Excerpt: Feral

I’m not the kind of person who ever gave much thought to how I would go about covering up a murder in the event that one happened. As it were, I never planned on killing anyone. Mostly I was concerned with keeping my thoughts to myself and giving everyone else the privacy to theirs.
But when I walked into the locker room to find Soren standing over Vince Fabre’s mangled body, I couldn’t help overhearing what ran through his head. If thoughts could have volume, his dial was turned to maximum. Please don’t tell Cillian, please don’t tell Cillian.
Technically, I’d seen more than just the aftermath. I’d seen more than I really wanted to. I’d come out of the shower and heard a scuffle in the back corner. From between the rows of lockers, I could make out Soren hefting Vince off the ground with a fist around his throat. Vince dangled from that leonine grip like a limp rubber chicken. He tried to speak, but no words came out. I could hear them anyway, stamping out a message like Morse code in my brain. Oh shit, I’m going to die. He’s going to kill me. I can’t breathe, somebody help, oh God, I don’t wanna die.
Soren couldn’t hear. Of course he couldn’t. What was going through his mind was quite contrary to Vince’s muddled last moments of thought. Soren heard a siren’s song, melodic and sweet and peaceful, building to a crescendo.
Vince’s skull shattered, and the insides of it sprayed the lockers like a macabre Jackson Polluck painting.
I gagged. Soren whirled, dropping Vince’s body, which made more of a liquid rather than solid sound when it hit the floor. His dark eyes were wide and his chest heaved. It may have been a comical sight, this big man caught like a cat with its paw in your salmon dinner, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist and a bib of blood down his front. Maybe he was a little shocked to see me, but mostly I think he was still drunk on the lullaby his Calling sung.
I couldn’t be sure if he knew I could hear what was running through his head, because there was a lot, and most of it wasn’t a plea for help. That one glimpse into the mind of a Slayer was enough for me. Of all the infectious Callings, I thought I’d been dealt a mediocre hand. Pining for the affections of people who would never return the sentiment like a love-struck teenage girl in a high school musical is one thing, but spending night after night staring at the ceiling with not even a infinitesimal chance of falling asleep, that’s cruel. I’m sure even Romeo and Juliet got some shut eye between heartfelt soliloquies and planning their eventual elope. I just lie there until the bruises under my eyes are dark enough to look as though I was sucker punched in the face by a gorilla.
Insomnia isn’t any fun, but at least the thing I’m lusting for while I count sheep and cracks in the ceiling isn’t the hot trickle of human blood over my tongue.
I looked at Soren, at the dark red ribbons weaving down his chin and the steadily expanding pool under the carnage he’d wrought, and said (to my chagrin), “I won’t tell Cillian, but we will need Ryder’s help…”