The suit said something that sounded Russian, but after a second I realized he’d said, “Bring her,” with a heavy accent. I frowned, hating anyone talking about me as if I wasn’t in the room.
“Go,” Asher barked into the back of my head.
I jumped. It took a bit of silent convincing to make my legs work, but I finally started toward the group. Walking in front of Asher had been bad enough. Now I wobbled like a newborn deer testing out my legs on greased ice. Stupid shoes.
None of them seemed particularly happy to have me there, all wearing blank, bored, or angry expressions. Sophia urged me forward with a subtle wave. Why were they so pissed? Or was a bad temperament some prerequisite to work for the Mortal Machine? It made sense. Either that or it was a crappy place to work. Considering what the job description entailed, it seemed the most likely answer. Another reason why I didn’t belong with them.
The group opened like a noose and waited for me to crawl inside, Asher at my back, before cinching tight around us again. He moved by me, his posture rigid, and stopped before the suit. As Sophia had done to him, Asher held his arms snug against his sides and bowed, quick and sharp.
“Colonel, I present to the Mortal Machine a new candidate to be judged,” he said.
“I’m not a candidate for anything,” I blurted. Asher turned slowly to glare at me. I shut up.
“This is her?” The Colonel’s eyes were a tad brighter and colder than Asher’s. The Colonel stared at me the way a guy would greet a wart-ridden spinster who showed up as his blind date, brow arched, lips pinched. His mouse-brown businessman haircut had so much gel, it appeared to be a plastic cap.
Asher gave a quick nod, military precision and efficiency at its best. “We must speak before the votes are cast.”
The Colonel traced me up and down. His frown deepened. “It had better be something extraordinary you have to tell, or I’ll take it out of your hide for risking a gathering for this … this … woman.” The accent seemed to fade the more he talked. Weird. He flicked his fingers in my direction.
“Outfitter,” Asher said, “do not fail me.”
I caught a glimpse of Sophia at the edge of the crowd to my right. She paled a little before doing that abrupt bow thing. What was that all about?
Asher and the Colonel fuzzed around the edges before pulling a Houdini and vanishing. Huh. There’s something you didn’t see every day. Was that what it had looked like when Asher brought me here? Had I disappeared like that? I had to admit it was kind of cool compared to most things on my weird-shit-o-meter.
Most of the others meandered off into the room, talking among themselves. Their darting glances back at me suggested the topic of conversation. Awkward.
I caught an Aussie accent on a sentinel with shaggy brown-sugar hair who was parked on one of the sofas, yakking with a guy with heart-of-Africa skin. The tallest Asian guy I’d ever seen propped up the wall beside them, thin as a whip and probably just as sharp given how his attention seemed to latch on to every speck of movement in the room.
In my peripheral vision, a woman wearing a black sentinel uniform flipped out white-blonde hair you couldn’t get from a bottle. It fell like a spill of silk around her shoulders, long and sleek. The rest were guys, but one glance told me she’d been cut from the same cloth as the rest.
Back in front of the mirror, I’d been impressed with how good I looked, but the sight of her made me feel like Little Orphan Annie dressed in rags. And she wasn’t even in a dress. Whatever. Feeling like a frumpy bag lady landed pretty low on my priority list at the moment.
With Asher out of sight and nobody paying particular interest in me, other than Sophie who glared at the floor, I moved through the little people-huddles toward the door. I wasn’t going to leave, but with all of the hate in the room coming in my direction, I’d feel safer near the exit.
Before I made it out of the room, Sophia rushed past me and stretched her arms across the archway into the anteroom, bracing as if she expected me to pull a Mike Tyson on her. Even if I had the nerve to and the know-how, I kind of liked her.
“I wasn’t leaving, really,” I whispered. Too many ears in the room. I glanced back. Many eyes stared at me, suddenly full of interest. They could all bite my lily-white butt.
She sagged, exhaling hard. “Thank goodness for that. If you’d made me choose, I wasn’t sure which way I’d go.”
I rubbed my hands over my stomach just to feel the silk of the gloves sliding over my palms and calmed down a notch. “Choose what? What are you talking about?”
