“You like?”
“Yes. I like. Is this your favorite loaner?”
“Is it yours?”
“Yes.” She curled up, snuggling closer. “You’re so warm.”
“Of all the bodies? Yes, this is perhaps my favorite. With the thrassian second.”
The waterfall chattered for a while before she again spoke.
“I suppose it should be up to me to begin this. You have convinced me.” Her mouth twitched a few times.
“More?”
“It’s still difficult to say this aloud but...I understand why you did what you did.”
He sneaked a tentacle close to her rear then toyed about near her cunt, rippling the water, making her squirm. “Keep going. I wanted you to see that the s’kar indoctrinated you with a skewed view of sex.”
“I know. I can say it. I can. Sex can be...is good. It isn’t bad. Though if you poke at me again down there I will bite you. I’m terribly sore.”
He chuckled softly. “Good then. Liking sex does not make you a bad girl. Should I get you to write that out a hundred times?”
“No! Don’t push your luck. I’m back to being my bossy self now.”
Except during sex, he thought to himself, musing. He’d figured out that weakness of hers, prayed she would let him experiment again.
“So, which way will your decision fall? S’kar or siren?”
“I’d sort of...” She wriggled and having her wriggle when all naked in his lap, jiggling those breasts with their pink-red centers...it was the most adorable and sexy thing. “I’d probably already decided on siren. I know that may surprise you but I think I would’ve...I think. Anyway. Now I’m sure.”
“Would they have even accepted you back, as a true s’kar?”
“Well, that is the problem. It’s what persuaded me. I don’t think so. I’d not be a pure blood.” Thorn sighed sadly. “A fish is nibbling on my toes?”
He leaned forward. “Want me to scare it away?
“As long as they don’t have big teeth, it’s fine.”
The waterfall poured neverendingly, churning the far edge of the pool, and he held a tentacle tip beneath, watched the water patter and bounce droplets. A white blossom floated past his knees.
With her in his lap, the serenity of this grotto almost made him forget what happened today. He roused himself.
“Your appointment is today. Soon. There is something else that I need to talk about.” He frowned down at her and she stared back with those pretty eyes. “Fucking you was so much easier.”
Her mouth formed an O then she shook her head a little.
“I think I’m in love with you, Thorn, and those are words I never wanted to say, never thought I could say... However I have said them.”
And he’d opened his heart to her rejection. The pain was there, waiting. He knew this was ridiculous.
“Love?”
“Yes.”
He steeled himself, feeling more vulnerable than he’d ever been in any battle.
“Love, from what I know...” she began.
Already he was going oh shit, oh shit, but he waited.
“Is not something decided from so little uhhh experience.”
He blinked down at her.
“Even though!” Thorn had raised a hand and waggled a forefinger at him. “We have done you-know-what...fucking, see I said it...a few times. A lot. Okay I admit that. But is that love?”
He blinked some more. “I’m a cyborg. You’re asking me what love is?”
Then she lay there in his arms, and his temporary tentacles, looking cuter than anything cute should ever look, and sucking her lip until it was wet and shiny. He wanted to crush her in his arms and never let her go. And do other things.
“Talk faster or I might want to fuck you again.” Molloks truly were sex fiends. His mating tentacle was filling up with the cum they produced even as he sat here trying to look serious. But those tits were so...
He let out a hard sigh. “Go on.”
“I’m a s’kar, you’re an ex-cyborg. S’kar I have come to realize know fuck-all about sex, and love seems a close second.”
“Your father loved you.”
Her eyes looked shinier than before and she gulped. “Yes. True. He did. In spite of what he didn’t tell me, I guess he did.” She swallowed again. “I don’t think this is the time, Led. We are definitely friends and what some species call f –”
“Fuck friends.” He’d finished it for her. It sounded less painful if he said it. Maybe.
“Yes. Love is for after you’ve known someone for ages. Isn’t it? After you’ve talked about more stuff than we can in one morning, or these past crazy weeks? However.” She wriggled straighter, sat up. “What I do know is that I want to explore this. My head is whizzing in circles. I have an appointment with a genetic surgeon. He might tell me my case is impossible. And I’m aching in places I never knew I could ache in.”
She reached over and took his hand.
“I’m not saying no, Led. I’m saying maybe.”
“Okay.” He nodded sagely, or hoped it looked wise. “I listened to Smorg and Jocelyn on the way up Mount Eccles. Beginning to think they know more than we do.”
She laughed then a smile broke free. “You might be right.”
Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered. Or the other way around? If he was the prince rescuing the princess, he hadn’t been sent his membership card to royalty yet.
Maybe, she’d said.
“Maybe is excellent.”
Suddenly, he recalled the mollok secret cache. He needed to contact them. Yesterday. Getting rid of whatever was inside him would be safer for them both if people were after it.
He played with her fingers while he put through a call to the mollok embassy on Skrull, left a message vaguely hinting at who he was and what he carried.
“You’re messaging someone?”
“Calling the mollok embassy. I may as well tell you.” He put his finger across her mouth. Thorn licked it, grinning, then chewed lightly. He scowled down at her.
