He’d asked her for sex every night since that first night they’d been together. She understood why he wanted it, but it quickly became clear their liaison could only be temporary, regardless of how good the sex.
Trazen got sadder each time, for one thing.
By the last night, Chloe almost couldn’t bear his sadness through the venom, even with what he’d done to her physically. She’d almost been relieved when he told her he’d found a new living situation for her, one that would force them to end this thing.
With Agnon gone, he said, there was no reason for her to stay a slave at all.
Trazen wrote her a certificate for her freedom that very morning, right before he drove her up to one of the free settlements of humans in the hills above old Albuquerque.
It turned out Trazen did a lot of this kind of thing.
Buying humans.
Setting them free on the outskirts of the Nirreth settlement when no Nirreth were watching. The only stipulation he gave her was never to return to the Center, where someone might recognize her from his confrontation with Agnon.
It wasn’t exactly a difficult promise to give.
Now Chloe studied his face as he paced the grass-covered hillside below, his long fingers clasped at his back as he watched the sun rise in the sky. The muscles in his dark blue arms stood out in the morning light, giving her a slight shiver of desire in spite of herself.
She wasn’t touching him, but felt she could read his mind anyway.
“Stop it,” she chided him, smiling when he turned. “Just cut it out.”
“Cut what out, most honorable Chloe?” he smiled back.
“Feeling guilty,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’re being ridiculous. You’re not abandoning me. You set me free. Remember?”
He looked at her like he was about to argue, then exhaled in a rumbling growl.
Walking up to her in a few strides, he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her against him.
“I’ve never done it like this,” he confessed.
She smiled. “Are you asking me for goodbye sex, Ringmaster?”
He rumbled a Nirreth laugh. “No! You know what I mean! Confounding human!”
She saw sadness touch his expression and nudged him with an arm.
“I do know, dummy,” she said, dropping the teasing tone. “But I seduced you, remember? And I know how much you hate gratitude, but I am grateful. So deal with it.”
He gave her a mock puzzled look. “For the sex?”
She smacked his broad chest, laughing.
“No, jerkface! For this. I’m grateful for this. So stop feeling guilty for giving me a new life. I’m happy about it, okay?” Letting a smile quirk her lips, she shrugged. “And, okay, maybe a little grateful for the sex,” she added, making him laugh. “I don’t suppose you do house calls up here? The occasional drive by?”
He grunted, looking down at her before using his tail to brush the hair off her shoulder.
“What will you do now?” he said, softer.
She grinned, leaning into his chest.
“Oh, you know. The usual human stuff. Learn how to fight so I don’t end up some asshole’s slave again. Learn how to program Nirreth machines. Maybe learn a few more colony languages, so I could work as a translator.” Shrugging, she said more seriously, “Basically all the things I thought about doing for my sister to protect her. I figure I may as well do them for myself now.”
His eyes grew thoughtful. “I have people up here who could teach you some of those things––” he began.
She laughed, then reached up to kiss him on the mouth.
“I’m sure you do,” she mused, looking at him.
Still studying his perfect features and those gold-flecked eyes, she smacked him again, adding sharply, “You’re one of the good ones, Trazen. Stop being an ass to her, okay? She’ll see it. I promise you, she will.”
His deep blue skin darkened perceptibly.
Feeling the silence come over him, she shrugged, her arms still slung around his neck.
“Or just sting her,” she said drily. “Then she’ll really see it. Along with your nice, big, fat Nirreth dick against her leg…”
He let out an involuntary laugh, releasing her before he smacked her on the ass with his tail.
“Be good, Chloe,” he said to her then.
She grinned, folding her arms. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“Be safe then,” he said more seriously. “I’ve grown very fond of you.”
He hesitated, then added more awkwardly, “It wasn’t a mistake. That it was you, I mean. It wasn’t a mistake, Chloe.”
It took her a second to realize what he meant.
Then pain came to her chest.
He was talking about her sister. About who lived, and who died.
Fighting a tightness in her throat at the sincerity in his eyes, she forced a smile.
Of course he would know.
He would have felt her mind and heart through the venom, too.
He would have known she’d lived for Kiji before now.
But he was right. She couldn’t do that anymore.
That door was closed. Whether it was a mistake or not, it was closed.
“I won’t waste it,” she said, the words a promise. “I won’t, Trazen.”
He continued to study her face then nodded, giving his tail a satisfied flick.
Smiling, he waved a hand over the valley. “It is a new day.”
“It is indeed,” she said, grinning even as she rolled her eyes at his corniness.
“Don’t waste it, Chloe. That’s a good thing to say. I won’t, either.”
She smiled back, and in that moment it really hit her.
She was going to miss him.
She was going to miss him a lot.
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Sample Pages
ROOK (Bridge & Sword #1)
1
Allie
I KNOW WHO I AM.
Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.
I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.
For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.
Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.
What I was mattered a whole lot more.
On that front, I knew a lot less than I thought I did. I might have ha
d that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.
“HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.
Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.
“Did you see, Allie?”
I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.
“What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”
“Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”
Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”
I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”
Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.
Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.
Two months ago, everything had been teal.
She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.
I hated her a little for it, sometimes.
Other times, I pitied her for it. Truthfully, I hadn’t seen that it had done her a lot of favors over her life, and Cass and I had known each other since we were kids.
Looking up from where I was doing battle with the diner’s antiquated espresso maker, a machine I was convinced had it in for me, personally, I blew my much less dramatic dark brown bangs out of my face, glancing at the man in the corner booth in spite of myself.
I’d seen him walk in.
Truthfully, I’d felt him walk in.
It was unnerving as hell, the effect he had on me, simply from entering a building I happened to occupy.