“I like you, Addison, but I’m afraid of Asher more.”
Oh. Ohhhh, crap. “If I’d left, he would have made your life even more hellish.”
She laughed, a deranged burst of sound that made me afraid for her sanity more than mine, and that was saying something. “That’s the understatement of the century.”
Bastard. “That’s why he let you come, isn’t it? He knew I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble, so he brought you to use against me. One more nail in my coffin, is that it?”
Her lunatic grin vanished. “Yeah, I just figured that out, too.”
“So by failing him, he meant you couldn’t let me leave.”
Nodding, she suddenly stiffened. “Among other things. Get behind me.”
I did as she asked, turning to see what had made her pale, and found a man wearing one of the black sentinel uniforms. “Back off, Marcus,” she warned. “Touch her, and Asher will snap you like a Christmas cracker.”
That brought an image of Asher grabbing the guy’s arm and leg and pulling really hard. Which tore a batch of giggles from my throat. Marcus grinned back at me. So this was the guy that made Asher squirm? It gave me a little thrill of glee that something could.
I had to admit Marcus was kind of cute for a psychotic assassin wraith hunter. He had sun-kissed hair, keeping it on the blond side of brown. It wasn’t long or short, but somewhere in between, curled up a little. As I said, cute. He pulled off one of those fresh-out-of-bed looks, mussed up a bit.
My cheeks warmed as he stared at me. The book said all sentinels had the same strange eyes: the brighter the color, the stronger the sentinel. Marcus’s were both bluer and greener than Asher’s, explaining why he had one more golden pin on his collar. His were pretty as opposed to beautiful, too surreal and otherworldly for me to accept them as anything other than little bits of artwork on his face.
Everything about him, that boyish smile, the lazy movements, all screamed innocent, harmless. If I didn’t know what he was, a sentinel of the Machine, I might have bought it. Since meeting Asher, I knew better. The danger contained in Marcus’s bronzed skin posed even more of a threat because of how disarming the packaging appeared to be.
“What’s got your panties in a twist, Outfitter?” he asked with a hint of good ol’ country-boy charm, the grin still firmly in place. Maybe it never left him, like permanent camouflage. It was certainly an improvement over Asher’s perpetual scowl. “Since when are you Asher’s go-girl?”
“Her name’s Sophia,” I said, smiling wide when he did. It was unnerving how I mirrored him, like a snake aping her charmer. I stopped smiling. His grew wider.
“There’s nothing wrong with my panties, and I’m not his anything,” Sophia said, her tremors growing worse. A knot of guilt tried to bisect my stomach. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be caught between two dangerous idiots. I just had to go and open my big mouth and demand Asher let her come. “Just stay the hell back, and we won’t have a problem,” she said.
I finally clued in that the “among other things” that would make Asher do something nasty to Sophia involved the boy next door. “What do you want?”
“You need to wonder why I wanted to meet a beautiful woman?” he asked, staring right at me.
Oh jeez, really? That was the worst line I’d ever heard. So why did my face suddenly burn as if it had been flash-fried? “Somehow I don’t think you’re impressed by small-town plaid with the ice
princess over there sharing my air,” I said.
He leaned back and glanced over his shoulder, pausing for a moment as if really taking her in, before focusing those pretty eyes back on me. “You mean Kat? She might look like a woman, but she’s just a guy without a penis.”
I blushed harder. I wasn’t used to guys naming their body parts in public. Prude? Yes, I guess I am.
Sophia snorted. “I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear you say so,” she said.
Marcus took advantage of her amusement and skirted around her. “Addison,” he said in a so-soft, dark voice that rivaled Asher’s for whispers-in-the-dark quality, only Marcus’s had more of a bedroom darkness than a monster-under-the-bed sort. “Lovely name. Strong name.”
I swallowed, staring past him at Sophia, who struggled behind him. It took me a second to realize he’d grabbed her wrist and held her behind his back. Being so small, she didn’t have much of a chance against him.
“Let her go,” I said. “And I thought nobody was allowed to touch.”
