Aliyah whimpered.
“Wilson, you need to be looked at. That’s an order,” Cat said.
“Jonas, take him to the nurses station,” Ms. Mueller told the man who had already been attempting to help him. “Dr. Lewis should be there. She can take a look.”
“We’ll go with him,” Cat said.
Each attendant slid an arm under Wilson’s shoulders, as if he were an injured football player being helped off the field. Cat held open the door while Jonas spoke into a radiophone. By the time they got to the nurses station, a doctor in a white coat was waiting for them.
“Wow, I would never have expected this from Aliyah,” the doctor said. “She hasn’t moved a muscle since she was brought in.” She applied a square of gauze to the bloody tracks, tossing it into a bin marked BIOHAZARD. Cat sidled over and plucked it out. Mazursky quietly picked up a paper drinking cup and Cat dropped the gauze into it. Then he slipped the cup into his coat.
“That was before the bubble machine was plugged in,” Mazursky said dryly. Cat couldn’t help her quick grin.
“I got through to her.” Wilson puffed out his chest. “Someone finally broke down the barrier.”
“Better you than me. You may have scars.” The doctor appraised his wounds. “I’m thinking a few sutures.”
“Once you’re fixed up, you should take the rest of the day off,” Cat said.
“I’m fine,” Wilson insisted, but he looked ashen. “The plumber is coming today. A white sage smudge…”
“I can drive you home,” Cat said. “Dr. Mazursky can drive my car to the precinct and wait for me there.” She just hoped she hadn’t left anything incriminating in the vehicle.
“To the precinct.” Wilson tilted his head. “I assumed that you worked here, Dr. Mazursky.”
“No, I’m a consultant,” was all Mazursky said, and Cat didn’t elaborate either. It was clear from Wilson’s bunched shoulders that he knew he was being kept out of the loop.
As the doctor numbed and stitched up Wilson’s face, Cat glanced at her phone to see a text from J.T.: FOOTAGE DANGEROUS. She was dying to know exactly what that meant, but J.T. had prudently not attached it. She replied to say she’d come right over after dropping off Wilson.
The gray-haired matron appeared and informed the doctor that Aliyah was sleeping now. They had administered a powerful sedative.
“What did you say to her?” the matron asked Wilson.
“I provided a safe place for her to re-experience her trauma, in hopes of exorcising it.” He frowned as the doctor tied off one of the sutures. “She said ‘Mommy.’ Right, Detective Chandler?”
As was usually the case with beast-related situations, Catherine chose to be very selective about her reply. “I think that’s right,” she hedged.
“It was definitely what she said.”
“Her mother’s been dead for most of her life,” Cat said. Or has she? Could it be that Lucky Number Seven, the first murder to feature the new beast DNA, had nothing to do with serums or government scientists and everything to do with revenge for Aliyah’s abuse at the hands of her aunt?
The three fell silent. The doctor applied bandages to the stitched areas, then handed Wilson two small white pills and a paper cup filled with water.
“Painkillers,” she said. “Take them.”
“So if the mother is dead,” Wilson murmured as he took the medication and chased it with his water, “maybe this triggered a memory of her mother. How did her mother die?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Cat said, easing up on him a little. “One I think is worth finding out. For all we know, Indira Patel’s death is related.” She glanced at Mazursky, who was chewing the inside of his cheek. He looked as uneasy as she felt.
“But you can find it out tomorrow,” she added. “I want you to go home.”
“Meanwhile, Aliyah is in here, suffering,” Wilson said.
“She’s unconscious,” the matron said flatly.
“The spirit still suffers,” he replied. “It still suffers.”
After Dr. Lewis wrote Wilson a prescription for antibiotics, Mazursky, Cat and Wilson walked back through the labyrinth of buzzing doors and gates. At the guard gate they returned their badges; then they got back their guns and walked to the parking lot. Wilson pulled out his phone.
