by Faith Hunter
I set out a sizeable litter box and a bowl of water for the cats, while they inspected the room, drinking out of the toilet—a water toilet, not a composting one—by choice, climbing atop the sofa to look out the window. Claiming beds and observation posts. Thankfully, they left me a small space on one mattress. Using the hotel’s satellite communication, which would have no security at all, I formatted and sent a text message to my favorite OMW asshole—make that my only OMW asshole—then stretched out on the oh-so-comfortable bed, an arm over my head, and closed my eyes.
When Cupcake returned to the room, banging open the door, she woke me from a sound sleep. “Get up, sleepyhead,” she said, “and take these aspirin. We have a lunch bar featuring steaks big enough to use as baseball mitts, scheduled now, with beer and wine. Cold. I checked. At Urgands, across the Elk. Then hot soaky baths, massages, and mani-pedis.”
“No massage, no mani-pedi,” I said, still hiding my face. I’d infect anyone who touched me skin to skin. That was how I ended up with Cupcake. Only queens could pass the nanobots that transitioned biological creatures into whatever we were, and Cupcake wasn’t a queen. She could get massaged and get her nails done, no problem. I was dangerous. “But the hot bath sounds wonderful.”
“But—”
“No buts,” I said.
“This is just so stupid.”
This being that I never allowed anyone to touch me.
I opened my eyes beneath the protection of my arm. That sounded like independence. Not at all like thralldom. I smiled slowly. “Yeah?”
“The nail techs wear gloves,” she announced with something like glee.
“Really?” Gloves? I could have a mani-pedi?
“Really.”
“You are hereby promoted to the woman in charge.”
I could practically feel her delight on the air like glitter, rainbows, and choir music. “You’ll take the massage, too?”
“No, but yes to the lunch, the beer, the bath, and the mani-pedi. And the aspirin.” Cupcake rattled the pills like dice and dropped them into my hand. I knocked them back with the icy water she held out. It wasn’t metallic and old, like the stored water I drank at the junkyard, but fresh and pure. Pure, prewar-style paradise. For this alone I envied Charleston. I closed my eyes, grieving for the world before war and a WIMP bomb—Weakly Interacting Massive Particle bomb—left this dried-out husk of a planet. “What else did you do?”
Cupcake said, “I arranged for the laundry to be picked up, cleaned, and delivered back to our room, and I told them to wear gloves like your note said. I hired an armed escort for the night, which, according to the concierge, will keep us from standing out as young and foreign among the locals. She got us reservations at 7:00 p.m. at a restaurant I heard about. I put a call through to Morrison’s Foundry, Metals, and Scrap, that contact who purchased your high-grade metal in the past?” she reminded, as if I might have forgotten my own contacts and the info on the notes she had taken. “We’ll see him in the morning at the foundry. He’s offering us breakfast.”
“That’s . . .” I sat up slowly on the bed. “Cupcake, did you hold a rank in the Hell’s Angels?”
“Yes. Well, as much as a woman can. And that changed a lot when the MS-13 took us over.” Her face went through a series of emotions, too fast to follow, except they had all been bad. “Things changed after that,” she said flatly.
Gently, I asked, “What did you do with the Angels?”
“I was the communication and records specialist for the president.”
My eyebrows rose nearly to my hairline. That was an important job in any organization.
She tried for nonchalant, but I could see the pride beneath her words. “I handled all appointments, kept the calendar straight, and kept the contact info for every chapter, every Enforcer, and every made-man in Hell’s Angels.”
“I’m impressed.”
Softer, she said, “Yeah. I used to be impressive as hell. When word came that the Mara Salvatrucha had gone to war with us and were trying to force a merger, I hid it all. They never got my contact info. I protected my people. But my Old Man changed after the takeover. Things were never the same between us.”
She took a breath as if tucking old pain away, and slapped my thigh. “Let’s go get that bath.”
“Cupcake? Do you think the MS Angels, maybe Warhammer herself, were responsible for the attack on the road? They were using Spaatz mini-tanks, same tanks that attacked the junkyard.”
