The beast began to stir. Kyle could feel it. It slowly uncoiled itself from its slumber. He felt it give a half-hearted push for release.

I 'm hungry.

"Go away," he whispered.

I need food.

"Not now!"

Let me out.

"No! Not again!" Kyle hissed.

The beast began to push harder. LET ME OUT!

Tears began to well up in Kyle's eyes. "God, please forgive me," he whispered.

NOW!

Kyle dropped his resistance, and the beast shoved his conscience aside. It was now in control. It drank deeply of the plethora of sights, sounds, scents, and feelings others take for granted. The sight of the cloud-laden sky was exquisite to its eyes.

That beast that walked as in the body of a man turned away from the window and scanned its surroundings. It was on a bus. Its eyes wandered over the various representatives of humanity that packed the wearied interior. It could smell their emotions. The sharp stench of joy was intermingled with the mellowness of a brooding anger and the overripe scent of grief. Above all, the sweet aroma of fear tingled in his borrowed nostrils. There was always fear, it was just a matter of finding it.

The creature noticed a meek looking young woman watching it. She was sitting alone a few rows behind Kyle's seat, across the aisle. She looked down as soon as they had made eye contact, pretending to be interested in the book in her lap. A few seconds later, she glanced up to see if the eyes of the man owned by the beast were still watching her. They were.

The beast scrutinized her. The woman could not have been very far into her twenties, conceivably still in her teens. She had a slight frame with long, black hair cascading over her fragile shoulders. She wore thick glasses over lusterless brown eyes. The woman was not particularly pretty, or even conventionally attractive. She was vulnerable. She would be adequate.

The beast stood up, gripping the back of the seat to maintain its footing in the unsteady bus. It took the first few steps of the eternal dance between predator and prey. It walked down the aisle and stood next to the woman.

"Is it alright if I sit here?" it asked with mock shyness.

The woman threw it a nervous glance and smiled. "Okay," she said softly, sliding closer to the window. She turned her attention back to her book. She seemed apathetic in her mannerisms, but the beast could hear her frail heart beating fervently.

They sat silently for a few minutes as the beast allowed the illusion to solidify. Finally, it spoke. "Look, I'm not really good at this...but...uh...would you like to...have lunch with me...or something?" It threw a glance up at her and then looked quickly away. The opening chords of the aria had begun.

She looked up at it and smiled. "Sure." The dance had begun.

The beast enjoyed the hunt more than the catch. The woman was victim just waiting for predatory fangs to tear into her soul. Her name was Heather. She had just moved to the city and rented an apartment across town from Kyle. The two spent most of the day together. As night fell, the beast walked with her to her apartment. Her dark eyes sparkled and she reeked of happiness. It knew what she was feeling, that her worthless, lonely existence finally had some meaning. Finally, they had reached the door of her apartment. Their tango was drawing to a close.

"Would you like to come in?" she said, looking up at him with a faint smile crossing her thin lips.

"Alright," it said quietly.

It knew what she intended. It had watched the actions of its host from the back of his brain. It witnessed the sweating, panting, empty passions of its prey. It had no desires to partake of this clumsy, desperate waltz. Instead, it sought the elegant ballet performed to the music of rushing blood liberated from its confining arteries.

The two embraced each other in the darkness and their lips met. The creature was repulsed by the contact, but it was part of the hunt. Heather made a soft, guttural sound. The beast unbuttoned her blouse and placed its hand on her warm skin. Its hand found her muffled heartbeat with little unnecessary roving. Silvery tendrils began to work into her pores. She did not feel them. She only knew that the man she thought she loved and stopped searching her inches from where she expected.

"What's wrong?" she whispered.

The beast did not hear. It felt the tendrils weave themselves past her ribcage and wrap themselves around her feeble heart.

"Kyle..." she began to say.

The beast looked her in the eyes. This was the part that made it all worthwhile. The tendrils contracted, squeezing her heart, stopping its vital blood flow. A perverse thrill moved through the beast's essence like a tidal wave when it felt one of the heart's chambers explode. Heather's eyes widened. Her grip on its arms tightened and then relaxed. In a fraction of a second, her expression changed from that of concern, to surprise, to betrayal. The last thing she saw was the face of her salvation staring at her, sneering. Dancers bow. Curtains close. Applause.

The beast watched her sink to the floor. It began to feed, absorbing the emotions that were flooding her dying mind. The silvery tendrils now waved in the air like strands of spider web in a breeze, stealing all that had made her human. Fear, hatred, and regret all radiated from the mass of dying cells lying at his feet. The emotions eventually dwindled and finally ceased. The tendrils returned to their host. Satiated, the beast retreated to the back of its host's mind, slamming Kyle back into his own flesh.

He looked down at the woman had he killed, but never met. Her face was another face was burned into his soul, another accusing pair of eyes staring at him when his back was turned, and another mouth accusing him in his sleep. His guts felt like they had vanished into a vacuum. He stumbled out of the apartment and onto the street. It took him a few moments to realize that the beast had left him without a clue as to where he was. It took him hours to find his way home.

"You owe me for this," he mumbled.

Dan Bischoff rubbed his eyes. He felt like he had a brick lodged in his sinuses, and his fever seemed to knock fifty degrees from the room's temperature. At least, he thought, the wall of mucus in his nose blocked the stale stench of death.

"How long ago do you think she died?" he asked, looking down at the grayish, desiccated body on the floor.

"Well," Adrian answered as he kneeled by the body holding a handkerchief over his face "I’d guess about four or five days, but we won’t for sure until the coroner looks her over." He looked up at Dan. "Why the hell am I checking out the stiff when you’re the one with the cold? You do it, sick boy." He walked over to a window and threw it open. He leaned out the window, breathing the chilly air deeply.

Dan leaned over and looked over the body. In spite of his cold, he could almost taste the rotten smell. "no obvious signs of violence, but it looks like somebody was here."

"How do you figure?"

Dan gently rolled the body onto its back. It left a damp spot on the floor where it had lied for so long. "It looks like somebody was making it to second base the way her blouse is."

Adrian glanced back at her. "Maybe she was starting to change when she died. It happens."

Dan shrugged. "Or maybe she brought somebody home and he freaked when she died and split."

Adrian looked around at the spartan, conservative room. "She doesn’t seem like the type to be a swinger."

