Day 16: Bloodlust, 2/3, Tosh/Owen
Title: Bloodlust
Author: Xenutia
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own them, but I'd like to think I can play with them once in a while. They belong to RTD, the BBC, and assorted other peeps I can't list here.
Characters/Pairings: Tosh/Owen
Word Count: 11,955
Rating: R (seriously R)
Warnings: Sex (not enough to be NC-17, but R, certainly), gore, some bad language. I think I missed out violence, but there's always next time. ;)
Spoilers: One minor mention of "Cyberwoman", and if you haven't seen anything past "Greeks Bearing Gifts", you might be a bit confused as to some of Tosh's character developments - but other than that, nothing specific.
Notes: This one is set just before "Countrycide" in S1, which places it hopefully in October if my calculations are right! It could fit comfortably into canon without changing anything, and the science is seriously wonky - but who watches Torchwood for the science, anyway?
Prompt: Vampires
9
Fifteen minutes of grim munching later, Owen pulled on his surgical gloves (a new pair, there was no way he was going to fish out the tangled red remains of his last pair), and directed his serious face at the alien shank again. He hadn’t really enjoyed the half of the pizza he’d managed; the garlic bread was hardly touched. Something about the tangible gore-reek of the air, even on the upper levels away from the autopsy room, put him off eating very much. Especially eating anything red.
“Come on, you bastard, give it up,” he growled, poking it with one rubber-clad finger. “What are you?”
“I think it’s fed up with being poked,” said Tosh’s voice from behind him.
She was standing at the top of the stairway, her lips barely curled in a pretty, perplexing smile. There was amusement in it, but also something else, something he couldn’t immediately identify, but that might have been a baser, more vicious, insouciance.
He gestured at the ragged socket-and-ball joint that protruded from the shank in a wet white nub of bone. “Why couldn’t whatever ate it have left a bit more of it?” he grumbled. “We’ve got one eye witness account, and this.” He prodded it again in childish defiance. “And I’m supposed to work out what it is with only the say-so of a short-sighted old bat and half a drumstick to go by.”
“You need to take a break,” she replied, still perched on the top step. Although perched, he realised, wasn’t really the right word for the way she stood, the way she moved, the general looseness of her limbs as if utterly comfortable with herself and her surroundings. Odd. She wasn’t standing or perching but lounging, one elbow rested on the railing, one hip tipped jauntily upward, her face stung into high colour by the cold outside until her cheeks looked like blood spots on a clean sheet. She looked . . . yeah, that was it. She looked like someone who has just received good news.
“What I need is my bloody head read. What’s got you looking so smug, anyway?”
“She shrugged. “Nothing. Let me make you some coffee.”
Owen tipped her a sidelong look, his mouth half-poised to make some smart remark about that being Ianto’s job and why the bloody hell wasn’t he here to do it instead of off gallivanting with Jack . . . but something, he thought it might have been the hot intent on her face, stopped him. If she wanted to play assistant instead of actually going home and sleeping, like normal people did, then he wasn’t about to say no.
10
She brought it rich and steaming from Ianto’s machine a few minutes later, the earthy fragrance for one brief, blissful moment closing out the dark stench of butcher’s shops and secret body fluids and the disinfectant which tried, and failed, to mask it all.
Owen reached to take it from her when she extended it to him, and stopped himself an inch from closing his gore-slicked hand around the warm enamel. He had been re-examining the creature’s musculature in her absence, and his new gloves were already a candy-apple gleam of wetness, as red to the wrist as his old pair. Behind him on the examination table the alien’s hip-joint was neatly bisected, an intricate hammock of crosswise tendons and ligaments exposed to the open air.
“Shit,” he said, pulling his hand back. “Put it on the table over there, wouldya?”
Tosh demurely did as he asked. “No luck?” she asked.
“If you define luck as the total absence of success, then yup, I’m rolling in it. Luckiest bastard alive. I should buy a lottery ticket while I’m still hot.”
“Well,” she said lightly. “I’m sure one alien tastes as good as another.”
“What, to a Weevil, you mean?”
She shrugged. She hadn’t made any coffee for herself, he noticed; she simply stood at the foot of the steps, her arms folded across her chest, her coat abandoned somewhere along the way. Had she been wearing her blouse tied up at the midriff that way earlier? He couldn’t remember, and that in itself was maddening, because he was sure he should remember if she had. But in October, with this cold spell they were having . . .
Owen shook his head. No, he guessed not. He wasn’t entirely sure why she wore it that way now - not that he was complaining, he was nothing if he wasn’t the kind of bloke to appreciate a little female skin when it was on offer - but it wasn’t particularly warm in the Hub tonight. That little ruffle of silk had been scant enough worn down, but tied up like that . . . buttons loosened on top, so that it hung aslant off her shoulders . . . she should be freezing her arse off.
“Did you meet Gwen all right?” he asked, not entirely sure why he wanted to change the subject - only that he did.
“Yeah.” Casual, disinterested. Clearly it had been a boring, normal night.
“And what did Jack have to say?”
“Not much. It was a bust.”
Owen nodded, and regarded the meat sombrely. “And that’s exactly what this is,” he said. “A bust.”
He heard the deliberate staccato of her high heels click-clacking across the floor behind him, and the next thing he knew she had reached a small hand past the side of his head and tugged on a forelock of his hair.
“You’ve got blood in it,” she said.
