Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [121]
“You’re quite a—”
I turned to face him full-on, letting him get a good and nasty look at my too-black eyes and my too-white skin with the fragile blue veins crawling spider-like beneath it. I wasn’t wearing any makeup and that, too, had been deliberate. “Look buddy,” I growled, still keeping it quiet. “I know about your program, and I know what you’re doing here, rounding up these assholes for reconnaissance.” I used Major Bruner’s word. The one that gave me the shakes if I thought about it too hard.
“You don’t know dick,” he argued.
Trying to lure him now, trying to draw him outside, I turned my back to him halfway and began to ooze toward the rearward door where the back stairs appeared to be. “Dick? Oh, I know him. But I think his name is actually Bruner,” I sneered, keeping close watch on his face as I retreated.
“Boss?” somebody said. One of the young grunts, the parkour acolytes.
“Not now!” he hissed, reaching out to take me by the arm.
I moved it out of his grasp fast enough to make his eyebrows shoot skyward. And still it looked like I hadn’t moved at all. Catlike, I lingered a step beyond him, but I did not run. “We should talk,” I told him.
And I practically slithered toward the stairs.
He shuffled behind me, too heavy and loud for a man who taught a class on how to sneak around and run away, but maybe he was just that nervous. He was young after all, and maybe he’d heard lots about my kind but hadn’t encountered many of us.
Or, as I considered with scorn, it might be that he’d only ever encountered us while we were restrained, or blinded, or crippled, or dead. The very thought made me want to turn around and rip his head off but I didn’t, not yet. Self-restraint is not one of my chief virtues, but self-preservation is—and I still had my uncertainties to anchor me to nonviolence.
We slipped together into the stairwell and let the door ease shut behind us. It was dark in there, and would’ve been romantic or, like, totally hot under different circumstances. He started to talk, but I wasn’t listening yet. I was looking upstairs and downstairs, and opening my psychic sense to feel around for other people in either direction. I was wondering about the bare lightbulbs screwed into the wall fixtures at the platforms where the stairs leveled, and turned.
“What are you doing here—what are you really doing here? I know what you are, yes, if that’s what you want to know. I know, and I’m not going to sit here and bring you along on one of these game nights, just to have you toy with the kids who—”
I caught up to his rambling and chose this point to interrupt. “Toy?” I blurted. “You accuse me of planning to toy with your Boy Scouts? A fine attitude, you motherfucker, given what you’ve been known to do to my breed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Project Bloodshot, and Major Bruner and his sick Nazi experiments.”
He paled. “Bloodshot’s a closed program,” he insisted.
“That’s what I heard, but that’s not what I’m seeing. Bruner’s still at it, and you’re in it with him.”
“No. You have no idea!”
“Then what’s this for? These junior paramilitary enthusiasts? Don’t try to tell me you’re not using them for recon; don’t lie to me and say that this is some stupid extracurricular activity. You’re sending them after us, using them as disposable pawns to track down safe spots and homes, and then raid them and turn them inside out.”
“No one said they were disposable,” he objected. I couldn’t gauge his sincerity. He was too rattled by being so close to me, which told me I was probably a novelty. A known novelty, but a novelty all the same.
“You send them into facilities that are owned and maintained by vampires, unarmed,” I added, remembering Trevor’s utter lack of defensive weaponry. “If you don’t expect them to get killed, you’re stupider than you look.”
“Fuck you,” he said, resorting to that last argument of vice presidents.
“I know you’re working with Bruner,” I added. “I know he’s been using