Blood Trails Page 3

  Chapter Three

  August 1st, 3032 Sapphire City, Planet Jericho

  She’d lost the trail. Hailey just prevented herself from growling in frustration. This cat-and-mouse game was becoming tedious. Hunting was one thing. If she went out of her way to stalk her prey, then she wanted the satisfaction of catching it.

  Being hunted, on the other hand, infuriated her.

  She sniffed the air again, searching for any trace of the scent she’d been following—the one that seemed to be following her from world to world. There was nothing left. The bastard lost himself in a crowd as if he knew she wouldn’t be able to find him there.

  Her jaw ached, fangs itching to emerge. Hailey swallowed the urge, dropped low to the ground to sniff again. It had rained last night, a huge storm she could still hear from miles away where it had moved on. The ground was still wet but it didn’t hold a clue to point her in the right direction.

  She was vexed. And that was a word she’d never have used to describe herself BC (Before Changing). Losing her patience, she gave up and turned back. She was walking downwind. If anyone followed her, she’d know before they even came into her sight. Hailey wished the bastard would. She was sick of having a shadow. She wanted to finish this.

  Her shoes pinched. Hailey had gotten too used to walking barefoot. People—normal people, anyway—tended to frown at that. Gave her strange looks. Better to fit in. The less attention she got, the better.

  And the more she clung to her human habits the less she behaved like an animal. It never left her, though. Hailey went to sleep in a bed each night but some mornings she woke up on a nest of blankets on the floor. More and more now she wanted to eat with her bare hands and had to remind herself to use utensils.

  Clothes felt wrong on her skin. They abraded and confined, making her fur itch when she didn’t even have any. She’d started wearing long, loose dresses and a trench coat, easy to put on and take off in a hurry in case she needed to change.

  Weird, though. She felt a sense of the cat in her mind but there was still just her. Hailey. With freakishly altered senses that made her jumpy. She kept her head down to protect sensitive ears. Loose clothing didn’t abrade as much. There was that eating thing, but that was just impatience as far as she was concerned. Who didn’t eat with their hands every once in a while? Besides, metal tasted cold.

  Hailey stepped out of the alley onto the main street. A transport whizzed by, horn blaring for no good reason. It hurt her ears and she hissed. Stupid creatures, drivers. A low growl rumbled in her chest. She bit it back.

  Maybe she should have stuck to the side streets.

  The planet’s two moons would be crossing in a day or two. The gravity fields played havoc on the seas. In this harbor city people were already taking precautions against a possible flood. There was a lot of nervous energy making her hackles rise. She shook out her head like a wet dog then glanced around warily to see if anyone noticed.

  Her damn stalker was making her paranoid. Hailey flipped her collar up, hunched her shoulders, and quickened her step.

  Two blocks from her den—apartment, damn it!—she got that being-watched feeling. She was really getting sick of it. A hunter didn’t like being hunted. Had a tendency to lash out at inanimate objects when threatened by something unseen. She’d mangled a number of parked transports that way.

  Digging her claws into her palms, Hailey focused on the human side of her mind to bring herself back under control. She couldn’t. Not until that feeling receded, her watcher gone. Only then did she relax the slightest bit.

  The rest of the way Hailey walked slowly, careful with every step she made. Scents filled her nose, both familiar and strange. Don’t think about it. Let it go. If she didn’t, she’d lose it. Can’t do that.

  Three steps from the door.

  Hailey scented the air a last time, a security measure. She didn’t sense a threat; couldn’t tell if she’d been followed but her stalker’s scent wasn’t among the many she could distinguish.

  Key in the lock. Low-tech, no biometrics. Shady part of town. Bars on windows and doors. A cage she willingly locked herself into. Couldn’t be helped. It was as much for her protection as everyone else’s.

  Door locked from the inside, chain wedged in place beneath the handle.

  Only then did Hailey take a full breath.

  Her hands were shaking, her entire body humming with the nervous energy of a failed hunt. The beast inside her was restless for a good kill. She could feel it. Fur bristled against the underside of her skin, making her itch all over.