He reached up to the spot she had pulled, and foolishly his hand hesitated just as hers moved away. Why worry about touching her hand, for fuck’s sake? He had never been concerned about casual touching before - not with the girls, at least. But something was different about the Tosh that was here with him, alone with him, tonight, and that was the problem. He wondered, not quite idly, if she had been drinking.
Owen smoothed the clump of hair back with his bloody glove. “Now there’s more,” he said. “I could market it as a new form of aftershave. Eau de bucherie.”
Tosh smiled, distractedly. He could just see it from the corner of his eye, tepid and tantalising; but she was still mostly standing behind him, and so much of it was lost.
“It might catch on,” she said.
Owen blinked stupidly as that same curiously child-sized hand trailed across his neck, to his cheek, the arm it belonged to resting, reaching, over his shoulder.
“Whatja doing, Tosh?” he asked, stricken.
“I’ve just . . . been thinking about things, that’s all. I guess I realised tonight that there are a lot of men out there, and not many I actually want.”
“Lots of people think that,” he replied, quickly. “It’s called not being a slut.”
She tittered, a sickly, girlish sound quite unlike Tosh’s usual demure smile and polite expressions of amusement. “See, you’re funny. Most of them are just boring suit-fillers, no personality at all. If you were choosing someone to be with, wouldn’t you want someone that at least made you laugh?”
It was at this point that alarms started clanging in his head like the bells of Notre Dame; he had had his suspicions that Tosh found him attractive, and he knew that Gwen did, but that was understandable. It was this talk of choosing somebody that had made the hairs on his neck stiffen like the quills of a porcupine - it had a disquieting note of finality to it.
But she was just drunk, right? Nothing to worry about. She would be embarrassed as hell in the morning.
He had finally convinced himself of this when Tosh caught his elbow, spun him towards her, and pressed herself firmly to the front of his body, a wet sail clinging to its mast.
11
His startled yelp caught on his tongue as her lips found his neck, and the sound melted away like toffee in his mouth. She was kissing along his neck, but that clinical, passionless statement did nothing to describe what she was really doing. Her lips hovered, teasing, skipping along his skin, moist as they touched onto the late-night stubble there. Her teeth, Oh God, her teeth grazed lightly over his pulse, delicate, but still somehow dangerous. His life was in her mouth when she kissed just there, one bite from the edge. He had always liked teeth in sex, and so few of the women he slept with used them, or asked him to; it was as if a switch had been thrown in his head the moment hers touched his skin. The heat baking from her, from her small, wet mouth, was incredible. Owen grabbed her and pulled her tighter in against him, the blood on his hands forgotten . . . lost his balance, tripped . . . and fell backwards into the office chair.
She laughed delightedly against his throat as they fell, sending another hot plume of wine-scented breath across his skin. Her pleasantly curved body had landed in his lap, and the inevitable happened, had already been happening. His jeans stretched uncomfortably taut against the swell. He expected Tosh to be indignant, but she only cast him that catlike smile that he had never seen before tonight, and, looking directly into his eyes, slowly spread her knees wider, wider, until her legs slipped down on either side of his and she was straddling him. Her pencil skirt hitched up by painful inches at each outward movement, until it had bunched at her hips. She ground herself into the swell in his jeans, only her knickers and the denim between them . . . he groaned, half-threw his head back at the sudden burst of sensation. His eyes fluttered closed.
Tugging, at his lab coat. He felt the sudden slackness across his chest as two of the buttons pinged open, but she carried on, fingers probing between the open edges to creep between the buttons of his shirt, too. His breath hitched in the back of his throat as her nails strummed, playfully, maddeningly, down his chest.
“You like that?” Her voice was an un-Tosh-like purr, and the sudden rush of her breath blew steaming against the skin her nails had already reddened.
Eyes still closed, his bloodied, gloved hands held away from them like a prostrate saint in a stained glass, Owen said: “Not complaining.” His voice sounded husky, even to him.
“Good.” And she dug her nails in four deep, hard furrows down his chest.
His eyes flew open, but he honestly wasn’t sure if he gasped in pleasure or pain. Before he could even decide, her tongue had found one of the red, angry weals and was licking up it in a slow, ponderous line.
“Fuck, Tosh, what are you doing?” he hissed . . . for a second, a fragile second of sanity that threatened to snap at one more lick, one more bite, he saw how wrong all this felt.
“What does it look like?” she sounded ever so slightly impatient.
“I just didn’t know your tastes ran quite so much to the exotic.”
She grinned, and her hands fell away from him, pettishly, into her lap. “Okay,” she said. “Show me what your tastes run to.” She reached out to either side, grasped his bloody wrists, and forced his hands onto her hips.
This . . . this was just . . . fucking weird. Couldn’t she see his hands were saturated in gore from the alien meat? Couldn’t she see that he was leaving slick, red, alien-bloodied tracks all over her?
“Tosh, you . . .”
But that was when that hot, firm little mouth planted itself on his, and he swallowed the protest, not sure if he had meant to, or if she, with her new-found powers of persuasion, had forced the words back into his throat.
12
Afterward, he couldn’t believe how quickly it had all changed. There was a moment when the sick, soaking heat that baked up from her seemed to invade him, almost, and her tongue pushed insistently against his lips, wanting inside. He gave in, opened his mouth just a little, deepened the kiss . . . and then she was reeling backward, shoving him - and the chair - away from her, hissing like a scalded cat.
“What the bloody hell . . .”
