Naomi Lucas - [Cyborg Shifters 04] - Mutt
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Mutt
A Cyborg Shifters Novella
By Naomi Lucas
Copyright © 2018 by Naomi Lucas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the author.
Any references to names, places, locales, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Art by Cameron Kamenicky
Editing by Lindsay York at LY Publishing Services
Editing by Tiffany Freund
Stranded in the Stars
Last Call
Collector of Souls
Star Navigator
Cyborg Shifters
Wild Blood
Storm Surge
Shark Bite
Mutt
Ashes and Metal (Coming Spring 2018)
Valos of Sonhadra
Radiant (Coming February 2018)
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Author’s note
BEWARE OF DOG
Clara was confused when she encountered the sign outside the Cyborg breeding facility. She wanted a child and nothing would stand in her way. But she didn’t heed the sign’s warning—she had more important things on her mind—and once she understood, it was too late. Her heart was already on the line.
Reid was the ultimate protector, the perfect bodyguard, his loyalty embedded in his DNA. The animal his creators chose for him was a favorite, a downright blessing, and an ongoing nightmare. He found the perfect reprieve after the Great Galactic War: Division Head of the last Cyborg breeding facility on Earth. The empty halls offered more than silence—they offered him sanctuary.
Territory.
When a woman walked through his door, begged to join the program, and wouldn’t take no for an answer, her delicate features and desperation awakened a behavior that had long lain dormant—his need to claim.
Chapter One
Clara sat in her land-flyer at a loss for words. She didn’t know if it was karma she was facing or just downright scum-covered bad-fucking-luck.
The hum of her vehicle, shaky and rough, only reminded her of all the mistakes she had made, and the past life she was fleeing.
She pressed her finger into the scanner and shifted the vehicle into neutral with a sigh. A chime sounded from the speakers right as the first beads of sweat glistened above her brow, and a name appeared over her windshield, transparent in its neutral, projected blue. She had to squint to read it.
Marsha Tannett. Clara’s contact from the police department in her hometown. She accepted the call.
“Hi, this is Clara speaking...”
“Hey, Clara. It’s Marsha from the Pecos PD. We have an update for you, ma’am, but can you verify your full name and address?”
“Clara A. Warren, and I... no longer have an address.” She had an address yesterday, a musty rented out motel room, but no longer. Staying in one place for too long was dangerous.
She realized long ago that her enemy would find her wherever she went, and even verifying her personal information via a secure line was still taking a risk. Her hands flexed in her lap.
“What about your date of birth?”
“11 05 2854.” She rubbed her sweaty palms over her pants.
“One moment, please,” Marsha’s voice tuned out.
Clara looked around her, taking in the dry beige desert. Nothing caught her interest, but it had become a habit to check over her shoulder every few minutes ever since Santino had been released from prison. Everything was dust, dead, irradiated by the unhindered rays of the sun. There was no life, no movement, nothing. It didn’t make her feel better, knowing she was the only living being amongst the sterility of the desert wastes.
The line tuned back in. “Sorry Ms. Warren, always have to check. About that update—”
“Which is?”
“Your ex checked into a halfway house—”
“Where?”
“Outside the Dallas metropolis, Pleasant Grove, ma’am—”
“When?”
Marsha grumbled, “Yesterday morning.”
Yesterday morning. Clara took in her surroundings again; the flat fields of powdery dirt and dried husks of vegetation that drank their last drop of water an age past. Santino could be anywhere by now. Anywhere.
It was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Are you still there, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Clara croaked out as she switched her flyer out of neutral. A soft breeze of conditioned air coursed over her face, chilling the sweat on her skin and making her shiver.
“If you have the funds, we can deploy a protection-model android to guard you.”
Clara closed her eyes.
She didn’t have the money to afford android security. In fact, she had just enough saved to be on the run for a couple months, well, now that she no longer had a wedding to plan for. Clara glanced down at the white band of skin where her engagement ring used to be and wilted...
She wilted in the middle of the desert where no one would see her. Where, for a brief second, she belonged with the dead, the debris, and the dirt.
Clara was done with men. Done with her sadistic ex and her fiancé who had broken off their engagement—not a week after he discovered the baggage she carried. She was done being hurt, used up, and thrown out. All she wanted out of life was a little security, a family, and to wake up with a smile on her face in the morning.
Am I asking for too much? Is what I want akin to the world?
“Don’t bother,” she quipped then added, “Thank you for the news.” Clara moved to disconnect the call.
“Ms. Warren?”
Her finger hovered. “Yes?”
“Please reach out to us if you need anything.”
They disconnected.
Clara picked up her tablet and stared at the screen where she had bookmarked the only option she had left for the future she wanted.
