Assassin's Hunger (2 page)

The drunk stiffened, as if she’d slapped him, and the bodyguard Jorr brought the muzzle of his hazer around. But the drunk staggered back, even more unsteadily than he’d approached, his gaze never leaving the girl and his hand clamped over his heart in the universal gesture of a smitten lover.

In a low voice, little more than a growl, the man Morav said, “You shouldn’t be here, Torash.”

“True,” the girl replied. “Yet here I am.” She snapped her fingers when Morav turned toward the bodyguard. “Don’t bother yelling at him when there wasn’t anything he could do about it. And trust me when I say my displeasure being here far eclipses yours.” She twisted the syllables of
pleasure
in her mouth almost cruelly and thrust the mug at the other girl. “Here, Alolis. You can have the rest.”

The blonde peered into the mug, nose wrinkling, but Morav snatched it from her hand. “No one is drinking that. It’ll make you blind.”

Well, Shaxi thought, that would certainly explain the compounding errors in her programming, but she couldn’t escape the lingering effects of whatever sensual trickery the girls had woven. Her heart thudded as painfully as if she was standing in the open portal of her drop ship, staring down at the raging battlefield, facing her probable doom…but suddenly discovering she’d been granted wings to escape it all. Every nerve sang with the perilous but heady elation.

Her attention snagged on Morav’s voice. Even with his tone pitched roughly in exasperation, she caught the lilting accent of one of the mild inner worlds that Hermitaj mercenaries never had reason to visit. Her own orders had always come in a secured data stream straight to her implants or more rarely in tersely worded missives. When was the last time someone had spoken to
her
with any emotion? Or spoken to her at all? Even the bartender had slung her a drink without a word. As if she was already being stripped away, piece by piece, and the shriving hadn’t even started yet.

She wanted to be seen for what she was underneath the armor, for what struggled to survive outside her failing programming. She wanted to feel like she was still alive, at least for the moment. She wanted…

No, this was not her desire. It was as if some other force commanded her.

Not true
, a ghostly voice whispered in her head. Those were exactly her desires, she’d just never had the freedom to speak them aloud.

Well, she wasn’t about to blurt her secrets to strangers, even such compelling strangers as these. But even though she fought the compulsion with every dyne in her biomechanics, somehow she still found herself rising to her feet.

As did the other occupants of the room.

“Blast it,” Jorr said. “Now see what you girls have done?”

The men from the quintet and two of the trio—the drunkard was sprawled back in his seat, his eyes closed and one hand down his pants—stalked toward the girls, ignoring the hazer rifle in their path. Even the bartender had come around the end of his bar, passing Shaxi without a glance.

The strange charm set like hooks in her twitching skin, threatening pain if she didn’t give in…and promising pleasure if she gave herself up. Her implants buzzed a caution at her accelerating heartbeat when there was nothing to fight. Had she finally lost it, her last grasp on her programming? She clamped her hand on the edge of the bar and locked the cyber-embeds. Her fingers dented the plyscrete, but she managed to hold her position.

Jorr brought his rifle to bear, not subtle at all now, and squeezed off one short burst. The charged particles seared across the floor in front of the advancing men’s boots, igniting the scuffled dust in a short-lived fog of fire. The blonde let out a scream, cut off as the dark-haired girl yanked her back. Both girls shrank toward Morav.

“No further now,” Jorr suggested with a tight grin.

The charcoal stink of scorched dust burned in Shaxi’s lungs, as if the shriving had come at last. She held her breath, and the cantina seemed to shimmer with possibility. Whether dissolution or infinite union, she wasn’t sure.

In a rush, as if of one mind, the seven patrons and the bartender charged the girls and their protectors.

Jorr unleashed with the rifle, but the eight he faced produced weapons from their sand-robes, and the cantina blazed with harsh hazer light.

Ah, here was the not-quiet she’d been waiting for.

