He stepped up to rub his hand over Toother’s ear. The critter was happy again. Third owner lucky, hopefully.
“How is the schedule going, Maura?” Rutger asked.
“Well.” She had to catch her breath. “Damn. Riding takes it out of you. Comms are working with the leapfrog messaging around the globe. Everyone we could get to reply has the attack day down, adjusted for time zones so it’s nightfall where they are. All the drone drops are verified, except the last couple. Our drone may have gone down way up near the North Pole, but I think we have enough quarters invested in this.”
Enough to save the human species, if they could defeat the GLs.
“So the nanites are getting grown?” Vargr dug in a pocket for the packet of dog chews he kept for Toother, took it out and unwrapped a piece. “’Cause that sounded fucking complicated to me.”
“Yes. There are other fae of course, other medical techs and doctors. Enough who have the right skills.” The blue in her eyes intensified. “That’s the key. The instructions should be clear enough, but I was never sure if anyone else would succeed. We have a go, Houston. The GL want to launch queens? We are going to stop them.”
She leaned over Toother and hugged his neck.
“I’m not sure I want to take him to the Top though.” A frown line embedded between her eyebrows. “I’d hate to get him killed.”
“Mmm.” Rutger reached and took her hand. “We can’t tell you this one.”
“I know.” She sighed.
“A change of subject. V wants to go hunt down Cyn. Would you like to repeat your advice?”
Vargr threw him a scowl.
“Vargr.” She tilted her head and looked sad. “This is a bit late. She’s been gone weeks.”
“I know, Just… fuck.” He wandered over to a stool beside a tank, where someone had been messing with a cannon. A sheet on the ground was littered with bastardium-etched bullets—twitchy blue showed in a spiral on the casings.
He laid his rifle against the tread of the tank then bowed his head, peered up at them both. “Your demon theory is still just a theory. And what if something eats her out there?”
Neither answered him. Okay, so that was improbable. Nanodogs seemed to stick to the ground levels and Ghoul Lords weren’t likely.
“Fuck,” he muttered again. “It was worth a try.”
Rutger came over and squatted beside him. “It hurts me too, and do you think she’s doing this just to hurt us? No.”
“You know I don’t think that.”
Maura dismounted and came closer, with Toother silently following. Sneaky thing was so quiet on those fluffy feet. After riding, her hair was always crazy, and this time her locks looked alive—all pure white, azure blue, and wriggly.
Fae, his brain reminded him. Sometimes their strange origins felt more magic than science. Doctor Nietz had been a true nutter. “What? Don’t fucking lecture me.”
“Vargr,” she began, all schoolmarm in tone. “It was her choice, and I guess she should’ve asked you. But I guess she also knew you’d have said no. We need this, we do. The last raid you four did had its problems, and dosing her higher with demon had reached its peak. This, Cyn going full demon, may be what lets us win. In all the world, only we have someone with demon nanites.”
“That was a lecture.” He sighed. “Yeah. I get it. Still hate it.”
“Stop worrying. When it happens, if we win, I do have an answer to the worst that might happen to her. If we don’t win, we’re screwed anyway.”
She did? He tweaked an eyebrow. “Going to say what it is?”
“No. I have a few secrets that are best kept as that until I need to use them.”
“But what is that worst scenario?”
Maura pursed her lips. “Cyn, irretrievably evil. That do?”
Crap. He stood, retrieved the rifle. “I hate you all. It’s not personal exactly, but I need someone to hate right now, and can’t bear to hate her.”
Rutger chuckled and slapped his back. “Awww, shucks. I forgive you, man. Let’s go help someone paint pretty pink paw-prints on a tank. Besides, if we’re hurting, you know she is too. Right?”
“Hurting? I haven’t been able to come for two weeks.”
“Ahhh, that. Me too. I may explode my balls soon.”
“Your turn to stop talking balls.”
Rutger eyed him. “Balls. Balls, balls, balls. And my final one—balls.”
“Jesus. H.”
“He won’t help you.”
True.
