I snorted, laughing as the frog tap danced through the air toward me, his hat weaving through a complex series of motions. Then the dexterous amphibian settled on my shoulder and grabbed my ear.
“Mallory, please do a purify spell. If you do, I won’t tear out your spleen through your nose.”
“You don’t even know where my spleen is,” I replied before more laughter spilled from my lips. I tried to staunch their flow with my tentacles but only succeeded in smacking myself.
“Is she high? Her pupils are huge and silver,” Chloe asked as she appeared in front of me wearing skin-tight black leather that made some very interesting thoughts run through my head. I mean, normally I wasn’t attracted to werewolves because of that whole wet dog smell thing when they sweated, but right about now, I thought I might be able to deal with it.
“Yes, the stupid bitch fucking licked me,” the frog said, which struck me as odd because I was really sure I hadn’t licked a frog in my whole life. I mean, there’d been that one time in Vietnam where that dude had bet me fifty bucks to…
“Great,” the werewolf said, leaning down. “Just great.”
“Well, hello there,” I slurred, trying to push myself to my feet with my tentacles. Only, all I succeeded in doing was a lot of unattractive flailing. “What brings you here?” I waggled my eyebrows at her as she grabbed me by one tentacle and hauled me to my feet.
“Mallory, you’re high. I’m going to take you to the med bay,” the werewolf said as she literally threw me over her shoulder like I was a sack of laundry. I didn’t mind so much because this view gave me a spectacular view of her ass.
“Or, and hear me out, we do something more pleasurable.” I snorted at her as she started walking, carrying me off to God knows where. “After all, you and me are just a couple mammals. We could do it like they do on the discovery channel.” Then I woofed. You know because she was a werewolf. I am one slick mama, let me tell you.
“I’m going to ignore that crack ‘cause you’re all hopped up on the dust,” Chloe said, her voice rippling out across my body like satin and silk. “I need you to try and behave because we weren’t supposed to land in the middle of a goddamned armada. We were supposed to arrive beforehand so we could set the bombs up. That way they’d crash into our space mines and explode. Now, we’re at risk of dying via intergalactic trampling, and even if we do survive that, we have to figure out a way to chase them all down, plant bombs on them, and blow them up.”
“I don’t see how that concerns me,” I replied, crossing my tentacles over my chest indignantly. Well, I tried to do that. In reality, it was sort of impossible with my chest pressed against her back, so I more just flailed at her in annoyance. “What concerns me is my sudden lack of Cheetos and cotton candy, speaking of which…”
“This is exactly what I’ve been dealing with,” the frog sang as it landed on top of my ass and glared at the werewolf. “There’s no way she’ll be fit to help us.”
“You make an excellent point,” the werewolf said, totally talking about me like I wasn’t being woman-handled against my will. I mean, I couldn’t walk or anything, but still. I didn’t want to go to wherever the fuck we were going. Or did I? I tried to remember, but my mind was filled with fuzzy peaches and strawberry daiquiris. The real kind. Not the fake stuff.
“Man, I hate those stupid umbrellas they put in drinks,” I said, nodding furiously. “A mini umbrella does not make it fancy or yummy.”
“That’s it, you idiot,” the frog said, glaring at me with so much rage, I’d have been scared if it wasn’t so funny looking.
As I started giggling uncontrollably, the creature pointed its top hat at me, causing a stream of fireworks to shoot from the end. I had half a second to squeak, and then everything went completely black. Which wasn’t so bad because the void of unconsciousness greeted me with lemon meringue pie.
12
When I woke up, I did not feel like P. Diddy, but I was totally going to brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack because, otherwise, there was no way I was going to get the taste of sewage out of my mouth.
“Holy fuck, did you get the number of that bus?” I grumbled as I pulled the sheet up over my face to block out the bright light coming from fucking everywhere. Fuck, my head hurt so badly, even my hair ached.
