by Kresley Cole
As his gaze widened with horror, hers slid to the only door, where a pad of lights glowed, indicating someone was punching in the code necessary for entry. “You will not enter this room,” she called.
Though voodoo worked best with contact, it still worked without. The lights stopped flashing, and the door remained closed.
Today is my day!
Lifting to her tiptoes, she removed Dr. Walsh’s earplugs. She wrapped her fingers around his neck, and the increased contact delighted her—the warmth, the different textures, the very life that pulsed within another soul.
Disgusted with herself now, she gazed deep into his eyes. “If I fail to kill you today, you will kill yourself. You will kill your colleagues too.” Always plan ahead.
“Kill,” he repeated. “Myself. My colleagues.”
Still at optimum levels! With the flip of a mental switch, she created suction between their flesh—a suction he couldn’t break without ripping out hunks of his skin. Not that he fought her.
With another mental flip, her power gushed out of her and into him . . . rather than concentrating on his human characteristics, it focused on trace amounts of alien DNA. Well, well. He must have experimented on himself.
His desire for more power would be his downfall.
Her power met his, charging it like a battery. He shook. He seized. Sun-weathered skin turned red, and blood trickled from his eyes and nose, his body unable to contain so much excess so swiftly.
She felt no pity, offered him no mercy. Little Wicked? Yes, oh yes. She was the coldhearted monster he’d trained her to be. She owed him pain.
Suddenly the door opened. No, no, no. The orderlies must have summoned others, those she hadn’t compelled to stay out. Smart. Next time she would have to make sure to cover every base. They surged into the room, pulled at her, hit and kicked her, but they failed to separate her from Dr. Walsh.
“Leave her alone!” Trinity shouted.
“Don’t you dare touch her!” Jade screamed.
The girls fought with all their might to reach her, determined to protect her from further injury. The orderlies turned their aggression on her sisters, striking with fists and steel-toed boots.
“Stop. You will stop.” Argh! No more voodoo. She’d used too much power on Dr. Walsh.
Speaking of, his knees buckled. He tumbled to the floor, taking her with him. Only then did the suction loosen.
One of the orderlies pounced, shoving the syringe into her neck. A sharp sting. A stream of warmth in her veins . . . Darkness shrouded her mind.
As she fought to remain awake, she laughed. “If he lives, he’s going to kill you all. . . .”
Someone punched her in the stomach. Air exploded from her lungs.
—Lilica!— A cry from both her sisters.
She didn’t have the strength to respond.
No matter. Things at IOT would never be the same.
Either Dr. Walsh’s colleagues would kill him, fearing what he would do if he lived, or he would do exactly as she’d commanded. He might be able to resist her voodoo for weeks, months, even years, but one day, he would obey her. The compulsion had taken root; she’d seen it in his eyes.
These orderlies were doomed. One day, she and her sisters would be able to escape. One day, they would finally have a chance to live.
As the darkness beckoned her deeper into the abyss, she smiled.
1
Help me.”
The feminine whisper drifted through the hall. Dallas Gutierrez finished tying his boot and glanced up. No one had entered the small corridor. He straightened. As the sound of muted gunshots and squealing tires rang out, he solved his first case of the day. The TV was on.
Clearly I’m the greatest Alien Investigation and Removal agent ever to live.
But then, Dallas Gutierrez did his job the same way he did everything else, even bragging: with style.
He was certain the one-night stand he’d left sleeping in bed would agree. Not that he would ever ask her. He shuddered. Waking her would defeat the purpose of tiptoeing into the hall to dress.
And yeah, okay, leaving without saying good-bye was a total douche move—even when done with style—but both he and . . . Cori? Cadi? They’d agreed their time together would revolve around pleasure, not permanence.
Dude. I even suck in style.
To be honest, he deserved a participant ribbon for last night’s performance, not a gold medal. Picking a companion for the evening had become a chore, kind of like deciding which STD he preferred. And sex . . . sex had become a duty rather than a desire.
