by J L Aarne
The sound of her screams pierced Ezekiel’s ears like pins and he roared at her, the loud, blood-curdling mountain lion scream that no human throat could mimic. Shocked into silence, she shrank away from him as he jumped to the ground and loped toward them, but Ezekiel had little interest in her. She was terrified, but she smelled like infection and she was already dead. It was Davey he wanted.
He let Davey get up, scramble to his feet and run a few feet before he gave chase. Ezekiel pounced on him and took him to the ground with his claws deep in Davey’s back. Then he let him go again. He watched Davey run before he ran after him and knocked him down.
He was playing like domestic cats did with their food. There were several theories about why housecats teased their prey before finally killing it and Ezekiel had heard them all. Maybe it was because cats were possessed of a sense of fair play and gave their prey a chance to escape. Maybe it was because adrenaline tenderized the meat and made it taste better. Ezekiel didn’t know why cats did it, but he did it because it was fun.
Davey screamed and called for help. His pathetic cries got the woman going again and she started to sob and scream for someone to help them, please, oh God, Davey’s getting murdered. Ezekiel made an amused huffing sound and chased Davey down, swatted him hard across the back and knocked him down then ran after him as he tumbled to a stop.
The man opened his mouth to scream again for help or mercy and Ezekiel silenced him by ripping out his throat. Blood sprayed and he turned his head so he wouldn’t catch it in the eyes, but then the blood slowed to a thick, burble, flowed out to soak his clothes and stain the dry ground. Ezekiel’s whiskers drew forward, beads of blood caught on them, and he sniffed him, drew the thick metallic scent of his dying into his lungs and exhaled it on a purr.
“Oh, Jesus, oh fuck, someone help us!” the woman screamed. She crawled a little through the dirt, pushed herself up and moved toward them at a stumbling jog. She was weeping, her mascara cutting trails down her face, her blotchy skin reddened from crying.
Ezekiel hissed at her and she froze.
“Is he dead?” she asked in a rough whisper. “Oh, God, he’s dead, ain’t he? You killed him.”
Ezekiel sat crouched beside Davey’s cooling body and began licking blood off his fingers, chewing it out of the pads around his claws, still purring to himself. The woman didn’t scream anymore, which was good because she was diseased so he did not want to dirty himself killing her, but she cried and she was not quiet about it. Ezekiel groomed himself without hurry, unmoved by her tears. As far as he was concerned, he had done her a favor, though the woman was unlikely to see it that way even in time.
It made no difference to him. He hadn’t done it for her; he had done it for himself. The hunt and the kill had slaked his need. It hadn’t satisfied the hunger for what he really wanted, but it would make living with it easier for a little while. For the first time in a long time, he was content and he had Davey there to thank for that.
Chapter 36
Killing Davey held Ezekiel over until Valentine’s Day. It was enough to soothe the monster inside back to sleep for a time and he got some work done. He became more pleasant to be around again. He did not apologize to Jacob, but he moved back to their room and Jacob accepted that as the truce it was.
Then it began to wear on him again, like a nagging itch that could not be eased and only moved somewhere else when you scratched it.
He had not stopped thinking about killing Rainer, but for a little while had been able to look at it more rationally and decided that killing him would cause him more trouble rather than less. The FBI didn’t see Rainer Bryssengur as a suspect and he was not officially even a person of interest anymore, which meant that Ezekiel’s interest in him was not sanctioned and would come to light if he were to disappear or end up dead. And Rainer, unlike a lot of psychopaths, had friends and loved ones who would miss him and be all too happy to point at Agent Ezekiel Herod if something bad happened to him. His concern that Rainer might say something about him had also proved so far baseless.
During his lunch hour on Valentine’s Day, Ezekiel followed Rainer from the university parking lot to a coffee shop Rainer liked. Ezekiel had watched him there before many times. Often enough that he even knew how Rainer took his coffee—Grande espresso, extra shot of coffee, cream, very little sugar—and that if he ordered food, he got a croissant or a muffin and it would sit there being picked at while he read or graded papers. Then he would eat it before he left and throw the wrapper away with his coffee cup.
