Oh boy. “If you need help holding her down—”
“Do you want me to punch you?” Strangely, after looking at them both, several times, Vargr had wound down his anger a notch or three. “You fed her come? And it worked? It fucking shouldn’t have.”
Should he put forward his theory?
“It is possible that some might be able to have two bondmates.”
Vargr went very still.
“Ignore me.” He cleared his throat. “Just a theory.”
The swish-swish and lub-dub of his heart and blood were playing interference in his temples, and he had to consciously untighten his muscles. Nothing to do here. No fight needed.
For once Cyn remained silent, and he could almost see her figuring the angles. Or had she already done that? When he was near her, it was impossible not to notice her perky nipples elevating the fabric of her heavy-metal-inspired T-shirt.
Her jacket had gone missing after the fight. And thank you whoever you are for organizing that. It never felt right to thank any lord above anymore.
“Fuck the apocalypse,” he murmured.
“What?” Vargr woke from his perplexed, what-the-fuck reverie.
“Nothing. What I did, I did out of concern for her…” Should he say this? His natural diplomacy, if he had any, had run away. “To be honest, also because I feel far more attraction to her than I should. I know you’re bondmated. I respect that. I’d never tear apart that law on a whim. And I didn’t. I didn’t fuck her. I fixed her enough until you returned. That it apparently worked—I think logic tells us it worked for a reason.” The fury in Vargr’s glare heightened. “If you’d gotten killed, I’d happily have taken your place, but that’s not relevant, unless you have another death mission in mind?
“Now, I’m moving on. It’s dangerous outside the tribe for us, all of us.”
Then he turned his back on the two of them. It was the only way he could think of to defuse what he’d just done. His fault. He should’ve held his tongue, and having Cyn take pleasure in them squaring off only made everything more dangerous. He then stopped, struck by a piece of concern that niggled.
He addressed Vargr. “Hey. Don’t let her look in any of the prams here. Okay?”
“Sure.” The beaster nodded, and he saw the man understood why.
“Good.” His heart eased a little, and he walked away, passing Little Mo where it waited in shadow.
If a pin dropped behind him, he didn’t hear it. Neither of them was about to follow him immediately. He kept going. They were adults, and he was not bondmated with Cyn, or not so anyone could recognize. Not yet.
Curiosity eventually won out, and he looked back. They hadn’t followed him yet, and Vargr was talking to Cyn. She looked small beside him, even with his wings folded in. Her hands were clasped before her as if she were a penitent nun, which was a total switch in attitude.
Vargr approached her, crowding her into a shop wall, pressing her against it with the full length of his body and his hands on her at hip and collar, and he kissed her for a very long time. Started out rough and ended up sweet, as far as he could tell.
The world heated several degrees.
That he’d ceased to breathe, took a while for Rutger to register. Finally, he turned away, went toward Tom, and picked up Maura on the way. He’d only interfere if they started fucking against said wall. They did need to get moving.
The one thing that kept him thinking most, was how quickly she changed from teasing to embarrassed or innocent. He’d noticed her do it before. The nanites? Probably. She’d only woken to them recently, and even he had his problems with those things rearranging his hormones, his body chemicals, his every damn cell, really. He was going to go pound some walls with his fists, once they reached camp.
His pulse was burning in his veins like it did when the PNT was rearing up. Luckily, he hadn’t smote Vargr like the god-monster they liked to call him might’ve done.
Chapter 21
The rippers hauled the dead-ish human to the base of the Ghoul Lord’s swathe of writhing tentacles. Avidex twirled some thicker wrigglers over the steaming flesh, tasting and sniffing. Blood dribbled from strips and gouges in this creature’s skin surface. The face was relatively unscathed. Though the heart had ceased to beat, the cells of the skin still lived and so did much of the brain and several organs.
It would make a nice snack, though there was an alternative.
To allow time for his primordial thought processes to decide on a path, Avidex kept the body and brain alive, infusing direct energy that bypassed the need for blood and this oxygen these creatures required.
