Hammer Down: Children of the Undying: Book 2 (7 page)

“And people are wondering what to do with him, and whether you have four more in the visitors’ quarters.” Devi leaned on a rickety table, determined not to let him see her discomfort. “Did I miss anything?”

“Not really.”

His eyes were dark, and Devi rubbed her hands over her bare arms. “As far as I can see, there’s not much my crew or I can do about that.”

“Nothing except sit tight.” His gaze followed her hands as they smoothed over her skin. “There’s only one easy way into this sector, and I’ll have a guard on the door. Someone I trust to defuse the situation if anyone thinks to come and try to talk to you. And I’d like you to meet with my second soon, if you’re willing. If she tells people you’re not a danger, most will believe her.”

Keeping her mind on business was a Herculean struggle. He still stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest, and she found herself watching his hand where it rested on his arm.

He was tense—who wouldn’t be at the moment?—but her attention shifted from his obvious unease as sudden desire struck her, slowing her brain and quickening her body.

His hands were strong, but she’d already felt how gentle they could be. Careful, controlled. Would he fuck a woman the same way? Afraid to let go for fear of hurting her?

No. He’d drive into her, grinding deep. Rough, hot. Intent on pleasure.

Fuck.

His voice was lower when he spoke again. Gravelly. “Devi?”

She suppressed a shiver as her body betrayed her, head to toe. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and her nipples hardened under the light, damp cotton of her shirt. When she shifted on the table, pressing her thighs together, she almost groaned. That slight movement proved her more than ready for him, wet and sensitive and aching.

He was clear across the room, and if she rubbed her thighs together just a little more, she’d probably come.

It was unacceptable. “What?”

“That okay with you?”

Don’t look, Devi…
He was aroused, an impressive erection straining the front of his pants. “Your second-in-command. Got it.”

His jaw clenched, like he’d caught her looking but wasn’t willing to admit it. “There is one thing you can do, if you’re willing. We could compensate you.”

“What’s that?”

“We need intel. Information on the area, the closest settlements. Haulers see things.”

She thought of the maps carefully rolled into her duffel. Each was her own personal creation, meticulously marked with routes and locations, including some of her own stashes of goods and chips. “Yeah, we see things. We also have to be damn careful about what we share.”

He nodded once, as if he’d expected the words. “Considering where you’re standing, it’s a virtue I can appreciate. No settlements would do business with you if you were going to tell their secrets.”

“Exactly. I tell you something about Forestville today, next week we’re not welcome there.” And news got around, whether through the Global or because no one liked to talk as much as a hauler with a few drinks in him.

“There’s only one place I need information about.” His gaze didn’t waver. “And I’m not planning to use it unless they come after us, if that makes a difference.”

Nicollet. Devi shivered. “How can I be sure you’re not planning a preemptive attack on the city?”

He didn’t blink. Didn’t hesitate. “Why would I want to? Their resources are overtaxed and I have enough people to feed as it is.”

The answer had been drilled into her head as surely as every other human’s for as long as she could remember, and she gave it to him now, a weapon of truth—and a plea for him to deny it. “Because you’re monsters. Bloodthirsty monsters.”

Her words struck home. He flinched, his eyes tightening, then resumed his blank expression as if the lapse hadn’t happened. “Sometimes,” he agreed blandly. “And we’re honest about it too, which is more than you can say for the bastards running most of the cities these days.”

Surely he didn’t expect her to disagree. “Yes. If you swear you’ll only use the information for defense, I’ll help you.”

The room had a small table with a couple of folding chairs that had clearly seen better days. Zel nudged one back with his foot and folded his body into it before pulling out a tablet. “I swear on all the lives in my care, I will not invade Nicollet.”

“All right.” Devi knelt beside the bed and pulled out her duffel. “Most of my maps deal with other settlements, but I have some information on the city. You can talk to Juliet and Tanner too, if you need to know what sort of military forces and armament they have.”

One of Zel’s eyebrows swept up. “They know that sort of thing?”

“Some.” She shrugged. “People talk. The training is hard to hide, and so are the rifles the guards carry. The guns they set up around the perimeter and at checkpoints are hard to miss too.”

