But all that shit came swimming back up to the surface as Shop Dude came toward me, confident and cocky. He was about to get himself a piece of southern tail from the pathetic homeless waif who’d wandered into his shop late on a Sunday afternoon. He knew he was in control. Maybe he’d threaten to call the police if I fought back, accuse me of theft or prostitution. He looked like a fairly respectable man, not at all sleazy or smarmy. Cops would believe his side of it, no doubt.
“C’mon, man, where’s the fucking back door?” I said, then ducked into the office as I saw Trench Coat walk past the shop. Shit. Maybe I was reading the whole situation with Shop Dude wrong. Anything was possible, right?
“What’s your hurry?” he asked, stepping into the office. He closed the door behind him, eyes traveling over me with a combination of distaste and nastiness in them.
Nope. Wasn’t reading the situation wrong one little bit. Damn it. I backed away out of pure instinct, stopped when I came up against the desk then lifted my chin.
“Seriously?” I loaded my voice with exasperation, though it sounded high and shaky to my ears. “Is this where I have to give you a BJ to get out of here?”
“For starters,” he replied, then reached behind him and locked the office door, a move that I knew damn well was meant to intimidate me.
I pushed the hood back from my face and bared my teeth. I had a gun, but a gunshot would bring the Saberton guys running. “You do this often?” I asked. “You see girls in trouble and figure you can get some action?”
He shrugged as he unbuckled his belt, eyes remaining on me in a way that made my skin want to crawl off and take a hot shower. “All I see right now is you,” he said, unzipping.
I looked down at the semi-hard cock that flopped out of his pants. “I’m gonna take that as a yes,” I said, then returned my attention to his face. “No way is this your first time.”
“Suck my dick, you little whore,” he sneered, “or I call the cops and tell them I caught you shoplifting.”
Even though I’d known he was going to say that, it still robbed me of my breath for an instant. My pulse raced as old fear yammered in the back of my head, trying to tell me I was weak and small and couldn’t possibly fight back against this guy. Old insecurities joined in, adding that I wasn’t worth fighting for, that it would be easier to let it happen and try and put it behind me later.
I heard a low growl and realized it was coming from my own throat. Fuck the fear and fuck the insecurities. I was worth fighting for. Every woman was worth fighting for. Didn’t matter if they were trash or addicts or rich or popular. Didn’t matter if they dressed like a homeless waif, or in tight skirts and heels, or in jeans and flannel. No one deserved to feel helpless and worthless the way this goddamn asshole wanted me to feel and, I had no doubt, made other girls feel.
“If you’re going to call the cops to report a crime,” I said, flexing my hands, “it should be for something more interesting than theft.”
A flicker of hesitation passed over his face, but he recovered and let out a chuckle before giving his stupid cock a couple of strokes. “You think I’m scared of a little whore barely half my size—”
The rest of his sentence died in a gurgling cry of pain as I punched him as hard as I could in his pretty nose.
He staggered back against the door, hands automatically going to his face and the gush of blood. I fell back into a stance and without a broken hand, which meant that my success with Carol Ann at the bar hadn’t been a fluke. I guess all those drills on the punching bag paid off!
This guy wasn’t a weenie like Carol Ann, though. It only took him a couple of seconds to recover, anger burning through the pain. He pushed off the door to grab me, one hand reaching out like a claw.
Time didn’t slow down or any crap like that. I didn’t have a cloud bubble above my head with my sensei telling me what to do. But I still grabbed that extended wrist with one hand, seized his shoulder with the other, yanked his balance onto one foot, and then executed the prettiest damn osoto gari any martial artist had ever seen.
Okay, it wasn’t actually all that pretty, since the office was cramped, and Shop Dude had no idea how to fall properly—shame on him. But I did manage to sweep his leg—to my unending shock—and sent him crashing to the floor. And if I happened to lose my balance and land on him with my elbow in his solar plexus, well, shame on me.
