gun up against his temple, Syn smiled. “I’m okay with that outcome. Can we do it now, or do you have to wait for nightfall so we can go out into the woods and leave less of a mess for the doggen to clean up.”
Xcor’s foot started to tap, his shitkicker’s heel bouncing on the tile floor. “You’re cycling really tight. Eight months ago. Six nights ago. The night before last with the human male in the alley. You’re moving really quickly.”
“So let’s end it right now.” Syn nodded at the gun holstered on V’s hip. “He can do it. Or if you want to, you do it.”
The Brother Vishous frowned, the tattoo at his temple distorting. “I still haven’t heard you say you killed the females.”
Closing his eyes, Syn thought back to that night, that club . . . the female with the wig and the bustier, the breasts and the lips. He remembered seeing her through the crowd, the push and shove, the argument she’d been in. Then she came across to him, came on to him, toyed with him, until he picked her up and took her down below. Against the door, fucking. Door falling open and them spilling into the black interior of the storage room.
His monster stirring in his skin. Prowling. Demanding to be let out.
Then him outside of the club, the cold burning his face, his body hot under his clothes, his cock still hard.
He was so tired of all this, so exhausted by his nature, his urges, this thing inside of him that had to get out. He had done his best, at least in the Old World, to choose victims who deserved it, but now . . . he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
“Of course I did it,” he said as he looked at the Brother. “I killed both of them and I hung them up by meat hooks in the storage rooms. And unless you take care of me properly, I’m going to do it again.”
* * *
Hours later, as the sun gave up on its illuminating duties and sank below the horizon, Butch was back in his evidence room at the training center, staring up at the wall, his chair on two legs. In his hands, the Bic he used to take notes, notes, and more notes was traveling in and out of the stalks of his fingers, pirouetting around the digits in an endless dance.
When the door opened, he didn’t look over. No need to. By the scent of Turkish tobacco, he knew who it was.
Righting his chair, he pulled over some of the papers on the table to make a spot for Vishous if the brother wanted to park it. “How’s tricks, kid?”
“You tell me.”
The door closed, and his best friend went over and stared at the black-and-white photographs of Mai. Both V and he stayed silent for a very long time, and he had to admit he was glad his roommate was in the house, so to speak. V was the smartest person he’d ever met. Surely, if there was anyone who could make sense of this fruit salad of WTF, it was Vishous.
Because things just weren’t adding up, and that did not make sense. It just . . . did not. Everything on the surface was pointing directly at Syn, but that was it. The evidence didn’t back things up, and it was hard to fathom why somebody would cop to a killing—or two—that they did not commit. Butch had a few other angles he could explore . . . but if the way the case had been going so far was any indication, he wasn’t going to get any better answers than the ones that had been coming through to him already.
“You mind if I light up?” V asked as he backed up like the close-up hadn’t worked so maybe a panoramic view of things might help.
“Nope. I’m thinking of volunteering for the habit as well at this point.”
Vishous went to pull back one of the chairs. When it resisted, Butch sat forward and reached for his Phillips head. “Here, let’s unscrew the—”
The brother yanked the thing up, the high-pitched whine of metal reaching and surpassing its structural integrity making Butch wince. As some of the screws bounced on the hard polished floor, V turned the chair around and inspected the mangled feet.
“Didn’t think that one through,” he muttered.
His solution to the inevitable instability was to pound those four feet into the concrete over