’t let some old fart like me get in the way if I were you—”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Ah, yes.” Carl cleared his throat. I could just see him, a great brown-haired bear of a man who looked more like a lumberjack than a physician. He was probably the best doctor I’d ever known, in spite of his notoriously simple social graces. “It’s about Julio Ramos. I thought you’d want to know he ended up back in here tonight.”
“What? I discharged the kid yesterday.” I had a bad feeling growing in the pit of my stomach, a sickness that had the density of lead. Carl’s voice had gotten softer, more apologetic, and that wasn’t like him. “Cops bring him in?”
“Yeah. Look, Mikey, I know you liked the kid, so I’ll just be blunt and brutal: he’s dead. We lost his girlfriend before the wagon pulled in, but we thought Julio might pull through-then all kinds of shit started going wrong. I worked on him in OR for an hour; I didn’t want you to think I didn’t go goal-to-goal on this one.” Carl paused, and I could feel the wheels turning on the other end. “You got him on stab wounds originally, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s in the chart.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, never mind the drips. The eager length of my erection was already dwindling. “He told the cops he was stabbed in a gang fight.”
“That wasn’t what he told you.”
“No.” My free hand grabbed hold of the smooth flowered surface of the Laura Ashley bedspread under me and made a fist. I needed an anchor. “He told me his father stabbed him in a fight over the girlfriend. Julio wanted to marry her. Dad apparently had a problem with interracial dating.”
“Goddamn.” Carl’s expletive was soft and contemplative. “You know what happened, then. Julio and the girl were shotgunned in his car. Looks like they had everything they owned packed in there.”
“Did the cops pick the bastard up?”
“Yep. He’s in jail, where I hope to God he’ll rot, but your wife can tell you the chances of that. Anyway, the bodies will be transferred to County tomorrow for the autopsies—as if having a pound of buckshot in the bloodstream isn’t a valid cause of death.”
“Jesus, I fucked this up,” I whispered, and rubbed at my aching eyes. “I told the cops what he said, but Julio wouldn’t back me up —I should have tried harder, Carl. I should have made sure his bastard father got picked up, and this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You aren’t a goddamn psychic, Mikey, and you aren’t the police. Lighten up.” Carl was in a rare bitter mood, but he sighed and forced some cheer into his voice. “Anyhow, I thought you ought to know rather than hear it from some flat-foot out to take a statement—or worse, some bloodsucking journalist.”
“Yeah, the vampires will be out in force. Thanks, Carl. Hey —the bodies are in the morgue?”
“Yep, I checked them in with Adam about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Okay. Thanks for calling.” I hung up and sat there for a long while, watching drops of water run off the smooth plastic of the handset. The room smelled of Maggie’s sweet perfume and orange potpourri.
Julio Ramos had been seventeen years old. His girlfriend—well, she hadn’t looked more than sixteen. God only knew how young she really was.
“Fuck, I hate this,” I whispered. It came up directly out of the black weight under my heart, bypassing my brain. The words surprised me, and so did the anger coating them.
“Mike?” Maggie asked. I looked up to find her standing there in the bath doorway, wrapped in a big towel. The shower had stopped. I’d been too wrapped up in my thoughts to even notice.
“Sorry. I was—thinking.” My voice got lost. I didn’t try to find it. I just stared at her, at the damp glittering blonde hair and big blue eyes and china-smooth curve of her body, and I thought about making the wrong decisions. Somewhere, eight years ago, I’d made the right one.
Oh, thank God. Thank God there were still things in the world that survived, like my love for her.
“Don’t think,” she advised me quietly. “What happened?”
I told her, flatly. She didn’t flinch. She rarely talked about work, but when it did come spilling out of her it was a thousand times worse than my little honor stories, and I knew she saw a hundred Julios a year.
“Nasty” Maggie sat down next to me on the bed and stared at her fingernails. “And you fed responsible.”
“I knew the son of a bitch was dangerous.”
“Nobody knew that better than the kid” she put in softly. Her voice was very steady, a cop’s voice. Cops and doctors, models of professional detachment. “You want I should take a look at it, make sure everything gets done by the book?”
“I didn’t mean for you to punch the dock, Maggie.” It was a halfhearted apology, at best, and she smiled at it. At me.
“Bullshit, but thanks.” Maggie looked up at me, and her face was gentle and earnest. “Hey, I mean it, Mikey. I’ll trade for the case. What’s the kid’s name?”
“Julio Ramos.” I swallowed hard. The chief of staff would be appalled, I thought. Dr. Bowman, you’re taking this personally, back off and take a good look at yourself. I could almost see his walnut-withered little face pucker up in disapproval; there was only one sin deadlier than not caring about your patients, and that was caring about your patients. I pulled in a deep breath. “Only if you can. Understand?”
“Yeah. You let go of it, huh? We both need to punch the dock now”
I forced a smile and tackled her backward onto the Laura Ashley bedspread. She raised her eyebrows comically high, but she didn’t fight me. Didn’t, apparently, feel inclined to fight.
“I’m damned sorry, sweetheart,” I whispered against her hair. It smelled dean and a little fruity from the shampoo. She put her arms around me and ran her fingernails lightly down my spine.
Oooohhhhh … very nice.
“No apologies, Doctor. I’m off duty—unless you’d care to have an intimate little interrogation session—just the two of us?”
“Nah,” I pretended to think while I pulled the towel open around her body. “Let’s play doctor.”
“I get to be the doctor.”
“Says who?” My voice was muffled by the smooth weight of her breasts. She laughed, a deep, throaty laugh, and pulled me back up for a long, long kiss. I’d almost forgotten how very good it was to kiss her.
