Mandy M. Roth - Magic Under Fire (Over a Dozen Tales of Urban Fantasy)

by Unknown

  “That’s the arm of a killer.” He embraced her again. “A priest,” he shifted to indicate his right arm, “and a condemned murderer. My maker believed in duality.”

  “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful,” she murmured and continued her exploration. His chest was a mass of scars, but two determinate marks over his heart. “And this, what happened here?”

  “It’s where he gave me another heart.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll never know.” His massive hands circled her wrist, but he didn’t try to stop her. He simply held her and waited patiently.

  With her other hand, she dared down to his waist where he bore another scar, the circled all the way around him. Then another at his hip. She pushed her hand down past the waist on his black fatigues and gripped his cock.

  A low groan was drawn from him. “It’s been so long.”

  “For me, too.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder, and down his collarbone, while she moved her hand over him.

  “You’re so soft,” he said, peeling her bloody lab coat from her shoulders. “So breakable, but not. Strong in the way only soft things can be.”

  His hands on her felt so good, so right. “You promised me fucking against a wall,” she said breathlessly.

  “That I did, Doctor.” He hoisted her up effortlessly, and she wrapped her legs around his hips.

  She regretted not being able to play with his cock anymore, that gave her more power over him than any curse or binding ever had—the power to give pleasure or deny it. But that meant he was going to fuck her, and she knew it would be good.

  He made short work of her slacks, tearing them from her. That was one way to try to keep her from going back to the facility, but she found she didn’t care.

  Adam kissed her again and pushed his length inside of her as he pressed her back into the wall. There was little preamble, but she didn’t want it or need it. She just wanted him—hard and fast.

  As soon as he began to move, that lightning snapped between them and sparked deep inside, almost as if—oh god!

  “Elizabeth!” he growled against her ear. As if that spark was something she’d done, and not him. Or maybe she had, or he’d turned her into this primal thing that could only feel. Could only want.

  Could only gorge herself on need.

  She liked how the cold, craggy cave wall felt against her back, the contrast of the heat of his skin, but it too was like rock. So hard everywhere. She loved touching him, raking her nails across his back because of how much he liked it. It made his hips piston a little faster, a little harder.

  He was so deep inside of her, and she felt impossibly stretched to allow his girth, but she liked that too. She wanted more.

  So she told him. She dug her nails into his flesh, “More, Adam.”

  “More what?” he rasped.

  “Everything.”

  Her demand spurred him on, and he gave her exactly what she wanted—more of everything. He gripped her thighs harder, lifted her higher, and thrust into her again and again. He seemed indefatigable.

  There were definitely benefits to sex with non-mortals.

  She locked her ankles and moved with him, clenching her walls to pull him deeper, hold him longer, almost as if she fought his thrust. Elizabeth could feel his twin hearts beating fast and hard against his chest.

  His muscles were all tensed, even though she knew it cost him zero effort to hold her up. Her orgasm snarled and clawed at the edges of her awareness, but she didn’t want to surrender to the pleasure. She wanted it to last, needed it to. She wasn’t ready to be back in the world.

  The choice was taken from her when suddenly, the wall moved and slid open to reveal a hidden room.

  Before he could say anything, she whispered, “I don’t fucking care.”

  “Me either.” He drilled into her, kissing her hard.

  It was his kiss that pushed her over the ledge to tumble down into the mindless storm of sensation. She was so lost in him it was like drowning, but she didn’t want to be saved.

  His culmination arrived just after hers and he spilled inside of her, with his powerful body spasming against her.

  Elizabeth clung to him even as he softened, her face buried in his neck. She didn’t want to look at the room. Didn’t want to report to Bureau 7 and receive the orders she knew were coming, but didn’t want.

  Right now, consumed by him, the world and possibility was infinite. If she allowed the outside world to intrude, this would become nothing but a memory she was sure would pass to the realm of fevered dreams.

  The idea of ever being parted from him twisted something in her.

  Fucking shit, she’d caught something worse than a zombie infection.

  She’d caught feelings, or obsession, or something for an immortal who had better things to do than drag her through eternity.

  6

  H e didn’t want to look at the room. He didn’t want her in there, at the whims of men who claimed to be apostles of science but cared nothing for the lives they meddled with. He knew voicing that opinion would get him nowhere.

  “Are you going to wait out there?” she asked, after she’d wrapped her lab coat around her, bloodied as it was.

  He knew it would be best for both of them if he did, but the idea of that wall closing between them was unthinkable. Adam tugged his fatigues up and put on his shirt before stepping into the cold, sterile room with her.

  “It looks like there’s a bathroom. All the luxuries. Maybe you want to go in there while I activate the emergency comm?”

  “I don’t give a shit if they see me.”

  “Adam, this is already hard enough.”

  Hard enough because she was embarrassed? He hated that voice in his head because usually it was right. Except not this time. He knew that she simply didn’t want 7 to get their hands on him. Or order her to—she was right. This would put her in a bad and possibly dangerous position.

  “Yeah, okay.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head before locking himself behind the door in a space that he was sure had been designed for human toddlers. The walls touched him on all sides and the ceiling caused him to hunch over. He was pretty sure the edge of the sink was going to ask for a second date.

