Oh, gargoyles. Right. This was not the inside of a building, and for them that was a big psychological change.
She leaned up a little. “Mo cleared me being here. Nothing is going to attack without us knowing. We’re safe.”
“If only it was only that,” Vargr began. “Since we’re in the middle of trying to fight off the Ghoul Lords, we figured it worth asking you about how strange you’ve been acting.” He dug his fingers into her sole again.
She groaned. “You’re distracting me.”
“Good.” He grinned.
Rutger was playing the silent card again. Though she needed time to decide what to say and what not to say.
Could she even lie to them? “You? Why are you worried? Same reason?”
“Hmmm. I used to go camping back before I had nanites. Even so, the Outside does make me nervous. And I can see you aren’t answering my question.” Rutger’s smile was strained.
“Ooo. I have leverage. My big strong man-friends are nervous of the sky.”
“Of the sky falling, of the moon dropping tinsel, of Ghoul Lords materializing. Of many things, Cyn.” Rutger sighed. “Stop throwing this back at us. What is the problem? Is it the nanites?”
Fuck. Okay then.
“I think so. Just the demon nanites, that trivial thing.” She turned onto her side with her feet on Vargr’s lap. “I worry over how demon I will become, but then again, who wouldn’t do that?”
“True.” Vargr stopped massaging. “What can we do to help?”
At least they hadn’t dug out the crux of her worry—whether to deliberately make herself go full demon. To stop fucking them and let it happen. To try out Maura’s theory. What would they do and say if she told them that?”
“Maura verified our nanites mix in with yours when we fuck…” he mused.
“Yes.”
“So…” Rutger raised a finger. “We should do it more?”
Only males would find that the answer. It was unlikely to delay the changes she had happening. After all, it hadn’t yet stopped her nanites from reproducing.
Vargr raised his head. “I vote that the best answer.” He waggled her big toe then drew his fingernail down the middle of that foot, making her hiss and squirm.
Bastard. She couldn’t help grinning. Something had altered in him too. He was less… wild. His demon nanites were lessening, Maura had said—that would be it. They’d made him deliciously aggressive. A pity, even if she was thinking of abstaining from sex.
And how did she accomplish that? Her reasons would probably make them more determined to do the opposite.
“I’m feeling distant from people,” she reflected quietly, but loud enough to be heard over Mo’s sounds… over the rising wind and the chirping of bugs that had made Mo’s forward hull their temporary home. The Outside was noisy. “The more the nanites rise in me, the less emotional I get. Except for anger. I guess.”
A terrible anger.
At that thought and word, she felt that fiery anger rise, remembering and yet simultaneously projecting into the future.
To meet her teeth in the flesh of her enemies, to grind them to ashes under the tread of her feet, to bathe in their warm blood and sear them until they were blackened meat.
Cyn blinked. Ooo, fun future there. Rein it in, evil demon brain. She swallowed.
“Some of the time I feel very alone. I’m not sure where this is going or how we will win, even though we must.”
There. She’d said too much and too little, and she blinked at them.
They really could not help her, not really, not ever. There was something coming that was hers to do and no one else’s.
After a few long seconds, Rutger bent forward and curved his hand down the side of her face, trailed his fingers over her mouth. Then he kissed her softly. “You aren’t alone. We will get through this together.” He straightened a little, still partly bent over, eyeing her. “Are you planning to be up here until we find the drone?”
The feel of his lips on hers still frissoned from where he’d touched her there, and his scent roiled through her, reaching down, between her legs. Her lips remained parted as she thought this through and tried to tamp down her natural reactions.
“Yes.” She ran her tongue over the seam of her lips, as if to taste him. “Would that bother you? I’d prefer you to stay.”
He sat back.
Vargr spoke. “We can always fuck her here. She needs fucking.”
“Yes, she does.” The way he smiled, the way the two of them batted about her fate, her fucking fate, it was quite arousing she discovered.