“Help me.”
As the second plea drifted into his awareness, he was forced to reopen the case file. The voice couldn’t have come from the TV. He recognized it.
Shock and fury combined as Dallas reached for the pyre-gun holstered at his side. He inched forward. Maybe he should have invited his date to his place, where he controlled security, but only three people were ever allowed inside: Dallas himself, his friend Devyn, and, when he felt like being tortured, his boss, Mia. No one else ranked high enough on the DG scale of excellence to receive such a—dare he say it—amazing privilege.
Yeah. He dared. Truth was truth.
Footsteps soft, he rounded the corner, and the living room came into view. There were eight pieces of furniture: a floral-print couch, two matching chairs, a side table/serving cart, a coffee table, a TV, and two barstools. The only thing missing? The speaker.
“Help me.”
He stiffened as she crawled around the couch and, strength abandoning her, collapsed on the floor. Long blond hair tangled around an emaciated face, pale skin sagging over a delicate bone structure. Even her eyes sagged; they were bloodshot and framed by open sores rather than lashes.
Trinity, queen of the Schön, would probably scare the boogeyman right now. Not that it mattered.
The beautiful monster—now just a monster—had the power to emit a potent pheromone that lured unsuspecting men into her arms, no matter how ugly she happened to be, addicting the poor bastards to her taste. Those men would then find themselves infected with the Schön disease, faced with a gruesome choice: have sex with others to spread the disease, keeping it from feeding on their own bodies, or rot from the inside out, ultimately succumbing to the desire to eat human flesh.
Yep. The bitch created sex-zombies.
AIR had been on her trail for months, but she’d always managed to evade capture. Then she’d been sucked into a parallel universe by—no joke—Father Time, and Dallas had thought he’d seen the last of her. Three cheers!
But now, here she was, back in his life. Three boos and a hiss.
How had she found him?
To his knowledge, she wasn’t able to teleport to specific people. And why the hell was she here, anyway? To seduce him, infect him, and place him under her command? She’d tried before and failed royally.
As her gaze met his, she stretched a trembling arm in his direction. A sizzle of lust burned through him, disgusted him, and he stumbled backward, increasing the distance between them. At least the lust wasn’t genuine, and he wouldn’t have to scrub his hormones clean with bleach.
“Your pheromones don’t work on me,” he reminded her.
“Help. . . .”
“You say help, but all I hear is please put me out of my misery.” He crouched to withdraw a second gun. The SS—also known as the Schön slayer. A special weapon created exclusively for her and her victims. A single shot may or may not kill her; it was designed to trap the disease inside her, providing time to figure out what to do next.
The Schön disease was a separate alien life-form, according to the researchers at AIR. If the host died and that life-form wasn’t trapped, it would search out a brand-new sparkly host. A.k.a. the person in closest proximity.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he told Trinity. Once, she’d killed nearly an entire contingent of AIR agents. His coworkers. The only family he’d ever really had, and he wanted her to p
ay for it. And pay hard. “I’m enemy number one.”
“Help . . . pleeease. . . .”
Such desperation. How delightful! “Poor Trinity. Did you get yourself into a pickle and now hope to pull my heartstrings to convince me that you’ve—what? Changed? Atoned for your sins?” Too late. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t actually have a heart.” On the streets, he was known as the Heartless Foe.
Resolve and relief swirled in the depths of her ocean blues, even as tears spilled down her cheeks.
His brows knitted together. Why relief?
Did it really matter? Today he stopped her.
He canted his head to tap his ear against his shoulder and turn on the internal cell phone he’d recently had installed.
“Yo,” Mia said a few seconds later, her voice so clear she could have been standing beside him. “This better be important, Agent Gutierrez.”
Mia Snow liked to act as tough as nails, but underneath her bark-that-was-just-as-bad-as-her-bite, she was actually a marshmallow—if the marshmallow was made with poison.
“I’m in the presence of a Schön. The Schön, actually. She’s injured, even docile.”