No more men. No more pain. I can have it all. Security, family, and hopefully that morning smile. She brushed her fingers across her stomach, remembering the pain. It had been gone for a long time and she didn’t know what she hated more: that the pain was gone and no longer occupied all her thoughts, or that its absence had burgeoned a new, worse pain in her heart.
Clara sighed and put her vehicle back into self-drive. It lifted into the air, sweeping dust around her windshields, temporarily cloaking her shaken heart from the world.
She was going nowhere fast and vastly off-kilter.
The dirt cleared and the desert re-emerged, along with an unsettling feeling that she was being watched. She kissed her fingertips and tapped the roof of her vehicle, praying that she was making the right choice.
The Cyborg breeding facility—the name made her flinch—was set in her GPS. Bred up, bred once, bred well and good. Her pamphlet relayed no statistics on success or failure; in fact, the information it held was subpar at best. It was old. The paper edges were worn and frayed but she knew it still existed. She knew that much at least.
She had never heard of a Cyborg fathering children and that was fine with her. She wasn’t going there to get knocked up by test-tube sperm...
Clara fisted her hand into the loose cloth of her shirt.
If she did get pregnant, fine, it would save her a step, but if she didn’t, her next stop would be a fertility center to ply herself with human designer seed.
No more men. She wanted to shout out her window and scream it to the world.
The landscape blurred and her flyer shot forward. The chimes pinned to her dashboard swayed with the continuous blast of air conditioning, their fragmented garnet and crystal stones refracting rainbows over her face.
No one would suspect she was crying. No one would know that she shivered, not from the cold air, but from uncertainty.
I’m running away.
She only hoped that whatever was chasing her would never catch up.
Chapter Two
Reid stared out his office window at the flyer sitting at the back of the parking lot. He plucked at his lips with his thumb and pointer finger.
The vehicle had arrived two hours ago, passed through all of the facility’s security, and obtained a visitor's pass. The occupant had been fingerprinted, eye-scanned, given contracts to sign, placed in holding while the flyer was checked over, and eventually, after all the trouble it took to gain access to the front door, decided to sit her old metal hulk down and not move.
At first he’d been annoyed, but now he was intrigued.
The visitor’s information sat open on his console, a holographic image of a face projected before him. Reid had memorized it—unwillingly—and captured it so it would remain in his head, behind his eyelids, and in his personal hard drives forever until he either died or deleted it.
Clara Anne Warren.
The name simply represented the next woman he’d have to turn away from the program.
She’d be one of many in a long list of hopefuls: infertile couples looking for a fix, women—sometimes men—who wanted to indulge their Cyborg fetish once and for all, and single women, homeless and poor, looking for a place to stay and get medical care. The last group stabbed at his cold and bloodless metal heart.
Reid wasn’t a saint but neither was he callous. Those women always left with a recommendation from him for the nearest medical plaza, where they would be treated and taken care of with their expenses paid for by the facility.
They never came back. They never needed to.
He clasped his hands behind his back, stretching his suit tight over his chest; its restraints cut into his freedom. He was different, not because he was a shifter Cyborg, but because he had a tendency to shift into his beast... and never want to shift back.
Reid checked his watch. Fifteen hundred hours. Clara had still yet to leave her vehicle. The projected image of her face burned a hole into his back.
She was a thirty-one-year-old female, unattached, but made a handful of bad choices in her past. She had an ex who had recently been released from prison, a series of venue cancellations, a disturbing history of medical issues and surgeries, and barely a penny left to her name.
Reid tilted his head. There was movement beyond the glare of the vehicle’s windshield. Clara was just what he needed: another woman knocking on his door, another pair of sad eyes to turn away.
He sighed, straightened, and peeled out of his blazer, meticulously smoothing any wrinkles and hanging it behind his office door. He loosened his shirt and unbuttoned the first two clasps at his throat before he cracked his neck and stretched out his fingers.
All this he did while refusing to look at the image of the woman on his wall. He wouldn’t get distracted by soft curves, plush lips twitched up into a smile he could only describe as coy, and big, thickly framed violet eyes.
Violet eyes the color of a downtown metropolis at happy hour. The color of an Elyrian three sunset, each star blending a different purple into the horizon, violet and bottomless, and powerful enough to bring a man to his knees.
He had never seen the like. But he wasn’t a man: he was a Cyborg, and one with a heart encased in steel, frozen by his choice of career. A frozen heart couldn’t beat. At least that’s what he told himself to get through the day. A pair of unusual eyes meant nothing to him.
He chose to ignore that they were plastered on his wall, and returned to his post by the window, knowing that even if Clara Warren were looking straight at him, she wouldn’t be able to see him through the darkly shielded glass.
The land-flyer’s door opened. His finger twitched. You have one more warning, Clara dear. One more.