  Hailey toed off her shoes and dropped her trench coat, shrugging out of her dress on her way to the bathroom. Blasting the shower all the way to cold, she stepped into the freezing stream. It was the only thing that seemed to work. Maybe it had something to do with her animal. Snow leopards thrived in freezing weather. The cold calmed her beast enough for Hailey to feel human again.

  She didn’t bother with towels or clothes when she emerged. The longer she stayed pleasantly chilled, the longer she was able to concentrate. And she needed to concentrate. Bypassing the mirror Hailey padded on bare feet to the one defined room in the shithole apartment, trailing water.

  It was empty except for a bed in the middle and a handful of whiteboards. Every available surface she could reach was covered in writing. Somewhere in that unholy mess all over the walls was an answer to her condition. Somewhere in the midst of chemical formulas and complex calculations there was a mistake Hailey had overlooked, a contingency she hadn’t accounted for.

  The one that would kill her.

  Hailey knew her mistake—hubris. She’d been so drunk on her victory, giddy to have superseded years of research in three days, that she’d forgotten one crucial fact: nothing exists in a vacuum.

  She knew what went wrong: her compounds had reacted to each other. What she didn’t know was why. And without knowing the why she couldn’t formulate a solution. The trigger compound hadn’t broken down. It was still in her body, messing with other things. She needed to fix that before she could fix the rest.

  Hailey looked around at the daunting task before her. She was determined to continue her research but each roadblock and failure disillusioned her a little more.

  Amelia had a fully stocked lab and a virtual team of assistants and she couldn’t come up with a trigger. All Hailey had was herself. She couldn’t even use a public library computer. Any search she might make would alert someone. That was the last thing she needed. Hailey wasn’t a certified scientist; she didn’t have the necessary clearance to allow for unhindered research. The chemicals she needed to research were volatile, sometimes unstable, and dangerous in large quantities; just using certain search words would red flag the computer and paint a great big bull’s-eye on her back. The government still had tight control over their failing chem-treatment business. They monitored every molecule of chemical elements from production to storage and disbursement.

  Hailey wasn’t yet desperate enough to pursue black market vendors but she had no illusion that was precisely where she was heading. Without hands-on studies, all her calculations and research were for nothing.

  When the cold began to fade, Hailey found a patch of clear wall, picked up a marker and set to work. Keep busy. Keep thinking. Idleness shut down the ego and the id came out to play. She wrote until her hand began to cramp then wrote more, until the marker fell out of her grasp. By then, her hair was almost dry. She brushed the snow-white tresses out without ever looking at them until they were soft as silk. Then she slipped into a nightgown and set to straightening the room up.

  Her stomach growled insistently. Hailey had been so involved in her hunt she’d forgotten to eat today. A dangerous thing to do in her condition.

  The refrigerator was empty except for a few frozen meals. She took out two of them, perforated the packages with her claws, and heated them. It took less than two minutes to make them ready to eat. When she took the trays out of the heater, Hailey’s hand w
as already reaching for a piece of chicken on one of them. She stopped herself, stubbornly took out a fork, and transferred the food onto a proper plate. There was no table or chair in the kitchen. She usually ate her meals sitting on a big pillow on the floor in her bedroom, picnic style. Tonight was no different.

  Hailey liked it that way. It reminded her of her college days when her roommates would come home carrying bags of takeout for the inevitable all-nighter they were about to participate in. She had fond memories of those times. She’d used to laugh. When was the last time she’d laughed?

  Back then she and Amelia had hardly talked to each other. The obligatory phone calls were limited to bare minimums of personal information and a whole lot of weather and school small talk. That was one thing she could always talk to Amelia about—school. They’d compared notes on their respective colleges, made fun of professors, complained about the cost. Amelia bought her textbooks, preferring to have them on hand for reference. Hailey had checked hers out from the library.

  But the moment their conversations touched on ambition and Hailey’s lack thereof, they always ended the same.