“I’m not touching her skin, only her uniform, which I can do all day long if I want to, since I outrank her. And if she promises to go away, I’ll let her go.” Through that honey-sweet charm and those harmless good looks, the predator peeked through. I had no doubt I’d find a gun if I felt his jacket, too, and he’d make no more beans about using it than Asher. Only it would be that boyish grin you’d see last before a bullet exploded your skull. Creepy. Why didn’t he just order her away? Then she’d have to go, right? Maybe he just enjoyed watching her struggle.
“You know I can’t do that,” she said, grunting, her foot propped against his butt as she tried to pry herself free. I didn’t want her to hurt herself, and I had to admit, a small part of me wanted her to go and get Asher. The monster you know is better than the one you don’t, and all that.
The way Marcus carried himself, loose and swaggering, had made me overlook the potential in that body. I had no doubt he could twist Sophia like a pipe cleaner. “It’s okay, Sophia. He’s just flexing his charm. I’m not impressed, and I don’t think he’ll shoot me in the middle of a crowd, so just go, okay?” I didn’t want her to go and leave me with the cute monster, but I couldn’t stand there and watch her burst a vein.
Marcus dragged her around until she stood nose to nose with him. They stared at one another for seconds until she finally winced and nodded. The Machine’s version of “uncle,” I guessed. She shot me a sympathetic gaze before trudging a few feet away, shoulders hunched. Why wasn’t she going to get Asher? Oh, right, he’d gone off with the Colonel. Shit.
“Alone at last, sort of,” Marcus said, backing me flat against the door. Like Asher, he’d made the words sound more obscene than they should have, more suited to pillow talk than casual chatter. “You are a breath of fresh air. So unlike the rest of us.”
I squirmed at his closeness, the sense of intimacy his body language implied even when he was just standing in front of me. “Yeah, and thank God for that. But for curiosity’s sake, what do you mean?”
Still grinning, he pressed his palm against the door, bringing him that tiny bit closer. “We were all similar in what we wanted before we came here, in our personalities. Dominant, greedy, lusting for power or status in one way or another. But you … you I don’t understand yet. You’re a rabbit quivering in a corner of the wolf den, yet … there’s something about you, a storm alive just under your skin. It calls to me, as if I could reach out and bring it forth.” He extended his hand toward me. For a second, I just watched, wanting him to touch me, before remembering what Sophia said about that soldier girl dying.
A mere inch from him making contact, I darted away and made for the rest of the strangers. I walked backward, sliding right by Sophia. He might have been on the adorable side of handsome, but I didn’t want him at my back. Baby tigers were cute, too, but they could still rip you to pieces.
“I think you maybe forgot your meds this morning, but thanks anyway. I’m just going back over here. Coming, Sophia?” I couldn’t believe I was stuck schmoozing with a bunch of sociopaths while Dad could be in danger. And everyone else, too. Shouldn’t everyone have been pulling wraiths out of people? Or collecting intel or some junk?
Sophia stood between us again, no less alarmed than before.
“This is the first time the pattern of recruitment has been broken,” he said, and for once, he wasn’t smiling. “There’s no hardness to you. No malice. Yet you’re no mere soldier, that’s for sure.”
“We both know I don’t belong here, like, at all.”
“That’s the big question we need to answer tonight, isn’t it?” He went back to smiling, brewing up some devious little nugget of thought I couldn’t begin to guess at. “In the sixty-some-odd years I’ve served the Machine, you are the biggest puzzle I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering.”
Couldn’t have heard that right. “How old are you?”
“I was recruited when I was twenty.”
I squinted at him. An urge to grope his uniform had my fingers tingling. I still couldn’t wrap my head around immortality. “But you still look twenty.”
“As I always will.”
I jerked back a little as if that news flash had come with the sonic boom of a grenade. I imagined my face had that freshly-struck-by-a-hammer look pasted on it. Yep, I just needed to get away from here and have a little sleep. And maybe some meds of my own. I wanted Dad, wanted his arms around me. Even when the walls were unraveling around us, I still felt safe with him.
“You look pretty spry for an eighty-year-old, Marcus,” I said.
He roared with laughter. Even that sounded intimate. Before I’d met a sentinel, a guy had never made me blush.
