John Levitt - Unleashed

“Exactly. One and the same, perhaps. Add to that the fact that Sherwood finds her oddly opaque, and you’ve got a hell of a lot of coincidence.”

The chain of logic was flimsy, but it was one of those things that felt right-it had the ring of truth on an emotional level, and that’s often more reliable than cold fact. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.

I offered a few halfhearted objections, but it was more just to excuse my own lack in not even thinking of it in the first place. It was still hard to believe that none of us, even Lou, couldn’t tell the difference between a child in a Lion King costume at Halloween and a real lion.

Timothy had been listening quietly, but he had a puzzled look on his face.

“I have a question,” he said. “You were over at your friend Morgan’s yesterday, right? When the shape-shifter was there?” I nodded. “But Ruby was over here almost all of yesterday. So how could it have been her?”

Damn. The idea had made perfect sense, only to be torpedoed by an inconvenient fact.

“That is a problem,” I admitted.

“It would seem so,” said Victor, “but something’s not adding up here, and I think at the very least we need to pay Ruby a visit. Unannounced and unexpected. Mason?”

“Now?”

“When better? After the next person dies and we figure out the details?”

Point taken. We decided just Victor and I would go-maybe we could catch her by surprise. If we all showed up en masse, she’d know something was up right off the bat.

A half hour later we were looking for a parking space for Victor’s silver BMW. Ruby’s place turned out to be on the second floor of a small apartment building in the Richmond, not far from where Eli lived.

Victor wasn’t relying on any use of talent this time. Anything that involved talent would be up to me-he was going with firepower, a Glock.40 that he had taken out of his safe and put in a shoulder holster.

When we arrived in the area he parked two blocks away, as a tactical move. We walked over to the building separately, a half block or so apart. If true, it was entirely possible Ruby had realized she’d been outed-Sherwood might be as transparent to her as she was opaque to Sherwood. No point in providing her an opportunity to take us both down at once. I wasn’t that worried, though-between Victor and myself, I thought we could handle her. But we didn’t know the extent of her powers, and it never hurts to be cautious.

Victor entered the building first, and I entered behind him a few seconds later. It was an older building, with three apartments on the ground floor and three more up above. We climbed up the stairs to the upper landing and stood outside Ruby’s door, listening. Victor knocked, loudly. It was silent inside. Either she hadn’t got home yet or she was very sound asleep. Or she was quietly awaiting us.

Lou gave a little snort and wrinkled up his nose as if there was a bad smell in the air. I took a deep breath, but couldn’t smell anything. But when I took another, I could just sense the faintest whiff of something, sweet and cloying like rotten fruit. Or meat. It sent an atavistic chill up my spine to the back of my neck. The reaction to that particular smell is rooted deep, and is never good.

“No wards,” Victor said quietly.

I checked; he was right. No practitioner leaves their home unguarded. But perhaps Ruby wasn’t precisely a practitioner, was she, now? He tried the door. Locked, of course. That wouldn’t be a problem for Victor, however. Mechanical devices are very difficult to affect using talent, but in addition to his talent, Victor was a regular James Bond. I had no doubt but that he carried a handy collection of precise lock picks in his wallet.

He reached inside his jacket, pulled out the Glock, and held it six inches away from the striker plate where the lock met the doorjamb. So much for precision and subtlety.

“Muffle the sound for me, will you?” he said. “We don’t want to disturb the neighbors.”

He half expected me to have trouble with that, at which point he’d sigh and whip out some preset spell and do it himself. But a thick carpet covered the hallway, and overhead, a cone-shaped metal shade held a ceiling lightbulb, the kind you slip over the bulb and then screw the bulb into the socket.

I used the funnel shape as a template and curved a line of talent around the gun, then another line spreading out into the floor of the landing. When the gun fired, the sound would bleed off into the carpet. People in the adjacent apartment might feel a slight vibration, but in San Francisco occasional tremors are hardly worth remarking on.

Victor put two silent shots next to the doorknob. Splinters of wood flew off, one almost gouging my face. He shoved the door open and stood in the doorway, gun ready, scoping out the inside. After a few seconds, he motioned to me and eased his way into the apartment.

Inside, it was a mess. Half-eaten pizzas falling out of their boxes littered the floor, along with crusted cartons of takeout. Clothes strewn about, dirt everywhere, empty wine bottles collecting dust on the floor. A mattress had been shoved into the corner of the living room, up against a wall. On each end, blankets and sheets had been torn into strips and jumbled together into a nest, with indentations at either end where a heavy body might have laid at rest. The lair of the beast. The whole room smelled like the big cat house at the zoo, overwhelming that first faint whiff of corruption I’d noticed in the hall.

A bathroom, surprisingly clean, was off to one side, and next to it a closed door, apparently to a bedroom. Victor crossed the room, crouched down so that his head was below the level of the doorknob, and reached up for it. Anyone inside the room would be expecting someone outside to be standing erect, and the most common attack is focused at chest level. The split second it takes to adjust can make all the difference.

I moved out of the line of sight from the bedroom door. A couple of years ago Victor would have needed to remind me, but I’d at least learned the basics by now. He swung open the door, whipped his head into the doorway for half a second, then whipped it back before anything inside could react. None of these precautions turned out to be necessary. There was nothing in the room. At least, nothing alive.

Ruby was there, of course. The real Ruby. Parts of her. She lay crumpled on the floor next to an unmade bed. Her chest had been torn open and there was an empty cavity where her heart had once pumped merrily away. Her head had been detached from the rest of her body, and the skull had been cracked open like a walnut. What was left of her face was swollen and barely recognizable, smeared with blood and gray brain tissue. Her long red hair was clumped and matted, like stuffing in an old pillow, and its once-vibrant color was dull and washed out. Everywhere, flies swarmed greedily around the carcass.

I walked over to the doorway but didn’t go in. With the bedroom door open, the distinctive sickly sweet odor of rotting flesh was now evident-not overwhelming, but enough to make my gorge rise. I had to swallow several times to keep from throwing up. Lou backed away and went over to the front door, pretending to stand guard. I wished I’d thought of that first.

Victor walked into the room and knelt down by her body as if this were something that happened every day. But he straightened up quickly and got out of there before very long. He wasn’t anxious to linger any more than I was, and there was little point in performing forensic tests. It’s not like there was any mystery about what had happened here. We took a brief look around the apartment to see if there was any indication of where Ruby, or rather, the shape-shifter, might be now. Papers were strewn over a table in the living room; handouts promoting bands and clubs, a brochure from a show at the Asian Art Museum, a flyer titled: “Open Studios at Hunters Point.”