InsistentHunger (9 page)

“Disgusting. That’s me.” Brady turned his back, his shoulder
hunched and his body radiating misery over a chicken…a fucking chicken. Paige
loved chickens and she still butchered and ate them.

“Actually, disgusting is my basement. You’re just emo.”

That forced a pained laugh out of him. “I think I’m entitled
since I woke up dead.”

Paige crossed her arms, sick of the roller coaster of
emotions she’d been on for the last few hours. Confused, terrified, angry,
frustrated, terrified again. She hadn’t felt this turned around for years and
she hadn’t liked the feeling then either. She’d come back here to talk about
what she’d learned, not cry over a chicken. Not a fucking chicken.

She might cry over Brady, over the unfairness of this whole
situation. She might cry over the murder victims the captain thought were
linked to Brady’s death, women who had died from rapes so brutal their bodies
couldn’t handle it. She’d even cry for the majority of their rape victims who
did survive. There was a lot of shit she wanted to cry over, but a chicken did
not make the list.

“It’s a chicken! You’re emotionally shredding yourself over
a chicken, Ross.”

He turned on her, his bloodshot eyes and pale amber eyes
flashing with anger. “I couldn’t control myself!”

Paige took a deep breath and looked at the mess. “Brady, no
one can control themselves if they get hungry enough.”

“Really?” His voice dripped with disbelief. “They’d do
this?”

“Yeah, they would,” Paige said firmly. “There was that team
in the Andes that crashed and had to eat the dead. People aren’t rational when
they’re hungry, and if you’re hungry, you’re welcome to my freezer or my
chickens. That’s what food is for—eating.” Paige walked over to the steps and
sat down. She had passed her limit for weird three exits back and she wanted
this whole conversation over. Of course, if it were over, they’d have to talk
about what Jim had said and that led to even more weirdness.

“But I’m not natural. I’m not human. I’m dead.” Brady
sounded so weary that Paige studied him, a whole new worry pulling at her.

“Don’t complain too much,” she said. “My first partner did
the old-fashioned kind of dead. It was a lot less fun.”

“What? Really? You lost a partner?” The unhappiness that had
been weighing him down dropped away from Brady as he focused on her instead of
his own problems. “I didn’t know that.”

Paige shrugged. “I don’t talk about it all that much. A
suspect’s bullet went in his gut, hit a hip bone and ricocheted through a
couple of internal organs.”

“And he died?”

“Not immediately.” Paige shook her head. “The bullet he put
in his own brain eight months later pretty much did the trick though.”
Sometimes Paige thought she’d done something very evil in a past life to
deserve all the violence in her life. She doubted her nice Lutheran minister
would appreciate that thought, but then there wasn’t much about this whole
situation that Reverend Ward would appreciate.

“Shit.”

“Exactly. So all this crap about being evil or wanting to
die—it ends right now. We’re partners and we’ll figure this out together.”

Brady ducked his head and gave a short laugh. “I thought for
sure that when you saw this, you’d throw me out or stake me.”

“For killing a chicken? Come on. I’ve been a cop for fifteen
years, plus I grew up on a farm, and you thought a bit of blood…and gore…and
feathers stuck to my cinderblock would send me over the edge?” Paige looked
over. “Okay, the feathers come close. You are cleaning that shit up.”

Brady gave a desperate laugh. “I guess I underestimated
you.”

“Hell yes. Just…let’s leave the neighborhood dogs alone,
okay?”

Brady inched closer and his body language looked more like
the Brady Ross she knew—a man who still had a touch of the lanky awkwardness of
youth in his movements. “I can do that. I feel more in control now.”

Paige thought about that. “After eating the chicken or now
that you know I won’t toss you out on your ass for eating it?”

Brad took a deep breath and looked over at the mess he’d
made. “The first, I guess.”

“Did you even consider thawing the steaks I had in the
freezer?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I looked at them, but I just couldn’t
bring myself to eat them. They looked—” He stopped, and from the way he pressed
his lips together in a tight line, Paige guessed that there was something he
didn’t want to tell her. The first priority was to make sure he wasn’t starving
and he could control himself. Torturing him into confessing whatever thoughts
he had in his head could wait until later.

“Okay, that suggests you need more than blood or meat.”