  “Executive Director Lin,” she began.

  He heard something soft, quiet.

  “My errors?” He heard the pitch rise in Elizabeth’s voice. “No, this situation has nothing to do with any error I made. It has to do with Bureau 7 pushing protocols that were put in place for a reason and—no, let me finish. I just chopped the head of our security team’s head off with an ax. An ax! Those subjects had been injected with another bastardized version of my prions. Without my consent or my permission. That, and X’s sabotage. You should’ve gotten the playback from the transport.”

  Damn it, why did Lin speak so quietly? He hated only catching half of the conversation.

  “Yeah. What? I don’t want to go back in there. Why don’t you have SWAT deployed for that?”

  He didn’t hear anything else for a long time, not until a soft knock on the door, and Elizabeth stood pale and shaking in the doorway.

  “I knew she’d want me to go back. They need the research.”

  “I heard. Why can’t SWAT go in? You know, the people they’ve trained and employ for this kind of thing?” It didn’t make any sense, not unless they hoped to eliminate all the evidence of what had happened here, including Elizabeth.

  “Polidori locked down the satellite comm. A parting gift, I guess. The uplink has to be reset on site and manually sent.”

  “SWAT can’t do that because?”

  “They’re already on the way. Apparently, some of the subjects are trying to walk to the mainland. This thing with X was a coordinated attack. Several other facilities were hit with other things. The installation in Siberia was hit with a carnivorous form of anthrax. Everyone has to do their part. I guess this is mine.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he offered.

 
; She touched his arm. “You’ve already done your part. Now, you’re free.” Elizabeth exhaled heavily. “And I don’t want them to catch you. I think Lin knows that you’re here.”

  He nodded. “With all the tech on the island, I’m sure this place is wired with heat sensors and everything else you’d need to survive an apocalypse. Doesn’t matter though. I’m going with you.” He grinned. “And you can tell me not to all you want, but I’m going anyway.”

  The look on her face was something akin to pain. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. “Hey, it’s okay, Elizabeth. We’ll get through this.”

  “It’s just… you didn’t leave me, Adam. Everyone leaves me, and it sounds so overdramatic to say, but I’d rather you do it now.”

  “As opposed to when?”

  “As opposed to when I’ve come to depend on you.”

  “Yeah, well, I already depend on you. Maybe you’re not sure about what happened between us, but I am. I don’t want to give that up. Do you? And I may be a monster, but I’m not a piece of shit. I wouldn’t leave you here to fight by yourself. No matter if I wanted something more from you or not.”

  “You can’t mean that. It’s just chemistry. Science. People who experience trauma together—”

  “Maybe this will disturb you, Dr. Wollstonecraft, but today was not trauma for me. I killed what needed killing. That’s part of who I am. What I am. This isn’t trauma. It’s a connection.”

  “A spark?” she asked hopefully.

  “It’s a goddamn electrical storm. I’m not letting go of you.” For the first time, he’d gotten something he wanted. Adam hadn’t known how badly he wanted her until she’d been in his arms. He hadn’t reconciled the little girl she was with the woman she’d become.

  He was now her creature in all ways. In giving him his freedom, giving him the choice to serve her. He’d follow her into Hell.

  Or a Bureau 7 facility infested with zombies.

  Whichever came first.

  Adam still couldn’t believe she’d given him his freedom. It had been like dropping one-hundred pounds of chains that had been wrapped around his neck for the whole of his existence. Now, they were gone. His purpose wasn’t to serve; his purpose was whatever he wanted it to be. He’d never felt like his life was a gift, not until this very moment.

  She pulled several pairs of fatigues and boots, t-shirts, and other essentials from a storage bin. “Hey, look at this. You’re right. They were prepared.”

  Elizabeth shrugged the lab coat off and dressed.

  He liked watching her slide those fatigues up her long legs. He liked looking at her body, her face. He even liked watching her tying her boots.

  The idea of her going anywhere near the facility twisted him up. He was afraid for her. He’d never felt that for another creature before.

  “I’ll do it for you,” he blurted. “Just tell me how. You can stay here. Safe. I can do the rest.”

  “You’ll need a staff fingerprint to access it.”

  “I can take it off one of the dead.”

  “Adam, I’m going. I need to go and help set this right.”

  “I knew you were going to say that, but I had to try.” He had this insane urge to tranq her, put her on the boat and haul her back to Trieste and chain her up in the deep, dark, secret places of the castle so no one could ever hurt her.

  So no one could ever take her from him.

  He knew that was completely unreasonable, but it didn’t stop him from feeling it. Adam grabbed the ax and handed it to her. “You’re going to need this.”

  “You know just what a girl wants.” She grinned. “I wonder if there are any more weapons stashed in this place. If I’d been thinking, I’d have grabbed that laser scalpel from the lab.”

  “We’re probably better off with old faithful.” He patted the handle. An ax was pretty much the final solution to most problems.

  “Are you going to make me walk back or can you run?”

  “I’ll go with you. I’ll run to get you away from danger. But toward it? No. That goes against my prime directive.”

