BEAST HORDE TRILOGY BOXSET: MFM SciFi Romance

by Cari Silverwood

  They needed to get up Top and kill the Ghoul Lords. They couldn’t even rescue Willow, for god’s sake.

  Tears stung her eye and she attempted to ignore them. The other’s voices shuffled through the back of her consciousness.

  Too many dead friends. Everyone was dying, and it was her fault.

  “So that’s settled.” Maura pursed her lips. “We figured it best to run it by you, Cyn. Since he is a bot programmed to be with you. We’ll do this before we travel upward.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “Go for it.”

  Chapter 5

  Cyn lazed back in the pilot’s seat in Big D’s cockpit. Or was it the driver’s seat? Since this thing couldn’t fly, driver might be the best term. Little Mo had been injected into the system, and Locke was waiting too, behind her, his mind connected to the inner workings of Big D. She swung her leg, unsure why this bothered her, that Mo was in two places at once.

  Communications had been established with War Quarters people and the whole permission-to-join-you thing was finalized. Outside was almost empty of people, for others had already left to ascend. So much for not splitting up. They’d seesawed about carrying docs and items up by foot or waiting for Big D. On foot and by wing had won out.

  As far as she knew, Vargr and Rutger were helping with scouting the nearest upper section with Little Mo in tow, or even in the lead, for no one else could detect incoming skinsuits.

  The fear of another attack was a real concern. They didn’t know what she did. They hadn’t felt the fear in the mind of the skinsuit she’d encountered and killed.

  That movie IT or any horror movie she cared to remember, those movies captured raw fear like the fear the Ghoul Lords had for the dark and for being trapped inside a dark box and unable to leave. Their own personal Boogie Men, so to speak, were claustrophobia and being afraid of the dark. It amused her, when she wasn’t worrying.

  Fuck worrying. Fuck sitting still.

  Mouth twisted, sucking through teeth and pursed lips and making idle squeaky noises, Cyn swung her leg where she’d draped it over the armrest, wondering if turning either of the steering wheels or pressing a dashboard button would do anything interesting.

  She was here, because… it felt as if someone should be. Mo was her little mechanical baby, and her baby was kind-of about to have a big baby.

  “How’s it going, Locke?”

  He grunted back at her.

  Bored, she began to try bringing the flames to her fingertips and found she could. Why these did not hurt her was a puzzle. What if she could make them bigger, badder? What if she could use this in battle?

  A second later, she heard someone lightweight step into the vehicle, felt the slight shaking as they walked up the wide aisle. The scent, the weight, and her instincts told her who this was.

  “Hi, Maura.” She partly twisted to greet her.

  The fae woman was carrying the sheathed sword they’d found in Willow’s study on the night she vanished. It would be the same one she recalled being here, in a cabinet or shelf at the very back, the day she woke from a coma.

  “Found something?”

  Maura shrugged, slid into the red-upholstered co-driver’s seat, and propped her feet on the dash. Becoming fae had stripped years from her body, and she moved with extra bounce, though wrinkles still showed on her face and neck, and her hair had, if anything, become whiter. The pert hairstyle was as perfect as a trimmed coiffure at a hairdressing show. Spartan girl warrior chic. Especially with that sword in hand. The fae markings had weaved a path further up her forearm and spread pretty scintillations around her eyes in branching blue.

  “You look good. Awesomely good.”

  “I feel it. Now I know why the elves in LOTR last forever. Anti-aging genes.” She smiled at Cyn. “I’ve come to say a few words to you about what Willow was thinking.” She laid the sword across her lap and frowned at the metal floor beneath the dash. “It seemed a good quiet time to do this.”

  After Maura had been silent awhile, she prompted her. “Go on.” Then she couldn’t help adding, “So, the sword is nothing?”

  “This?” Maura unsheathed a few inches, revealing steel with blue etchings. “It has bastardium inlaid in the design, so I was curious. But it’s nothing special.”

  “So it’s not magic?” She screwed up her face. “Silly question, I know.”

  Maura shook her head.

