“You’re a disgrace,” John Doe says to her.
“Why? How so? Because I’m a bounty hunter?”
“Not at all.” He lifts his nose, his gun now pointed toward her.
A snarl escapes me. I hate it when he has the gun on her.
They ignore me, though.
My finger curls on the trigger. Can I shoot him before he could shoot her?
Too risky. If the gun was pointed at me, I would risk it. Until then…
“You fucked a Kurian,” John Doe says. “You deserve to die just for that.”
“And here I thought it was because of Ali Khan.”
She’s lifting her chin, still baiting him.
“The Kurians—”
“We’ve done a lot for Earth,” I cut in. “Why do you have a problem with me?”
“You don’t understand,” John Doe says.
“We could if you would just talk,” Sophia says.
John Doe says nothing, his lips a thin line.
“Let me guess. You want the world to be in anarchy. You hate the Kurians and the Novans because they’re the reason why all of the countries on Earth banded together to stop having their individual countries and all of us unite under the Global Countries of Earth.”
“Not quite,” he spits out. “You don’t know anything.”
“Then you want to take out Madelaine Downing, is that it? Take over for her, take control of the Earth… Since you hate the Kurians, will you go after them? When they have the means and the weapons to kill us all like they wiped out and obliterated the Grots? Yeah, that’s really smart.”
“You don’t know anything!” he repeats.
The look in his eye. He’s seconds away from pulling the trigger.
“You need to be stopped!” I shout.
John Doe glances at me, but he doesn’t turn his stance, doesn’t point his gun at me.
I fire anyhow.
The bullet strikes him, and then his gun goes off, but my bullet hit him right in his hand. His arm drops, and then he drops, crunching over, hunching into a ball.
The bullet he fired, where did it go?
I don’t know, but Sophia is still standing, and she fires a bullet. This one blooms red on John Doe’s chest, and he falls down.
She glances at me. The blood all over her, I can't tell if there's new there or not, but she rushes over to John Doe, who is lying on his back.
He’s writhing in pain, and she grimaces.
“Tell me your plan, what you set into motion,” she demands.
“Fuck…” Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.
She lifts her hand, her gun trained on his forehead, but he’s already dead.
Sophia meets my gaze. “You’re wounded.”
“You?” I take a step toward her.
She grins and touches her wet shirt. “I’m fine.”
“But the blood…” Another step.
“Fake.”
I reach for her, but then I notice a subtle shift in the air. The wind rustles the grass, but then a twig snaps.
I grab Sophia, pulling her toward me, and I have us crouch down, using the dead man’s car as a shield.
A bullet whizzes above us.
“Who the hell is there?” Sophia calls out. “We’ve already wasted three. We can waste more.”
A man stalks around the car toward us. He has a gun in both hands, and he has a wide smile on his face.
“Hello, Sophia,” he says as if they’re good friends.
“Who the hell are you?” she retorts indignantly.
“You really should do a better job learning about the competition,” he mocks.
“You’re a bounty hunter,” she spits out. A muscle in her jaw jumps. She’s furious, and I don’t blame her.
“What’s wrong with there being competition?” I ask. My side is starting to hurt. That’s where I got hit, and I want to remove my shorts because it’s right by the waistline. It’s rubbing against the entry wound, and I grit my teeth.
Sophia glances at me as she stands. I stand, too, my gaze fixed on the ovian bastard before us. The bounty hunter is tall but not nearly as tall as I am.
The bounty hunter ignores me, focusing on Sophia. “Competition is meant to be eliminated.”
“I don’t understand that,” I gripe. The pain is worse from standing from crouching, but I don’t think my voice gives away my discomfort. “Why not just be the better bounty hunter? That’s the one who should get hired.”
“You would think that there would just be a bulletin board with all the jobs and whoever gets to the mark first wins the gold, right?” The bounty hunter shakes his head. “But, no, that’s not how it goes. Instead, the best jobs all go to princess here.”
“I’m no princess,” Sophia says through gritted teeth.
“No? Damn straight you aren’t. You’re a fucking disease, and you give us all a bad name.”
“How so? And why should I care what you or anyone else thinks? You do your work, and I’ll do mine.”
“There’s a bounty out for you, darling,” he says.
“We killed the guy who put the bounty out on her,” I protest. “Or didn’t you realize that John Doe—”
The bounty hunter snorts. “So what? It’s personal.”
“So personal I know the name of the one who’s going to try to kill me,” Sophia mocks.
The bounty hunter slowly grins. He has decent teeth, a slightly off-white color, and his hair is short, almost to the point of being fuzz. His nose is long and wide, and I never saw a jaw as weak as his before.
“My name isn’t of consequence,” he says. “Just know that you got bested by a better bounty hunter.”
“Did I, though?” Sophia asks.
“You’re about to.”
“Think again.”
He lifts his gun, but Sophia yanks out the car door, slamming the mirror right at crotch level. The man’s gun comes flying out of his hands toward us, and Sophia brings down the back of her gun hard onto the man’s temple.