Dan stood up. "What do you know swingers, mister family of four in suburbia. Shall we split?"

"Sounds good to me," Adrian answered. "And how do you know the misses and I don’t dress up in leather and chains and cruise the red light district after the kids are in bed?"

Dan threw and incredulous glance over his shoulder as a left the room. "Don’t touch the doorknob, we’ll need the prints." He caught the attention of a uniformed officer in the hall. "We’re done here. We need to dust for prints, especially the inside doorknob."

"Yes sir," the officer replied.

"We aired it out for you, too," Adrian said.

"It’s all in Ricky’s hands now," Dan said as he pulled to a wad of tissues from his pocket.

"Didn’t you hear?" Adrian said. "Ricky’s retiring."

"No way."

"Well he’s about due. He had his 70th birthday last week."

"When the hell did that happen?" Dan asked as they trudged down the stairs. "I’m missing memos again."

"Do you by any chance happen to remember that birthday card that circulated around the office last Monday?"

"Uh..."

"And you wrote ‘keep ‘em stiff doc?’"

"Oh yeah," Dan said. "Damn I’m clever. I’m gonna miss Ricky, though. He was like a dad to me."

Kyle looked at the plain white ceiling above his bed. It seemed to writhe with the faces of the people the demon had used him to kill. The last woman was the eleventh victim of the beast's appetites. Ten of them were women. Once Kyle had regained possession of his body and saw a man lying on the ground in front of him. His lips burned at the thought of what the beast had made him do with him. The thing incubating in his brain would not tell him, allowing his imagination to run wild. It was the price he had to pay, though, for his immortality.

"I’m ready." He listened for a response.

"I said I’m ready."

I heard you.

"Well what’s taking so long?"

I’m deciding what to show you. Kyle’s head was silent for another moment. Grab your brushes. You’re going for the ride of your life.

Kyle shot upright in bed. He began to see the universe through the demon’s senses. Alien vistas opened before him with unbelievable clarity. There were things he never could have imagined appearing in his mind as the beast caressed the deepest parts of his mind. He stumbled to the large blank canvas and clumsily grasped his brushes. He painted feverishly and time flew by. Finally he had it. The image in his mind and on the canvas matched. Reality slowly began to trickle into his mind. He stepped back and barely contained a gasp. It was beautiful. The canvas was more than art. It was a vision of beyond. The colors, the lines, all of it was perfection.

Better call your agent.

"Yeah, yeah that’s a good idea. I think there’s still time to include it the exhibition."

You’re going to be famous.

"Feeling better, ace?" Captain Richards asked, rubbing Dan’s head roughly.

"Yeah, but I’m probably still contagious," he answered.

"God forbid," Richards said as he walked into his office.

Adrian looked back at his desk, drumming his fingers impatiently. There was a stack of reports on his desk and he was not enthusiastic about filling them out.

Adrian sat down across from him. "Top o’ the morning to ya’".

"Whatever."

"Sign this," Adrian said, giving Dan a get well card. "It’s for Ricky."

"NOW what happened to him?"

"He slipped on some ice and broke his arm. Looks like he’ll be retiring early."

Dan threw his arms up. "How did I get so far outside the rumor loop?"

"It’s just as well, you don’t want to know what they’re saying about you. And hurry up and think of something clever because we have to go down the morgue to see the new coroner about the Meyers women we found a couple of days ago."

"What’s up?"

Adrian shrugged. "Who knows? At least we’ll get to meet the new doctor death."

Dan quickly signed the card, "Next time break something less useful. Love and kisses--Dan".

"Let’s go." Even a trip to the morgue was more attractive than an afternoon at the office.

"So who’s the new coroner?" Dan asked as they pushed into the antiseptic atmosphere of the morgue.

"Doctor Ulm," he said. "My guess is that he’ll be the one checking out the stiffs." He hated the place. He recognized the irony of being a homicide detective and being made uneasy by the presence of sheet covered corpses,

The two strolled through the brightly lit and pathologically clean room.

Adrian spotted a woman in a labcoat standing near an uncovered body, scribbling on a clipboard. "Excuse me," he said, "but we’re looking for doctor Ulm?"

"You’re looking at her," she said, not looking up. "What can I do for you?"

"Well, we’re detectives Lewis and Bischoff and we were told you wanted to see us about Heather Meyers."

She looked up with a friendly smile. "Of course," she said offering her hand. Adrian was surprised at how attractive she was, with high cheekbones, shoulder-length black hair, and shockingly blue eyes. He could imagine the lascivious thoughts that were running through his partner’s mind. "Now who’s who?"

"I’m Bischoff," Dan said as they shook hands. "Dan Bischoff." He spoke in a tone reserved for women he was suddenly and hopelessly interested in.

If Dr. Ulm noticed, she didn’t show it. "I read your report on the Meyers case, such as it is, and I trust you read doctor Smith’s cause of death report?"

"Yeah," Adrian said. "It was a heart attack, right?"

She led them over to a sheet-covered corpse. "I think that you’ll agree that a heart attack in a woman under 30 with no evidence of drug abuse is very rare, right?"

"I’d go along with that." Dan said.

"Well, since I’m probably going to be the coroner around here for awhile, I decided to get up to speed on how doctor Smith operated and I was kind of curious how he came to that conclusion."

Adrian nodded absently, wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.

"So I checked out everything by the book and found out that everyone was consistent except for one thing. Her heart is gone."

"Gone, huh?" Dan said. "Gone as in...how?"

"Gone as in no longer in the body and nowhere to be found. It looks as though doctor Smith cut it out. Now it’s not unusual to take organs out to examine them, especially when they’re the suspected cause of death. Still, the organ’s location should be documented for later study and so it can be buried with the body."

"So do you think something else killed her?" Adrian asked.

Dr. Ulm shrugged. "Everything else is consistent with a heart failure since the woman is in perfect health with no injuries or toxins in the system, but I would have liked to look at the heart to see what specifically killed her. There is something weird, though. Have a look," she said as she rolled back the sheet.

Adrian felt a twitch inside him at the sight of the decomposing body. He had seen a lot of bodies in various states of decay, but those that had been dead for a week still looked human, but the fact that they were dead was painfully obvious. The damage from the autopsy made things worse. He swallowed his unease and tried to concentrate on what Dr. Ulm was saying.

