Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(18)

I pulled onto West Jackson, wondering if the original target was Abrams Tolliver or one of the others or more than one of the others. This was getting sticky. I rolled down the truck window and held out ID to the uniformed officer at the barricade. I followed his pointing finger to parking in the staging area. “I’m on-site in official parking,” I said. “Occam? What’s your twenty?” His “twenty” was his location.

Occam said, “I see your POC POV. Park at the back of the lot where it adjoins the train tracks. Approaching you now.”

“POC POV” was “piece-of-crap personally owned vehicle.” Occam was making fun of my truck. I pulled into a parking spot between a van for EMTs and the special operations team—SWAT—patted the dash, and cut off the engine. Occam tapped on the window. I opened the door and slid to the ground.

Shots sounded. Two, close together, followed by a third. Before the first two echoed, I was on the pavement underneath Occam. Fear blasted through me. Fear of being held down. Fear of being controlled. Memories of fighting for my life. I could take his life . . . Bloodlust slammed through me. On instinct, I elbowed him in the gut, rolled, and hit his jaw with the heel of my other hand. A fast two-strike reaction. Spook School training. Fighting my need. “Get off me!” I yelled, kneeing him hard.

Occam oofed, breath leaving his body fast.

I could have his life for the land . . . I hit him again.

He rolled over. Out of my reach. “Do not . . .” I caught a breath. Forced down the craving, the want, the blazing desire to kill, to take his blood and his life and his soul for the earth. To save myself. I found my feet and backed away, moving in a crouch, into the shadows of early evening, hiding. Heard sirens taking off and tires squealing as if chasing a car. I shivered hard and took another breath. “Do not ever . . . ever . . . attack me. Again.”

“Holy shit.” He groaned, still on the ground half under my truck. Curled in a fetal position. “Ohhh. Why’d you do that?”

I ignored him and tried to replay the shots and the echoes. I estimated them coming from a distance. More cop cars chased away. No more shots were fired. “The unit’s AR is behind the seat,” I said, “if you want it.”

Occam shook his head no and made a little gagging sound. I locked the truck cab.

“Are you Special Agent Ingram?”

I flinched. Whirled. Pulled my service weapon. All at once. A female uniformed cop stood near me, crouched low between vehicles, as if to avoid shots fired. I swallowed a pillow-sized fear clogging my throat. I was breathing fast, my pulse beating in my temples and the back of my neck. I pushed down the bloodlust and managed to speak almost normally. “I’m Ingram.”

“Ming of Glass just drove up. She deman—requests that you speak with her.”

If the vamps were here, it was now officially night. I bent and picked up my comms gear and my bullet-resistant vest and reseated my ten-millimeter. Occam was watching me as he rose from the ground, not quite all cat grace. His nose was bleeding where I’d hit him. The blood-need reared up in me, almost as if it was a separate consciousness, a demon of deadly desire. I squeezed it down, forced my shoulders to relax. Surprisingly, the lust inside me complied, if only enough not to kill.

Occam wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve. If he reported the blow I’d be in trouble. But he was grinning, a satisfied, intense smile that suggested something I couldn’t interpret. His blond hair hung over his eyes and his jaw was fuzzy with a two-day beard he hadn’t had last time I saw him only hours ago. The beard was a result of shifting to his cat and back to human. His cat was still close to the surface, but not so close that his eyes glowed. Yet.

A thought squirmed in the back of my mind like a worm on a hook, that female cats often fought a male as part of mating rituals. Which was not an idea I wanted to contemplate. I shoved it aside.

“Where did the last shots come from?” Occam asked the uniform as I geared up. Our eyes met and slid away. Met and slid away. Nervous, I reseated my Glock GDP-20 in the hard plastic holster with a faint click.

“Shooter in a car. Drive-by. Handgun. No casualties. They already got him.” To me she said, “If you’ll follow me. And keep your head down.”

I was still fastening my vest as we wove through the lot, our feet silent on the pavement. I caught snatches of conversation between cops as we jogged:

“Twenty-five rounds located so far. Most in the restaurant’s wall.”

“Way more casings in the street than twenty-five.”

“No shit?”

“Way more.”

“Witnesses’re in the empty building next door.”

“Two bottles of perfectly good vodka hit and shattered.”

“I hear the vodka set off a kitchen fire.”

“Singed the hair off a cook but didn’t touch her scalp.”

“Ten-ninety-ones are to stay in place until CSI and the MEs are finished.”

“Medical examiners are here?”

“I know, right? Weird.”

Ten-ninety-ones were dead bodies, in Knoxville PD radio codes. The stink of gunfire and burned hair and scorched building fouled the air. I looked around for fire trucks and decided the trucks must have pulled up to the restaurant from the back, from the street on the other side. EMS units were lined up in the roadway, uniformed officers standing guard at the door to the restaurant, visible in the glaring headlights. Heavily armed SWAT officers were inside and out. Shadows flickered on the walls and the asphalt, oversized, bulked, armed.