Touch the Dark

Page 24

"Tomas, put me down! You don't understand—I've been looking for him for years!" I may as well not have bothered talking for all the attention he paid me, and struggling would only be a waste of time. I gave up and raised my gun, hoping that the close quarters would compensate for the lousy angle and let me get at least a couple shots into Jimmy. I doubted that I'd do much damage, both because of my lack of skill and because weres are notoriously resilient, but all I needed was to slow him down enough for Billy to do his thing. He could find out what I wanted to know and fill me in later. But before I could fire, Tomas shifted me into one arm and snatched the gun away with the other. I was beginning to be very tired of his doing that, but, armed or not, I wasn't giving in. This might be my only chance to deal with Genie's killer, and I wasn't about to miss it. "Billy Joe—what the hell are you waiting for? Do it already!"
The hovering cloud gathered itself and dropped onto Jimmy like a stone. Tomas tried to pull me away but I fought him. He didn't want to hurt me and it slowed him down a fraction. A second passed, no more than that; then Billy Joe burst out of Jimmy as if he'd been fired from a cannon and slammed straight into me. I didn't resist him, thinking that he might not have had enough energy left for the possession and needed a draw to complete the process. But the force kept pushing on me until I thought I would suffocate, as if there was more of him than usual and there wasn't room inside my skin for both of us.
I had no time to think, much less react, before a tremendous explosion rocked me from the inside out, like an airliner losing cabin pressure. I felt something tearing and thought it was my blouse, what little there was of it. I instinctively clutched at it since I'd had to leave the ruined bra behind, but my hand didn't encounter my familiar curves under spandex. Instead, my fingers slid over well-worn denim. I looked down to see the top of my head. I blinked, but the view didn't change: I was still clutching myself to my chest. I had a complete sense of disorientation, but no time to deal with it because Jimmy decided to rush me and all hell broke loose.
Jimmy tore into me, literally, latching on to my arm with those knifelike teeth. I screamed and dropped the body I was carrying onto the ground. I had time to see a pair of huge blue eyes looking up at me in amazement before Jimmy started to shake his head, trying to rip my arm off. I reacted without thinking, pulling away from the piercing pain, and stared in shock as his body went sailing past me and crashed into a nearby car. Throwing him had been unbelievably easy, like he weighed no more than a doll.
I looked around and it seemed as if everyone was moving in slow motion. I watched Pritkin blow a basketball-sized hole through the unfortunate car Jimmy had been standing in front of before I sent him sailing. I could see the explosion as it blasted out of the muzzle of the gun, and the glass that burst out from the windshield seemed to float to the ground as slowly as leaves falling from a tree. Pritkin turned equally slowly to meet the tide of furry bodies coming towards him at a gentle lope instead of an all-out charge.
The only person moving at normal speed was Louis-César, who skewered a rat through the heart and, as I watched, pulled out his blade to turn it on another. "Did you not hear me? Get her out of here!" He was looking at me, and I blinked at him, wondering what he was talking about. Then he whipped out a short throwing knife, which he sent into the throat of a rat that had somehow snuck up on the body lying at my feet. The knife caught it in the back of the neck and it squealed, pawing at the knife with claws extended so that it cut its own flesh. It rolled away from the person it had been about to attack, and I stared down at the sight of myself lying on the asphalt.
I finally noticed that the bloody arm Jimmy had been gnawing on wasn't mine. I felt the pain, saw the blood, but the flesh underneath the gore was a light, even honey tone, a color I couldn't get unless I had it sprayed on. The hand was long fingered, the arm was muscular and the chest supporting this new arm of mine was as flat as a man's. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a man's, and that it was wearing Tomas' cobweb shirt and denim jacket. I staggered against a nearby Volkswagen and the body at my feet sat up.
"Cassie, where are you?" My blue eyes shone with anger and what looked like fear. It was hard to tell; I wasn't used to reading my own expression. "Answer me, damn it!"
I knelt beside what had been my body and looked into those familiar eyes. The face looked wrong for a second, until I realized that I was seeing myself the way everyone else did, instead of the usual mirror view. There was no way to deny it: somehow, I had ended up in Tomas' body. Which left the question, who the hell was in mine?
"Who are you?" I grabbed my arm, trying not to notice that Jack had had a point about my wardrobe lately, and my body let out a shriek.
"Cut that out, goddamnit!" If blue eyes could let off sparks, mine were doing a pretty good job.