She pointed to a piece of skin on her sternum. "Do you see these? Look close."

Dan leaned forward. Adrian refrained, not wanted to get closer to the body than he had to.

"What am I looking at?" Dan asked.

"See those pores right in this patch of skin that seem to be enlarged?"

Adrian leaned forward slightly. He could see a small patch the looked like a cluster of tiny needle holes in the woman’s skin.

"It looks like something entered her skin. I checked lower levels of tissue and it really looks like something entered her body all the way past he rib cage."

"And to her heart?" Adrian asked.

Ulm shrugged. "Looks like it. It looks almost like someone stuck a hypodermic needle repeatedly into her heart, but there’s no blood and it really doesn’t...feel like it."

"And I’m guessing you want the heart to see if they’re consistent," Adrian said. "What do you need from us?"

"I haven’t been able to get a hold of doctor Smith, something about his phone being disconnected," she said. "Since this is more or less your case, I’d really appreciate it if you could drop by his house and find out."

Dan shrugged. "Yeah, I guess we can visit Ricky. You got it."

"Thanks,’ Ulm said as she covered the body. "Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of things to catch up on."

"Okay, we’ll be back after lunch." Dan said as the left. "you know what? I think I’ll be spending a lot more time down here."

"She seemed kind of all business to me," Adrian said doubtfully.

"Hey, she’s new. Give her a break. She’ll warm up to my charms."

"Don’t hold you’re breath."

The thing that was Nick Young swirled the paint on the paper with his fingers. It would be much better if they would have given him brushes, but he had decided not to push his luck since he was just recently freed of his restraints. He was glad they let him paint. If he couldn’t, he felt that he would lose his mind.

He did not realize that the psychiatrist was standing over him. He was startled when the doctor spoke.

"What are you painting there, Nick?" he said.

Nick jerked his head around, staring at the psychiatrist with his dead eyes. After a moment he slowly turned back to his painting. "Not Nick. Nick went away."

"Okay, so what are you painting?"

Nick thought for a moment. "Not sure. It’s something the demon sees. It’s the kind of things the Beast let Nick paint."

"I thought we decided that there was no demon," the psychiatrist said paternalistically.

"There is a demon," Nick said, "it’s just not in Nick’s body anymore. It’s in someone else now." He tapped his head. "Part of it is still in here. It let’s me see what it does, what it paints, who it kills. Need more red..."

"Who does it kill?"

"It killed a woman a few days and nights ago. It crushed her heart." He smiled a little. "It seduced her and broke her heart. That’s what it does."

"And where is the this demon now?" the psychiatrist asked.

Nick pointed a paint-stained finger to his left. "That way."

The psychiatrist turned to speak in hushed tones to some other psychiatrists. They always came and asked him questions like that, but he did not care. As long as he got to paint.

"Jesus," Dan said as he caught the car door to keep from falling onto the wet street.

"Careful there, slick," Adrian said as he climbed out and walked easily onto the hard-packed snow on Ricky’s yard.

Dan half-walked, half-slid on the icy patch on the passenger side of the car. "No wonder Ricky broke his arm. This shit’s slicker than greased snot."

"Lovely metaphor," Adrian said as the two of them reached the door of the well-kept, beige house. Adrian pushed the doorbell and sighed heavily, blowing a long white cloud into the crisp air. Although he had worked with Ricky as long as he had been on the force and knew him well, it felt strange to be visiting his house.

"I’ll bet you parked so that ice was right under my door on purpose," Dan said as they waited.

"No," Adrian answered with a grin, "but I would have in if I knew it was there."

The door opened and a weather-worn face appeared. "Danny! Adrian!" Ricky said in his gruff voice, pushing open the screen door. "Come on in! Wipe your feet."

Adrian stepped into the warm potpourri-laden air. He blinked a few times to allow his eyes to make the adjustment from the blinding brilliance of the snow to the softly-lit interior of the house. He scraped off his shoes before continuing into the plushly furnished living room.

"Edith’s off at the store," Ricky said off-handedly. "Can I get you guys something? Tea or anything?"

"No thanks," Adrian said, "we can’t stay long." His eyes drifted to the white cast around Ricky’s arm. "How’s the arm?"

"Itches like crazy. but it’s not too bad."

"Your pro football career isn’t over, is it?" Dan asked.

Ricky laughed. "No, I don’t think the Steelers are going to resign me this year."

"Good thing you have that degree as a coroner to fall back on."

"I won’t have that much longer, either," Ricky said with a sad grin.

"Speaking of that," Adrian said, "the new coroner had a bit of a problem on her first day with the Heather Meyers case. You had ruled it a heart attack, and she wanted to review your conclusions--you know, to get a feel on how things work in our place--and she couldn’t find Meyers’ heart."

Ricky’s eyebrows went up. "She couldn’t? Well, I was certainly meaning to get back and tie up lose ends, but this," he motioned toward his cast, "kind of changed things."

"Well do you have any idea where it could be?"

Ricky sighed and tapped his temple with his fingers. "That’s why I decided to retire. The old noggin couldn’t take the strain anymore. Tell the new coroner that I’ll be by in a couple of days...say Thursday and we’ll get all of this sorted out."

"Can do."

"So the new coroner is a woman?" Ricky asked. He tossed his head in Dan’s direction. "Is she material for bachelor boy here?"

The office’s coffee was unusually bad that day, Adrian decided as he set the styrofoam cup down in disgust. He leafed through the evidence from the scene in Heather Meyer’s apartment, but was not really reading. He had already read everything twice and he was preoccupied with decided what he would have to buy his family for Christmas. He saw Dan come strolling into the office and was thankful for the distraction.

"So when are you going to marry Ms. Ulm?" he asked as Dan sat down across from him.

"That chick’s all business," he said, shaking his head. "As soon as I get down there she tells me that she’s been reviewing the profiles and wants to exhume eight damn bodies whose cause of death she deems as ‘questionable’. Would have been more if it wasn’t for the miracle of cremation."

"What doe she think is going on?"

Dan shrugged. "Has something to do with Ricky classifying Meyers as a normal death and then losing that one critical organ. She apparently thinks Ricky may have overlooked some things."

"Does she apply that he did it on purpose?" Adrian asked, hostility creeping into his tone.