“There,” she says, handing me her gun. “Stay with him.”
She darts into her house, and then she comes back out with a rope. She expertly ties up his wrists and ankles, and then she starts to drag him toward the house.
“I can do that,” I protest, reaching to recover the bounty hunter’s gun first.
“I’m fine,” she grunts.
Knowing better than to say otherwise, I trail behind her. The dead bodies will have to be dealt with, but there’s one body whose owner isn’t dead.
Yet?
Nah, I guess we can turn him over. Sophia must be thinking the same, or else she would’ve killed him already.
Once the three of us are inside, I help her heave the unconscious bounty hunter onto her couch. She locks the front door, and I grimace, reaching for my side.
“You were shot. Are you all right?” she asks worriedly, her hands reaching toward my wound, but then she hesitates and draws her arms back to dangle by her side.
“I just need the bullet out,” I tell her.
“It didn’t just graze you? It didn’t exit?”
She walks around behind me.
“I thought it just grazed at first, but the pain… It must be in me yet.”
Her face white, she nods, and she grabs my hand and directs me to the bathroom. She has me pull down my shorts some and sit on the toilet lid, and she washes her hands first and then the wound. I hiss from the liquid she pours on next.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Disinfectant. I don’t want it to become infected.”
I grunt. Novans seem to be immune to infections and a whole host of sicknesses that Earthlings get. The jury’s still out on how much of that immunity Novans passed onto Kurians, but as far as I know, my friends who have been living on Earth for some time and should have been exposed to their sicknesses haven’t become sick themselves.
She grabs a tiny vial from a kit from beneath her bathroom sink and inserts a needl
e through the opening to draw up some of the liquid.
“This will make it so you won’t feel me digging around.”
Without waiting, she injects me, and then she waits a few moments before touching near the wound.
“Can you feel that?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Here?” She taps the needle against my skin much closer to the wound.
I shake my head.
“Good.” She goes back to the kit, rummages around, and puts on gloves, muttering about how she should’ve had them on earlier. Then, she removes a pouch that contains tweezers. “Should be sterilized.”
I shrug.
She glances at me, the tweezers an inch from the opening. “You let me know if this hurts too much, and I’ll stop.”
"You gave me stuff, so I'm all numb. I won't—"
“I don’t know if I’ll find the bullet right away, and if I have to dig…”
I shrug again.
She reaches inside with the tweezers, but only a few seconds later, she draws back.
“Can you grab the flashlight and shine it at the wound?” she asks, nodding to the kit.
I do as directed, and she goes back in. She does dig a bit, and right when I’m starting to feel it, she pulls back, this time with the bullet, stained blue, is caught inside the tweezers.
“All done!” she says triumphantly.
“Thank you,” I say.
She covers the wound with a bandage, using tape to keep it in place. It’s soft, almost as soft as her hands, and once she’s done, I grab her hand, placing my other on top to sandwich hers.
“Thank you,” I repeat.
“It was nothing,” she insists.
She pulls her hand free and cleans up everything and puts the kit back where it goes.
“We should call the general and let her know what happened.”
“I suppose,” I grumble.
She eyes me, lifting her eyebrows.
I just force a smile. “You can call.”
“Hmm.” She just shakes her head as she leaves the bathroom.
But I’m grinning. We should celebrate, and she knows it.
18
Sophia
“You’re sure there aren’t any other bounty hunters who are going to show up and try to take me out?” I ask the general.
It’s only twenty minutes after my phone call to her, and I was surprised when she showed up in a centuricmobile with several other soldiers. The soldiers all loaded the bodies onto the car, and two of them are holding up the now-conscious bounty hunter who the general identified as Travis Grey.
“Travis here has always been a thorn in the other bounty hunter’s side, trying to steal jobs away and acting as if he’s the best of the best when he’s passable, if that,” the general remarks.
“You don’t even know who I am, lady.” Travis scowls.
The general just smiles.
“You don’t even know who she is,” I retort.
The general just motions for the soldiers to escort Travis to the centuricmobile.
“What do you think you’ll do with him?” I ask.
"That decision isn't up to me," she remarks. "The other bounty hunters have already been told that John Doe is dead. There's no longer a bounty over your head, and the others should leave you alone. If you want to keep an eye out to be sure, I won't blame you, but you should be in the all clear."
“Good. Thank you for dealing with all of them.”
"It's a part of the job, unfortunately." She wrinkles her nose. "We think we can trace the car back to where it had been last, courtesy of GPS. If we can get to one of John Doe's hiding holes, we might be able to find out what all he hoped to set into motion."
"So you can stop it before it happens because whatever he wanted to happen, I'm guessing shouldn't."
"Exactly. We might be in touch with you for help with this."
“Doesn’t really seem to be a bounty hunter-type job.”
“I think you have skills that can be stretched beyond bounty hunting. Maybe you’ll agree. If not… there will be more bounties eventually, I suppose.”
I nod, and she nods back, to me and to Tox, who has been standing in the doorway, whereas the general and I are on my lawn.
