by Lucas, Naomi
Dark Hysteria
Cyborg Shifters #8
Naomi Lucas
Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Author’s Note
Viper (Naga Brides)
Viper
31. Chapter One
Also by Naomi Lucas
Copyright © 2021 by Naomi Lucas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the author.
Any references to names, places, locales, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Art by Cameron Kamenicky and Naomi Lucas
Edited by Tiffany Freund and LY
Created with Vellum
To my husband, Justin, and our baby dragon boy, Jesse. They are the loves of my life and my entire world. Thank you for giving me meaning.
And to my dad.
I miss you every day.
Alexa has one purpose in life, and it’s to take down the war machines called Cyborgs. Specifically the one known as Hysterian, also known as the Tormentor, the Twitch, the Jumper. The Cyborg killed her father in cold blood, and she’s determined to see the same thing happen to him.
First, she needs to get close to Hysterian.
Second, she needs to get him to trust her.
But the closer she gets, the stranger and more fascinating he becomes. He’s in every shadowy corner. He’s in her dreams. He’s even stoking a desire in her that she’s long kept buried. There’s no turning back while stranded on a ship in the middle of outer space.
There’s nowhere to run.
There’s nowhere to hide.
He’s her father’s killer.
Whatever happens now, however the Cyborg makes her feel, she’s determined that only one of them will make it off the ship alive…
One
Alexa stared at the Cyborg on the other side of the airfield.
The one creature in this universe she’d spent years chasing. The bastard who murdered her father. She knew she was being conspicuous—she wasn’t shy about staring—but she wasn’t the only one. The rest of the crew watched him too.
Hysterian.
Cyborgs were uncommon, relics of a past that everyone wanted to forget, but still lived with everyday. Products of a war that devastated two species.
But the crew didn’t watch him the way she watched him.
They didn’t have the burning hatred for Hysterian like she did. They didn’t have a history with him.
She squeezed the rag in her hand then wiped it across her brow. She was sweating like crazy, and it wasn’t even that hot. It was a mild day near the end of summer. Even though she’d been doing manual labor all morning to prep the ship for takeoff, the heat shouldn’t have affected her like this. None of her other crewmates were as hot as she was.
Alexa glanced at them. Some glanced back, and she averted her eyes.
All of them were men. She knew they would be but had hoped there would be at least one other woman on the ship with her. That was a lot to hope for in her field. Getting a degree in space systems technology, space law, and ship management wasn’t something a lot of women did, though there had been a handful in her classes on Elyria. Elderly women especially.
No one wanted to retire on Elyria. It was a glitzy metropolis with the seediest underground in all the cosmos. It was cheaper to get a job working on a spacecraft for a woman than going through the application process to move to a different planet, even with the looser restrictions for women who hadn’t been born on Earth.
Old folk wanted to retire on Gliese, or Kepler, but not Elyria. Even retiring on Earth was better than a place that gave no rights to the elderly.
Turning back to the task at hand, Alexa lifted her case and headed for the hatch. Her gaze slid to Hysterian as she walked up the ramp.
Covered from head to toe in a black mesh and cloth suit, he stood out.
Speaking to several men in business suits out on the tarmac, Hysterian was devilish and enigmatic. His dark eyes lightened to gray when numbers skittered across them. If that didn’t command attention, then it was his height, or the way his uniform hinted at the manmade muscles beneath it.
The muscles were hidden, though. His suit covered him from toe to…eyes. Alexa averted her own eyes when he looked in her direction.
He’d been speaking to the men most of the morning.
She tried to find a reason to get within earshot of them earlier, but nothing had come to mind. Whatever they spoke of would remain a secret.
If I was a higher rank, I could maybe find out…
She wasn’t. She was high enough to be on a Cyborg’s ship, but she wasn’t an officer. She wasn’t military. She wasn’t even bridge crew.
She was one of two people to oversee the ship’s laboratory and requisitions. She wouldn’t be in Hysterian’s neck of the ship.
Alexa wanted to be closer, needed to be closer. After he killed her father, she’d only wished to get as close to Hysterian as possible. To kill him. To do to him as he did to her father.
Elyria had been hot that day too. She’d sworn the planet was trying to cook her.
It was a hungry planet, after all. Elyria, always insatiable. Cooking her would be the kindest thing the planet could do. She hated the heat. Almost as much as the man she now worked for. Though, back then, she didn’t even know Hysterian existed. His kind had been nothing more than a distant nightmare. A prickling memory. One she hadn’t experienced since she was a child.
