Infected: Shift (48 page)

That was the absolute least of a cycle. It didn’t happen a lot. It was rare, but it did occasionally occur. Obviously, it did to this poor bastard. “One of your friends attacked you?”

“I thought I could leave without getting noticed, but I shoulda stayed put. It was Brandon, I think, but I don’t blame him for what happened. Shit happens.”

Roan wondered where the EMTs were, but thought he heard noises below them. They probably were having trouble finding the door. Roan was kneeling beside Ben and felt blood soaking into the knees of his pants even as it ran down his hand. The funny thing was there was so much blood in a person; you really had no idea how much until you had one bleeding to death right in front of you.

Ben stared at him, and Roan could almost see him falling somewhere deep inside his eyes. He wanted to sleep, and Roan knew he couldn’t let him, had to keep him conscious. He could hear the EMTs pounding up the stairs, but they were taking much longer than Roan had. But to be fair, he wasn’t lugging equipment, and also he wasn’t quite Human. “You should be our leader,” Ben said.

Roan gave him a quizzical look. “Excuse me?”

“We need a leader. Most groups have them, but we don’t. And you’d be perfect.”

“I doubt it.”

“You would. Most normals are afraid of us because of what we could give ’em. They’re afraid of you ’cause of what you can do to them.” His gaze was steady and strong—he honestly believed what he was saying. But that could have been the blood loss. “You’re dangerous because you remind them they’re just prey.”

Finally the EMTs reached the landing, huffing slightly. “He’s infected,” Roan told them. Both of them, a far-too-handsome man and a woman built like a fireplug, nodded as they put their kits down. Roan waited until EMT Handsome was ready, and then quickly removed his hand from Ben’s neck wound, where just a bit more blood spilled out before Gorgeous George put his gloved paramedic hand over it. He had a thick gauze pad too, but it would probably last only a few seconds before it was soaked with blood and utterly useless.

Roan stood up, and Ben’s hazel eyes followed him even as the female paramedic shined a penlight into his eyes and asked him basic response questions. Roan felt bad for the kid, but there was nothing he could do for him now, and he still had friends upstairs. Which reminded him to ask, “How many?”

“Four,” Ben replied, still ignoring the EMTs.

Roan nodded and skirted them, heading for the fifth floor. “You’ve got blood on you,” Paramedic Sexy said. Bizarrely, he had a British accent, which he didn’t expect. But why not? Paramedics could be British. “It’ll draw the cats right to you.”

“Good.” He wanted them to come to him, to leave the Humans alone and respond to their alpha. It might be the only way to save them before the normals killed them all.

Roan
entered the fifth floor angry, and he wasn’t completely sure why. Well, maybe the helpless feeling of someone bleeding to death, of someone dying pointlessly for an honestly stupid cause. Insurance companies were bastards. They could only profit if people died, and people hated infecteds, so why would anyone else care if infecteds died? They wouldn’t. People hated insurance companies too, but the treatment of infecteds wouldn’t sway them one way or another. He wished it would.

On the floor, he could smell panic, fear, blood, and cat, tainting the otherwise cold and business-bland hallway that still had faint traces of coffee, toner, and ozone. He let out a challenging roar, channeling his anger into the scream, but it didn’t work—it made him angrier.

There was a responding roar down the hall, and he heard claws clicking on the floor, running for him. He ran for it, wondering if this was Brandon, if this was the cat that had accidentally killed his own friend. He couldn’t hate it if it was; it wasn’t his fault. But that was logic, and he was too angry to be logical. He ran toward the noise, still roaring, feeling the pain in his jaws, in his gums, tasting blood in his mouth and hearing bones crack in his cheeks. He thought briefly of dropping to all fours, of trying to summon the change so he could sink his teeth into its fur and rip the flesh off its bones, but he somehow managed to hold that back.

It was a lion charging down the hall toward him, and he roared another challenge at it, continuing to run toward it. Something made the animal hesitate, stop so suddenly its claws skidded on the shiny, slick floor, and Roan almost didn’t stop, but then he was dimly aware that if he didn’t, the lion would run and he’d have to chase the damn thing.

They exchanged growls and snarls, the lion a squat one with streaks of mud brown through its ruffled mane. Roan felt the muscles boiling in his arms, the tendons stretching, the bones dislocating and cracking in his hands and feet. One side of the hall had offices and conference rooms with opaque glass inserts in them, and he was aware of Human-sized shadows in his peripheral vision, people quarantined in their offices trying to see what was happening. If he saw nothing but shapes through the glass, that was all they saw too.

The lion was confused, probably because he smelled like different kinds of blood, and Roan found himself distracted by his own internal fight. The last time he'd partially changed, it hadn’t hurt at all, but he hadn’t been fighting it then. (He hadn’t realized it’d been happening, but that was beside the point.) Fighting it was nearly as painful as simply transforming.

The lion sensed the hesitation in him and lunged, which was fine with him. He caught its muzzle in one hand, forcibly shutting its jaws, and while its claws tore into his arms and chest, he punched it straight between the eyes, hard enough that he heard something crack in his hand. Or maybe its head—maybe both. But he was in too much pain to feel any more pain; the circuits were overloaded and couldn’t accept any more signals.

He knocked the lion out. It sagged heavily in his grip, and he was the only one holding it up. So he dropped it, and he knew it wasn’t dead. He just hoped he hadn’t done any serious damage. But part of him didn’t give a fuck.