“Hi, Mom. Listen, I accidentally cut myself. Do you have aloe vera growing in the apartment? That’s great.” He was pressing his fingertips on his bandages and wincing. Cat felt truly bad for him. He had succeeded in getting through to Aliyah when no one else had been able to. She wanted to chastise him for doing it without her but she could also understand, and countenance it. They were in the middle of a crime wave, and he had been relegated to financial forensics and waiting for ATM footage. It showed initiative that he had gone to visit Aliyah. Truly, he should have checked in with her and Tess, too, but both of them had been too busy to pay much attention to him.
Mazursky said, “Do you have any evidence bags on you? I’ll take the gauze square into our lab.”
“You’re going to be at my precinct,” she began as she handed him a bag, but he shook his head.
“I know you managed to process samples at your lab but we have a lab that’s fully protected. I’ll retain possession.” He put the square in the bag and sealed it shut.
“Dr. Forbes can examine it.”
“Not at the university,” he countered. “That’s equally risky.” He looked at her. “Short of pulling a gun on me, there’s no way you’re going to take this from me. A modicum of trust, remember?”
Her temper flared but she kept her cool. After all, she had the victim with his clawed face. And she could always go back to the facility. As long as Aliyah was a patient there, she would have access to her DNA.
“Trust goes both ways,” she said. “We pool information.”
“Yes. We do.”
Then Mazursky parted ways with them and Wilson gave Cat verbal directions to his apartment. The snow was falling sideways now, obscuring visibility. Cat watched the bars on her phone decrease one by one.
She didn’t know what she had expected, but Wilson lived in a charming old brownstone with a bay window. The house was filled with plants and stained glass. A large statue of the Virgin Mary stood in an alcove that had been painted sky blue. That surprised her; she’d thought he and his mother were into Buddhism.
Cat helped him to a gray velvet Victorian settee. On a curved wooden coffee table there was a handwritten note paper-clipped with a plumber’s business card. He picked it up and nodded to himself. With his cheeks bandaged and his back rounded, elbows resting on his knees, he looked less like a smug California kale-juicer with a fake tan and more like a stunned person in pain who was still trying to understand what had happened to him. In other words, traumatized.
“Can I get you something?” Cat asked, removing her coat and hat. “You wanted some aloe vera?”
He smiled, the cocky Californian returned. “I think I’ll start with aloe vera. I have some other herbal remedies but I think I’ll wait until you leave to break them out. You already think I’m a crackpot.”
“No,” she began, then laughed and shrugged as he rose from the couch. He was unsteady. The painkillers, she guessed.
His gait was measured as he led the way into the kitchen, which was a jungle of potted herbs crowded into another bay window and hanging in clusters from the kitchen ceiling the way some people hung pots and pans. He seemed to regain some of his bravado as he picked up a large ceramic pot of aloe vera—she recognized it—and showed it to her.
“This is the universal healer,” he said. “It helps with sunburns, cuts, scars…”
The blood drained from his face. He looked absolutely white. His eyes widened to the size of dinner plates and he half-fell, half-leaned against the kitchen counter.
“What is it?” she asked him. He was looking past her; she drew her gun and whirled around—
—as the ceramic pot came crashing dow
n on her head. Stunned, it took her an extra half-second to regain her footing and launch a back kick, and by then he had smashed the pot into the back of her head a second time. She went sprawling on the ground, her gun skittering away. As she tried to scramble toward it, his shoe came down hard on her wrist and she cried out.
He said nothing as he grabbed handfuls of her hair and dragged her to a small wooden door. He threw it open; muzzily, she expected a broom closet. But it was a flight of stairs to his basement.
“Get away from me, stay away!” he cried. And then he flung her headfirst down the stairs. She went airborne into the darkness for a second that lasted a lifetime; then her chin impacted with wood and she was bumping down a staircase into pitch-black nothingness. She flailed for a railing; finding none, she tried to tuck in her chin and cover her head, but only succeeded in slamming her forehead into something hard. The searing, slicing sensation was only one pain among many. She thought she heard the door crash shut but in the cacophony she couldn’t be sure.