Tosh hunched forward over herself, the way a person that has had all the air punched from them, in just the wrong spot, might. One hand curled around her middle; the other cupped her half-hidden mouth, a tangle of glossy black hair obscuring her face. Owen was both alarmed and oddly relieved to see that a thin tendril of smoke curled like a gunmetal ribbon from behind her raised hand.
He didn’t know what had happened to her, if this was even Tosh or something that looked like Tosh, but the fact that the wild, abandoned lust of a moment before might have been the result of some alien influence, on both their parts, filled him with a wonderfully cool, peaceful relief. Like a dry well, filled by some new leak or sudden rain fall.
She dropped her hand away, not to show him the injury but with the air of someone that couldn’t hold her arm steady anymore, and her mouth was split and black like the skin of a burst sausage.
“Garlic,” she accused, the syllables mushy and swollen in her burnt mouth.
Owen’s eyes darted to the half-eaten pizza and garlic bread, still lying in their grease-spotted box on the table. “You never had a problem with it before,” he said, carefully. She only glared at him, eyes huge and round and beautiful over her ruin of a mouth.
“Listen, I left my burns kit over in Jack’s office. Let me get it and I’ll see what I can do with that kisser of yours. What is it, allergic reaction?”
Wary now, her glaring, staring eyes followed him as he backed up the stairs . . . but she said nothing. Owen kept his gaze on her until he had rounded the pillar, turned his back, and fled.
13
Cold and heat alternately assaulted him; breathlessness; a distant swell of giddiness that traced sweat-trails down his face.
He was running without knowing it, and without having made any conscious decision to do so. It was the percussion in his head that finally reached him, made him slow at the door of Jack’s office and then halt altogether inside; that and the quick thwap thwap thwap of his footsteps, flung back from the shadowed corners of the Hub’s echoing space. With its terminals powered down, the lights hushed to pale blue reflections like will o’ the wisps over water, the Hub looked like a cave - or a mouth. A black, round maw of shadows and echoes, like a spider’s. He usually loved this place - shit, it was far more like home than home was - but tonight each trickle of water and each distant tap had his skin hopping.
He ran home the bolt on Jack’s door, and only then did he really hear his own breathing for the first time; heaving, stentorious. He sounded like a set of bellows in a steelworks. His blood was up, but at least his hard-on had gone down. Wilted rather alarmingly fast, in fact. When he thought of how close he had come to . . . to . . . if she hadn’t kissed him, then he didn't believe, in his heart, that he would have stopped. And it was entirely possible to have sex, from start to finish, without kissing . . . it had been luck, only blind, total . . .
Owen’s knees unhinged and went suddenly, bonelessly, slack, depositing him on the floor beside Jack’s desk. His lab coat and the upper part of his shirt flapped open around the red, raw sting that had come crying to the surface as the endorphins faded.
He parted his shirt, gingerly. Of the four livid runnels she had gouged into his chest, two had bled, a third scoring cleanly across his right nipple and drawing it out into a hard, pink nub. That hurt the worst. In the heat of injected hormones and sweat, of sex, lots of things felt good that later hurt like a mad bastard - with her tongue on him, licking the sensation into submissions, these scratches hadn’t hurt, they had . . .
Owen froze, back rigid against the desk. She had been lapping the blood up.
Blood. Garlic.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
With a grunt he levered himself up into Jack’s chair, and sank back thankfully into its welcoming support. He had been right, when he surmised that something had gotten into Tosh. He had assumed, as she had been at the pub, that it was drink. Now he wondered if something a little less mundane had found its way into her system.
On the desk, Jack’s old, heavy black handset sat, mute and expectant. Now even inanimate objects seemed to be accusing him of not noticing at once, of letting his little head do the thinking in place of his big head.
“All right, cut it out already,” he snarled at the innocent, silent phone. Then he picked up the handset, and from memory dialled the number for The Green Dragon.
The phone was answered not with a hello but with a wheezing, yellow cough that spoke of too many illicit cigarettes and too much passive smoke. That cough was old Frank’s universal punctuation mark; he gave it to emphasise, to show disapproval, or even, occasionally, amusement. It was part of the package with the rusty old landlord, and it often made Owen smile as it did everyone else . . . but underneath the gruff heartiness, he could hear shades of disease in that cough. Emphysema. COPD. Bronchitis . . . cancer.
But he didn’t have time, now, to diagnose an old man’s lung condition. Not when he might have a much more serious condition, and much more close to home, to diagnose.
“Frank, hi,” he said, managing a false cheer he certainly didn’t feel. It sounded like bravado, but tasted like lies, ashes in his mouth. “It’s Owen Harper. Yup, I know, working again. Listen: you didn’t see Tosh in earlier, did you?”
There was a pause as Frank violently dislodged phlegm from his throat. Then, his voice creaking like an old gate in high winds: “Yeah, she was in here. Got through four white wines, too. I think that’s her personal best.”
Owen barely heard the banter, although a part-time worker in the back of his mental filing-system put it away carefully for later use. “Did she seem okay to you? Daft question, I know.”
“She was talking to some bloke for most of the evening. Left with him around midnight.”
Owen let his eyes slip closed, unable to bear their hot, throbbing beat in the sockets as his pulse skittered and jolted right behind them. He could taste it in the back of his asophagus, like a lump of lead with an electrical charge running through it.
“What did Gwen make of that?”
