Overlord: The Fringe, Book 2

by Anitra Lynn McLeod

  Zippity do da, I’m going to die.

  She laughed. A funny word, zippity. Zipper. The zipper of Commander’s jacket was metal. So? Bolting upright, she blinked back the encroaching swirl of static-gray that tried to lure her into darkness. If this didn’t work, she didn’t have a plan B, so it damn well better work.

  She unzipped the jacket, shrugged it off her shoulders and let out a howl when she jostled her foot. Taking several deep breaths, she zipped up the jacket, affixed the compact to the zipper, then dipped the jacket in the puddle, getting it as wet as she could. Twirling the jacket over her head, she threw it at the fence. The jacket bounced off without so much as a spark.

  Spewing every expletive she knew, she crab-walked over to retrieve the jacket, passed out and woke again. Realizing she had to get the jacket wetter, she pulled the orange out, squeezed it until the juice ran and dribbled it all over the jacket. She tried her throw again, with the same result as before.

  Laboriously, swearing her head off, she retrieved the jacket once more, but the effort caused her to lose consciousness again.

  When she awoke, she realized the jacket wouldn’t short out the fence unless she got it really wet.

  “I should have swiped a bottle of his very fine wine.”

  Should have, could have, would have. Truth be told, she shouldn’t have put such a foolish plan, one riddled with holes, into action. Her plan might have worked if she hadn’t broken her stupid foot. She glared down, but as the full horror dawned, her eyes went wide and her heart raced. Not just her foot. Her calf swelled and her pant leg looked like an overstuffed sausage casing. Carefully, she split the rough fabric at the crooked hem. Once she started it, the run raced up her leg with a wave of dizziness. Blasted by the drop in blood pressure, she passed out yet again.

  When she woke, the two moons had set behind her, and brightness glowed just beyond the hill in front of her. Morning? With it, she knew they would start searching for her. Still, full daybreak was at least an hour away, and she didn’t know if she could wait that long. Her leg looked gigantic.

  She knew she had one way left to soak the jacket. Dipping it in puke paled beside what she planned to do now.

  “Gotta do what you gotta do.” With a high, hysterical laugh, she unbuttoned her pants. “I won’t die without a fight.”

  A loud insistent clang ripped through Michael’s office, jerking him awake. “What the hell?” He swiveled his chair to scan the array of sensors.

  “Breach. North fence.” Duster leapt to his feet, issuing commands into his wrist com.

  “My north fence?” Lethal voltage surged through—Michael shot to his feet and knocked his chair over. “Shut it down!”

  “Whatever hit the fence shut the whole thing down,” Duster coolly informed him.

  “It can’t be her.” Michael shook his head and cast an anxious glance at Duster. “No way. Fifty miles?” Even to himself, he sounded incredulous, worse yet, frantic. “No way did Mary touch the compound fence.”

  Duster shook his head, barking orders into his wrist com.

  “She would have had to come fifty miles in six hours.” A surge of adrenaline shook his entire body.

  “Calm down. It’s probably another bird.”

  Last spring, after a sudden rain, a soaking-wet bird had flown into the fence, shorting it out. Armed to the teeth, his guard investigated with enough firepower to blast a thousand elves to kingdom come, only to find the charred body of a hapless bird.

  “I’m coming with you.” He yanked on a pair of boots and a flak jacket, then followed Duster and a pack of guards to the tarmac.

  Whisper gleamed at the far end of the base. Michael tried to ignore the ship as he followed Duster and a plethora of fully armed guards, but his gaze flicked to it repeatedly. Whisper mocked him, a monument, a shrine, to a woman he now realized he’d never loved. He’d hung on to her memory and ship in some crazy bid to turn back time. He could have chosen a very different path once. A slower path to where he stood now. If he had taken that path, he knew Kraft still wouldn’t have stayed with him, because she hadn’t loved him any more than he loved her.

  “Don’t shoot unless I specifically order you to.” Michael instructed the guards to keep their weapons pointed skyward.