  “Not a plus ten Sword of Ice?” If only.

  “No. I wish. I really do,” she said in a strangely wistful yet happy tone—Cyn knew the feeling. A weapon in one’s hand conjured a feeling of power and hope… hope for destruction maybe, but that was her kind of hope. Maura slid the sword home into the sheath. “Anyway, what I came to tell you was this. Willow had all sorts of ideas set out on paper. Some of them I don’t yet understand, but one of them was to do with your nanites and the troll nanites. May I?” She reached for Cyn’s arm.

  She extended it for Maura to touch and the woman grasped her hand and closed her eyes. The faint whispering Willow had once said over her hand rose into the air yet again. Muttering incantations must come with the fae gene-territory.

  After a few minutes, Maura released her hand but kept her eyes shut. “I’ve been practicing by touching skin and feeling for nanites in the Worshippers. Vincent and you do have similarities. You both have higher concentrations of very active nanites in your blood, though you…” She drummed her fingers. “As Willow wrote, you have a mixture. The gargoyle nanites are coming through from your bondmates.”

  Oh, now that was new, in a way. Though she had been told something similar, just had not extrapolated what it meant.

  “She thought they might be both helping you resist the Lure as well as stopping your demon nanites from taking over. And that…” Maura opened her eyes and gazed directly into Cyn’s. “It might be another way to gain Lure resistance, considering the trolls have it and they too are Maelstrom.”

  “Are you saying that if I could go closer to full demon, I might be better at fighting the Ghoul Lords?”

  “Perhaps better at resisting them,” she said slowly. “You might also lose yourself in this new person you become.”

  Become too demon, she meant.

  “I understand. And…” She tapped the armrest. “The only way to find out would be to stop making love to my bondmates.”

  “Probably. I think that would be best kept as a last resort. Do you think you’d be safe if you tried this, if it succeeded? Because, let me add that I’m telling you this more as a caution. Willow wasn’t sure if she should. She thought it might somehow tempt you, but I trust you to stay away from this…”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless we have no other way to fight the Ghoul Lords.”

  “I see. Of course.” She stretched and held out her hand again and shook Maura’s. “I won’t mention this to anyone.”

  “Good.” Maura swung herself around in the chair then stood with the sword in its sheath held low and casual in one hand. “I heard someone return. I hope this business here with Mo.” She waved at the ceiling. “Will be settled soon. We have to move on.”

  “Of course.”

  She went to the door and exited, then a man’s bent leg arrived at the exit, she could see nothing more of him, his boot sole having landed flat on the top step of Big D. He paused to talk to someone, perhaps it was Maura.

  The man was Vargr. She’d known that before he spoke, from the color of his pants, even from the shape of his leg and his scent.

  What she’d promised Maura, well, she hadn’t actually said she wouldn’t try anything dangerous. Her answer had been deliberately ambiguous. This, after Maura had said she trusted her, and trust was something one earned. Although she’d be sad to violate Maura’s trust, one day it might be the right choice.

  Risk nothing, win nothing. Risk all, win the universe.

  Vargr was coming, and she was feeling prickly.

  She swiveled her seat to point it at the middle and plonked he
r boot on the armrest of the co-driver’s seat. It was provocative, since she wore skin-tight gray leggings that molded over her muscled legs and ass as if painted on.

  Provoking him was often interesting.

  She smiled thinly when he leaped into Big D and approached with an evil glint in his eyes. To be precise it was an evil, sexy look, the best kind. He stopped when he reached the cockpit, standing there observing her. The new hard skin bumps and blunt spikes on his shoulders, the hardening of his hair into layered wedges, the way his wings had paled and sparked with more blue, it said he too was suffering from the nanites adapting his body.

  Slowly but surely, and where would it end for any of them?

  She cranked back her neck to meet his eyes and saw how he dwelled on the line of her leg where she’d propped it.

  “What bad things have you been up to? Want to tell me? I figure I can read it in the way you’re smiling. You fucked someone over today, princess?” He took hold of her knee then slid his hand down toward her torso, stopping to squeeze her thigh. His fingers were a little too close to being between her legs for it to not affect her. Her ovaries went to high alert level in a millisecond, heating her down there and making her nipples harden.