“Didn’t see Gwen. She hasn’t been in all week.”
He had suspected as much, but actually hearing it said seemed to dislodge several small stones in his head, prelude to an avalanche. Most of the rubble it brought down consisted of Gwen, perhaps already injured or compromised by the new improved Tosh, perhaps by whatever had brought on the change.
“The man,” he asked, as unconvincingly nonchalant as a small child eyeing the impulse-buy chocolate bars at a supermarket checkout. “Do you know who he was?”
Frank chuckled, a smoky grate that descended into chokes and great, hacking coughs. “Jealous, are ya? I would be. All the women have been trying to pick him up all week. He wasn’t having none of it, though, not till your friend come in. Seemed he took quite a shine to her. Why’dya want to know?”
As much as it bruised his own sense of self - Owen Harper, jealous of another man because of Tosh? - he decided to gratefully accept the easy excuse the old man had offered him. “Ya got me. I’m jealous. Who is he?”
“If you’re going to punch the bastard, I get to watch.” Frank’s voice crackled like a scrunched-up sweet wrapper, and Owen didn’t think it was the fault of a bad line. He thought the old man’s lungs were dying inside him.
“Give me his name, and maybe.” Owen snatched up a pen from Jack’s precisely arrayed desk, poised it over his palm in readiness. “Why didn’t you like him?”
“The eyes, I guess. You get to know it in my line of work, when a customer’s liable to get dangerous. It’s the way the women were around him, too. If I didn’t know better and that half of ‘em were so pissed they couldn’t tie their own shoes, I’d swear he was hypnotising ‘em.”
As much as he sometimes loved to hear Frank ramble over the bar and a beer, Owen silently urged him to get a move on now. “I need a name, Frank.”
The old man had the good grace to sound chastened. “Well, he didn’t strictly offer it to me, you understand. But you hear a lot of things not meant for your ears, running a pub . . .”
Owen almost growled his impatience. “Frank! This is serious.”
“Bloke’s name’s Drew Garek. Says he’s some kind of genetics researcher.”
Owen scratched the name, and the word ‘GENETICS’, on his hand, but he thought he would have to be stoned not to remember, anyway. Bingo. “Thanks, Frank,” he said - slipping into his soft, reassuring doctor’s voice as effortlessly as sliding tired feet into an old pair of slippers. “I’ll buy you a pint when I’m in.”
The chuckle-cough again, although this time the chuckle was cut short sooner, the resulting cough longer. “You’re a good one, you are. Those friendsa yours, too.”
“You’re not so bad yourself. Oh, and Frank? That cough of yours isn’t sounding too good, mate; you should go get that checked out.”
“Is that doctor’s orders?” Frank asked, and although he was at the far end of a phone and Owen couldn’t see him, he could hear the smile in the old man’s voice.
Despite it all, despite a potentially changing Tosh in the autopsy room, a missing Gwen, and a probably dangerous man - or otherwise - out on the Cardiff streets, Owen felt a weary smile stretching his mouth. It was accompanied by a treacherous prickle in the back of his eyes. It was probably too late for Frank when they first met, he could hear it in that cough, but . . . “It absolutely is. Doctor’s orders,” he said.
He set the handset softly, almost reverentially, back in the cradle. It fell home with a barely-audible click!, leaving him alone with the silence.
14
The scene that awaited him in the autopsy room was one that Owen imagined would be forever burned into his memory, the way a solar eclipse can be burned into the retinas of the unwary. It would have been impossible to get a better view of it; from his vantage-point at the top of the stairs the entire vista of the autopsy room was open to him.
Tosh stood beside the stainless-steel examination table, the hunk of alien meat and bone clasped in both hands until they were as sodden as a pair of his discarded surgical gloves, her wild-haired head bent almost studiously over it. Her posture, and her air of extreme concentration, put him in mind of a monk hunched over a prayer wheel. She was lapping catlike along the sides of the meat with the same long, sure strokes she had used on his chest. Then, as he watched, she nuzzled her face into the joint with gluttonous delight, slurping, sucking, like a kitten at a Queen’s nipples.
“All right, that’s enough!” He took the stairs two and three at a time, putting himself at the opposite end of the steel trolley to Tosh. The front of her tied blouse and exposed stomach were now a mat of gore and wetter things, but lower down he could still see his own hand prints, smeared like five-fingered exclamation marks on her hips. His bile rose, a salty wave in his throat.
She saw him coming, and after a first, cringing, clutching motion of the meat in towards her chest, she turned, loosened her grip, and flung it away. Her attention was all for him.
“You don’t wanna try it, sweetheart,” he said, though locked teeth - if he didn’t keep his jaw clenched, his stomach clamped down, he was going to be sick. “Uncle Owen’s a pro on these things.”
As a little boy in the supermarket, charging down an empty aisle, picking up speed, his feet lifting from the floor and trusting to his aim, his skill, and luck . . . getting smacked around the head by his mum when he overturned into a display of Cornflakes. Later, as an intern, sneaking empty stretchers out into the car park for a race or two after dark.
She didn’t stand a chance against Hurricane Harper.
There was none of Tosh’s subtle strategy in the way she charged for him, barely attempting to skirt the stretcher. Owen pulled back slightly on the steel rail, inching the structure toward him; then with a single, perfect trajectory, he rammed it forward, end-first, into Tosh’s stomach. The projectile sent her flying backwards off her feet, and smack into the far wall, where her head connected with a meaty thunk.