“So, I need to feed off something’s life?” he asked
uncertainly. Paige watched him and waited for him to realize that’s exactly
what she meant. It took a few seconds, but he broke eye contact, his gaze
skittering away. “This is where you’re supposed to flee, screaming,” he said
softly.

“I don’t flee. And I only scream when I see those really big
spiders. Hate those.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “God, you should be
disgusted by me and you’re making jokes.”

“Brady.” She stopped, caught between wanting to just order
him to pull his shit together like he was still her trainee and wanting to
comfort him as the victim of a horrific crime. He was both. However, she wasn’t
sure how to handle that.

He walked over to where an overly ornate mirror her father
had given her was propped up against the wall. Crouching down, he reached out
and brushed his fingers over the dusty surface so that four clear streaks
reflected his otherwise dust-obscured image. So much for vampires not having
reflections. Brady’s distorted face appeared in the mirror and he traced a
finger along it. “I don’t know what I am. God, Paige, you should kick me out
and do an exorcism or something.”

Paige walked over and crouched down next to him, looking in
the splotchy mirror with silver dots that didn’t reflect anymore.

“That’s still Brady Ross,” she said confidently. Jim had told
her about vampires in general, but he hadn’t said one thing that was true of
Brady. She reached out and brushed her fingers over the image in the mirror.
“Those are his brown eyes and his brown hair and his ridiculous dimple.
Seriously. You’re a cop, you aren’t supposed to be cute,” she teased.

“Stop.”

“What? You’re going to press sexual harassment charges?” she
asked playfully, but after a moment of awkward silence, she thought that maybe
she’d missed the mark. “That was a joke. Not a good one, obviously, but I don’t
have a lot of experience with t comforting the undead,” she offered.

“I don’t want your comfort.”

“I’m just saying that it’s still you.” She let her hand fall
away from the mirror.

However, Brady was shaking his head. Standing up, he backed away
from the mirror. “No. No, it isn’t. That isn’t me. I can’t stand to look in the
mirror because that isn’t me.” Whirling away, he stared at the block wall.

“What are you talking about?”

“That.” Brady gestured toward the mirror without looking at
it. “That isn’t me. That’s something weak. It’s like….” He sucked in a loud
breath.

“Like what?” Paige asked when the silence had gone on too
long

“I don’t know!” he shouted. Immediately, he fell silent and
looked around with horror. Paige waited as he seemed to gather his thoughts.
“Like parts of me are gone. Do you know that disgusted feeling that you get
when you see someone who’s had some body part hacked off, when you look at a
body that’s been cut into pieces?”

Paige knew the feeling too well.

“That’s what I feel when I look in the mirror, like there’s
something gone, something fundamentally wrong with me,” Brady whispered.

“Brady.”

“Don’t go sympathetic on me now, Silver. Not now.” Brady
looked up at the ceiling. Paige had seen enough people do that to know that he
was trying to avoid crying. One sympathetic word and he was going to lose
control of those tears and Paige knew her partner well enough to know he didn’t
want that to happen.

“Sympathetic? Are you kidding?” she asked in the most casual
tone she could manage. “I was going to point out that you’re an idiot.”

He whirled around to glare at her. “Excuse me?”

“A first-class idiot. I mean, you’re adorable as hell and
now you have the eternal life thing going for you and you’re complaining that
it isn’t enough.”

“I’m dead.”

“You’re cute dead,” Paige pointed out. “I’ve seen plenty of
DBs, and trust me, very few are as cute as you.”

Brady’s mouth fell open. “This isn’t some storybook. I’m not
going to start sparkling or something because you think I’m cute.”

“Hell, one sparkle out of you and I’ll stake you myself,”
she warned. “I’m just pointing out that you’re looking at the negative here.
You think I’m looking at all the love stories and expecting you to be that
vamp, but you’re expecting yourself to be the leading role in some horror film.
Give it up, Brady. Yeah, this sucks. Yeah, things are different. How different
is still up to you.” Paige stood up and crossed her arms as she gave him a good
glare—the kind she’d give him when he’d been a trainee and he’d said something
painfully stupid.

“Shit, you shouldn’t be this calm.”

