The Beast That Was Max Read Online Free PDF Page A

reached out to him because he was alive, because he could still breathe perfumed air and taste spiced meat.
    Images of his fresh kill enraged the shade as it recognized him as a murderer, a victimizer. But in the spirit's partial state it was powerless to seek retribution. Its glacial hate, inexorable and endless, bore down on him, sending a shiver of fear and excitement through Max. Immune to his own and even the Beast's rage, its appetite for what it had lost fed on Max's awareness and grew stronger.
    It was as if the soul of one of Max's victims had returned to share the journey of its fate with him. But he had no hand in the cause of this spirit's pain. He was not the murderer of its original house of flesh. The thing did not care. Like the Beast, like Max, it was appetite, and though it did not hunt as Max and the Beast did, it was as capable of rage and destruction if its hunger was not appeased.
    Max wondered what pursuing and consuming such a power might be like. Even without the Beast at his call, he wished the full spirit had resided within her, and not as the corrupting reflection of a ghost caught in meat.
    But without the Beast's reassuring savagery or the comforting rhythms of his own body, Max's confidence wavered. Separated from his tools and weapons, was he still a hunter, a killer? As whatever he was, a spirit, a soul, a wisp of imagination, could he still find a way to kill a thing accustomed to such an existence?
    The woman's voice rose again, offering ways for him to handle the spirit. What he was being offered, he realized, were paths to becoming someone else and forgetting who he truly was,
    The hollow, mocking roar of the Beast, itself a memory, offered another way to escape.
    Before Max could feel the chill of fear over losing himself to the vengeful spirit, the woman, or in his own killing fury, he was torn out of his exile. The world spun as he landed back in his own body, as if pulled home by an elastic band's tension. A hurricane of sensations and emotions ripped through him, and for a moment he blacked out, overwhelmed by the force of the change. But only for a moment. The Beast rose from unknown depths to envelop him in its strength. His body fit like an old, comfortable coat, and responded willingly, though with a hint of sluggishness, to his will. He was Max again, stumbling, dizzy, skin cold and prickly, but a single weapon once again. One force, out of nature, with a single, insatiable appetite.
    The Beast whined in confusion, but quickly snapped with joy, eager to welcome its familiar. Heart racing, Max embraced the monster. The darkness within deepened. People in the Temple group eyed him suspiciously.
    "Mani Kalliyan Chea," Lee said, bringing the woman to Max. Closer to Max, Lee whispered, "Straighten out, buddy. You're looking like shit and you're freaking everybody out."
    She tilted her head to the side, met his gaze, and gave him the same smile she had given him when he was in her body. The Beast reared, ready to pounce on the challenge. But then it hesitated in its routine headlong pursuit of prey, recognizing something in her. So did Max. Together, they felt the same rush of surprise and excitement in encountering a fellow traveler. Not since Paris, when the twins had captivated him during one of their murderous hungers, had he felt the same conflict between desire, dread, and rage. But the twins had been children, evoking a previously undiscovered and overruling instinct for protection. Seeing himself in them, he had not wanted their young years to be lived like his, alone and unprotected on unforgiving streets.
    She was not a child. What she provoked did not fit the assignment parameters. Appetites collided. He did not know whether to kill her or fuck her.
    And there was the hint of her inside him: an impression of her sinuous body pressed into the walls of his mind; a warmth permeating his senses, like a lover's body heat smoldering in the bed long after they are gone. Max