by Stacy Gail
Ghost in the Machine
© 2011 Barbara J. Hancock
A Cybershock Story
I live in a world of waifs and shadows. Live might be an overstatement. I scrounge and scramble and survive in an atmosphere made thick and gray by the ashes of the Fallen. And sometimes I dream of sunlight. My parents were taken, even though they followed all the rules. Never scavenge at night. Never talk to Shadows. Don’t fight the Sweepers. Run. Run. Run.
Now that they’ve taken my little brother, Douglas, I’ve realized I’ve only been surviving for him. I have two choices: Follow him or lie down and die. I can’t just quit after years of struggle. I wouldn’t know how if I tried. Determination is all I have left.
And then I meet him.
He claims to be a rogue who can help me find my brother. It’s got to be a lie. But I don’t run. I stop. I listen. And I make a deal with a Shadow even though I know it will mean the death of me.
Never talk to Shadows.
But no one ever told me what would happen if I kissed one.
Warning: May cause fantasies of forbidden kisses from dark heroes who balance on the edge of evil. Where shadows wait and ashes fall…
Enjoy the following excerpt for Ghost in the Machine:
He looks so heroic treading with purpose through the ash, every bit as graceful as I am not. I remind myself the lean muscle that glides beneath his skin was turned to dust years ago, but the reminder doesn’t help. He has held me with those strong hands. He’s saved me with that lithe body. I no longer tingle where the spider’s venom dripped, but everywhere Gabriel touched me seems permanently sensitized.
Heat rises in me as I acknowledge a different kind of tingle than I’ve known before. If talking to a Shadow is dangerous, surely desiring one will be deadly.
We walk forever. Past crumbled buildings and long-dead alleys. I try not to stare at him, but it’s a lot like trying not to breathe when a Shadow is passing—you can stop for awhile, but soon enough your lungs start to burn with the need for oxygen.
My eyes need to soak up his mystery. For the first time, I see how ash doesn’t settle on him. Not on his hair or his clothes or his skin. He has a physical form. I’ve felt it. I blush with the urge to feel it again. But the ash doesn’t touch him. I’ve lived with Shadows always, but I’ve never noticed this about them.
But his gleaming dark curls and shining armor, I notice.
In comparison, I’m filthy, covered in soot from head to toe.
I try not to think about it. I’m doggedly following Douglas into the jaws of death. But as the dark night turns to gray day, the ash that coats me bothers me more and more. Just as when I fought the spider and after when I thought about an ashen grave, it seems a claiming and a giving up.
Irrational. A fancy brought on by fear, exhaustion and hunger. Every third step is a stumble now. Each blink threatens to become a long sleep. And still I trudge on. It isn’t until my forward momentum stops that I realize I’ve collapsed. My head is so light it seems as if it might float to the gray-choked sky.
I can see Shadows.
They move behind windows of nearby buildings, up and down crumbling sidewalks, across a crosswalk and back again. They’re uninterested, stuck in mindless repetition. I see them almost as a whole entity. Like a shifting darkness that fills the outer edges of my world. But when might one or more unglitch and come for me?
I try to rise, but my exhausted state betrays me. A bottle rolls away from my clumsy foot as I try to place it. The clinking of it sounds like the toll of a bell against the curb.
Gabriel comes to stand by my side. Sidekick or sentry? I peruse the lean length of his leg as I freeze. The tactical uniform worn by soldiers of the First Wave had been custom fitted and molded to their skin. A leather-like body armor, it had been useless against an enemy that didn’t use projectile weapons. The SoulEater had taken them down and taken them in. It had created Shadows and Sweepers and who knew what other abominations.
We wait. What will the other Shadows do?
The one beside me had been a fine specimen of soldier when he’d been alive. It soothes me even though it hadn’t saved him.
But then, not so much.
They are coming.
The sound of hundreds of heads turning our way is like a wave of whispers washing over me. I rise to my feet, swaying. My hand goes to the weapon at my belt. There isn’t enough charge. No way is there enough. The shifting darkness around us begins to coalesce into forms and shapes with deadly substance. Coming closer. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. More.
Just as I raise my disruptor to fire for the hell of it and with no hope of taking out more than a few before we are overwhelmed, Gabriel’s angelic wings embrace me in a feathery cocoon. A staticky charge ripples and reaches to the heart of me. My nerve endings hum with it. In protest or pleasure? Borderline. Being touched by a Shadow from the top of my head to my feet definitely walks the line between pleasure and pain.
