His gray-haired head jerked up and down in quick, nervous nods. His dark eyes were wild. With fear or drunkenness?
“It’s this place,” he said with a shudder of revulsion.
“We didn’t have to come here.” She wasn’t sure why he had insisted on her following him from the station to the alley. With no sun between the buildings, the air wasn’t just still—it was cold.
She shivered. But not just from the cold.
One of those buildings had a bar in its basement—Club Underground. A bar where strange things happened...like Bernie had claimed happened here. Too bad her friend owned the place...
“This was my home first,” he said, gesturing toward a Dumpster shoved against one of the buildings. “Then all of them started coming around—making trouble.”
“All of them?” she asked. “Who are you talking about?”
“What,” he corrected her, the word sharp. “They’re not human. They can fly.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. And exactly how much had he had to drink?
“Those things,” he said. “I’ve seen ’em fly out of the alley—straight up in the night sky like big, human-looking bats.”
He had definitely gotten into some strong alcohol, but his words weren’t slurred. So maybe he’d just been drinking so long that the alcohol had damaged his brain. Over her years on the streets, she had seen a lot of vagrants develop alcohol dementia. She wouldn’t be able to reason with him; he was probably beyond that.
So she simply asked, “What do you want me to do about them, Bernie? Flying isn’t a crime.”
“They’re killers,” he said. “They kill humans and each other. If you’re not careful, Detective Wever, they might kill you.”
Kate smiled and opened her mouth to assure him that she would be fine. But the alley suddenly grew darker and colder. Along with a chill, a sense of foreboding rushed through her, and for a moment she believed Bernie. There was something out there—something not quite human—and it was coming.
For her.
The murderous intent gleaming in the man’s topaz eyes chilled Kate’s blood. He was going to kill someone.
His hands, with wide palms and long, strong fingers, grasped her shoulders. Then he moved her aside and continued his pursuit of the man he had been chasing down the street before Kate had stepped into his path. But instead of knocking her down, he had caught and steadied her. Her skin tingled from his touch despite the layers of jacket and sweater that had separated his palms from her bare flesh.
She shook off the eerie feeling and forced herself to move, running after him. And as she ran, she reached for her phone and her gun. She wasn’t on duty, but it was her job to stop him from killing.
In a metropolis like Zantrax, Michigan, a detective was never truly off duty—no matter that her real shift had ended hours ago. Or that she wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and a soft bed and sweet oblivion.
“Where the hell did he go?” she murmured, unable to catch a glimpse of him ahead of her. This close to midnight the sidewalk wasn’t as crowded as during the day—especially since this area consisted mostly of office buildings and warehouses.
Except for the underground nightclub in the basement of one of those buildings.
Club Underground was always busy, always full of people who were too beautiful to be real. She shook off the doubts Bernie had put in her head a few weeks ago.
He was crazy, she reminded herself.
And maybe so was she for not calling for backup before chasing after a man as big as the one who had nearly run her down. But she couldn’t call in a crime in progress until she knew he was actually committing one. It was possible he’d just been running, albeit in jeans and a white sweater, and she’d just imagined that murderous gleam in his eyes.
Damn Bernie and his wild stories. But if she was being honest, she had to admit she’d had doubts about her city even before Bernie had warned her about flying nonhumans.
The man who’d nearly run her over had been human, though. And he had definitely been angry as hell. She couldn’t see him now, but she couldn’t get that brief image she’d had of him out of her mind. He was so tall and broad-shouldered, with a long mane of thick black hair that he would have been impossible to miss had he still been on the street ahead of her. But he couldn’t have just disappeared.
She stopped and glanced around, peering into the shadows gathering outside the circles of light from the streetlamps on the sidewalk. A rage like his wouldn’t have been easily suppressed or controlled so that he could hide silently in the shadows, though.
She cocked her head and listened. Grunts and groans and an almost inhuman cry shattered the quiet of the nearly deserted street and confirmed that her instinct to pursue the man had been right. Her pulse leaping, she tracked the sounds of the fight to the narrow opening of that alley between the building with Club Underground in the basement and the deserted furniture warehouses.
Lifting her cell phone, she reported the assault in progress. A unit would be dispatched for backup. But, remembering the gleam in those unusual topaz eyes, she doubted backup would arrive in time to prevent a murder. So she pulled her gun from her holster and, adrenaline and nerves coursing through her, stepped into the alley.
The two men grappled on the ground, rolling across the asphalt as they locked in mortal combat. The man with whom she’d collided swung his fists over and over into the face of another man. They were closely matched in size—tall and muscular. But one was clearly the attacker, the other the victim. The victim kicked and pushed, trying to get away. “Stop!” she yelled. “Zantrax PD. Break it up!”
The man on the ground murmured something, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
“Shut up. Just shut up! Or I’ll tear your damn throat out,” the attacker growled, his hand reaching for the other man’s neck.
“Stop!” Kate shouted now, panic rising. “I’m Lieutenant Wever, a detective with Zantrax Police Department, and I’m placing you under arrest for assault.”
But he ignored her as if she had not spoken at all. She couldn’t just stand there and do nothing while one man killed another—as she watched. So she fired. The bullet struck the man’s shoulder and propelled him back. He shook his head and shrugged, as if shaking off a muscle twinge and glanced at the blood spreading down his sleeve and across his white sweater.
The victim struggled beneath the man she’d shot, but before he could get out of reach, his attacker caught him again. His hands, his long fingers stiff like claws, closed around the man’s throat. Despite the bullet in his shoulder, he had lost none of his strength.
Was he on something? Drugged suspects were sometimes harder to subdue and apprehend because they tended to be more violent. And superhumanly strong.
So Kate fired again.
This bullet propelled him back farther, his hands slipping from his victim’s throat. Finally, he turned toward her, as if just noticing that she’d joined them in the alley. With that murderous intent directed at her, he lurched to his feet, and she noticed the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
He was armed and he was heading straight toward her.
Heart hammering with fear, Kate fired again. This bullet struck him directly in the chest—in his heart. He pressed his hand to it as if pledging allegiance. Then he pulled it away and looked down at his bloody palm—seeming surprised to see the blood.
Had he thought she was firing blanks? Couldn’t he feel the