I try to rise, but my exhausted state betrays me. A bottle rolls away from my clumsy foot as I try to place it. The clinking of it sounds like the toll of a bell against the curb.
Gabriel comes to stand by my side. Sidekick or sentry? I peruse the lean length of his leg as I freeze. The tactical uniform worn by soldiers of the First Wave had been custom fitted and molded to their skin. A leather-like body armor, it had been useless against an enemy that didn’t use projectile weapons. The SoulEater had taken them down and taken them in. It had created Shadows and Sweepers and who knew what other abominations.
We wait. What will the other Shadows do?
The one beside me had been a fine specimen of soldier when he’d been alive. It soothes me even though it hadn’t saved him.
But then, not so much.
They are coming.
The sound of hundreds of heads turning our way is like a wave of whispers washing over me. I rise to my feet, swaying. My hand goes to the weapon at my belt. There isn’t enough charge. No way is there enough. The shifting darkness around us begins to coalesce into forms and shapes with deadly substance. Coming closer. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. More.
Just as I raise my disruptor to fire for the hell of it and with no hope of taking out more than a few before we are overwhelmed, Gabriel’s angelic wings embrace me in a feathery cocoon. A staticky charge ripples and reaches to the heart of me. My nerve endings hum with it. In protest or pleasure? Borderline. Being touched by a Shadow from the top of my head to my feet definitely walks the line between pleasure and pain.
“Shhhhhhhh,” Gabriel says.
Trapped in those magnificent wings, I’m as frightened of their protection as I am of the approaching horde. Because I want to hush. I want to accept his cool embrace and the way it makes me feel—saved, seduced, secondary.
For once, I don’t have to fight. They are out there, eddying around us like leaves in a stream, but I’m hidden. Enclosed in Gabriel’s shadowy substance, I’ve disappeared to the others. I hide within the very thing I fear the most.
His wings wind tighter. They pull me closer—he pulls me closer. My cheek presses to his solid chest. His scent is ozone-kissed. It envelopes me in an atmosphere not unlike an approaching storm, surprisingly pleasant. And then I feel it. The thud of a heartbeat against my face.
How can a Shadow have a heartbeat?
Like the swinging girl, it must be only an echo, a memory, a glitch.
As I stand there, Shadows all around, the pace of his phantom heartbeat increases.
I want to pull away.
This is too close to his mystery.
Panic rises, making my own heart thump.
I would push him away. He shields me. He protects me. But I could more easily fight the Shadows around us than the beat of that heart against me. That sort of fight is much more familiar than the fight to resist his scent, his touch—the lie that he is human.
A wavering whisper stops me when I would have pushed my way free.
Very close, just outside my Shadow-wing hideaway, a child’s voice speaks in a singsong cadence that is at once horrifying and haunting.
“Olly olly oxen freeeeeeeeeee…”
The last syllable ends as if the lungs that force air over dormant vocal cords are too weak for volume. An all-out scream couldn’t have been worse. I start to shake. My imagination gives the voice a face, and it’s the face of the swinging girl, come all this way to find me and searching still.
Of course, there are other Fallen children. Everywhere. But my shivers won’t be chided. It is her. She’s out there. And this time I can’t slip away.
“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black…”
The nursery rhyme murmurs from Gabe’s lips, oddly eerie in its coaxing. Like a father encouraging his child to play, he sings the song, gentle and low. I recognize it for the suggestion it is and hold my breath, hoping.
There. A slight sound of scuffling against the cluttered pavement. From hide-and-seek to double Dutch sans rope. In my mind’s eye, I watch the creepy Shadow hop away. Creepy but sad too. Forever young. Forever lost. Missing the games she used to play but caught up in a much more horrible game for eternity.
“Don’t speak,” Gabriel whispers against the top of my head.
Strong arms come around me, more intimate than the wings. Gabriel scoops me up, still hidden, and begins to stride forward, a Shadow among Shadows. Nothing to see here. I hug my arms around my chest to keep them from clinging to him. And I wonder what game, if any, my angelic soldier is determined to play.
The invaders thought they had crushed humanity. They messed with the wrong species.
Metal Reign
© 2010 Nathalie Gray
An Impulse Power Story
Francine Beaumont is tired. Tired of waiting for an armada of Imber ships to finish off what’s left of humanity. Tired of fear and privation. Tired of living like a rat, feeding off what scraps the cat lets her have.