She stepped out of the vehicle and he loosened another button on his shirt. Reid squinted, honing in on the woman who slowly emerged from the beat-up metal, his scope tech zooming in. His view of her was unhindered except for the hair that breezed across her face.
He wanted to catch a glimpse of her irises. He told himself it wasn’t for their color, or that he cared, but to see if hers were tinged with sadness like the rest.
But her head was bowed low and she’d tugged a pair of sunglasses down her face. She lifted her head as her hair wisped around her cheeks and turned full circle before she faced the facility again, and as she made her way toward him, she kept looking behind her.
Reid trailed her progress. Her skin glistened with a sheen of sweat, and her pulse fluttered like a frightened sparrow.
What’re you looking for, Clara? It made him scan the grounds despite already knowing nothing was there.
Her face tilted up and looked directly at his window. He stiffened regardless of the fact that she couldn’t see him.
One more warning.
She picked up her pace and continued approaching the facility, the flops of her sandals easily heard through the cement and metal barrier between them. His ears pricked despite his carefully feigned indifference, an indifference and cold demeanor that had taken him years to cultivate. He’d frozen his instincts, burying them so deep into his coding it would take an exceptionally skilled hacker to find them.
Reid loosened his cuffs, turned away, and waited to see if she’d heed his final warning.
BEWARE OF DOG
Clara stared at the sign, reading it, and reading it again.
She glanced around her, over the nearly empty parking lot and its steaming asphalt, to the triple-gated fences, along the entrance and exit, but saw no dog, nor any sign that there had ever been one.
She shrugged it off.
She had examined everything within the vicinity of her vehicle, buying her time. Now that she didn’t have any more check stops between her and her destination, she no longer had any reason to turn around.
The decision to contract with CBF would have been infinitely easier if it had been taken out of her hands.
Raising her glasses onto her head, she twisted and glared at her car, half expecting to see her sadistic ex leaning up against it, but it sat alone in all its old glory. It hadn’t broken down like she’d hoped on the way. Instead, it betrayed her and forced her to push through her nervousness. The only obstacle between her and the door was the haze of heat that bathed everything in its path.
That and her own cowardice.
Clara adjusted the shoulder strap of her purse, righted her composure, and walked toward the door. It opened as she neared. The sign vanished behind her.
A blast of air hit her dead in the face, making her cringe. Her skin chilled and in one instant she went from being on the verge of heatstroke to being in danger of frostbite. She rubbed her palms up and down the goosebumps on her arms.
She knew two things: that she was being watched, and that the first step through that door would be the step that turned her life around.
Clara took in the empty reception room.
The interior was white with black metal paneling and floor-to-ceiling glass walls to partition the space. There were two painfully white plastic chairs facing a reception desk that was manned by no one. Behind it and throughout the room were screens displaying fertility information interspersed with moving images of exotic alien locales.
She approached the desk, unsettled that the
only sound in the air was the slaps of her shoes. Everything gleamed, polished to perfection. It was beautiful and stark and... she was completely out of place. Nothing about the entrance room of the facility elicited comfort.
It was utterly dissimilar to the worn cement and barbed wires of the outside, the swirling dust and the scorching heat, where rain hadn’t fallen in over a hundred years.
“Hello?”
Her heart pounded as her question echoed. She looked around, hoping to find an android or another living being rushing to assist her, but it remained silent.
“Hello?” she said louder.
Again, no one answered, but a screen raised from the desk. Clara swallowed as she came upon a questionnaire. There was no tablet to take back to a seat for her to answer in comfort. She straightened her back and refused to be deterred and began answering the dozen or so questions with her fingertip.
Have you had surgery anytime the last twelve months? Specify when and for what purpose. If yes, was the procedure medically necessary, medically advised, elective, or cosmetic? She answered each of them with a hint of boredom. She had done it all before, dozens of times over the past ten years or so, ever since Santino hurt her.
But as she continued, the questions became more direct, more personal. Clara shifted on her feet, now relieved that the room remained empty.
Have you had any miscarriages? If so, how many?
Have you ever had cybernetic surgery? If so, when was it? And for what purpose?
Is this your first time at a breeding facility? If not, where else have you gone?
Clara frowned and stared at the question. There are other breeding facilities?
Are you allergic to sperm?
Have you had sexual relations with an alien?
No. No. No.
Do you have a Cyborg fetish?
Clara stopped. What the?
She wasn't sure if what she was feeling was confusion, concern, or both. She wiped her finger on the side of her jeans as if it needed to be cleaned.
Do I have a Cyborg fetish? She had seen Cyborg-inspired porn on occasion, and had even thought that some of the newer companion androids were attractive. Clara's pulse thrummed every time she saw an image of the Cyborg heroes in the tabloids.