The Taste Of Night

hypothetically could. Hypothetically being the key word. Down was one thing; you just aim and let gravity do most of the work. Up was quite another.

All in all it took me a little over a minute to scale the wall, long enough to be spotted if someone had been approaching from a westerly direction. I still had the presence of mind to glance around before swinging myself onto the crackling, dilapidated rooftop, sidestepping broken tiles, bottles, and newspapers in a crouch, wondering how so much litter found its way onto the rooftop.

According to my calculations, and the death scent growing stronger with every advancing step, the opposite wall should look down on the alley where Chandra had stashed the body. I took a full minute to center myself, making sure my breath was even, then peered over the side.

It took a moment for me to spot them, eyes running over the various bumps and shadows protruding from the alley floor, but then Chandra’s bulky, loathsome silhouette lumbered into view. She bent over what I assumed was the body, examining it with careful attention until softly running footfalls caught her attention. She tensed, shoulders squared, then relaxed as Micah rounded the corner. They whispered in half sentences and medical jargon, a conversation born of familiarity and long hours spent together in the lab, and the few words I caught were difficult to follow.

Half a minute later Warren stumbled up the opposite side of the alley, still immersed in his character. His walk gradually straightened, though he still possessed the authentic limp, and his head came up, scouring their faces before moving on to the rest of the surroundings.

I jerked back from the ledge, because if anyone was going to discover me, it was Warren. He had an uncanny sixth sense, especially when it came to me. We’d been linked with a binding agent months before, and though he swore the compound had been dissolved, I sometimes felt twinges in my breastbone when he was near, like a second heartbeat. And if I felt that, I’d decided, Warren probably did too.

I waited another minute, then chanced another look over the ledge. There were six silhouettes now assembled around the body as if about to perform some sick act of satanic worship…or as if they’d just finished. Jewell arrived just then, moving quickly, and the others made room for her, falling back to allow her in, and giving me my first good look at the ravaged body.

It was a woman, painfully ordinary in every way. Height, weight, hair color…even her state at the time of death could be termed average. After all, plenty of people died naked. Some even died with a horrific and pained expression on their face, eyes sealed wide in the final throes of fighting off the Reaper. But I doubted many others died with burn marks blackening their lips, shriveling their skin so that their death mask was frozen in a grotesque parody of a grin. I also doubted too many people had the same burn marks charring their fingertips, incinerating skin and tissue all the way down to the bone.

But this woman had pulled a triple-hitter. The burns extended to the entire area nesting between her spread legs, a charred and blackened void now, still smoldering and unrecognizable. The rest of her body was marble white, pristine and untouched against the filthy ground.

“What the fuck?” I pulled back, unable-indeed, unwilling-to process what I’d just seen. It looked like nitric acid had been poured over her body. Except there were no splash marks. And who burned only in three distinct and entirely separate areas of the body? And how had her attacker gotten away without discovery, without the victim- who looked like she’d died in intense agony-even making a sound?

Worse, was this what all the victims looked like?

I leaned back over the ledge to hear the other agents wondering the same thing. Hearing the word prostitute gave some clue as to how she’d gotten naked, why she’d been vulnerable to attack, but no one could guess at what had caused such painful mutilation. “How does a person burn to death with most of their body untouched?” I wondered aloud.

“They don’t,” came a voice from behind. I whirled, blood pounding in my ears because suddenly I smelled her- smelled the lack of her-and it was too late. Regan stood a handful of feet away in a flowered summer dress, looking young and completely out of place on a dilapidated rooftop in a neighborhood that looked and smelled like it needed to be flushed. For someone with supersenses, I sure was getting snuck up on a lot lately.

“How did you-?”

“Evade your detection? Again?” Her face was guileless, but her voice teased. Seeing the way my eyes narrowed, how my shoulders squared defensively, she answered her own question. “I’m an initiate. I’m losing my human odor because I’m no longer mostly mortal. I haven’t metamorphosized yet, so the Shadow pheromones can’t be scented on me. Basically I’m in an olfactory no-man’s-land. We often send out older initiates to do reconnaissance work because of that. It’s good training, and we can’t be tracked by the agents of Light. Didn’t you know?”

I hadn’t-we hadn’t-and I was peeved to find it a good idea. Warren would never go for it, though, in part because he’d have to get through Rena to do so. Shit, I thought wryly, they didn’t even allow full-blown agents to leave the sanctuary if they thought it unsafe. Thus my position on the rooftop.

“That’s another opportunity you had to kill me,” I said in a whisper. “And you didn’t.”

Regan shrugged the words away and crouched beside me like we were longtime bosom buddies. “You’re starting to owe me big time.”

And my sense of right and wrong was just fucked up enough to believe that. Almost. “You’re not going to kiss me again, are you?”

“Believe me, once was enough.” She leaned forward to study the drama unfolding below.

“What did you do to that poor woman?” I finally asked.

“Nothing.” She tilted her head prettily. “She did it to herself.”

“Because she was a prostitute? Because she made her living off the streets?”

“Now, Joanna,” she sang-she seemed to love saying my real name. Shooting me a sly smile, she blinked twice. “You know we don’t play favorites when it comes to harming mortals. Besides, how could we be in this alley as well as at the other hundred and eighty-seven places at the same time this brutality was occurring?”

“A hundred and eighty-seven?” I repeated faintly. That was more than in the past…what? Five years combined?

“That’s what the preliminary reports have confirmed,” she said, and I was sickened to hear a note of pride tinge her voice. If there was any doubt she was Shadow, it was gone now. “Who knows how many have yet to be found.”

All I could think to ask was, “Why?”

That little laugh tinkled out of her, subdued given the other agents, but infused with delight. “Chalk it up to collateral damage, Joanna. We had to cast our net far and wide. I told you we had something big planned for the agents of Light. The real question is how.”

I didn’t know. How did a person burn to death with marks on only ten percent of their body, at most? How did it happen all over the city at approximately the same time? How were the Shadow agents doing it seemingly from remote? And how was this to affect the troop? The same gnawing sense of anxiety I’d had when talking to Regan on the phone came over me, that unease as I’d watched the fireworks from the boneyard, feeling I was missing something so obvious it was staring me right in the face.

I gasped and looked up to find Regan doing exactly that.

“It’s a virus,” I said softly, and watched recognition dawn mockingly on her face. She tilted her head slightly, a silent indication to go on. “It’s airborne, released with the fireworks from atop Valhalla. The spores needed time to drift, to settle, to infect. That’s it? That’s the plan? To make thousands of people sick just so you have a chance of infecting one or two agents of Light?”

I couldn’t think of anything more heartless and inhumane. I recalled the way the gunpowder had possessed a peppery note, how the sky had filled with smoke-God, with disease-and the ground in the boneyard had disappeared in a haze of filmy, infested clouds. A cursed battlefield. The second sign of the Zodiac.

I swallowed hard, pressing a hand to my lips. I knew my thoughts were flashing across my face like a ticker on television, but I couldn’t stop them. I’d stood in that boneyard, breathing deeply, trying to scent out the irregular notes on the wind…and that had been just what the Shadows had wanted.

I imagined myself in the place of the woman sprawled carelessly and obscenely on the ground below me, imagined what had to occur inside the body to end up that way, and I couldn’t help but shudder.

“Don’t worry, Joanna.” Regan leaned forward until her eyes found mine, and she smiled reassuringly. “You’re