When the chance comes to hit the Imbers where it really hurts—right at their fuel supply—she takes it. One stealth cruiser. One pilot. A cargo hold filled with explosives. A suicide mission for sure, but better that than doing nothing.
As the ship’s cook, John O’Shaughnessy knows everything that goes on aboard the warship. And something is definitely up with his Frankie. If she thinks he’s going to let her carry out this crazy plan of hers alone, that stubborn woman has another think coming.
Frankie thinks she’s gotten away clean…until her instincts tell her she’s not alone on her mission. Still, it’s a shock to find her peace-loving John standing there with eyes that spell murder. Now is a hell of a time to discover they’re more than friends. But there’s no turning back…
Warning: Space invaders were seriously harmed in the making of this story.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Metal Reign:
Everything happened fast.
One second, about a dozen alien ships were flying a couple thousand meters ahead and the next second, a hit sent the reefer barreling to portside. The impact rocked both Frankie and him back against their seats. Only the harnesses saved them from being projected across the bridge like the rest of everything not anchored or strapped down with thick cargo netting. Clacks, clangs and rattles drowned what Frankie yelled. Alarms wailed, lights flickered, died for an agonizing second then switched back on.
John’s instinct surprised him. Instead of trying to stay the ship, he extended an arm to grip Frankie by the back of her coveralls. Just in case. He’d never known a protective nature hid under his cynical crust. Great timing…
As the reefer gathered speed in its gut-flattening spiral, John braced his feet wide apart on the consoles. Gs built up. Space flew sideways in the tacscreens. Stars became white lines. Interspersed with these lines, a green blur—Earth. Fighting against nausea, John forced himself to focus on the altimeter. Too low. Too damn low.
“Take…the nav,” he growled. “I’ll…take…propulsion.”
Both wrestled the effects of gravity, which tried to keep them glued to their backrests, as they struggled to control the ship’s spiral. Frankie quickly punched in coordinates while John gripped the engines control and pushed them as forward as they could go. The only way out of a spiral was down hard and fast. With any luck, they’d gain enough momentum to break out of the corkscrew, skim along Earth’s atmosphere then bounce off into space. But then again, luck was a bitch these days.
“Hang on,” John warned a split second before the attitude jets responded to his commands. By his side, Frankie held on to the console corners.
Turning, turning. Slower. Another turn that stretched out told John their maneuver may just work. Alarms finally clicked off when the reefer pointed downward and entered into a dive just as scary as the spiral. Except that now they were in control. Somewhat.
“Tell me when it’s five degrees,” John said through his teeth.
Frankie nodded. Sweat coated
her face and made limp ribbons of her usually curly hair.
Silence was only broken by their panting as they each fought with their assigned console.
“Five degrees!”
John gunned it.
The reefer shot forward and up, at thirty-five degrees to starboard, higher still, until they’d made a complete U-turn that sucked every iota of power out of his poor ship. When the moon appeared in the tacscreens, John spared a hand to pump his fist. Had to let out the testosterone somehow.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered. “They hit us and didn’t even come back for a look.”
“We just don’t matter to them. Would you come back to look at a bug you just squashed?”
“Still, for Pete’s sake.” She combed a hand in her sweaty hair. “Man, that was close.”
“I’ll go check for damages. That hit can’t have left just a scratch.” He unclipped his harness, worked his stiff legs and neck. Without his brain’s consent—his brain had pretty much taken an extended vacation…wasn’t he on a suicide mission?—John bent over and placed a loud kiss on her forehead. “We make quite the team, Commander Beaumont. Want to recruit me? I promise I won’t spoil your other recruits’ young, impressionable minds.”
Her beaming smile made everything all right. Her betrayal, her lies. Nothing mattered anymore. Affection swelled his heart, and pride his head. This woman, strong and capable and hot as the coals of hell, made him feel as if he could take on the world. Which in a sense he was about to do.
He left her in command of his reefer while he climbed down below into the detachable section of his refrigerated ship. Used to transport produce and other perishables, his reefer had never been meant to withstand the hit it’d just taken. Not without serious damage. They were lucky not to have been sucked out into space.
All along the passageways, metal plating had buckled, rivets popped off and steam whistled out of bent pipes. Not good. Near the airlock, e-suits hung on hooks and resembled a row of hanged men. Those environment suits may come in handy if the ship had suffered hull damage. At least until they connected to the pipeline. Afterward, well, it wouldn’t matter much, would it?