He heard himself growling but couldn’t seem to stop. Needles of red-hot pain seemed to have settled in his eye sockets, and thin tendrils of it were worming their way through his jaw, down his throat, settling deep into his spine. He was aware that if he didn’t fight it, it might not hurt so much.

He didn’t trust himself to take the stairs, so he went to the elevator and then had to take a few seconds to remember how to work it, how to use his hands beyond hitting or grabbing. He wondered how many IQ points he dropped when the beast took over, or if he could even remember how to talk. He was trying hard to see if he could, but his output was currently limited to growls and snarls.

The elevator had mirrored surfaces in it, and he saw himself, but he didn’t quite believe what he saw. It was him, kind of, but his eyes were all wrong, the pupils bloated and more oval than round, and his mouth… well, no. He wasn’t seeing things clearly, and that must have been it, because his lower jaw looked like it belonged to another creature entirely, certainly not a Human. Blood caked his mouth, covered his chin, and hid some of his teeth, of which there were too many, and some were pointing at broken angles. He attempted to close his mouth and couldn’t, his teeth clicking awkwardly and his jaw feeling dislocated. He’d cut his tongue—on his teeth?—and it hurt. His vision was kind of blurry up close, so he was convinced he wasn’t seeing correctly—he just couldn’t be seeing correctly—but the shock of it felt like cold water thrown into his troubled mind. He didn’t know what he’d seen in the reflection of the elevator door, but it looked like a freak, some kind of lame rejected demon from
Buffy The Vampire
Slayer
.

The glimpse of… well, whatever it was he thought he saw, threw him enough that he hadn’t expected the lift to stop and the doors to open, but as soon as he smelled blood and cat his mind snapped back into focus.

There were two cats on this floor, a cougar and a leopard, and he shouted a roar that tore up what was left of his throat. He heard an incongruous soft, pattering sound, and figured out it was his own blood dripping from his chin. The taste was so constant he’d stopped noticing it about two minutes ago.

There was a responding roar, and the leopard tore down the corridor to see what new cat was in its territory. Roan was happy to meet it halfway down the hall, where it stopped upon seeing him but still kept growling. They exchanged snarls until he heard the click of claws down a side hall, and Roan found that he was surrounded, with the leopard in front of him and the cougar behind him. He should have cared, but he still didn’t. He had opposable thumbs and they didn’t, which meant he’d always win, as long as he didn’t get stupid or change completely.

He stood with his back to the wall and crouched down, so he was closer to eye level with the cats, hoping he gave off the appropriately wounded air. He wanted them to close in, thinking he was wounded prey. He briefly wondered why they hadn’t attacked each other, but one was male and one was female. They were different species, sure, but the leopard female was bigger than the cougar male, giving the male more impetus not to get overly territorial. (Only tigers would attack their opposite gender members as a matter of course, but that was generally because tigers were the most territorial of all cats.)

The cats were falling for it, coming in warily, snarling and sniffing at him, when he heard an office door open.

Ah fuck. Why did people have to mess up perfectly good plans?

What the person intended he had no idea. Did they actually think Roan was in trouble? Did they think he was with SWAT? The leopard was closest and lunged for the person in the open door (all Roan saw was a dark suit—just the scent alone told him it was a man, but other than that he wouldn’t have known). Roan was forced to jump for it, screaming (roaring), “Shut the fucking door!” He didn’t know if what he intended to say even came out as words; he heard the roar, slightly modulated, but little else. He caught the leopard in midair, centimeters from the man, and the door slammed shut as he and the squirming leopard rolled down the hall, the leopard’s claws raking his chest and throat as he fought the urge to sink his teeth into its exposed neck and end it all now.

The cougar took this opportunity to lunge, but even though he was only peripherally aware of it coming in, a tawny blur, he somehow kicked it out of midair and sent it flying down the hall as he sunk his teeth into what was essentially the leopard’s cheek. Blood that wasn’t his for a change flooded his mouth, and the leopard squalled and squirmed away from him, gaining its feet but turning to face him as Roan got on all fours and spit out a mouthful of blood, growling at the leopard as it snarled at him, baring uneven teeth.

He’d hurt the cougar, so it came after him again like the stupid beast it was, and as it jumped he dropped and rolled over onto his back, so as the cougar came down on him he grabbed it and slammed it headfirst into the wall. It went limp almost instantaneously, and he tossed it aside before rolling back up to his feet.

The leopard was looking at him warily, growling low, but the fact that it hadn’t tried to attack him while he was dealing with the cougar told him she wasn’t as dumb as her male counterpart. “I don’t wanna kill you,” he snarled. “Stay down.”

The leopard was still growling at him, but it lay down on the floor, taking a submissive position. He pulled out the tranquilizer gun and shot it, although it took him a minute to remember how to use it.

He was stalking back to the elevator, aware he was bleeding more and still not caring, when Gordo’s voice came out of nowhere and startled him. “SWAT incoming.”

Okay, yes, SWAT were bad. He needed to get to the cats before them, or they’d simply kill them on sight. He had three of them, now he just needed to find the fourth.

In the elevator, he remembered how to talk and said, “Got it.”

“Whoa,” Gordo replied. “Was that you, McKichan, or did a demon just come on the radio? What’s up with your voice?”