Page 18 of Ghoul Huntress (Maelstrom Duology #2)

18

Vargr loped alongside Rutger toward the armory entrance. Seven or eight armored vehicles had been lined up outside, and as they drew nearer, he saw most were shiny with new paint. Names like Ghoul Lord Nemesis, Dark Revenge, and Tank Rabbit were plastered on a few in pink and blue. These beasters sure had a love of graffiti.

They slowed their run to a trot. Vincent was guarding the entrance. His healing arm was puny as fuck but he grinned and raised his other hand.

Vargr nodded to him and to Orin, the new Warriors leader. Orin cheerfully waved a paint brush. The male was getting along fine in his new job, leading by example and a cool head, and not bluster and fear.

The lead-up to this attack was going better than he’d ever dreamed it could.

Except for that one thing.

A week to go. Everything was being rushed, but with only two weeks to queen launch, as Cyn’s first message had indicated, they were caught between rock and hard place. Go early and die. Go late and there would be zero humans left alive.

No Cyn however, and she should be here. It’d been two weeks without her. It hurt.

His heart squeezed in on a painful beat.

“We should be hunting her down, and you know it.” Vargr smacked the wall beside the armory door as he passed through.

“Cyn?”

“Of course. Who else?” His fist crushed in on the weapon he held, one of the newly developed sizzle guns.

He eyed the nearby activity balefully. How dare anyone have fun painting while he was hurting? And they should’ve asked him about the name of this rifle. Gun Sizzle was better because then he could’ve called it Jizz.

A bad pun but still…

Rutger was taking his time answering.

“Well?”

“No, I do not know that. And I’m the one who gets to punch walls, not you. Has Maura been ODing you on demon nanites?”

“No. Fuck. She as much as admitted she’s never given me as high a dose as that very first one. Even when we went to the Top.”

“Really?” Rutger’s eyebrows slanted up. “So your bad temper is just you?”

“Har-de-har. This sex withdrawal is making my balls ache. We are bondmates, and this is not natural.”

“Crap, V. Enough with your balls. Hi, Maura!”

The incoming nanodog weaved in between the armored vehicles bearing Maura with that fancy sword in hand. Toother bounded along like a big fluffy attack tiger, a floof-ball of joy. Only when he showed his sharklike teeth did you get the impression this might be a mean creature.

She said something to Toother and he slowed, padding toward them. The naked sword she bore was carried low. Was she practicing for something? He’d asked her a few times about its purpose. Surely a gun was more useful, but she’d only smiled. A plus-something-ice-sword Cyn had once joked.

He stepped up to rub his hand over Toother’s ear. The critter was happy again. Third owner lucky, hopefully.

“How is the schedule going, Maura?” Rutger asked.

“Well.” She had to catch her breath. “Damn. Riding takes it out of you. Comms are working with the leapfrog messaging around the globe. Everyone we could get to reply has the attack day down, adjusted for time zones so it’s nightfall where they are. All the drone drops are verified, except the last couple. Our drone may have gone down way up near the North Pole, but I think we have enough quarters invested in this.”

Enough to save the human species, if they could defeat the GLs.

“So the nanites are getting grown?” Vargr dug in a pocket for the packet of dog chews he kept for Toother, took it out and unwrapped a piece. “’Cause that sounded fucking complicated to me.”

“Yes. There are other fae of course, other medical techs and doctors. Enough who have the right skills.” The blue in her eyes intensified. “That’s the key. The instructions should be clear enough, but I was never sure if anyone else would succeed. We have a go, Houston. The GL want to launch queens? We are going to stop them.”

She leaned over Toother and hugged his neck.

“I’m not sure I want to take him to the Top though.” A frown line embedded between her eyebrows. “I’d hate to get him killed.”

“Mmm.” Rutger reached and took her hand. “We can’t tell you this one.”

“I know.” She sighed.

“A change of subject. V wants to go hunt down Cyn. Would you like to repeat your advice?”

Vargr threw him a scowl.

“Vargr.” She tilted her head and looked sad. “This is a bit late. She’s been gone weeks.”

“I know, Just… fuck.” He wandered over to a stool beside a tank, where someone had been messing with a cannon. A sheet on the ground was littered with bastardium-etched bullets—twitchy blue showed in a spiral on the casings.