Fuck friends? He needed to reassert the fuck part. No time though, alas.
They were answering already. Apparently he was a sought-after person. Not a surprise.
*Where are you?*
*First I need some information on this thing.*
*We’ve made this a closed call. No one else will hear any of this.*
*Okay. I still need more. What is it that I have in my head?*
The next message took a while to arrive.
*I’ve been authorized to reveal this. In summary. What you have was stolen from us by a Fellen Zed. It accidentally stuck to you instead of his brain framework.*
*Okay.* Figured. It suggested how this cache had been implanted. *So I wasn’t supposed to have this?*
*No. Fellen Zed was passing the cache from body to body. You have a synth brain and so does he. That unusual common factor made the cache glue to you even when you changed from the Fellen Zed loaner to another.*
*And is it some sort of deadly weapon?*
*It’s a way to transform a lifeless planet into one that can be lived on. Terraforming to be exact. The money to be made is prodigious.*
*Right.*
People were killing each other over this?
*Our own home planet suffers, and we have worked for generations to perfect the method. We must have it back. We will pay you but do not try to extract it yourself. That could destroy the data and could damage you.*
He needed somewhere neutral.
*I have to be at the offices of Bob Stardrake this morning. With Thorn Ironhand. Be there and I will return it. Can you do it there?*
It seemed wrong to ask for money, so he didn’t. Today he had bigger concerns.
*Yes. Easily. It’s just an encryption issue. We knew you were here, somewhere. Others do too. The politics on Skrull may create new problems. They’ve grounded all air transport this morning.*
*So it could be dangerous?*
/>
*Yes. Take care. We will meet you there.*
Should he be going where Thorn was if he could potentially drag her into a bad situation? But he was her protector. Leaving her alone could also be bad.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“There are complications.”
“Let me try to sum it up.” He began with Fellen Zed, ended with the danger. “I think it might be safest if you travel to Stardrake’s offices by a different route.”
She twisted her mouth and was definitely frowning.
“You don’t like me leaving you while I solve this?”
“No. I don’t, because I think we are strongest together. Plus there is only one road up there.”
He raised her chin with a tentacle curled beneath it. “What if I disagree?”
“I follow you. We stick together.”
He considered the ramifications. “I’ll assess this once we get out there, on the street. If anything goes wrong, you disappear and leave me.”
“No.”
He shook his head. Starship captain wannabe, but she had said maybe to him. Maybe to love. This was the best day of his three hundred years.
It could also end up the worst, his nastier, more realistic side reminded him.
So? He’d destroy anything or anyone who dared to threaten her. And he was good at that.
Chapter 24
Outside the Elvedor, she tugged on the black gloves that Led had ordered for her along with a black, armored catsuit. Then the helmet, which on her touch had popped up feline ears. She smirked at that and gave Led an eyeroll.
“To strike terror into your enemies,” he told her, motioning her forward.
At least he too wore body armor under his muted red mollok coat, along with numerous holsters for his weapons.
Smorg and Jocelyn hadn’t been told about the dangers and were meeting her and Led at the very top, at the offices of Bob Stardrake. The skies above were quiet minus all flying traffic.
“Too quiet,” Led said, as he slid into the waiting armored fleetjer.
A cross between a car, a mini-tank, and a superhero accessory, this four-doored scarified-pink and black fleetjer could outdistance and outgun most opposition and do it in style.
There were harpoons too. Big plus.
The city regulations on Skrull were clearly weighted toward the use of large and unusual ordinance within city limits.
Thorn slipped into the opposite passenger door. Whatever Led thought was coming for them, this should be adequate. Two of his tentacles had to be curled out though the window due to lack of room, but he’d sleeved them in black armor and given them guns to hold.
“Go.” Led commanded the driver – a dalk with a penchant for knives.
The fleetjer shot forward.
Then the situation began to go...awry.
She wasn’t sure of every detail, for small objects inside the vehicle began to float off the floor and circle her. Her vehement cursing of how this couldn’t possibly be a cycle did zero good.
Led had turned his head to look, which informed her he’d noticed. Things grew hazy as the knowledge of where every sexually mature male, female, and in-between sex within a huge radius, burst into her consciousness.
She held it down, held it all back by curling over her stomach and breathing tightly.
The vehicle zoomed onward, bouncing, slewing. Ricochets of something like bullets hit the outside. The driver began to sweat as her influence rose and rose.
Her skin wasn’t touched but she saw the flirtations of the objects as they whirled. Fluff and seatbelt ends, pens and bullet casings.
OMG the roar, and the smell of sex.
The scent of everything intensified, assaulting her nose as the projectiles assaulted them, and Led yelled instructions.
The fleetjer tilted, and the engine sounds stopped, metal crunching and spinning down, ticking over, though the screams of people continued.
The driver was dead, she saw, as she was hauled from the fleetjer by a tentacle.
“Run, Thorn. We have to go building by building.”
He’d been hit somewhere. The mollok body wept blood from wounds on his chest and tentacles.
She rocked in place, able to control the siren call for this moment. “Led?”
