The Glamour Thieves

by Donald Allmmon

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 1537

  Burnsville, NC 28714

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  The Glamour Thieves

  Copyright © 2017 by Don Allmon

  Cover art: Simoné, dreamarian.com

  Editor: Sarah Lyons

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at marketing@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-615-6

  First edition

  August, 2017

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-616-3

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  JT is an orc on the way up. He’s got his own boutique robotics shop, high-end clientele, and deep-pocketed investors. He’s even mentoring an orc teen who reminds him a bit too much of himself back in the day.

  Then Austin shows up, and the elf’s got the same hard body and silver tongue as he did two years ago when they used to be friends and might have been more. He’s also got a stolen car to bribe JT to saying yes to one last scheme: stealing the virtual intelligence called Blue Unicorn.

  Soon JT’s up to his tusks in trouble, and it ain’t just zombies and Chinese triads threatening to tear his new life apart. Austin wants a second chance with JT—this time as more than just a friend—and even the Blue Unicorn is trying to play matchmaker.

  To Barb

  About The Glamour Thieves

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Don Allmon

  About the Author

  More like this

  Austin Shea was wearing the same damn Sanzi wraparound sunglasses and blue-and-green-flowered Hawaiian shirt he’d been wearing the last time JT had seen him. The same khaki pants, tight through the crotch and thighs, loose through the legs. Same shoeless feet like he was a druid and couldn’t lose touch with the ground without losing his power, which was almost true.

  Austin took the sunglasses off, and his eyes glittered under the Arizona sky like gold-flecked emeralds. He let the glasses dangle from his fingers as he draped his arms over the winged-open door of the Corvette Dawnstrike FX27. He cocked his head and smiled his winning smile, lopsided. That meant he was about to lie his ass off.

  “Hey, JT,” he said. “Been a while. Nice place ya got here.”

  JT’s place: The yard was filled with recyclable scrap plastics and metals like it was a junkyard. The work sheds were prefab, and all of it was surrounded by a turreted wall that made the place look like a prison. There were a dozen urban-support vehicles all lined up in a row being prepped for shipping. Four-legged robots the size of Great Danes crawled among them, polishing. The air smelled of paint and desert heat.

  JT folded his arms. “My place makes you trespassing. Get off my land.”

  The smile didn’t let up. “I missed ya. You’re looking good.”

  JT’s looks: Baggy overalls covered in axle grease and transmission fluid. Plastic baseball cap stained with six years of sweat that smashed his Mohawked hair down and made his green ears stick out even more than usual. He hadn’t shaved in four days.

  JT nodded at the car. “Who’d you steal that from?”

  “I didn’t ask his name.”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “Fine. Go ahead. Christ. I can’t even say hi.”

  They both turned away simultaneously, like they were reverse images of each other—an expression of frustration one had learned from the other, and who could say which one had done it first?

  Neither of them moved. JT didn’t call the police.

  The Corvette was a coupe on the old design. It was painted Event Horizon Black, same color they were using these days for stealth tech. Illegal in Pacifica. The car was rumored to get six hundred KPH on the magway, plenty of speed to make paste of yourself if you made a mistake. It was an off-balance kind of car, took the right touch to drive—a better touch than Austin had. It took a touch like JT had.

  Just knowing that car was there, not even having to see it, made JT’s blood pump a little bit faster. Seeing it, yeah, JT went a little hard. And no, none of that had anything to do with Austin standing there, hair too long and falling over his eyes, long knife-ears swept back and pale in the sun, long, hard-muscled arm draped over the upturned wing of the open door. And thank god for baggy overalls, or Austin might have seen JT hard—might have thought it was him JT was hard for and gotten all kinds of wrongheaded ideas. It was the car, JT told himself. Only the car.

  “You can’t bribe me with a stolen car, Austin.”

  “Ain’t no need.”

  “Because whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”

  “Don’t want nothing, JT,” Austin said, the damned liar.

  JT rubbed his hands on his coveralls, except now they were just as filthy as his hands, so he stripped out of them and left them lying there on the pavement, blue jeans and a Nochi’iru Kitty T-shirt underneath. He touched the fender of the car the same way old Catholics touched statues of the Virgin Mary, except there was nothing virgin about this car here.

  JT circled around, and Austin circled around like they needed to keep the car between them. And maybe they did. JT slid into the driver’s seat, and Austin slid into the passenger’s side. The seat molded to JT’s broader frame and shorter legs, and still the cabin was a bit cramped. Had he been any bigger, he wouldn’t have fit. They never sized the nice cars for orc bodies. Orcs never got anything nice.

  Austin said, “It’s unlocked.”