His breath whooshed out, and he turned some pretty shades of purple. I replaced the elbow with my knee and grabbed his throat as I knelt on top of him, then reached my other hand down to grab hold of his balls. A part of me wished I could bring myself to bite his damn cock off, but, eeew.
“I’VE HAD A REALLY SHITTY DAY,” I yelled, my face inches from his. “And then you come along, and you try to make it worse? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He made a strangled sound, and I loosened the grip on his throat a bit—just enough to keep him from turning blue.
I silently counted to ten in order to regain some calm. Or at least the Angel-version of calm. “Let’s try this again,” I said, keeping my voice nice and even and friendly-like. Well, maybe not all that friendly, since I had my fingers dug into the sides of his neck, and the grip on his balls . . . well, that wasn’t friendly at all. “Listen close, asshole. I want to be damn sure you understand what I’m about to tell you.”
His eyes met mine, and for the first time I saw doubt and, yes, fear. Hunger coiled hot and tight in my gut, and I inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring at the scent of his brain beneath the fear. I wasn’t hungry enough to be out of control, but that didn’t mean I was unaware of the Food beneath my hand.
“I know all about monsters,” I purred, face close to his. Sweat broke out on his upper lip, and he made a quick attempt to throw me off, but I simply tightened my grip on his throat until he gasped and coughed. “Shh . . . We’re talking here. You’re being rude.” I relaxed my hand enough for him to suck in a breath. “You get off on being a monster. How many girls have you done this to?” His eyes darted around the room, and I shook my head. “Nevermind. Doesn’t matter. You won’t tell me the truth anyway.”
He saw it in my eyes, saw what a real monster looked like. The fear wafted off him like bad cologne. I could kill him, eat his brain. On the surface it sounded like a great idea. The guy was a piece of shit, and society would be better off without him.
But the reality was a lot stickier—literally, in some ways. Killing him would draw all sorts of attention, and—so far at least—I wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. I’d killed two men in my life. One was William Rook a.k.a. Walter McKinney, whose skull I’d smashed after he shot me a bunch of times. I didn’t feel any guilt about him whatsoever. He was a despicable and horrible person who’d killed plenty of people who hadn’t deserved it one bit.
The other one . . . Every now and then, that one kept me up at night. He’d been a Saberton man sent to retrieve Naomi—back when she was still Heather—after she broke her brother’s nose and ran. During a firefight out on a deserted highway he shot me as I came at him. In response, I took a baseball bat to his head. In the heat of that moment, he’d done what he had to do, and so had I. But I couldn’t console myself with the idea that he was a terrible human being, so it was okay to kill him. None of this shit was black and white, and everything had consequences.
I released the dude’s throat and balls, then stood. He rolled to one side and tried to cradle his nads and his nose at the same time. “You broke my nose,” he whined. “Jesus Christ. My nose.”
“I let you off easy,” I said sharply, then stepped past him, unlocked the office door, and peered cautiously out. No sign of any Saberton guys hanging around outside the shop. I eased to the front and peeked around the globes. Edwards and Trench Coat were nowhere in sight, and I didn’t see anyone else who could remotely be a security type in disguise. I decided to be cautiously optimistic that no one had seen me.
/> Shop dude was still curled on the floor when I returned. “What are you going to do?” he asked, voice muffled by the hand he held to his bleeding nose.
I gave him a disgusted look. It pissed me off that I couldn’t do anything to this guy except leave him with a broken nose, but all the other options would draw a bunch of unwanted attention to me. “I’m going to leave, you fucking prick.”
Anger and fear danced across his face. His eyes flicked from me to the door, as if unable to believe it could be that simple.
I wanted to make it as unsimple as possible, but I only had a few options at the moment. I prodded him in the lower ribs with the toe of my shoe. Hard. “Gimme your wallet,” I ordered.