"Who knows? If she does, she wasn’t explicit about it."

Adrian slid his palms over his balding head in frustration. He did not like the thought of someone disparaging Ricky’s competence. After all, Ricky had been coroner for almost fifty years and had mountains of experience compared to Ulm. If he said the person died of natural causes, that was good enough for Adrian.

Dan read his emotions. "Give her a little bit of a break, man. She’s new. I’m sure all this will blow over."

"It sure had better."

"Adrian," Dan said firmly, "lighten up. You saw Ricky. He practically admitted that his mind was going. Now if there’s reason to believe that things have been slipping by him, then we better find it out, don’t you think. You saw Meyer’s corpse. Something is up, and Ricky didn’t see it. We have to be sure."

Adrian slumped in his chair. Dan was right and he knew it. Ricky was almost a second father to him and it hurt to think that he was falling short of Adrian’s expectations.

"When’s the digging begin?"

"I’m going to take the paperwork to the judge before I leave today. I suspect they’ll break ground Friday or so."

"Do you think we should tell Ricky?"

Dan thought for a moment. "Why upset him? He doesn’t need to know. I think it would be better to allow him to retire not knowing that there were some questions he left behind."

The beast slid through the collage of images of Kyle’s memories to amuse itself by wallowing in the mind of a lesser creature. The pain of a broken arm in childhood, the secret guilt of a brief bout of Oedipus complex, and the excitement of that first desperate grope with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember. The beast was considering moving on to a new host, primarily because this host was becoming incredibly boring. It was also dangerous to stay in the same host for too long a period, particularly with the new levels of science this species had recently gained. Most of its kind had fled to less developed areas for safety’s sake.

The slight sting of adrenaline coursing through Kyle’s blood pulled the beast out of the depths of his brain. The beast tapped into its host’s optical and auditory nerves to see what was happening. Through Kyle’s eyes, it saw an angry man with a rough gotee screaming at its host in the weak light of an alley.

"I said, give me your wallet or I’ll rip your fucking head off!"

The beast made a quick scan of Kyle’s nervous system. He had been punched in the face and stomach. The beast decided that the situation was unacceptable.

Move over, it commanded.

"Sure," Kyle said out loud.

It took the beast a fraction of the second to take over control of Kyle’s body. Without hesitation, it rammed his palm into the man’s nose. He stumbled backward, bleeding profusely and stammering obscenities. Kyle’s body moved forward quickly and caught the man’s throat.

The beast made Kyle’s face smile. "Don’t mess with my hosts." Then it jerked his arm back, tearing the assailant’s windpipe. He fell to his knees, gurgling futility. The beast considered staying to consume the smoke rising from the dying embers of the man’s life, but the risks were too great. It returned to the recesses of Kyle’s mind, putting its host back in control.

"Jesus," he said, looking down at the still struggling man.

Go home, the beast said.

"Yeah, that’s a good idea," he said as he hurried back toward the street.

I told you about being careful. It would be a shame for anything to happen to you right at the beginning of your career as a world-famous artist.

Kyle didn’t answer. He was not in the mood to be lectured. His mind was on the exhibition of his work that was going to take place the following night. The terror he had experienced moments before melted quickly in the elation and excitement that was burning in his stomach. The brush with death forgotten, Kyle walked quickly down the street, his mind full of the future.

There was another cause for his elation as well. His agent, a pretty, young blonde with an affinity for short skirts named Jessica, seemed to harbor an interest in him that went beyond exposing his work to the public. She was not interested in him while he was controlled by the beast, with its subtle manipulations and ability to play off of people’s desires, she was interested in the real Kyle.

He felt the beast gliding over his brain, reading his thoughts. "She’s mine," he said quietly. "Leave her alone."

Very well, it answered. It saw how she acted toward him and it was mildly surprised that its host’s perceptions were correct for a change. The strain of saving Kyle’s life sapped much of the beast’s energy and it would have to feed again soon, but it would allow its host to try to enjoy itself for now. After all, soon the beast would be moving on to a new host, and Kyle’s brain had become dependent on its presence. When the beast left, most of Kyle would be gone, too.

Nick stared blankly at the white wall. I enjoyed watching what shapes emerged from the shimmering paint if he stared long enough. It was more interesting than paying attention to doctor Matthew Hogan in these weekly sessions.

Matthew, a thin, secretly balding man in his 40’s with thick glasses sat across from Nick. He did not share Nick’s boredom. In fact, he looked at nick with a mixture of keen interest and profound fear. Nick had a personality and a pathology no one had seen before, and he always revealed a little bit more of himself at each session. "How are you today?" he said, keeping in mind that the patient did not respond when referred to by his name.

"Adequate," Nick answered flatly.

"What are you looking at?"

"The wall."

"What do you see?"

"White paint."

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Are there any goats in the room?" Matthew asked.

"No," Nick answered in the same tone, not acknowledging the absurdity of the question.

"Someone told me there were."

"No."

"How do you know?"

"I’d smell them."

"What if I said I could smell them?"

"I’d say you had mental problems."

Matthew would have cracked a smile if Nick hadn’t been so ardently serious, staring at the wall, rocking slightly in his chair.

"I saw the paintings you made. Very impressive."

"They’d be better if I had brushes."

"Now you know we can’t allow that."

"I know."

"Where do you come up with things like that? What inspires you to mix the colors?"

"The demon. It shows them to its host."

"I thought we already decided there was no demon in your body."

"No. No one in this body. Not even Nick. He left when the demon left."

"So how can you see what this demon is showing its host" Matthew asked patiently. They had had this conversation many times before, and he believed that its consistency was an important part of Nick’s disease.

"Don’t know. We’re still connected somehow. When it was with me it taught me music."

"Yes, you were doing very well, too. You had a single that was climbing the charts. What happened?"

"The demon left."

"The hospital said you were full of drugs. We think that that destroyed your mind. What do you think?"

"Nick never used drugs. The demon wouldn’t let him. When the demon and Nick left, I tried to kill this body. It didn’t work."

"So you see what the host sees?"

"Yes. Today the demon killed a man in an alley. It doesn’t take kindly to people who threaten its host." Suddenly Nick made eye contact with Matthew. "You like the things I painted? There’s an exhibition of the demon’s host’s work tomorrow night. You should go. They’re better with brushes." The spark in his face faded quickly, and his eyes drifted back toward the wall.