  “It’s not Mary.” Duster fell back to stride beside him, his own Slim-Shot Thirty pointed to the lemon-yellow sky.

  “I don’t want anyone to shoot her if it is.”

  “If she touched the fence, she’s already dead.” Duster gave him a stricken look. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You always know just what to say, don’t you?”

  “Let’s just say Mary didn’t short out the fence. Okay?”

  Warily, they approached the burned-out section. Hour-off morning sun cast the base tarmac in a surreal light. Something black fluttered between two of the wires. Michael could almost smell the collective inward breath of relief.

  “Co-man-dur?”

  His heart constricted as the men around him gasped, moving in unison to rivet their guns. “Don’t shoot!” Michael knocked barrels toward the brightening sky.

  Crumpled, looking for all the Void as if a mean giant had picked her up and slammed her repeatedly to the ground, Mary lay ten feet beyond the fence. She lifted herself on trembling arms. Her face, tiny and pale, split into an incongruous grin.

  “Remember that deal you offered?” She locked her arms. Eyes wide, luminous in the pale light of dawn, she swayed like a cobra. “I think I choose—” Her face went slack as her body splayed out on the gravel-strewn ground.

  “Get this fence out of my way right now!” Michael wanted to rip it apart with his bare hands.

  Dropping their guns to their chests, the guards struggled to hold open the dead wires of the electric fence so he could dart between them.

  Mary sprawled motionless. He charged toward her, horrified when he realized what looked like a log turned out to be her leg. As he dropped to his knees, her scent hit him in a shocking wave of smell-memory. Death hovered around her body with the stench of decaying leaves.

  “Medic!” Michael cupped her dirty face. He felt an overwhelming urge to wake her and tell her he loved her before she died.

  Chapter Eighteen

  You came, you came! Mary tried to scream the words but nothing passed her lips. Only in her mind did she shout her gratitude. Face out of a dream, she saw Commander rush forward, then everything went fuzzy gray.

  A blast of rushing pain brought her back when someone touched her right foot, and said, “Internal bleeding with a fracture of the—”

  “That hurts, you—” She condemned him, his ancestors, and his progeny with a slew of nasty words. She hit a good thirty languages so every soul within a five-mile radius would know the full of her displeasure.

  She grasped the fact she was alive and vocal because of Commander. That fact didn’t curb her vicious mouth. “Let off grabbing my foot, you—”

  “She’s going to be okay.” Duster settled himself to the edge of an orange plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. He offered up his eclip.

  Michael rejected the electronic device with a lift of his hand. “You know I hate those things.” He liked reports on paper. Tactile. Semi-permanent. “Just define ‘okay’ for me.”

  He’d been sitting here for hours, tormented that Mary might not live. Once he knew she would survive, he then worried she’d lose her leg. MacKay’s daughter had. Michael remembered approving the bimech limb request and wondered if he’d soon be signing another.

  “Okay means she’ll live and keep her foot.” Duster tucked the eclip into his multitask vest and pulled out a handful of seeds.

  Michael closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. “When will she be conscious?”

  “Dunno. Four to six hours.” Duster munched crackleseeds with neat efficiency as he dug his sharp-shined black boots into the rust-colored carpet of the waiting room. “What deal was Mary talking about?”

  “You really don�
��t want to know.” Actually, he didn’t want to tell anyone, especially Duster. At the moment, Duster didn’t think too highly of him, and his proposed deal to Mary certainly wouldn’t improve his opinion.

  “You’re gonna let her go, right?” Duster leaned forward and stared at him with the intensity of an interrogation officer.

  “With a broken foot?” Michael tried to get comfortable in the molded plastic chair designed for a man half his size and weight. “That seems heartless, don’t you think?”

  Duster gave him an irritated frown. “How convenient.”

  “What? You act like I broke her foot.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but you seem to have no problem using her injury for your own ends.” Duster looked down at the floor.