His jaw tightened, but he pulled his wallet from his back pocket and slapped it onto the floor in front of him. I crouched and checked out the contents. Looked like over four hundred in cash, and an absolutely ridiculous number of credit cards. I yanked his ID out and peered at it. “You’re a piece of shit, Jerome Womack.” I wanted to leave him with some sort of threat about how I’d deal with him later, but at this point I needed to get the fuck out of there even more. In a perfect world I’d be able to take care of all my other shit, then return here and exact glorious vengeance for every woman this shitstain had abused or taken advantage of. But this wasn’t a perfect world. I knew that from hard experience.
Straightening, I jammed the wallet into the pocket of my jacket then grabbed a rubber band off the desk. “Have fun cancelling all your cards, asshole.”
With that I grabbed the black wool coat off the rack and tugged it on, slapped the fedora onto my head, and left.
Chapter 27
As soon as I was a couple of blocks from Greene Street I removed the cash and chucked the wallet and its credit cards into a trash can. The fedora I stuffed under my shirt, then I raked my hair back with my fingers and tied it back with the rubberband. Finally, I buttoned the coat up—which reached to my ankles—stuck my fedora-padded tummy out, and pretended to be pregnant. A glance in a shop window had me fairly satisfied with the result. I sure as hell didn’t look like a homeless waif anymore. Or like Angel Crawford, for that matter, which was also fine.
Yet my mind whirled with worry and confusion as I made my way to the subway station. How the hell did Saberton know about the meet with Brian? I knew it was possible to listen in on cell phone conversations, but supposedly the phones Naomi bought were the kind that couldn’t be spied on. Plus, Saberton would have to know where either Brian or I was at to do so, and if they knew that, then they could’ve simply grabbed us instead of listening to a stupid call.
The train for the return uptown was crowded, and I gave a distracted no-thank-you shake of my head to an older gentleman who tried to give me his seat. By the time I remembered I was supposedly pregnant, he’d sat back down, and it was too late. Probably for the best since I’d have felt a bit guilty taking a seat from someone I’d normally give one to.
Instead I gripped the pole and continued to fret about Saberton showing up at the meet. Someone tipped them off. It was the only possible answer, and I hated it. A miserable dread clung to me as the train continued on its way. I sure as hell hadn’t told anyone besides the Krewe about the meet, but that meant it had to have been one of the others. Had Kyle’s impassioned story, explaining his hatred of Saberton, been an elaborate pile of bullshit? I tried to consider the possibility that his capture had been fake, but why would he have gone so far to make sure the rest of us escaped—and with Andrew Saber? If Saberton’s plan was to allow us to escape so that we would then lead them to Dr. Nikas, why not simply, oh, I dunno, let us fucking escape instead of chasing us into the sewer?
Or maybe it was Naomi/Heather/Julia? My misery deepened at the thought, but the truth was that she had the deepest ties to Saberton. Maybe her whole defection had been a long con to get Pietro and Dr. Nikas. But why tip off Saberton about the meet if the goal was to get to Dr. Nikas? Naomi wasn’t stupid. It would make more sense for her to wait until we all joined up with Dr. Nikas and Brian and then let Saberton know where we were. And the same argument applied to Philip. He was at the bottom of the suspect list, but I had to consider the possibility that he’d been subverted during the time he was undercover with Saberton.
Wrapped up in my thoughts and worries and stress, it wasn’t until I saw signs for “168th Street” that I realized I’d totally missed my stop. I scrambled off the train with far more speed than a pregnant me should’ve had, then peered around in confusion until a woman took pity on me and showed me how to get on the train going the other direction.
By the time I emerged from the subway at Lincoln Center, I still hadn’t come up with a brilliant explanation for how Saberton knew about the meet with Brian. Nothing made sense. I stopped at a little grocery and bought snacks, sandwiches, ibuprofen, bottled water, and vitamin C with Jerome Womack’s money, then took the slightly rumpled fedora out from under my shirt and stuffed it into the bag before heading to the sewer hatch. Yet as I climbed down the ladder my stupid, neurotic, and paranoid brain tried to insist that the tunnel would be empty and the others gone, either because Naomi-or-Philip was the insider and had thrown Philip-or-Naomi to the Saberton wolves as soon as I left, OR because Naomi and Philip simultaneously decided that I had no clue what I was doing, was obviously dead weight and would get them all killed, and it would be best for them to cut and run while they had the chance.
