The Chosen

Then he was gone, heading out through the slider and disappearing into the night.

After a moment, Layla walked across and shifted the lock into place. Then she turned back around and started rifling through the cabinets, looking for cans of soup.

The first thing Trez did when he got back to the restaurant was go into iAm’s office and hit the mess on the desk. He didn’t have to work very hard to find what he was looking for. The female’s résumé was right on the top, and he checked out the header.

Did he dare?

That question was answered as he returned the piece of paper to the pile of bills and orders, and snuck out of the back part of Sal’s like a criminal. Dematerializing, he proceeded to a not-so-hot section of town, to a rooming house that made him want to scream. The damn thing was three stories high, a block long, and had at least half a dozen windows that were boarded up. Its paint job had been fresh white back in the 1970s, but had faded to piss yellow, and the couple coming out of its metal double doors looked like they could have been homeless with their dirty clothes and filthy hair.

Had he even gotten the address right?

Shit. Yes, he had.

She shouldn’t be here, in this nest of grubby humans. For godsakes, was she staying aboveground with just drapes between her and the sun during the day?

What was she thinking?

As Trez strode across the street, he worried it wasn’t a choice.

When he got to the entrance, he looked through the chicken-wire glass panels. It was hard to see clearly because the damn things hadn’t been cleaned in a decade or two, but on the far side, there appeared to be a “lobby” of sorts with lights out in the overhead fixtures, a carpet that could have counted as tile for all its nap, and a wall of mailboxes where half the little portals were broken and lolling like the tongues of dead animals.

It was the building equivalent of a colon … dank, windowless, with brown sludge staining the walls.

“You need in?”

A human male who smelled like old booze and cigarettes pushed his way past, opening the door with a swipe card and keeping on his merry way.

As Trez contemplated his own entry, he had some thought that it would be better for both him and Therese if he let this shit go. Let her go.

But he went inside anyway.

There were a couple of hardies in the far corner, nodding off like they had recently injected themselves, and their bloodshot eyes passed over him with the marked lack of enthusiasm characteristic of H addiction. No bliss anymore for them. You only got that in the beginning during the rose-colored part of your relationship with opiates.

The elevator was out of service, a half-assed caution tape tied in several places across its closed panels, a handwritten sign taped cockeyed with a Band-Aid to the wall. The sight of it made him think of the Otis in The Big Bang Theory—and he was willing to bet this place’s bad boy had been broken longer.

There was only one set of stairs and they were cramped and smelled like urine. And as he made his ascent to the third floor, the noises he heard along the way were not any more optimistic and lighthearted than the rest of the dump: yelling, coughing, loud music from bad speakers, thumps like someone was banging their head into the wall repeatedly.

Jesus Christ.

On the top floor, he looked left and right. It went without saying that there wasn’t a little plaque telling people which way for which apartments. Oh, yeah … of course. Right in front of him, at eye level, there was a bald stain on the cracked wall where one had been ripped off.

’Cuz you could repurpose something like that. For a dinner plate. Or a level to help cut your drugs on.

She stayed in 309, and it turned out to be down on the left.

Goddamn, he hated the number of her apartment. He didn’t like threes or nines in sequences. Four-oh-two was a good number. Eight-oh-four. Two-twenty-four.

He was a divisible-by-two guy. He didn’t like threes, fives, or nines.

Seven was okay, he thought as he came to stand at her door, but only because two together equaled fourteen.

Thirteen was the bane of his existence.

“You looking for that girl?”

Trez cranked around. Directly across the hall, a guy in a wife-beater and a shitload of tattoos was lounging in the doorway like he owned the place, a real King of the Douche Bags. He had a handlebar mustache, bags under his eyes like canvas sacks, and cologne courtesy of the crack he’d been smoking.

“You her pimp or something?” The human stretched his neck and then scratched over his jugular. “How much is she? She’s fresh—”

Trez closed the short distance between them, grabbed the guy by the face, and forced the piece of shit back into his den of self-destruction.

As Trez kicked the door shut behind the two of them, the John-who-wasn’t-gonna-get-none started flapping his arms like he was trying to take flight—and hello, roommate on the couch.

Trez used his free hand to pull out his gun and point it to the other guy across the room. “Shut the fuck up.”

The junkie over there just put his palms high and shrugged, like people being manhandled and Glocks getting popped were part of his daily life—and he was not about to get involved in anyone else’s shit.

Trez shoved the propositioner against the wall, keeping a palm lock on that face. “You don’t go near her. If you do, I’m going to take all your drugs and flush them down the toilet in front of you. And then I’m going to kidnap you and drop you off at county hospital downtown where they’re going to hold you against your will while the court decides what rehab to mandate you into. Do you hear me? You fuck with her and I’m going to inject your sorry ass into the system—and the next time you see any kind of a hit is ninety miserable fucking days from now.”

After all, you didn’t threaten someone like this with a gun. They were already dead, for fuck’s sake.

Nah, you tortured them with the thought of third-party-enforced sobriety.

And no, Trez didn’t feel an obligation to help either of these rats without tails. Killing yourself with chemicals was a God-given right of both species, and he was not interested in interfering in the course of somebody else’s addiction. He was, however, more than happy to use any weakness to his advantage.

He glanced over at Couch Man to make sure the sonofabitch was hearing this, too. “I have her apartment rigged. I know where she is every second of the day.” He smiled tightly to keep his fangs to himself. “You two or anyone around here get near her, I’m going to know.”

Then he refocused on the one he had a hold on, squeezing those features so hard the man’s dumb-ass mustache merged with his eyebrows, like a Muppet whose operator was having a hand spasm.

When Trez finally let go, the bastard’s face was all Halloween mask, swollen and misshapen, the ’stache off angle like a pair of glasses that had been broken.

Trez looked pointedly at the couch again.

“Yeah. Sure,” the guy over there said. “You got it. She no for no one.”

TWENTY-THREE

Sooner or later, when one stole to survive, one thieved from the wrong sort. And Xcor made that mistake in his twenty-sixth year, in a thicket of woods three hundred and sixty lochens from the cottage that first his nursemaid, and then, after some comings and goings, he himself had abandoned.

It was fate at work, he would later suppose.

What initially drew his attention, as he progressed through the night alone, was the scent of the beef stew. Indeed, he had been long used to searching out sustenance, sticking to shadows with such competence and constancy that he had begun to think of himself as one. It was best that way. Other eyes upon him never went well.

In truth, prior to his transition, he had had a hope that his defect would magically fix itself. That somehow, the change would repair the split in his upper lip, as if his gestation required that last spurt of growth before he was in his proper order. Alas, no. His mouth remained as it was, curled up. Ruined.

Ugly.

So aye, it was wisest to stay in the shadows, and as he currently took cover behind the stout trunk of an oak, he regarded the glow of a fire far off in the forest as a possible meal or source of supplies.

Around the crackling flames, he saw people—males—and they were carousing in the shifting orange light. And there were horses, tied a ways off.