A Ghoul Lord relied on millennia of banked-up instincts sharpened in battle and apocalypse after apocalypse.
The Way of the Ghoul Lord was simple and effective:
Subjugate the dominants.
Kill the aggressives.
Lure them all.
Keep to the upper surface of the planet, for in darkness lies peril.
If they worshipped anything, it was the life-giving light and the radiation. Bathed in distant solar radiation, they had surged slowly from planet to planet across the universe. Even in the depths of space, with no planetary barriers to block it, the radiation found them and nurtured them, and kept them from burning in the darkness. These thousand or hundred-year journeys rarely rewarded fast thinking. They knew their weaknesses. When the need arose for complex thought, trespassing upon the brain of an enslaved species was the simplest way to increase one’s processing power, as well as gain local lore.
More information was needed.
He snagged a nearby human to piggyback onto the fresher brain’s capabilities—spearing a tendril into the head.
His intelligence ascended. Thoughts accelerated.
Why had the attack failed? Why was the female human not here before it, begging for attention, for ravishment before her painful demise? He needed the satisfaction of eating the enemy that had cut it.
This had been a perplexing result. Only two rippers had survived.
Avidex plunged a tip into the brain area of the dying one and encouraged the tendril he’d planted there to emerge. It squirmed out and rejoined the main body mass, spilling the data it had recorded. Then Avidex paused to assimilate.
In the lower levels, where all was dark, the human prey flourished. They used the darkness to their advantage and somehow resisted the Lure when they kept away from the Top. They had reacted quickly to the attack, killing the ghoul guards with their projectile weapons and cutting blades, also using a large creature with teeth and fur to kill many rippers.
The female had never come close to this guard. Seen from a distance, she’d fought efficiently, the same as she had when she severed the tentacle of Avidex.
Nevertheless, some humans had died.
He linked to the fresh human’s brain thoroughly for some time and harvested some curious ideas.
The darkness and lack of Lure were the main problems.
To remain unshielded in the dark would kill Avidex. His tissues would boil away there, for it was anathema to his species. Darkness was poison.
And so, in the interest of making this escaping girl dead, he would need to confront them more closely, wearing a shield the humans would accept. What better shield than a human? Protection from the darkness and a face they’d like.
Two in one, the fresh human brain offered up as the main idea.
Two in one.
A skin suit.
He needed a human skin suit. Like that cockroach guy in the movie.
The dead-ish one seemed to have a certain power among the humans. It had been recognized. The solution was obvious.
Avidex never did anything by halves, except when it involved preserving his own genetic matter. Some of Avidex would go down below to kill humans. Some would stay here. The reunion with himself would be joyous.
In one rapturous flurry of goop, gobbets, and disarticulated vertebrae, of tearing and shucking motions, Avidex tore the dea
d-ish one’s head from the neck stalk connecting it to the below body, then forced half of his own brain and tentacle flesh inside the fresher human, making the skin bulge here and there.
He wrenched off the fresh head, then squashed the dead-ish human head on top instead.
Watching himself be inside the skin suit and yet also still outside with most of the tentacle swathe was giving him a headache.
A splitting headache. Ha-ha.
The new glued-together human managed a liquid laugh, coughing up a mess of blood afterward. The windpipe was barely abutting onto the other bit of windpipe. And eating? Oy veh now that would be something impossible.
He must go below, post-haste, and kill people and drag the girl back here to himself before this body properly expired and fell apart… kicked the bucket, like a dead cockatoo.
What curious phrases these humans used.
Before Avidex-human left to descend, he made a final effort to look presentable—tucking the shirt in, swiping off the biggest flesh gobbets, rearranging the torn flesh of the neck join with these new foreign fingers.
He could see his fingers below! Skin suits were amazing, he decided. He must do this more often.
Though, as he walked, bits did insist on oozing and spilling and bleeding. Seriously icky.
I should have a name for alternate me. Avi-man? Hu-dex?