Shaxi unlocked her grip on the bar and dove into the fray. She’d been forced to sell off most of her defensive gear since she’d been on her own, in an effort to keep body and breath together. What parts of her own body she still had, anyway. Her exosuit—little more than scrap metal without the crucial Hermitaj uplinks—had been first to go, along with the coupled gloves and helmet. Which left the tactical black skin of her hands and face exposed.

Battle had never felt intimate before. Was that the reason why Hermitaj had masked its soldiers so utterly? She’d sometimes wondered if she’d even recognize her fellows without their once-feared emblem.

Even as she launched forward, her finger clicked her hazer setting over to pain and stun. She didn’t blame these men for whatever had possessed them, and she had no liking for unsanctioned blood on her hands.

One of the girls—the blonde Alolis, Shaxi assumed—screamed again, but the piercing sound was drowned by the chorus of masculine yelps as Shaxi’s hazer cut through them. The flower-nose pistol sometimes elicited boorish remarks for its precious name and almost delicate design when she brandished it, but when she opened fire, the concentrated light pouring off the widespread “petals” quickly and decisively changed minds. She’d live—or not, depending—without her defensive gear, but the hazer was as much a part of her as the zinc-white hair that had started growing out as soon as she’d sold her helmet with the built-in depilatories that had kept her bald.

Pinned at an angle between her shots and Jorr’s, the other men scrambled to find cover. Morav, with the girls huddled under his arms, was aimed as if he would make a run for the doors, but that would take him through the minefield of men hunkered down.

“No!” Shaxi shouted, retreating toward them. “Out the back.” She pointed to the service doorway partially blocked by stacked crates.

Edging aside his hood to reveal shaggy locks of brown hair waved back from his brow, Morav straightened to meet her stare.

As if the ocean she’d imagined earlier had conjured him from its depths, his gaze was as fathomless as the sea. But it was not the peaceful blue-green lull she’d pictured. Instead the moody gray was touched with flecks of silver like raindrops over rough waves, and there was a darkness underneath that made her wonder what lurked in the black. The piercing intensity slammed through her heart with the fatal focus of an ultraviolet plasma arc.

He wasn’t a handsome man, his features too rugged for masculine beauty. The sharp ridge of his nose flattened to flared nostrils over thin, hard lips set in a line that paralleled his clenched jaw. But the severe angles of his face had the keen, resolute strength of a sheership, a vessel built to endure the vast emptiness of space while taking her to the stars…

Tangle it, her programming was blown to any hells.

“Right behind you,” he said.

The words, though issued in his lilting cadence, sounded almost like a threat, and she shuddered with the peculiar agitation she’d only experienced when someone was about to shoot her. Getting shot usually hurt, so why did she want to hear more of that low, melodic voice? This pandemonium in her physical reactions was unacceptable, really.

She disguised her inexplicable shivers with a dive across the bar as one of the pinned men managed to get off a couple of cheap projectile rounds that blasted chunks from the plyscrete. She threw her not-inconsiderable weight at the intruding crates, making enough room for the girls’ slight figures to wedge through.

Back at the tables, Jorr’s hazer whined as he fired, a desperate signal that the charge was running low. He too must be firing on stun, which drained the charge more quickly than a simple, lethal dose of pure light. The dark-haired girl, Torash, squeezed through the doorway without even a whisper of her robe touching Shaxi, dragging Alolis behind her.

Shaxi stepped around them, sweeping the dark, cramped storage space. The scrape of crates told her Morav was making more room for his big body to get through. “This way,” she said. “To the alley.”

“They can’t come after us, can they?” Alolis’s sweet voice held a panicked edge. “It’s not our fault.”

“You think they care?” Torash asked harshly.

Shaxi swung back to face them. “Take off your robes.”

Alolis cringed and stuttered, “What?” Torash made fists of her hands.

Morav loomed behind them. “You need to disguise what you are.”

Shaxi gave him a nod. “The interiors are less gaudy.”