"How did you know that?"

"I know what the demon knows."

Matthew was disturbed. He was planning on taking a date to an art exhibition that night. Perhaps this would be an opportunity to quiet that nagging doubt in his mind that Nick was more than mad.

Kyle picked up the phone, wondering if it was Jessica calling to fill him in on details at about the exhibition. Who else would be calling at two at night?

"Hello."

"Hello," the raspy voice of an older man said uncertainly. "I’m not sure if I have the right number, but I wanted to talk to your keeper."

"My keeper? What--"

Kyle was suddenly pushed into the vague recess of his mind. The beast decided it wanted to have a conversation and he didn’t have much say about it. He waited, lost in a swirling sea of his own memories. It was better than being in that horrible gray world of complete sensory deprivation. The beast did that sometimes when it was annoyed with him. It was Kyle’s turn to be annoyed, though. He took umbrage at the beast considering itself his "keeper".

Finally with a flash, a tingling, and a roar that sounded like the ocean, he was back in his body, listening to a dialtone. He put the phone down.

"What was all that about?" he asked.

Nothing that concerns you.

"Then what’s this keeper crap?"

The beast did not answer.

"You are not my keeper," Kyle said angrily. "I let you in. You’re here because I let you be here."

Kyle gasped involuntarily as he felt the beast’s tendrils ripple through his brain.

You remember what happened in the alley today. You remember what you were before I came. Think about those things, and then tell me who is existing at whose suffrage.

The beast yanked Kyle’s consciousness out of his body and tossed it into a whirlpool of his darkest memories. The beast walked Kyle’s body to a chair and made it sit down. It needed to consider the situation.

The caller was one of the coroners in the beast’s hunting grounds. Because of the rapidly improving technology of its prey, the beast’s kind needed to adapt. Most fled to greener pastures in less developed areas while many settled took hosts in the medical fields, surviving on the tasteless, bland byproducts of prey they did not claim on their own. A few even fled the planet, risking the void to colonize a new world. The beast curled up in Kyle’s skull was one of the very few who still dared to hunt in the old ways in this area.

The beast’s methods required it to sidestep those who would discover it. Sometimes it had to dispose of the bodies or mutilate them to erase the evidence of its existence. It had managed to achieve prime conditions here, though. Through a series of threats, reasoning, and sliding in to his brain to make alterations, the beast had managed to get the coroner to overlook its kills. Now he was retiring, and the beast had to consider what to do about the new one.

After weighing its options for awhile, the beast released Kyle from the nightmare world of his own making to the peace of slumber. While Kyle’s brain slept, the beast was on the move in his body. Someone knew too much, and the beast had to fix that.

Dan picked up the phone and said hello without even waking up. Consciousness didn’t begin to accrue for several seconds.

"Dan, this is Adrian, are you awake or just sleep-talking?"

"I’m up," Dan said, forcing himself up on one arm. He squinted at the glowing red digital clockface. It was barely five-thirty. "What’s going on?"

"I just got a call from the station. Ricky’s dead."

Sleep lost its last hold on Dan’s mind. "What did you say?"

"Him and Edith," Adrian said gravely. "There was a fire and it gutted their house. To firemen found them in bed."

"How could they ID them so quickly?"

"Well, technically, we don’t know for sure that it’s them until we get the dentals, but let’s be real. They’re gone."

"Jesus," Dan said. "Do they know how it started?"

"No word yet, but there were no obvious sings of arson."

The two were silent for a moment.

"Well, look," Adrian said, "I’ll see you in a couple hours for work, and maybe we’ll have a bit more of this sorted out."

"Yeah, see you later," Dan said quietly. He hung up the phone and lied back on the bed. He stared at the indigo darkness outside his window. He had no delusions about getting any more sleep, but he was reluctant to leave his bed to enter a world that had become a little bit colder.

Kyle awoke with a jump. He was lying sprawled out on the bed with his clothes on. He sat up slowly and glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten. He wasn’t in any hurry, since he didn’t have to be at the exhibition until three, but he wanted to make certain he was presentable. As he took off his shirt, he noticed that his clothes smelled like smoke. He thought back to the night before. The last thing he remembered was picking up the phone, but he could not recall who he was talking to.

He immediately suspected the beast.

"What happened last night?" he asked out loud.

Just tying up some loose ends. Nothing you need to worry about.

Kyle accepted that answer. He was too excited about the coming exhibition to pry. He climbed out of bed and looked through the closet. He quickly decided on a black suit with a black turtleneck. It seemed trendy enough.

The blackened house stood out like a cancer on a world blanketed with a skin of newly fallen snow. Adrian stood in silent awe before the place that was warm and cheerful just the day before.

"Damn," Dan muttered.

A moment later a man with a red beard walked up to them. "Detectives Lewis and Bischoff?" he said, offering his hand. "I’m Luke Willis, the fire inspector."

"How’s it going?" Dan said flatly.

Adrian nodded his greeting.

"I understand that this was the home of your coroner."

"Yeah," Adrian said. "He was about to retire."

"Follow me, and I’ll show you around," Willis said, turning toward the door. "Most of the structure seems to be intact, so we should be safe."

Adrian and Dan followed him into the dead house. The living room was stained gray with smoke and everything had been soaked by the hoses of the firemen, but it was otherwise intact.

"The fire started on the second floor, so damage down here was really minimal. Now before we go upstairs, I have to warn you that everything’s as we left it, and if you were good friends with Mr. Smith you may not want to go up until after the bodies have been removed."

"This is our job," Adrian said simply. "Let’s go."

As the three climbed the stairs, the air became thicker with the stench of smoke and the hint of burned meat. Adrian clung to his grim professional determination to get him through what he knew would be a difficult experience.

The hallway at the top of the stairs was blackened. A few shreds of wallpaper still clung to the mostly immolated wall, waving impotently from a cold wind that blew in through a ragged hole in the roof. Willis led them into the bedroom. All of the furniture in the room had been reduced to piles of ash except for the metal-framed bed. Lying on a mattress of springs denuded of cloth were two charred corpses clinging to each other.

"This was where the fire started," Willis said. "No doubt about that. We haven’t exactly pinned down the cause of the fire, but there are no signs of accelerants."