  She kept her smile in place. “I’ve been good. You?”

  “Well.” He leaned over her, one hand at the back of her chair below the headrest. “I am about to be very, very bad.” Then he kissed her while his hand moved along her leg until it cupped her pussy, his fingers finding a place to nestle there in the space between her legs, pressing, playing with her.

  Her throat closed in and she almost… stopped… breathing, thoughts half on his hand, half on what his mouth did to hers. The dark leggings offered him zero resistance.

  Next time wear leather, she told herself, answering his hot kiss with her lips.

  “Ohhh, my,” she said breathlessly, nibbling at him, tonguing along the seam of his mouth, and trying to revive her resolution to abstain from sex to test her Lure resistance.

  Maybe tomorrow?

  His teeth caught at her, clamping down as she retracted her tongue and nabbing her lower lip instead. He sucked on it, then kissed her harder, forcing her head back. She grabbed at the seat then his shirt, finding herself moaning as passion rose and swamped her sense of self, or doing what was sensible.

  Sex was never sensible, not for her.

  She loved resisting, loved making it harder for her males, because that made it all so much more fun, more arousing, more everything. And so, she lit up her fingers.

  His curses were instantaneous, loud, and angry.

  “Oops. And fuck.” Eyes wide, she watched him jump back and smother the flames on the shoulder of his shirt with one madly patting hand.

  Smoke rose, clogging the small space with a pungent smell, and Vargr growled at her. His shirt had a black-edged hole, half the size of his palm, and the skin beneath was red and blistered.

  Well, that settled her question. The fire on her fingers was hot.

  “Just testing?” she said, timidly. Timid wasn’t her, but she had gone too far, and his eyes looked ready to melt steel.

  “Fucking what?”

  With his dark-gray eyebrows almost meeting above his nose, Vargr stepped in and scooped her up, then carried her to the rear section of Big D, past a surprised Locke, through the separating doors, until they reached the section where the bed waited. She assumed he was going to toss her down onto it, but he set her on her feet and shoved her stomach-first against the wall next to the opening into the last room.

  Breath coughed from her lungs when she encountered the door frame, her belly against solid metal, his open hand locking onto her nape, and squeezing there, hard.

  And at that she shut down, for a second, slumping, wanting him to handle her as he wanted to.

  Her weakness—a man grabbing there.

  “Not fair,” she rasped, after a few seconds, “That’s my kryptonite.”

  “This?” He pressed at her even harder, fingers and thumb digging in. “Good. I need an edge, you vicious bitch. You’re due for fucking, and you burn me?”

  Was she?

  “Accidental.” She whined, squirming as he drifted his palm over her butt while still pushing her into the wall with that hand on her neck.

  His fingers wedged up between her legs and began pressing rhythmically into her slit. Soon, she felt the wetness of arousal leak. His fingers began to slip, and she felt the cloth stick to her pussy and slide.

  “Bed?” The word had felt glued inside her throat. She was hoping for other, nastier, treatment.

  “Fuck no.” His gravel-ridden voice torched her ear as he bit her there, licked her, bit the side of her neck. “You burn me, you get fucked any which way.” He thumbed her nape, pushed her whole body higher with that hand below.

  “Oh. Ohhh.” Her voice had died; her eyes rolled up. She angled her neck as if to escape him, only to find she’d given him a bigger target, for he bit her there again then lower, where neck angled into shoulder.

  He would heal the burn quickly, and they both knew it, were both ignoring that inconvenient fact. She wanted an excuse for him to take her roughly, crazily. His fingers were still working at her, and her legs had spread, a little, enough to let him in. She moaned when it seemed as if he’d shoved her panties and his fingers inside her—he was pushing so deep.

  He stopped. “Stay fucking still.”

  Vargr took both her wrists and towed them high, above her head, pinning them there even as he stuck a finger into the back of her leggings and tore a hole.