Her shock crackled over the line. “You’re kidding. If you’re kidding, I’m going to deep-fry your testicles for my afternoon snack.”
“No need to break out the blowtorch.”
“Bless you! Is it contained?”
It. How accurate. “Yes. It is. And I’d like permission to use it as target practice.”
A pause. A heavy sigh. “Denied. Sorry, my friend, but hold your position without firing. Why take risks if we don’t have to? I’m dispatching a unit for pickup. Expect arrival in four minutes, thirty-eight seconds.”
There was no need to rattle off his location. He knew the cell had been tracked the moment it had activated. “You spoil all my fun.”
“I know! Because that’s how I have my fun.”
He disconnected the call with another tap of his ear. While he sheathed the pyre-gun, he kept the other one, the SS, trained on his target. “We’ve got ourselves a good news/bad news situation here. Which do you want to hear first?”
“Help. . . .”
“The good news, then. You’re going to be locked up, probably studied like a lab rat. Bad news is you’re going to live. Wait. Did I fail to mention that the good and bad were meant for me?”
Her relief completely overshadowed her resolve, which made exactly zero sense. “If live . . . they . . . live . . . die . . . they die.”
They. Meaning the people she’d infected? Were the Schön forever tied to their queen, what happened to her happening to all? Well, well. Hello, beautiful loophole. “Why didn’t you say so sooner?” If he could neutralize all her people at once . . .
Screw permission. This woman had already triggered one epidemic, with hundreds of lives lost. Why give her a chance to cause an actual pandemic, with thousands, maybe even millions, of casualties? If Trinity were stopped here and now, the others stopped with her, AIR wouldn’t have to hunt for her victims, the disease spreading all the while.
“Enjoy your taste of karma, Trinity. I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but I never lie.” He squeezed the trigger.
A soft whoosh sounded as a beam of liquefied fire blazed between them. Contact!
Her entire body seized before going lax, smoke wafting from the new hole in her torso, the edges already cauterized. The light in her eyes dulled as she cried in pain.
Unlike his coworkers, he wasn’t burdened by remorse when it came to harming a target. Especially one that posed a threat to innocents.
Harsh? Maybe. He didn’t exactly care.
Harried, panicked, his date rushed around the corner. She trembled as she tied the belt of her robe. “What’s going—what the crap? You shot my couch! You shot my freaking couch!”
“Stay back,” he snapped, wondering what he’d seen in her. Sure, she was everything he’d thought he needed to start enjoying the world of dating again. The supposed ideal standard of modern beauty: a short, curvy blonde with blue eyes. Basically a replica of Trinity, before the disease had ravaged her appearance. But come on. Would a little calm have been amiss? “Return to the bedroom.”
She did the opposite, stopping at his side because he’d outstretched his arm to block her from going farther. “You have two seconds to tell me why you shot my couch, or I’m calling the police. And who were you talking to?”
Who else? “The woman on the floor. And I am the police, honey.”
She scanned the small living room, a frown pulling at the corners of her mouth. “What woman?”
Was she serious? “That—” He pointed, but Trinity’s image wavered . . . disappeared altogether.
She’d been a hallucination?
Cursing, he stomped to the spot where she’d lain. Excuse me, where I thought she’d lain. He swiped his gun through the air, encountered no resistance, and pressed his free hand against the hole he’d blasted in the couch. The fibers were hot but dry. Had the beam gone through a physical body before hitting the furniture, the fibers would have been ice-cold. A safety measure meant to prevent wildfires.
Yep. Trinity had been a hallucination. And not his first this week. Not even his first this month!
He straightened with another curse. What was wrong with him?
“I’ll buy you a new couch,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Damn right you will.” Capri? Cara? She scrubbed a hand down her face. “Look. Why don’t you just go? I’ll call you a cab.”
A few hours ago, this woman had begged him to stick around for a second marathon of bliss—her words, not his. Now she couldn’t wait to get rid of him, all because of a little gunplay.
