Page 10 of Ghoul Huntress (Maelstrom Duology #2)

10

Rutger sat eyeing the procedure as Maura laid hands on all of the beasters she could get to sit down in this once-trendy café. The space was scattered with dusty tables and chairs and a few lost bits of cutlery, a few wallets, and the obligatory lost cellphone. Sometimes he dreamed he could pick one of those up and talk to someone in the past, tell them to run because the Ghoul Lords were coming, to bury themselves far underground.

Beyond the long glass wall, Big Mo waited on the roadway, engines turning over in a quiet rumble. The roadway continued on a short distance to where it hopped across a bridge to the next quarter—the one that’d had the top sheared away. Beasters were loading gear into Mo—heaps of gear.

He leaned on the tabletop, sighed. From the amount of supplies, you’d have thought they were heading for the North Pole.

“Have we a sleigh and a herd of huskies in there?” He nodded in the direction of Mo.

Vargr snorted. “Yeah. You’d bloody well think so. I’ve got champagne and chocolate and plan on celebrating when we hit the ground, providing I don’t throw up from Mo lurching about like a drunk. Fuck that for a joke.”

“And we will be heading into the open too. Did you consider that? No scraper under our feet.” He and the other beasters with gargoyle genetics were attached to buildings. Not his choosing, but Below and in the open could be a shock.

“I’ve camped out on exercises.”

“Sure.” It wasn’t going to be the same, Rutger guessed. The nanites affected them. Moving from quarter to quarter had upset his equilibrium. Weird, but he accepted this as true. What else could one do?

“Shhh.” Maura frowned from where she leaned over Kiko. His red beard and hair marked him in any crowd.

The nanodog, Toother, lay asleep near her with his nose at her feet, his ivory hair fanning out and covering the faux paved floor. His miniscule wings looked as ridiculous as ever. He seemed to grow attached to those who could empathize with him. Every so often, Maura raised her soft-shoed foot to rub at his neck and he’d make this noise that seemed more a purr than a snore or a grumble.

Hopefully, this time, his owner would survive longer.

Cyn glanced at him and Vargr but stayed silent, letting Maura do her divining. Divining was probably the wrong word for what she did.

Kiko had also volunteered to come on this expedition. There was plenty of room inside Mo.

Would’ve been good for him and Vargr to get Cyn alone, but it was wiser to have reinforcements in case anything went wrong. He scratched the base of one horn, thinking.

Having a dwarf beaster like Kiko along might be important with regards to keeping Mo running, or fixing the drone. Cyn’s gun had been bought from Kiko and then she’d named it after Willow. Was it vengeance or sadness that had made her name the weapon that? She was honoring Willow’s memory, but being Cyn, he figured vengeance was a part of it too.

He harked back to some words Cyn had said today, poetic but strange words. The world around me seethes with uncertainty. She’d said it in a hushed tone while staring around the armory. The smokiness of the air had lent a certain eeriness to the situation.

He did not like what he’d seen in her unfocused gaze. Running on the spot —she’d said that too. As if they’d accomplished nothing. He’d never seen her so downhearted, so lost.

“Your turn. No talking.” Maura sat on one of the black, art deco style chairs around the table he and Vargr had claimed, then she took his hand, and began muttering over it. Fae blue surged through the delicate branching lines decorating her arms.

“Sure,” he said belatedly, thinking how similar this was to a visit to the doctor.

Low cloud floated past the outer café window where the venue overlooked the edge. He’d been told of how the skinsuits had rappelled down and smashed through the glass in a nursery and killed many of his fellow Worshippers… That was a bad day. Today, they had Little Mo sniffing for signs of skinsuits and stinkers, but there was always a risk when this close to the edge of the quarter.

He’d heard Drummer was looking at a way to use a scent molecule detector found on some of the police drug-detection systems—now that he knew of the skinsuit risk. They just needed to recharge those, reprogram them, and rig up a warning siren or something similar. This was all possible. At least Drummer was a doer, not a sitter.

Maura was still muttering, and he zoned her out, stroked his chin. There might be some buildings out there, below. A day’s travel to get where the drone had ended up meant they’d be covering a lot of countryside.

“Good. No change I can see.” She released him. “Now you.” Maura dragged her chair over to Cyn. When she touched Cyn’s left hand, the lines between her eyes crinkled deeper. “Be very still. You’re difficult to read.”

Cyn grunted an affirmation, not a ladylike sound, and Rutger smiled internally. His woman was done with being a lady. Demon-girl was more her style.