Hudex. Yes.
Hudex waved goodbye to the rest of himself, to Avidex, and set off whistling and burbling for the nearest stairs. Undoubtedly, his eyes shone with effervescent white glee. A few rippers scampered at his heels.
With the Lure given to them, up close and personal, the humans below would be duck food.
Chapter 22
So busy. He was getting itchy just seeing them all, milling about.
Mercantor had fewer people and a less-imposing camp. Trees—hadn’t seen those up close for ages, and three stories of open space above? Fuck. He craned back his neck to look then found Rutger had returned. Still had not decided how to react to this horned ‘god-monster’.
He’d trespassed on his territory—Cyn.
After a fast goodbye, Rutger waved them onward to the center of the crowd. Vargr nodded, distracted by his memory of the blood roaring in his ears when he’d been told about this beaster feeding Cyn his come.
“I have to go punch some walls. Locke will find you and take you to the biotechie we have here. She’s called Willow.”
The memory faded when Rutger left and headed for a grand set of stairs leading downward. Trees, grass, plants were a big part of the scenery here. Some of the green stuff was artificial, some not. It was real over by the observation area… That looked out over the landscape.
Out over the fucking outside.
He shook his head. Were they insane here? This must be vulnerable to assault?
“People everywhere,” Cyn murmured.
“Yeah.” He ran his hand over his head, gaining a strange comfort in the hard-soft triangles of his hair.
The caravan idea was a hit, with the packs on Toother being unstrapped and unloaded, as well as the two bodies. He helped to lower the bodies and place them to one side. Blood had seeped through the cloth in which they were wrapped.
Orm was one of these. His mouth twisted in sadness. The first dogrider, first to train a nanodog, and he’d been so proud of that. Toother hadn’t stopped looking puzzled at how Orm no longer moved, and even now he was poking the wrapped bundle with his nose.
“We’ll have to think what to do with Toother.” What if he ran wild?
Tom nodded. “Yeah. He’s a good boy, though.” He reached up and scratched the creature under the ear.
“We need another beaster like Orm. Someone who wants him too.” Without that empathy Orm had, he doubted Toother would respond to them or obey.
They’d made plans to have a funeral ceremony later.
Though the dead, their gnawed or partly mummified skeletons, were found in every hall, every second room, every shopping mall and street, this hit hard. They hadn’t lost anyone for more than a year. Two was a high percentage of the tribe.
He sighed and looked aside. Dwelling on death was a fast track to depression.
Little Mo, he realized, had vanished. Which didn’t say much for them keeping an eye on him. He prayed nobody would spot the AI and blow it away.
“We haven’t brought much to trade.”
Tom shrugged. “The idea is good, as long as we have something the Worshippers can’t get easily.”
“Yeah. If nothing else, we can talk, do strategy stuff. The Ghoul Lords aren’t leaving in a hurry. Least if they are, I missed getting the bloody memo.”
“Me too!” Tom punched his shoulder. “I’m going to see what fun they have here. An unattached female would be nice. There’s a Worshipper guy called Locke looking for you. There he is. There.”
The nod led Vargr to see the beaster in question.
“You go do that, Tom. And keep an eye on Maura!”
He didn’t like the man’s chances. Not in all this lot. Any nubile females would have partners. Even for Maura not to have a mate surprised him. He’d been deliberately celibate, but there were more males than females. Course, some of the beasters preferred men or other beasters. Not that anyone was getting pregnant. It was all in the name of lust and love, unless they figured out how to restore fertility.
Babies, now babies in this new world would be both wonderful and terrible.
Bad things happened way too often.
“He has a punching room?”
“What?” He realized Cyn had been watching Rutger lumber down those stairs. “Shit. Forget him. We got our own business. He can go punch all the rooms he wants to. Here. Him.”
He took her hand, clasped it to point at Locke, the Worshipper beaster.
