The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1)

by Jessica Meigs

  Scott tucked the card into the pocket with the envelope of cash and nodded. Then he picked up his tumbler of bourbon and tossed the rest of it back, swallowing it down and offering the glass to Damon. “I should get moving, now that I’ve got my marching orders,” he said. “If, of course, you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Damon said. He stood and circled the desk, heading for the door, and Scott followed, already planning his moves even as the director unlocked the office door and let him into the outer office. After returning his electronics to him, Damon said, “Promise me something, Mr. Hunter.”

  “Anything within reason, Director Hartley,” Scott agreed, which drew a small smile from Damon, a smile that was quickly squashed.

  “Good answer.” He paused and looked back at the steel door behind him before saying, “Promise me you will not allow anything to happen to Riley.” Scott looked up at the director then, detecting a note of something else underneath his words, something that was less professional and more personal, like he had a stake in everything that was going on. Damon must have read his expression like a book, because he added, “Like I said before, you’re the only one I can really count on to do what’s necessary to protect her. Everyone else here…they’re going to want to go after her and try to claim that five million dollar prize. I think there’s something more personal there with you two. You trust each other. And that’s imperative if you’re going to keep her alive.”

  “Of course I will,” Scott said, confused by the obvious care that Damon was showing over Riley’s well being. He didn’t get a chance to question anything further, though, because Damon had opened the steel door. Scott stepped through it and, after Damon retrieved his personal effects and returned them, he turned to ask the director another question. But before he could get a word out, the steel door slammed shut, leaving him alone in the vestibule with a dozen unanswered questions swirling through his head.

  ~*~

  Late evening found Zachariah Lawrence sitting in his bedroom’s bay window, wearing a pair of loose black sweats and sipping from a cup of coffee as he watched the sun drop below the horizon. His head was hurting from lack of sleep, but he ignored the ache. He had more important things to do than waste time sleeping; besides, he’d waited all day to see the sun set, and he wasn’t going to miss it because he was stupid enough to sleep.

  Zachariah still hadn’t fully wrapped his mind around the events of the previous days and around his transformation from human to vampire and back again. It certainly hadn’t come without its own effects, though, both physical and psychological. He ran his tongue over the sharp points of his teeth, the fangs that hadn’t gone away with his return to the ranks of humanity. He wasn’t sure how he felt about their presence, but he had no intention of having them filed down like anyone else would. No, they would serve as a reminder to him of everything he’d almost lost trying to serve an organization that didn’t give a shit about him and wouldn’t have hesitated to see him dead.

  At that thought, Zachariah twisted around on the window seat to look at the bed. Ashton lay on his stomach on the bed, barely covered by the sheets, his head half buried underneath the pillow as he slept. He hadn’t moved a fraction since Zachariah had gotten out of bed an hour before, hadn’t budged while he’d made coffee, and hadn’t woken when he’d tried his poor attempt at cleaning the bedroom. He’d decided to leave him be and let him sleep. Physically, Ashton was still recovering from the hell he’d been put through courtesy of Brandon Hall, and even where he sat, Zachariah could still see the pattern of bruises that marred his already scarred torso. The sight of them was enough to inflame his anger all over again, and he clenched his fingers around his coffee mug hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He released the mug before he broke it and set it gingerly onto the window seat. Squeezing his eyes shut, he blew out a breath and abandoned his drink in favor of sliding to his feet. With one last glance at Ashton’s sleeping figure, he turned away from the bedroom and headed to the bathroom. He was still in need of a shower, having decided to forego one in favor of spending time with Ashton, and he worried that he was starting to smell.

  Zachariah staggered to the sink and turned the water on, and he got his first real look at himself in the mirror since before everything had gone down. Jesus, was that really him? He looked awful. His almost shoulder-length black hair was tangled and twisted, running wild everywhere; and his skin was entirely too pale, giving him an anemic, unhealthy appearance, emphasized by the dark circles under his eyes. He ran his fingertips underneath his right eye, as if the darkness were makeup that he could simply wipe off, and scowled, which only served to reveal the tips of his fangs. He grimaced further, pulling his lips away from his teeth to see them better. Unable to resist, he flicked the pad of his thumb against the point of one. It broke the skin easily, and a bead of blood welled to the surface. He licked it off without thinking about it and then remembered the running water. After splashing frigid water onto his face, he turned the faucet off and focused on the shower.

  Five minutes later, he was under the spray, which was cranked up as hot as he could stand it. He stood under the rain of water, hunched over and shivering. Shock, he realized as water sluiced down over his hair, plastering it against the back of his neck and the sides of his face. I’m going into shock. It was the kind of shock he’d been through before, after Ashton had rescued him from a torture pit in Bolivia three years before. It was the kind of shock where his brain was decompressing, no longer running on the adrenaline high it had been on during the fight, and comprehending just how close to death he’d come.