In Maura’s fae veins, the blue raced in spurts then drifted back. The murmured words and sounds she made seemed familiar yet were indecipherable. Fae, it made sense now they knew what they were.

At last she drew away, rubbing her divining hand against her other hand as she studied Cyn.

“Well? What have you found?”

“In you, puzzles. All of you three…” She beckoned to Rutger and Vargr also. “Come over to where we can talk privately.”

“Sure.” Amused, he followed her to another table where the woman slumped then propped an elbow on the table, with her curled hand resting beneath her nose. She looked past her fingers at them, as if she was thinking things through and was unhappy.

Cyn sat on the padded booth seat opposite her, and when he and Vargr sat they smooshed her between them. Pouting, she leaned back and wriggled to get some more room, elbowing him. When he grabbed her elbow and chided her, he earned himself a glare and a smile, then they all waited for Maura to begin.

“Okay. Cyn. You’re different, of course. Most of the others seem barely changed, though it’s been very little time that’s elapsed since I started doing this. Everyone else’s nanite levels are fairly stable, except Vargr too, but you have a mixture. The demon nanites in you have lessened.” She paused. “I think that must be good, Vargr? The jury is out on that, and there are no guarantees. I don’t know enough.” She dismissed him with a hand wave and turned to Cyn,

“And me? Am I pregnant, do I have gold dust in my veins?”

“Pregnant?” He ruffled her hair. She ignored him, but she had made him wonder.

What if the world was saner? What if they could have children and there was no one trying to eat them? What if he could once again have an apartment that looked out over the plains, or watch the birds fly by without worrying, have a pet, go on holidays, or drink wine with friends…

He shook his head, sank back to reality.

“ You have more of those red demon nanites than you did only a few days ago. It is quite a perceptible change, and that does concern me because we don’t know what will happen as the level rises.”

As the level rises?

“Hmmm.” Cyn chewed off a broken nail. “I might be fine?”

He found himself highly aware of precisely how good and fine she felt against him, and he exchanged a glance with Vargr, who looked as worried as he was. Stoic but worried. He knew the beaster well enough to see the difference.

“Those notes of Willow’s on nanites—I told you there are samples stored that have never been used? Those don’t have labels, not exact ones, just guesses as to what they might be.”

Those words caught his attention. Had she said? So much had happened recently and he was getting muddled. His tombstone might very well carry that: Died because he wasn’t paying attention.

Cyn nodded.

“Well, I also found where they list the calibrations of the ones that are inside us. They set limitations on the reproduction of our nanites. It stops them multiplying once their blood levels reach, say, X percent. Gargoyle, fae and dwarf all are programmed to stabilize early. The troll limit is higher. And your nanites, I couldn’t find any data on them. They seem to have forgotten to set a limit.”

“Oh.” She stared at Maura. “Crap.”

More like fuck.

“In theory, they may eventually reach one hundred percent. All I can see that is stopping them is the nanites you have in you from your bondmates.”

Double fuck. So sex was keeping her normal. Make that normal-er.

She nodded, slowly, looking past Maura at everyone in the café. They were chatting, laughing, scratching their heads, doing what was normal.

Here in this neglected café was a collection of all her living friends, and many of his. Rutger tried to imagine what she must be thinking. That if she went full demon, she would be a danger to everyone else? He’d bet on it.

“Are you afraid of that, Maura? Of me?”

The fae woman inhaled, exhaled slowly, all while meeting Cyn’s gaze. “I wish I knew if I should be. What do you think?”

“I… have been feeling odd today. Surreal, as if I’m separated from everything around me.” Several seconds passed before she continued. “Everyone I connect to is here, you and my lovers, my friends.” Her voice grew quiet. “These others I met, the Warriors, I feel nothing for them or even for those left behind at Mercantor and Worshipper Quarters. My feelings seem to have drowned on this tide of muffled surrealness. Do I wish all the humans up Top to live, yes, but more than that…” She nodded, and her jaw wiggled from side to side as she tensed it. She spoke louder, deeper, gnarlier. “I want the Ghoul Lords to be fucking dead, dead, dead. That consumes me.”

Those last dredged-up words had chilled him. Judging by her expression, Maura was shocked.

“But is that me or is it the nanites? I feel I am losing myself. You ask if you should be afraid of me? I am beginning to be afraid of me.”

Gods. He looked over her head at Vargr and mouthed the words: We need to talk.

Vargr nodded.