Poison Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

or some other sorcerer would discover his presence and make him an offer. She’d send Hamil to check out the woman after she got to his apartment.
    “Sleep well,” she said, rising. And then stopped. “Holy shit.” Marla tried to remember what the woman in the photograph at the Blackwing Institute had looked like. It had been a lousy picture, blurry, but this woman was petite, she had that mass of hair, it
might
be her. “Hey,” Marla said. “Is your name Genevieve Kelley? Are you…lost, hon?”
    The woman moaned, a sound of deep distress, and Marla knelt again. “You okay?” She touched the woman’s cheek.
    The street tilted, and the sides of the surrounding buildings bulged out like the bodies of huge creatures taking deep breaths. Marla ducked her head and tried to grab the pavement, vertigo upending her sense of gravity. This was like falling through space, but the only movement was inside her head.
    The woman opened her eyes—they were violet, the color of crushed flowers—and clenched Marla’s hand. “His mouth,” she said, her breath a hot wind on Marla’s face. “His reeking mouth.”
    Marla fell backward, breaking contact with the woman and sitting hard in the snow. She looked around, bewildered, head pounding.
    What happened? Why was she on the ground? Had she fainted? She looked at the homeless woman lying on the grass.
I didn’t even see her. Did I trip over her?
She stood and brushed snow from her coat. The woman before her shifted a little, her fingers fluttering as if grasping for something. Marla felt a twinge of pity mixed with disgust. A thin layer of snow had started to form on the woman’s face. She’d be buried within an hour if she didn’t move. Marla nudged her in the side with her booted foot, but the woman didn’t respond. Sleeping off a drunk, probably. Marla sighed, took off her long coat, and put it over the woman’s sleeping form. That would keep her from freezing to death at least, and Marla had other ways of dealing with the cold. She’d walk back this way when she left Hamil’s place, and if the woman was still there, Marla would call someone from a shelter to pick her up. She stepped around the woman and went on her way.
    Z watched Marla from the shadows of an alleyway across the street. He couldn’t believe she’d actually spoken to him on the bus! He’d been riding to the nightclub where Marla spent most of her time, to continue his stakeout, and had been astonished when she boarded the bus herself at that stop. He’d been in disguise all week, assuming the invisibility of the homeless. Instead, Marla had seemed to notice him more readily in his down-and-out disguise than she would have if he’d dressed in a suit and pretended to be a businessman. After she departed, he’d stopped at the next corner and circled back to observe her.
    Z could have put a knife into her ribs while they were sitting on the bus, and he’d been sorely tempted, but his employer wanted him to cut out Marla’s heart and deliver it to him—something about preventing magical resurrection, Z gathered—and that demanded a more private location and a stretch of uninterrupted time. He would keep stalking her, pin down her routines, and kill her during some dark empty hours when she wouldn’t be missed for a while.
    He watched as she knelt to examine a woman sprawled on the ground. Suddenly, Marla fell backward in the snow, landing hard on her ass. She sat still, chin on her chest, eyes closed, for almost a full minute. Z inhaled and exhaled seven times while Marla sat unmoving. Very interesting. Was she narcoleptic? No one had mentioned that. A woman who fell unconscious on the street would not be difficult to kill, he thought.
    Then she jerked, lifted her head, and looked around, confused. Z didn’t breathe—the puffs of his exhalations made small clouds of mist, and she might see them when she looked his way. Marla rose to her feet, draped her coat over the still-unconscious woman,