The Debt Collector (Season Two)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  “I’m supposed to keep you contained while you come down.” Then a small smile finds its way onto his face. “And I’m supposed to seduce you.”

  I frown and pull back slightly. Seduce me? Given the setting, it makes a kind of sense: I’m in his bedroom, he’s half-dressed, and I’m high as a kite. His electric kiss from before shoots to the front of my mind. It’s not exactly unappealing… but something is very off.

  “I’m no expert in these things,” I say, my head still buzzing, “but I don’t think you’re supposed to tell me you’re going to seduce me.” My verbal filter is apparently still off.

  He grins. “No, probably not.”

  But he pulls me close and swoops down to kiss me anyway. I’m surprised, but my body is in no way displeased. Before I can blink, our tongues are tangled, and he’s pulsing life energy through every point where we touch: our lips, my hands on his bare chest, the tips of our tongues exploring each other’s mouths. It’s a delicious rush on top of the high that’s already floating my body. I’m as quickly lost in it as I was in the life energy flood in Ishtar’s bedroom. Just as I slide my hand up to bring him closer, he breaks the kiss and pulls away. We’re not completely disconnected—he’s still holding me and my hands are still on him—but he has stopped all the tiny, electric transfers.

  I frown, utterly confused. My head is swimming with too much of… everything.

  “I’m not saying I’m averse to the idea,” he says, his voice soft, “but not this way, Alexandra.”

  My body is a turmoil of need: desire for Zachariel’s mouth on mine, lust for the endless flush of life energy from Ishtar and Moloch. A surge of shame tamps some of it down: am I so easy to manipulate? A hit for the addict, and I’m theirs? A single kiss, and I’m his?

  It would appear so.

  The shame flames higher, and it scorches through my brain, sobering me. A little. I lift my hands from Zachariel’s chest. He releases my shoulders in return.

  His gaze is appraising me, but he makes no move to bring me back. “Are you tempted, Wraith?”

  Oh yes. “You give incredibly hot kisses, Zachariel, but I think I can resist.”

  He grins, then gives me a small nod of approval. Oddly, that makes my cheeks heat up more.

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who found that rather hot,” he says, then his humor cools a little. “But I was actually referring to Moloch’s uniquely visceral offer of eternal life.”

  Eternal life. That’s exactly what it is, but hearing the words aloud somehow makes it more real. And more… shocking. Is that really what Moloch has on offer? And is it really something I can say no to?

  I regard Zachariel anew. “You’re the closer. Here to seal the deal with a kiss.” Only he’s not. He’s kissing me and… decidedly not seducing me. “I don’t… I don’t understand. Aren’t you just going to report all this back to Moloch?”

  “Absolutely,” he says, watching me carefully. “I’m going to tell him you’re seriously tempted by his offer. And I’m going to tell him we had amazing sex as well.”

  My eyes go wide. “You’re going to lie for me.”

  “Who said I was lying for you? I have a bit of a reputation to protect around here.” But it seems clear that he is, in fact, lying to protect me. For some reason. I just don’t understand why.

  “Can I… can I be honest with you?” I ask, and shockingly, I actually mean it. I’m lost in all of this, almost literally drowning in the life energy Moloch and Ishtar have pumped into me. I could use some help. Maybe a friend. At least someone who can help me sort this out.

  Zachariel’s face opens, surprised. He hesitates, then says, “I have a talent for keeping secrets. I should be able to keep yours.”

  I hesitate, doubt rushing in. Should I trust Zachariel? He seems to be looking out for me at every turn: arguing for my life, helping me with the boosting, not taking advantage of me when I’m higher than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know if I can really trust him, but I know I need his help.

  I swallow and take the leap. “I find it very hard to resist what Moloch’s offering. But I didn’t come here for that.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you came here voluntarily at all.”

  “I chose to live,” I say. “You’d be surprised how often I have to make that choice.”

  He frowns, then steps a little closer and touches my hair. It’s a small touch and gentle, not like he’s making a move to kiss me again, more like he’s trying to reassure me. It reaches inside me and moves something around, something I don’t expect.

