Path of the Tiger, стр. 27

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As William walked into his building, an unexpected surge of anxious panic hit him, and with frantic hands he patted the back pocket of his jeans, sighing with relief as he felt the little bulge there: the packet of white heroin he had just purchased.

He almost started drooling as he thought about the high that awaited; sweet oblivion, a slow-motion swan dive off the precipice of the present into a land of soft clouds and low gravity, soaked all the while in the warmth of an all-loving sun deity. He stopped as he reached the stairs, pausing to breathe in and compose himself; it would not do to get too excited about the hit, not yet. He knew how preoccupied his mind would get when it came to the anticipation of a high, so he concocted a hasty plan to get the heroin out of his pocket and into a safe spot in the apartment as soon as he stepped inside, so he could get back to his chess game. And then, later, he would lose himself in oblivion … and then Ben Young would be erased from existence.

It would be a process, of course – a new city, a new apartment, a new name, a new identity, and all the bureaucratic hassle and monetary expense that came with such things, especially when all of it had to be forged and counterfeited – but he had been putting it off for far too long now. Indeed, he had lingered for such a dangerously extended period of time in this identity and this space that he wondered how it was that the Huntsmen had not yet caught up with him. Certainly, since he had started using heroin again, after years of being clean, he had started to get sloppy with things like secrecy, alertness, thoroughness … and being who he was, what he was, any sort of carelessness with these sorts of things could have lethal consequences.

On a purely rational level he understood, of course, that he could not continue this downward spiral, that he could not allow opioids to seize complete control of his life again. Not after the havoc they had wreaked before, and especially not with the Huntsmen on the verge of picking up his scent.

They will find me, and indeed, with Hernández on my tail here, they may already have; there’s no way I can continue evading them. I’ve been too careless recently, far too bloody careless. Well, no more of that. I’ll just have this one last hit, just one more to ease the pain … and then I’ll go. One final goodbye to my medicine, then I’ll get back on top of things.

When William reached the flight of stairs leading up to his floor, though, he realised that something was dreadfully wrong. As he paused for a moment to analyse the situation, the first stirrings of adrenalin began scraping their fiery bristles along the inside of his veins and arteries. His enhanced senses sprang immediately into action; his acute sense of smell quickly informed him of the presence of enemies, although their diluted scent did not place them too close at this moment. With an anxious glance up and down the dingy hallway to make sure he was alone, he dashed over and turned off the passage lights before stripping off his clothes, which he hid behind a bin before transforming into his tiger form.

As soon as he shifted into his animal form his brain was inundated with a glut of data, with his super-senses flooding his mind with a deluge of detailed information. His precision-dialled sense of hearing picked up the sounds of the elderly couple wheezing behind their door at the end of the hall, and the moans, gasps and grunts of a porn video came to him through two sets of walls, originating from a young lawyer’s apartment. An argument between two lovers from two floors up rang in his ears as clearly as if it were happening alongside him.

Filtering out these irrelevant distractions, he crept up the staircase on his tiger paws, his ears pricked and his eyes peeled in the gloom, his cat senses illuminating every shadow with their night-vision capabilities. He paused on the stairs before he reached his floor, sniffing at the air and in a nanosecond drinking in the symphony of scents that filled this place, instantly dissecting and analysing every molecule that passed through his olfactory filter. Like a gold prospector sifting through a pan of dense river sediment, he picked his way through the scents of a hundred different foods – some cooked, some raw, and some in varying stages of decomposition – as well as the ubiquitous odour of rats, mice and cockroaches and their waste. He kept on sifting and sorting, sorting and sifting, picking his way through the myriad smells, trying to find that elusive scent that would allow him to hone in on the location of his enemies.

In terms of more human smells, he encountered the rankness of unwashed clothing and bedding, as well as the musky and sour smells of sweat, urine, faeces, vomit, menstrual blood, semen, and vaginal fluids, and wafting above all of this was a cocktail of aromatic perfumes and colognes, all scattered throughout the building, some mere traces of presences now twenty years gone. While mentally picking through this landfill-like miasma of smells, though, something specific jumped out at him and he paused abruptly in his efforts: the unmistakable smell of fresh human blood.

A lot of it.

The instant William detected this last scent, a wave of panic hit him, and he quickly transformed back into his human form. He hurried back down the stairs, dressed himself with alacrity, and then pulled out his revolver, which he cocked and readied for action. Flattening himself against the wall, he crept up to his apartment, his heart hammering and his breath coming in short, shallow jots. Pausing outside the door, which had been left slightly ajar,