Regardless, the day her dad was murdered, her blood boiled under the sun… Skin melting in the summer heat…
Alexa shook her head, clearing it. It’d been a hot day.
She entered the ship.
Earth was just as hot as Elyria on its worst days. And with it being midsummer on the human planet, she’d already experienced a few. She checked her grip on the case, bypassing the ship’s menagerie and making her way to the storage facility attached to it.
The door opened for her as she neared.
A blast of cold air hit her, and Alexa paused, enjoying the chilling relief. It was enough to take the edge off. She placed her load on a shelf and locked it into place, scanning the barcode attached to it.
Inventory updated.
It wasn’t something she needed to do. The ship was high-tech enough to have an artificial intelligence programmed into it to keep inventory on everything up to date, but she did it anyway. She moved to the other resources and scanned them as well.
She didn’t trust anyone else’s data. They were often wrong. Her lack of trust had saved her ass on several occasions. If she trusted Elyrians, she’d still be in the slums. If she trusted the police on her home planet, her father’s death would go unavenged.
Why else did women not get degrees in her field of
study? Because they were discouraged—sometimes aggressively—to do so.
Women, and only women, were welcomed within the Trentian-controlled space sectors. If a woman owned and piloted her ship, what would stop her from leaving Earth’s jurisdiction and cross over? What would stop her from smuggling other women across?
Trentians suffered a breeding disease—their society had few women left because of it—and those who remained had trouble reproducing. Trentian males and females could reproduce with humans, though, and with the lack of Trentian females having babies, or even being born, Trentian males sought human females to replenish their ranks.
Human men don’t like the competition, especially not from a species that had warred with them for over a century.
The Earth government couldn’t afford to lose women to the aliens. They want to have the biggest dicks in the universe. Keeping women landlocked was what the government sought to do instead.
There was talk that the Trentians grew their young now in labs, but that was speculation and rumor. No one actually knew. She didn’t. Breeding politics meant nothing to her. She had no interest in having kids with a human man or an alien.
Hysterian’s demise was all she cared about.
Which was Alexa’s driving force to degree-up because she didn’t have access to money any other way. If she was going to kill a Cyborg, she had to be competent, smart. She had to know more than what she could learn in the slums. She knew Hysterian wouldn’t remain on Elyria forever. Traveling through space was expensive.
Though Elyria was different from most Earth territories. It was easier to do as you pleased, even as a woman. Breaking the law was commonplace.
Yet another reason why she didn’t trust easily.
The medical examiners said her dad died of a drug overdose—their equipment verified it. They were wrong.
Dad hadn’t overdosed on drugs. There were no needles, no marks on his flesh. There was no sign of vein bulge from Elyrian Sky, or excessive sweating from Scarlet opioids.
He was murdered.
All they found was an abnormal substance on her dad’s hand, nothing more. The substance neutralized all their tests—it responded to nothing. Benign, they decided. They took a sample of his skin and put it in a container to cryopreserve it. But when she followed up with them, the sample had miraculously gone missing.
It wasn’t missing. Someone stole or destroyed it. Why else would it have gone missing?
She scanned another container. Words flashed above her wristcon telling her what it was: grain.
“There you are.”
Alexa saw her coworker walking into the room. Raul, her menagerie maintenance partner. Middle-aged and muscled, Raul was a decent-looking human man. With thick black hair that was cut short and curled around his head, he always appeared as if he’d spent his morning sitting in front of an industrial fan. What with his five o’clock shadow covering his jaw, Alexa was certain he had.
He could’ve spent that time shaving instead. He was dressed in the same form-fitting uniform she wore. Unlike hers, his vest wasn’t zipped to his neck, which left a peek of his white undershirt showing underneath.
His name tag was displayed prominently on the right side of his chest. Raul Gilmartin.
All of her crewmates were well-built. One had to be in peak condition for a job such as theirs.
With a pallet under his arm, Raul moved past her and set his load down, locking it in place. She went to his side and scanned it.
Tranquilizers.
A lot of them. Alexa licked her lips. When she looked up, Raul was watching her curiously.
“You do know there’s more to load, right? You can scan them in later,” Raul said. “It’s not like we’ll have a ton to do between requisitions.”
“I needed to get out of the heat for a bit.” She held up her rag still scrunched up in her hand.
Raul laughed. “If you think this is hot, you should head south to Texas for the summer. This heat isn’t anything compared to that.”
She headed for the door. “Right.”
A hand grabbed her arm. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
She tensed and looked down at Raul’s hand on her. “Release me.” Her eyes snapped up, realizing what he just said. “Him?”
“Our captain, the boss man, the scary Cyborg fucker we now work for. You’re in here because of him, aren’t you?”