John breathed a sigh of relief as he inspected the seal between the main portion of the ship and the separate cargo area. It seemed intact. But as he stepped through the hatch to survey the damage to their precious cargo, he couldn’t abort the long string of curses. He didn’t know much about explosives, but the way the charge had shifted on its rails in the hold, with yellow wires pulled out of connectors and plastic coils all crumpled up against the glowing blue core… That just could not be good.
“Shit.”
The comms panel still worked so he switched it on. “Hey, Frankie. You know how to build that thing, right? Because right now, it looks like something the cat spat out. Except in metal and plastic.”
Her voice crackled but he got the last bit. “…goddamnsonovabitch.”
“Indeed.”
“I’m coming down.”
John felt the ship decelerate to automatic pilot. A minute later Frankie barged into the cargo hold like a Valkyrie down the hills. His nape tingled with arousal. He forced his mind to clear.
Not the time, O’Shaughnessy.
“Argh, no, no, no.” She rushed to the sad-looking bit of Imber destruction smashed against the side of the cargo hold and muttered for a good minute as she inspected her patient. In the end, she straightened, fists on hips—sending his testosterone fever into the danger zone—and blew air through pursed lips. “I think we’ll be good. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Is this like ‘it’s-not-as-bad-as-it-looks-just-a-sucking-chest-wound-Ma’am’?”
Her snort of laughter unreasonably stroked his ego. “No. I can fix this. We’ll reroute some power to the charge, hook it up to the ship directly. It’ll work.” She nodded, muttered to herself some more. “I can fix this,” she repeated.
“Well, get to it then because we can’t take another hit like this.” It was one thing to die in the name of humanity and all that, it was an entirely different thing to just get blown into bits by a passing Imber ship. Not as, well, fulfilling.
Before he left her to work while he checked the rest of the reefer for damage—something told him he’d find much, much more—John stopped inside the hatch leading to the main part of the ship. Frankie was crouched underneath the electrical panel and muttering through her teeth as she yanked on knotted wires. He tamped down the regret. He wasn’t doing this only for her. Well, mostly for her. But along the way, he’d begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was better than doing nothing at all. He’d never tell her that, of course, in case she started to think of him as a romantic. John O’Shaughnessy had a rep to keep. Catholic Irishmen weren’t a flower-in-the-hair, bright-eyed bunch. Or he liked to believe. But then again, to his widowed father’s horror, his eldest child and only son of four children had become a cook. His little sisters all teased John about his choice of career, especially since he was a trained machinist like their da. Oh well, to each their own path.
They better dedicate a whole city to her name, complete with wide boulevards, airy gardens and gurgling fountains. Frankieville. Frankburg. Francine-sur-Mer. Ha.
When she let out a long string of curses, John smiled and turned away to hide what he knew was in his eyes.
Gridlock
Nathalie Gray
He finds love on the eve of a war he doesn’t plan on surviving.
A Cybershock Story
Dante knows the price of rebellion. The Grid created him in its likeness, turning him into a killing machine—tested, modified and enhanced to be a “better citizen”. Years may have passed since he escaped that freak show, but the scars are still fresh.
Without the mandatory implant, Steel scrapes by, living free of the Grid’s control. When a job goes bad, everyone around her dies, their minds crushed by the notorious Cardinal. But he doesn’t kill her. He takes her to a secret lair filled with fascinating, forbidden pre-Grid knowledge. Who is this man—ruthless murderer or eccentric loner?
Bad-mannered as she is, Dante can’t bring himself to silence the abrasive, cigarette-addicted Steel. Something about her calls to him, though trusting her could be a mistake. Should she betray him, it would wipe out years of patient waiting. Waiting while the Grid hunts him for the priceless information he carries within his living data vault. Waiting while his dish of revenge turns ice cold.
For Dante intends to go back. And this time, he intends to be the only one left standing.
Warning: Contains violence, offensive language, a tattooed woman, a man who’s ready to light a few fuses, several variants of the F-word, machines behaving badly, thugs and PVC fashion. But no ninjas. That’s for the next book.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
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Gridlock
Copyright © 2011 by Nathalie Gray
ISBN: 978-1-60928-518-0
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kanaxa
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: August 2011
www.samhainpublishing.com
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