She couldn’t, though. Abstinence, remember?
“Fucking is not the answer to all my woes.”
“Your woes will feel lesser, surely, if we take you. I’d prefer below in the bedroom, but there is no one to see us here, apart from the zebras.”
Those problems might feel lesser, temporarily, for she knew how sex let her blot out the world, but they would not be lesser.
“Zebras?” She raised her head and tried to sit up, only to find Vargr had trapped her feet.
“Rutger, remember the slave comment?”
“I do. We need to teach our own slave some lessons.”
“Drone.” She growled at them. “Priorities. There are more things than sex in this current dark world of ours.”
“There are?”
Oh fuck. How was she going to avoid fucking when they thought it was the answer to all her problems?
Vargr slid his hand up her leg, then dragged her along the seat closer to him, until her ass was against his body. “Off with the clothes, slave.”
Oh. My. Giving in seemed the best current option. Especially when Rutger stood and grappled a large amount of her hair into his fist, then pinned her to the red seat with it.
She could have given in. She loved this sort of fight over her body but… no.
“Not this time. No.” She set her mouth, stared from one to the other. “Not this time.”
It took them a while to wind down and accept her seriousness, but they did.
After Rutger released her hair and sat back again, she slowly removed her feet from Vargr’s grasp and drew herself into a sitting position. Her heart returned to normal speed.
“I have my reasons.”
Well, she’d said no to them despite the thumping pulse of need below, and in her chest, and everywhere. This was going to be difficult. Especially with Vargr eyeing her as if she were his next snack.
“Later then.” Rutger raised his voice, “Mo! Open the hatch so we can get at the champagne.”
“As you wish.” Mo’s voice came from several directions.
“I’m not a princess, Mo. Have you been watching old movies?” The hatch snapped upward a few inches and he reached over to pull it fully open.
“It passes the time while I scan for enemies and the drone. I’ve pinpointed the drone more precisely but that is all.”
“Good. I’ll be back soon. Champagne, snacks, any other requests?”
Neither she nor Vargr had any, and Rutger slipped below.
Mo piped up, “Please take care not to consume excessive alcohol. It would seem unwise in the circumstances. You might fall off my roof or fail to notice a warning.”
“Sure.” Though she was certain from experimenting that alcohol no longer affected the beasters the same way it did humans. “We’ll drink slow. Just it seems a good time to celebrate where we are now, before we take the next big step.”
Vargr nodded. “It does, and you know what? I’m getting less antsy about being up here.”
Funny, but she felt safer here on the roof, beyond the scrapers, past the rubble of missile strikes, in this place where only the wildlife ruled. Safer than she had for ages.
When Rutger handed up the two bottles and a bag full of goodies, she decided it best to distract them and her. Besides, she was curious.
The wine was poured into goblets and they raised them and drank after making several ridicu
lous as well as a few serious vows.
She cupped her glass and bowed her head over it. “Tell me… tell me about who you once were.” She looked from one to the other. “I only heard a little that day at Parklands and I’d love to know who you used to be.”
The champagne was drunk slowly, and when it affected none of them much at all, more was had, then a few other bottles were discovered. The drone would not be reached until they’d travelled through a single period of daylight and entered night again, and they were preparing to descend into Mo when an island of three, thin, linked scrapers appeared to the right, against the paling sky.
“We need to get out of the dawn light,” Vargr pointed out, but even he was peering at the distant buildings.
Rutger tossed the last bottle into the sky and it arced across toward the horizon.
“What are those, Mo?” She half expected him to not hear, she was that quiet.
“That is Maelstrom Towers, owned by Dr. Nietz. His main residence is, or was, there.”
“Oh.” The possibilities that arose swamped her for a moment. “Then we shall visit there on our way back, if it won’t cut into our time too much?”
She prayed it would not. She had yet another need to know. There might be photos.
“I will need some hours to perform maintenance, so that is acceptable.”
Was that a tone of smugness in Mo’s words? Did the bot wish her to go there?