The general gets into the centuricmobile. A soldier climbs into John Doe’s car, and he follows the centuricmobile away.
I turn back to Tox and usher him inside. “You should rest.”
“I’m fine,” he protests.
“I don’t care if you think you are. Don’t be a stubborn ass.”
“You can take care of my ass by rubbing it,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “Not happening.”
“Why not?” he demands without being too forceful.
“You were just shot!”
“I heal faster than humans do.”
“So, what, Kurians are part-vampires?”
“No.”
I blink a few times. “You know what a vampire is off the top of your head, but you didn’t know about Romeo and Juliet?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you know about vampires?”
He crosses over to me, towering above me, and he slowly leans down and kisses my neck. His teeth scrape against the tender skin there, and then he nips and even bites harder.
A moan slips out, and he leans back with a cocky grin on his face.
“Oh, so someone else you had sex with called you a vampire.” I nod a few times.
“Are you jealous?” he asks.
“Do you want me to be?” I counter.
“You first.” He lifts his chin in challenge.
“I’m not.”
“No?” He grins. “Good.”
“You don’t want me to be jealous?”
“No. I think jealous is an act of… What did you call it? Immature love? Like Romeo and Rosaline.”
“Ah. Is that so?” I murmur.
He nods. “Besides…” He trails his fingers down my cheek and then rests his hands on my shoulders. “I would rather think that the others I fucked, but you…”
I suck in a breath, waiting, listening.
“You I made love to.”
“You hardly knew me then,” I protest.
“But I wanted to protect you.”
“You came to kill me.”
“No. I thought about it, but I didn’t want to kill you. I was going to suggest that we fake your death, but then you had to go and be all how can I buy you off? What do you want? And I wanted you, and I had you, and I was distracted. Then, you ran off and made me chase you, and—”
“You found me,” I murmur.
“You were going to Wildwood, weren’t you?”
I nod. “The new Wildwood. The Grots destroyed the original one, but yes. You… You know me.”
“Yes, I do, and I know that you think I should rest, but I can rest later. Right now, what I want to do is celebrate.”
“Fine, we can celebrate, but for that…” I reopen the front door. “Let’s go out and eat.”
“You’re hungry,” he says, his tone flat.
“Starving!” I beam at him.
He looks a little less than pleased, but he'll deal. I'm sure he can go for some food after being shot, and I don't know if it's the poison or what, and the crash of adrenaline may be adding to it, but I am so very hungry that I'm ready to eat myself.
I let Tox pick the place as I drive us around, and we go into a barely lit place. There aren’t any menus, and the waitress just asks a few questions about what flavors we like, if we’re allergic to anything, what we want to drink, and she’s off. She returns with two Long Islands, and I’m all for that even if it means we’ll be walking home and have to come back later to get my car.
The waitress then comes out with some appetizers, tiny sandwiches with glazes and meats and cheese. They’re all divine. My main course is some kind of strange pasta dish with all kinds of things mixed into the pink sauce. It’s exquisite, whatever it is, and the garlic br
ead, although blackened, isn’t burnt at all.
“Aren’t you glad I picked this place?” Tox asks.
“Yes,” I admit.
His dish isn’t like mine at all, various kinds of meat as well as several different versions of potatoes, and he holds out a forkful of meat for me to sample.
For me to enjoy is more like it, I realize as I lean forward and claim the food from his fork. I like it when he feeds me, especially if the meat is this tender and juicy, and I moan.
Tox licks his lips, watching me, and I grin. It’s clear that I’m having an effect on him, and maybe we can see about continuing the celebration back at my place.
By the time we’ve finished most of our plates, the waitress is back. “Will you care for dessert?”
“What is it?” I ask.
She grins. “You do know that’s not how this place works, right?”
I nod and eye Tox. “Do you want dessert?”
“That depends.”
“On?” I lift my eyebrows.
“If I’m only entitled to one dessert.”
“Oh,” the waitress says, “you can have more than one. Usually, people just want to split one, but if you want your own, or if you want two, and—”
“Not the kind of dessert I’m eyeing for the second one,” Tox informs her.
My face has to be beet red, but I’m more flushed from the heat of the promise than from being embarrassed. Maybe he’s helping me to come out of my shell a little bit.
“You can have two,” I tease.
“Great. Then, we’ll split one,” Tox tells the poor waitress, who averts her gaze and rushes away.
“You didn’t have to traumatize the poor girl,” I tell him.
“I wouldn’t have thought that would,” he protests.
“Did you see how young she is? This might be her first job!”
“Juliet was—”
“Juliet isn’t real, and nowadays, people get married in their twenties, sometimes thirties. Just because some people have multiple sexual partners doesn’t mean that all teenagers have sex. Some wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait for love, the one guy for them. There are some who don’t have sex until their wedding night.”
“Is that so? I’m glad that’s not the case with you.”
“Hmm. What if I decide that maybe it should be? That maybe I shouldn’t just sleep with just anyone?” I wait, watching, knowing I’m going to enjoy his reaction to this.
Mesmerized by the Alien Mercenary Page 11
