LustAfterDeath (2 page)

Chapter Two

Bane tromped as far along the house as he could then back
again. He flicked his lighter on and off out of sheer nerves. His head pounded
with a hangover and his neck ached from sleeping on the ground. He should have
slept on the damn boat, not camped in a bivy sack outside her window.

Brush licked at his thighs. Water beaded on the material of
his pants. Bane brushed the moisture off with his palms and crouched to run
past one sweeping camera, and then another, before reaching her window.

He drew up the milk crates and climbed up to the ledge. Bane
flinched to find her standing right by the window as if she’d been waiting.

She smiled. Bane thought he’d had beer goggles last night
when he watched her, but she was the real goddamn deal—a re-animated angel. Her
pale fingers traced his face and for a second he closed his eyes.

Then he thought better of it. He might not remember his
transgressions after this assignment, but she might. Bane raised a stern finger
and then reached in his pocket and lifted his handwritten note up to the
window.

Her forehead drew together and her eyes darted along the
lines. When she looked at him again and her lips bowed into a shy smile, he
realized she’d understood nothing.

He growled low in his chest. An ache settled there as well.
He’d hoped that asshole had at least built her intelligent. Bane didn’t know
why he cared whether the stein was nothing more than a husk of a person. But
she seemed like more.

Her lips moved and she waved her hands. He couldn’t
understand what she said, but she seemed to be speaking more to someone behind
her. Pinning the windowsill in his fingers, he rose up on tiptoe and scanned
deeper inside the room.

She was talking to a damn cat. Worse than that, from the
look of it she was talking to what used to be roadkill. The girl picked up the
catenstein and started petting it, murmuring words in its scarred, hairy ear.

Bane tapped on the window to get her attention. When she
turned back to him, he mouthed, “I'll be back soon.” Her eyes widened and grew
wet. He tapped the glass again, then placed a hand over his heart and mouthed,
“I promise.” The girl squared her shoulders back and wiped her hand across her
eyes, and then her nose. She petted the glass by his face.

He closed his eyes and breathed heavily. “I'll be back.”

She nodded then waved a goodbye.

No sooner did Bane’s feet touch ground than he dialed the
ZU. “I need to wrap this shit up, Q! Tell me what I want to hear!”

The sound of chewing carried over the line, and then
slurping like Q-ter was sucking something through a straw. “What do you want me
to say? We agreed three days.”

Bane heard the sound of a computer beeping and pinging in
the background. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “So help me, if you are
gaming—”

“What’s the deal? Things bad there?”

Bane heard clicking of keys and knew Q-ter had gotten his
ass in gear. “Yeah, they’re bad. She’s seen me. And I don’t know if she’s got
the bandwidth not to say anything.”

A sputter of coughing erupted from the other end of the
line. “You let her see you? Who are you, and what have you done with Bane
Connor?”

Ignoring Q-ter’s dorky joke, Bane trudged back to his bivy
and gear. He assessed his set-up. He could be packed and out in a little over
an hour, not counting download time in Adam’s lab. “I got sloppy.”

Q-ter sounded distracted when he answered. “You don’t get
sloppy.”

Bane passed his hand over his face, remembering the girl’s
tentative caresses on the glass. “Well, I did this time.” He opened one of his
packs and pulled out a bottle of water. The other end of the line was silent,
but Q sometimes lost his ability to talk when he interfaced too hard. Bane
waited.

“Eat me!”

“Wassup?” The kid hardly ever cursed. Worry, something Bane
thought he hadn't been reborn with, slid up his spine.

“The situation’s sloppier than you think.”

* * * * *

Synaviv Operative 402 downloaded the coordinates, storing
them in a section of his mind accessible to the others on the boat. All twelve
of his men sat behind him on the motorboat’s benches.

“We have the location.” The voice that responded in his head
sounded like his own, the part of him located at the company’s Bellevue campus.
Few operatives could communicate over distances, even with the company’s
redundant and always shifting layers of coverage. Synaviv required hinges like
him to lead missions.

Pride rushed to 402’s mind, and he set his neurotransmitter
receptors to higher uptake before HQ could notice his fluctuation in mood.

“Danger?” The voice of Synaviv’s server queried his brain.

“No,” he answered. “Just…” He didn’t want to say “happiness”
or even “annoyance”. The parts of his mind that processed feelings were
supposed to have been removed. “We will not reach the island for approximately
one hour.”

“Approximately?”

“Some variables cannot be accounted for. The closest weather
center is located in Friday Harbor.”

The voice went silent.

402 circled in a wide arc, pointing the bow toward Patos
Island and the scientist’s lair.

“Make sure to bring in her maker too. No matter his
condition.”

402 telepathed his assent, then cut the connection.
Maintaining contact over such long distances taxed his charge. And sometimes it
was nice to only hear silence.

* * * * *

I’m ready. Go!

Bane clicked off his phone on Q-ter’s message and then
crouched as he ran alongside the house, the reassuring weight of his pistol
filling his hand. He reared up at the scientist’s door, unloaded two rounds
into the doorknob and kicked hard, shredding the remains of the handle. A wide
dining room lay ahead. Josie in a wedding dress and her maker in a tuxedo
stared up at him from a candlelit table. His ocular nerve sent the image to the
positioning center in his cerebral cortex. Bane drank in her hopeful expression
while, without looking, he shot Dr. Adam Friedman between the eyes.

Bane heard the scientist’s head
thunk
on the table
and the girl smiled as if he were a knight in fucking shining armor. The
glimmer only lasted a second, though, before her gaze dimmed, grayed. The
newborn stein convulsed once and then she died.