“I hope to hell not, because that would mean she’s already moving in or one of her people gained access to junkyard comms when they attacked you there.”
How had that not occurred to me? I tapped my earbud. “Mateo? Are you there? What do you think?”
“Cutting transmissions. Rerunning our security software. Analyzing the IT capabilities of the log house.” That meant using the SunStar’s comms and a satellite. Dangerous.
The comms went silent again. We were on our own.
∆∆∆
I slid down and rocked back my head on the porcelain rim, water up to my chin, silky bubbles all through. It smelled like gardenias, remembered from my youth. And it was hot, so hot the air steamed and water dripped down the white tile. So hot my blood wanted to turn to sludge and my skin was sending reports to my brain about blistering off my flesh. It was a fraction of a degree from actual damage. It was perfect. And because lots of water—especially hot water—killed my mutated nanos, I could empty the tub, wipe it down, and not infect anyone. I could relax. Totally relax. It was amazing.
Cupcake, on the other side of the short wall, was in her own tub, not talking. At last. The only sounds were her snores, the plink of water falling, the gurgle of the water heater in the next room, and . . . nothing else.
All the tension began to ease out of me. I was facing problems and peril and combat, but I had survived a battle with sex bandits outside Sylvester, had a belly full of beef, and my head was full of hoppy happiness from the four kinds of beer brewed at Urgands. Beef was a treat so expensive I could afford it only once or twice a year, and getting even a little soused was risky. But I had two cats patrolling outside with the human guard recommended by the hotel, and a SOG SEAL 2100 knife under the towels on the table beside the tub. I was reasonably safe. And clean. I closed my eyes and let sleep pull me under.
∆∆∆
After the bath, I got my first professional mani-pedi by a woman wearing gloves, while Cupcake got a massage. My feet and hands looked fabulous, not that they would stay that way for long working at a junkyard. While Cupcake was treated to her mani-pedi, I got my hair professionally trimmed by the same woman who did hands and feet, and who agreed to wear gloves once I promised a hefty tip. After, she used this amazing goopy stuff that made my short hair spike up like bristles. I stared at my reflection, dressed in an orange top, a full swingy skirt (to hide my knife), with adorable little platform shoes, lipstick, Kajal (desert-dweller’s heavy eyeliner), and my orange-lensed 2-Gen sunglasses to cover my funky eyes. With the thin lacy gloves, I looked fabulous.
Cupcake looked just as grand in my mother’s pink silk skirt and peasant top, with pink Kajal and sandals. We indulged in another beer, fresh fruit—bloody hell I had missed strawberries—and we were done with being pampered. I paid the outrageous bill, and Cupcake and I walked into the afternoon. I nodded to the bodyguard and spotted Spy peeking around the corner from the nearby alley.
Everything looked fine, but the cat’s shoulders were high, and she blinked at me, and I understood she was telling me that we were not completely safe. She looked across the street. An electric delivery truck slid past us along the roadway, nearly silent, blocking my view. When it passed, I spotted the man across the street.
Adrenaline spiked through me like cactus sliding along my nerves. My heart raced. His Harley was parked in the shade of a dusty tree, and he was braced, sitting sideways against his bike seat, facing me. This Harley was an older model with no defensive armament or visual shieldi
ng. No visible weapons on bike or rider.
His legs were stretched out, ankles crossed, arms folded across his massive chest. He was leaner, harder than only a few weeks past, his muscles defined beneath the thin, UV-blocking, long-sleeved T-shirt and dusty black jeans. He was wearing biking boots and the barely visible Morphon on one wrist, a metallic wristband on the other. Black anti-glare sunglasses. His hair was slightly longer than before. Rings on every finger like fancy knucks for fighting.
No weapons. And, most important, no OMW kutte. He was here, undercover, as I had requested in my message. Requested. Not ordered. And to be here so fast, he had been close by. Though I had left my own outdated Morphon turned off, he had found me, in a city of nearly a hundred thousand people.