  He touched his stomach and chest, feeling the raised knots of scar tissue where Brandon’s secretary’s bullets had struck him while he’d been immortal, and bile rose in his throat.

  “Oh God, I could have died,” he said out loud, testing the sound of the words, the feeling of them against his tongue. They struck the tiles of the shower stall and rebounded back to him. “I almost died.”

  His stomach felt like it cramped then, and he hunched over further as a sob exploded from his throat, loud and barking, amplified by the acoustics of the tiled stall. He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, panting, fighting back the cries that threatened to follow, as they did every time he’d been on an assignment that had come close to being his last. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenching his teeth, feeling the sharp dagger-like fangs cutting into the inside of his lip. He embraced the pain, letting it remind him that he was, in fact, still alive.

  There was a thud somewhere in the apartment, and a surge of alarm that wasn’t his own rippled through him. Ashton, he recognized. Then the bathroom door slammed open, like the person entering the room wanted to give him plenty of warning. The shower stall’s glass door slid open with a swish, letting in a blast of cold air, and then a pair of arms wrapped around him, hauling him upright and embracing him tightly against a strong chest. Zachariah let himself be held, just like he’d let himself wallow in the momentary lapse of control.

  “What’s wrong?” Ashton asked after a long silence that he’d spent rubbing his hands along Zachariah’s spine in slow, soothing motions. When Zachariah found that he couldn’t get the words out, Ashton added, “Is it the usual?”

  Zachariah hated that he even had a post-assignment “usual.” His continual breakdowns after his rough assignments were wearing on him, and he was worried that eventually, they’d take their toll and he’d have a complete mental meltdown. Not to mention the strain it was going to one day put on his and Ashton’s relationship, which was stable and comfortable and normal compared to everything else in their lives. He gently disengaged from Ashton’s arms and backed up a step, his shoulders colliding with the water-warmed tile behind him. He closed his eyes for another moment, breathing in the humid air through his nose and exhaling heavily. Then he forced out the words that had been stirring in his mind for at least the past six months, words that had become truer with every passing assignment, words th
at would get him into serious trouble if they were ever repeated outside of the sanctity of his shower. “I want out.”

  “Out?” Ashton repeated. “Of the shower?”

  Zachariah made himself look at him. Ashton’s expression was a mixture of confusion and worry. “No, out of this life.”

  Ashton’s expression switched to stunned and horrified. “Zach—”

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t mean it like that,” Zachariah said. He waved a hand between them. “This? This I can do. This I want to do. It’s probably the only good thing I’ve ever had going for me.” He let out a slow, tired sigh. “I just…I don’t want to do this job anymore. I can’t.”

  Ashton’s eye was wide with surprise at his declaration. “Well, if you want out of the Unnaturals, I’m sure we can arrange a transfer—”

  “I don’t want a fucking transfer,” he interrupted, trying his best to not snap at him. “I want out.”

  “Out?” Ashton repeated. His voice was a hushed whisper.

  “Yes, out,” Zachariah said again. “I want…” He trailed off, leaning over again, bracing his hands on his knees and hanging his head. “I’m twenty-eight years old, Ash. Twenty-eight, and I feel like an old man. I’ve been beaten, shot, stabbed, tortured, nearly drowned, raped, turned into a vampire and back, and almost killed multiple times, and I’ve developed new and interesting psychoses that are probably undocumented, and for what? A bunch of assholes that couldn’t give a shit about me or about what happens to me. I’m sick of it, Ash. I’m just…sick of it.” His shoulders sagged, and he asked in a voice that sounded broken even to him, “What the fuck did I do to myself?”

  Ashton’s hands were on his arms again, forcing him to stand up straight. Grasping Zachariah’s head gently in his hands, Ashton tilted it back so the water poured over his hair and said gruffly, “Keep talking.”

  Zachariah obeyed, letting it all pour out as the sound of a bottle being opened reached his ears and the scent of his shampoo brushed against his nose. “I’m tired, Ash. I feel like I’ve been misled. Cheated. They don’t tell you about this shit when they recruit you. They make it sound like some wonderful, great, fun thing to do in service of your country or whatever the fuck catchphrases they use now to sucker people in. It’s only after you’ve already put pen to contract that you find out the job is pretty much Hell on earth, and then when it comes time to re-up, you’re given no choice on whether or not to continue working for the assholes because they basically say they’ll kill you if you don’t sign the contract. Slavery is what it is.”