She crumpled to the floor, unconscious.
Author: Xenutia
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own them, but I'd like to think I can play with them once in a while. They belong to RTD, the BBC, and assorted other peeps I can't list here.
Characters/Pairings: Tosh/Owen
Word Count: 11,955
Rating: R (seriously R)
Warnings: Sex (not enough to be NC-17, but R, certainly), gore, some bad language. I think I missed out violence, but there's always next time. ;)
Spoilers: One minor mention of "Cyberwoman", and if you haven't seen anything past "Greeks Bearing Gifts", you might be a bit confused as to some of Tosh's character developments - but other than that, nothing specific.
Notes: This one is set just before "Countrycide" in S1, which places it hopefully in October if my calculations are right! It could fit comfortably into canon without changing anything, and the science is seriously wonky - but who watches Torchwood for the science, anyway?
Prompt: Vampires
9
Fifteen minutes of grim munching later, Owen pulled on his surgical gloves (a new pair, there was no way he was going to fish out the tangled red remains of his last pair), and directed his serious face at the alien shank again. He hadn’t really enjoyed the half of the pizza he’d managed; the garlic bread was hardly touched. Something about the tangible gore-reek of the air, even on the upper levels away from the autopsy room, put him off eating very much. Especially eating anything red.
“Come on, you bastard, give it up,” he growled, poking it with one rubber-clad finger. “What are you?”
“I think it’s fed up with being poked,” said Tosh’s voice from behind him.
She was standing at the top of the stairway, her lips barely curled in a pretty, perplexing smile. There was amusement in it, but also something else, something he couldn’t immediately identify, but that might have been a baser, more vicious, insouciance.
He gestured at the ragged socket-and-ball joint that protruded from the shank in a wet white nub of bone. “Why couldn’t whatever ate it have left a bit more of it?” he grumbled. “We’ve got one eye witness account, and this.” He prodded it again in childish defiance. “And I’m supposed to work out what it is with only the say-so of a short-sighted old bat and half a drumstick to go by.”
“You need to take a break,” she replied, still perched on the top step. Although perched, he realised, wasn’t really the right word for the way she stood, the way she moved, the general looseness of her limbs as if utterly comfortable with herself and her surroundings. Odd. She wasn’t standing or perching but lounging, one elbow rested on the railing, one hip tipped jauntily upward, her face stung into high colour by the cold outside until her cheeks looked like blood spots on a clean sheet. She looked . . . yeah, that was it. She looked like someone who has just received good news.
“What I need is my bloody head read. What’s got you looking so smug, anyway?”
“She shrugged. “Nothing. Let me make you some coffee.”
Owen tipped her a sidelong look, his mouth half-poised to make some smart remark about that being Ianto’s job and why the bloody hell wasn’t he here to do it instead of off gallivanting with Jack . . . but something, he thought it might have been the hot intent on her face, stopped him. If she wanted to play assistant instead of actually going home and sleeping, like normal people did, then he wasn’t about to say no.
10
She brought it rich and steaming from Ianto’s machine a few minutes later, the earthy fragrance for one brief, blissful moment closing out the dark stench of butcher’s shops and secret body fluids and the disinfectant which tried, and failed, to mask it all.
Owen reached to take it from her when she extended it to him, and stopped himself an inch from closing his gore-slicked hand around the warm enamel. He had been re-examining the creature’s musculature in her absence, and his new gloves were already a candy-apple gleam of wetness, as red to the wrist as his old pair. Behind him on the examination table the alien’s hip-joint was neatly bisected, an intricate hammock of crosswise tendons and ligaments exposed to the open air.
“Shit,” he said, pulling his hand back. “Put it on the table over there, wouldya?”
Tosh demurely did as he asked. “No luck?” she asked.
“If you define luck as the total absence of success, then yup, I’m rolling in it. Luckiest bastard alive. I should buy a lottery ticket while I’m still hot.”
“Well,” she said lightly. “I’m sure one alien tastes as good as another.”
“What, to a Weevil, you mean?”
She shrugged. She hadn’t made any coffee for herself, he noticed; she simply stood at the foot of the steps, her arms folded across her chest, her coat abandoned somewhere along the way. Had she been wearing her blouse tied up at the midriff that way earlier? He couldn’t remember, and that in itself was maddening, because he was sure he should remember if she had. But in October, with this cold spell they were having . . .
Owen shook his head. No, he guessed not. He wasn’t entirely sure why she wore it that way now - not that he was complaining, he was nothing if he wasn’t the kind of bloke to appreciate a little female skin when it was on offer - but it wasn’t particularly warm in the Hub tonight. That little ruffle of silk had been scant enough worn down, but tied up like that . . . buttons loosened on top, so that it hung aslant off her shoulders . . . she should be freezing her arse off.
“Did you meet Gwen all right?” he asked, not entirely sure why he wanted to change the subject - only that he did.
“Yeah.” Casual, disinterested. Clearly it had been a boring, normal night.
“And what did Jack have to say?”
“Not much. It was a bust.”
Owen nodded, and regarded the meat sombrely. “And that’s exactly what this is,” he said. “A bust.”
He heard the deliberate staccato of her high heels click-clacking across the floor behind him, and the next thing he knew she had reached a small hand past the side of his head and tugged on a forelock of his hair.
“You’ve got blood in it,” she said.