He laid his rifle against the tread of the tank then bowed his head, peered up at them both. “Your demon theory is still just a theory. And what if something eats her out there?”

Neither answered him. Okay, so that was improbable. Nanodogs seemed to stick to the ground levels and Ghoul Lords weren’t likely.

“Fuck,” he muttered again. “It was worth a try.”

Rutger came over and squatted beside him. “It hurts me too, and do you think she’s doing this just to hurt us? No.”

“You know I don’t think that.”

Maura dismounted and came closer, with Toother silently following. Sneaky thing was so quiet on those fluffy feet. After riding, her hair was always crazy, and this time her locks looked alive—all pure white, azure blue, and wriggly.

Fae, his brain reminded him. Sometimes their strange origins felt more magic than science. Doctor Nietz had been a true nutter. “What? Don’t fucking lecture me.”

“Vargr,” she began, all schoolmarm in tone. “It was her choice, and I guess she should’ve asked you. But I guess she also knew you’d have said no. We need this, we do. The last raid you four did had its problems, and dosing her higher with demon had reached its peak. This, Cyn going full demon, may be what lets us win. In all the world, only we have someone with demon nanites.”

“That was a lecture.” He sighed. “Yeah. I get it. Still hate it.”

“Stop worrying. When it happens, if we win, I do have an answer to the worst that might happen to her. If we don’t win, we’re screwed anyway.”

She did? He tweaked an eyebrow. “Going to say what it is?”

“No. I have a few secrets that are best kept as that until I need to use them.”

“But what is that worst scenario?”

Maura pursed her lips. “Cyn, irretrievably evil. That do?”

Crap. He stood, retrieved the rifle. “I hate you all. It’s not personal exactly, but I need someone to hate right now, and can’t bear to hate her.”

Rutger chuckled and slapped his back. “Awww, shucks. I forgive you, man. Let’s go help someone paint pretty pink paw-prints on a tank. Besides, if we’re hurting, you know she is too. Right?”

“Hurting? I haven’t been able to come for two weeks.”

“Ahhh, that. Me too. I may explode my balls soon.”

“Your turn to stop talking balls.”

Rutger eyed him. “Balls. Balls, balls, balls. And my final one—balls.”

“Jesus. H.”

“He won’t help you.”

True.

Rutger sighed, waggled his eyebrows, then grabbed him in a brotherly embrace. Between Rutger’s horns and his raised wings, they entered an enclosed, private space of deeper shadow. He grabbed Rutger too, listened to the cracks of the beaster’s skin and maybe his ribs, before they released each other. He smiled weakly. It had helped.

“We’ll get through this.”

He nodded. “Yeah. We will.”

“She’ll be back. We’ll see her the day we go to war, and once we’ve fucked over the assholes above, it’ll be back to normal for us. Whatever that turns out to be.”

If anything the silly exchange about balls and the hug only cemented how badly this was affecting him, because Rutger was a part of their threesome.

Before Cyn came along, he’d been alone, and he’d been mourning the loss of his sister, even if he’d never admitted that. The three of them were apart now, and all he’d been able to think of for a large chunk of these last few days, was of how it’d felt to hold her, to be there curled around each other. It wasn’t just about the fucking anymore to him, it definitely wasn’t that with Rutger, but it was love—for him and for her. He wasn’t sure how he’d live if something happened to either of them.

Cyn crept to the edge of the balcony overlooking the atrium to the formerly elegant restaurant and took the shot. Flame lanced from her out-thrust hand and sped across the open space to where a rat scuttled across the floor a story below.

Bullseye.

The rat turned into a charred smoking lump, and she extinguished her hand. Target practice was almost unnecessary anyway. From what she’d seen above, the Ghoul Lords and their guards were one huge target. There might be some collateral damage if humans were too close.

It was something she had to remind herself was bad.

Fresh cooked rat would be a relief after the mountain of canned food she’d consumed over the past weeks.

“Want some rat, Mo?” she asked as she skipped down the spiral staircase to retrieve her food.

“No, thank you, miss.”

The benefits of having a metal bot sidekick—she never had to feed him, just stick him in the sun every few days.

The apartment she’d been using as her base since she stopped moving about, was only fifteen stories below the Top, and she had sneaked higher too. The Lure signs were there most days but had ceased to affect her in any way. Maura was right. Going full demon had benefits.