  She laughed. “I’m not changing my mind.”

  “I know.”

  “We could possibly sail around to the other side. I thought I saw an emergency raft in one of those bins.”

  “That would be safer,” he agreed. “Did you see rappelling equipment, too? The face of this cliff is sheer. I can jump.” He shrugged. “You, not so much.”

  Elizabeth went to the bins and riffled through them, but found only the emergency raft and a pack of flares.

  “They seem to be big on secret passages.” Adam pressed his hands against the walls. He could jolt them like he had in the lab, but he didn’t want to take the chance it would activate some unwanted failsafe.

  “There are instructions.” Elizabeth held up a booklet. “Apparently, when one is at a loss, one should read the directions.”

  Diagrams within the pages made him think that he’d much rather jump off the side of the cliff. He was right, there was another secret passage, but it was beneath him. A freshwater river that connected the various safehouses with the main facility. The door could only be accessed from inside the safehouse.

  But he didn’t like it. Of course, there wasn’t much about any of this he did like. Just Elizabeth, really. “You don’t think they’ve found their way into the river yet?”

  Elizabeth looked from the raft to him, and back to the raft. He knew what she was going to say.

  “Listen, if we go overland, we’ll be out in the open, but that also means there are more places to run. If we take—” he motioned with disgust “—that thing, we’ll be singularly vulnerable. There won’t be anywhere to run, we’ll be underground. We also don’t know what kind of life has developed in this river. This installation has been here in one incarnation or another for a long time. Do you think this is the first incident to happen here?”

  “The river would empty into sea. Surely…”

  “No, look at the diagram. It’s self-contained. Fed by various creeks and underground pools. There are falls here.” He pointed on the diagram. “The water goes into a pool that eventually wraps around to feed the mouth of the river again.”

  Her eyes brightened. “Now you know I have to go down there. This was not the way to change my mind. When I read about the independent ecosystem in the Movile Cave, a place where animals have no eyes, and they live off carbon dioxide, not oxygen, I almost wanted to become a microbiologist so I could go in the cave.”

  “There are probably leeches the size of my arm.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to take care not to fall in.” She grinned. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He helped her unfold the raft and, when they’d gathered everything they needed, he pulled the tab to activate the self-inflating mechanism.

  The floor dropped out from beneath them and they careened into a sulfuric darkness. The raft didn’t hit the water though. They’d been caught by some sort of lever mechanism that lowered them into the water gently and didn’t disturb the flow. Yeah, leeches. “It stinks like someone’s asshole in here,” he muttered.

  Elizabeth held up the lantern, the soft sallow light illuminating their surroundings. The walls were stone and moist, algae growing up over them just until the cavern ceiling. Something about it the algae couldn’t tolerate and he was grateful for it. There was something about the red-tinged growth that told him it was no regular algae.

  Something dark darted through the small rapids. Several somethings. It was too much to hope for that they were dolphins. As if to display itself, one leapt up and crashed back down into the water on top of another, its tubular mouth of teeth, just like the zombies’, closed over its prey. Others latched on to the one that was bleeding and took it down, thrashing.

  One of them didn’t join the others. No, instead, it turned its eyeless face toward them. It sensed them, even if it couldn’t see them.

  Shit, the blood on her hands. Shit, shit.

  “Elizabeth,
I need you to stay very still.”

  “If I wanted you to catch one of those—”

  “Not a chance.” He was torn between relief that she wasn’t afraid and fear because she wanted to catch one and study it. “It can smell the blood on your hands.”

  She peered over the edge of the raft with the lantern.

  It was promptly smacked from her hand and they were plunged into darkness. Electricity crackled around his fingers and he upped his voltage. He wondered how much it would take to fry the entire river—charge it all with electric current.

  “Stop that,” a strange, silky voice said.

  He’d never known a voice could sound…slimy. It reminded him of the algae somehow. Moist. Slippery.

  Wrong.

  “Hello?” Elizabeth said. “I’m a doctor from Bureau 7 and I’m trying to get back to the main facility.”

  “I know who you are, silly girl. And you didn’t follow the directions, did you? It said to bathe before you came down here. To bind all open wounds with the laser and rinse all blood from your body. It’s not nice to taunt my children.”

  Elizabeth leaned further over the boat, obviously trying to get a better look at the creature talking.

  “And you better not try to catch one, or I’ll tear you apart.”

  Scaled hands gripped the edge of the raft. It would be so easy for her to use her claws on the raft. They were long, and sharp, like knives. She pulled herself up so that she was face to face with Elizabeth.

  She flicked her tail at him, the long scales flickering with her own electric current. She was like some kind of mermaid, electric eel, zombie hybrid.

  But the creatures moved for her as she passed.

  “I’m sorry.” Elizabeth apologized. “May I see one?”

  The creature laughed. “You want me to show you my children? You aren’t afraid?”

  “I find fear is easily allayed with knowledge.”

  “I suppose, then. Put out your hand.”

  No way in hell. Adam put out his hand. “I will hold him first.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Let her wash her hands, first.”

  “My children will not hurt her.” The creature seemed offended.