by Andrea Speed
Praise for Andrea Speed’s
Infected
Prey
“When I picked up Andra Speed’s Infected, I definitely did not expect to completely fall in love with the writing, the characters, and the plot.”
—Blackraven’s Reviews
“…a masterful job…”
—Dark Divas Reviews
“Ms. Speed didn’t miss a trick in this story and the suspense and mystery kept me on the edge of my seat. I think I might have even bitten off a nail at one point, it was so intense. This is my kind of book and I’m ever so happy I read it.”
—Whipped Cream Erotic Romance Reviews
“If you are looking for a fascinating mystery suspense story with shape-shifters that actually shift, pick up a copy of Infected: Prey.”
—Literary Nymphs
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com
Copyright
Published by
Dreamspinner Press
4760 Preston Road
Suite 244-149
Frisco, TX 75034
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Infected: Bloodlines
Copyright © 2010 by Andrea Speed
Cover Art by Anne Cain [email protected]
Cover Design by Mara McKennen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/
ISBN: 978-1-61581-664-4
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
December, 2010
eBook edition available
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-665-1
Dedication
Thanks to my Mom, my sister Lancia, Ruth, everyone at CxPulp and Dreamspinner Press, and all my readers. You guys are fantastic.
1
A Beautiful Lie
MATT was glad that Callie had told him about the faulty bathroom window, or he’d never have been able to break into her apartment.
It was awkward, as he had to shinny through the narrow window and get down into the bathtub, but he was glad he was still pretty thin, and had done enough yoga to contort himself without pulling something. He belatedly wished he’d brought a flashlight, but he was new at this whole “breaking and entering” thing, and on top of that, he was never that organized to begin with.
He carefully drew back her shower curtain, which depicted colorful tropical fish of all kinds swimming in an ocean too blue to be real, and he quietly crept to the door, which was ajar. He peeked out and saw a light on in the bedroom (its door was open as well), but the front room looked empty, so he ventured out.
You could usually tell if a place was occupied, although he couldn’t say how. It was just one of those things, a sense that there was another warm, breathing person near you, a kind of sixth sense that everyone had. That sense was telling him he was alone here, which he’d kind of expected, but it was still a bit creepy. He really had no right to be here, not like this, but he knew something was wrong. Callie wasn’t answering her phone, and after what that bartender told him, he was really worried that something awful had happened to her. She should have been safe at Panic, and he had no idea what had gone wrong, or who could’ve wanted to hurt her. Sure, she was screwed up, but weren’t they all?
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and it was obvious now that he had not been the first uninvited visitor in the apartment.
The front room was totally trashed. Her glass-topped coffee table was lying on its side, her shell-shaped candy dish upside down on the oatmeal-colored carpet, and the M&Ms that used to be in it were scattered across the floor like confetti. Glossy fashion magazines were splayed open and strewn about like discarded fliers, while junk mail that she never bothered to open lay like broken tiles beside them. Judging from the indents in the carpet, her leather sofa had been shoved back as well.
Oddly enough, her Bose stereo system and flat screen TV were untouched. Thieves would normally take things like that, wouldn’t they?
He went to the bedroom, and things were no better in there. He could see her computer sitting on a desk, the hard drive, printer, and iPod dock all untouched, and the light in the room was coming from the bedside lamp, which had been knocked off its table and was now lying on the floor. Save for that and an open drawer on her nightstand, everything else looked perfect: her bed was made so that the wine-colored duvet looked as taut as the surface of a trampoline, her mirrored closet doors shut tight, reflecting all the clean emptiness in her expensively appointed but rather sterile bedroom.
Of course everything in this place had an expensive but rather cold, sterile look to it, because Callie was a rich girl, and she had a whopper of a case of OCD. She was one of those neat freaks, one of those kinds of people who had to scrub down an entire kitchen if they found a single hair in the sink. She’d tried a whole bunch of medications for it, but nothing ever worked, and her own obsessions drove her crazy, enough that she took to using more illegal drugs to try and kill the impulses she could barely live with. It also helped her anorexia, or at least the pot did; the pot at least made her eat.
She never would have left her place like this—never. She couldn’t even sit down if the chair wasn’t in exactly the right spot.
Something had happened to her, he knew it in his gut, something awful.
But the problem was, he couldn’t think of a single person besides himself who would care.
ONE of the biggest problems of working with the person you were in a relationship with was the arguments that occurred when one of you was sick but refused to stay home.
