Free Prey by Andrea Speed Page A

grabbed him tight enough to mimic his moves as he made them, and he didn’t automatically discourage her. Roan felt the slightest twinge of jealousy, and remembered what they said about the pheromone load being at its peak when the virus was in its transitional phase: the virus wanted so badly to propagate itself it made you more sexually appealing than ever.
    And then the genius of what Paris was doing suddenly dawned on him. Paris had come to distract, and that was what he was doing… and there were loads of teenage boys now off the dance floor, looking on from the sidelines in a wide swath of emotions ranging from relief to open, seething hate as Paris danced with and captivated their girlfriends. Roan smiled, almost laughing. He had to remember to give Paris a big kiss for this later.
    Roan faced Stovak, and said, with just a hint of a lisp, “He’s just flamboyant. You know how we are.” Stovak recoiled in disgust, and this time Roan did allow himself to laugh at this petty little man.
    Leaving a horrified Stovak behind, he headed for the crowd now ringing the side walls, searching for Danny.

    48
    Andrea
    Speed

    7
    Black Swan

    IT WOULD have been too easy, and he knew it, but it didn’t keep him from hoping that he’d find Danny here. On his search, he came across an obviously infected man (no amount of Axe body spray could hide it), a man in his early twenties who was clearly trying to pass for sixteen. He leaned in close so the man could hear him over the pounding music, and said, “Get out of here before I arrest you for whatever charges I care to make up, and don’t come back.”
    The man stared at him, eyes narrowing in hatred. “You can’t do that.”
    “Yeah, I can. You know how much cops like us infected too.” He held up his hand, and pointed out the Leo tattoo on his wrist as the man opened his mouth to protest. Although his eyes locked on it, it seemed to take him a moment to put two and two together. “Now scat before I get nasty.”
    He continued to glare molten death at him, but he must have figured that this was a battle he couldn’t win, so he turned and flipped him the bird as he walked out of the auditorium. One down, probably about forty to go.
    He was just too old for this shit.
    Roan gave up on finding Danny here, and decided to start showing the kids his picture and asking if they’d seen him. He’d made up a fairy story about him being a private detective hired by the Nakamura family lawyer to find Danny, as he’d just come into a large inheritance from an aunt. If he said he was looking for him because his parents wanted him home, the kids wouldn’t help, but money was the magic word. It was a good thing, and there was a possibility that Danny would be grateful to them for ratting him out. It was a very slim possibility, but hope sprung eternal when it came to easy money—how else did you explain lottery ticket sales? No one ever went broke betting on people’s greed, laziness, selfishness, or stupidity; Paris would call him jaded, but it was true. Those Infected: Prey

    49

    were the easiest bets in the whole goddamn world.
    Eventually he hit pay dirt in the form of a pimply fifteen-year-old with pink, spiky hair and a nose ring, making Roan wonder what kind of idiot parent let a kid this young get a nose ring. “I think I’ve seen that kid, like, hangin’ around Tweaks.”
    “Tweaks?”
    The kid scratched his face and looked around, as if making sure no one was seeing him talk to the narc. Light glinted off gold nose ring, and Roan had to suppress the urge to just rip it out of his nose. “Yeah, he’s like this guy who lives near the, um, tracks, y’know, down in the East End.
    Like everybody crashes at Tweaks’s when they’ve got no place else to go.”
    Oh, so he was one of those… a guy with a crap house where he let teens he didn’t know stay over. Obviously a druggie—tweak indicated a
    “tweaker,” someone into the meth or Ecstasy scene—who was trying