Shadows Read online

Page 5

 

  But every second I’m alive is one more moment I still have a chance to do something. She watched as they sidestepped the unconscious girl—and never wavered but just kept coming, silent and implacable, that weird choke of hot turpentine and resin mixed with roadkill so strong it was as if that scent somehow yoked them together the way beads ranged on a strong cord.

  All right, she accepted that there was nowhere to go. Even if she bolted, beyond the circle the snow would be too deep. Could she surprise them again, the way she had Spider? Do something they wouldn’t expect? Yes, that might work, especially if she could get hold of a weapon . . . but what could she use? Come on, come on, think! She took another quick step back, pressing up against what remained of the pyramid as the Changed drew so close that Wolf could’ve reached out and taken her hand.

  But only if he put down Spider’s corn knife first.

  4

  Her blood iced . Hips braced against the ruined tumble of frozen flesh and bone, she tried not to flinch as Wolf ’s gaze dragged over her body. His nostrils suddenly flared as he inhaled, long and deep, pulling in her scent. A moment later the too-pink tip of his tongue eeled from his mouth to skim his lips in a slow, sensual glide.

  Oh God. Wolf was tasting her, savoring her scent the way a snake sampled the air. Her eyes flicked to the others. They were all standing there, mouths open, tongues writhing, drinking her in. A scream bubbled in her throat, and she felt her breath coming faster and faster. No, don’t. She muscled herself under control. This is what they want; they want you to panic; come on, don’t lose it, don’t lose it!

  Wolf edged closer. She could feel the hum of his anticipation; saw it in the set of his body, smelled his need on the air, read it in the way his gaze roved as if undressing her with his eyes. His was hunger and more: it was possession, deep and primal and sensual and awful in its power. He wants me, and he’ll have me, he’ll—

  And that was when something very, very strange happened. For just the briefest of moments, something so fleeting it was more an impression than an actual thought, an image swam into her brain—of her, stretched on the snow, clothes gone, and Wolf, crouching over her body, his tongue dragging over every inch of her skin—and she felt when his hands feathered down and between her—

  No! Gasping, she cringed away, both from the scene playing itself out in her mind and this boy. Get out of my head, get out of my head! In the next instant, her mind seemed to snap back with a shock as physical as a slap. Her awareness sharpened to a laserbright focus, and as she came back to herself, she felt her fingers clamped on icy bone.

  And then the skull cupped in her right palm moved. “Aahhhh!” Her shriek was wild, inarticulate, enraged. Wolf ’s arm was already coming up, steel flashing in the early light, but she had the skull now, was swinging with all she had left, thinking, Hit him, and when he drops the kni—

  Something slammed against her right temple. The blow was so vicious, so stunning, Alex’s mind blanked and stuttered the way a bad CD skips a track. She went down like a stone, the skull tumbling from her nerveless fingers. Through a swirl of pain, she saw Slash, the girl with the scar, standing over her, a cocked fist ready to strike again.

  Even if Alex could have fought back, Acne never gave her the chance. He dropped onto her legs. A moment later, Slash straddled her chest and ground her knees into Alex’s shoulders. A surge of white-hot pain flooded her chest, and Alex let out an agonized shout as Slash forced Alex’s wounded left arm to straighten, tacking Alex’s wrist to the snow with both hands.

  Wolf loomed. He made sure she saw the knife, too. But it was when he drew back and she saw where he stood and read the tilt and angle of his body that Alex finally understood what would happen next.

  He wasn’t going to kill her, not yet. Oh no. Too easy. Too quick. First, he would chop off her arm.

  God, no, no! Her heart boomed. Frantic, she heaved and surged, but it was a waste of energy. The others were too heavy. She was pinned, and this was how it was going to end: in the snow, arms and limbs hacked away, her body emptying her life in a hot red river that would melt through the snow until there was nothing more for her heart to pump. She’d done enough amputations with Kincaid to know that you had to clamp off those arteries fast before they could spring back into muscle, or else you might as well just cut the poor guy’s throat. But what if the Changed were so good at this that they knew which arteries to pinch? What if they kept her from dying fast and made her linger, carving her up, eating her alive, one juicy, quivering mouthful at a time? She might last a long, long time, because she didn’t think anyone could die from pain. Maybe, for them, watching her suffer was part of the fun.

  The corn knife flashed before her eyes. In her terror, the blade seemed a foot long and then ten feet and then a mile. Her vision was so keen that she picked out every nick, every scar where that razor-sharp edge had bitten into bone. The sewage stink of the Changed mushroomed and swelled—

  And then she smelled something else, just behind that roadkill reek: not turpentine or resin, but a misty swarm of shadows from the deepest woods on the coldest, darkest night.