“I’ll schedule a panic attack for next week,” Paige said.
“Right now, we have things to figure out. So, if you’ve gotten over your emo
moment, we have to move forward. So, you don’t feel like this body is you?”
Paige studied him, remembering what Jim had said about the vampire really being
a demon that took over the body. She had trouble reconciling that with the
vampire standing in front of her because she was definitely looking at Brady
Ross.

Brady rubbed his upper arms like a kid trying to get warm.
“It’s like that’s not me. I look in the mirror and it makes me sick.”

“I met someone today—a hunter who killed a vampire right in
front of me,” Paige confessed. Brady’s gaze snapped to her and his eyes seemed
for a moment to glow with fury. The red certainly got brighter.

“You saw…? You were close enough to see the vampire?”

“Yep,” Paige said, ignoring the unvarnished fury in Brady’s
face. “The hunter…he knew what he was doing and he gave me a few tips.”

Brady leaned back against the wall and slowly slid down the
cinderblock until he was sitting on the floor. “A hunter. You met a hunter.”
Brady sounded shell-shocked. “What did he tell you?”

Paige considered lying. It’d be easier on Brady, but it
wouldn’t be fair to him. “He said that the ceremony is designed so that a
person’s soul moves out and the demon moves in and takes over the body.”

Brady nodded like that made sense to him.

“It’s crap,” Paige said firmly before Brady could go getting
some crazy idea in his head.

“What?”

“Brady, you came to me. You remembered our friendship. You
asked me for help. If you weren’t in there, if this was just the body of Brady
Ross walking around with some stranger in it, none of that would have happened.
Jim is full of shit.”

“Brady Ross wouldn’t have ripped a chicken apart because the
sound of its heart beating made his mouth water with need. Brady Ross wouldn’t
have bitten you,” Brady snapped, with an angry gesture toward her arm.

Paige moved to a spot right in front of Brady and knelt
down. “A demon would have killed me. A demon would have fed when he was hungry,
and you were starving this morning, weren’t you? You bit because you needed the
blood, but you stopped because you are Brady Ross.” She reached out and rested
her hand against his knee. His whole body shivered. “Alex thinks you like me,”
Paige said. Even as she said it, she had no idea why she would throw out that
random bit of nothing.

He looked at her and the red in his face intensified. He
swallowed so many times that she knew the answer before he said it. “I kind of
did.” He shrugged and looked the other way.

“Do you now?” Paige asked. She wasn’t exactly a hot
commodity. She’d been fine in a girl-next-door way when she’d been younger, but
now she had the tiny lines around her eyes and creases that led from her nose
to the outside corners of her mouth. Some women fought the signs of age, but
those wrinkles and the first wisps of gray in her brown hair were marks of
honor—proof that she had survived the years. Not everyone she knew had.

Her mother had died younger than Paige was now and her
father—well, even if he was technically alive, life at the bottom of a bottle
wasn’t really surviving. It was just hard to believe that Brady had a crush on
her.

He shrugged again. “Yeah,” he admitted softly.

“Not exactly demonic,” she pointed out. “Not exactly sane,
but not demonic.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Brady said as he looked up.
“You’re a strong woman—a beautiful one.”

“Hell yes, I’m strong. I’m also average and more than a
decade older than you.”

“Which is why I never mentioned anything. That and the fact
that I was afraid you’d kick my ass, file harassment paperwork and dump my
bruised body on my parents’ lawn, not necessarily in that order.”

“I might have,” Paige said with a small laugh. “I would have
taken you to a psychiatrist first.”

Brady rolled his eyes. Shifting around, Paige sat on the
ground next to him. “This guy Jim wore garlic, so garlic works,” Paige said.
She’d dumped it in her trunk rather than risk making Brady sick with it.
“However, the vampire came out into the sun, so the whole immolation myth is
clearly more myth than reality.”

“We already knew that one,” Brady pointed out.

“Jim says there are different kinds of vampires, and from
the sounds of it, even he knows that he doesn’t know as much about his enemy as
he should.”

Brady looked over at her. “Like what?”

Paige thought back on the conversation she’d had with Jim.
“He doesn’t know if the demon can be driven out after it’s gotten in there. He
doesn’t know if the soul can stay in there with the demon or if a demon can
take over a person who hasn’t been weakened by a ceremony or an injury. He said
some old hunters talk about demons jumping into people without the ceremony
they put you through.”