Reawakening Eden (11 page)

“Lieutenant Locke, attention!”

It was the strangest thing, was all Via could think while her pulse pounded in her ears and in the lips that had become the most sensitive part of her body. It was as though she and this man—a militia man, for God’s sake—had discovered that with a kiss, they could create a magical little sphere where only they existed, and nothing of the gritty, desperate, dangerous place that was their world could encroach on their private slice of perfection. Then her lips drifted like a dream away from his, and the restless throb of the ever-bustling city once again filled her ears. But nothing felt the same.
She
wasn’t the same. As mad as it sounded, she felt changed from the inside out.

Were kisses supposed to change the world?

Via opened eyes she couldn’t remember closing, and gazed up in dazed confusion at the man she held with all the passionate fervor of a long-time lover. Where was the explosion? Had she interrupted the sequence of events? Was everyone safe?

Everyone except her, of course. Her safe life was officially over now that she had revealed to a gun-toting jarhead member of the militia that she was a psionic.

Dayum.

“What the hell are you hick farmers feeding your oversexed women?” Colonel Fynn raged at Weddo, who was staring at Via in horrified disbelief. Her eyes shimmering with the chaos churning her insides, she could only shake her head. There was no time to explain her behavior. There was no time for anything, except…

Maybe there could be one last way out.

When she looked back to Locke, his flat, not-really-human optics were still trained on her as if he didn’t know how to look away. “Kill me,” she whispered in a rush, and watched his cyberoptics widen in surprise. It was probably the stress that made her think there might have been an impossible flash of emotion there. “If you have even one ounce of compassion left in that meched-out body of yours, please kill me. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

Slowly he shook his head while Fynn yelled at Weddo, “You’re a—”

“
Please
.” She grabbed the muzzle of his pulse rifle and angled it under her chin with the surreal calm of one who had no other choice. “Do it.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You’re crazy.”

“No one will blame you. I attacked you.”

“Attacked?” His head continued to shake. “That’s not what I’d call it.”

“Locke, you come to attention, you worthless bastard!” Fynn was all but frothing at the mouth while the rest of his troops closed in on the uncharacteristic knot of chaos in their midst, wary and confused. “What do you think you’re doing, soldier, falling for a classic diversionary tactic while the enemy closes in?”

“The no-goods are dispersing, Colonel.” Locke’s voice was oddly remote, as though he was only half-aware of the words coming out of his mouth. And all the while he stared at Via as if the next beat of his heart depended on it. “Look around. Even an untrained eye can see there is no enemy out there.”

Fynn turned an alarming shade of puce, making Via wonder if anyone had ever mustered up the
cojones
to contradict him. “The moment any soldier thinks that, they become worse than a liability. They become as bad as the enemy itself.” In sheer contempt, Fynn threw the cigar he still held at Locke’s feet. “Lifers, fall back double-time.”

“
Bomb
!” Locke suddenly shouted and waved at Weddo and the others. “Get in the transport,
now!
”

“Wait, I stopped—” Via’s protest was cut off as Locke’s free arm clamped around her waist like a vise, and she let out a strangled gasp when it felt like the lower half of her rib cage was crushed. Then, without warning, he leapt an easy fifteen feet off the raised loading dock in a mind-boggling show of inhuman strength, landing on the ground beside the dock so hard Via’s teeth clicked together.

“Get down!” Locke’s roar was superfluous, for his massive warrior’s body crouched over hers like a smothering blanket until she was forced into a fetal position, her head pushed down so far her chin gouged into her chest.

“But I stopped it—”

Via’s strangled protest was interrupted once more by an explosion above them. A sickening, hellish wave of heat billowed out over their heads. The concussive force made her eardrums quake like aspen leaves as the air pressure heaved out, then sucked back into the loading dock, as if a mythical giant were pulling in a massive gulp of air and holding it. Then the world went strangely still, while her stunned brain rattled around in her cranium like a tiny marble caught in a washer’s spin cycle.

Rule number one: Run from the Shadows. Unless one knows the secret that will save you.