Roan had reached the point where he wasn’t going to argue with Paris anymore, mainly because it never got him anywhere, and it just made both him and Par upset. Par insisted he wasn’t sick, which was technically true, but he wasn’t well. The last transformation had taken a lot out of him, and it was shocking how skinny he was now. His heart problem kept him from working out too much, at least until he got his weight back up, and it was a constant struggle for him to gain back weight in time for the next cycle to begin, no matter how many fattening foods they kept giving him. Paris compared it to racing uphill in a hurricane: it wasn’t a race he was ever going to win. He used to be nearly two hundred pounds, most of that muscle, the kind you’d think an athletic, broad-shouldered man would have. Now he was closer to one hundred and fifty (to be generous), his handsome face lean enough to have an almost feral look to it. His clothes, once perfectly suited to him, hung limp and baggy on his frame. He was cold a lot and had taken to wearing lots of fleece and layering his clothes, the latter of which had the added benefit of making him look a bit more solid. Paris had enough vanity that he chose his clothes carefully, and he had had his hair cut in a mid-length, casually shaggy way that accentuated his sharp cheekbones and sensuous eyes, made him look like a male model, not only healthy but alluring. But he tired easily nowadays, and he had almost no energy at all, so that’s where his carefully crafted illusion ended.
And it scared Roan. Holy Christ, it scared him so badly he could hardly stand it. Paris was getting weaker, getting another day closer to dying, while he had never been stronger in his life. It was like he was a vampire
, sucking the life out of Paris, even though that wasn’t exactly what was happening. The tiger was burning Paris from the inside out, consuming him, while Roan and his lion had reached some kind of equilibrium; they had reached a détente, as if aware how much they depended on one another to survive. He wished there was some way he could talk to the tiger in Paris, get it to understand that killing its host was counter-protective… but it didn’t work like that. The tiger wasn’t really doing it; the physiological trauma of it all was breaking down Paris’s body. It could no longer tolerate having its bones broken, its metabolism abused, its muscles and ligaments torn. As a virus child, Roan’s body had adapted to this insane abuse from the beginning; this was still a shock to Paris’s system, a shock that only got worse with repetition.
Things had gone downhill so fast. Just yesterday Paris was working on the Mustang, still his hobby of choice, but coming in from the garage, he looked oddly flushed. When Roan commented on it, he said he was just “overheated” and needed a drink, but he stumbled on the way to the kitchen and Roan could have sworn he fainted; Paris was limp when he caught him. But after a second of holding him up, Paris straightened as if by reflex and claimed that he hadn’t fainted, he was just “woozy.” It was bullshit, they both knew it was bullshit, but Paris refused to admit it. And Roan decided to just let him have it because he was weary of playing the role of the nag.
He’d avoided coming in to the office for days, so Paris had no reason to as well, but he just had to today. He was done with his usual adultery cases and had accepted a job to do some background checks, and he needed to access his computer at work. He was hoping to sneak in alone, but of course it didn’t work that way. He really thought Paris should have stayed home and slept, but Par felt differently. He still refused to be “babied,” and sometimes he could get downright surly about it.
Sometimes Roan wondered if Paris kind of hated him now. He was so obviously healthy and Paris was so obviously not. He supposed he’d hate himself if he were in Paris’s position, at least in the back of his mind.
The drive to the office was relatively quiet, and Paris nursed his coffee as Roan drove, the radio on and filling the silence. Winter was starting to come in and let itself be known in air cold and sharp enough to scour the lungs, a layer of frost glistening whitely on the grass and glazing the edges of the windshield. Until the heater really warmed up and filled the car, they could see their breaths like vapor trails in the frigid air.
Roan had dressed warmly but casually in a heavy blue plaid flannel shirt, black wool trousers, and his fleece-lined bomber jacket, and he knew he didn’t look much like a private detective, but fuck it, he didn’t expect to see any clients today. It was cold, and the holiday season had a tendency to scare off the suspicious spouses, or at least deprive them of the money to hire a private detective. Around New Year’s was a bit of a boom time, though.
Looking at his outfit, Paris had joked Roan looked more Canadian than he did. Paris was wearing lined jeans and a loose gray cashmere-blend sweater over a long-sleeved T-shirt, with a lightweight blue parka over it all, and a gray watch cap pulled down over his forehead. His haircut was so good that it could survive hat hair, which Paris said came from knowing where to find the good gay hairstylists in the city. Roan couldn’t help but point out that it also helped that the guys found Paris insanely attractive and wanted to jump his bones right in the chair, and with a slightly smug smile, Par admitted that never hurt.
By the time they reached the office, Paris had apparently decided to pretend that their brief but fraught argument that morning over whether he should come in or not had never happened, as he pulled out his set of keys, opened the door, and asked Roan what kind of coffee he was in the mood for. Roan decided to play along, and told him anything that had enough caffeine in it to kill a rodent would be fine.
As Paris started the coffeemaker going, Roan opened the blinds, letting in the icy cool light of day, and noticed that the bright bouquet of daisies, dyed in a rainbow of artificial colors (some also painted with glitter), was still alive. “Goddamn,” he cursed, inspecting the flowers up close. The blue plastic dollar-store vase they sat in on the back filing cabinet was the same, but you could buy a truckload of those and easily swap them out. It wasn’t above Randi to do it either. “I swear, Randi is sneaking in and replacing these damn flowers daily. She’s doing it on purpose.”