  There was silence between them as Ashton burrowed his shampoo-covered fingers into his wet hair. He closed his eyes tighter and leaned his head further into the fingers massaging his scalp. As the shampoo’s scent got stronger, his tense muscles loosened, easing off from the tightness that he hadn’t realized had settled in them. Ashton continued massaging his scalp until he was practically putty in his hands, and it was only then that Ashton spoke. “So what do you propose doing then?” His hands slid out of his hair, grazing along his neck and over his chest, and Zachariah dipped his head back to rinse the suds from his strands.

  “Leave,” Zachariah said simply. “What else can I do? There isn’t any other way out.” He finished rinsing his hair and opened his eyes to gauge his partner’s reaction. Ashton was looking back at him with his single good eye, his bright blue gaze boring into him as he seemed to be attempting to read his mind.

  Finally, Ashton heaved a sigh and ran a hand through his short hair, cutting his eye away from Zachariah and onto the tile surrounding them. “You’re proposing going rogue. You realize that, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m aware.”

  “They’re going to come after us, you know.”

  “I know—wait, us?” Zachariah said, interrupting himself as he realized what Ashton had said.

  “You’re fooling yourself if you think I’m going to let you take off by yourself,” Ashton said.

  “You…you can’t go with me,” he protested. “You have an entire life here, and someone has to run the Unnaturals—”

  “I don’t have a life here, Zach,” Ashton interrupted. “I just exist. I lived in that building surrounded by nothing but work. I immersed myself in work because I didn’t have anything else, not even a family or a life—or any memory of a family or a life—outside of work that I could go to. My life is nothing but work, and the only time I ever feel remotely alive is when I’m with you.” His hand lightly brushed against Zachariah’s jaw, and Zachariah closed his eyes and leaned into the touch once more. “Besides,” he added, “the Agency can always find someone else to put in charge. I’m not the end-all-be-all of the organization, you know.”

  “But you’ll be marked for death.”

  “So will you.” Ashton reached past him and turned the water off, then leaned outside the shower stall and snagged a couple of towers from the towel bar, passing one to Zachariah. “Someone has to watch your back, though, and keep you out of trouble. I figure that someone should be me.”

  Zachariah clutched the thick white towel so tightly that his fingers hurt. Ashton was really willing to do this? To leave a life he’d been heavily involved with for thirteen years—literally the only life he actually knew—to help him and put his life on the line in the process? Though he’d known that Ashton was in love with him and had been for a long time, practically since they’d met three years before in Prague, he’d have never imagined that the man’s feelings ran so deeply that he was willing to abandon his life to help him.

  Zachariah was still staring at the man in silent amazement when the sound of a buzzer rang out through the apartment. Both of them startled and looked toward the bathroom door, and a frown crossed Ashton’s face. “You expecting anyone?”

  “No, not that I’m aware of.” Zachariah quickly dried off and wrapped the towel around his waist before slipping past Ashton and stepping into the apartment proper. As the buzzer rang again, he scooped a pistol off a small table in the entryway, checked that it was loaded and the safety was off, and peered through the peephole.

  “Who is it?” Ashton asked. Zachariah glanced back to see the other man standing in the hall by the bathroom door, similarly covered by a towel with a pistol in his hand.

  “Where did you get that gun?” he asked.

  “It was in your linen closet,” Ashton answered. “So who is it?”

  Zachariah looked out again and finally caught a glimpse of the face belonging to the figure standing outside his apartment door. He re-engaged the safety on his pistol and set it on the table by the door. “It’s Scott Hunter,” he reported, unfastening the locks on the door.

  “Hi,” Scott greeted once Zachariah had wrangled all five of the door’s locks and gotten the door open. “I need your help.”

  About the Author

  Jessica Meigs is the author of The Becoming, a post-apocalyptic thriller series that follows a group of people trying to survive a massive viral outbreak in the southeastern United States. After gaining notoriety for having written the series on a variety of BlackBerry smartphones, she self-published two novellas that now make up the first book in the series. In April 2011, she accepted a deal with Permuted Press to publish The Becoming as a series of novels. The first of the series, entitled The Becoming, was released in November 2011 and was named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Zombie Fiction Releases of the Decade by reviewer Paul Goat Allen. Five more novels and an assortment of novellas followed.

  The Unnaturals is the first book in The Unnaturals Series. Five more books will be released in the coming years.

  Jessica lives in semi-obscurity in Demopolis, Alabama. When she’s not writing, she works full time as an EMT. She can be found on Twitter @JessicaMeigs, on Facebook at facebook.com/JessicaMeigs, and on Goodreads at goodreads.com/JessicaMeigs. You can also visit her website at www.jessicameigs.com.

  Jessica is represented by Hannah Brown Gordon of Foundry Literary + Media. For any rights inquiries, ple
ase contact Hannah at HGordon@foundrymedia.com.