  JT tapped the wireless key and initiated the handshake between his neurals and the car’s brain. “How did you even steal this thing? This is state-of-the-art. You shouldn’t have gotten five blocks without a police lockdown.”

  “I’m not helpless.”

  “How’d you do it?”

  Austin ignored him, evasive as always.

 
Controls passed to JT’s neurals, and his senses bled into the car’s nav array. High-end as this array was, it took less than a second for the additional senses to integrate, all sliding together like oiled glass. He let out a shaky sigh. His sense of self slipped, a bit of vertigo, and now the car and his body were all one thing. He could feel the car’s engine the same way he could feel his own heartbeat. The dash lit with hologram displays. JT didn’t need them, but not many people had the built-in tech to the extent he had.

  Austin jutted his chin out. “You aren’t going to comment on my beard?” What Austin called a “beard” was a patch of short dark peach fuzz on the point of his chin. It tapered out along the edge of his jaw.

  “How long did it take you to grow?” JT kept it icy because he sure as hell didn’t want Austin thinking this car was going to work on him.

  “Two years. Started it right after you left.”

  “I suppose it just grew in like that. Didn’t have to trim it or shape it or anything.”

  “Well, yes.”

  JT shook his head. “Fucking elves.”

  “You’re bound and determined not to pay me a compliment. You know I said you were looking good. Second thing I said to you.”

  “But not the first thing. You don’t need me to stroke your ego.”

  “Returning a compliment, it’s only polite.”

  “Fine. You look like an elf. You’re gorgeous. Same as every other elf.”

  “I’m going to pretend you meant that sincerely. Thank you. I’ve been working out.” Austin flexed a biceps, rock-hard and scar covered.

  “You have not.”

  “No, I haven’t. It’s all genetic.” He looked out the window. “So I fucked a guy until he fell in love with me and gave me the code to his car.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s true. I’m a very good fuck.”

  “I ain’t fucking you.”

  “I ain’t this, I ain’t that—that’s all I’m hearing from you. When did you get so negative?”

  JT laid his heavy hands on the dash and sighed. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to drive this car. The way it’s supposed to be driven, not the half-assed way I drive it.”

  JT threw the Corvette into gear using nothing but his mind—that and the quarter million dollars’ worth of electronics inside his skull and down his spine. They coasted the lane that led to the highway, JT getting used to the touchy controls. It was like waking from a cramped sleep, all your limbs numb and not working like they should, overshooting some marks and undershooting others, and a growing tingle that was almost painful, neural pathways forged and opening. And slowly, slowly, the tingle went away and you remembered, Oh, this is how you walk.

  He opened a channel to Dante and said aloud, “Dante, goin’ out for a bit. Keep an eye on the place.”

  “Gotcha, boss,” came Dante’s voice back. “Who’s that you’re with?”

  “No one important.” JT cut the signal.

  “Girlfriend?” Austin teased.

  JT rolled his eyes at the thought. “Apprentice.”

  “You’re teaching her how to steal cars?”

  “Teaching her how to build them.”

  “An apprentice. How old-fashioned and responsible of you.”

  “I got a business, Austin. A good business. A legitimate business. I got investors. Important people with a shitload of cash and two shitloads of influence. I don’t need that old life anymore. I’m done with it.”

  “And yet here you are with me in a stolen car. It would be just like old times if you were wearing a few less clothes.”

  They pulled onto the magway. It was a black expanse a hundred meters wide, stretching east to west until it vanished over the horizon. Embedded beneath the surface of the tarmac was a series of focused electromagnets, the whole thing nothing more than twelve magnetic bobsled channels running side to side. Theoretically safe as daisies.

  JT flipped the mag array and tucked his wheels up, bouncing a bit as the two fields settled against each other. His heart was thumping hard and fast, knowing what was coming. “Ready?”

  “Born.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  For several seconds the car crept forward as if nothing had happened. Coriolis drift.

  JT acquired twenty new senses he hadn’t had fifteen minutes ago: radar, gravimetrics, magnetic fields down to the planetary, weight distribution and balance because he was centimeters off the ground and now moving at one hundred KPH so smoothly probably Austin didn’t even know that. One bad dip to the side and it would throw them out of the mag-channel.

  Finally, acceleration you could feel. One hundred fifty. Two hundred. One G and the memory foam was resetting, adding lumbar support, pushing back.

  Look at Austin. Austin’s nose with that break at the bridge; those long, swept-back ears he was so bitchy about back when JT would try to bite them; lips, slightly parted, goddess, those lips; that chin with its stupid peach-fuzz beard and how would that feel rubbed on JT’s balls? Austin’s head was pressed back into the seat, and he was grinning and panting like he was getting sucked off on a roller coaster ride.