This was in spite of him never saying a damned thing to me, apart from whatever single-item purchase he made off the diner’s crappy menu. He paid in cash. He never came in with anyone else. He flat-out ignored any attempts at small talk, even polite questions. He rarely made eye-contact, although I always felt his eyes on me. When I looked over, however, he was usually staring out the window, or down at his own hands on the table.
Mr. Monochrome wasn’t a talker.
He wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He took ignoring other sentient beings to the level of an art form. The extremes he went to in avoiding conversation didn’t just verge on rude; they were rude. Mr. Monochrome didn’t care.
Mr. Monochrome wasn’t interested in our opinions of him.
Mr. Monochrome wouldn’t even tell us his name.
That last part was the pool Cass referred to.
Given that most people paid bills with their headsets these days, the fact that he paid in cash made him frustratingly impervious to our curiosity about him. He was a blank canvas. My mind superimposed that canvas with various stories, of course, as did my co-workers––undercover cop, international fugitive from justice, spy, private detective, writer doing research, terrorist for the seer underground. Serial killer.
I knew the reality was likely a lot less interesting.
Jon, my brother, referred to him as my “current stalker,” but Jon was paranoid about that kind of thing, given the number of problems I’d had in that area back when I was a kid. Apart from the fact that Mr. Monochrome insisted on sitting in my section every day––even when we moved around which tables were mine––he didn’t seem all that interested in me, either.
He certainly hadn’t made any overtures in my direction, not even oblique ones.
He was probably just a guy who lived somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I’d fallen into his daily routine.
At most, he might be cultivating a deep-seated paranoia around being tracked by the government, one that made him reluctant to use his headset. If he did have some kind of socially-dysfunctional crush on me, he didn’t seem the type to do much about it. He likely worked at one of the tech companies nearby and came to the Lucky Cat because we still accepted cash; more and more places in San Francisco didn’t.
So yeah, a tinfoil hat weirdo, maybe… but a harmless one.
At the thought, I glanced up at the monitor on the wall.
Cass or one of the other waitstaff had turned the volume down, but the news feeds were still playing up there, showing the reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Europe. I watched the President of the United States as he gave a speech from behind a podium, his mouth moving silently. Blooming trees waved gently in a breeze behind him, framing the view of a sprawling lawn and flower gardens. His blond wife stood beside him, hands clasped, a small smile etched on her face, her expression rapt, if bland.
I knew she didn’t really look like that, of course.
Neither did he.
According to Human Protection Act rules, both were required to wear avatars to avoid being targeted by seers owned by enemy governments. Even the landscape around them was digitally altered, to prevent seers from tracking them or reading their minds.
Still, his avatar suited the speeches he gave.
Hers suited him, somehow, as well––meaning, she looked like the kind of person that the man giving those speeches would marry.
Of course, his actual voice was altered digitally, too.
I’d listened to dozens of his speeches over the past however-many years, like everyone else. Daniel Caine was the most popular president we’d ever had, at least as long as I’d been alive. There was already talk of adjusting the presidential term limits again, so he might be allowed to run for a fourth term.
Opposite Caine’s wife stood his Vice President, Ethan Wellington. His avatar showed him to be a handsome black man in his late forties, roughly the same age as Caine. I remembered reading somewhere that they’d even gone to school together.
Both were young, energetic, articulate.
Both of them bothered me.
I honestly couldn’t explain to myself why.
I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.
To be clear, I didn’t think they were evil or anything, or even that they were hiding some sinister secret; I just didn’t fall all over myself with love for them, the way most people did. Maybe it was just a random distrust of any image that had so few apparent cracks. I knew most people would think I was crazy for thinking that, even Cass. Hell, even Jon liked President Caine, and he hated most politicians, no matter what side of the spectrum they fell on.
Objectively, I got it.
Caine ended years of stalemates and infighting in congress. He’d been the one to move the country as a whole back to a more moderate middle, socially and politically. He’d brought stability, boosted the economy, created jobs, improved our image overseas. He’d even fixed healthcare, and all without raising taxes too much.
If there were conspiracy theories about Caine, they usually involved him being too perfect. Like somehow that must be a trap, which I guess is how my mind worked, too.
Still, in almost ten years of running the country, he’d managed to avoid pissing off any of the major
political factions, including the military and the corporate elite.
He was pretty universally liked.
Frowning slightly, I glanced at Mr. Monochrome again, wiping the counter off with a wet rag where I’d spilled the espresso bean grounds.
If I was right in my tinfoil hat theory, Mr. Monochrome likely believed a lot of the same conspiracy theories my brother, Jon, did. Jon had a whole paranoia thing about seers, in particular, and how our own government was likely using them against us, via our headsets and whatever else. To be fair to my brother––and possibly Mr. Monochrome––I had noticed a lot more seers in San Francisco lately.
Most didn’t seem all that involved in government espionage rackets though. From what I could tell, most worked in sex fetish clubs, or for corporations downtown.
Of course, rich people had been importing and maintaining privately-owned seers in San Francisco for years. They’d kept their “purchases” behind closed doors for the most part until about the 1990s, however, in part because of the strict Seer Containment Codes in California, and partly because they likely didn’t want people to know they had a psychic living in their house. After two world wars prominently featuring seers––primarily as villains, or the tools of villains––most people were pretty paranoid about them still.
I knew from listening to anti-seer talk feeds that a lot of people wanted them all deported from the United States entirely. Some people wanted them exterminated––as a species, I mean. The real nutjobs even wanted to kill the more docile variety of seers living in the monkish enclave of Seertown, a quasi-mythical town somewhere in Asia, supposedly filled with chanting robed seers and their human followers.
Since the feeds weren’t allowed to go there, I had no idea what Seertown looked like, but like many people, I was curious.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 103