Infected: Lesser Evils

Praise for Andrea Speed’s

Infected

Prey

“When I picked up Andrea Speed’s Infected, I definitely did not expect to completely fall in love with the writing, the characters, and the plot.”

—
Blackraven’s Reviews

“…a masterful job…”

—
Dark Divas Reviews

“If you are looking for a fascinating mystery suspense story with shape-shifters that actually shift, pick up a copy of
Infected: Prey
.”

—
Literary Nymphs

Bloodlines

“The deep emotion and love that Paris and Roan have for each other comes through from some very vibrant, strong, and powerful story telling.”

—
Whipped Cream Erotic Romance Reviews

Life After Death

“This is a book that a reader should not read fast. Instead, sip it like a fine wine and draw it out to savor the experience for the full effect.”

—
Whipped Cream Erotic Romance Reviews

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

By
A
NDREA
S
PEED

N
OVELS

T
HE
I
NFECTED
S
ERIES

Infected: Prey

Infected: Bloodlines

Infected: Life After Death

Infected: Freefall

Infected: Shift

Infected: Lesser Evils

N
OVELLAS

The Little Death

Published by
D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

Published by

Dreamspinner Press

5032 Capital Circle SW
Ste 2, PMB# 279
Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Infected: Lesser Evils

Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Speed

Cover Art by Anne Cain   

[email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Ste 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA.

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

ISBN: 978-1-62380-012-3

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

October 2012

eBook edition available

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62380-013-0

Thanks to the usual suspects (Mom, Charlie, Derek), the unusual suspects (Craig and everyone over at the CxPulp), and the fabulous people at Dreamspinner.

Oh, and hi, Patrick. Yes, I mean you.

Four songs are cited in this novel, and I would like to give proper attribution: “Goodbye Sober Day” by Mr. Bungle, “Horse Girl” by These Arms Are Snakes, “Everything’s Ruined” by Faith No More, and “Drown With Me” by Porcupine Tree. I’d encourage you to seek out and listen to these songs, but they’re for the brave and musically adventurous only. Seek at your own risk. (But I love them!)

Gimme Shelter

R
OAN
knew he should never have taken Nadia Rubin’s case the moment he took it.

She couldn’t afford him, she’d know he was taking pity on her and would probably resent it, and it wasn’t his usual thing anyways. She was asking him to be a bodyguard as much as a detective, and that really wasn’t his thing.

Still, how did you turn down a fellow infected? Especially when they were being threatened by another infected. It almost felt like a duty.

What she was, was a waitress who wasn’t wearing enough makeup to cover all the broken blood vessels beneath her eyes, indications of past beatings. She was a cougar strain, in the midst of a divorce from her abusive husband, Mike Oliver, who’d been threatening her. The problem was, the threats were obscure and personal—leaving dead flowers inside her car, leaving dead mice on her porch, flooding her e-mail with spam, putting dog shit in her mailbox, throwing red food coloring on her door—and to get him arrested she’d have to prove he did it. The cops had talked to him, but it had had no effect whatsoever, and she was sure he was going to ratchet things up, mainly because she’d finally got a restraining order. Right now she had no idea where he was living, as he’d been evicted from his last apartment, and all his family lived in Alabama or Virginia. What she wanted Roan to do was twofold: find where Mike was, and catch him in the act of vandalism. If she could prove something, she could get him arrested for harassment and violating the restraining order.

Oh, and he was cougar strain too. Apparently they’d met through the Church of the Divine Transformation. Sometimes Roan wondered if the universe took perverse pleasure in mocking him.

She couldn’t afford him at all. But he accepted her hundred dollars and lied and said that was his exact fee, and then did a little checking around. He called Gordo but got Seb, who told him Gordo was on vacation. A forced vacation, as Connie had been insisting he take it easier since his heart attack, and he had to play along if he didn’t want to spend the next few months sleeping in the guest room. (Roan totally understood.) Luckily, for all his Joe Friday stoicness, Seb was willing to help. No shock, Oliver was in the system, and one report had flagged him as a TI—total idiot. Great. Usually a guy marked TI was happy giving shit to cops or other authority figures, no matter how big their truncheons or Tasers. They were usually also the first to sue, even though they generally caused their own problems. So yeah, it figured that Mike would be one of those. This guy sounded like a real gem. Why were any women straight? Seriously, if this was the class of guy available, why bother? Not that gay guys couldn’t be abusive dirtbags, Matt’s crackhead stalker proved that, but that just made Roan wonder why evolution even bothered with men. Maybe women would luck out and men would become totally redundant one of these days.