The connection between us was electric, but I didn’t reach for him. I curled my fingers under, fighting that urge that made me a queen in my species.
A hot breeze whirled down the street, my dress swishing around my legs.
Jagger puffed once on a cigar, the mellow scent and smoke curling along with the wind. He didn’t move otherwise.
“Ohhh my. Girl, is that who I think it is?” Cupcake whispered.
“Yeah,” I breathed. “Remember to call me Heather.”
“Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm,” she hummed, as if he were delicious.
Cupcake had been healing in the med-bay and then going through the transition—for the second time—in the days following Clarisse Warhammer’s attack and defeat at the junkyard. But she and Jagger had been together for several critical days of their transitions. What did he remember? The memories I had implanted? The full truth? Or a warped combination of the two?
“Wait here,” I said to Cupcake. I stepped off the curb and crossed the narrow street. From the corner of my eye, I saw Spy dart over. Then two more cats, dark streaks. My cat-guard clowder. The bodyguard followed behind me, and I could practically smell his biochemical markers flood with fight-or-flight pheromones. “He’s okay,” I murmured to the man, hoping I was right. “Wait with Cupcake.” The guard stopped and backed up. He took Cupcake’s arm and pulled her into a shadow.
I stepped into the shade of the tree, into Jagger’s personal space, and stopped. He smelled of exhaust and sweat and cigar. He smelled of the past, of the same scents my father had carried, the scent of OMW and the open road.
“Jagger,” I said softly.
Talking around the cigar clenched in his teeth, he said, “Heather. Or Shining. Which is it this time?” His voice was low and gravelly and vibrated through his chest, through the air between us, and into me. His question let me know that he remembered more than I wanted him to. Remembered enough to be dangerous to me and to the junkyard. And my nanobots wanted him, wanted to take him to my bed and—
No. That would be totally unfair to him. I had to feel my way through this meeting. “You came.”
“Didn’t have a choice, did I?”
I tilted my head at him, studying his body language, tone, the facial muscles visible below his dark glasses.
“What did you do to me?” he asked. “You and that Bug ship you call an office.”
Fear sang through me. He remembered not just what had happened in the fight and during his healing time in the med-bay, Berger chips running. He had been able to figure out even more. We had never talked about the alien ship buried in the junkyard.
“I did nothing on purpose. You touched my stuff. You got infected. Who have you told about me? About the junkyard?”
“No one.” He lifted a hand to the cigar, puffing several times to keep it alight before he removed it from his mouth, raised his glasses, and glowered at me. “Whatever you did to me, it kept me silent. I wasn’t even able to text or email the info. Hell, I couldn’t even whisper it to myself.” He was furious, but that fury was leashed. So far. “I planned to come here today and gun you down in the street just so I could be free of you. But I couldn’t pick up a weapon this morning. Not a handgun, not a blade. What. Did. You. Do. To. Me?”
Spy sent me a vision of Jagger and me as seen from above. She and her cats were in the tree. Her claws were out. She was staring at the spot on Jagger’s unprotected neck where she would land and bite him.
I nearly reeled from the visual connection and broke it with an effort. “Nothing,” I said again. “I have a disease. You caught it.” Infection. Disease. Good words. They hid the truth in plain sight.
“I’m faster. I heal quicker. I see better than I did. And sometimes…”
I waited.
“Sometimes I think I smell you, hear your voice. I research stuff, track people. I’ve always tracked the MS Angels, but now I’m watching my own people in case someone’s in contact with them. Without OMW orders. Just doing it because you might want me to. I have new contacts all over the scrap-business world, and when I should be sleeping, I plan how to buy scrap from you and how to send you weapons and tech. I came here today without weapons. Because I’m a damn fool, and all I could think about was you.” This time he whispered, “What did you do to me? What is this disease?”
I could take him over again, as fully as the day he rode away from the scrapyard. It would be easy, a single touch, my bare palm to his. I could make him mine, a thrall, as servile as Cupcake had been. Or I could give him his freedom, as much as possible, and tell him the truth. That was a novel idea.
