Page 49 of Red Rooster

“No,” Jamie said, through his teeth this time. “What am I going todo? With my life? I’m legally dead, and I…” Oh shit, he was breathing too hard, loud and rough enough to attract a concerned glance from the next table. “I…”

Alexei laid his hand over top of Jamie’s, and Jamie jerked out from under it, almost dumping his plate in his lap.

Alexei sighed. “You should calm down.”

“Ican’t. My roommate saw me getting coffee this morning, and she screamed. And I can never go home…”

When he was thirteen, and weighed no more than a wet cat, according to his grandmother, Brent Hardman had taken a box cutter to the oil painting he’d spent three months painstakingly perfecting in hopes of entering it into a local youth art show. He’d left it in the art room at school, and went in early one morning, flipped on the lights. The canvas in tatters. The yellow-handled box cutter – the same one Brent had been flipping over and over on the bus yesterday, the one he’d tucked in his pocket before the driver could see – on the table beside it. No painting; no entry for the contest; no chance to get into the exclusive May-Thorough summer program for gifted young artists…

He’d tilted the box cutter under the harsh lights, watched the light catch its blade. And he’d wondered. He’d almost…thought about the way his blood would look, welling against his too-white skin. Running off his wrist, dripping onto the tile. An art piece all its own.

He’d wondered, as a kid, what it would like to no longer be alive. Simpler, he’d always thought. Being dead wasn’t complicated.

Except now hewasdead, on paper, and blood was something he had to drink, and everything,everythingwas complicated and awful.

He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. “I don’t want this,” he whispered. “None of it. And I don’t know what todo.”

Alexei laid a consoling hand in the middle of his back, and this time he didn’t try to avoid the touch. It was a measure of small comfort, if nothing else, genuine or not.

“Jamie,” Nikita said. “Look at me.”

He did, through the gaps in his fingers, hating him.

“It doesn’t matter if you want this. It happened.” His voice lowered a fraction; a tiny note of sympathy crept in. “It won’t be easy, learning to live this way. But you can’t collapse. If your life before was worth something, then this one has to be as well.”

Sasha turned to smile at his friend, expression almost proud.

Nikita ignored him, staring steadily at Jamie. “We can help you. And right now, we need your help, too. Someone’s abusing immortality in this city, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

Jamie let his hands fall slowly down to the table. “But – but I’m an artist.” And it sounded like Nikita was asking something of him he’d never contemplated before.

He nodded. “Notjust. Not anymore.”

~*~

“I don’t even know what to think anymore,” Captain Abbot fumed. “Somethingatethem? Ate them?”

Lanny tossed his stress ball from one hand to the other and said, “Wouldn’t be the first time a dealer had a buncha riled up pits.”

Abbot stopped his pacing, spun, and pinned his glare on Lanny. “Andyou. The vics wereyour neighbors.”

“Yes, sir,” Lanny said, blandly. They’d all learned it was best not to respond in kind when the captain got like this.

“We’re working on some possible leads,” Trina said.

He swung his glare to her – long enough to make her want to wriggle down into her shirt collar – then muttered something unintelligible and stormed toward his office.

“That went well,” Lanny said.

She sighed. “Speaking of leads…”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Jesus, don’t pull a muscle.”

“What if we go back to the scene, and I” – he tapped the end of his nose – “tried to follow them?”

Something about the gesture, and the offer, struck her as unbearably cute, so she hated to burst his bubble. “Sasha already sniffed it out, though. Said the trail ends. They must have gotten in a car.”