“What’s so funny?” That voice. Not like Asher’s terror in the dark, or Marcus’s 1-900 tenor, but an angry vibrato that could have shaved Asher’s shadow beard off with its razor edge. I knew before looking over my shoulder it would be the ice princess. I looked. It was her all right, and she didn’t appear any less lethal close-up.
I found myself hoping harder that Asher would come back soon. Good-bye, sweet sanity, if Asher had become the lesser of the evils in the room.
Chapter 12
Sophia put herself between me and Kat. It seemed entirely wrong to let someone smaller than me act as my protector, but I didn’t want to insult her by saying so.
Marcus stood beside the ice princess. She came up to his chin, but she seemed much larger than him. I began to see what he meant about her being a guy with boobs, finding the hardness he’d mentioned in her posture and the tight lines of her body. If you didn’t look at her cold, pale eyes, the jade star barely noticeable, she was drop-dead gorgeous. The instant those eyes came into play, though, it sucked all of the pretty out of her.
“I said, what’s so funny?” Kat asked, and at first my mind couldn’t decipher what she’d said, but after a second, I figured out she was speaking with some sort of accent, maybe eastern European. “This is dangerous and a waste of our time. I find nothing funny about that.”
When I stopped shivering under her nasty voice, I said, “I didn’t ask to be here, so stop staring at me like this is my fault.”
“Shut it,” Sophia ground out. Tension turned her into a tuning fork. For what? Were we about to get into a fight? Part of me thought, that’s kind of cool, before I remembered they all had guns, and I probably couldn’t defend myself from an infant.
“It means,” Marcus said, “that Kat’s already afraid you’ll outrank her if the vote goes in favor of making you one of us. She’s our only female sentinel, and just barely at that.”
Oh, balls. The stare she shot him would have melted me into the wall, and I was damn glad she pointed it at him and not me.
It didn’t shock me that was what they were voting on, but I still didn’t know what happened if they voted against it. “Look, Kat, I’ve got no designs on your rank or anything. I don’t belong here. You and your little assassin buddies are peas in
a pod, and you can have them. Quite frankly, I’d be quite happy never to see any of you ever again.”
Her laughter cut through the air like shrapnel. “At least you can admit you’re nothing next to me. I’m glad we both know you’re a waste of skin.”
Anger boiled up like black tar from my boots. I might not have been brave, but I didn’t let anyone talk down to me like that. My mouth took off on its own as I came up behind Sophia, who sighed. “Look here, honey. I may not have the nerve to go against the wraiths, but I’ve been seeing reality come apart since I was six, and I’m still here without being completely mental, unlike you. I’m going to be an accountant and make my dad proud of me. And if it was up to me, I’d ship you back to Bitches ’R’ Us and demand a refund.” My air cut off when I realized I might have taken that a teensy-weensy bit too far.
Wide-eyed, Kat and Marcus both looked like they’d swallowed a spider. Others beyond them, too. You could have heard a mouse fart on the far side of the room, it was so quiet.
Asher moved into my line of sight just beyond Marcus. I wasn’t sure when he’d come back, but his “you idiot” face let me know he’d heard what I said and didn’t like it. “I guess the cat is well and thoroughly out of the bag,” he said.
Marcus turned to him. “Is it true? She can see the rifts?”
Asher grinned with … what was that, pride? Or just his usual smug mask? “And the wraiths, too, apparently. She described one in detail that I’ll add to the bible.”
Oh, that’s what they were upset about? I figured I’d insulted Kat so badly I wouldn’t be invited back to the psycho club. I’d rather that have been what dropped the silent bomb on the room than my rank on the weirdness scale.
Asher raised his voice. “I think you all understand why I’ve kept this one to myself until I was sure of her potential. We encountered third-caste wraiths early this morning. They identified her as a guardian on sight, so she’s on their radar now. They’ll try to get her before we can initiate her. I’m sure you feel them out there even now, testing weaknesses in the veil where they might come through. She’s more dangerous on her own than within the protection and service of the Machine.”
Darkside Sun (Entangled Embrace) Page 10