Thankfully, my stupid, neurotic, and paranoid brain was quite wrong about all of this. Naomi was in the same spot, eyes closed and face drawn, apparently dozing. Philip sat against the wall a few feet away, and his unfocused expression told me the MegaPlague had attacked again. Andrew was the only perky one. Well, his eyes were, at least, as they glared at me above the gag shoved into his mouth. The rest of him was bound in a secure hogtie.
“Naomi? Philip? I have stuff to eat and drink.” I set the bag down between Naomi and Philip. Naomi muttered something and sighed without waking, but Philip opened his eyes.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
My throat tightened. “He wasn’t there. I’ll explain in a minute.”
His forehead creased in concern, but he gave me a slight nod. “When you can,” he said, with understanding in his voice even though he had no way of knowing all the shit that had happened.
How the hell can either of them be the insider? They were my friends. If one of them had tipped off Saberton, it would mean that friendship was bullshit. I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle that. Both of them were too damn special to me.
Still unsettled, I let Philip take care of getting the stuff out of the bag while I shifted over to Andrew and pulled the gag from his mouth. “Sorry,” I said as I undid the hogtie. “Do you need something to drink?”
“Sorry? Really?” He struggled to a sitting position, mouth twisted in contempt. “Somehow I doubt that.”
All possible sympathy for him evaporated in a flash. After the monumentally shittastic day I’d had so far, that one pissy remark sliced right through the last remaining frayed thread of my self-control. “Listen to me, Andy-boy,” I hissed. “I’m not like you and your people. I don’t do shit like this without provocation. So don’t you get all high and mighty and morally superior with me, whining about how I’m not sorry enough.” I poked him in the chest with my index finger. “Your people kidnapped my dad and then me, and put me through all kinds of fucked up hell in Charish’s lab.” My voice rose as the pent up anger and fear and frustration came spewing forth. “Your people ran a bunch of experiments on innocent civilians. Your people do horrible shit to zombies. And your people kidnapped Pietro Ivanov and three of his men, murdered Chris Peterson, tried to kill Brian Archer, and now have Kyle.” I was shouting now, right in his face. “So you can take your goddamn doubt and shove it up your fucking ass!”
“You’re lucky we don’t expose you,” he snarled. “There’d be bounties on
you monsters in a heartbeat.”
“At least your shit would be out in the open then as well,” I shot back. “You’re lucky we don’t expose you. And you’ve got a lot of nerve calling us monsters.” Fury trembled through me. “Hey, I have an idea. Maybe I’ll show you what it’s like to be a monster. Maybe I’ll turn you, make you one of us! Let’s see how you feel when you’re the one trying to scrape out survival when everyone is trying to fuck your world up!”
He went white as a sheet and recoiled as if I really was a slavering monster. “You wouldn’t,” he gasped, eyes darting back and forth in a desperate search for escape.
“Wouldn’t I?” The cloying scent of his fear wound around me. I let out a nasty laugh, caught up in the glorious thrill of being in control of this prick, this slimeball who was responsible for so much bad shit. Deep down I knew I couldn’t lay it all on him, but I was cocked to the full pissed-off position, and he’d made the mistake of pulling my trigger. “You know damn well I’m capable of it,” I growled. “Call me a monster? You’re the monster! Only fair to make you one for real!” I grabbed his shoulder, and he let out a panicked cry and fought to twist away. “Whaddya say?” I shouted, distantly aware that someone else was yelling my name. I tightened my grip and gave him a rough shake. “It’ll only hurt a lot!”
Eyes wide in panic, Andrew struggled against the cuffs, feet scrabbling as he tried to get away from me.
“Angel! Stop it!” It was Naomi yelling at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her struggle upright.