“I like the pink,” Alolis muttered. Torash had already stripped out of her robe and turned it inside out. Alolis repeated the actions, synchronized a half-step behind. Except for their contrasting coloring, the two were so alike as to be twins.

The inner layer of the robes that protected wearers against Khamaseen’s weather was a good, boring dirt color. Shaxi let out an approving grunt. “Let’s go.” She pushed through to the outer doorway with a glance at Morav. “Do we wait for your man?”

“He knows the way.”

She opened the door, bracing against the blast-furnace heat that slammed into her like the backwash from a sheership thruster. She swept the alley, wary that one of the men from inside might have come around, but the path in both directions was empty. “Clear,” she called.

Morav nudged the girls out, muttering something into the comm link set in his collar. He cast a quick glance at Shaxi with those fathoms-deep eyes. “Cover us back to our ship and there’ll be a reward for you.”

She hesitated. As he’d stepped out the door, the edge of his sand-robe had blown back and she’d seen the hazer at his side. It was not a design she knew, and Hermitaj had been very thorough in her training. More, she saw the way he moved out here in the open: quick for all his mass, and decisive, as if he had made hard choices in the past. He did not need cover.

So why did he ask for hers?

Sweat prickled between her breasts, though her gun hand stayed cool as always. A reminder that despite her faltering reactions, she was still a fighter. This was what she was made to do. So she led the way into the ripe stink of the alley and toward the nearest side street. Sand crunched like billions of tiny bones under her boots.

If she couldn’t find a way to regain control of herself, the erratic electromagnetic tornadoes of the shriving would add her mortal remains to their endless dance around Khamaseen. But she wasn’t dead yet, and for this moment at least, her hazer was steady, her sights were clear, and she had a mission. The wind moaning through the pitted plyscrete crenellations above seemed like it had something to say on the matter, but she ignored it.

Over her shoulder, she asked, “Your ship is at the port?”

He swung his shaggy head in a pattern she knew well, assessing every shallow doorway in the dark, cramped alley to the street beyond. “Had our choice of berths. Seems not many sheerships stop on Khamaseen during the storm season.” His roaming gaze locked on her as if he’d found a potential threat. “Which ship brought you?”

“Came in on an unmanned cargo drop.” And that miserable, desperate trip had taken the last of her credit as she sought this last solution to her deteriorating condition.

“Just in time for the shriving.” There was a note of disbelieving reservation in his voice.

“Just in time.” He’d promised a reward for her covering fire, not her sad history.

Those light-dark eyes dipped briefly to her breast, where the metallic threads of the Hermitaj emblem still glimmered on her reinforced jacket. Her free hand—not the one with the cyber-embeds that interfaced with her hazer—itched to cover herself. The impulse surprised her. Her body had been used as a shield before, by important people who had paid Hermitaj for the privilege, but she’d never felt so exposed and vulnerable before a mere gaze.

She switched her hazer to her free hand to give it something to do that wouldn’t embarrass her while she peered around the alley corner to the wider street. “We could get to the port via back routes, but the main road is faster. We’d be better served by speed. Assuming no one else is looking for you. How much trouble are you in?”

Torash glowered around the wayward strands of dark hair peeking out from her drawn-up hood. “What makes you think we are in any trouble?”

Shaxi raised one eyebrow. “We just shot our way into a back alley.” She directed the look at Morav. “And I recognize the smell of trouble.”

Alolis huffed out a breath. “
I
smell like flowers.”

Even more baffling than the physical response to Morav—what
were
all these emotions?—Shaxi found herself smiling at the blonde girl. “You’ll have to share your secret with me.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a secret,” Torash snapped.

Morav flicked one finger in the air to silence them. “The main road. No one is looking for us. Torash, Alolis, keep your hoods up and walk ahead of us. Not too fast, but don’t linger.”

“The window shopping in Levare leaves something to be desired anyway,” Torash said archly.