“I’m okay. We run. Not far to go.”
But down this street of howling winds and flying debris, through the storm, she saw the white road winding up the mountain. It was precisely a long way, and there was a battle going on all the way up that winding path. Lasers flared, plas-cannon zigzagged their beams. A crazy sword bearing warrior swept an arc of dead before him until something cut him down.
“The way is paved with the dead,” she muttered.
“Yeah. Dumbass sidekicks, but not us.” He towed her toward a building entrance while firing from several weapons at once, in different directions, leaving the wrecked and crumpled fleetjer behind.
A spray of blue-lit projectiles buzzed away, swatting down a trio of armored males ahead. “We’ll get another vehicle and drive up...” He blew away a few more opposition, dropped a pistol, snagged a new gun from his chest arsenal, turned it on with a hum and click of button.
If only she wasn’t feeling so ill. And this storm... Thorn squinted. This storm was her doing.
“My psionics are going wild. I can feel it in here.” She clutched her stomach then her head. “Both. Led you should leave me. I feel unsafe.”
For once he paused. “Fuck. What Fiana said, I hope she was wrong.”
They’d reached the building’s doors which hung open. Fragments of glassomer made jewelry of the pavement. Five or six males poured out the entrance brandishing guns, firing. Others began firing from above. Though the first pattered against her and Led’s armor it was only a matter of milli-spokseconds before something vital was...
Something broke inside her.
She regained consciousness, crumpled and curled on the ground, with Led plucking at her arm. This time it was he with the bloodied eyeballs, not her.
“If they’re after what’s in your head,” she whispered as he carried her somewhere, “why did they shoot you there?” She stroked trembling fingers down his face.
“Not them. You, Thorn. I think you’re hitting the extinction event. I’m going to give you the last of the agruth, dear girl, and I pray for your sake, mine, and whoever it is you can reach with this effect of yours, that it works well.”
He kicked in the door of an office then laid her on a couch in a corner.
“Here.” In his shaking palm sat a ball, roiling with purples and reds. “Swallow it.”
She took it in finger and thumb, and the memories swept in.
She saw how it had been – the blow-out of psychic energy rolling from her, picking off the susceptible – and that was almost everything in the path of this powerful, scouring, wave of testicular-focused onslaught.
She knew when it swept over each male, registered how each of them screamed as their genitals exploded. Thorn grimaced. Not pretty. Death had come soon after, though she wasn’t sure why they died. Shock perhaps?
The wave had faded long before it left the zone of battle, but another was building inside her, and it felt far stronger, more powerful, likely to raze a bigger area.
She heaved in one breath, then opened her mouth, and swallowed the strange pill.
The flowering of whatever chemicals the pill released was near instantaneous and made the walls around her shudder. Or perhaps that was merely an imagined effect.
She licked her lips and rose onto one arm. The couch cushions gave way under her hand. Led stepped back as if wondering what she’d unleash.
“Thorn?”
“I’m...better.”
She found another memory surfacing – the power gifted to her the last time she’d swallowed this pill. On Lura. How she’d manipulated the molloks.
This time...
She rose from the couch, and Led trailed in her wake until he caught up, grapplin
g her with tentacles about her wrist and neck.
This time she could do so much more.
“Not so fast. There might be snipers. I don’t think they value you.”
She turned to him. “I’m not wounded. You are.” The blood dribbling down his chest made her frown and draw a trembling breath. “Watch this.” She shrugged off the tentacles and stepped outside onto the pavement, aware that Led had also emerged, guns raised.
Extinction level, he’d said, told by her mother no doubt. As long as she could hold herself together until the end, this was going to be easy. An easy massacre.
She rolled her shoulders then tilted her head, sniffing out all the hidden ones, behind windows, beneath overturned vehicles, on knee or two feet, or lying down, some with para-max grenades held in outstretched hands ready to throw. Weapons whined as the power surged within them, and then...
Then she took the first step on the journey up the winding road.
It was a little like dancing, maybe, she thought as she flung a wave to the left, then another to the right.
Swirl to the left, dance to the right.
Males screamed and fell, fell and screamed. Genitals were suffering as she strode and advanced, with Led picking off the few she missed.
The casualties mounted.
When they reached the bottom of the road, there were few ahead as they’d seen the destruction wrought and were cowering, climbing up the cliffs or down them to escape.
She and Led kept going, on foot as the road was littered with bodies and burning vehicles.
“You’ve done it,” Led said in awe. “With a swipe of your hand. And a very messy explosion of what I’m guessing were testicle-equivalent organs.”
“Yes.” Her voice had cracked at the end of that word. “And if I don’t get help soon, worse will come.” She could feel it scratching at her insides, at her temples, wanting out.
“Getting help. Soon. I’ll get them to put you into stasis while they figure out what to do. I have recorded your request for siren genetics.”
She nodded grimly.
He commandeered a vehicle near the top since the road was clear above. They hurtled up the road to slew to a stop in a screech and burn of tires, next to the immense glassomer doors of the Stardrake Private Genetic Hospital.
Blade (Dark Monster Fantasy Book 3) Page 16
