Creations 1: The Perfect Creation (2 page)

Now it was rundown and festered with trash and street vermin—both animal and human.

Drekk punched in a code, the sounds of which she committed to memory. They entered into a dingy receptacle, where a scanner made note of her weapons. Drekk raised a dark brow and waited, a hand out.

Erin quickly handed over her pistol and the Easfran dagger she’d pocketed from the first Mardu thief dumb enough to misjudge her. Playing along with Drekk set him at ease even more. Though the large man didn’t unbend enough to slouch, she read the ease in his body and contained an inner sneer, her confidence returning in force. She couldn’t wait to lay into him. Him and that scum Cheltam.

Drekk dumped the weapons in a storage bin that pinged a moment after disposal. A large door slid open, and they walked through it. Once past the entrance, the hallways showcased an altogether different house than the one she thought she’d walked into. The air smelled clean. The floor boards underfoot sparkled, and the walls had not a smudge or nick to mar the refreshingly bright yellow colour.

“In here,” Drekk growled and nudged her towards a set of large
furen
wood doors. He pushed them open and followed her inside.

“There you are. I’ve been waiting.” The man who stood from behind an oversized, ornate desk was nothing like what she’d been expecting. Yes, he had measuring, unforgiving eyes and a full-lipped smirk. He wore danger like a second skin, the menace inherent in his character there to see. Yet the sheer beauty in this Mardu male took her by surprise. Cheltam had shoulder-length dark-brown hair pulled back in a neat tail. His face was narrow, masculine planes and lines that hinted at a rough life. His nose was strong, his chin square and hinting at stubbornness. The stark cheekbones and exotically slanted eyes made her think of a jungle cat’s—golden and mesmerising if one stared too long.

“Cheltam.” She waited, wanting to hear him acknowledge his name.

“In the flesh.” His gaze wandered over her. “All covered up I see. Smart.” He nodded.

“You’re worth a pretty bek to the folks at Blue Rim. Not sure if it’s really because you’re stirring up trouble with science or not. Obviously interference in the scientific process is a criminal offence. But you must have seriously interfered with something big to be worth a hundred grand.”

“Wheller had said you were a man who could help.” She wanted to smack the satisfaction off his handsome face. Instead she trembled and shrunk smaller. “Why won’t you help
me
?” Calling on the helplessness she’d felt all too often during her short life, she willed tears to her eyes. By the blessed suns, she managed to squeeze one over her left lid.

Drekk homed in on the tear trailing down her cheek and frowned in what looked like concern. Cheltam, however, didn’t budge.

“Nice try, but—”

Drekk coughed at the same moment and offered her a cloth to wipe her eyes. Cheltam, dammit, was too far away to take down with Drekk. But she feared if she waited much longer, they’d bring in reinforcements. When Drekk shoved the cloth at her again, she slowly reached out a hand.

In seconds, she’d taken the cloth, and Drekk, to his knees. A wrist lock kept him down while she pinched the nerves on his neck, at a spot at the base of his skull, to knock him out.

As he tumbled to the floor, she crouched before shooting into the air, meeting the blow Cheltam aimed her way. She saw his eyes widen as his fist met her open hand.

Good, she’d surprised him. But that wasn’t all she meant to do. Whipping her glasses off, she shocked him anew with her eyes and used that short moment of inattention to cuff his chin. The blow knocked him back enough that she could use what she knew of the Mardu to her advantage. Clamping one hand on his wrist and another to his thigh, she tugged on the inner bands of his feralis nerves and took him to blessed unconsciousness.

The damage she’d done to both men would keep them out of it for at least half an hour if not more, enough time for her to scout the place, find some restraints, and then convince Cheltam that he’d be helping her, one way or the other.

* * * *

Rafe of Mardu swore as he checked his timepiece again. Gar had a bad habit of ignoring him to suit his convenience. It wasn’t as if Rafe wanted to be here, checking on his older brother. But Sernal, damn his hide, had ordered him to.

“Either check on Gar and ascertain his readiness, or be prepared to take on the roll of Cheltam
again,” Sernal, the oldest of the Mardu brothers, ordered. “Though I have to say, Gar makes a hell of a
crook, almost better than you were.”