“Coming down off the dust is a real killer,” the vampire said, his voice somewhere beside me. “Want some of my spit? It helps with that.” I heard a glass scrape against a table, and then he pulled back my protective sheet and held a glass of slobber in front of my face.
The smell, like old gym shoes and cat hair, hit my nose, traveled down my throat and booted my stomach in the ass. Everything inside took the express elevator back up my throat and sprayed out of my mouth as I tried vainly to keep it contained by my hands. Unfortunately, it was not to be. My cheeks ballooned outward as barf filled my mouth before surging outward through my fingers and sprayed across the floor, my bunk, and the table to my left.
Somehow, Jeffry the vampire managed to move in time to avoid becoming a casualty, but as the last of everything inside me hit the ground like a bucket of slop, and my stomach muscles clenched like they were trying to medal in it, I suddenly felt better than I ever had in my life.
“Did you do that so I’d vomit?” I asked, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and leaving a slimy trail of unmentionables across my bare arm. It was gross, and the smell of my own sick was starting to get to me, but there was nothing else inside me.
“Yes. Vampire spit makes people vomit. It’s a thing.” Jeffry shrugged like he’d just said the sky was blue or Logan was the best superhero movie ever. “And throwing up helps your body cleanse the dust.” He nodded at me as I glared at him.
“You couldn’t have warned me before I threw up all over everything?” I asked, trying to figure out how I could get myself out from under the sheet plastered to me with puke without actually touching it more.
“That’s like eighty percent of the fun,” the vampire replied, grabbing the sheet and yanking it off of me in a flourish that flecked me with bits of vomit, which was somehow worse than the feel of the slimy sheet sliding across my bare legs. “Besides, you’d know that if you’d read any of the files on the holo, which you should. Being unprepared gets people killed. Consider this a warning.”
“Where are my clothes!” I snarled, as I frantically tried to cover my naked body with my hands. “Not fucking cool.”
“I don’t mind,” the vampire said, tossing the sheet on the ground before he pointed what looked like a firehose at me.
“You don’t mind—”
The rest of my snarl was cut off as a blast of warm water tore from the end of the hose in his hands and hit me full in the face, drenching me to the bone in the span of a breath. I coughed, trying to breathe, but succeeded only in swallowing a gallon of water before the stream of water left my face and traveled down my body like a pressure washer, getting all the gunk off me in the space of a second.
Then, as I sat there sputtering, dripping, and more pissed off than Yosemite Sam himself, the vampire turned off the hose, spun on his heel, and grabbed something off the table.
“Put that on. No one wants to see you naked,” he said, tossing a yellow polka dot bikini at me that hit me right in the face. I did try to move, but it happened so fast, all I could do was pull it off my face while desperately trying to cover my nakedness with my other hand. Although as I watched the vampire, I realized he didn’t care about seeing me naked in the slightest.
It was weird, and not because I wanted him to look at me. No, I knew I could turn heads, but the way he looked at me was like I wasn’t even there.
“A bikini? Are you fucking mad?” I asked, shaking the garment at him as he shoved his hands in the pockets of his black trousers and began walking away whistling.
“It’s just a spare uniform. It will transform to look like whatever you want once you put it on, which I suggest you do. As a vampire, I do not find you attrac
tive since we have no sex drive, but I assume you do not want people to see you in such a state.” He raised an eyebrow at me, regarding me like I was a curious bug.
“Wait, I thought all vampires were all super sexual,” I asked, trying to push out the details of virtually every vampire novel I’d ever read.
“Not quite. That’s one of the first things that goes when you become undead. No blood to get the juices pumping. Again, that’s in the holo. You should read it. Might learn something,” he said, and then turned and walked out of the room, which was weird because the door had opened and closed so quickly, it seemed like he had phased through the far wall.
“Okay…” I said, looking down at my new bikini and taking a deep breath. None of this made much sense. I sort of remembered teleporting the ship into a field of ships, but then I’d fallen and practically swallowed the fairy. Everything else was sort of a blur of color and sound and not a lot else.