"If there were no accelerants," Adrian said unemotionally, "that means the fire would have started small and they should have woken up."

"Even if there were accelerants," Dan said, "if it was right here, they would have realized it before smoke inhalation killed them."

"I know," Willis said. "That’s what stinks about this. The only thing I can think of is that they were dead before the fire started, meaning either suicide or murder."

Dan and Adrian looked at each other.

"Of course," Willis continued, "you’ll have to have a post mortem done to determine true cause of death, but this doesn’t look normal. There are no clear signs of violence that I can see, so it may have been suffocation or poisoning. Hell, this could even be a case of spontaneous human combustion, but I’m not banking on that."

Adrian felt the walls of his professionalism beginning to break down. He had to leave before he lost control of himself. "Thank you, mister Willis," he said as he turned toward the door. "Let us know when you’ve determined a cause."

Alissa Ulm looked up from the dead organs of the corpse she was examining as Detectives Bischoff and Lewis walked in. Both of them had gray, dead expressions on their faces. She covered the corpse and walked toward them.

"We heard that you had a cause of death already?" Lewis said, dispensing with greetings.

"Yes," Alissa said, slightly taken aback by his intensity. "Since Dr. Smith had recently held this office himself, I performed the autopsy on him and his wife as soon as they came in." She walked over to a pair of beds with morbidly misshapen human forms underneath the sheets.

"And?"

Alissa paused, considering whether to pull back the sheets and show her evidence. Not yet, she decided. "They were both still alive when the fire broke out. Their lungs are filled with smoke and badly singed. If they had been dead there would be little or no lung damage."

"So they burned in their sleep?" Dan asked. "I find that a little hard to swallow."

"No," Alissa said. "They were alive, and probably conscious." She pulled back the sheet, revealing a charred, barely recognizable corpse lying on its side. She pointed at the back of the neck. She had exposed the off-white tissue of the spine. "Here, the spinal cord had been severed."
"Severed?" Adrian said incredulously.

"It’s not a clean cut, but more like something tore through it. The tear is identical in both victims. These kinds of things don’t happen in a fire."

"How--" Dan stammered, trying to come to grips with this revelation. "How did it happen?"

"In the tissue around the spine, I found a few needle-sized holes. They looked the same as the ones on Meyer’s body. We need those others bodies exhumed immediately to determine if it’s the same MO and try to figure out how it’s happening."

Adrian nodded, staring at the corpse.

Alissa covered it with the sheet. "There’s something else that you might not want to hear." She hesitated. She had no idea how they were going to react to this. "I suspect that Mr. Smith has been aiding the killer in these cases."

Adrian’s face contorted with rage and Dan’s went blank with surprise.

Alissa held up a hand. "Please, hear me out. I checked all of the records here, and there have been a lot of deaths that simply should not have happened that Dr. Smith assigned natural causes to. The exhumations will either exonerate him or prove that he...was coerced into helping the killer. We have to know."

Adrian turned abruptly and stormed out of the morgue.

"We’ll see what we can do about speeding up those exhumations," Dan said as he hurried after his partner.

"That bitch," Adrian grumbled as he walked quickly down the hallway. "That fucking bitch."

"Lighten up, man," Dan said as he caught up.

"No sooner is Ricky dead than she has to go out and destroy his reputation."

"What if she’s right?"

Adrian turned, grabbing Dan by the lapels of his coat and forcing him against the wall. "She’s wrong!" he shouted, his eyes wide with anger. "She so dead fucking wrong! Ricky’s didn’t aid or abet any criminals!

Dan grabbed Adrian’s shirt and forced him against the opposite wall. "We have to know for sure!" He shouted back. "We have to know the truth, no matter how damn ugly it is! We owe to Ricky, ourselves, and the goddamned badge!"

Adrian looked at him for a moment, then ripped free of his grip. "Let’s get this over with," he said bitterly.

Kyle’s stomach was alive with butterflies as he walked around the gallery. There were no people there yet, so he walked freely amongst the artwork and put himself in the shoes of one of the public. He strolled around nonchalantly, with his hands behind his back, imagining what they would be thinking as he looked at other artists’ work. No, that one’s not any good. Tsk, mediocre at best. There’s no vision there. My four year-old could do that.

Then Kyle’s wandering eyes meandered onto one of his paintings on the wall. Stunning, absolutely stunning. Who’s the artist? Kyle Nelson? Well, we’ll just have to shower him with money and fame. Kyle smiled.

"How do you like the layout, Kyle?"

Kyle turned around and saw Jessica standing behind him. She was looking as glamorous as always with a tight, short black suede dress that shimmered slightly in the light. His eyes passed quickly over her athletic figure and met her dark eyes. The butterflies in his stomach became more frantic.

"It’s great," he said. "I’m really excited about tonight."

"Me, too," she said, looking at one of his paintings. "You really are a rising star in the art world. We got a lot of response form word of moth alone." Her eyes turned back to him and she smiled a smile that made Kyle’s groin ache. "You’re really going places."

Suddenly Kyle felt something like snakeskin rasp against is brain. For a moment he was horrified that the beast was going to take control, even though it assured him it wouldn’t.

Jessica saw the wave of horror move over him. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, fine," Kyle said as the feeling subsided and he was sure that the beast wasn’t moving in on him. "I just thought I forgot something important, but I didn’t, so everything’s okay."

"Oh," Jessica said, looking slightly nonplused. She shook it off. "Listen, I’ll be busy here tonight, but would you be interested in getting together tomorrow night for dinner or something?"

Kyle’s eyebrows went up. "Of course. That would be great."

"Great," she said with another classic smile. "Give me a call some time tomorrow and we’ll sort out the details." She squeezed his arm gently before walking away.

Kyle stood there, watching her leave. His life was truly picking up.

Alissa Ulm half-listened to her date, the shrink, drone endlessly about work and his theories of psychiatry. Alissa did not want to be here. The first two of the exhumed bodies had arrived that afternoon. Both were young women in previously good health who had no business dying of heart attacks as their certificates claimed. In each case, the actual heart was missing and on their chests were a cluster of those small holes. It was clear that doctor Smith had been covering for someone and that that someone had turned on him. Bischoff and Lewis were not pleased when she gave them the results and asked them to try to find any evidence collected in those two cases. She new they would cooperate, though. They seemed professional enough, even if Bischoff looked at her like a schoolboy with a crush.

