He touched the lump again. His fingers came away gummy with drying blood. His hair stuck up, blood-stiffened. He looked like shit, and he wasn’t going to be able to tolerate the shield lenses on his inflamed eyes for a while. He’d have to rely on shield specs alone, which was too much light exposure. The light that came in the sides would keep the AVP combat program revved to screaming, wild-sex-or-pitched battle levels. Just to keep things interesting.
The other option was to call his people, have them bring Caro in for him. Safer for everyone. Except that he would be likely to burst a blood vessel, if he were waiting at home like an asshole.
Caro would just have to deal with the problematic thing that he actually was. He staggered around, looking in vain for the Porsche keys until he remembered with a fresh surge of fury that Caro had taken them.
He dug out the keys for his Mercedes SUV. Stopped for a moment to plug the flash drive into his laptop to copy the video file for future study. It went back into his pocket, and he sped out the door.
Caro had awakened the beast. He’d bent over backwards to be a perfect gentleman for her, and it hadn’t worked out. He couldn’t keep the mask up any longer. He had nothing left to hide behind. And this naked, jacked up, deformed thing that he was, both more and less than human . . . here it was. In your face, girl. Good luck with it.
At this hour of the night, the road was his, which was a good thing at this speed. He had the reflexes of a race car driver, and the high speed mellowed him out a little.
Until he spotted his Porsche parked outside her building. In a fucking tow zone, no less.
The front door of her shitty tenement building was still unlocked. Weirdos skulked in the foyer, but they scuttled into the shadows when they saw him. He must look like something straight out of the crypt right now.
He leaped up the six flights, four steps at a time. Most of the wall lamps in the corridor were burned out, and the remaining one flickered fitfully, choked by a drift of dead bugs.
Freddie was stretched in front of his door again, snoring. Noah loped past him, alarm bells buzzing in his mind. The shadows on her door were the wrong depth. The door was tilted at a different angle with respect to the other doors in the corridor.
There was no way that a young woman alone in a run-down tenement would leave her door hanging open at night. For any reason on earth.
Panic threatened to drop-kick him off the AVP deep end. Stay cool. Breathe. You need your whole brain functioning for this. Wrongness thrummed as he approached the door, like the throb of an infrasound weapon. He wished he’d brought a gun, but he’d been too busy wallowing in agony to think of it.
Her door squeaked against the warped floor as he opened it. No one there.
Without light to activate it, the visual magic of the room was gone, and he saw it as it truly was. Cramped and shabby, without Caro’s transforming influence.
The duffel was there, and a battered hard-case wheelie, pawed through, contents flung upon the floor. A hot plate, a toothbrush, a snarl of cotton underwear, bags of instant oatmeal. A spoon. The keys to his Porsche lay on the floor. A single sneaker. The one she had been wearing.
He grabbed his Porsche keys, staring at that grayish, shabby kick, once white, very worn. From what he’d seen, in this place that had no drawers or closets, it was the only pair of shoes she had, and it had no mate. So Caro had gone out on a cold, rainy night, leaving everything she owned, with her door hanging open. Wearing one shoe.
The carved wolf he’d given her lay on the floor in two pieces. The tail and one of the hind legs had snapped off. He picked the pieces up and shoved them into his pocket.
For the sake of certainty, he peeled up the floor mat, and checked where she’d stowed the envelope he had given her. Still there. The entire wad of cash, intact.
He pulled up the program on his phone to monitor her tile, hoping desperately that she still had her coat on. A map appeared. An icon moved north on the Interstate, going too fast to be a bus, and she hadn’t had time to catch one. She’d still be moving through Seattle toward the station, if a bus were her plan. Not heading north into wintry mountains with no bags. And only one shoe.
He exploded out the door, then on impulse, skidded to a halt next to Freddie. He nudged the guy, none too gently. “Freddie! Wake up!”
“Huh?” Startled, Freddie peered up. He shrank back, eyes wide with alarm when he saw Noah. “What? I didn’t do nothing, man!”
Noah grabbed the guy’s sweatshirt under his chin and hauled him a foot or so off the ground. He leaned into the man’s rank body odor. “Who took Caro, Freddie?”
Freddie’s eyes rolled frantically. “Caro? Who’s Caro?”
“The chick in six-oh-eight. You slime her every time she walks by. Someone came and took her away. Did you see them?”
Freddie blinked, disoriented. “What? Are you talking about, like, her dealers?”
“Dealers? What dealers?” He shook the guy the way a terrier shook a rat.
“Uh . . . some guys,” Freddie sounded bewildered. “I saw her leave with them.”