He reached up to the spot she had pulled, and foolishly his hand hesitated just as hers moved away. Why worry about touching her hand, for fuck’s sake? He had never been concerned about casual touching before - not with the girls, at least. But something was different about the Tosh that was here with him, alone with him, tonight, and that was the problem. He wondered, not quite idly, if she had been drinking.
Owen smoothed the clump of hair back with his bloody glove. “Now there’s more,” he said. “I could market it as a new form of aftershave. Eau de bucherie.”
Tosh smiled, distractedly. He could just see it from the corner of his eye, tepid and tantalising; but she was still mostly standing behind him, and so much of it was lost.
“It might catch on,” she said.
Owen blinked stupidly as that same curiously child-sized hand trailed across his neck, to his cheek, the arm it belonged to resting, reaching, over his shoulder.
“Whatja doing, Tosh?” he asked, stricken.
“I’ve just . . . been thinking about things, that’s all. I guess I realised tonight that there are a lot of men out there, and not many I actually want.”
“Lots of people think that,” he replied, quickly. “It’s called not being a slut.”
She tittered, a sickly, girlish sound quite unlike Tosh’s usual demure smile and polite expressions of amusement. “See, you’re funny. Most of them are just boring suit-fillers, no personality at all. If you were choosing someone to be with, wouldn’t you want someone that at least made you laugh?”
It was at this point that alarms started clanging in his head like the bells of Notre Dame; he had had his suspicions that Tosh found him attractive, and he knew that Gwen did, but that was understandable. It was this talk of choosing somebody that had made the hairs on his neck stiffen like the quills of a porcupine - it had a disquieting note of finality to it.
But she was just drunk, right? Nothing to worry about. She would be embarrassed as hell in the morning.
He had finally convinced himself of this when Tosh caught his elbow, spun him towards her, and pressed herself firmly to the front of his body, a wet sail clinging to its mast.
11
His startled yelp caught on his tongue as her lips found his neck, and the sound melted away like toffee in his mouth. She was kissing along his neck, but that clinical, passionless statement did nothing to describe what she was really doing. Her lips hovered, teasing, skipping along his skin, moist as they touched onto the late-night stubble there. Her teeth, Oh God, her teeth grazed lightly over his pulse, delicate, but still somehow dangerous. His life was in her mouth when she kissed just there, one bite from the edge. He had always liked teeth in sex, and so few of the women he slept with used them, or asked him to; it was as if a switch had been thrown in his head the moment hers touched his skin. The heat baking from her, from her small, wet mouth, was incredible. Owen grabbed her and pulled her tighter in against him, the blood on his hands forgotten . . . lost his balance, tripped . . . and fell backwards into the office chair.
She laughed delightedly against his throat as they fell, sending another hot plume of wine-scented breath across his skin. Her pleasantly curved body had landed in his lap, and the inevitable happened, had already been happening. His jeans stretched uncomfortably taut against the swell. He expected Tosh to be indignant, but she only cast him that catlike smile that he had never seen before tonight, and, looking directly into his eyes, slowly spread her knees wider, wider, until her legs slipped down on either side of his and she was straddling him. Her pencil skirt hitched up by painful inches at each outward movement, until it had bunched at her hips. She ground herself into the swell in his jeans, only her knickers and the denim between them . . . he groaned, half-threw his head back at the sudden burst of sensation. His eyes fluttered closed.
Tugging, at his lab coat. He felt the sudden slackness across his chest as two of the buttons pinged open, but she carried on, fingers probing between the open edges to creep between the buttons of his shirt, too. His breath hitched in the back of his throat as her nails strummed, playfully, maddeningly, down his chest.
“You like that?” Her voice was an un-Tosh-like purr, and the sudden rush of her breath blew steaming against the skin her nails had already reddened.
Eyes still closed, his bloodied, gloved hands held away from them like a prostrate saint in a stained glass, Owen said: “Not complaining.” His voice sounded husky, even to him.
“Good.” And she dug her nails in four deep, hard furrows down his chest.
His eyes flew open, but he honestly wasn’t sure if he gasped in pleasure or pain. Before he could even decide, her tongue had found one of the red, angry weals and was licking up it in a slow, ponderous line.
“Fuck, Tosh, what are you doing?” he hissed . . . for a second, a fragile second of sanity that threatened to snap at one more lick, one more bite, he saw how wrong all this felt.
“What does it look like?” she sounded ever so slightly impatient.
“I just didn’t know your tastes ran quite so much to the exotic.”
She grinned, and her hands fell away from him, pettishly, into her lap. “Okay,” she said. “Show me what your tastes run to.” She reached out to either side, grasped his bloody wrists, and forced his hands onto her hips.
This . . . this was just . . . fucking weird. Couldn’t she see his hands were saturated in gore from the alien meat? Couldn’t she see that he was leaving slick, red, alien-bloodied tracks all over her?
“Tosh, you . . .”
But that was when that hot, firm little mouth planted itself on his, and he swallowed the protest, not sure if he had meant to, or if she, with her new-found powers of persuasion, had forced the words back into his throat.
12
Afterward, he couldn’t believe how quickly it had all changed. There was a moment when the sick, soaking heat that baked up from her seemed to invade him, almost, and her tongue pushed insistently against his lips, wanting inside. He gave in, opened his mouth just a little, deepened the kiss . . . and then she was reeling backward, shoving him - and the chair - away from her, hissing like a scalded cat.
“What the bloody hell . . .”