That made Paris chuckle faintly. “You really think she wants to annoy you that much?”
“I don’t like flowers. I don’t see the point of them outside a garden. And these damn things won’t die. How long have they been here?”
“Uh… God, is it almost ten days now?”
“I think so. And they’re still going. So either she’s replacing them and denying it, or we have undead flowers.”
Paris smirked at him. “I think I read somewhere that daisies can last as cut flowers for a long time. This is probably just proof of that.”
“No, I still say it’s a conspiracy. Somebody’s fucking with me.” He went ahead and turned the thermostat up, a bit beyond what he normally did. He usually liked to keep it warm but still fairly brisk in here, mainly so he didn’t nod off during interminable background checks, but he didn’t want to make Paris miserable. Paris had almost no body fat to help keep him warm anymore.
“Driving you insane with flowers? That’s a rather passive-aggressive approach, isn’t it, when forcing you to listen to a Josh Wink album will do the same thing quicker.”
“Yes, but you’re the only one evil enough to try that.”
Even though it was an unspoken rule that they keep home stuff at home, not bring it to work, looking at Paris was just breaking Roan’s heart this morning. He wasn’t cut out for this shit; he wasn’t. He was bad with people, and he was worse with loss.
Roan went up and put his arms around him from behind, and Paris leaned back against him with a sigh. “I’m sorry about this morning,” Roan told him, giving him a quick kiss on the neck.
“So am I. This is just so stupid. I want to have as much of a normal life as long as I can, okay?”
See, if Paris put it that way, it sounded perfectly reasonable. The bastard. As if he didn’t feel bad enough already. “I love you, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t put you through a wall.”
“Bring it on, pansy,” Roan teased. He held Paris and wished somehow he could give him some of his strength, transfer it by osmosis, but that didn’t seem to work. Nothing seemed to work, and if he thought about it too long, he’d get too depressed to even get out of bed in the morning.
The phone rang, a noise that seemed shockingly loud, but it was their cue to go back to “work mode.” Paris did so easily, slipping out of Roan’s arms and moving to his desk to answer the phone, pulling off his watch cap and dropping it on his desk before lifting the receiver. And yeah, his hair still looked great. Why couldn’t hairdressers ever want to fuck him? If that was how you got a decent cut, Roan had to work on that.
The call was from Dennis Caldera, wanting to hire him to do some work on a case of his. On top of suspicious spouses, most of Roan’s other work came from lawyers and businesses, so he wasn’t too shocked to hear from him. In fact, Dennis had been his very first client, and helped him get a toehold in the private investigations marketplace. Roan didn’t kid himself, though—yes, Dennis was a nice guy (for a lawyer), and a decent human being (again, for a lawyer), but the reason he had hired Roan in the first place was because Roan was gay. And Dennis, being gay himself, liked to keep business “in the community” whenever possible, and it wasn’t like there was a plethora of openly gay private eyes around here.
He’d just gotten the first of the background checks out of the way when he heard the front office door open. His inner office door was slightly ajar, so he assumed it was just Randi come to see if the flower torture was working—or maybe Braunbeck offering them holiday gorp—until he heard Paris gasp in surprise, “Oh my God—just look at y
ou!”
Curiosity made him get up and look.
At first he almost didn’t recognize the man, but when recognition finally clicked, he was just as shocked as Paris. There was a lean but obviously fit young man, with stylish but slightly spiky blond hair and a close-cropped golden blond beard framing a youthful, handsome face, with watery blue eyes and a tasteful silver stud in his eyebrow piercing. It was that and the four slender gold rings and fake gemstone studs in each of his earlobes that gave his identity away. “Matt?” he asked.
Wow, he looked… different. He’d added about twenty pounds of sleek muscle to his frame, so he no longer looked like a string bean, and the close-cropped beard and mustache combo made him look less fey and more masculine. In fact, Roan had no idea a blond guy—usually not his type—could look that attractive. He was wearing battered black Converse sneakers, black sweatpants, and a brown leather jacket over a dark blue sweatshirt, making Roan think he had stopped by on his way to the gym or on the way back. He grinned openly at both of them, although his eyes seemed riveted to Paris. “I was about to say the same about you, man! Look at you! Love what you’ve done with your hair.”
“Love what you’ve done with you. You’ve been working out.”
Matt glanced down at the floor, his smile slightly sheepish as he blushed faintly—it was too easy to see on the fair skin. “Yeah, well… I had to do something to keep the cravings from driving me crazy, y’know.”
Paris eyed him sympathetically. “Drugs?”
Matt nodded, still not looking up from their industrial blue carpeting. “Yeah. It got kinda bad there for a while, but I got through it.”
“How long have you been clean?”
