by daisy harris
Lust After Death
Daisy Harris
In the Pacific Northwest, where life hurries to keep pace with technology, a re-animated bride named Josie struggles to escape her creator and to find her identity in the half-erased circuitry of her mind and body.
Assassin Bane Connor just wants to get the girl to the Zombie Underground and receive his payoff—a mental reset that will erase his memories as well as his guilt. But an attack by a rival faction derails his rescue, and the wide-eyed female whose circuitry requires a husband tears at his hardened heart and ignites desire like he’s never known.
Acting as Josie’s spouse-substitute is tougher than Bane expected. The newborn stein needs touch to live, and wanting her is a complication he doesn’t need. To make matters worse, she sees into the darkest recesses of his mind. The last thing a killer wants is for his lover to read his thoughts, but if Josie can love him the way he’s programmed, perhaps Bane can find a way to heal his past.
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
Lust After Death
ISBN 9781419935053
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Lust After Death Copyright © 2011 Daisy Harris
Edited by Grace Bradley
Cover art by Dar Albert
Electronic book publication July 2011
The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.
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Lust After Death
Daisy Harris
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wonderful critique partners, Danica Avet and Taylor Lunsford, for sticking with me through what seemed like one hundred rounds of revisions, and to my editor, Grace Bradley, for whipping me into shape.
Chapter One
On either side of the door to her prison, panes of colored glass alternated with clear. Josie Friedman lowered her face to look through a square. Her breath blew puffs of steam on the window.
A riot of green battled outside. Celadon moss hung from algae-covered branches. Ferns burst from rotted logs and hostas curved from wet indentations. Her maker Adam’s rough gravel driveway bled onto an unpaved road. Everything looked slick and damp, soft alternating with hard. She imagined the crunch of stones under her feet, though she’d never left the house.
Her eyes followed the gray stream of pebbles to where it disappeared in a thicket of vines, but something caught her eye. At first she thought it moved. Or maybe at first it did move, but then it was still. It was a man.
Most noticeable about him was the black metal shape he pointed in her direction. His stance was aggressive, leading from the machine in his two-handed grip to rangy arms, up a tan neck and face, to one bright-blue eye. She knew he had another eye behind the closed eyelid, and half-broken memories told her it would be blue as well.
A thatch of blond hair covered his head. His shoulders stretched a black, short-sleeved shirt. Trousers the color of the greens behind him fell from slim hips. She liked him, though she had no reason. Perhaps it was simply that he wasn’t Adam.
Josie sought out his identity in that corner of her mind pre-set with the obvious answers, but found nothing. He disappeared when she blinked and Josie gasped, hoping with desperation she hadn’t just imagined him there.
“Josie.” Adam’s stern reprimand echoed in the corridor.
She fought a spasm of fear and shook out her clenched fists, acting as if she’d merely been curious. “Yes, Adam?” She added a lilt that her mind whispered he’d like.
His narrow shoulders fell and he chuckled, holding out a pallid hand. “Come to me.”
* * * * *
Bane Connor swung his body behind a red cedar and tucked his R9 in his back pocket. He darted another look back at the Patos Island mansion, but the newborn stein wasn’t at the door anymore. He stomped a few hundred yards down the narrow path before sweeping his thumb across his smartphone’s screen. Q-ter’s text message flashed, telling him the girl had been re-animated. No fucking kidding, boy genius. Breaking into a jog over the pine-needle-strewn ground, he hit redial to call the Zombie Underground. Bane growled into the phone. “Tell me something I don’t know, Q! When can I ice the guy and grab her?”
He stepped over a waist-high fallen Douglas fir and landed silently on the other side. On the phone, Q-ter back at the ZU office in Seattle rattled on about upload times and bandwidth. Bane squeezed his temples between his thumb and middle finger. “Put Frank on.” He heard jostling, and Q-ter’s muttered assent before Frank got on the line.
“Could you at least try and not scare the kid, Connor?” Frank King’s baritone carried over the connection. Bane could almost picture the old stein rubbing his hair with his mismatched hands in the basement office in Pike Place Market.
He reached the tree line and wound down the pebbled trail to where the Underground’s rented Sea Sport docked. “Tell Q-ter the new guy who gets my body will apologize.”
“Har-de-har-har, jackass.”
Bane’s gait slowed when he reached the water. He looked out over the San Juan Islands dotting the horizon. “So when can I go in?” His mind replayed the sequence of seeing the girl, and watching her big, brown eyes flash. She looked freaked as hell. “Far as I can tell, it’s just him and her in there.”
“Our surveillance shows the same. His cleaners don’t come ’til Monday, and I’d bet he’ll lock her up tight that day.”
The phone cracked slightly in Bane’s grip and he switched hands, shaking his right one out. He made a mental note to see if Frank could amp down his adrenaline levels when he did the reset.
“But Q-ter wants to download her program directly to our server if possible.”