Maelstrom. The doctor had named the scraper complex after his secret company—hid it in plain sight. She touched the back of her neck where the tattoo lay.
Perhaps the man had possessed a keen sense of humor? Why else would he name his creations beasters, all the while knowing what they were truly descended from—myths and legends.
Chapter 12
Cyn woke to hear Mo making an announcement. She untangled herself from her mates, slipped from the bed. For once she’d worn clothes, all of them, to bed, in an attempt to avoid sex.
It was hard to achieve that outcome. Since both of them were hard. Oh the jokes she could make. She nervously eyed them where they lay, stirring. It wasn’t that she couldn’t say no, or insist if they persisted, but the outcome of that was growing more tedious, more painful. Neither male had been happy when they went to bed merely to sleep, but they had eventually accepted her demure refusals—okay make that her growling refusals.
She stripped, tugged on new underwear and leggings, then pulled a black tunic with red piping over her head. She adjusted the burgundy-colored leggings and strapped on her gun belt as she strolled out the door toward the cockpit. By then both Rutger and Vargr were grabbing clothes and dressing, and she ignored their entreaties to stop and do naughty things. Maybe she should sleep elsewhere? And what if Maura was wrong and she found herself more vulnerable to the Lure?
Could she tell if that was happening way out there? Once upon a time, in the days following the invasion, the Lure had reached everywhere. Perhaps it still did. She should have checked for the signs, yet she had always possessed greater resistance than any humans ever did, even in the hours of the day.
Decisions, decisions. “To fuck or not to fuck. That is the question,” she murmured to herself, amused.
Along the way, she slipped past Kiko, who was working on some piece of equipment, and sidled by the larger and rockier Vincent, who waved and smiled. His scarlet-and-white kimono draped to the floor. He was already eating the first meal of the night at the smallest table while making the chair under him groan. Brupper or brinner, he was eating, and it made her stomach rumble unhappily.
On reaching the driver’s seat, she did a slick, one-handed jump over the back of it and nailed the landing. The metal nose shield was raised again, and she could see out through the glass. It had been shut for the duration of the sunlight hours.
“What is it, Mo? Report.”
“Found it. Nyah nyah. Sleepy heads.”
It? Oh, of course. “The drone?” She glared out the windshield, as if that was where Mo resided.
“Yes. Ta dah!” He shifted course and ground to a stop. She heard the whine of wheels and legs cease, and dust spilled upward, obscuring the glass for a second or two.
There it was. Their goal. A dented, dusty, rusty metal thing with rotors and wings, and twice the size of the steering wheel she leaned over.
“You need us to go out and fetch it? Or do you have, like, grappling arms?”
“I do. But you’re easier to handle. Fetch.”
Boot-steps told her that V and Rutger had caught up and Rutger seated himself in the co-driver spot as she replied to Mo. “My god, you’re getting more smartass daily.”
“Thank you.”
“He is. I assume we have no predatory animals nearby? Lions?” Rutger asked.
“Negative. I always have movement sensors and radar active as well as heat sensors.”
“Huh. So that’s our drone?” He peered out at the object lying between two green-gray shrubs. The ground hereabouts was dry and red-brown. The trees were twisted and looked as if they had bit parts in a horror movie.
“Yup.” At the back of her head, she gathered and tied her hair into a ponytail. “Who’s coming to get it?”
They both answered her with, “Me.”
Retrieving it proved simple and fast. Mo maneuvered until the door was opposite where the drone lay. They opened the door, snagged the drone, and carried it back inside. At most this had taken fifteen to twenty seconds.
“Kiko?” Beckoning him with gloved fist, Rutger carried the drone one-handed and through into the second room where Kiko could examine it. He deposited it with a small clank onto the table, dropping dirt in a rough circle onto the surface. Dragging up a chair, Kiko brought his face close then placed his hand on the top surface between the back pair of rotors. The stripes and wriggly lines on his arms trickled brighter in veins of alien blue. He closed his eyes.