Ghost in the Machine

© 2011 Barbara J. Hancock

A
Cybershock
Story

I live in a world of waifs and shadows.
Live
might be an overstatement. I scrounge and scramble and survive in an atmosphere made thick and gray by the ashes of the Fallen. And sometimes I dream of sunlight. My parents were taken, even though they followed all the rules. Never scavenge at night. Never talk to Shadows. Don’t fight the Sweepers. Run. Run. Run.

Now that they’ve taken my little brother, Douglas, I’ve realized I’ve only been surviving for him. I have two choices: Follow him or lie down and die. I can’t just quit after years of struggle. I wouldn’t know how if I tried. Determination is all I have left.

And then I meet
him
.

He claims to be a rogue who can help me find my brother. It’s got to be a lie. But I don’t run. I stop. I listen. And I make a deal with a Shadow even though I know it will mean the death of me.

Never talk to Shadows.

But no one ever told me what would happen if I kissed one.

Warning: May cause fantasies of forbidden kisses from dark heroes who balance on the edge of evil. Where shadows wait and ashes fall…

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Ghost in the Machine:

He looks so heroic treading with purpose through the ash, every bit as graceful as I am not. I remind myself the lean muscle that glides beneath his skin was turned to dust years ago, but the reminder doesn’t help. He has held me with those strong hands. He’s saved me with that lithe body. I no longer tingle where the spider’s venom dripped, but everywhere Gabriel touched me seems permanently sensitized.

Heat rises in me as I acknowledge a different kind of tingle than I’ve known before. If talking to a Shadow is dangerous, surely desiring one will be deadly.

We walk forever. Past crumbled buildings and long-dead alleys. I try not to stare at him, but it’s a lot like trying not to breathe when a Shadow is passing—you can stop for awhile, but soon enough your lungs start to burn with the need for oxygen.

My eyes need to soak up his mystery. For the first time, I see how ash doesn’t settle on him. Not on his hair or his clothes or his skin. He has a physical form. I’ve felt it. I blush with the urge to feel it again. But the ash doesn’t touch him. I’ve lived with Shadows always, but I’ve never noticed this about them.

But his gleaming dark curls and shining armor, I notice.

In comparison, I’m filthy, covered in soot from head to toe.

I try not to think about it. I’m doggedly following Douglas into the jaws of death. But as the dark night turns to gray day, the ash that coats me bothers me more and more. Just as when I fought the spider and after when I thought about an ashen grave, it seems a claiming and a giving up.

Irrational. A fancy brought on by fear, exhaustion and hunger. Every third step is a stumble now. Each blink threatens to become a long sleep. And still I trudge on. It isn’t until my forward momentum stops that I realize I’ve collapsed. My head is so light it seems as if it might float to the gray-choked sky.

I can see Shadows.

They move behind windows of nearby buildings, up and down crumbling sidewalks, across a crosswalk and back again. They’re uninterested, stuck in mindless repetition. I see them almost as a whole entity. Like a shifting darkness that fills the outer edges of my world. But when might one or more unglitch and come for me?

I try to rise, but my exhausted state betrays me. A bottle rolls away from my clumsy foot as I try to place it. The clinking of it sounds like the toll of a bell against the curb.

Gabriel comes to stand by my side. Sidekick or sentry? I peruse the lean length of his leg as I freeze. The tactical uniform worn by soldiers of the First Wave had been custom fitted and molded to their skin. A leather-like body armor, it had been useless against an enemy that didn’t use projectile weapons. The SoulEater had taken them down and taken them in. It had created Shadows and Sweepers and who knew what other abominations.

We wait. What will the other Shadows do?

The one beside me had been a fine specimen of soldier when he’d been alive. It soothes me even though it hadn’t saved him.

But then, not so much.

They are coming.

The sound of hundreds of heads turning our way is like a wave of whispers washing over me. I rise to my feet, swaying. My hand goes to the weapon at my belt. There isn’t enough charge. No way is there enough. The shifting darkness around us begins to coalesce into forms and shapes with deadly substance. Coming closer. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. More.