Ezekiel watched him from his car for a few minutes. When Rainer went to the restroom, he got out of his car, crossed the street and went inside.
The coffee shop was decorated for Valentine’s Day with paper doilies, red and pink hearts and crepe paper streamers on the light fixtures. Behind the glass at the counter they had Valentine’s Day themed sweets and pastries to sell; pink frosted red velvet cupcakes, heart shaped cookies with icing and ruby red sprinkles, gingerbread cookies shaped like cupids, novelty gourmet cakes screaming Happy Valentine’s Day! and giant dark chocolate brownies with thick frosting and heart shaped sprinkles. Ezekiel ordered a brownie and a large cup of coffee, black.
The boy behind the counter gave him a strange look about the coffee. “You don’t want anything in it? We’ve got a special flavor for the holiday. Hot cinnamon. Do you want—”
“No thanks,” Ezekiel said. Then because he expected the coffee to be too weak, he said, “A double shot.”
“Okay,” the boy said uncertainly, probably thinking that Ezekiel’s order sounded like something that would peel the enamel off his own teeth, but whatever the customer wanted. He made the coffee.
Rainer was still in the restroom when Ezekiel sat down at his table, but he had just taken a bite of his brownie when he came out. He saw Ezekiel immediately, their eyes locked and he cocked his head. Then he crossed the room and took his seat across from Ezekiel.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Ezekiel said.
Rainer smiled, a reluctant twist of his lips, and picked up his coffee to sip it. “Hello, Ezekiel.”
Ezekiel ate another piece of brownie and nudged the plate toward him, offering to share. Rainer glanced at it but didn’t eat any.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Working,” Ezekiel said. “You’re not the only nut job on the West Coast, you know.”
“Hmm, well, I thought you might be avoiding me,” Rainer said. He put his coffee down and picked up the red pen he had been using to grade one of his student papers with. He tapped it. “Which would be disappointing.”
“Oh, yeah? Miss me, did you?”
“It seems a bit cowardly.”
“You really don’t know when to fucking stop, do you?”
“I’ve been told that,” Rainer admitted. “It’s okay, I understand. You’re still trying to be good.”
Ezekiel fumed and ate more of his brownie, drank his coffee and wondered why he was doing this to himself. Why couldn’t he just walk away from this guy?
“Oh, happy Valentine’s Day, by the way,” Rainer said.
Ezekiel didn’t say anything for a minute. He pushed his brownie aside. It was rich and just too damn big. “I wouldn’t think it was something you celebrated,” he said. “Being what you are and all.”
Rainer shrugged and plucked a napkin from the holder on the table. They were pink in honor of the holiday. He began to write on it with his pen. “As it happens, I did miss you. Confession time just isn’t as fun anymore without you. I might even get a little nostalgic from time to time when the music changes and things get super serious on screen. Odd, really. As you said, considering what I am. Did you miss me?”
Instead of answering him, Ezekiel took another drink of his coffee and tried to see what he was doing with the napkin without being too obvious about it. “I have never understood this holiday,” he said.
Rainer smiled a little and glanced up at him. “I suppose it used to make a little
more sense than it does today in this digitally addicted age,” he said. “But some things have not been changed that much by the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and humanity’s addiction to phones that are smarter than they are.”
“Like what, love?” Ezekiel asked, amused to be having such a conversation with a psychopath.
Rainer shook his head, his eyes downcast on what he was doing. “Everything’s digital today. Money is numbers in an account somewhere, it’s not even supported by gold these days, it’s just figures. Sex is online with people you never see at a keyboard or people you never touch on a video cam. All of our conversations happen with text messages and instant messengers and chat rooms and emails. Our closest relationships develop and die inside the isolated bubbles of social media and we call it intimacy. Murder though, it’s still an analog process and so is dying.” He finished what he was writing, put the pen down and pushed the napkin across the table to Ezekiel, tapped it to draw his attention. “This is love.”