Bane walked out onto the three-plank-wide dock and stepped into the boat. The vessel rocked under his feet and he switched on the outside light before opening the door and rifling through his bag to pull out the pile of external hard drives. “What, he doesn’t think I’ll have enough memory? Or smarty-pants just doesn’t trust me?”
“Connor…” Frank’s tone suggested Q-ter was sitting next to him. “It’s not that. We need to know how he built her if we’re going to be able to help her.”
He raked his hand across his jaw. “Whatever. For all we know she could be just another brain-dead corpse.” Bane knew Frank wanted to argue, heard it in the older stein’s labored breathing and slowed speech.
“This guy’s correspondences soun
d legit. You should see the pile of data Q hacked off his email.”
Bane’s gaze drifted across the empty bay, to the dusky gray sky touching the greenish water. “I just want to get her out of there.” He exhaled. “And be done.” This was his last assignment before his reset, the full brain-wipe that would rid him of all his memories. Bane sighed—he’d been waiting years for this.
“Give us another few days.” Frank’s voice lowered sympathetically. “Whatever happens to her in there, we can probably erase it when we reprogram her.”
A harsh chuckle broke from Bane’s lips. “Yeah, like you did with Kuriko and the girls.” Pulling out Kuri was a low blow, and Bane knew it. Frank had long harbored a crush on the girl. And of all the steins at the ZU, Kuri clung hardest to her original, horribly flawed programming.
Bane wasn’t surprised when Q-ter got back on the line.
“I don’t know what you just said, but Frank stormed off. He’s probably gone to watch All in the Family.”
Bane let out a quick laugh. Built ninety years earlier, Frank King had some odd habits. And though Q-ter was a smartass, they always bonded over ribbing their boss.
“How many days?” Bane put some menace in his voice.
Q-ter squeaked. “No more than five. I’m hoping for three.”
“Make it three.” Bane hit end, and made sure it was set to vibrate. Q-ter and the girls loved resetting his ring tones to the latest pop sensation. The last thing he needed was to get woken up in the middle of the night to some prank call ringing some teenagers-on-speed soundtrack.
He tossed a bowl of organ meats into the tiny microwave and heated it, pulling out a fork. When the timer dinged, he speared a few pieces into his mouth and drank Gatorade out of a liter bottle.
Bane pushed out the door and sat on the lid of a cooler on the back of the twenty-four-foot boat. He wondered what the hell he was sitting on before realizing he hadn't taken his gun out of his pocket. He pulled it out and grabbed his lighter as well, thumbing it in his hand.
The image of that girl’s face popped back into his mind. He drew his flask out of his backpack and took a swig. Bourbon singed his throat and he braced himself for the onslaught of memories that always came when he found a new stein. It was their goddamn eyes that did it every time—set up a loop. He knew his builders back at the army base hadn’t programmed it. But every damn time he saved a newborn one, the images played like a snuff film.
The parts where they’d operated him under remote control, those bits were blurred from all Frank’s efforts to wipe them. But what came after—the rooms full of bodies, the blood coating his skin, the lifeless eyes—that shit stayed lodged in his brain, stuck next to the part that knew how to assemble an automatic rifle in his sleep.
He flicked the steel roller of his lighter and watched the fire dance. Metal scalded his thumb, and Bane shook out his hand and took another swig. The alcohol dulled some memories but sharpened others—the picture in his mind of the girl’s glassy eyes.
They’d been dark and shining, like her near-black hair. Her chin narrowed to a point from the wide set of her cheekbones. Her skin looked like a cloud.
He scrubbed the flesh and blood from his plate and set it to dry, throwing back another scalding shot. Q-ter and Frank said he couldn’t take her yet, but that didn't mean he couldn’t watch her, make sure she didn’t get hurt too bad.
Bane tucked the revolver and lighter into his waterproof pants. He wouldn’t kill the bastard scientist…yet. Frank had said not to kill him at all—but Bane couldn’t take his boss seriously. No one wanted blood on his hands. Bane, of all people, got that. But if Frank really believed the doctor would end up alive, he should’ve sent someone else.
* * * * *
By the time Bane reached the trees edging the mad scientist’s concrete mansion, he’d emptied the flask. His fists curled at his sides, raring for a fight. Even Bane could tell he was drunk. It wasn’t like him to get wasted while on assignment. He usually reserved that for the privacy of his crappy apartment. But helpless while the girl suffered in that house… Well, he’d been driven to drink by less.
Damp leaves padded the ground under his feet, and Bane kept to the darkest shadows. He cursed that he’d forgotten his skullcap back at the boat. His Ken-doll hair stood out in the dark. The guy the army had used to build him had been a handsome fucker. Not for the first time, Bane wondered if they told him he’d live forever, or retain his memory of his past life. If they did, they’d lied on both counts.