“I—”
“It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone. He gives me the heebie jeebies too.”
“I’m not here because of him. I’m not scared of our captain,” she said. Oh, how she lied.
“You heard what he is, right?”
She shook his hand off. “Besides a Cyborg?”
“He’s one of those shifter ones.”
“I knew that.” She did know that. She’d known that since before he killed her father. People whispered about him back home, saying Hysterian could bring you bliss or death with a single touch. She didn’t know of an animal in all the universe that could do that.
She didn’t know what kind of animal Hysterian was, and it wasn’t for a lack of research.
That type of information about a Cyborg was heavily guarded. Besides several old articles about Hysterian’s time during the war, there was virtually nothing about him anywhere. There was very little about any Cyborg.
It was frustrating. It made tracking him hard, at least at first.
What made them so special? It wasn’t fair how they were given things that normal people weren’t. Most humans would give their souls to be born into the kind of power Cyborgs possessed. Killing machines with unlimited freedom… It wasn’t fair. They needed to pay for what they’d done.
Unlimited freedom, unlimited strength, unlimited wealth and power.
Alexa was desperate to ask Raul if he knew Hysterian’s animal. But that would reveal that she cared enough to know more about the Cyborg. Could she trust Raul? Trust wasn’t her thing.
“Although, I hear he’s messed up,” Raul said. “Bad design or something. It’s made him mad, really mad. Being defective. Heard he only took this job because there’s a possibility the EPED could fix him.”
“Messed up?” Bad design? Wait? “Defective?” She’d never heard of Hysterian being defective. She’d also never heard of Hysterian having a problem with his mecha side, but then again, the only information she had about him came from people who used to work with him.
And those were some shady individuals. Anyone who worked for the crime boss Raphael at his club, Dimes, wasn’t someone you wanted to know. Which was who Hysterian used to work for.
Traffickers, drug dealers, murderers, rapists. Raphael surrounded himself with shit. And since Hysterian had been working for him, Alexa assumed he had done all of that and worse.
Shit breeds shit.
“Yeah,” Raul continued. “Daniels, his second-in-command, was given a briefing by the big guy, Nightheart. We’re not supposed to get close.”
“What do you mean ‘get close?’ I haven’t heard anything.”
“He probably hasn’t come to talk to you yet. You know how it is.” Raul shrugged.
“No. I don’t know how it is. Is it because I’m a woman?”
He let out another laugh that made her bristle. “Woman? Not at all. We’re all stoked you’re here. What I meant is that—” Raul stopped and looked at something over her shoulder. She watched as Raul squared his shoulders.
Someone was behind her in the doorway.
A feeling of foreboding had her inhale a breath and hold it. Alexa stiffened, knowing exactly who it was behind her. She prayed Cyborgs couldn’t really read minds, and that was all a rumor too.
“Captain,” Raul said and genuflected, briefly catching her eye in warning. “What can we do for you?”
She twisted and locked eyes with him.
Her captain.
Hysterian.
Though his suit came up to cover everything below his eyes, she would recognize him anywhere. Those dark iri
ses, the sharp brows framing the tops of his eyes, and his incredibly pale skin were unmistakable. She was pale herself, but Hysterian was unnaturally so. Like at any moment, he’d go translucent and slip into thin air.
But it wasn’t his skin and eyes that were so recognizable, it was his hair. It was shock white, pulled back from his face and gathered behind his head, falling to an arrow-point at the base of his neck. It was always perfectly kempt, and she didn’t know how he did it.
She couldn’t imagine an indomitable war machine using hair gel.
Hysterian stepped forward, his hair brushing the top of the door frame. He was tall, and built too, because what Cyborg wasn’t muscled? Hysterian wasn’t like a wrestler. He had a ripped, lean way to him. His neck and arms were long, and what she could see of his facial features were sharp and piercing, giving them the appearance of elongation without the uncanniness.
He was one of a kind.
He clearly looked down at them.
Pushing her sudden hatred and curiosity deep within her, she greeted him. “Captain,” she said thickly, nodding her head. His eyes went to her, and she nearly choked on her heart.
“Ms. Dear, Gilmartin, you’re needed in the menagerie. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” both she and Raul said at once, breaking the tense moment.
Hysterian remained in the doorway when Raul tried to leave, refusing to let him pass. Awkwardly, Raul waited for him to move so he could obey the order. Alexa remained behind. She was immobilized under the Cyborg’s gaze.
His cold, black eyes were hard to be under, and Alexa tried not to balk. She summoned her courage and clenched her hands.