  It was a scent she also knew, very well.

  No, it can’t be. This close, she could make out the boy’s eyes, dark and deep as pits behind that wolf-skin mask. He’s got the same eyes, the same scent. But that’s crazy, that’s—

  The knife hacked down with a whir.

  5

  The heavy steel blade buried itself in snow with a meaty, muffled boomph. A quick lightning jag of heat and fresh pain streaked across her chest and blazed into her jaw. Her vision flashed dead-white, then fractured, turning jagged as a single great talon of pain dug. Yet there was a clarity in her mind, like a brilliant pane of clear glass, and she realized that while the pain was very bad, it was not the bright agony she expected if Wolf had just hacked off her arm.

  Her eyes inched left.

  Her arm was still there. So was her hand. But Wolf held a scrap of something drippy and wet and very red and—

  Oh my God. Her breath, bottled in her chest, came in a sobbing rush. What Spider had begun, Wolf had finished. Horrified, she could only watch as Wolf inspected a flap of parka and skin and dying muscle.

  Her muscle. Her heart was banging in her ears. Her flesh.

  With a delicate, almost comical daintiness, Wolf tweezed the shredded, bloody parka as if removing a scrap of butcher paper from a freshly carved steak. Then, palming snow, he swiped the meat clean of gore and held it high, studying that slab of her flesh with a curious, strained intensity, smoothing the skin with his thumb. Looking for . . . what? She couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Satisfied, although with what she couldn’t guess, Wolf threw her a quick, speculative look, and she had the insane thought that in another time and place, he might even have winked as if to say, Watch this.

  And then he offered her flesh to Beretta.

  Her gorge bolted up her throat. She gagged as Beretta teased the meat with his tongue, lapping her blood the way a kid licks the melt of an ice-cream cone. There was that queer, ripping sound of wet cloth again, and Beretta’s jaws worked and he began to chew.

  This isn’t happening; this can’t be happening. Numb, she watched as they ate, sampling her and licking their lips like those guys on Top Chef trying to decide if maybe the sauce needed a tad more salt. She felt her center skidding again. Soon she’d tumble off the thinning ice of her sanity altogether. Or maybe she’d just snap, her mind breaking like a dry twig, and start screaming. They’d have to cut her throat just to shut her up.

  Now that they were so close, she also made out those weird, colored rags. They weren’t single pieces but a patchwork sewn together with crude, irregular stitches that reminded her of Frankenstein’s monster.

  And the rags were not cloth.

  They were leather.

  They were skin.

  Those colors weren’t just colors
either, but designs. A withered butterfly. A wrinkled coil of barbed wire. A tattered American flag. In the leather knotted around Wolf ’s throat, she made out a faded red heart and frank done in a fancy, black cursive swoop.

  Now she knew why Wolf had used snow to scrub blood from that flap of her skin. He was looking for a good tattoo. The Changed were wearing . . . people.

  Oh no no no no no oh God oh God oh God! A scream balled in her throat as Wolf took the last bit of her flesh and flipped back his cowl. So she saw his face. She got a very, very good look.

  No. Something shifted in a deep crevice of her brain. No. That’s not right. I’m wrong. I have to be.

  But she wasn’t. God help her, she wasn’t.

  6

  The eyes were identical.

  So were the nose and the high plains of his cheeks. The face was a carbon copy. So was his mouth. Those lips were the twins of those that had pressed hers, and with a heat that fired a liquid ache in her thighs. The hair was longer but just as black. Even that shadowy scent was the same.

  The only difference—and it was huge, because it was the margin between life and death—was a pale pink worm of a scar. The scar meandered from the angle of his left jaw, right below the ear, and then tracked across the hump of his Adam’s apple before its tail disappeared beneath the collar of his parka.

  Her parents had enjoyed talking shop at the dinner table. Having listened to her mother, who’d been an emergency room doctor, talk about cases and her cop father chime in with his own, first-responder stories, Alex knew how some people went about suicide and, especially, where to cut and how. Of course, a freak accident—say, a car crash—or a fight or even an operation might have produced the same scar, but she didn’t think so. His skin was otherwise unmarred, too, though she would later wonder about his wrists and arms. Some people also scarred very badly. Thickness didn’t necessarily translate to depth. But working by Kincaid’s side as she had these last few months meant she now knew her fair share of anatomy.

  To her eye, this cut had been wicked, a vicious slice long and deep enough to have slashed open the boy’s jugular and, maybe, his carotid. Maybe—probably—both. Cut the carotid and a strong, young heart can empty the body in a crimson jet in a matter of about sixty to ninety seconds. That he hadn’t bled out and had survived . . . well, his parents had probably seen that as a miracle and, maybe, some kind of sign.