  “Is that what you think?” Michael considered for a moment. “Let me put it to you this way. If I let her go back to Taiga, who will take care of her? The lovely folks of Pine Glenn? Those same folks who pinned a nasty name on her and took great pleasure in slinging malicious talk about her to my operatives?”

  Chewing on a seed, Duster rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You’ve got a point.”

  “Indeed. She’s safe right here. And I don’t have to do this, but I’ll make you a promise.”

  “What?” Duster cocked his head expectantly.

  “I won’t hurt her. I swear I won’t.”

  “Sure.” Duster popped open another seed, gazing at a poster that listed the warning signs of the Tyaa plague.

  Michael didn’t need to be a reader to know Duster didn’t believe him. “I mean what I say.” He wanted to convince Duster he didn’t mean Mary any harm. If he couldn’t convince his best friend he wasn’t a villain, how would he ever convince Mary?

  “I’m sure you do mean it,” Duster said, still considering the poster. “Problem is she’s already hurt.”

  Waves of cinnamon-pastry scent billowed off Duster, piquing Michael’s anger. Was Duster just being a hero to the damsel in distress, or did his feelings for Mary go deeper?

  “I didn’t break her foot,” Michael said coldly.

  “She was running from you.” Disgust laced Duster’s cinnamon-pastry smell with rotting flowers. “Don’t you feel even remotely responsible?”

  Damn it all, he did. She wouldn’t have run if he hadn’t offered her such a terrible choice to give up her body or her secret. Become a whore or a traitor. He wanted to smack himself upside the head.

  “This has been a total unmitigated disaster from the moment she set foot on Windmere.” Michael wanted to turn back time, but he doubted he’d do things any differently than he already had. Mary, her spirit, her scent, struck such a fierce chord in him he lost all perspective when she came near. Like an addictive, deadly drug, Mary made him want more and more.

  “Stay away from her.” Duster shook his head in reproof. “Let her get better, then let—her—go.” He gave each word forceful emphasis.

  Michael bristled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were in love with her.” The cinnamon-pastry smell of Duster began to edge around that alluring scent of love.

  “I don’t know her well enough to be in love with her.” Duster’s face reddened. “But I admire her. She’s sneaky smart. I respect her criminal mind. Only a fool would underestimate that woman twice.” Duster tucked his used seeds into a vest pocket. “Mary is so focused she can’t see anything but what she’s after, and she isn’t gonna stop until she either gets to her goal or dies trying. Either help her, or get the hell out of her way.”

  “Why do you care?” Michael leaned close, wanting to smell the answer.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Duster stood.

  “Try me.” He stopped Duster with a hand on his arm.

  After long consideration, Duster settled himself back into the chair. “Mary reminds me of you.”

  Duster’s words shocked Michael. “Me? How?”

  “She’s the way you were when you built all of this. You had that same focus. You didn’t give a rat’s for anything but making your dream come true. You had a goal, a reason for being.” Duster sighed and looked at him. “Seems to me you’ve forgotten all of that.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Of late, he’d been thinking an awful lot about the past and the choices he made. Mary and the damn mirror she held up to him. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I find that difficult to believe at the moment,” Duster said with a sigh and a glance down the hall toward Mary’s room.

  “You keep me in line.”

  “I’m lucky you haven’t killed me in a fit of rage.” An edge of bitterness gave the words power to hurt.

  “You know I wouldn’t,” Michael reminded his best friend. “We made a deal a long time ago. The only reason I have you bound is so I won’t attack you.”

  Duster grimaced. “You don’t have to do that to remind me you’re in charge.”

  “That’s not why I do it, and you know it. I put you in custody to remind myself not to lash out.” Duster refused to meet his gaze, and Michael was embarrassed that he had to resort to extremes to keep himself from acting like a child. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way.”

  They fought often and with a verbal viciousness that could stun an outsider, but rarely did it get physical. When it started to that edge, Michael had Duster taken into custody to stop it. Once, he’d lashed out, and his focused blow to Duster’s solar plexus nearly killed him. When Duster woke up a day later, Michael vowed never to strike him again.

  “I’ve kept my word. I’m sorry I have to go to that length, but I will keep my word to you.”