Rutger sighed, waggled his eyebrows, then grabbed him in a brotherly embrace. Between Rutger’s horns and his raised wings, they entered an enclosed, private space of deeper shadow. He grabbed Rutger too, listened to the cracks of the beaster’s skin and maybe his ribs, before they released each other. He smiled weakly. It had helped.
“We’ll get through this.”
He nodded. “Yeah. We will.”
“She’ll be back. We’ll see her the day we go to war, and once we’ve fucked over the assholes above, it’ll be back to normal for us. Whatever that turns out to be.”
If anything the silly exchange about balls and the hug only cemented how badly this was affecting him, because Rutger was a part of their threesome.
Before Cyn came along, he’d been alone, and he’d been mourning the loss of his sister, even if he’d never admitted that. The three of them were apart now, and all he’d been able to think of for a large chunk of these last few days, was of how it’d felt to hold her, to be there curled around each other. It wasn’t just about the fucking anymore to him, it definitely wasn’t that with Rutger, but it was love—for him and for her. He wasn’t sure how he’d live if something happened to either of them.
* * * * *
Cyn crept to the edge of the balcony overlooking the atrium to the formerly elegant restaurant and took the shot. Flame lanced from her out-thrust hand and sped across the open space to where a rat scuttled across the floor a story below.
Bullseye.
The rat turned into a charred smoking lump, and she extinguished her hand. Target practice was almost unnecessary anyway. From what she’d seen above, the Ghoul Lords and their guards were one huge target. There might be some collateral damage if humans were too close.
It was something she had to remind herself was bad.
Fresh cooked rat would be a relief after the mountain of canned food she’d consumed over the past weeks.
“Want some rat, Mo?” she asked as she skipped down the spiral staircase to retrieve her food.
“No, thank you, miss.”
The benefits of having a metal bot sidekick—she never had to feed him, just stick him in the sun every few days.
The apartment she’d been using as her base since she stopped moving about, was only fifteen stories below the Top, and she had sneaked higher too. The Lure signs were there most days but had ceased to affect her in any way. Maura was right. Going full demon had benefits.
“Hi guys.” Three cats ran after her as she walked toward her open front door. The door was black, glossy, and sported a gold handle in the shape of a curled tentacle. Every handle in the place was similarly themed. Love at first sight. The day she found it, she’d decided this place was meant for her.
Inside was as crazy. The giant living room had a spa, currently empty, and a light in the shape of a yard-wide octopus. The carpet was a big orange octopus. If she’d had a fear of tentacles before, which she hadn’t, this would either have cured it or turned her into a gibbering thing shivering in a corner.
The three cats meowed and eyed the scorched rat she dangled from her hand by its tail. She eyed them back.
“Oh hell. Here.” She tossed it back out the door and watched them dive on it and proceed to eat it, then try to run away with it, while all of them were growling at the others.
“There. Proof I’m still good, Mo.”
The bot made whirring sounds, and that was a giveaway as it generally ran silent.
“What? That’s c
harity to sweet innocent animals.”
“I am not an expert, Miss Cyn, but I asked Big Mo to check if their color is a problem. He said maybe.”
“Black is a problem?” She tipped her head. “Sure all three are black, but—”
“Traditionally witches, demons, and evil are associated with black.”
“Pfft. I’m equal opportunity. Probably all from the same litter. Black is sexy and badass. Also, we do live in the dark, ya know? Oh! Forgot a good one. The Ghoul fuckin’ Lords are white. So pfft again.” She snagged a bottle of whisky off the kitchen bench and unscrewed it, chugged half the damn bottle. “Lucky liquor is free now.”
She had to drink gallons of the fucking stuff just to get tipsy.
“Miss Cyn, you asked me to watch over you, and I am trying. For a bot telling a good soul from a bad one is supremely difficult.”
She threw herself into the bright red armchair with the white tentacles all over it. The timber feet screeched and shifted backward. “And so?” She poked a finger at him as he scrambled onto the fat armrest. “Admit it. No lies. I know you’ve been getting help from Big Mo.”