Tosh hunched forward over herself, the way a person that has had all the air punched from them, in just the wrong spot, might. One hand curled around her middle; the other cupped her half-hidden mouth, a tangle of glossy black hair obscuring her face. Owen was both alarmed and oddly relieved to see that a thin tendril of smoke curled like a gunmetal ribbon from behind her raised hand.
He didn’t know what had happened to her, if this was even Tosh or something that looked like Tosh, but the fact that the wild, abandoned lust of a moment before might have been the result of some alien influence, on both their parts, filled him with a wonderfully cool, peaceful relief. Like a dry well, filled by some new leak or sudden rain fall.
She dropped her hand away, not to show him the injury but with the air of someone that couldn’t hold her arm steady anymore, and her mouth was split and black like the skin of a burst sausage.
“Garlic,” she accused, the syllables mushy and swollen in her burnt mouth.
Owen’s eyes darted to the half-eaten pizza and garlic bread, still lying in their grease-spotted box on the table. “You never had a problem with it before,” he said, carefully. She only glared at him, eyes huge and round and beautiful over her ruin of a mouth.
“Listen, I left my burns kit over in Jack’s office. Let me get it and I’ll see what I can do with that kisser of yours. What is it, allergic reaction?”
Wary now, her glaring, staring eyes followed him as he backed up the stairs . . . but she said nothing. Owen kept his gaze on her until he had rounded the pillar, turned his back, and fled.
13
Cold and heat alternately assaulted him; breathlessness; a distant swell of giddiness that traced sweat-trails down his face.
He was running without knowing it, and without having made any conscious decision to do so. It was the percussion in his head that finally reached him, made him slow at the door of Jack’s office and then halt altogether inside; that and the quick thwap thwap thwap of his footsteps, flung back from the shadowed corners of the Hub’s echoing space. With its terminals powered down, the lights hushed to pale blue reflections like will o’ the wisps over water, the Hub looked like a cave - or a mouth. A black, round maw of shadows and echoes, like a spider’s. He usually loved this place - shit, it was far more like home than home was - but tonight each trickle of water and each distant tap had his skin hopping.
He ran home the bolt on Jack’s door, and only then did he really hear his own breathing for the first time; heaving, stentorious. He sounded like a set of bellows in a steelworks. His blood was up, but at least his hard-on had gone down. Wilted rather alarmingly fast, in fact. When he thought of how close he had come to . . . to . . . if she hadn’t kissed him, then he didn't believe, in his heart, that he would have stopped. And it was entirely possible to have sex, from start to finish, without kissing . . . it had been luck, only blind, total . . .
Owen’s knees unhinged and went suddenly, bonelessly, slack, depositing him on the floor beside Jack’s desk. His lab coat and the upper part of his shirt flapped open around the red, raw sting that had come crying to the surface as the endorphins faded.
He parted his shirt, gingerly. Of the four livid runnels she had gouged into his chest, two had bled, a third scoring cleanly across his right nipple and drawing it out into a hard, pink nub. That hurt the worst. In the heat of injected hormones and sweat, of sex, lots of things felt good that later hurt like a mad bastard - with her tongue on him, licking the sensation into submissions, these scratches hadn’t hurt, they had . . .
Owen froze, back rigid against the desk. She had been lapping the blood up.
Blood. Garlic.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
With a grunt he levered himself up into Jack’s chair, and sank back thankfully into its welcoming support. He had been right, when he surmised that something had gotten into Tosh. He had assumed, as she had been at the pub, that it was drink. Now he wondered if something a little less mundane had found its way into her system.
On the desk, Jack’s old, heavy black handset sat, mute and expectant. Now even inanimate objects seemed to be accusing him of not noticing at once, of letting his little head do the thinking in place of his big head.
“All right, cut it out already,” he snarled at the innocent, silent phone. Then he picked up the handset, and from memory dialled the number for The Green Dragon.
The phone was answered not with a hello but with a wheezing, yellow cough that spoke of too many illicit cigarettes and too much passive smoke. That cough was old Frank’s universal punctuation mark; he gave it to emphasise, to show disapproval, or even, occasionally, amusement. It was part of the package with the rusty old landlord, and it often made Owen smile as it did everyone else . . . but underneath the gruff heartiness, he could hear shades of disease in that cough. Emphysema. COPD. Bronchitis . . . cancer.
But he didn’t have time, now, to diagnose an old man’s lung condition. Not when he might have a much more serious condition, and much more close to home, to diagnose.
“Frank, hi,” he said, managing a false cheer he certainly didn’t feel. It sounded like bravado, but tasted like lies, ashes in his mouth. “It’s Owen Harper. Yup, I know, working again. Listen: you didn’t see Tosh in earlier, did you?”
There was a pause as Frank violently dislodged phlegm from his throat. Then, his voice creaking like an old gate in high winds: “Yeah, she was in here. Got through four white wines, too. I think that’s her personal best.”
Owen barely heard the banter, although a part-time worker in the back of his mental filing-system put it away carefully for later use. “Did she seem okay to you? Daft question, I know.”
“She was talking to some bloke for most of the evening. Left with him around midnight.”
Owen let his eyes slip closed, unable to bear their hot, throbbing beat in the sockets as his pulse skittered and jolted right behind them. He could taste it in the back of his asophagus, like a lump of lead with an electrical charge running through it.
“What did Gwen make of that?”
“Didn’t see Gwen. She hasn’t been in all week.”