“As if,” Rafe muttered and kicked at a fallen shoe. By Flor’s dagger, his brother was a slob. Gar’s bedroom looked as if a solar storm had lit it. Clothing scattered everywhere.

Shoes, socks, and… hell, was that a woman’s undergarment hanging from the overhead fan?

Rafe perked up, pleased at the thought that his brother might finally be putting the past behind him. Not that Rafe expected Gar to ever get over the loss of his wife and son. But hell, it had been nearly three years now. Three years of consuming grief, defeat and rage swimming in Gar’s gaze, one once so like his own. Whereas once he and Gar had been identical, the years of pain had ravaged Gar’s features, turning the once warm Mardu into a steely-eyed devil, one who liked nothing better than to annoy those he considered bothersome. Still, people who didn’t know them well took them as twins. As if Rafe’s head was anywhere near as hard as that of his stubborn idiot of a brother.

“Fuck this.” Rafe pushed past the sloppy bedroom he’d been relegated to and stomped down the hallway, which, thankfully, remained tidy. It hadn’t been easy to give up his plum undercover assignment as Cheltam—an independent crime lord—but Rafe had been getting restless. At the time, he’d thought more involvement with the peacemakers would cure him of his malaise. Unfortunately, Sernal was more annoying than boredom. Though his brother, now the head of Peacemaker Central—a term which annoyed Sernal to no end—had an efficiency rate bordering on incredible, he also had a major stick up his ass. Sernal always adhered to the rules and had an irritating tendency to see the world in black and white, or so it seemed to Rafe.

I ought to kick Gar out and resume my duties as Cheltam. Let Gar deal with Sernal on a daily
basis.
Rafe snorted with amusement, imagining his older brothers facing off. Catam, their youngest sibling, had avoided joining the peacemakers by taking up with a bounty hunting crew. Smartest one in the litter. Not only did the little jerk not have to follow the rules, but he’d become a successful bounty hunter, husband and proud father to two mischievous little girls. And how Rafe’s mother loved the justice of that.

Rafe smirked, thinking about the last time he’d seen his nieces as he sought Gar. Those little beauties had nearly started an all-out war by stealing a royal kitten from Prince—

The sight that met his eyes stopped Rafe in his tracks. The study, where he’d thought to find his brother schmoozing with Drekk, looked empty, save for the two unmoving bodies slumped on the ground. Hurriedly checking both Gar and Drekk, he found, to his relief, both of them breathing but unconscious.

Knowing he needed to get a bead on the perpetrator before more damage was done—

Flor forbid anyone discover Cheltam was actually a peacemaker—Rafe called on his Xema abilities and drew out his pistol. Quickly and quietly moving through the room and into the hallway again, he listened for any sign of an intruder. To his frustration, he caught nothing.

So it was with great surprise when he turned into the kitchen to find the flat of a marbled pan aimed at his head.

Inherently fast reflexes saved him from being smashed in the face, and he ducked and rolled to safety, only to have a strong foot kick his gun from his hand.

“I’ll hand it to you, Cheltam. I underestimated you. I won’t do it again,” a husky, feminine voice warned.

Rafe managed a look at his attacker and made the mother of all mistakes. A glance at inhuman eyes had him pausing in wonder. Her face had been cast in Flor’s bountiful Beyond. She had the lips of a god’s pleasurer, the eyes of his goddess. The whites of her eyes were overshadowed by a bounty of colour. Bright purple surrounded blue irises around pupils of yellow flame. Her eyes, the slim sternness of her nose, the high, delineated cheekbones which carried both fragility and strength…the woman’s face mesmerised with unique, unreal beauty. And in that moment, his study gave his attacker the time she needed to bring him to his knees.

The shot to his groin stunned him speechless, and the pain was worse than anything he could equate it to. So the blow to the back of his head was almost welcome when it took him into the blissful blackness of sleep.

This was so not what she needed right now. Cursing under her breath, Erin left the criminal on the floor and reclaimed the bag of food she’d put together before she’d heard him approach. Returning to Cheltam, she hurriedly hefted his deadweight over her shoulder, grateful for the genetics that gave her such enhanced strength, and raced towards the front door. Easily recalling the passcode Drekk had used, she entered it to escape. A quick assessment of the area around her showed nothing but Drekk’s vehicle on the street. Not a hint, sigh or speck of any other presence nearby.