She kept sliding down the stairs and landed hard at the bottom onto bare concrete. Every part of her body crunched and crumpled, and then she was out.
* * *
“This is bad,” Tess said as J.T. replayed the grainy, black-and-white ATM footage for her. J.T. had summoned her to preside over the doctoring of the film so they could put it in Wilson’s email inbox without his ever seeing what they were seeing:
Julia Hogan, in a padded winter coat, boots, and a Cossack hat, was standing at the ATM machine. She looked left, right, then over her shoulder like a good New Yorker before she put in her card.
Her only mistake was in not looking up.
From above, a huge shadow fell over her. Then she looked up, screamed… and the blackness completely engulfed her. As it yanked her backwards out of frame, a shimmer of sparkles played over it.
“Rewind,” Tess said. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and jerked her forefinger at the screen. “What the hell? What is that?”
“I know, right?” Vincent said. “This is weird even for beast weird.”
J.T. opened his arms in a “ta-da” pose. “That, my friends, appears to be bioluminescence. Glowing organic material. The specialty of our friendly tenured FBI agent, David Mazursky.”
“So that’s a beast?” Tess said. She leaned forward and squinted at the screen. “It doesn’t look bestial, at least like we’re used to.”
“Not human,” Vincent said quietly. He went cold. He had always wondered if the people behind Muirfield had pushed the envelope past human-beast hybrids to manufacture creatures so foreign and terrifying that they could be said to be alien. The beast skeleton that was hidden in a large wooden chest in the gentlemen’s club was thousands of years old, and resembled nothing on this earth. That creature’s DNA had been injected into Vincent. What if the shadow organization had found other, even more violent or bizarre creatures and created hybrids from them?
“Hmm.” J.T. tapped the screen. “This is why. Whatever that matter is, it’s affecting the recorder and distorting the image. It could easily be human-shaped. We just can’t tell.”
“How do they do that?” Tess muttered. “I guess it’s like when they beam up on Star Trek.”
J.T.’s smile was so loving that it was a shame Tess couldn’t see it from her vantage point. It was obvious to Vincent that she was trying so hard to see life from J.T.’s perspective. Surely they must know that the love they shared transcended knowledge of TV shows. He and Cat had accepted their differences—and there was no one on the planet more different that Catherine Chandler and Vincent Keller.
J.T. reached up and took Tess’s hand. She leaned over him and kissed the top of his head.
Vincent wanted Cat here.
“So what you’re saying is that this creature contains bioluminescent cells that affect attempts to take pictures of it. Cell phones too?” Vincent asked.
“One would theorize yes, but of course, we can simply ask the lying bastard who’s been sent to keep tabs on it.”
“I agree. Mazursky’s got to be in on it.” Vincent continued to focus his predator senses on the recording. The hair stood on the back of his neck and his heartbeat picked up. “My fear response is kicking in.”
“From just looking at it?” J.T. swiveled around in his chair. “You okay, big guy?”
Abashed, Vincent took a couple of steps away from the monitor. “Not so much, J.T.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m moving into fight or flight.”
J.T. looked at Tess. “What about you?”
She shook her head. “I guess we aren’t affected because we’re not predisposed. But if all it takes is just looking at it… they could flash pictures on TV, or on smartphones…”
“Maybe they already are. What if they’re sending this beast to take out specific targets? Triggering it to kill would be like changing a channel on the remote.”
“It would be really good if Cat showed up.” J.T. eyed Vincent warily. “I thought she was just going to drop off Sky Wilson and then come over.”
“You mean, it would be good if she were here so she could calm me down,” Vincent said.
“In a word, yes.” J.T. pushed back from the desk and walked to the bar. He bent down and murmured, “Oh, right. Heather has it.”
Vincent frowned. “The tranq gun?”
“We should stock up. It’s not just you and me anymore. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to knock you out if you go beast.”
At the computer, Tess had put on a pair of sunglasses and was staring at the monitor, leaning forward, moving her head in a circle. She took them off and then clicked a picture of the screen with her smartphone.