  “I’m not as surprised as you might think,” he says softly.

  I nod. Somehow, I think he actually does understand—that I fight with it, wrestle with death nearly every day. And that the idea of living forever, of banishing death, is attractive on a deeply fundamental level that’s hard for me to deny.

  I look up into his eyes. “Do you think it’s really possible? That with enough life energy, someone could live forever?”

  “Forever is a very long time,” he says gently. “I’d focus on staying alive for the next couple of days, if I were you.”

  I nod. Moloch’s offer is a horrible thing. I know it is. But I can’t help wondering if it’s really possible. And what that means. My life-energy-buzzed brain is grasping at it, but the ramifications of it feel just out of my reach. I can’t get past my visceral wanting of it to really understand it. Plus I’m still ridiculously high. But Moloch certainly appears to believe it’s possible… and it seems core to his crazy world domination plan for debt collectors.

  “I think I’ll focus on doing something with the life I’ve got at the moment,” I say, as much to myself as to Zachariel.

  He smiles and nods his approval. “In the meantime, we need to at least make it look like I’ve spectacularly succeeded in seducing you.”

  A smile jumps to my face. “And how are we going to do that?”

  He reaches to ruffle my hair, which is funny all by itself, given my curls stand out from my head of their own accord. Then he takes my hand—it’s skin-to-skin contact, but I don’t even think to shirk away. He leads me to the bed, which is neatly made, then uses his other hand to whisk off the cover and toss it on the floor.

  “Wow, we were very enthusiastic.” I admire the lump of satiny fabric on the floor.

  “Of course,” he says with a frown, like I’ve just insulted him. Then he climbs on the bed, making more of a mess of the sheets than he has to. When he reaches the pillows, he flops on his back and beckons me with a curled finger that almost makes me laugh. I crawl across the bed to sit cross-legged next to him. He props his head in his hand, close enough to touch me, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just stares up at me with humor-filled eyes.

  “Should I moan your name?” I ask.

  “I think we’ll be respectful of our neighbors and keep the noise to a minimum.”

  I flip open my palm screen. “Should we time this out? Maybe four minutes?” I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning.

  “Now that’s just cold.” But he’s smiling wider now. He takes my hand with the screen, swipes it closed, and holds it. “I know you’re already way too high, but we should probably cycle some life energy. That’s one thing that’s pretty hard to fake.”

  His hand is gentle on mine. I still don’t understand what’s driving him to help me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask, softly.

  “I want you to live, Wraith,” he says, still holding my hand. He peers up in my eyes. “But I don’t want to ruin you. Not like Moloch does.”

  Once again, he’s touching something deep inside me. “You know, you really need to work on your bad guy act. Not convincing at all.”

  He smiles, then shifts his position until he’s mirroring me, sitting cross-legged on the bed. He hasn’t dropped my hand the entire time, and now he takes the other as well. We’re sitting knee-to-knee, holding hands just at the fingertips.

  “I’ll feed a little to
you with one hand,” he says, “you cycle it back with the other.” He starts with a small push, and I send it right back. I’m brimming full, but somehow that extra kick still hikes up my breathing.

  We sit that way for a minute, passing energy, exchanging small smiles. Then he looks down at our entwined fingers and frowns. I hadn’t noticed it before, but where Ishtar and Moloch had clamped hold of my wrists, there are now angry red welts the size of their hands. Without a word, Zachariel slides his hands up to my wrists, never losing contact. He covers the marks and pulses life energy through both hands at once. I have to stop cycling for a moment while he heals me. Then he leans back, holding me just at the fingertips again, and we resume the cycling from before.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, referring to the high.

  “I wouldn’t have thought I could ever take this much without dying.” But the truth is that I’m coming down—a long, slow slide down an infinitely gentle hill. It hurts a little, in the way that absence of joy can. “But yeah… I’m okay.”

  He nods, and we don’t speak for a long time after that. I should ask him more about Moloch and Gehenna and how all of it works. But at this exact moment, Zachariel’s giving me the one thing I truly need—a safe harbor in which to come down and think all of this through. I don’t want to muddy it with anything else.