Just as I raise my disruptor to fire for the hell of it and with no hope of taking out more than a few before we are overwhelmed, Gabriel’s angelic wings embrace me in a feathery cocoon. A staticky charge ripples and reaches to the heart of me. My nerve endings hum with it. In protest or pleasure? Borderline. Being touched by a Shadow from the top of my head to my feet definitely walks the line between pleasure and pain.

“Shhhhhhhh,” Gabriel says.

Trapped in those magnificent wings, I’m as frightened of their protection as I am of the approaching horde. Because I want to hush. I want to accept his cool embrace and the way it makes me feel—saved, seduced, secondary.

For once, I don’t have to fight. They are out there, eddying around us like leaves in a stream, but I’m hidden. Enclosed in Gabriel’s shadowy substance, I’ve disappeared to the others. I hide within the very thing I fear the most.

His wings wind tighter. They pull me closer—he pulls me closer. My cheek presses to his solid chest. His scent is ozone-kissed. It envelopes me in an atmosphere not unlike an approaching storm, surprisingly pleasant. And then I feel it. The thud of a heartbeat against my face.

How can a Shadow have a heartbeat?

Like the swinging girl, it must be only an echo, a memory, a glitch.

As I stand there, Shadows all around, the pace of his phantom heartbeat increases.

I want to pull away.

This is too close to his mystery.

Panic rises, making my own heart thump.

I would push him away. He shields me. He protects me. But I could more easily fight the Shadows around us than the beat of that heart against me. That sort of fight is much more familiar than the fight to resist his scent, his touch—the lie that he is human.

A wavering whisper stops me when I would have pushed my way free.

Very close, just outside my Shadow-wing hideaway, a child’s voice speaks in a singsong cadence that is at once horrifying and haunting.

“Olly olly oxen freeeeeeeeeee…”

The last syllable ends as if the lungs that force air over dormant vocal cords are too weak for volume. An all-out scream couldn’t have been worse. I start to shake. My imagination gives the voice a face, and it’s the face of the swinging girl, come all this way to find me and searching still.

Of course, there are other Fallen children. Everywhere. But my shivers won’t be chided. It is her. She’s out there. And this time I can’t slip away.

“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

All dressed in black, black, black…”

The nursery rhyme murmurs from Gabe’s lips, oddly eerie in its coaxing. Like a father encouraging his child to play, he sings the song, gentle and low. I recognize it for the suggestion it is and hold my breath, hoping.

There. A slight sound of scuffling against the cluttered pavement. From hide-and-seek to double Dutch sans rope. In my mind’s eye, I watch the creepy Shadow hop away. Creepy but sad too. Forever young. Forever lost. Missing the games she used to play but caught up in a much more horrible game for eternity.

“Don’t speak,” Gabriel whispers against the top of my head.

Strong arms come around me, more intimate than the wings. Gabriel scoops me up, still hidden, and begins to stride forward, a Shadow among Shadows. Nothing to see here. I hug my arms around my chest to keep them from clinging to him. And I wonder what game, if any, my angelic soldier is determined to play.

Reawakening Eden

Vivi Andrews

When life is a struggle, love is the ultimate luxury.

Librarian Eden Fairfax knows exactly where to find books about survival. None of them mentioned how to manage in the aftermath of a worldwide epidemic—with two young orphans in tow.

On a journey south to warmer climes, she finds sanctuary for all three of them among a community of survivors in Seattle. Until she realizes the children are the centerpiece of their bizarre new religion. There’s no choice but to run as far and as fast as her stolen car will go.

Former Army Ranger Connor Reed had planned to live out the end of the world in peace. Yet he can’t stand by and do nothing while a lone woman defends two children from an armed thug. Even if doing
something
means taking the trio in.

Eden’s not sure if the armed hermit is her salvation or an even more dangerous threat. A blizzard forces her to trust him with their lives, and in Connor’s arms she remembers what it’s like to live
.

Just beyond the edge of the storm, though, the cult leader awaits his chance to get his hands on the children—and make Eden his next sexual sacrifice.

Warning: This book contains a strong, silent action-hero, a tough, tenacious heroine, a pair of steal-your-heart kids, and a pony-sized dog named Precious.