  Hailey wasn’t the brains of the family like Amelia, but what she lacked in smarts she made up for in tenacity and stubbornness. If theories and laws were put into context and engaged her curiosity she was just as good. Hailey had studied because she wanted to learn, not because she wanted a piece of paper that said she was smart. Amelia never understood that. To her, results were everything and if Hailey wasn’t going to do anything with what she knew, there was no point in learning it at all.

  But that was the past. Dead and gone. No point dwelling on it anymore. Only today was relevant, and the brand-new day tomorrow.

  She cut her tongue on her fang while she ate. She barely noticed. The taste of blood didn’t make her as sick now as it used to. And the cuts healed by the time she was done with dinner.

  She cleaned and put away the plate and fork, then Hailey had nothing else to keep her busy. This was the part she hated. After a full day, before sleep, those few hours in which all she had was herself for company and nothing to do. It made her feel restless and caged. The walls were too thick, the windows didn’t open far enough, and those bars. God, those bars! Much longer and Hailey would be clawing at the door to get out and run. Just run free. Wherever.

  She’d done it before. One time when it got really bad she’d completely blacked out. One minute she’d been sitting on the couch of some strange apartment, the next she’d been waking up on the beach three hundred miles away, waves lapping up to her waist, and it had been three days later. There’d been people around that time. They’d called the authorities about a confused, naked woman on the beach. Hailey had swum away before they could catch her.

  Today was beginning to feel a lot like that. Without a TV or any kind of entertainment system, the apartment was quiet as a tomb. Fitting, since she was probably going to die here.

  No. I’ll figure this out.

  It was just a matter of time and, although Hailey might not have the lifetime she would have liked, as long as she didn’t change too much, she had enough time to fix herself.

  Tonight would be another experiment. Another card in her hand, one she hadn’t used before, discounting it as outside her capabilities. She didn’t have the luxury of discounting anything anymore. It was worth a try. People had been learning and succeeding to control their minds and bodies since the dawn of recorded history. It was a question of discipline. Concentration and meditation. It was a possibility. One more twig to grasp onto and hope it held long enough for her to fight her way out of this quicksand.

  Hailey sat on the bed, praying this wouldn’t set her back, and closed her eyes.

  The beast in her instantly sensed an opening and tested its limits. Her hearing intensified until she could make out the waves breaking on the beach a few blocks away. She matched her breathing to that rhythm, forcing her hands to relax, her claws to retract back to human nails. Or as human as she could get them. Her skin itched everywhere, needing to grow fur. Hailey wouldn’t let it. She set the boundaries. She drew the lines for the beast, not the other way around.

  A curious thought. It had become a battle; a war between her and the beast. It shouldn’t have. Not when the whole point had been to integrate the animal into herself.

  A lofty goal.

  And look where it got you. Doubt. She hated its voice in her head. Alone, stranded on a strange planet, without a friend on it. Lost … losing yourself. It has to be a battle. And you have to win.

  Her claws ached, but remained dormant. It was my choice, she argued back to herself stubbornly. I chose this. I wanted this. And I’d be happy now if…

  If you weren’t dying.

  Hailey had no comeback for that.

  Her beast growled grumpily. It was a temperamental little bitch. Or rather … what was the term for a female feline? Hailey drew a blank on that one.

  She shook her head, straightened her spine, and focused on nothing. She cleared her mind of all clutter, even the useful kind. Uneasily she let go of her formulas, bushed back the memories, crowded the beast into the cage she’d constructed for it. It fought her. Hailey fought back. It swiped a paw between the bars, scoring a mark. Hailey could feel soft fur erupt along her spine.

  She pushed back, made the walls solid and soundproof. Still, the beast threw its weight against the walls of its prison and the shock waves reverberated through Hailey’s mind. For a moment, she was afraid she’d falter. The walls bulged outward, softening, and she braced herself for the moment they gave and let the beast loose, enraged and out for blood.