Not knowing how much time she had until Drekk regained consciousness, she dropped both her ‘saviour’ and the provisions bag to the ground, reached into her pocket for the restraints she’d palmed off of Drekk while he lay passed out, and secured Cheltam’s hands behind him. With ease, she tossed him into the vehicle that Drekk had conveniently left unsecured and sat with her hands poised over the controls.

The genetic enhancements she’d been given made it difficult to hold Erin under lock and key. She could manipulate her vocal cords to sound like anyone or anything, to include automated intelligence. Her strength made drugs or an actual Ragga necessary to keep her in line when she didn’t want to be managed. And her beauty had been amazingly constructed to appeal to anything male in the Vrail System. Better than any Nebite pleasurer, Erin could also regulate her pheromone secretions, to better attract, and thus control, her enemies.

She wasn’t without flaws, however. Namely, that she’d been bred to obey.
Only by
taking charge of my own life, by putting
myself
in charge, did I overcome the psychological control of
Blue Rim’s scientists. I won. I’m stronger than they are,
she continually reminded herself. Yet being in charge had its own problems.

Because for all that she’d taken command of the situation, she didn’t know exactly what to do now. She had Cheltam, but she needed his cooperation to take down Blue Rim.

Without his connections, it was only a matter of time before Erin found herself a captive of Eyran science once more. And frankly, she’d rather be dead than return to the labs an experiment gone wrong.

Shivering at the thought, she took another glance at Cheltam. He slumped uncomfortably in the seat, and would no doubt awaken with a crick in his neck. But it was no less than he deserved for not even bothering to hear her out.

Fuming at the mess
he’d
made of things, she started the rover using Drekk’s voice, overriding his fingerprint command—no wonder he hadn’t bothered to lock it—and ordered it to traverse along the lesser used roads towards the Eron Forest. Her jaunt to this planet was logically sound. Though Mardu professed the largest number of bounty hunters per capita of any planet in the System, it also had as many criminals with true skill. Not like the rebels on Melan or the corrupt miners on Mornio, Mardu held a cache of the best thieves in the System, and she meant to use that to her advantage.

But first she needed to get her bearings and a safe enough distance from Cheltam’s thugs. Leaving the planet was always an option, but Mardu had both distance and one hell of an asteroid belt between itself and Eyra, making it the ideal hiding place to regroup. Familiar enough with Mardu’s topography, specifically the viable regions, she knew that her safest course of action would be to lose herself in the south, in the Anate Jungle while she “convinced” Cheltam to help her. The west held a bevy of lawmen and politicians she definitely needed to avoid. In the east too many bounty hunters and mercenaries polluted every whorehouse and drinking establishment along the coast. The north had too many rich people, and where there was money, there was law. So she decided the south would suit her best.

Once through the Eron Forest, she’d then have to pass through the Fields of Flor. And then on to Anate, where the tribal inhabitants, natural predators and poisonous creatures made even the most dangerous criminals turn away in favour of a prison sentence. But not Erin.

She smiled and settled back in the bench seat, confident in the rover’s ability to guide itself. What would Ryen and Anin think of this mad ride through Mardu?

Thinking about her brother and sister took her focus from Cheltam, for which she was grateful. Ryen and Anin had been created within days of one another, a few short months after Erin. Like Erin, all three bore the same genetic construct, with emphasis placed on developing different characteristics within each of them. Ryen looked almost Ragga, and he had been trained as a warrior, the ultimate fighting machine. Unfortunately, Canunn must have missed something important in her brother’s creation because Ryen had a hard time turning off his aggression once wound up. Anin, on the other hand, was the ultimate in subservience. Her attitude pleased everyone she came into contact with, and even Synster considered her a triumph in the field of genetic research. Of course, Synster valued docility, not to mention her sister’s skill in all things sexual.

Erin sighed, feeling for her family. Though they’d been created independently of one another, Canunn had impressed upon each of them that they were in fact related genetically, and as such should consider themselves family. One of his sociology experiments Erin had never quite understood yet appreciated all the same. The many lessons and courses of instruction throughout their accelerated growth only exacerbated their need and dependence on one another. In time, Erin experienced what Canunn insisted was love. And from that emotional foundation, Canunn had taught them all about respect, gratitude and loyalty.