Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(31)
All this talking exhausts him. He keeps a handful of lozenges in his pocket and finds an antidote to all the noise on the treadmill—pounding out five miles every evening, sweating through his clothes—and in sex. Sometimes he seduces women—the blond reporter at KOIN 6, the redheaded waitress at the Book of Kells Irish pub—and sometimes he pays for them.
Today he pays. At the day spa, in the back room, a digital thermostat on the wall reveals the temperature to be seventy-five degrees, warm enough to make him eager to kick off his boots, peel off his clothes, pile them in a heap in the corner. Jeans and a denim shirt. Corduroy jacket. Belt with a Buck knife holstered to it. Silver six-inch blade, a birthday present from his father when he turned sixteen. He carried it in the Republic and doesn’t go anywhere without it now. He retired as a colonel, and across his naked shoulder, like a bruise, he carries the faded ink of the anchor-and-eagle tattoo.
He palms a condom from his pocket. A white towel hangs from a hook. He ties it around his middle. The light is such that his shadow hardly seems to exist, oozing faintly across the floor and then the massage table. He climbs up and settles his face into the cushioned groove.
He hears the knob rattle, the door click closed, the footsteps whisper across the carpet. Her name is Choko. They visit for an hour every few weeks. Sometimes he lets her dampen his back with oil, rub the poison out of his muscles—and sometimes he does not. Sometimes he asks her to flip him over. Sometimes she takes him in her mouth or her hand. And sometimes she climbs onto the table with him.
“Hey, you,” he says and raises his head to peer at the woman standing a few feet away. She wears a red kimono with a black dragon stitched into it. Hair down to her elbows. She smiles. The fountain gurgles. He lets his head drop into the groove again. “Give me a little rub, will you? I’m knotted up. Then we can get busy.”
He feels a hungry anticipation. The blood pools in his center. His erection presses uncomfortably against the table. He hears her clothes drop. He hears her breathing heavily, almost panting.
“Hey, what kind of a party’s going on without me?” He is smiling when he rises on his elbow. The pressure of the table has made his vision muddy. At first he believes this is why her nude form seems to shift, to bulge and bend, like a reflection seen on the body of a passing car. And then he blinks hard and observes between blinks the contorted posture, the lengthening teeth, the black hair bristling like quills from her skin. He feels a hole in his stomach like he used to get when small-arms fire popped in the near distance, when tracer rounds streaked through the night like blood-red comets.
Her voice is guttural when she says, “I have a message from the Resistance.”
Before he can slide off the table, she has his leg—snatching it up—her claws and then her teeth sinking into his calf. He kicks at her and she falls with a mouth full of blood. His blood. He doesn’t take the time to examine the wound, to recognize what this means, infection.
The towel slips off him when he falls off the table. His first impulse is to stupidly grab for it, cover himself—and then, equally stupid, to race for the door, call for help. But he realizes midshout that this was a planned attack and plans are rarely made alone.
She growls. It is a bestial sound. He can feel it. Feel it in his bones like when bass pours from a too-loud stereo. He has never been more vulnerable, naked and unarmed, bleeding. He doesn’t feel any pain, not yet. Only the warmth of blood running along his leg, its tackiness underfoot when he stumbles back, looking for a weapon, something to swing.
The bureau jars against his spine, preventing any further retreat. The mist from the fountain licks his back. He yanks its cord from the outlet and scoops it up and hurls it at the lycan. Its stones are like a brightly colored hail rattling the floor. The bowl arcs toward her, and she puts out her arms to catch it and it thuds against her chest and the water dampens her hair and makes it appear a rippling shadow.
She is on one side of the massage table—the padding torn through in yellow slashes—and he is on the other. He needs to get to the pile of clothes, the knife nested in it, on the opposite side of the room. He can smell her. He would recognize that smell anywhere, the smell of a lycan. Like an unwashed crotch. Supposedly set off by their hyperstimulated pituitary gland.
Her posture is hunched and her breasts dangle pendulously and her arms rake the air and her face is nearly impossible to decipher beneath all that hair. She makes a noise that sounds like a guttural string of words. His skin goes tight. She begins to climb over the table, toward him, one arm and then the other. He tries to run and nearly topples, his feet sliding across the stones.
He is to the clothes when she leaps and knocks him to the floor. For a moment they might be lovers, a tangle of limbs, breathing heavily. She is faster than him, but he is stronger. He loops an arm around her throat and drags them back against the wall. Her body bucks against his but he holds her in place. She wears his arm like a necklace. He is choking her and she claws at him, tearing away ribbons of skin from his forearm, his thighs, his ribs, wherever she can reach, while he sets his jaw against the pain and uses his free arm to seek out the knife, yanking his belt from the pile of clothes, fumbling with the leather casing.
Finally he withdraws it and unfolds the blade. In its silvery flash he catches a glimpse of his eyes, wide with fright. Then he draws the knife toward them in an arc. The woman—no, the lycan, the thing—tries to block the blade, swatting and tearing at him, but her strength is fading and after a few wild swings he sneaks the knife to her chest, where it catches against a rib—and grinds its way inside her.