Chapter Three

Bane turned up the volume on his headset and heaved the
female over his shoulder. White taffeta flapped around his eyes and he shoved
it out of the way. “Motherfucker, Q! What the hell just happened?”

“I don’t know! He must have set her up to require neural
feedback from him. Guy probably planted a chip in his brain. Like a stein.”

Bane scrubbed at his chin and swiveled his head, looking for
where the doctor would have stashed his lab. His gaze caught the guy’s limp
body. He scanned the skin of his face, looking for a telltale scar. “How long
would it take me to dig it out?”

“I don’t recommend that. Just send me whatever he has on his
hard drives. I can reason something out.”

Bane cursed into the phone. His eye caught a half-wall, and
when he investigated, he found a staircase leading down to a basement door.
“Jackpot.” He patted the girl on the rump before running down the stairs and
into the scientist’s lab. He poked his head into several small rooms housing
animals in cages and walls of jars. The hallway emptied into a wide room banked
with a central island of computers and monitors. Next to it sat a gurney, and
Bane laid the girl on it before pulling out his stack of hard drives and the
ZU’s laptop. He sat and rolled the desk chair into its dock.

He inserted the USB port. “I'm connecting you now. How long
’til you break the—”

“I’m in!” Q-ter cut him off and Bane watched the bites
stream from the scientist’s set-up to the Underground’s mainframe. Yeah, the
kid was that good.

“D’you still want me to load what I can on the external
drives?” He connected another port as he asked.

“Absolutely.”

Bane started clicking files from one drive to another when
the creak of a door opening sounded from upstairs. “Fuck me! Synaviv’s here. I
thought you said I’d have a few hours.”

Q-ter’s distracted voice mumbled, “They must have been
closer than I calculated.”

Bane stole down the hallway and shut the internal dead bolt
on the door, then ran back to the girl. “Tell me something good, Q. I don’t
know if she’ll keep fresh all the way back to Seattle.”

“I figured out how you can re-start her.”

Bane cocked his head, listening to the footsteps of the team
upstairs. They sounded like ants scurrying. Really big ants.

“Great,” he whispered. “What do I do?”

“Just say to her ‘Wake up, Beloved’. It’ll network her to
you instead,” Q-ter whispered back, mimicking Bane.

“You don’t have to whisper, dumbass. What’s the catch?”

Q-ter cleared his throat and spoke louder. “She was designed
to run as a bride. She won’t function without a male to network to. Her name is
Josie, by the way. Congratulations!”

The door at the end of the hallway shook. Bane cursed Q-ter
to hell under his breath and bent over the girl. “Does she have an automated
mode?” He didn’t want to have to use it, but it might come in handy to get them
out of here.

He heard Q-ter’s fingers clicking keys, even above the fists
pounding the hallway door. “Yeah, just call her by her name and use the word
‘come’.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“The irony is not lost, my friend.”

Bane clicked the phone off. He threw his hard drives in his
pack and scowled. He sounded like a fucking prick when he whispered in her ear,
“Wake up, beloved.”

The girl gasped in a breath. Her eyes darted wildly, up and
left, down and right. She focused hard on his face and then started with the
eye rolling again.

Bane didn’t have time to let her adjust. “We have to get out
of here. Now! Is there another exit?”

She shook her head, a hysterical glint shading her
expression. Then she swallowed. “You’re Adam now?”

He hauled Josie to her feet and dragged her, looking for a
place to hide. Wordlessly, she pointed to a door tucked behind an angle in the
wall. He nodded and pulled her inside a darkened supply room. Gallons of
cleaning supplies alternated with formaldehyde along the walls. Buckets of
animal feed filled the corners. It smelled like a veterinarian’s office.

Bane shut the door just as he heard the sound of a
sledgehammer being taken to the laboratory’s door.

Josie’s eyes shot daggers. “Why are you Adam? I don’t want
you to be Adam.”

He shushed her. “Bane.” His whisper came out a snarl. “My
name is Bane.”

She opened her mouth to speak again, but he clamped his hand
over her lips. Her breath feathered over his palm, and he could have sworn she
sighed. But then she jerked, trying to pull away. Bane tugged her arm and swung
her so that he stood behind, with one arm pinning both of hers, and his other
hand covering her mouth. “Don’t make me put you under.”

She stiffened in a move that pushed her ass into his hips,
which in turn got him hard as a pipe. Her tiny whimper should have made him
feel guilty, but Synaviv’s guys were in the hallway and battle excitement raged
under his skin. Bane lowered his lips to her ear, considering rasping something
else, perhaps something dirty to shock her and make her squirm a little more.
Instead he tightened his grip, not hard enough to hurt but with enough force to
warn.

The girl relaxed into his hold and her breasts settled onto
his bare forearm. She leaned back and laid her head on his shoulder and mumbled
something against his hand. In a quick move, Josie twisted and thrust her elbow
into his solar plexus.

Air whooshed out from his lungs and he closed his eyes and
gritted his teeth to remain silent. With slow determination, Bane gripped the
newborn stein’s neck. He brought his face close to hers. The team had passed
the door now. It sounded like they were rifling through the lab, likely trying
to download everything they could off the scientist’s hardware.

Her eyes narrowed—a challenge or maybe a dare—and Bane
allowed a cruel smile to play at his lips. “Ah, Josie, you are going to make me
‘come’ so hard someday.”

She gasped in fury, but then her face went slack and her
eyes dulled. Josie’s muscles relaxed until she stood placid before him, just
another re-animated corpse awaiting its master’s commands.