She had considered breaking this date. She knew that Matthew would probably be boring and that the evening would be unrewarding under any circumstances. She also knew that unless she did get out she would probably spend all night pouring over the records at the office and be in poor shape to deal with the second wave of exhumations the next day. So she forced herself not to think about work and to try to concentrate on what Matthew was saying. Her task would have far easier if what he had to say was the least bit interesting.

Alissa was only vaguely aware that he slid the car into a parking space. "We’re here!" he said cheerfully as he got out of the car and into the cold night air. "Prepare to be dazzled by up and coming artists."

Alissa climbed out of the car stepping carefully over a mound of packed snow on the edge of the sidewalk. For a psychiatrist, she thought, he did not seem to notice her keen disinterest. They walked the half block to the exhibition building with Matthew talking incessantly about the artists that were going to be featured. They stepped out of the night into the well-lit, warm room. Alissa was grateful not only to be out of the winter weather but to get to hear other people’s voices besides Matthew’s. Even so, he continued to comment on what probably drove the artists to make a particular piece. She nodded in agreement and interjected an occasional "Really?", but for the most part tried to enjoy the exhibit.

When they had explored half of the exhibit, Matthew suddenly stopped talking and instead said, "Oh my God," in a hushed tone.

She looked at him. He was staring wide-eyed at the painting in front of him. Alissa acknowledge that it was a striking piece. It depicted rows of black, shimmering, strangely angled columns reaching for the sky which burned a fiery orange. "Kyle Nelson" was the name printed prominently below it. The expression of Matthew’s face was not one of aesthetic fulfillment, though, but one of fear.

"Matthew?" she said. "What’s the matter?"

He looked at her. "It’s...it’s impossible," he stammered. He stepped back from the painting and looked down the hallway to the other paintings from this artist. He covered his mouth, his eyes screaming panic. The other paintings were equally fascinating. One showed a fortress made from the skeleton of some titanic beast. Another depicted an indigo see lapping at a shore coated with black sand. Still another displayed a landscape of some bizarre, alien city. All of them had the same fiery sky and some of the same exotic plants in the foreground. Alissa could not see the source of Matthew’s distress.

Matthew stumbled backward onto a bench, holding his head. Alissa sat down next to him.

"Matthew," she said firmly, "what’s wrong?"

"These pictures," Matthew said, sweat appearing on his face. "I have a patient who likes to paint. He says that there was a demon inside him and now it’s in someone else, but he can still see what it sees. The pictures he paints are exactly like these!"

"Interesting," Alissa said indifferently.

"You don’t understand," Matthew said, desperation creeping into his voice. "According to Nick, this demon kills people, most often women, and most often by crushing their hearts."

Alissa’s blood ran cold.

"All this time," Matthew continued, "we didn’t believe him, but he was telling the truth. I mean, it’s absurd! How could we know it was real? How could we know he was actually sane?"

"How?" Alissa said grabbing his arm. "How does it crush their hearts?"

Matthew was surprised by her intensity. "It--well, according to Nick it sends little tendrils through the skin and wraps them around their hearts and just...squeezes."

Alissa stood up abruptly. "Stay here. Excuse me," she said to one of the growing throngs of people, "but do you know where the artist of these paintings is?"

"I’m sure he’s around somewhere," the man said, eyeing her. "It sure is a hell of a collection, though."

She brushed aside his attempt at conversation. "Thanks anyway," she said courteously. She walked around the collection of Nelson’s work until she saw what she was looking for: a group of people flocking around one stylishly-dressed man. She walked toward the group and listened to the conversations. It did not take long for her to be sure that she had found her man. He was standing straight, with a self-satisfied smile on his face, holding a half-full glass of champagne. The fawning praise from the people and the artificial modesty on the part of the artist removed all doubt. Alissa tried working her way into the crowd to get closer to him.

"So where do you get your vision?" someone in the crows asked.

"The secret to is let your mind go," Kyle Nelson said, sounding just abstract enough to keep his newfound fans happy. "You have to let go of everything you know and start from scratch. You have to forget everything you’ve learned from day one and than start from there. You have too--"

Alissa chose that moment to bump into him, spilling his drink. "I’m so sorry," she said, with feigned horror on her face.

"It’s alright," Nelson said with a magnanimous smile.

"Please let me get you another drink," she said, taking the glass from his hand, careful not to smudge his fingerprints. She hurried back to where she left Matthew. He was still sitting there with his head in his hands. "Let’s go, Matt," she said.

"Where?" he asked.

"The police station. We got a killer to bag."

The beast felt the world move around it using senses that its host could not even conceive of. It had used the night of the exhibit to search for new hosts. It released it spore into the air through Kyle’s lungs. Each spore was a tiny piece of itself that floated freely in the air until inhaled by a potential host. The spore then entered through the bloodstream and lodged in the brain of the host. It gave the beast a view of the fundamental drivers of the person and how suitable they would be to become its new home. The act took a great deal of energy and concentration. Some spore landed in people whose bodies were toxic to the beast and immediately died. Others lodged in people who were unsuitable hosts and the beast let them dissolve.

There were a number of people weak-minded or desperate enough to become hosts, but there was one that grasped the beast’s attention and held it. The beast would need more time to probe into their brains more deeply, but it believed that it had settled on a new host.

Dan was excited. It was the kind of excitement he got when they were closing in on somebody who really had it coming. Kyle Nelson was going to be another notch on his belt of captured crooks. He and Adrian had been working feverishly all day connecting all of the dots that had eluded them for so long. Kyle’s fingerprints were reported at five of the death scenes that Ulm had labeled "questionable". She had also autopsied four more bodies and found the missing heart and the same punctures in each case.

For their part, Dan and Adrian connected each of the victims with Kyle. Through interviews with friends and acquaintances, they determined that Kyle could have been at the right place at the right time to meet the women and kill them. There was still a lot of work to do, but they had enough evidence to get a search warrant. It was nearly six o’clock when they had reached Kyle’s apartment building.

"Ahh, I love the smell of a bust in the evening," Dan said as they followed the landlady up the stairs. "It was very good of you to apologize to Ulm. Very big of you."