  It occurs to me, somewhere swimming in the back of my mind, that if Zachariel wanted to win my confidence… if Moloch truly wanted him to seduce me into believing Gehenna had more to offer than my real life back in LA… that this gentle, tender approach is precisely the one that would work best. The one-two punch of offering eternal life, then following it with someone decent, not to mention hot, to share it with. As I sit quietly with this debt collector, cycling life energy and holding hands—something I would never have imagined doing only yesterday—I realize this is everything that has been missing in my dark, secret-driven life. The ability to touch another person without the fear of killing them. Life energy hits without the cost of stealing someone’s time on earth. And a complete sharing and total openness about who and what I am.

  Zachariel knows all my secrets. I have a feeling he somehow knows even more about me than I do myself. And yet here he sits, helping me, regardless.

  The temptation to stay in this room forever is more than I want to admit.

  Even to myself.

  The effects of a massive dose of life energy are nothing short of stunning.

  My cheeks are flushed, my lips are full… even my eyes sparkle, and I can’t remember when that has ever been true. I almost don’t look like myself—more like an airbrushed, reshaped, more alluring version of myself is staring back from the mirror in my room. If someone said it was actually a screen that portrayed a fantasy version of myself, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  I understand now why Ishtar is so powerfully beautiful.

  The idea that life energy enhances beauty isn’t exactly new to me. But this is taking it to a whole different level. Ishtar and Seth both must be on the receiving end of decades, maybe more, on a regular basis. My mind boggles for a moment at the idea of how much life energy they must have inside them. Moloch isn’t quite so ethereally handsome, and while Zachariel is definitely hot and growing more attractive by the day with the way he’s been helping me, he’s not at the Seth-level of male beauty either. Which bothers my brain for moment. Perhaps the enhancement only goes so far… or maybe Moloch was extraordinarily ugly when he first started stealing life at the decades and centuries level.

  I shake my head. The relative beauty of the members of Gehenna is the least of my concerns. More troubling is that the “special payout” Moloch has lined up for me has arrived. And the costume Ishtar has assigned to me is… disturbing. The white leather shorts ride low on my hips, and the spike-heeled boots come up over my knees. My upper body has more bare skin than covered—temporary blue glow-tattoos curl along my arms, but the only clothing is a swath of faux-metal fabric that hugs my chest. It covers just enough that I’m not in danger of falling out. Two real-metal bracelets with blue glow inserts are clamped around my upper arms, and another gathers my hair in back. Ishtar insisted a cascade of black tendrils be left around my face. I look like a fantasy princess from a holo-game, and an underdressed one at that. Add in the life-energy-enhanced makeover, and I can’t imagine where we can go that I won’t twist heads right off their necks with the staring.

  A soft two-beat knock at the door of my room is Zachariel letting me know it’s time to go. I bite my lip, wondering if there’s any way of begging off the costume, but Ishtar will have none of it. I’ve already tried. I swallow my pride and stride to the door—I’m sure the flashy outfit will be the least of my problems during this payout.

  I punch the button, and the door slides to reveal Zachariel waiting for me. He’s obviously part of whatever costume party we’re attending, because his black-metal jacket and heavy, combat boots aren’t de rigueur debt collector wear. When my gaze finally meets his, the look on his face is priceless: something between stunned and ravenous.

  “Please tell my you’re wearing that all day,” he says. “And all night. And tomorrow as well.”

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” I say with a smirk. “This thing’s coming off as soon as we’re done.”

  “Off works for me as well.”

  I shake my head and brush past him to lead the way downstairs. I don’t mind the flirting, but in spite of spending most of yesterday under his care and leaning on him for support in a way I haven’t with anyone else, ever, I’m not sure more than the occasional scorching kiss is in any way a good idea. Although it is an idea that tends to make my mouth water. But getting hot and heavy with Zachariel is a dangerous distraction.