Ezekiel looked down at the pink napkin where Rainer had done a line drawing in red of a human heart a lot like the one he had seen on his office wall. Inside it was what looked like a chemical formula written in Rainer’s distinct half print, half script writing:
C8H11NO2 + C10H12N20 + C43H66N12O12S2
Ezekiel thought about it and he recognized the chemicals. “Dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin,” he said.
Rainer nodded. “A high school student could make it in a lab,” he said. “However, overdose on any one of them can cause schizophrenia, paranoia and good old insanity. That’s love. We might be better off without it, don’t you think?”
Ezekiel grinned. “Yeah, maybe so,” he said. He folded up the napkin and put it in his pocket. “But then we wouldn’t have all this beauty,” he said, gesturing at the gaudy decorations around them.
Rainer reached over and pinched off a piece of Ezekiel’s brownie, put it in his mouth and chased it with a swallow of coffee. “They do this for every holiday,” he said. “You should see this place on Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“Ugh, I bet it’s like a family of leprechauns blew up in here,” Ezekiel said.
Rainer laughed. “Easter is also fun. They have a hard time coming up with a holiday flavor of the week though.”
Ezekiel drank the rest of his coffee and checked his watch. He would not tell him so—he balked at stroking Rainer’s ego when he was still holding on to his anger with him—but he had missed him. He had missed these strange, sometimes circular, often seemingly pointless conversations of theirs. He had even missed the verbal sparring, though he was quicker to become annoyed with it than he had been before Christmas.
Part of him wanted to stay there, go on sitting with him while he delved back into grading student papers about Gilgamesh, Robin Hood, King Arthur and the nature of heroes versus villains. However, his pride would not let him forget how angry he had been and still was so easily because that Christmas party, that had very nearly been the end of all of this and of Rainer, too.
So, instead of staying and talking more, instead of forgiving Rainer or promising to see him later, Ezekiel got up, put his empty cup in the trash and walked out of the coffee shop. He felt Rainer’s eyes on him as he walked across the street and got in his car, but he didn’t even look back before he drove away.
That night, Ezekiel was exhausted, but he lay there in the dark beside Jacob with his eyes closed and tried to sleep for a long time and didn’t. Jacob lay on his side turned away from him, sleeping soundly, untroubled and unaware of the thoughts that played through Ezekiel’s mind, keeping him awake.
He thought about Davey and the diseased whore, the way Davey’s throat had opened up so easily under his clawed fingers, the heat of the blood on his face when it hit. The moon had been huge in the sky, a screen of Los Angeles smog making the silver disk faintly golden. The shadows in the empty lot behind those trashy apartment buildings had smelled like rot and afterbirth and the burning linoleum stench of crack in a pipe. The breeze through his fur was calming, like a petting hand.
He drifted off to sleep without realizing it was happening and he dreamed. In the dream, he was with Rainer. Rainer was in the shadows, he slipped from them, up through the darkness like he was rising through water, and Ezekiel was there to meet him. There to wrap his hands around his throat and kiss him.
The kiss was cold and icy. It numbed his throat like cocaine.
Suddenly, as happened in dreams, Ezekiel held a knife. The knife changed depending on how the light hit it, became a straight razor, a dagger, a scalpel then a knife again. He stroked one hand down Rainer’s throat and Rainer tilted his head back, bared his throat to the touch with a moan that Ezekiel thrilled to. He closed his hand around his throat and squeezed, felt his claws slip free and pop through the flawless skin of Rainer’s throat. Blood leaked around his claws and Rainer gasped, choked and arched against him.
When Ezekiel made the incision, Rainer reached into his own chest and took hold of his rib cage. With inhuman strength, Rainer cracked it apart and spread it open wide for Ezekiel. The knife was gone from his hand and Ezekiel reached inside Rainer’s chest to wrap his hand around his beating heart. He kissed him and moved against him, the blood hot and slick on his skin, his body partially inside Rainer’s chest cavity as he lay over him. As he kissed him, he squeezed his heart rhythmically and Rainer moaned and rocked toward him, moved against him to the rhythm of his contracting heart.
