Hellions: Badlands: Next Generation

by Natalie Bennett

  “Oh.” That was all I could think of to say. I felt oddly pleased with his logic, but also somewhat bothered by it, which irritated me.

  He irritated me.

  My mood constantly ricocheted anytime Maliki was near. From chaotic, to happy, to sullen, to angry—I loathed it.

  And I didn’t understand it.

  I wasn’t some purified virgin, obviously. So why did he make me feel like this? Butcher most definitely hadn’t.

  Ugh. I really needed to stop comparing the two of them, but there weren’t any other relationships to go off. When Maliki was near I was like, well, this. When he was away, I remained firmly in my sea of chaos and cloaked in melancholy.

  That was enough of a struggle for me already without adding all of the emotions that came with being a twenty-one year old girl.

  I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew I wanted him when I shouldn’t. I had no idea who I was meant to be, but I knew my feet fit perfectly in my father’s footsteps.

  I didn’t know much else beyond the fact that my baby brother was still missing, and a certain redhead had a soul that was mine for the taking.

  A feather light touch on the side of my face had my lids fluttering and reality replacing my cogitations. “What are you doing?”

  “Bringing you back to me.” He dropped his hand and recreated the distance between us before I had a chance to process that he’d been in front of me. “Do you know that when you do that, you zone out completely? It’s almost like you’re comatose, but sometimes you mumble to yourself.”

  “No, I don’t,” I refuted, though I very well could have. I certainly fucking hoped not.

  He turned around with such a darkly mischievous smile on his face that apprehension didn’t delay in making an arrival.

  “You do. You’ve said many things I’m not a fan of. And others that let me know you’ve got a filthy fucking mind.”

  This was a trap. One that would make me share what he claimed to already know. I wasn’t falling for it. I was weird, yes, perhaps what some would even call strange, but not to that extent.

  I looked down at the last man my blade had been acquainted with and studied the slit in his throat so I wouldn’t have to stare at Maliki any longer than necessary. “I think you and I have had too much alone time.”

  “I think the exact opposite.”

  My gaze flew to his, diverted, and then found its way back. “Did something happen? You’re acting different. If there’s an issue, just tell me what it is.”

  He did that thing again, the one where he perused my body from head to toe so thoroughly I had to refrain from shielding myself and, whatever he was thinking afterward, he kept to himself.

  “We gotta go.” He turned and walked out of the garage without a backward glance.

  “What about these guys?” I questioned, following after him.

  He waited until I was outside and then reached up, grabbing hold of the metal shudder door. “They’re dead. Let em rot.”

  That was my original plan, so it worked for me. I stood back and watched him close the garage, shutting the three corpses inside.

  The temperature in the Badlands was hot enough that you could sometimes cook on the asphalt, so it wouldn’t be long until the bodies began to swell and leak.

  Maliki stepped back and gestured to the hideous brown van that lacked windows. “I got our guy hogtied in the back.”

  “You did all that within a few minutes?”

  “You sound surprised,” he replied, rounding around to the driver’s side of the prehistoric vehicle.

  “I’m impressed, actually. I know I shouldn’t be. You’re really good at what you do. Even when I didn’t like you…”

  The cocky grin he aimed in my direction shut me up.

  “If you’re impressed now, wait until you see what else I’m good at.”

  The simply spoken words could easily be considered a sexual innuendo. Based on how things were between us lately, I assumed that was intentional. It wasn’t one-sided in regards to either of us. It wasn’t just all about fucking, though.

  I’d thought about an us in a thousand different scenarios.

  I imagined what it would be like to have him for more than just a few nights of fun. This was the problem, wanting more than what he might offer.

  The line was already blurred and, once we crossed it, there would be no going back. Honestly, that scared me. I didn’t want to risk losing someone who was never mine to begin with. I didn’t want unrequited feelings to rob me of him. Was that selfish?

  I cleared my throat and regained control of my tumultuous thoughts. “So, do you want me to meet you across the street?” I asked, already stepping in the café’s direction.

  “No, hop in.” He patted the hood of the van. “There’s just enough gas to get us to V3.”

  I laughed, there was no way he was serious. “You’re joking, right?”

  The look on his face said he wasn’t.

  “Oh, hell no. You’re on your own. I’m not riding in this thing. You shouldn’t either; you have no idea if it can make it to wherever V3 is.”

  “Nyx.”

  “No, Malik.” I began walking back towards the café. I wasn’t sure what his reasoning was for sticking this man inside the van, but it wasn’t this.

  “This asshole drives this piece of shit all over the Badlands. It will make it. I can’t do this alone. I need someone to watch Buddy.”

  I glanced up at the sky just in time to see Charon sailing back, landing on the roof of the SUV.

  Was that a sign?

  Pausing, I looked over my shoulder, immediately regretting it when I was met with a pair of dramatic puppy dog eyes.

  “Malik…” I sighed. I’d been serious that we may have been spending too much time together.

  “Come on, babygirl. I need you.”

  If the pleading eyes failed, his beseeching tone and boyish smile would have won me over on their own, toss in those stupid two words together, and he had me hook, line, and sinker.