Maybe humanity would become redundant. He suddenly remembered that weird conversation he’d had with Doctor Rosenberg, and immediately shoved it out of his head.

He couldn’t find Mike. He’d flashed his picture to many of the no-tell motels around town, but he just didn’t have time to cover them all, and sometimes the smells were so strong in certain offices (body odor, cigarette smoke, and cheap, heavy aftershave) he couldn’t actually tell if they were lying to him. (He added Aqua Velva and Old Spice to his olfactory shit list, just beneath Axe.) Oliver may have been a TI, but he knew enough not to use credit cards to rent a room.

Nadia lived in a trailer park, the oddly named Golden Bough, but luckily a trailer across the way from her was empty and abandoned. A heavy lock, chain, and hasp were attached to the front door to keep squatters out, so Roan just went ahead and forced a window open. (It was a trailer. None of the locks was especially sturdy.) The trailer was empty inside but hadn’t been long abandoned, as he could smell faint traces of old cigarettes, food, booze, dog, and diapers. A foreclosure? Probably, or people who just picked up and moved in the middle of the night, leaving behind a ratty old trailer and a mountain of bills.

One of the windows had a good view of Nadia’s trailer, so he settled down for a stakeout, pulling out things he’d brought in his messenger bag. He called Dylan to let him know he was staking out a client’s place and explained the circumstances as he set up his digital camera on a tripod. Dylan was worried, mainly because nothing “domestic” (as in domestic violence) ever came out well. Like he had to tell him that? It was a domestic violence incident that had torpedoed his career as a cop. He still had an extra special hatred for bullies, anyone who beat up someone weaker or smaller than them. But if he sat down and was completely honest with himself,
he
was a bully, because almost no one he fought was strong enough to compete with him. That was the problem with being a freak of nature.

Night settled uneasily, and he watched Nadia come home in her little Accord, dented and rust stained, and she looked around as she unlocked her door and went inside. She didn’t see him, but she wouldn’t—he was far enough away from the window that seeing him would be difficult unless you came right up to it, and since he was both wearing all black and had no light source (he didn’t need one; he had the night vision filter on the camera), he was as good as invisible in the fading light. He allowed himself a schoolboy moment of thinking he was a ninja, then let it go.

He ate a sandwich he’d bought at a deli on the way there, quietly pining for the spicy angel hair pasta Dylan was making tonight (at least he’d leave him leftovers), putting enough mustard on the bread to cover up the taste of subpar turkey. He’d also bought a Mountain Dew and an energy drink, both of which tasted like Satan’s ball sweat with differing amounts of sugar, but he didn’t buy them for taste. He bought them for caffeine and sugar, stuff to keep him awake and alert. He listened to a Stephen King audio book on his iPod, only one earphone in so he could listen for exterior noises. He doubted he’d hear anything, but it was good to cover all the bases.

As he watched Nadia’s trailer, watched lights go on and off in various rooms, his mind wandered to the problem of what he was going to tell Dylan. When Dylan had picked him up from Willow Creek, Roan had told him Rosenberg had said it would take a week or so for results to be known from all the testing, with the blood work possibly taking two. This wasn’t exactly true; some of the tests would take a week or so. But she’d given him some of the results before Dylan arrived, and he’d still been trying to process them as he packed up his small bag. The week was over, and they were into week two now. Dylan was starting to get suspicious, and Roan couldn’t blame him. He was going to have to tell him something. Was it going to be the truth? He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t rely on Dylan’s willingness to play along forever. But what did he say? He wasn’t even sure he’d completely processed what she’d told him yet, mainly because he’d avoided thinking about it as much as possible. But on this dark and boring night watch, he had nothing but time to think.

She’d used technobabble and tried to be nice about it, but she was saying he wasn’t really human anymore, wasn’t she? The virus was doing something to his body, beyond what it had already done. He was becoming something else, which he should have known when his transformation began to happen so rapidly, when things began to shift without his knowledge. A Faith No More song lyric tripped through his mind like an accusation aimed at himself:
He made us proud, he made us rich, and how were we to know he’s counterfeit.