Undertow by Andrea Speed

Author:Andrea Speed [Speed, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance
ISBN: 9781623805654
Google: 7EE1Fuz02CgC
Amazon: 1623805651
Goodreads: 18089019
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2013-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

19

We Die Young

IT HAD been a while since Roan took a bunch of pills without looking at any of them, but this time he did. Just a few from random bottles until he stopped crying and felt calmer.

So was he changed since he came out of his coma? Was it worse? Doctor Rosenberg thought removing some of the tumors would help with his control of the lion, but it hadn’t helped at all. Perhaps the tumors were a convenient excuse for what was actually happening: the lion was taking over.

As Rosenberg always told him, there was no precedent for the later stage of the virus. Most people didn’t live with it long enough, and computer models were highly flawed. He’d always worried that eventually he’d transform into a lion and never transform back, but this was worse. The lion was infiltrating him, making transformation pointless. He might look Human, but the Human was gone. The Human was dying in slow increments, in the space between seconds, in pieces so tiny it was hard to notice until a huge section was simply gone.

When the lion woke up in his body? That was a precursor. That’s what was coming. And they were all idiots not to see it.

He decided he really wanted to get loaded and shut his brain off. He knew he needed to be honest with Dylan, too, give him a heads up so he could abandon this sinking ship before it went down.

It probably wasn’t a great idea to go to Panic, but before he did, he stopped in a convenience store, used their grotty little washroom to wash his face and take away the tear tracks, and bought a plastic-wrapped sandwich that tasted exactly like Saran Wrap to eat in the car and allay his nausea. That sick feeling happened sometimes with painkillers. He managed not to barf, although it was a close thing.

Panic was loud and fairly busy, but that’s what he wanted. He wanted everything loud enough to overwhelm his senses, including the scent of people, which was enough to roil his newly calm stomach.

He lucked out and Dylan was busy at the other end of the bar, so he sidled up to an open spot and ordered a microbrew from Rodrigo, one of the small legion of hot Latino bartenders who worked at Panic. (A growing category that included Dylan, although most people didn’t know that.) Rodrigo served Roan with a smile and a joke about… something. He really wasn’t paying attention. Roan just smiled and nodded, to be polite. Rodrigo didn’t seem to notice.

Roan drank his beer and waited for Dylan to come down to where he was, aware that the music playing now was some Interpol remix, mainly because the singer’s voice was fairly unmistakable. He found himself mouthing the words, caught off guard by the fact that he knew them. But Interpol had been a favorite of Paris’s, so he must have absorbed the knowledge by osmosis. Funny what you pick up.

Dylan

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