Read Online Running With the Pack by Ekaterina Sedia - Free Book Online

was kneeling down to rub his sprained ankle. The two of them went over together in a heap, and then Hayden was on them.
    The impact of his landing drove all the breath out of Thug Number One, the one on top. An agonised squeal from the bottom of the pile suggested it wasn’t doing much for his clumsy mate, Goon Number Two, either, but Hayden didn’t care. First things first. Before he knew it he was close in and pinning the lead mugger down, forcing his arms away from his head to expose his face. In the brilliant moonlight Hayden could see the fear in the face of the kid—more than that, he felt it, tasted it rather—and it was the fear that set off some primordial time bomb buried deep within him. Heedless of the snarl that disfigured his own features, he leaned in and bit, hard and deep and fierce.
    Hayden remembered little else about the fight, to be honest; the who-did-what-to-who, the wirework and the stunts. But that feeling, when he first battened on to his opponent? The roaring, the struggling, the piteous screams and whimpers at the end; his strong and bulging jaws clamped down tight against the limited resistance of skin and flesh? The power of it . . . that he remembered well enough. And afterwards?
    When the two least maimed of his muggers had scrambled away, snivelling and shrieking, he’d straightened up in amongst the gravestones, and tilted his head back to the fat enormous moon above the harbour. Never in his life had he known such transformative intensity; never before such focus and clarity. Beyond the graveyard, beneath the moon, there lay the radiant sweep of Hong Kong’s harbour. Everything he could see was his, it belonged to him and him alone—and he could see everything. No element of it escaped his hungry gaze; not the meanest, least significant scintilla. All his.
    Involuntarily, he tilted back his head and howled, howled to the echo. The nightbirds rose from the branches and broke in a panicking spiral; away down the hill, even the tamest, most domesticated dogs twitched and grumbled in their sleep, hackles rising the length of their tensed spines, muzzles peeling back to reveal mottled gums and sharp teeth.
    “But the teeth—!” Dr. Pang was staring at him in amazement.
    “Hang on,” said Hayden mildly, and instantly the dentist closed his mouth. “I’m coming to that. Bear with me.” He smiled, to convey reassurance. Dr. Pang did not smile back.
    Now, those things that take place in ancient graveyards after dark, under the appreciative sanction of the bleak and vengeful ancestor spirits, may end up looking very different beneath the bland pedestrian glow of electric light. When Hayden made it back to the hotel he was jacked up with energy still—he’d run the couple of miles from the hillside park to the Mid-levels in no time, and was up for another circuit of the harbour at least—but he was also exquisitely aware of the need for caution and discretion. Given the events of the last few hours, he realised that a low profile was essential at this stage of his adventures. In his jacket pocket he’d found his old face-mask, proof against infection, ubiquitous amongst the passers-by during times of epidemic and contagion; before collecting his keycard at the desk he’d slipped it on, the better to conceal the focal point of his mysterious Shifting.
    Up in his room Hayden made for the bathroom, where he used up a whole bottle of Listerine rinsing and gargling. There was a sharp brassy taste in his mouth, charged, electric, like biting down on tinfoil. When he woke very early in the predawn of the next day after a short yet intense power nap filled with strenuously incomprehensible dreams, his morning coughs and snuffles drew the clotted tang of blood from the back of his throat. Again, he spat for a long time over the washbasin, looking at himself in the backlit mirror.
    He looked good, though. Didn’t he? A gloomy Gus no longer, freed from toothache pain and jet lag; damn it,