Page 202 of White Wolf

“I think something big might be about to happen,” Sasha confessed.

“Me too.”

“But we’ll be together for it. Whatever it is.”

“Yes.”

Sasha’s phone rang.

44

EAT YOUR HEART OUT

Should have known, Trina thought with an inward snarl of frustration. If they hadn’t been exhausted and caught up in their own personal bullshit drama – Lanny dyingwasn’tbullshit, she corrected, not really – one of them would have been sharp enough to think that, at some point, Chad Edwards would go running to his girlfriend. And give her the scare of her life.

The door to her apartment had been torn off its hinges and lay broken in two pieces on the floor of the front hall. A starburst of cracks in the sheetrock of the entryway marked a place where a fist or a head slammed into the wall. A shattered plate lay in the divide between kitchen and living room.

Chad’s girlfriend, Christa, sat on a couch that had been shredded at one end, stuffing and foam spilled out onto the rug. A paramedic dabbed at a nasty cut on her face and someone had draped a shock blanket across her shoulders. Her gaze was vacant, fixed in the middle distance. She didn’t blink, or twitch, or react to the sting of alcohol on her wound.

A middle-aged man, presumably the neighbor who’d called in the disturbance and then rushed to the rescue, sat on a stool at the kitchen island, a second paramedic bandaging his right arm. He looked dazed and spooked, but more together than Christa. His boyfriend hadn’t come back from the dead, after all.

“I’ll take him, you take her?” Lanny asked.

“Yeah.”

Trina went to Christa and knelt on the rug in front of her, setting a tentative hand on the girl’s knee. Christa didn’t react.

Trina made brief eye contact with the paramedic, who shook her head, eyes wide. The woman’s voice was calm, though, when she said, “We’re gonna take her in. Make it quick.”

“Yeah. Christa? Can you hear me? I’m Detective Baskin. We spoke a few nights ago.”

No reaction.

Trina heard Lanny asking the witness/good Samaritan questions behind her at the island. “Christa,” she said, “can you tell me what happened tonight?”

No reaction.

Trina shared another glance with the paramedic, who shrugged. Then she turned to glance at her partner over her shoulder. “Maybe we should–”

There was an almighty clatter on the fire escape.

Trina’s heart jumped up her throat. “He’s still here!”

“On it,” Lanny said, and charged toward the window.

“Lanny, don’t–”

But he was already throwing open the sash and clambering out onto the fire escape.

“Shit,” Trina said, and followed him.

It was the deep, black dark of just before dawn, and the fire escape seemed an illusion made of shadow – that was her initial, terrifying thought as she swung her legs over the windowsill.I’ll fall, she thought, but then her boots touched the metal with a clatter, and she started down the ladder after her partner, who was, judging by his curses, losing ground on their perp. Vampires were faster than humans, after all.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lanny chanted, one level below her, and she ran to catch up, one hand skimming the rail, the other clamped to the butt of her gun. At some point after seeing the impossible security footage of Edwards walking out of the morgue, she’d decided she’d shoot him, if given the chance. She hadn’t trusted him when she thought he was dead, and certainly didn’t now that he’d killed a boy.

Thoughts of Jamie Anderson’s face – peaceful and childlike in death – made her sick, so she pushed them away, and kept running.

“Goddamn it all to hell,” Lanny said, and she heard the slap of sneaker soles on pavement: Chad had reached the alley; they’d never catch him now.

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