“You know the nanobots that were put into the Cataglyphis bicolor ants?”
Accessing his Berger chip for the info, he inclined his head slightly and said, “Using bio-nanos, military and Gov. created ants to scavenge dead flesh, to clean up the rotting corpses in the cities so they could be habitable again. The ants were supposed to die. Instead, a few of them—thirteen, they think—mutated. One became a female, creating a new, reproducible species. Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius. Instead of being solely scavengers, they became predators.”
“They swarm and attack any human they find,” I said.
“They’re impossible to eradicate because they can change sexes and start a new nest. What does this have to do with what you did to me?”
“The queens can transfer the bio-nanobots to any human who survives being swarmed.”
“No one survives swarming.”
“Three of us did. A guy named Sherman Griffith. A woman named Catherine Warren, AKA Clarisse Warhammer of the MS Angels. And a twelve-year-old girl named Shining Smith, the daughter of the prez of the Outlaw Militia Warriors.” I peeled down the wrist of my glove to expose the scars. They were rippled, ragged, bumpy, pitted, and still red. I returned the wrist cuff to position. “That survival makes the victim a carrier. Only survivors of a direct queen attack, so far as I’ve been able to find out, can transmit the nanobots by deliberate or accidental touch. Or by someone touching the things recently touched by us.”
His body went taut, ever so slightly, and his jaw tightened as he put things together, things that had happened when he was inside the office of the junkyard, touching my things with his bare hands. To cover that minute reaction, he lifted the cigar. Puffed. I really wanted a cigar, suddenly. It had been years since I’d had one.
“So, I’m what? A slave?” His Alabama accent hard and rasping, he growled the last word. He stood. Too close.
“Not exactly. I call them thralls. You have free will, but you’re bound by protective instincts and a desire to please me.”
Jagger whipped out his hand and yanked me to him. My breasts were smashed against his chest, his hand a vise on my arm, bruising me. “Please you?” He dropped the cigar and gripped the back of my neck. “Let me show you how I want to please you.”
His mouth landed on mine. Heat and need and want blasted through me, through the bare skin of his palm on my neck. His tongue invaded my mouth. He tasted of cigar and Jagger. And I knew in that moment he had been part of my dreams. All of my dreams. Jagger, top enforcer to the OMW, had been inside my dreams, my sex dreams. He knew what I wanted. How to please me. He knew me. And I knew him. And on some level, neither of us c
ared if we were more tightly bound as long as we could have this.
My arms went around his shoulders. His tongue plundered my mouth. His hands gripped my ass and he hauled me up against him. His need was hard and huge against my lower belly. I raised my legs, wrapped them around his waist.
Bloody damndamndamn. I wanted this man. His beard abraded my face. He tasted of sex and cigar and . . . beer. He tasted of beer. I swirled my tongue around his. Sucked it into my mouth. I moaned deep into him, feeling the vibration of need against my core.
“Hey, you two,” Cupcake said, her voice intruding on . . . this. “You’re attracting a crowd. Unless you want to put on a free sex show, you should stop now.”
“Get a room,” a strange voice shouted.
I pushed back from Jagger. “Stop,” I whispered, gasping.
“No,” he whispered back, one hand sliding around front and up under my skirt. Electric heat shot through me.
“Stop,” I begged.
“I’ll stop, but this ain’t over, Little Girl. I’ll have you or die trying.”
∆∆∆
I rested my arm across my eyes, trying to shut out the headache that was returning, driven by Cupcake’s insistent voice. “Jagger is hot. He’s like chocolate sex on a stick, melting in the summer heat. If he was any hotter, he’d melt the ground he was standing on. That man would do anything for you, girl. You got to stop being such a—”
“Stop.” I did not want to hear what Cupcake thought of me. Life was too short for that kind of condemnation.
“I will not stop. We need that man for our nest.”
I dropped my arm, turned my head, and looked at my thrall. Or . . . my not-thrall.