"Well if she’s going to be working here, I might as well be cordial with her. You gotta admit though, it wasn’t easy to like her when she second-guessed Ricky and then said he aided and abetted a murderer."

"I know, but you gotta admit, she’s good at her job. And that’s not just the hormones speaking."

"I guess," Adrian conceded as they reached the apartment.

Dan knocked. "Mr. Nelson? Open up, it’s the police."

Jessica opened the door. Kyle was there, dressed in a gray suit with a black turtleneck and holding a bundle of roses. I did not take him long to realize that she was wearing black, translucent negligee.

"I take it we’re not going out, right away?" he asked.

"I thought we’d eat in," she said as she gently pulled Kyle into the apartment and closed the door. They embraced, kissing with unbridled lust.

"Wait," Jessica said, pushing him away slightly. She produced to tiny white pills. "First take one of these?"

"What is it?" Kyle asked suspiciously.

"Don’t worry, it’s good stuff," Jessica said reassuringly. "I want to see what you see tonight."

Kyle dabbed his tongue on her hand, catching one of the pills and swallowed it. Jessica did the same and began tearing at Kyle’s clothes. She buried her face in his chest, biting his nipples as his hands explored her body. suddenly she felt his heart jump and he suddenly gripped her delicate clothing tightly.

She looked up at him. "Kyle?"

His eyes had rolled back in his head and his jaw was clenched shut As she watched, a steam of blood began to meander down his chin and she heard his teeth breaking.

"Kyle," Jessica said, trying to push away. "what’s wrong?"

He still had a death grip on her clothing even as she tried more frantically to get away. Blood was pouring from his eyes and ears now.

"Kyle!" she screamed. "Let me go!"

Jessica’s flimsy negligee ripped in half as Kyle’s arms shot out to his sides. Suddenly free, Jessica fell backward. She looked up at Kyle as he fell like a tree onto his back and continued convulsing on the floor. Jessica crawled to the phone. She had to hurry. The LSD was just beginning to take affect. She carefully punched 911.

The beast finally regained control of itself. That idiot Kyle had taken something. Something bad. It had told him, never to take anything that affected the brain without the beast’s permission. Unfortunately, the beast had been busy monitoring the last few candidates for new hosts and was not paying attention to his current one.

They had both paid the price. The beast had been poisoned and lost control of the hundreds of tendrils running through Kyle’s brain. Now Kyle’s brain had been virtually liquefied and the beast had been sapped of a lot of its energy. Now it had to survive off of the dying energy of its host. It needed to move and quickly.

The beast quickly tapped the remains of the nervous system.

"...major brain hemorrhage, no pulse, irregular heart beat, unresponsive to stimuli," it heard.

The beast opened its eyes. It was lying on a bed being wheeled through the hospital. Someone was straddling its body, pushing on the chest, trying to get the heart to pump. The beast felt one of its host candidates nearby. It had to move.

The beast grabbed the doctor giving him CPR by the throat and sent her sprawling to the floor. It sat up and jumped off the bed, pushing panicked doctors and nurses out of it way. It was vaguely aware of people screaming for security to stop him. It walked quickly but shakily through the hospital. Staff and patients gave the bloodied figure a wide berth as it strode drunkenly toward its goal.

Finally, the beast saw it new host. The man stared at the remains of Kyle Nelson in shock. His surprise turned to horror as the beast lunged at him. The beast grabbed him and placed its hand on his mouth. In a fraction of a second, a thin thread of ethereal material burrowed into the man’s brain to the spore. The beast had to transfer what energy it had left to the new host. It was not sure if it was strong enough to make the jump. If it did not succeed, it would quickly die. If it stayed in Kyle’s body, it would also die. I had to make the jump.

Kyle’s corpse crumpled to the ground, completely lifeless. The candidate was dazed, staring down at the bloody, lifeless heap on the ground.

Three security guards arrived a few seconds later. "Are you alright, sir?" one of them asked as the other two stood threateningly over the corpse.

"Yeah, yeah I think so."

"Well, that was anticlimactic," Dan said as Alissa covered the corpse.

"So what’s the official cause of death?" Adrian asked.

Alissa shrugged as she pulled of her bloody latex gloves. "The obvious thing is a massive hemorrhage, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s like somebody just put their hand in there and waved it around. He had some LSD in his system, but that’s nothing that could have caused this."

"We finished talking to his girlfriend a little bit ago," Adrian said. "What she described was a seizure soon after they split some acid. There’s got to be a connection."

"Well," Alissa said, "there are a lot of things about this case that are weird."

"Like how you came to suspect Nelson," Dan said.

"This is going to sound weird," she said, "but a psychiatrist...acquaintance of mine said he saw a similarity between the paintings of Nelson and a patient of his who claimed to kill with the same MO, and it happened to be right."

"Maybe we ought to interview this guy," Adrian said.

"Sure," Alissa said. "I’ll got get his card."

"So are you going to ask her out?" Adrian asked quietly.

"No, man," Dan answered, "she’s hooked up with a shrink."

"You don’t know that."

"Well let’s size up the competition first."

Nick did not act like he realized someone entered the room.

"Hello, Nick," the man said.

"Hello."

"Do you know who I am?"

"You’ve got the demon who was in me."

The man smiled. "You’re too smart for your own good, you know that don’t you?"

"Yes."

"You’re a little too religious, though. It’s just a creature like anything else."

"It’s not very nice."

"I’m sure that the mouse doesn’t think that the cat is very nice, but does that make the cat evil?"

Nick didn’t answer.

"Besides, it’s more of an angel. It offers you the opportunity to see things that no human has ever seen and all it asks in return is to free some pathetic, fearful people who can’t enjoy life. Isn’t that equitable?"

Nick still did not answer.

The man’s tone changed. "Do you know why I’m here, Nick?"

"Yes."

"Do you know why I can’t do it myself, right? Something about former host etiquette?"

"Yes."

The man handed Nick a rope. "Do you know what to do with this?"

"Yes."

The man looked satisfied. "Goodbye, Nick. Sleep well." The man left Nick’s room and walked out of the mental ward for the last time. He said his good-byes to some of the staff he knew and left the hospital into he cold, sunny day. He was heading for warmer climes.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life, Matthew.

Copyright 1998 by Jason the Cool