  “True enough,” Duster said. “I know why you do it, but I don’t like it. Like when you snarl at me through your teeth like a talking wolf. I get why, I just don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words sounded hopelessly lame, but Michael had nothing else to offer.

  Duster nodded and promptly changed the subject. “They finally got the bracelet off her.”

  “What the hell did she put on it?” Not only was Michael relieved to turn his attention to another path, but also he desperately needed the answer to protect his planet.

  “Dunno. I sent it over to R and D.”

  “Good. Put Jones on it. That should keep the fussy Einstein-diva busy for a while.”

  “We’d best find out quick.” Duster grimaced. “If word got around of how easy it was for a woman named Remarkably Average Mary to breach security…” He trailed off and leaned close. “Point of fact, Commander, the rest of us call her Scary Mary, but only behind her back, and yours. Until now, that is.”

  Michael knew long ago about Mary’s new nickname, and he’d laughed then, but not now. Mary was scary. “Make your point and move on.”

  Duster calmly said, “My point is that if you underestimate her again, you’re a damn fool, and I will take endless delight in saying I told you so if you prove me right. That’s if—a big, huge, hulking if—Scary Mary generously leaves you alive.”

  Mary woke to a smell so clean it burned her nose. Once she got her eyelids to half-mast, ugly green walls and big lights swaddled by plastic bags greeted her efforts. Thankfully, the lights were off. If they had been on, she feared they would have burned out her tender, gritty eyeballs.

  Torture room? Why would Commander want to torture her when seduction was working rather well?

  Banks of equipment blurred past her gaze when she turned her head to the right. She followed the tubes of one until she found they led down into her arm. Not a torture room but a hospital. She tried to sit up but couldn’t. What the hell held her down? She couldn’t even lift her arms to investigate.

  I’m strapped down!

  Panic erupted. She filled her lungs to scream. Turning her head to the left, she calmed and let her pent-up breath out on a long sigh of relief.

  Commander sat slumped over in a white plastic chair like a wrung-out dishrag. Dark stubble made him look scruffy. All big and tall and dirty-dangerous. Still too s
exy. Didn’t he ever look ugly? He could have a black eye, a broken nose, be covered with runny green manure and still look scrumptious. Hands that barely refrained from stealing his goods itched to uncover the best treasure of all: him. All seven wicked feet of him.

  She winced her eyes closed. What was wrong with her? She shouldn’t be attracted to the man who’d created this whole mess. Even if she had to bash her own head in with a rock, she had to stop getting Commander mixed up with her lusty fantasies of Overlord.

  Commander probably insisted on guarding her himself. She figured she was in for quite a yelling fest when he realized she was awake. So let’s not tell him. It wasn’t the best idea. Right now, she would sell her soul for a sip of water.

  “Commander?” Her voice came out in a strangled, pathetic hiss. She swallowed and tried again. “Co-man-dur?”

  His eyes popped open. He rocketed to his feet and appeared at her bedside so fast he was a blur. “Mary?” He leaned over her and cupped her face with one huge hand.

  “Like magic.” She giggled. “I’m not trying to run away.”

  Tension drained from his face with the sound of his sigh.

  “Not on that foot.” He flashed her that quirky half grin as he took off the strap across her chest.

  He looked happy to see her. Weird. She figured he’d be bright red with anger. Maybe even strangle her. Her belly quivered with the thought he could be healing her so he could torture her more fully himself. Commander’s idea of torture involved a darkly welcomed submissive bent in her own nature. A twisted bent she didn’t think she could keep denying.

  “I’m thirsty.” Her voice crackled, sounding as dry as her lips felt. Her whole head felt packed with sand.

  He lifted a green plastic cup from the bedside table and pressed it to her lips as he cupped his hand to hold her head up. Nothing had ever tasted so good. She swallowed the cool water down in greedy gulps.

  “Doc Murphy said not too much, or you’ll bring it right back up.” He pulled the cup away and gently lowered her head back to the pillow.