  “Satanas,” I grumbled, spinning back around and heading for the passenger side door.

  Chapter Six

  Sex

  She leveled me with a glare that would have shrunken some men’s balls. I guess she wasn’t a fan of what I’d done to get Buddy in the van, or where he was sitting.

  “I don’t know what you expected. Was I supposed to walk in and kindly ask if I could fuck him up?”

  “That may have been better than that,” she snapped, jabbing a finger towards the back.

  “He’s alive. That’s all that really matters.”

  “Yeah, until he dies from heat-stroke.”

  “He’ll be fine.” I let the van coast across the street, pulling up beside the Suburban. Zane was already waiting with Addy tucked against his front. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if the two of them were fucking in broad daylight.

  “I don’t think she breathes without him,” Nyx mumbled so softly I wasn’t sure if I were meant to hear it.

  Her words could have been misconstrued as contemptuous.

  When I glanced over, the look I saw on her face was nothing but envious. If she missed her ex, I suppose I could understand.

  Then I thought about it, and nah, fuck that shit. He would be nothing but a bad memory by the time I got her where I wanted her. His punk ass didn’t even deserve that much.

  “I think they breathe as one at this point,” I remarked, shoving the worn gear stick into park. There was a low grinding sound as the van shifted, and then the whole damn thing seemed to shudder.

  “I’m not even going to comment on that,” Nyx drawled.

  “Good idea. Keep an eye on Buddy.”

  I fought a grin as another glare followed me from the van. I walked around to the other side, pausing where the bumper ended. “There are three bodies over there.” I nodded my head to the shop across the street.

  “I assumed that would happen when I saw you going inside,” Zane replied, separating himself
from Addy.

  He came to me and she went to Nyx, pulling open the passenger side door.

  “You got em?” he asked, eyeing the van.

  He didn’t waste time on trivial shit. It was one of the many reasons we worked so well together. I already had who we were searching for; how I got him was irrelevant.

  “Bound and shoved inside the bench seat, a little injured but otherwise alive and more than capable of answering questions.”

  “I might leave that part up to you and your girl.” His dark eyes lingered on Addy for a few seconds, and then he gave me his full attention.

  “What’s going on?”

  He rubbed his chin, glancing back at her. “She’s hiding something from me.I don’t know what yet. When I do, I’ll tell you.”

  Not a lot could catch me off guard, but this did. They were attached at the hip, and if Zane had a problem, he wasn’t one to keep silent about it. Which meant he suspected that her secret was either bad or super fucking bad; regardless, shit would hit the fan when he figured it out.

  “V3, I’ll follow you there,” I said, ready to get this show on the road.

  We’d waited long enough. A good interrogation, real food, and Nyx sounded like a master plan right about then. I wasn’t ecstatic about driving the van, but leaving it abandoned would be stupid. We didn’t know who this Buddy may or may not have been connected to.

  “You sure you wanna ride with her?” he asked, gaze going back over my shoulder.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He shrugged. “Have you two had the ‘talk’ yet?”

  “What talk?”

  “The ex talk. Gwen and Butcher.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure out if he was serious. “Did you and Addy have the ‘talk?’”

  “Addy doesn’t have an ex that matters. I got her first, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  I should get him a badge made that said he was the one and only who had fucked her…I think he might actually wear it, though, and none of us needed that extra reminder.

  “Addy may not, but we’re potentially going to go on a rescue mission for one of your fuck buddies.”

  “And?” he scoffed. “Addy is it for me. I would never do that to her.”

  I didn’t doubt that for a minute, but he knew as well as I did how far left this could go. Women were a different breed when pissed off. He may not have been concerned, but I personally would rather go to sleep knowing my balls were safe from harm.

  “I’ll follow you,” I said, turning back for the van. “Let’s see if this piece of shit can make it.”

  I climbed back in, settling on orange suede that should have been annihilated from existence half a decade ago.

  Addy whispered something to Nyx, and then slammed the door before walking over to the SUV.

  “What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” she mumbled, leaning over to stare out the window.

  It sure as shit didn’t seem like nothing, but I’d let her be…for now.

  “He’s still bleeding.”

  “That means he’s still alive.”

  “I know that. I’m just telling you he’s still bleeding.” She turned back around in her seat. “It’s so hot, Malik,” she moaned a second later, sticking her hand out the window.

  I gripped the steering wheel as the sound went right to my dick. It wasn’t even sexual, but her saying my name like that always got to me. Didn’t matter if she sighed, moaned, yelled…I loved hearing it.

  Soon, I’d have her chanting it, telling me how much of a god I was as I dicked her down and set a precedent no man could ever match.

  Catching a small blur in my peripheral, I glanced over just as she lifted her tank top over her head, revealing the top of her breasts, nice and snug in a black bra.

  The tattoo that began at her neck expanded across her chest, its dark tribal pattern layered with more flowers. It made her look more exotic than she already did.

  Fuck. She was perfect.

  “I’m starting to think you’re doing this on purpose.” I adjusted in my seat, trying to give my dick some room to breathe as it pressed up against the denim of my jeans.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t think Ace and Darrian are still alive.”