He reached back to grab the hood of his fleece and pulled it over his head, and then crept along the wall under the line of windows, staying close in enough not to trip the sensors and turn on the exterior lights. Bane headed the direction the stein had gone when she left the door.
The windows hovered a good two feet above his head, long, horizontal rectangles running the length of the house. He searched for a nearby rock or tree, hell maybe even a ladder, but all he found were a few empty milk crates in the scrabbly weeds at the side of the house. Bane lifted one in each hand and positioned them in front of a window. Hearing voices the next room over, he snatched the cartons up and placed them on the rocky ground. Then Bane climbed on top and craned his head to peer inside.
He heard a man’s angry voice, but Bane couldn’t see over the windowsill. He jumped down, stumbling a little on the landing. Then Bane grabbed another crate and climbed up again, balancing as best he could on the uneven surface of river rocks and weeds that surrounded the house.
The scientist towered over the girl while she huddled in a corner of a bathroom. She wore a torn hospital gown, and her thin, pale hands rubbed at her slim arms.
Bane gripped the ledge with one hand while snaking the other around his hip to grip the handle of his pistol. The doctor kept his back to the window, and Bane placed the gun’s barrel against the glass, calculating a shot that wouldn’t risk hitting the girl.
The man gestured between her and the tub. Water ran, steam curling above the surface. The stein said something, but Bane couldn’t hear what. The guy—Adam Friedman, Q-ter had said his name was—threw up his hands and stalked from the room.
Bane exhaled a low, growling breath and replaced his gun in his pocket and his hand on the windowsill. He readied to jump down and watch the guy from other windows, but the girl stood and damn near looked right at him. He froze in place, watching her wipe tears from her eyes.
She peered down at her wet fingers, confusion etched on her angelic face, and then she gave her digit a tentative lick. Eyes wide with surprise, the girl fed her finger farther into the bow of her mouth.
Ho-ly shit! His body sprung to attention, his nerve endings strung taut as a bow.
Feeling like a peeping tom, Bane looked away from the window, assessing the pebbles below his crates and a nearby bank of leaves and weeds he could land on quietly. Then he gave a last glance through the window and noticed her hand caressing the water’s surface.
A fascinated smile played at her lips. Damn, she was beautiful, and not in some fake plastic surgery and programming way. She was fresh, shiny, new—like she held the keys to paradise.
Fuck, he was drunk. The crates wobbled underneath him and Bane let go of the windowsill with one hand, readying to jump. Really, he was leaving.
Her ivory hand slid up her hospital gown and tugged at the tie. The blue-striped, papery material sank from her shoulders to the floor, revealing a pale, slender body that seemed to shimmer under the bright bathroom lights.
Bane bit his bottom lip to stop from groaning out loud. His hips bucked forward of their own accord. The crates tilted to the side and he grabbed at the windowsill’s metal edging to right himself. His arms supported his weight and he trapped the top crate between his legs and pulled the pile back under his body, desperate for one more look. By the time he righted himself, the girl had turned her back on him to step into the tub.
If he’d thought the front of her was nice… Her back was long and delicate, her ass spe
ctacular. Goose bumps rose on her skin and he could almost imagine the feel of them under his fingertips. The girl must have wondered about the water's temperature, because she bent forward at the hips to test it.
His right hand dropped to cup the bulge in his pants. He was a douche and a pervert. And he would jack off to this image for the rest of his undead life. Which, now that he thought about it, would only be a few more days.
Gritting his teeth against his guilt, Bane curved his fingers around his cock and stroked. The girl had tried to sit with her back to him, but realized the faucet poked her and turned around. Now he got to watch her breasts bob in the water. Nice.
She picked up a bar of soap and her eyes widened. Normally Bane hated how newbies wondered at every damn thing—but this girl didn’t look stupid. She looked kind, excited, happy. The bar slipped out of her hands into the water and Bane watched as she dove head-first to find it. His hand left his dick to grab at the metal. He worried she might not know enough not to breathe under there.
Her head popped up again and she flipped her ebony mane from her face. A grin split her face. Damp curls of hair framed her cheeks, tangled at her shoulders, licked at her collarbone. She giggled and rolled the soap in her hands. Her eyelids fluttered as she smoothed the cream over her arms and up the long column of her neck.
Bane’s fingers traced over his lips as he watched her soap her body. He held his breath, silently urging her hand lower.
She obliged, skimming over the curve of her breasts before sliding her touch down her belly. Her palm dipped below the water and he lost sight of it, but her eyes fell to half-mast and her lips parted. When her arm reached farther, the girl’s eyes pressed tight as her mouth made a shape like an O.
Fuck! His legs swung out from under him and his fingertips barely caught on the thin ledge. Bane hung there for a moment, wondering whether to drop to the ground or pull back up. Despite his better judgment, he wedged his toe into a crack in the concrete wall and angled his body to push his torso higher until he once again peered like a letch through her window.