  Especially now, when I seem to have passed Moloch’s first round of tests, and he’s fully engaged in recruiting me into Gehenna. I need to keep this going long enough to figure out some key flaw or weakness—some way I can bring the entire organization down. At this point, I don’t even care if I go down with it. There is so much evil Gehenna is doing in the world, my need to end it only grows the more I learn. And I’m not sure where Zachariel fits into that plan. If I have to take him down as well, that will be easier to live with if I stay out of his bed.

  Downstairs, we meet up with Seth, who is the most normally dressed among us—if a hooded black leather cloak and baggy canvas pants with combat boots can be considered normal. But it’s somewhat understated, and with his striking male beauty, it’s a powerful combination. He barely speaks two words before the three of us leave in the same black sedan Zachariel and I used the day before.

  It’s a long drive with no conversation—Seth up front, looking sullen, and Zachariel riding shotgun, looking even more like he doesn’t want to be here. I’m relegated to the back seat. All I know is we’re headed west with a two hour drive ahead of us. Not knowing what I’ll be facing when we get there leaves me agitated, not least because I have a vast reservoir of life to potentially pay out. There’s an unwelcome sense of possession about it—that it somehow belongs to me—even though I know it doesn’t. Maybe because it came from Moloch and Ishtar, leaving a degree of separation between me and the true donors. That’s why high potentials can look in the mirror after getting their hits: they don’t have to drain the poor souls who are the original source. I grimace at the idea of being anything like the targets I usually hunt, so I force myself to look through my messages as a form of penance.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  Wyatt is ready to put out a missing person’s report on me. I’ve been gone two days, ever since Zachariel whisked me away from the capitol building and before Wyatt could unleash his anger and disgust on me for killing Senate Bill 1321.

  I force myself to read through every message. They start with concern for my mental state—because that’s the only way he could probably express his outrage—then progress to a conviction that I’m doing this as some kind of revenge against him. By the tenth message, he seems to hav
e realized I’ve turned off the tracker in my palm screen. There are a few panicked messages where he thinks I’ve been kidnapped, then he seems to decide I’ve simply run away. The last ones are the hardest to read: he’s given up on me, gone back to LA, and he’s trying to hold off the board. With my testimony, he thinks I have a day or two max before they can gather enough shareholders to force a takeover.

  I can’t do this without you, Lexy. The last message is almost ten hours old.

  I grimace and archive it. If I don’t get back home soon, there will be no way to undo the damage.

  I stare out the window as we exit off the 880 Freeway at Santa Clara. While LA is the heart of the cybernetics industry, the biggest brains in technology still thrive in this startup haven. We wind through streets flush with money: clean sidewalks, new shop fronts, and a minimum of that dark underbelly. Everything is bright and new in the California sunshine here. Seth keeps driving until we reach a slightly dingier industrial side of the city… and our outfits begin to make sense to me. Silicon Valley is home to huge, legitimate tech behemoths as well as hopeful upstarts by the hundreds, but the slasher underground has a dominant influence on the culture—and we’re dressed just right for a slasher con. The darker side of tech is flagrant in tapping the infrastructure and talent here, congregating in real life and not just on the grid to do their less-than-legal back door work. And staying ahead of law enforcement is half the game.

  I’m not surprised Gehenna is involved.

  My suspicions are confirmed when Seth parks near a rusted warehouse that appears abandoned, yet has a variety of transports parked in front: maglev scooters, motor trikes, and a couple of suspiciously extravagant cars. Some tech execs must be slumming the underground. The front door is chained closed, but Seth bypasses that and heads toward the rear of the boxy building. It’s two stories tall and twice as long, but there are no windows in its corrugated metal exterior. A faded sign over the rear door says, Vigilance Electronics. I can’t decide if that’s an actual name or a slasher joke. Seth motions to Zachariel, who taps something into his palm screen and holds it up to the scanner next to the door. For the first time, I notice Seth doesn’t have a palm screen. For that matter, neither did Moloch or Ishtar—at least not that I remember. Yet Zachariel does. I frown, filing that bit of information away as the door unlocks, and Seth pulls it open.