  But the walls held and in a minute gradually straightened and strengthened again, with no effort at all. As if the beast just gave up—though Hailey knew it hadn’t. She could still feel it, a part of her, fighting to be free. She pushed her fear away and embraced darkness, finding peace where nothing else existed.

  Soon the sound of her breathing muted, as did her heartbeat. It was the calmest she’d felt since she’d started on this path. It took no effort at all to stay in that state. With the beast locked away there was nothing to distract her.

  Unreal.

  It was almost as if she wasn’t doing it at all. Hard to believe, given how wired she’d been lately, that she was capable of achieving such complete peace of mind. But Hailey wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She needed to catch a few hours of uninterrupted sleep while she could. So she lay down without opening her eyes and let her consciousness fade into that dark, calm pool…

  The dream Hailey wasn’t like the real one people saw these days. She was the Hailey of a few months ago. Dressed in a barely-there bathing suit, her dark hair blowing in the wind, getting in her eyes. She laughed, the sound echoing on the empty beach, and pulled the hair back, loosely braiding it to keep it out of her face.

  The sun was setting on a greenish blue sea, a giant broken moon rising in its place. Hailey closed her eyes for an instant to enjoy the heat of the sun on her face. As soon as she lost sight of the scenery, fierce silver eyes stared at her in her mind’s eye.

  Hailey gasped and stumbled back, falling onto the soft sand. She looked around frantically for that beast but there was nothing around her. When she shivered, a large beach towel appeared next to her. She bundled herself up in it, drawing her knees to her chest.

  She felt naked without people around, exposed and abandoned.

  “Where is everyone?” The sound of her voice was delayed. Her mouth formed the words a lot faster than her ears heard them. It was eerie.

  One by one, people appeared. Men, women, old friends and family members, even some strangers. There was music now but no voices. She saw her friends speaking to her but couldn’t hear them. Even so, when one of them pulled her up to dance she followed gladly, eager to lose herself in something familiar.

  He pulled her close to say something in her ear. Hailey closed her eyes and a flash of fangs rushed at her face. She pushed away from
the man—far away. He didn’t seem to mind, or notice much. He already had another woman in his arms. How easily he’d replaced her…

  It wasn’t right. None of it.

  Don’t think, just enjoy.

  She couldn’t. There was a wild animal on the loose, and Hailey just knew it was coming for her. She spun in a circle scanning the crowds, the beach, but saw nothing that would pose a threat.

  Except a man dressed in a suit staring right at her from across the crowd. There one second, gone the next.

  Hailey shivered. Her hair slid loose, blinding her, but it wasn’t her hair anymore. It couldn’t be; it was all white! “W-what is this?” She’d already turned another circle by the time she heard her own words. Something growled and Hailey got the impression it was pacing, waiting for something; an opportunity to strike.

  Hailey turned and ran.

  She didn’t get far. The crowd of dancers was all around her now, blocking all paths of retreat.

  And there was that man again! In a crowd of people wearing swimsuits and little else, he stood fully dressed in a suit and shined shoes. His eyes were intense, so blue they were nearly black. And they stared at her without blinking, watching and learning. It was like having her soul interrogated.

  Hailey blinked and he was gone again.

  She fought her way through the crowd, pushing and shoving against sun-warmed bodies but whenever she looked at any of their faces those same blue-black eyes stared at her. Hailey couldn’t run. She couldn’t even move anymore.

  The man had his arms around her, keeping her still, only his suit was gone and his arms were made of granite. She was trapped.

  The man spoke. His mouth moved, forming words but she couldn’t hear them.

  “Let go of me,” she pleaded.

  “You cannot run from this,” she heard him say, his voice as delayed as her own. It was foreign, didn’t belong. This was her dream, her world. He didn’t belong.

  Hailey fought but nothing would move him; nothing worked until she realized she had a secret weapon. She stilled in his arms, scared, furious. Desperate. She felt the beast stop as well, a coiled spring tensed to go off. Complete silence descended on the scene. The dancers froze midstep, the air stood still; the sea might as well have been made of glass.