“Shhhhhhhh,” Gabriel says.
Trapped in those magnificent wings, I’m as frightened of their protection as I am of the approaching horde. Because I want to hush. I want to accept his cool embrace and the way it makes me feel—saved, seduced, secondary.
For once, I don’t have to fight. They are out there, eddying around us like leaves in a stream, but I’m hidden. Enclosed in Gabriel’s shadowy substance, I’ve disappeared to the others. I hide within the very thing I fear the most.
His wings wind tighter. They pull me closer—he pulls me closer. My cheek presses to his solid chest. His scent is ozone-kissed. It envelopes me in an atmosphere not unlike an approaching storm, surprisingly pleasant. And then I feel it. The thud of a heartbeat against my face.
How can a Shadow have a heartbeat?
Like the swinging girl, it must be only an echo, a memory, a glitch.
As I stand there, Shadows all around, the pace of his phantom heartbeat increases.
I want to pull away.
This is too close to his mystery.
Panic rises, making my own heart thump.
I would push him away. He shields me. He protects me. But I could more easily fight the Shadows around us than the beat of that heart against me. That sort of fight is much more familiar than the fight to resist his scent, his touch—the lie that he is human.
A wavering whisper stops me when I would have pushed my way free.
Very close, just outside my Shadow-wing hideaway, a child’s voice speaks in a singsong cadence that is at once horrifying and haunting.
“Olly olly oxen freeeeeeeeeee…”
The last syllable ends as if the lungs that force air over dormant vocal cords are too weak for volume. An all-out scream couldn’t have been worse. I start to shake. My imagination gives the voice a face, and it’s the face of the swinging girl, come all this way to find me and searching still.
Of course, there are other Fallen children. Everywhere. But my shivers won’t be chided. It is her. She’s out there. And this time I can’t slip away.
“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black…”
The nursery rhyme murmurs from Gabe’s lips, oddly eerie in its coaxing. Like a father encouraging his child to play, he sings the song, gentle and low. I recognize it for the suggestion it is and hold my breath, hoping.
There. A slight sound of scuffling against the cluttered pavement. From hide-and-seek to double Dutch sans rope. In my mind’s eye, I watch the creepy Shadow hop away. Creepy but sad too. Forever young. Forever lost. Missing the games she used to play but caught up in a much more horrible game for eternity.
“Don’t speak,” Gabriel whispers against the top of my head.
Strong arms come around me, more intimate than the wings. Gabriel scoops me up, still hidden, and begins to stride forward, a Shadow among Shadows. Nothing to see here. I hug my arms around my chest to keep them from clinging to him. And I wonder what game, if any, my angelic soldier is determined to play.
&nb
sp; He finds love on the eve of a war he doesn’t plan on surviving.
Gridlock
© 2011 Nathalie Gray
A Cybershock Story
Dante knows the price of rebellion. The Grid created him in its likeness, turning him into a killing machine—tested, modified and enhanced to be a “better citizen”. Years may have passed since he escaped that freak show, but the scars are still fresh.
Without the mandatory implant, Steel scrapes by, living free of the Grid’s control. When a job goes bad, everyone around her dies, their minds crushed by the notorious Cardinal. But he doesn’t kill her. He takes her to a secret lair filled with fascinating, forbidden pre-Grid knowledge. Who is this man—ruthless murderer or eccentric loner?
Bad-mannered as she is, Dante can’t bring himself to silence the abrasive, cigarette-addicted Steel. Something about her calls to him, though trusting her could be a mistake. Should she betray him, it would wipe out years of patient waiting. Waiting while the Grid hunts him for the priceless information he carries within his living data vault. Waiting while his dish of revenge turns ice cold.
For Dante intends to go back. And this time, he intends to be the only one left standing.
Warning: Contains violence, offensive language, a tattooed woman, a man who’s ready to light a few fuses, several variants of the F-word, machines behaving badly, thugs and PVC fashion. But no ninjas. That’s for the next book.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Gridlock:
Forcing her gaze on his face was hard when he turned and displayed a fine network of lean muscles that knotted and played under the pale skin. She wasn’t fast enough to stop the gasp in time when she got a good look at his front. What the fuck?
“Science,” he whispered, “can be a sharp instrument in the hand of the unsympathetic.”
“Scientists did that?” Steel indicated with her chin the collection of scars crisscrossing Dante’s chest, snaking up his biceps, pock-marking his throat and slashing his belly in neat ten-centimeter partitions. As though someone had sliced him open, sewed him back up then did it again lower. She’d seen scars and what people could do to one another, but never something like this. Never this. “Up there, in the bunker? They did that?”