A weaponsmith type from the looks of him—all short and broad, like someone had tried whacking him into the ground with a big hammer. Blue ran in long squiggles down his biceps and forearms, wayward stripes of inkiness. His sandy hair and starter-pack beard were thick, same as Thad’s.
“Hi there.” Locke pulled at his beard and looked thoughtful. “Cyn and Vargr? Follow me. I’m to intro you to Willow.”
They followed, weaving past the curious who gathered about the nanodog. He’d forgotten how strange it would be to see a tame one. Lucky they’d not shot him.
All in all, this camp was familiar. Or the beasters were, by type if not by actual name. Only this extreme openness gave him a panicked feeling in the stomach. There were seats, park benches on the bright green arti-grass, gazebos, pots with fake flowers, and there were real trees, scrabbling roots over the soil.
They’d brought dirt up here just for this.
He supposed he must’ve read about this place, once, but had forgotten. The Mercantor Quarter had nothing similar. Glass as thick as his leg lowered from above in a huge visor shape that spanned the rectangular opening. He estimated the opening to be… Vargr screwed up his forehead. A quarter of a mile in breadth?
“Fuckin’ big,” he muttered.
“It is.” Cyn sucked in air, her hand still in his. “Impressive.”
He decided he liked how she was hanging onto him.
Moonlight shone over a range of hills. Out there was a wildlife preserve. No buildings, just air and a drop to the ground, and those distant hills.
They were accosted along the way by curious Worshippers who wanted to shake their hands and say hi, or express sadness over the dead and the unusual attack. The ghoul guards had been quiet for years, and certainly none had ventured this low. If there were over a thousand beasters at this camp, he figured about three hundred were here now. The rest would be out patrolling, hunting down fresh food and supplies, mapping, arranging fuel and electricity where possible, same as his own tribe.
They stopped near the edge at a bright pink tent with its open flap aimed toward the view. With dawn coming in a few hours, this would be flooded by light. He cringed internally.
�
��Willow.” Locke bowed and swept his arm in an arc. “Behold our biotechie. She takes no nonsense, so be nice to her or we boot you over the edge.” His grin said he lied.
“Hi there.” Inside the tent a young woman in red jeans and a storm-gray shirt slumped comfortably on an upholstered chair.
Her neon-blue hair teased at her shoulders and weaved about in Medusa-like snakiness. Her arms lay on the rests, and a small, varnished table before her was stacked with cards, a collapsed telescope, and a cup of something that steamed. Around her eyes and hands, the blue ran in veins. She had that slightly fragile, elegant aura he’d noticed in some biotechies. They were quality porcelain while he and most beasters were stoneware.
“Tea?” she asked, gesturing at a teapot set on the floor canvas the tent was pegged to. “And pull up a chair.” There was only one, to her right. “I hear you want to have your blood checked, girl. I was out looking at your arrival, but it was crowded. This is my space. Some of us like making a little home. My tent is it.”
Crowded? He agreed though. A hundred and a few more people were that. Five years ago, that would’ve been thought crazy.
“I’m Vargr. Nice tent and view. This is Cyn.” He stood to one side of the opening to let Cyn go past.
There was something about being in one place that made you want to construct a permanent abode. For him, standing at the edge of Mercantor was enough: peering out at the adjacent quarter, with your feet knowing this building here was where one belonged.
“I am looking for that.” Cyn boldly picked up and set down the other upholstered seat then sat. “I need to know what I am. I need to convince everyone I’m like you and not some creature sent by the Ghoul Lords.”
“That’s… more history than they told me. Why ever would anyone think you’re from the Top?”
“Because I am.” Smiling, she shifted in the chair. “I fell from the sky into Vargr’s arms. After I escaped from the Ghoul Lords.”
“Shit.” Her gaze flicked to him, lines tightening around her eyes. “Really?”
“She’s safe. We’re bondmated. Unusual pedigree but safe. I know she has nanites like us beasters, just we are searching for what sort, why she has them. Anything that helps us figure out what happened above.”
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