He’d told himself personality never mattered with a one-night stand. From now on? Personality came first. “Forget the cab. I’ll walk.” Which was exactly what he did—straight out of the apartment.
When he reached the sidewalk outside, he fired up his cell phone. First he canceled the AIR unit. Mia had questions, and threats, but he faked static and hung up on her. Then he phoned his closest friend, Devyn. An alien. An outlaw alien. A royal outlaw alien. The man was king of the Targons, a race with the power to control other races, including humans.
Dallas had been born a human, but after pyre-fire blasted a hole in his chest, nearly killing him, Mia’s husband, Kyrin, had fed him Arcadian blood to save him; he was now considered a hybrid with benefits. He could move faster than any eye could track, heal from nearly any injury in a matter of minutes, and dream visions of the future.
A thought occurred to him. One he’d had before. What if the hallucinations were a new type of waking vision?
The first one had featured a strange woman reclining in his favorite chair—naked—while sipping a glass of his favorite single malt. Though her face had been shrouded by thick, impenetrable shadows, the rest of her had been bathed in light and utterly magnificent.
Her hair had been a glorious waterfall of jet-black silk. Her skin had been dark, flawless, and covered in sweeping, scrolling tattoos that were a few shades darker. Elegant symbols he’d never before seen, the edges seemingly dusted with glitter. Her breasts had been plump, her waist small, and her hips heart-shaped. A perfect hourglass—and a perfect comparison. He’d counted every second in her presence, praying time never ran out.
He’d seen her over and over again. Perhaps the reason he hadn’t been able to purge her from his mind. She haunted him now. The beauty he never would have chosen in a dating lineup but now couldn’t forget . . . and hadn’t stopped craving.
She was the real reason he’d found romance so tedious lately. No other woman compared to her.
“Look how pretty,” she’d said, and a bolt of sizzling lust had struck him. She’d cupped her mouthwatering breasts. “We can pretend. You like to pretend, yes? You are a man, and I am a woman. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The first time he’d experienced the hallucination—possible vision—he’d
shoved his gun in her face and demanded answers. How had she gotten past his security?
The barrel had whisked through her, hitting the back of the chair. A second later, her image had vanished.
“You think you’re hallucinating,” Devyn said in lieu of a greeting, drawing him back to the present. “Or perhaps even having visions of the future.”
The guy always knew everything about everything, and being surprised would have been a waste of Dallas’s valuable time.
“Yes. Exactly.” Sunlight glared over box-shaped buildings made of materials capable of surviving a second human-alien war, if necessary. A myriad of people had opted to walk to work, congesting every direction. Gazes were glued to smartphones or hidden behind smart lenses, lives lived online rather than in person.
Welcome to New Chicago.
“What I don’t know is why,” he added.
“Then get your ass over here,” Devyn said. “We’ll talk.”
“Way ahead of you, king douche. I’m on my way now.”
“If that’s true, why are you ignoring my driver?”
Dallas skidded to a halt and scanned the cars on the road. A black limo was parked at the curb, a human waving at Dallas with one hand and holding open the back door with the other.
Okay. He was officially surprised.
He stalked across the distance and slid inside. Devyn reclined in the seat across from him. The cocky bastard wore a pin-striped suit that fit him so well it could only have been woven by magical sex fairies. Surely the only reason the guy laid more pipe than a plumber. Or rather, he used to lay more pipe than a plumber. Then he’d gotten married.
Sucker!
The door shut. The driver settled up front and a few seconds later, the car motored forward. Devyn offered Dallas a glass of viski. A single malt mixed with some kind of Targon sugar. He accepted with a muttered “Thanks” and drained the contents, the overpowering sweetness appealing to his Arcadian side.
“By the way. Your scowl is harshing my mellow.” Devyn claimed the empty glass and set it aside. “You know I like to start my day with a smile.”
“You like to start your day with the murder of an enemy.”