“Hi guys.” Three cats ran after her as she walked toward her open front door. The door was black, glossy, and sported a gold handle in the shape of a curled tentacle. Every handle in the place was similarly themed. Love at first sight. The day she found it, she’d decided this place was meant for her.

Inside was as crazy. The giant living room had a spa, currently empty, and a light in the shape of a yard-wide octopus. The carpet was a big orange octopus. If she’d had a fear of tentacles before, which she hadn’t, this would either have cured it or turned her into a gibbering thing shivering in a corner.

The three cats meowed and eyed the scorched rat she dangled from her hand by its tail. She eyed them back.

“Oh hell. Here.” She tossed it back out the door and watched them dive on it and proceed to eat it, then try to run away with it, while all of them were growling at the others.

“There. Proof I’m still good, Mo.”

The bot made whirring sounds, and that was a giveaway as it generally ran silent.

“What? That’s charity to sweet innocent animals.”

“I am not an expert, Miss Cyn, but I asked Big Mo to check if their color is a problem. He said maybe.”

“Black is a problem?” She tipped her head. “Sure all three are black, but?—”

“Traditionally witches, demons, and evil are associated with black.”

“Pfft. I’m equal opportunity. Probably all from the same litter. Black is sexy and badass. Also, we do live in the dark, ya know? Oh! Forgot a good one. The Ghoul fuckin’ Lords are white. So pfft again.” She snagged a bottle of whisky off the kitchen bench and unscrewed it, chugged half the damn bottle. “Lucky liquor is free now.”

She had to drink gallons of the fucking stuff just to get tipsy.

“Miss Cyn, you asked me to watch over you, and I am trying. For a bot telling a good soul from a bad one is supremely difficult.”

She threw herself into the bright red armchair with the white tentacles all over it. The timber feet screeched and shifted backward. “And so?” She poked a finger at him as he scrambled onto the fat armrest. “Admit it. No lies. I know you’ve been getting help from Big Mo.”

“I said I did. This is not a new fact.”

Teasing the bot was not a whole lot of fun. Not like target practice used to be. She fetched the half-drunk bottle of Moet from the other side of her armchair. It’d been there a few hours and was dead warm, as always. Refrigeration in the time of the Armageddon-ish Apocalypse was terribly lacking.

“Target practice,” she muttered, swigging, plopping her leg over the arm Mo was on, making him dodge backward.

Morosely, feeling oddly wrong , she curled her mouth and studied the opposite lounge that used to match the red fabric she sat on. Now it was mostly black and tattered due to her nuking it with flame over and over.

Her excuse? It took a while to get accurate with this fire thing she’d acquired.

One thing she had remembered was that she wasn’t supposed to kill too many humans when this war started. Mo often reminded her of that, which was why the remembering.

And so, in the interests of being good and being accurate, she’d put the stuffed octopuses the previous owner had collected on the opposite lounge and lined them up. They represented the Ghoul Lords.

In between them were the various corpses she’d found in the hallways, and one from the bathroom in here, trapped there by the Lure and a shut door, and stupidity—no doubt trying to march through a wall from the fractured finger stubs on the dried-up dead blonde girl.

Anyway, the humans she had tried not to flame.

It had helped. Though they were pretty black now.

She counted left to right. “Octopus. Girl. Octopus. Boy. Octopus… Black thing. Damn, can’t recall what that one was.” She chugged down the rest of the champagne, wiped her mouth and let her head fall back onto the upholstery as the empty bottle slipped from her fingers to the rug.

Her wet tongue ran over her lips and she shut her eyes. The alcohol was working on her, finally.

“Was I bad, Mo? Doing that?” This time her extended finger poked toward the dead.

“Probably. Yes. Though I appreciate your striving for accuracy.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes, I agree. Fuck. I have a relayed call coming through, Miss Cyn, from Rutger and Vargr.”

“Oh. I see. What is the message?”

“I quote: Are you ready? Do you think you’re Lure resistant enough? Love R and V.”

The message was not audio of course, just words relayed through Big Mo to Little Mo.

“Tell them yes,” she murmured. “I’m ready.” Then she ran her fingers over her face, feeling all the dents and crevasses and smoothness, then down to her neck where she found the black collar Vargr had placed on her eons ago.

She tore it off, ripping through the leather and metal, and slid it off her neck, tossed it aside.

“Very ready.”