  “You whip your shirt off and lead with that?”

  “I’m serious; the odds are not in their favor.”

  “I agree. They’re either both long gone or one is still alive…maybe. But the man in that bench seat might know something about Demon.”

  “And Sam and Lilith,” she was quick to add. “His birthday is in three days.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, but silence didn’t seem to be an appropriate response. “He’s the same age as Demon. So he’ll be seventeen, right? I remember those days.” And how fucking hard life was, I silently added.

  “Yeah, me and my parents would have celebrated with him, probably Lilith and Bella, too. He may have been better now…”

  I nodded, remembering the kid had an issue with his immune system.

  Personally, I thought he was a fucking idiot for risking his health until she’d mentioned he had been kept inside nearly twenty-four seven. I’d met Grimm, their father, on two occasions. It was safe to assume the kid probably needed a break.

  “It was stupid of him, I know, but I can’t blame him. Things were getting kind of…intense,” she continued, voicing almost everything I’d just been thinking.

  I still wasn’t sure how to respond. I sucked at shit like this; I never cared enough to comfort anyone unless it was my immediate circle. This was the most she’d said about her brother in a while, though.

  We were all concerned about those closest to us, but it seemed to be a topic we increasingly avoided.

  No one wanted to discuss the slight possibility that one may not live to see us again. Fuck, even I wasn’t that naïve. Five people went missing; basic Badlands fundamentals said two, possibly three, would be dead before this was over.

  My bet was on the kids all pulling through versus the adults. These weren’t normal teens. They were ruthless, raised in two of the strongest factions in the Badlands. Survival was all they knew. I had enough faith in them to do that until we could find them—because we would find them.

  This line of thought helped me come up with a reasonable reply that didn’t make me seem like the asshole I was. “You can always celebrate with him later. I’ve never known when my birthday was.”

  “If you don’t know when your birthday is, how do you know how old you are?”

  I wasn’t ready to share that yet. Not because I was against her knowing, but because it would open the door for a conversation I wasn’t in the right mental space to have.

  “I just do. I can tell you for sure that I’m twenty-six.”

  There was a long pause, her turn trying to think of a reply. “I can only imagine what you were like at seventeen,” she finally said.

  “I wasn’t someone you would have wanted to know.”

  “Aside from you being a pubescent asshole, why not?” Her tone was genuinely curious.

  Nyx and I had shared a lot of shit, but my murky past was an area we had yet to breach.

  I could ignore her, bullshit my way into a new subject, or tell her a story that would help lead her to the truth.

  What I couldn’t do was lie. She’d had enough of that, and our world was full of too many secrets already.

  “Seventeen-year-old me thrived in a different type of darkness. It wasn’t like now, where I try real fucking hard to keep it contained. I tortured and killed daily, sometimes multiple times, just for the fuck of it. I met Gwen around this time.” I paused, seeing her lips twist from the corner of my eye.

  Interesting.

  Maybe Z was right about having an ‘ex’ talk, but that could come after she’d accepted that we were going to be together.

  “So, there was this squirrel that used to come around our tent—”

  “Your tent?”
she interrupted.

  “After we got out of the subway, we lived out in the woods for awhile.”

  “Aw—”

  “Don’t do that sympathy shit, Nyx. And don’t interrupt me, you’ll ruin my flow.”

  “Okay, so your girlfriend thought a squirrel was cute and?” She circled her finger in the air, indicating for me to continue. Fucking smartass.

  “Anyway, there was this squirrel and I told her I’d catch it, just not why. She had been pissing me off; she always pissed me off, now that I think about it. But, I caught this squirrel after feeding it for a few days, gaining its trust.”

  She sat up taller and angled her body more towards me, pulling one leg up onto the seat. I took a second to decide how explicit I should go with details.

  “So I had this squirrel, but where Gwen thought it was cute, I saw something to kill. I disemboweled it in the center of her sleeping bag. Nice and slow, just to see how long it could live like that. It died after a few minutes; I watched it suffer until the end. The light kind of just vanished from its beady eyes.”

  “And you did what with its body?”

  I smiled to myself. Nyx didn’t miss a beat. “I left it there with the innards spread out. Z and I fried the rest of it up that night. I can still remember the look on her face when I forced her to lie on top of it as we….went to sleep.”

  “You mean, as you fucked her? Satanas, Malik, you don’t have to dance around your sex life. I’m not that petty or naïve. You’re a gorgeous man with a giant cock; I know you have sex.”

  She added the last part like it was an afterthought. For her to talk about my ego so much, she sure as hell knew how to inflate it. I’d never heard her comment on my looks before.

  Of course, I knew she was attracted to me; a blind man could see that. Hearing what she thought still made me feel as if I were on top of a damn mountain

  “So you think I’m gorgeous, and my dick is giant?”

  She brought a hand to her forehead and laughed. “You would focus on that out of everything I just said. Issues much?”

  “You just complimented my large member and charming charismatic appeal after hearing how I basically decapitated a squirrel and fucked someone in its guts. I think that applies to you, too.”