  “You don’t get to undress. You didn’t earn it. I’m making a hole I can get at you through and I’m fucking you here.” This time his finger reached her flesh, and hooked up into her cunt, went deep, then he pressed up with that hand and pushed her body higher up the wall.

  “Unh!” Fuck. This was hot enough that she could almost forgive him ruining her clothes. But not quite. She wrenched her hands from his hold and tried to spin around only to be reminded of the strength of this beaster. He trapped her wrists again and put them back where they’d been.

  “Tsk tsk. No fucking mercy. You like it, my bitch princess.”

  Bitch? She tried to wrench her wrists from beneath his hand and barely moved them.

  Vargr laughed.

  She couldn’t budge his hold. Kicking backward might work to free her, or doing worse, but no, not when he’d gone back to ripping and stretching a wider hole in her leggings, making her available to his cock. Her pussy closed in, squeezed on the fingers he again fucked her with. Her juices made where he probed and pushed a slippery mess.

  Fingers, then his hand, pushed through the hole in the leggings; his nails scraped over her ass, clawed in, making her hurt, and the coolness from his touch said it all.

  “Fuck you, Cyn, So fucking wet for me.” Then he breathed on her, just breathed. “Want me to fuck you?”

  She groaned at the question, whimpered when he clawed his fingers into her again. He shifted then shoved what seemed a whole cluster of fingers up her pussy. Wincing, aroused intensely by the invasion screwing into her, she wedged her face under her upstretched arm.

  “Answer.”

  “Just do it,” she croaked out.

  “Beg me.” His coned fingers shoved in, stayed inside her doing small jabs. “Or else I drag you out of here and tease you in public, maybe naked, maybe just with convenient holes, tied to one of the wheels out there.”

  She closed her eyes, sucked on her lip. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me.”

  He plunged those fingers and thumb in and out of her, then switched to three, and fucked her deep for a few strokes, with the wet noises growing louder. Her squirms and gasps were involuntary. She should’ve stayed silent but couldn’t. Then he stopped, paused with them high inside.

  “Say. It. Counting to ten.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He laughed. “You know you won’t get to come now. One. Two. Three. Four…�
�

  “Damn you.” It was hot and humiliating and just plain diabolical that he did this.

  “Not the right word, “Six, seven.”

  “You missed a—”

  “Eight… Nine.”

  “Okay!” She inhaled sharply, gave in, wanting him even more for making her do this. “Please, please, fuck me.”

  “Good.” He nestled his head into the side of her face, licked her once, over her eye. “Here, without mercy. And you’ll say please when I ask, or else I stop and drag you out and do you outside.”

  Oh god, where did this come from? Mister Asshole had replaced Vargr. Her answer sounded strangled. “Yes? I mean yes. Please. Fuck—” She bit off the you after the fuck, judging it wiser.

  “Better.”

  Vargr extracted his fingers from her, and she could feel the slick wetness coating them, dribbling on her thigh through the large hole in the now very damp cloth, and it was all from her. She heard him fiddling with his pants and then a second later his erection probed at her, pushing, moving inward, pressing aside her barely awakened pussy that wasn’t quite accustomed to having his ginormous member inside it, yet.

  “Fffff… Oh. Fuck. Fuck.” She ducked her head, clawed her fingers into the door frame, felt how his one hand gripped her wrists and stopped her from interfering with him fucking her.

  She loved being trapped.

  Do me. Fuck me. Groaning, she arched her butt higher, would’ve slid her hands down the door frame if he’d let her, as he shoved that cock all the way in, sliding, stretching her, making her hurt and want and almost die from the awesomeness.

  He jerked his body into her, smooshing her into the wall, and she whimpered out a “No!” Because she simply had to say that—no. It sealed this with the right kiss of protest.

  Her garbled noes and whimpers and cries blended into the wall, were dragging down the wall with her partly open lips when he rearranged her so he could pull her ass out further. And she embraced it all, opened her legs wider when he slapped her, stuck her ass higher when he said to, having gone past that point of no return. She begged him again and again when he stopped and demanded her words.