Either way, I wasn’t going to sit around here naked. Who knew what machines could be looking at me right now? Not that it mattered. I mean, at this point I’d shown my naked body to a vampire, had sex with a fish person, and deep-throated the fairy. All that was left was for me was to go down on Chloe and give the captain a hand job.
Jeez, I really needed to find me some Jesus, stat.
With that thought, I pulled on the bikini, and as I did, it totally morphed into the pair of kick ass jeans I’d worn in high school, complete with patches of my favorite bands, holes at the knees, and badly drawn stick figure alien robots.
A Nirvana dead smiley T-shirt completed the ensemble, and as I got to my feet, which were now clad in a pair of white Chuck Taylor’s covered in more scribbles, I couldn’t help but feel a little okay with everything because my eighth-grade self would have thought I was a baller.
Besides, I was in space on a ship, and who knew what else was going on behind door number 1? I wasn’t sure, but I had clothes, and I no longer felt like I’d spent the night out on a bender trying to pick up chicks and making bad decisions. Things were looking up.
I settled myself for a second, grabbed my wand off the table beside me, and made my way to the door just as lights began flashing red, and sirens went off.
“Warning!” screeched Oliver’s voice in my skull. “All personal head to the bridge!”
13
I teleported onto the bridge in time to see an asteroid field looming in the distance. Even though red lights were flashing, and the captain was sitting in his seat like he was Jean-Luc Picard, I didn’t see any cause for alarm, since the asteroid didn’t appear to be coming toward us.
I glanced at the captain because I was the first one here, what with my ability to teleport and all, and was about to ask him what was going on, when he spoke.
“Cortiri!” the captain called in his steadfast voice, addressing the blue hologram woman standing next to him. “How long until we reach the asteroid field?”
“We will reach the asteroid field in 3.7 minutes,” she replied in that weird voice my iPhone always used when it told me it had no fucking clue what I was saying because it was in my pocket, and I hadn’t actually asked it a damned thing.
“And the Maverick fleet?” he asked, turning his gaze heavenward. As he did, the metal ceiling turned translucent, revealing the whole of the surrounding fleet. The ships still had that horrible BDSM star destroyer thing going on, but we’d somehow managed to flit into their school like a sly barracuda.
That would have made me feel better if there weren’t over a dozen of them. I wasn’t sure how the fuck we were going to deal with that many ships, but I really hoped we had an awesome plan.
“The first will reach the asteroid belt in 1.57 minutes. The last will reach it in 4.2 minutes.” The hologram gestured around at the swarm of ships. “Estimated probability of successful mission, 0.007%.”
“Um… what are the parameters for success?” I asked, sweeping my gaze from the swarm of ships clustered around us to the hologram.
Cortiri took a second to glance at Captain Brand, and when he nodded, she looked at me, piercing me with her ethereal eyes.
I unconsciously looked away from her because pretty much everything was more interesting than trying to stare down a curious computer program.
“Mission success is defined as the destruction of the Maverick fleet. Once they enter the asteroid field, we will no longer be able to deploy the ship killer bombs because they must be line of sight, and we need to be in front of the fleet to do it. The likelihood of—”
I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “So we just need to blow up the ships? Is that hard to do?”
“Our ship killer bombs are more than up to the task.” She gestured in front of herself, causing a small black cylinder about the size of a stapler to appear in the air between us. “The problem is with the delivery.”
“The original plan was to spread out a net of bombs and let them run into it, but we arrived too late. Our calculations must have been off because we were supposed to have a couple days to get ready.” Captain Brand fixed me with his eyes as he spoke, and my knees went a little weak from the attention.