“Scientific objectives, unfettered by humanity, yes.” He pointed to one thick scar that ran diagonally along his left pectoral. “How long does a man have without a functioning heart? Or how fast can a synthetic replica beat before the rest of the body begins to shut down? My heart will outlast the rest of me by a millennium.”
Steel hid the shiver with a shrug, unable to take her gaze from the awful mark. “That’s just demented. Who gives a shit?” She cursed, shook her head.
“It needs to know everything about us. Information is the new gold.”
“Who’s it?”
“The new golden ratio, the alpha and omega, the all and the void. Gods used to fill this space. Even they were supplanted. The Grid took it all. And its thirst for knowledge is insatiable. It needs to know us to better control us. Everything, even the most sordid or inconsequential detail. We created it, and it has since then recreated us in its image. Men born of data.”
“The Grid and its data can kiss my ass,” Steel blurted. She froze out of habit. No one in their right mind would talk that way. But he wasn’t anyone regular, was he. He’d already shared how he wanted to blow the thing up.
Ordinarily, should a passerby or roving bot pick up such dangerous words, they’d be standing at the closest relay and alert security. She half-expected to have a squad of security responders descend on the room and take her in for evaluation. She’d tasted that sauce before and didn’t like it one bit. Pigs. But then again, there weren’t comms relays anywhere near, not visible ones anyway. They were completely off the waves in this place. No one would hear them.
No one would hear her.
Dante’s mouth quivered at one corner, as if he were unused to smiling. “A dangerous position to share with anyone. I could turn you in and reap a handsome reward.”
“Says the guy who’s planning to drop a train on top of the bunker. Yeah, well…” She shoved her hands in her pockets.
He drew near, which forced her to fight the urge to take a step back. As if she had proximity alerts built in, every nerve ending fired flight-or-fight responses. Maybe if she hit him hard enough, fast enough, she’d stand a chance. But then again, where the fuck could she go? She didn’t even know where the door was. Any door. By the time she stumbled onto one, he’d have caught her. Timing was, indeed, everything, and now wasn’t the time for silly heroics. She willed her body to relax. Almost succeeded. This Dante guy had killed people without touching them. She should keep that in mind instead of fantasizing about the fireworks his stunt would cause should it work.
“Do you fear me?” he whispered.
“Yes. I saw what you did.”
His blond eyebrows shot straight up, as though he hadn’t expected the response. Or the honesty. “Have I not treated you with respect and the utmost civility?”
“Is that before or after you shot me with my own gun then dragged me out of my home to keep me a prisoner in yours?”
This time, Dante smiled wide. “You are right, and I apologize for resorting to such drastic measures. I am usually more circumspect. And expedient.”
“What do you mean?” She couldn’t focus much. He smelled of soap. She hadn’t had a soap-smelling man near her in…ever.
He leaned closer. She stopped breathing. “I usually just kill people outright,” he whispered right into her ear. His words triggered another slew of instinctive reactions. Kick. Punch. Bite. Breathe in his clean scent.
“Then why didn’t you, huh? Want to play with me first?”
Zero Factor
Stacy Gail
Armed and dangerous…
A Cybershock Story
Born a psionic—a rare human prized by the government for her gifts—agridome worker Via Brede lives by two simple rules: slip into stealth mode whenever the cybernetic-enhanced militia is near. And never remove the gloves that block her psychic ability.
During a routine delivery, a tear in her glove connects her with what should be her worst nightmare. A meched-out soldier with bulging muscles and a scarred face that makes her heart pound like a pneumatic drill. She also envisions his death in an attack that happens…now.
Locke’s typically ho-hum mission goes sideways when the stunning, green-eyed bubble farmer plants a sensual kiss that sets fire to every one of his remaining man-nerves. He also sees her vision. His own commander is about to kill him.
He needs Via to find out why. First step is to get her to Old Las Vegas without succumbing to a raw, sexual need that burns in him like fever. Getting there will be a snap. Getting out alive—and winning her trust—might be a little tougher.
Warning: This title contains mild violence, blow-your-mind Psionic sex, buns of steel (literally) and the usual hanky-panky at a bordello. Author is not responsible for side effects, including locked-and-loaded hunks taking your dreams by force.
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Zero Factor
Copyright © 2011 by Stacy Gail
ISBN: 978-1-60928-519-7
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kanaxa
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: August 2011
www.samhainpublishing.com