He had suspected as much, but actually hearing it said seemed to dislodge several small stones in his head, prelude to an avalanche. Most of the rubble it brought down consisted of Gwen, perhaps already injured or compromised by the new improved Tosh, perhaps by whatever had brought on the change.
“The man,” he asked, as unconvincingly nonchalant as a small child eyeing the impulse-buy chocolate bars at a supermarket checkout. “Do you know who he was?”
Frank chuckled, a smoky grate that descended into chokes and great, hacking coughs. “Jealous, are ya? I would be. All the women have been trying to pick him up all week. He wasn’t having none of it, though, not till your friend come in. Seemed he took quite a shine to her. Why’dya want to know?”
As much as it bruised his own sense of self - Owen Harper, jealous of another man because of Tosh? - he decided to gratefully accept the easy excuse the old man had offered him. “Ya got me. I’m jealous. Who is he?”
“If you’re going to punch the bastard, I get to watch.” Frank’s voice crackled like a scrunched-up sweet wrapper, and Owen didn’t think it was the fault of a bad line. He thought the old man’s lungs were dying inside him.
“Give me his name, and maybe.” Owen snatched up a pen from Jack’s precisely arrayed desk, poised it over his palm in readiness. “Why didn’t you like him?”
“The eyes, I guess. You get to know it in my line of work, when a customer’s liable to get dangerous. It’s the way the women were around him, too. If I didn’t know better and that half of ‘em were so pissed they couldn’t tie their own shoes, I’d swear he was hypnotising ‘em.”
As much as he sometimes loved to hear Frank ramble over the bar and a beer, Owen silently urged him to get a move on now. “I need a name, Frank.”
The old man had the good grace to sound chastened. “Well, he didn’t strictly offer it to me, you understand. But you hear a lot of things not meant for your ears, running a pub . . .”
Owen almost growled his impatience. “Frank! This is serious.”
“Bloke’s name’s Drew Garek. Says he’s some kind of genetics researcher.”
Owen scratched the name, and the word ‘GENETICS’, on his hand, but he thought he would have to be stoned not to remember, anyway. Bingo. “Thanks, Frank,” he said - slipping into his soft, reassuring doctor’s voice as effortlessly as sliding tired feet into an old pair of slippers. “I’ll buy you a pint when I’m in.”
The chuckle-cough again, although this time the chuckle was cut short sooner, the resulting cough longer. “You’re a good one, you are. Those friendsa yours, too.”
“You’re not so bad yourself. Oh, and Frank? That cough of yours isn’t sounding too good, mate; you should go get that checked out.”
“Is that doctor’s orders?” Frank asked, and although he was at the far end of a phone and Owen couldn’t see him, he could hear the smile in the old man’s voice.
Despite it all, despite a potentially changing Tosh in the autopsy room, a missing Gwen, and a probably dangerous man - or otherwise - out on the Cardiff streets, Owen felt a weary smile stretching his mouth. It was accompanied by a treacherous prickle in the back of his eyes. It was probably too late for Frank when they first met, he could hear it in that cough, but . . . “It absolutely is. Doctor’s orders,” he said.
He set the handset softly, almost reverentially, back in the cradle. It fell home with a barely-audible click!, leaving him alone with the silence.
14
The scene that awaited him in the autopsy room was one that Owen imagined would be forever burned into his memory, the way a solar eclipse can be burned into the retinas of the unwary. It would have been impossible to get a better view of it; from his vantage-point at the top of the stairs the entire vista of the autopsy room was open to him.
Tosh stood beside the stainless-steel examination table, the hunk of alien meat and bone clasped in both hands until they were as sodden as a pair of his discarded surgical gloves, her wild-haired head bent almost studiously over it. Her posture, and her air of extreme concentration, put him in mind of a monk hunched over a prayer wheel. She was lapping catlike along the sides of the meat with the same long, sure strokes she had used on his chest. Then, as he watched, she nuzzled her face into the joint with gluttonous delight, slurping, sucking, like a kitten at a Queen’s nipples.
“All right, that’s enough!” He took the stairs two and three at a time, putting himself at the opposite end of the steel trolley to Tosh. The front of her tied blouse and exposed stomach were now a mat of gore and wetter things, but lower down he could still see his own hand prints, smeared like five-fingered exclamation marks on her hips. His bile rose, a salty wave in his throat.
She saw him coming, and after a first, cringing, clutching motion of the meat in towards her chest, she turned, loosened her grip, and flung it away. Her attention was all for him.
“You don’t wanna try it, sweetheart,” he said, though locked teeth - if he didn’t keep his jaw clenched, his stomach clamped down, he was going to be sick. “Uncle Owen’s a pro on these things.”
As a little boy in the supermarket, charging down an empty aisle, picking up speed, his feet lifting from the floor and trusting to his aim, his skill, and luck . . . getting smacked around the head by his mum when he overturned into a display of Cornflakes. Later, as an intern, sneaking empty stretchers out into the car park for a race or two after dark.
She didn’t stand a chance against Hurricane Harper.
There was none of Tosh’s subtle strategy in the way she charged for him, barely attempting to skirt the stretcher. Owen pulled back slightly on the steel rail, inching the structure toward him; then with a single, perfect trajectory, he rammed it forward, end-first, into Tosh’s stomach. The projectile sent her flying backwards off her feet, and smack into the far wall, where her head connected with a meaty thunk.
She crumpled to the floor, unconscious.