Everyone else, Vincent, her, Rutger and Vargr sat or leaned on some part of the interior of this smallish laboratory tech room, and they waited.
Though the drone looked dead as dead could be, after a few minutes one small square light lit up, in a row of four on the curved top. Kiko raised his head.
“This thing is damaged, but I think I fixed everything we need to read and download whatever it recorded at the Top reconnaissance. Mo, where can we plug it in. There’s a port undern—”
“The wall plug near your elbow will do for this, if you use the cord in the drawer at your hip…”
Mo directed Kiko on how to connect the drone. Once it was plugged into Mo’s outlet, Kiko sat up and ran his hand through his red, wavy hair, then waited with hands clasped in his lap. A square screen that hung from the ceiling, one not much bigger than the drone, flickered to life.
The film at first only showed the façade of the War Quarter scraper sliding past as the drone rose then it panned into sky, then downward. For a few seconds it swept across the Top, showing the edge where five, armed ghoul guards were looking up at it and beyond them a few people seemed to be scraping soil around plants, then the drone fell abruptly and the footage ceased.
“That’s when the skinsuits hit us,” Vargr pointed out.
“Where are the people?” Kiko asked, incredulous.
“Out of the shot. This is pretty useless.” She sucked on her cheek. If this was all it had filmed, they’d come all this way to find nothing.
There was a scrape and crunch as Vincent shifted his butt on another stool. “That will not convince the War Quarter leader, Drummer. This was night. Perhaps attacking them at night is not wiser?”
“It would be, if the skinsuits didn’t exist.” That was Rutger. “Daytime would have been worse. It would’ve made it impossible for the drone to be controlled.”
“When we go up there ourselves,” Cyn added, unsmiling, “We will go at night. The advantage for us is still too great. Daytime hurts us, maybe kills us. Or most of us I should say.” Not her.
“Huh,” someone grunted.
> She was too busy thinking to see who that’d been. “Drummer, now that I think this through, will not agree to help unless we can prove Lure Resistance.” She looked around at them. “Recovering the drone may have other uses, but the footage would never have convinced him anyway. We have to go up. We have to try out something new.”
“My thoughts too.” Rutger nodded, though as grim of face as she surely was. “And I think Maura has ideas on that—on how to improve our Lure Resistance. Some she deduced from the notes Willow wrote.”
“We have to go up?” Vargr eyed her dubiously. “Remember we are three.”
Cyn gave a small hm and a nod. If all else failed, she certainly had her own idea. Go full demon.
Though he was correct, she couldn’t do this alone. But what if gargoyles could never gain enough resistance? Who else would qualify? The logic following from that made her uncomfortable. Forcing anyone else to take on demon nanites would seem… sacrilegious in a funny, not haha, sort of way.
“I’m rerouting to return to War Quarter.” The vehicle lurched as Mo began to turn. “And stopping halfway at Maelstrom Towers for repairs and system checks. I suggest you all sleep… though knowing some of you, the activities may prove more rigorous than sleep.”
Cyn cocked an eyebrow and sniggered. “Was that a dirty joke, Mo?”
“Never, Miss Cyn. Though if you could use the apartments at the Towers, it would indeed lessen the… dirt inside my own rooms.”
Great, so now they had a filthy-minded centipede vehicle, and Mo had likely reminded Rutger and Vargr of what was missing lately: sex.
She must stay strong and resist them, for the sake of mankind.
She felt one of them move in behind her, his body pressing at hers, his large hand caressing her neck, his wings casting shadows on the walls before her. Vargr. She nibbled her lip.
“Don’t be getting ideas, V.”
“Too late.” He brushed aside her hair and bit her neck then his other hand curved beneath her breast and squeezed there, gently, while he still bit and licked at her.
“Fuck,” she croaked. Every bit of her anatomy that could get naughty had just melted. She was going to need a change of panties.
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