“I can take care of that,” I said, nodding as a stupid idea popped into my head. “Give me a space suit or whatever, and I’ll just go teleport to the ships and place the bombs manually. Then it won’t matter if we’re in the asteroid field or whatever.” I shrugged. “I probably won’t be able to carry them all, but I can make trips back and forth.”
As I spoke, the captain’s eyes widened, and he turned toward the hologram. “Will that work Cortiri?”
“The suggestion has a 46.346% chance of success,” the hologram replied like that wasn’t infinitely better than our original chances of 0.007%. “Our chances increase to 76.667% if she doesn’t make trips back and forth because she won’t lose as much time.”
“Well, that settles it,” Captain Brand said, rising from his seat as the door behind him slid into the ceiling to reveal Jeffry and Chloe. The fairy wasn’t with them, and I was sort of happy about that. I was not looking forward to the awkward conversation the two of us were going to have.
“What settles it?” Jeffry asked, his gaze flitting from Captain Brand to me and back again.
“Ready the bombs for delivery,” he said, gesturing at the hologram before turning to the vampire. “You and Chloe will be teleporting from ship to ship. You will plant the bombs, and when you are done, we will blow them all to Hell.”
“Okay. I trust your judgment, Captain. I’ll take care of it,” Jeffry said even though what the captain said sounded pretty fucking crazy, and that was bad because it was my plan. I mean, Jesus, I’d never teleported through space with a bunch of bombs, and wait a damned second.
“What do you mean he’s coming with me?” I said, pointing one shaky finger at the vampire who’d seen me in my birthday suit and hadn’t had the decency to look impressed because he was immune to sex or something. “That wasn’t what I proposed.”
Captain Brand raised an eyebrow at me, making his ruggedly handsome face even more ruggedly handsome, which was something I hadn’t thought possible. “Oh, I was unaware you knew how to set up ship killer bombs.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and as my cheeks began to flare with embarrassment, he continued. “On second thought, I just remembered I’m the captain, and you will do as I say.” He pointed at where Cortiri’s image stood. “Besides, you heard her. She says we have a better chance of success if you don’t come back and forth and you can’t carry them all.”
“Okay,” I squeaked, casting my eyes at the floor as I took a deep breath. I wasn’t even sure I could teleport the vampire along with me, but I didn’t want to tell the captain that, doing so might disappoint him, and something about him made me not want to do that.
No, for the honorable Captain Nolan Brand, I’d try, even if failure meant Jeffry and I would end up as the smear on the side of a Maverick ship.
“I will begin the preparations,” the vampire said as the fa
iry and Atlantean appeared behind them in the doorway. “I trust you have taken into account her limitations when it comes to transporting others?”
“I think it will be fine,” the captain said, turning those baby blues onto me. “I believe in her. She’s better than she thinks she is.”
And I swear. I melted into putty right there on the floor.
Sure, our plan was stupid, and we were all going to die, but I really hoped it’d turn out differently because right now the captain believed in me, and more than anything, I wanted that faith to be justified. For him, I wasn’t just willing to try. No, for him I would do.
14
“You ready to do this?” I asked, tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear as I glared at the vampire. He was dressed like me in a tight fitting black jumpsuit, which like mine, left little to the imagination. Weirdly, I knew it covered my face, but I couldn’t exactly figure out how because I could still pick my nose if I wanted to.
“Nearly,” he replied, hoisting the backpack onto his shoulders and cinching down the straps before tightening the strap that ran around his waist. As I watched him, I was glad the captain was sending him along with me. Not because of the whole “set up the bomb” thing, but because that bag was fucking heavy, or at least it was within the artificial gravity on the ship. I’d been stupid and tried to help pack the bag, and when I had tried to lift one of the explosives, I’d found I couldn’t.
Then, like an idiot, I’d actually strained, using my newfound biceps to the full of their ability, and had succeeded in doing little more than nearly hurting myself because they apparently weighed like six hundred pounds each.
Maverick: A Supernatural Space Opera Novel (Witching on a Starship Book 1) Page 7
