Only the guy with the ponytail and the highbrow paperback would never see that.
Didn’t matter how bright a man was, when a sexy woman smiled at you – that was all you saw. When you were looking at twin smiles that glowed like that, it was like being hit by closing car headlights and suddenly you were no better than a dumb rabbit.
When the man smiled back, Owen knew the guy was dead. Whatever the twins really were inside the flesh that they wore so well as they worked the men in the coffee shop, they were predators. And Owen watched, fascinated, as they stalked their prey across the half-dried puddles of cold coffee on the old scratched table. All it really needed was David Attenborough whispering a commentary in his ear.
He wasn’t close enough to hear what the women said to the ponytailed student/lecturer, all he could do was read the body language, but it wasn’t a long dialogue. Just a few minutes later all three were pushing back their chairs and moving towards the coffee-shop door and the darkness that waited outside. Owen watched them in the window, and started to work out what he was going to do. Fascination with these hunting creatures was one thing, they had provided a distraction from his nocturnal boredom, but he couldn’t let this go the whole way …
As they passed him and opened the door onto the street Owen could feel the heat of excitement coming off the ponytailed guy. If he’d looked, Owen was sure he’d have seen it building up in the guy’s crotch. Owen let them slip through the door, and the girls were laughing at something the guy had just said. Their laughter made Owen think of Disney fairies; it was delicate and musical and unreal. As the door closed behind them it cut the sound off. Owen watched them turn left, one twin either side of the student/ lecturer as he slipped an arm around each girl’s waist. Then Owen slid off his chair and headed after them. He checked for the automatic tucked into the back of his belt; his hand was still busted from that bad night with Toshiko a few weeks back (it would always be busted since his body no longer had the ability to heal), but he knew he could still handle the gun OK. He didn’t really want to use it on the two pretty girls, but Torchwood had given him a pretty reliable sense about things around Cardiff, especially at this time of night, when things that looked a little odd were, in reality, probably right off the scale. He didn’t want to shoot the two girls, but he knew that was not what they were.
As he opened the door, a drunk the size of a grizzly bear lurched through it off the street and waded blindly into Owen on rubber legs. Something unintelligible slipped out of the drunk’s mouth as his eyes scrambled for focus and gave up. Owen thought it might have been an apology, and told the drunk that it was OK, then tried to get around him and out of the door, but the drunk clapped a meaty shovel of a hand against Owen’s shoulder and said something else, his eyes still swirling in his head like a couple of goldfish in twin bowls.
V gt nmney. Lsst’t. Cnn yuu …
Owen told the drunk that he didn’t have time for this, but the drunk wasn’t listening. He put his other hand on Owen’s other shoulder, and Owen wasn’t sure if the guy was trying to fix him with a look or just trying to stand up.
Y’lk lk nss kndablk …
And the guy with the ponytail and the two sexy girls that were something else entirely were getting further and further away …
Owen really didn’t have time for this.
He kicked the drunk hard just under the kneecap and the guy went down like a detonated apartment block. Owen was out on the street a moment later, and turned left but there was no sign of the ponytailed guy or the two women.
Shit.
Owen ran. He knew they couldn’t have gone far, but around here it was a maze of backstreets and alleyways. Each one was a black hole that could hide anything. Owen took the first one he came to. Logic suggested that was what they would have done. He pulled the gun from where it nestled in the small of his back and moved into the darkness of the alleyway, creeping quickly but silently. One thing about being dead, you never ran out of breath.
That was when Owen had seen that he was too late to save the man with the ponytail, and he had taken cover behind the dumpster, overcome by sick fascination as he watched the two women-things devour him, bones and all.
It was over in no more than five minutes – the girls killed and ate with a bloody choreography that was both practised and obscenely natural – but the worst part came at the end.
As they finished their feast, the girls’ alien transformation went into reverse as if it had been a reaction to their hungry bloodlust and now, sated, the spikes, scales and crunching jaws were shrinking away, the monsters metamorphosing back into the slight, vulnerable young women Owen had seen walk into the coffee shop. Only now they were on their knees in the filth of the back alley, licking up the blood and last remains of their victim from the dirt-encrusted paving and from his shredded clothing that was now all that remained of the man that had been drinking a two-shot white Americano in Constantine’s just a few minutes earlier. But that wasn’t the worst part.
Owen watched in fascinated horror as the slighter of the girls held a ragged strip of shirt linen in both hands and licked the blood off it the way people lick a yoghurt lid clean. Then, together, they gathered the dead man’s clothes and moved towards the dumpster with them.
Owen sank back further into the shadows. For a moment he forgot he was dead and tried to hold his breath.
They threw the savaged bundle of rags into the bin, and then came the worst part of all. The really bad bit – that was worse than any amount of flesh-tearing, bone crunching and blood-licking. The part that made Owen grateful that he no longer slept, that he would never have dreams that could be haunted by what he heard as the two women held hands and walked off into the darkness.
Their laughter. Musical and ethereal. And enough to chill a dead man’s bones.
Owen didn’t move from the darkness from behind the dumpster for maybe a full minute. And when he did, he looked down into his hand and saw that he still held the automatic, fully loaded, not a shot fired.
Why didn’t you use the gun?
And he didn’t know what scared him the most.
That was why he had kept what he had seen to himself. When morning came, he had gone to the Hub, seen Jack, Ianto and Toshiko and he hadn’t said a word. But that night he had returned to Constantine’s and he had waited for the twins to show up. They hadn’t, but Owen knew that they would. Some time. They were hunters and hunters always returned to the site of a good kill. Lions hunted at waterholes, these things stalked bars and coffee shops.
A couple of days later, the Hub’s computer system picked up a missing persons report on the Cardiff police system. Owen recognised the guy with the ponytail. Jean-Claude Gabin, a French philosophy student. He had been reported missing by his flatmate. The police had so far failed to find any trace of him. Owen doubted that they would. But people went missing all the time, and most of them turned up again safe and sound – even in Cardiff. Jean-Claude Gabin wouldn’t show up on the Torchwood radar unless parts of him showed up in the gutter, and the twins had been too fastidious for that.
So that night Owen had walked the streets of Cardiff once more until daybreak. And he had spent hours bent over a cooling, and cold, mug of coffee in Constantine’s. But the twins hadn’t shown up again.