He pulled up a map of the countryside stretching between Rochester and the remains of what had once been Minneapolis and Saint Paul. “One thing we don’t know is how many of these roads are being maintained. I have a few people who make trips to nearby settlements, but most of us stay off the main routes as much as possible. Hopefully they’re not going to be able to bring an army offroad, though.”

She couldn’t deny the capability. “They have the vehicles and the ADS equipment to do it, I’m afraid.”

He sighed, as if he’d expected as much but hadn’t wanted it confirmed. “Can you show me which roads are still passable?”

“That I can definitely do.” She unzipped the bag, withdrew the maps two at a time and laid them out on the bed. “Come closer.”

He obeyed in silence, moving to stand so close that his arm brushed her shoulder as he bent over the bed and studied the first of the maps. “You drew these yourself?”

“Mmm.” He was warm and he smelled good—two things she didn’t usually associate with bloodthirsty monsters. “I worked from pre-Fall renderings. I used to mark old maps, but after a while they just look like a jumbled mess. Sometimes starting fresh is better.”

He traced a finger over one road. “There’s something to be said for physical copies. Nothing is secure in the network. Or real.”

“Cache has scanned them all, of course. She had to in order to integrate them with the trucks’ navigation systems.” Devi unrolled another map and smoothed a wrinkled edge. “But these…remind me of my dad. He and my grandfather had whole books of them, road atlases with every highway and interstate route marked. I didn’t have storybooks, but I had those maps.” She’d spent hours poring over them, tracing all the lines, blue and yellow and red, and asking questions about the places at the ends of those roads.

The corner of his mouth twitched up. “My mother loves printed books. My stepfather never thought much of how inefficient they are, but it didn’t stop him from building her a tidy little library of them. What he could find, anyway.”

She laughed at the thought of trying to haul that sort of thing around on a rig. “The electronics don’t bother me, really, not even the maps. This is all just me being a sentimental fool.”

His smile made him seem more human. “We’re all sentimental about something.”

Her heart hitched, and the heat flooded back with a vengeance. It seemed that nothing could distract her from his appeal for long, and that made him more dangerous than if he
had
been a monster.

Devi took a deep breath. “So what’s the deal? The information in exchange for what?”

“Fuel.” Was it her imagination, or was his voice a little lower? Rougher. “We can provide as much as you need, and you can pay us in information instead of credits or goods.”

An arrangement that certainly worked more to
his
advantage. “I think the information is worth both. Fuel and credits.”

Fire sparked in his eyes—not all anger, but enough to give his fierce expression a sweet edge of danger. “I can always send men out to look at the roads. You’ll have a harder time getting fuel. Supply and demand, my pretty little hauler.”

She reached for the nearest map and began to reroll it. “It’d take you months to map these routes. It’s worth it and you know it.”

His hand shot out and caught her wrist, fingers trapping without digging too deep. “How many credits?”

He was touching her, and her brain drew its own conclusions about the sensuality inherent in that touch. It didn’t matter if he’d intended it as a flirtation—it became one as soon as his fingers closed around her wrist, and her body throbbed.

A smile curved his lips, and the callused pad of his thumb scraped over her pulse. “How many credits, Devi?”

The low rasp jarred her out of her sexual haze. “Eight hundred. As a bonus for my crew.”

Zel slid his fingers lower, then twisted his hand to clasp hers in a firm grip. “Done.”

She had to swallow to speak. “I’ll have Cache send you the most up-to-date files I have.”

“Thank you. Have her send us your fuel requirements too.”

He hadn’t released her yet. “I can discuss that with your second when I meet with her, can’t I?”

“Yes.” Letting go of her hand, he took a hasty step back. “Yes, of course. Hailey can arrange everything.”

“Good.” Devi rubbed her wrist. “In the meantime, are we under lockdown?”

That wiped the soft look from his eyes. He straightened and nodded curtly. “It’s better this way, for now. Better for everyone. You have run of the guest quarters, and if you need anything, the guard posted at the entrance can get it for you.”

Better for everyone.
If he truly believed the words, it meant he had people who wouldn’t hesitate to pick a fight with her crew—or worse.