“I said I did. This is not a new fact.”
Teasing the bot was not a whole lot of fun. Not like target practice used to be. She fetched the half-drunk bottle of Moet from the other side of her armchair. It’d been there a few hours and was dead warm, as always. Refrigeration in the time of the Armageddon-ish Apocalypse was terribly lacking.
“Target practice,” she muttered, swigging, plopping her leg over the arm Mo was on, making him dodge backward.
Morosely, feeling oddly wrong, she curled her mouth and studied the opposite lounge that used to match the red fabric she sat on. Now it was mostly black and tattered due to her nuking it with flame over and over.
Her excuse? It took a while to get accurate with this fire thing she’d acquired.
One thing she had remembered was that she wasn’t supposed to kill too many humans when this war started. Mo often reminded her of that, which was why the remembering.
And so, in the interests of being good and being accurate, she’d put the stuffed octopuses the previous owner had collected on the opposite lounge and lined them up. They represented the Ghoul Lords.
In between them were the various corpses she’d found in the hallways, and one from the bathroom in here, trapped there by the Lure and a shut door, and stupidity—no doubt trying to march through a wall from the fractured finger stubs on the dried-up dead blonde girl.
Anyway, the humans she had tried not to flame.
It had helped. Though they were pretty black now.
She counted left to right. “Octopus. Girl. Octopus. Boy. Octopus… Black thing. Damn, can’t recall what that one was.” She chugged down the rest of the champagne, wiped her mouth and let her head fall back onto the upholstery as the empty bottle slipped from her fingers to the rug.
Her wet tongue ran over her lips and she shut her eyes. The alcohol was working on her, finally.
“Was I bad, Mo? Doing that?” This time her extended finger poked toward the dead.
“Probably. Yes. Though I appreciate your striving for accuracy.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes, I agree. Fuck. I have a relayed call coming through, Miss Cyn, from Rutger and Vargr.”
“Oh. I see. What is the message?”
“I quote: Are you ready? Do you think you’re Lure resistant enough? Love R and V.”
The message was not audio of course, just words relayed through Big Mo to Little Mo.
“Tell them yes,” she murmured. “I’m ready.” Then she ran her fingers over her face, feeling all the dents and crevasses and smoothness, then down to her neck where she found the black collar Vargr had placed on her eons ago.
She tore it off, ripping through the leather and metal, and slid it off her neck, tossed it aside.
“Very ready.”
Chapter 19
The Night of War and Reckoning.
The glassless window whose frame she stood upon faced onto the chasm between War Quarter and the next quarter. Her boots rocked to and fro on the edge.
The open space before her was five stories below the Top, and it would be miles of free-fall to the bottom. A pigeon pottered about on this same window opening, cocking its head as if suspicious of her intent.
She didn’t blame it—she had eaten a few of its friends. Pigeon roasted in garlic and olive oil was good… or pigeon fried by demon flame.
Cyn raised her arms. Her boots brushed dirt outward and the flecks were blown away by a gust. She flexed her knees and launched herself into the air, falling for a few seconds before her wings flamed and roared into being. They fried the air, blistering the paint on a GUN HEAVEN sign her left wing-tip brushed. Her wings were larger, brighter, and hotter than ever before.
The very air burned as she swept upward, electrons and molecules sizzling.
She spiraled, aiming to arrive a few seconds before the others. The others meaning absolutely everyone else from War Quarter who intended to attack the Ghoul Lords.
Her muscles shone. Her skintight black leather pants and the slashed red-and-black T-shirt with the Cute but Psycho slogan seemed the right degree of anarchy and violence. Her hair was a conflicting mess of sublime darkness and flickering red. Her eyes dripped fire motes as did her currently unlit hands, and she’d been so long without sex the nearest corpses had been tempting her, lately, and those were fucking ugly.
She sure hoped she had the right date. Although Mo had confirmed it, appointments always made her nervous.
Then she saw them coming. Below was getting populated.
