Eater of Lives(SPECTR #4) by Jordan L. Hawk Read Free Book Online

coat as John
carried it around the desk, nostrils flaring slightly. “Any
luck?”
    “Nope. Found stuffed between garbage bags in
an alley, suggesting the perp wanted to hide it. I’m amazed you
picked up anything on it, after what it’s been through.”
    “Yeah.” Caleb’s mouth quirked wryly, and he
looked away from the coat, as if realizing he’d stared at it for a
little too long. “What sort of NHE are we dealing with here,
anyway?”
    John sighed and ran his fingers lightly over
the slick material of the coat’s outer shell. If he concentrated
hard enough, he felt a tiny vibration in the skin of his
fingertips, a whisper of etheric energy soaked into the coat but
now faded to almost nothing with time. “Given it’s killing and
cannibalizing, we could be looking at a couple of different things.
Possibly a therianthrope, although usually they have to be pretty
far gone by the time they start actually eating people.”
    “No,” Caleb said with a shake of his head.
His long hair tumbled into his face, and John resisted the impulse
to sweep it back and sink his fingers into the soft locks. “It
doesn’t smell anything like the werewolf.”
    John glanced at Sean, who responded with a
frown. “They have different scents?” John asked. “The various kinds
of NHE?”
    Caleb blinked. “Um…yeah? Didn’t I mention
it?”
    “No. Just that Gray found
them…appetizing.”
    “Oh. Well, yeah. The werewolf reeked like
mange and wet fur, and ghouls are like rot, and the incubus stank
of sour roses. Gray says it’s because they’re different kinds of
demon.”
    Sean shifted uneasily. “You know what this
thing is?”
    “No.” Caleb looked confused a moment.
“They’re all demons as far as Gray is concerned. He doesn’t care
about labels. They’re just ‘mortal nonsense,’ he says. But he can
name some of them, if his past…hosts…had a word for them.”
    John sank into his chair and rolled it
around, bringing himself knee-to-knee with Caleb. Goddess, this was
all fascinating. Gray offered such a window onto a whole different
order of being…
    Damn. He sounded like Forsyth now. Nothing
wrong with that, if his interest in the drakul had been purely
academic, and not…well. “And Gray doesn’t recognize this one?”
    “No. Or just, you know, as food .”
Caleb swallowed convulsively, his gaze focused on his hands,
wrapped around his knees. “I can tell you it smells like a fucking
meat locker, though.”
    John frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “I used to work at a grocery store as a teen,
one of those really upscale ones which make their own cuts of meat.
They stored the carcasses in this huge room in the back. Had this
really distinctive odor to it. And a sticky floor. Ugh.”
    “Was this before or after you turned
vegetarian?” Sean asked.
    Caleb shot him a dark look. “Does it matter?
Look, the point is, the demon reminds me of it. Frozen blood and
torn flesh. Frost on dead skin. That sour smell people get when
they’re on one of those high-protein diets that are supposed to
mimic starvation. Ketones, I think?”
    Sean seemed about to say something else, but
John reached out and grabbed his friend’s wrist. “Sean. Think for a
minute.” And please Goddess, come up with some other answer than
what popped into his mind. “What variety of NHE does the
description remind you of?”
    Sean’s complexion went the color of old
cheese. “Aw fuck. Wendigo?”
    John hadn’t wanted to say it aloud. Hadn’t
wanted to even think it. “We might be off base. There might
not be a correlation at all.”
    “Yeah. You want to risk that?”
    Caleb looked back and forth between them,
dark eyes wide. “So…a wendigo is bad?”
    “They’re cannibals,” John said, amazed his
voice didn’t tremble. “They exist only to eat human flesh. But the
more they eat, the more they starve. Before the forty days are up,
the possessed person inevitably starts to murder and eat people.
Once possession is