Chapter Six

Connecting to… Rochester\Blackhole

Message from @root      rip: Next person I catch sneaking onto the secure server to access XXX clubs is losing their entertainment privileges for a month. Untraceable access is for OFFICIAL BUSINESS. Jerk off on your own time.

Rerouting to < > on GlobalNetwork\Southeast

< >

Authentication confirmed. Prepare to unleash your darkest fantasies.

REMINDER: Solicitation is strictly prohibited on the main floors. Those interested in operating as a for-hire escort must obtain a licensing application from administration. Violators will be permanently banned.

In retrospect, his second mistake was letting the woman blow him.

The first was coming to the club early, but his mind raced and his skin itched and he still had two damn hours until his assigned meeting with his contact. If he couldn’t get outside, at least he could get out of his skin, but the stinging, grating discomfort from the Global’s anti-demon signal had honed his already sharp temper to a vicious edge.

There was only one respite in the Global—or only one he knew of. Net-hackers had been building secret, underground communities in deserted corners of the network for years, but this club was his favorite. Whoever ran it had done a dangerous thing, tinkering with the anti-demon signal until it evidenced itself in throbbing heat instead of pulsing irritation. Not exactly arousing, but far less distracting and a lot more comfortable.

Especially if you were standing in a club full of halfblood demons and the humans who got off on the danger of fucking them.

Of course, it was all but impossible to tell which was which. Tradition held that humans dressed in black and demonbloods in red, but Zel always arrived in black. Habit, because he didn’t want to risk someone knowing what he was if he encountered them elsewhere. Better to have a reputation as a man with a demon fetish.

The woman on her knees in front of him was as human as they came, a sleepy-eyed nymphet with black hair, alabaster skin and a blood red dress that meant she was trying to pass herself off as demonic. Probably hoping to find human men who were into the idea of doing the nasty with a woman who had a little evil in her.

The layers of lies and deception were tedious.

So was the blowjob, which meant the entire fucking thing was a huge, dumb mistake. Or maybe his only mistake had been seeking out a woman who looked nothing like Devi, as if he could drive her bronzed skin and tawny hair from his mind by overwriting it with something different.

Idiot.

She might have been a liar, just like him, but the woman wasn’t stupid, a fact she proved when she lifted her head with a sigh. “You’re not into this.” Still trying to salvage the encounter, but a thread of exasperation had crept into her sultry tone.

He wasn’t, but retreating wasn’t in him. Nor was losing. Maybe this was more Lorenzo’s kind of fight than his own, but the objective remained the same—vanquish the opponent. In this case, leave her trembling and undone. So he dragged the woman to her feet and urged her back against the wall. “Close your eyes.”

She went, but she stared at him in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” They were in a dark corner, and his bulk kept her body mostly shielded from the rest of the room. It would be fast, give her a little relief to make up for the fact that his heart wasn’t in it—and satisfy himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t inept with all women.
Just the one I want.
“Close your eyes.”

Her lashes fluttered down, and she exhaled a shaky breath. “The forceful thing is hot.”

“Then maybe you should be here looking for demons instead of humans.” He didn’t even have to slide his fingers under her excuse for a dress. The heel of his hand worked fine, especially when the friction of fabric did most of the work for him. She trembled and whimpered, so needy she seemed to be half-starved for pleasure, but even splayed against the wall, thrusting her hips to meet his hand, she was totally passive.

Hard to imagine Devi being passive. Stupid to imagine Devi at all, with his hand between another woman’s virtual thighs. He’d made sure he couldn’t pretend, but now he wished he hadn’t. Maybe a long, hard ride with his fist clenched in curly golden hair would shake him out of his insanity. His cock might take more interest in the whole affair if he could close his eyes and feel sleek, warm flesh over hard muscles, the wicked contrast of soft and strong.

He was still thinking about Devi when a strangled moan alerted him to the fact that his playmate had come. She clutched at his shirt and shuddered through the pleasure, and he felt guilty enough about not noticing that he focused his attention long enough to get her off twice more before leaving her sprawled on a nearby couch, weak-limbed and purring like a kitten.