The wing soldiers arrowed into the space beneath her, their blue-gray-black wings spreading and flapping. One of those might be Vargr. Others, horned-and-spiked foot soldiers, were climbing the façade. From the internal rumble of War Quarter corridors the armored vehicles, the tanks, and likely Big Mo, were driving up using the roadways.
She’d left Little Mo behind, deliberately. He was too small and puny to in any way influence the outcome of this battle, and someone might shoot him. This way his memory could be back-up for Big Mo anyway. That was her best excuse—she’d become attached to the mech critter that didn’t quite understand the human soul.
Souls were conundrums. If you didn’t have one you never much cared to own one.
As planned, she rose above the concrete of the quarter to within eye level of the ghoul guard, the scuttling stinkers with their knifelike legs, and the Ghoul Lords before any other beaster or vehicle arrived.
She smiled at them as they focused on her and turned, their arms and tentacles moving.
Her newly minted demon powers were going to get a work-out tonight, and who knew when they’d run dry? So she unslung the rifle from her back and aimed at the sprinting, ambling, slithering line coming her way.
Then she squeezed the trigger.
Her gun poured out the rounds, casually blatting away whatever ran into the torrent.
This was a sizzle gun, picked up from the cache Maura had revealed to her through Big Mo and Little Mo. It was loaded with bastardium-tipped flechette rounds. Sharp, minute, and light, they gave the magazine a nearly endless capacity. The Warriors had killed some stinkers to test these, and a few rats to see what they did to flesh.
What the blue, powdered bastardium did to Ghoul Lords, that no one knew.
Grinning, Cyn found that out in the first few seconds. A line of flechettes zipped across three Ghoul Lords and tore them to shreds.
A tide of the Lure swamped her and fizzled, burning up and burning out in a large visible sphere of influence that she gradually pushed outward—she could see the boundary where her abilities frothed it into nothingness. Still flying, hovering as the rest of the beast horde arrived, she kept firing but in smaller bursts, because this was slaughter.
The beasters fired, and whatever they hit, died. Not all of them held bastardium-loaded weapons, but normal bullets and bolts worked fine
and dandy, they just took longer to kill.
The air was stitched with blue and red, with screams and cries, with bellows as the mighty Ghoul Lords collapsed into lifeless heaps of twitching blubber. Some of them spilled human brains from their jelly—a macabre reminder of what these creatures did to people.
She rose higher, flying above the battle and saw beyond the charging, slithering mass to where humans affected by the Lure stood, dumbly waiting. Some had been tending fields, a few were bloody and recently chewed on. There were also the blood-stained piles of bones she remembered.
Beyond the humans, more Ghoul Lords and their guards rushed closer, and past them were the queen mounds. Those were at least two stories high. Disdainful of the threat, she gained more height until the people below were dots, then dove at the nearest queen mound and emptied the rest of her bastardium magazine into it. The thing exploded into a creamy splatter that swept a small flood over the Top then settled lower into a vast puddle. A few chunks bobbed within.
Before the fire of the guards beneath her grew too accurate, she returned to fly above where the beaster army advanced.
Without the Lure this was a massacre. Without the Lure, the Ghoul Lords were bags of vulnerable meat.
The right flank was temporarily in trouble for a concentration of Ghoul Lords had overcome the beaster resistance. Swiftly she zipped across, losing height and slinging her empty rifle at her back.
Time to try some demon on these guys—her hands rained flame onto a cluster of the GLs, turning them into smoking lumps that slowly bubbled lower as she did circuits in the air above. Wherever the beasters had trouble she flew there and helped. It made her feel like a superhero on steroids—hosing fire on alien monsters was a job she could be down with, like, forever.
Already half the visible host of the enemy were deceased, and more were being flattened and made into fleshy sieves, when the armored column finally arrived a quarter of a mile away—a geyser of debris blew upward as they popped up through a sealed roadway entrance.
She spotted a horned beaster standing with legs spread on top of Big Mo, then a winged soldier helping him, firing where he fired, taking down the threats.
BEAST HORDE TRILOGY BOXSET: MFM SciFi Romance Page 50