  Three hundred KPH. Four hundred. Five.

  JT could feel the pressure all the way through him, all the way from tip to tailfin. He could feel wind pass over his sleek plastic body. It hugged him and circled him. There was no reason for pressure sensors on the surface of the car except to let the driver feel the sliding grip of the air. And he was fully hard now and probably leaking, it felt that good. This was what you got in a car that cost over one million: you got a car like sex.

  Outside in the distance ran a herd of horses the Apache had reintroduced, racing the car. Austin cheered them on. He was whooping and shouting and shaking his head. His feet pounded the floorboard. JT couldn’t help but smile and let go a long, satisfied growl, Austin’s joy infectious. They were both of them kids again, both of them stupid. This was how to run: six hundred KPH and ten centimeters of air between you and dying. And this infectious joy, this was Austin’s glamour all over again, reaching out to JT, stroking him with memories of how it once had been. Once upon a time, something like this would have left them wrestling in the seats to see who went down on the other while the world outside flashed by.

  Back when JT was a car thief and Austin an asshole more than anything else (which honestly wasn’t much different than today), and Grayson and Roan were still living, Bell Anderson had sent them all out with a case of beer and a dime of weed to get to know each other better. She wanted her new team to have a sense of camaraderie, she’d said.

  Three hours later and they’d been parked on the top floor of a San Francisco parking garage having a picnic at 3 a.m. JT and Austin were lying in the bed of the truck, beer bottles in hand, looking up where there should have been stars but the city lights made the sky nothing. Some gala-something or maybe a prison break swept a spotlight over the sky, and their eyes tracked that like it was something interesting. Roan and Grayson were going at it in the cab hard enough to make the truck rock sometimes. Roan was Austin’s sister, but he didn’t seem to mind he could hear her fucking. He’d laugh when the rocking got too frantic and the empties in the truck bed rolled around. JT eventually worked up the nerve to laugh along with him, and that took some of the tension out of the air.

  And only because he was drunk, JT had said, “Don’t you got any self-respect at all?”

  “Generally, I find it gets in my way. Is there something specific you don’t like about me?”

  “The bow-and-arrow thing. Don’t you think a bow is a bit stereotypical? Don’t you think we got enough problems without people looking at you and saying, ‘Oh look, elves really do carry bows’?”

  “I’m better with that bow than most people are with a gun. And let me tell you, there’s the stereotype and then there’s me doing the stereotype, because when I’m doing it, people forget they ever seen it before, that’s how goddamn good I am.” He mimed dr
awing a bow, aimed at a spotlighted cloud, and snapped his fingers open. He looked perplexed that the light didn’t go out. “You wanna talk stereotypes, let’s talk stereotypes. Is it true orc vaginas got teeth?”

  “That’s an urban legend, not a stereotype.”

  “That’s an evasion, not an answer.”

  “How am I supposed to know? When have I ever seen one?”

  “You’ve seen one.”

  “Not up close for real.”

  “Not even just being curious?”

  “And how am I supposed to do that? ‘’Scuse me, can I see your vagina? It’s okay; it’s for science’?” He took a swig of beer. “I heard elf jizz tastes like cotton candy.”

  “It does. Mine tastes like strawberries. Better than orc jizz. Orc jizz is green and tastes like old toilet water.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “That’s what I know. I’ve fucked an orc before.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the first thing they tell you. Don’t fuck orcs. They’re just as likely to kill you as get you off. Contusions. Ruptured spleens—”

  JT snorted.

  “I’m serious. So first thing we all do, of course, is fuck us an orc. Just the once. And then we know better, firsthand. Green toilet jizz.”

  “No elf’s ever fucked me,” JT said, as if that was evidence Austin was lying.

  “Maybe that’s because you’re ass ugly.” Austin hiked himself up on his side and set his nose only centimeters away from JT’s. He swayed a little, drunkenly, his eyes glittering as if they caught light from somewhere, but JT knew it was just a trick of the elf’s glamour.

  Austin’s breath was warm and smelled sour from beer. He had a drunken mischievous smile, so goddess-blessed pretty in a haphazard, hard-edged way, with his tousled black hair and a once-broken nose. Annoying how an elf could take a broken nose and make it perfect. But that was the glamour too, wasn’t it, because JT liked broken-up men.

  “So what did he do to you?” JT asked.

  “Who?”

  “This orc you fucked.”

  “The first one? Broke two ribs.” Austin was only a centimeter away now, whispering, each consonant a puff of breath on JT’s lips, and JT was pressed as hard into the bed of the truck as he could have been, cornered like he was afraid of this beautiful man.