“So look at this,” Tess said, walking up to Vincent with the smartphone in her hand. He did. Fear rattled through him like a cold wind. With a low growl, he looked away. Then she dialed a number and put the phone to her ear. “Yeah, hi, Cat, listen,” she began, then mouthed “voicemail” to the guys, “call me ASAP. I need to talk to you. A lot.”
Where was Catherine? Something was wrong. Vincent just knew it. His anxiety levels rose higher. He remembered the top-secret website of Major Howison’s that they had inadvertently opened. Mazursky had already told them that he had been working with Howison, but Vincent had gotten such an honorable vibe off him. The unending battle for the control of beasts and beast technology was like a series of Chinese puzzle boxes.
Back to looking at Howison’s home page. Had seeing it poisoned him somehow, programmed him? Could he trust himself to remain in control?
Tess dialed another number. “Wilson,” she explained, and waited. Vincent could hear the unanswered ringing, and then Wilson’s smooth-jazz invitation to leave a message.
“Call me immediately,” Tess barked. “And tell Detective Chandler to call me too. Also immediately.” She put her phone in her pocket.
“What’s Sky Wilson’s address?” Vincent asked. His tone sounded gravelly and inhuman, at least to his super-sensitive ears.
J.T. did some typing. He’d hacked into the NYPD databases and was pulling up Sky Wilson’s files. Tess took a nervous step toward him, as if she was afraid that there was classified data in the file that she didn’t want J.T. and Vincent to see. Vincent went on alert, but J.T. was unaware.
“Malibu, California,” J.T. read off. “His new address hasn’t been inputted yet.”
“Someone will pay for that,” Tess muttered. She gave Vincent a look. “But I will be the one who collects the payment, got it?”
“Yeah.” He put on his jacket and hat, and fished his gloves out of his pocket. “I’m going to look for her. Do you have any idea what part of town he lives in?”
“His mom does,” Tess declared. “She’s still at the Malibu address.”
J.T. pulled up the phone number for the Wilsons’ address in California, and Tess punched in the 310 area code. She shifted her weight on her hip and rolled her eyes. “Why do people have phones if they don’t use them? Yes, hell
o, Ms. Wilson,” she said in a polite tone of voice. “I’m Captain Vargas, Sky’s new chief. Sky was mildly injured on the job today and I want to send a uniform over to your place in the city to check on him. Unfortunately, your Malibu address is on his paperwork. Would you please call me back and give me the New York address?”
She hung up. “No one in law enforcement can know this is happening. I’ll be booted for sure.”
Vincent walked out the front door.
Blurring and then blurring again; raising his chin to sift through the layers of odors that were New York City—sewage, roasting chestnuts, expensive perfumes and car exhaust; tuning his hearing to ignore the clacka-clacka of the subway trains, the incessant honking of horns and the squeal of air brakes. The bustle and yelling; the sizzle of sausages and mini-explosions of popcorn emanating from food carts. Through it all, Vincent’s predatory beast-mind assembled Catherine’s scent. In one of the largest cities in the world, only one living creature carried that unique signature.
And he would find her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was freezing in the brownstone basement.
And pitch dark.
Cat smelled blood and all at once, terror crawled up her body like hungry, desperate rats. Digging in claws, ripping at her—
She shrieked, windmilled her arms, and kicked as hard as she could. A shape was looming over her, staring at her only inches away from her face, its mouth stretched into a maniacal grin bristling with pointed, blood-stained teeth. Pincers snapped together; she could hear them.
“Get away from me!” she screamed.
Only… she didn’t scream. Her throat was closed and sandpapery syllables roughened her lips. Her teeth ached. Her head rang. Her breath stuttered out of her chest in weak gasps. The fright mask was there. The monster was there. It was going to kill her.
She flopped onto her stomach and put every ounce of strength she had into crawling. It was coming after her, grabbing her ankles. Its knifepoint pincers were gouging the backs of her hands.