"Who are you? Who's in there?" Before I could get an answer, Jimmy shook off the blow I'd dealt him and came at us again. I had plenty of time to grab my gun from Tomas' waistband and shoot him. I saw a crimson flower bloom on his chest, slightly below the heart, if a rat's heart is in the same place as a human's, but he kept coming. I shot him again, in the arm this time. It was a mistake—I was aiming for his head—but it turned out to be a good thing because he had been in the process of raising a gun. He dropped it and scrabbled at his chest, while I knelt there wondering where he'd hidden a weapon in the few remaining pieces of his suit. He paused a few feet away, giving me plenty of time to finish the job, but he wasn't looking at me.
"Call off your pet gorilla or you'll never find your dad." The voice was unmistakably Jimmy's, so I learned another new thing—weres could talk in their altered forms, or at least half satyrs could.
"What?" I eased my finger off the trigger, and Jimmy threw me a dirty glance.
"I wasn't talking to you." He looked down at whoever was in my body and grimaced. "We can make a deal; don't be stupid—call him off. Tony ain't gonna tell you what you want to know. He likes Rog too much where he is."
"My father is dead." I couldn't understand what Jimmy thought he was playing at, but it wasn't going to work.
He looked pissed, although that could have been because of the blood seeping out from between his fingers and splattering the asphalt. "Damn it, I'm not talking to you!"
An explosion caused me to look up, and I saw that Pritkin and Louis-César had been busy. Six furry bodies littered the lot, sprawled over cars and slumped on the ground, about the same number that were still active. Louis-César was methodically butchering two of the remaining ones while dodging the flying talons that were trying to decapitate him. Pritkin, though, was really tearing loose, and by the expression on his face loving every minute of it. He blew up another car, shooting through a large wererat who looked down at his missing middle in surprise before keeling over. Then he stopped another that had leapt at him from the roof of a minivan by yelling something that caused the were to burst into flames in midair. Blazing pieces rained down on Pritkin's shields—I could see them spark in electric blue wherever one hit—but none got through.
I couldn't believe that no one from the bar was concerned about the noise. Shotgun blasts are not exactly quiet, and neither were the grunting, squealing and scuffling that accompanied them. It was also strange that the vamps weren't attacking but hadn't left, either. Five of them stood around, watching the action as if waiting for something.
"Tomas, behind you!" Louis-César jumped over the body of the huge rat in front of him and started towards me. His expression, and a curse in my own voice from behind me, told me that had I picked a really bad time to be distracted. I whirled around to see that Jimmy had grabbed my body by the hair and had one of those three-inch claws pressed to my throat. "I told you to get her out of here!" Louis-César was looking at Jimmy, but he was talking to me. Or, rather, to Tomas, only he didn't appear to be home. I wasn't too worried about the enraged vampire at my side, though; the claw, which had cut a fine line across my throat, was holding all my attention.
A stream of very inventive curses poured out of my body's mouth, some of which sounded real familiar. Well, at least I knew who was keeping house. "Shut up, Billy. Don't make this worse."
The blue eyes widened and focused on me. "Wait a minute, you're in there? Good God, I thought you were dead! I thought…"
"I said, shut up." I wasn't in the mood for one of Billy's harangues, and I needed to think. Okay, one problem at a time. It wouldn't do me much good to figure out how to get my body back if its throat had been cut in the meantime, so deal with Jimmy now and freak out later.
"What do you want, Jimmy?"
"Be silent, Tomas! You have done enough damage tonight. I will deal with this." Louis-César seemed behind on the action, but I wasn't about to take the time to get him up to speed.
"Shut up," I told him, and the expression of incredulity that passed over his face would have been funny in other circumstances. "Come on, Jimmy, what do you want to let… her… go? You wanted a deal, remember?" It was surreal, standing there in someone else's body and arguing with a giant rat, but all I could see was my body with Billy Joe's frightened expression. I couldn't rely on him to get us out of this: he'd never even made it to thirty before he ended up drowned like an unwanted kitten.
"I want out of here alive; what you think?" Jimmy glanced, not at the vamps at my side, but at the ones lounging around the fight. Okay, maybe they weren't his buddies after all. "And cutie here is going with me. Tony will forget about our little problem if I bring him Cassie, and that's exactly what's gonna happen."
"No way." I was not going to stand there and let Jimmy cart me off. None of my fantasies about Tomas' body had included taking up permanent residence. "Try again."