Ezekiel released his throat and ran his hand back through his dark hair, tightened his fingers and pulled him close to taste his breath and bite at his mouth. Rainer’s eyes were glazed, far away like he was seeing death already.
“I want you inside of me,” Rainer panted, the words themselves the trite, romantic sort of thing Rainer would never say. Except Ezekiel understood he didn’t mean it like that. He looked down at his hand around Rainer’s heart, watched the veins swell and tighten as blood pumped through the muscle then he began to burrow inside of him and fall through the darkness.
He fell out the other side into the waking world on the razor fine edge of orgasm. He turned his face into his pillow, wrapped his arms around it and bit at the cotton as pleasure hit him like a thunderclap and streaked through his body. He moaned and shuddered and came in his pants with his eyes closed and Rainer’s radiant blue eyes staring back at him from the half asleep depths of his mind.
I want you inside of me, he breathed in Ezekiel’s ear. Ezekiel gritted his teeth and groaned into his pillow. He could still feel the frost of Rainer’s kiss on his tongue and feel the grimy stickiness of his cooling blood on his skin and he wanted. No amount of cursing himself for it and swearing that he would not act on that want lessened it in the slightest. With Jacob lying less than an arm’s length away, he had never wanted Rainer more and he was ashamed of himself for it, but the desire remained.
When he had gotten himself under control, Ezekiel got out of bed, went across the hall and cleaned himself up. He changed his clothes, tossed the soiled ones in the hamper and lay back down, but the memory of the dream remained vivid in his mind. He stared up at the darkness above the bed and tried to banish it from his thoughts, return to sleep, but it persisted and he started to become aroused again.
Jacob shifted a little in his sleep, moved his head on the pillow and sighed. Ezekiel looked at him and he thought about waking him up. Jacob would not refuse him if he tried to initiate sex, but Ezekiel knew it wasn’t what he wanted. He could have it, but it wouldn’t satisfy the need. He didn’t want to use Jacob that way.
Ezekiel rolled out of bed, snatched the pants he had worn that day off the floor and took Rainer’s napkin valentine from the pocket. Then he went downstairs to the guestroom, closed the door and stood there leaning against the wall inside the doorway. He turned off the light and closed his eyes and recalled the beat of Rainer’s pulse under his fingers, the thump of his heart heavy and warm with life. He pictured the way Rainer had spread wide his own ribcage like he was o
pening his legs for him and felt the perfect way he fit inside him.
He slipped a hand under the waist of his cotton pants and wrapped his fingers around his cock. He caught his breath and sucked his bottom lip between his teeth as he squeezed and began to stroke himself, while in his mind, Rainer whispered, I love you and, I want you inside of me and, What do you want? and, You could be beautiful.
Ezekiel rested his head against the wall, one arm braced on it, hand clutching the pink napkin with the formula of love scrawled on it while he jerked off. He shivered, imagining Rainer’s breath against his ear as he whispered, This is love to him like it wasn’t anything special at all. While Ezekiel squeezed Rainer’s heart and felt his lifeblood ooze through his fingers and Rainer arched beneath him, his throat bared in offering.
Ezekiel growled and tasted his own blood when he came again. The second time was close to painful, not nearly as intense as that first one upon waking, but it left him wrung out and drained, sweating and trembling with exhaustion like he had been doing something far more athletic than standing there. He rested his forehead against the wall, gasping and turned his face into the napkin with Rainer’s writing on it. He was disappointed that he smelled nothing but paper and a faint trace of coffee.
Chapter 37
The next morning Ezekiel woke up later than he was used to. Instead of going back upstairs to their bedroom, he had fallen asleep in the guestroom and slept restlessly for a little less than five hours. He showered and went upstairs to dress after muttering a good morning to Jacob then returned downstairs for his first cup of coffee.
Jacob slid a plate of toast and bacon across the table to him. “Is something wrong, Zeke?”
Ezekiel paused while chewing a bite of bacon and looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you got up in the middle of the night and came downstairs to sleep,” Jacob said. “I rolled over about three-thirty and you were gone.”
