The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Extraterrestrial, pt. 2

BACK IN THE PENTHOUSE, I COULD BARELY KEEP IT TOGETHER I WANTED HER so much. There was no dancing around it this time. Just diving in.

Before we even got to the bedroom, she peeled the Prorsum leather jacket off my body and did the same with her own. She wrapped her arms around my neck and jumped to put her legs around my waist. I hiked up her skirt and put my hands on her, bringing her close. Her body filled an imprint I didn't know it had left.

I didn't know what it was with this chick. My head spun, and my body went rigid, and I couldn't get enough of her.

Her mortality showed through as sweat formed on her brow, her pulse quickening. She unbuttoned my jeans so fast I couldn't see straight. Couldn't think straight. I couldn't do anything but find myself lost in her.

I didn't feel this with people. Not with hot human girls I'd tempt myself with, not with the supernatural ones I'd dated, not even with Madeline when she and I had briefly explored a territory more chaste than this. But with this stupid, double-agenting, knockout of a traitor, my throat closed up, my world stopped, and I could do this all night for maybe all of my nights.

It couldn't be love. It had to be lust. And it was dangerous. Intoxicating. Poisonous.

Perfect.

She let herself go better than she had before, wanting it more, I suspected. Was it bad that I was inside a girl Alexander Raven had likely been inside of too? Probably. Did that maybe fuel my interest in her, especially in her reactions to this particular act? Definitely. I don't pretend to be anything other than a power-hungry egomaniac. That was what I'd been groomed to be.

The entire thing was over when I realized too late that if I were going to, say, freeze time and embed a giant GPS tracker in her body, it probably would have been best to do that when her endorphins were at their highest, when her mind and body the most out of control with lust, so she'd be least likely to feel what I'd done when I had healed her and unfrozen her. But a look at the clock told me she'd been there a long time, and I worried intensely about Sadie coming back in the middle of this. Come to think of it, what was she doing with Cole all this time? Just how bad was it that I'd left her alone?

Not the time to think of her, Mark. Not. The. Time.

I couldn't expect to pull off the plan if she were anything less than fully distracted. Perhaps a particular kind of distracted.

I took my chances. I found it somewhere in myself to go for a second round, this time taking the time to undress her completely. And even though I was searching for focus on the task at hand, I gave myself the tiniest second to admire her body. I'd dreamed about that body. Or done whatever it was I did instead of dreaming.

This time around, I paid close attention to her, feeling as she reacted to each moment, detecting when she would be the least attached to her consciousness, the most attached to her body itself. And just when I thought I'd found the clarity I needed to do what I was supposed to, I heard Sadie come in the other room. It slowed me down, which slowed her down, and I panicked for a second. Luckily, Sam didn't hear it. But all those conversations Sadie and I had had about how she could feel what the girls felt . . . I lost my focus. Sadie was fifty feet away and Sam was here . . . like this. As I made Sam feel things, by extension I made Sadie . . .

No. No. I pulled back from the thought as soon as it crept up in my mind. But it was too late. It had taken hold in my subconscious and now I could think of nothing else than the fact that getting Sam off would make me wonder if . . .

I grabbed the last fleeting shred of focus I could cling to, desperate to keep my sanity.

It was now or never. So I froze Sam, and there she was, all glistening and back-arched and naked in the bed.

I got the GPS tracker out of the bedside table, wrapped in its waterproof, (theoretically) indestructible case. We'd see about that. Bulletproof was one thing. The ability to sustain a shape-shift was entirely another.

I went to her thigh and opened up the thickest part of her quad down to the bone. This was a muscle, Sadie and I had theorized, that was the most likely to be there in any form she took. It was a long shot, but it was the best guess we had. I tore back layers of fascia and muscle fiber carefully, wedging the device in there as carefully as I could. Then I coated each fiber I'd torn apart in the thinnest layer of venom I could spread and let them wrap back into each other, each healing into the next until the device was concealed and golden scar tissue began to form, encasing the thing until it was completely obscured. I healed her layers of skin, and I waited, naked, and still spinning from the thought of her, and eager to get back to what I was doing. It would take a few minutes until the scar became mostly unnoticeable. They were some of the longest minutes of my life.

Then I heard something strange, a stirring, quiet sound that was distant yet not distant enough. I had frozen Sam and Sadie, so I couldn't determine the source.

I emerged from the bedroom and looked for the source of the noise. Coming closer to Sadie's room, I still couldn't identify it, and so finally I opened the door to her bedroom and saw her in the bed, looking asleep but not frozen, on the bed, atop the covers, still fully dressed. The tiny sound came from her hair moving against a pillowcase. I found it hard to believe that she'd returned after what I'm sure was a tough conversation with Cole, and fallen asleep minutes later. But even all that aside, I couldn't figure out why she wasn't entirely frozen.

I neared and prayed as hard as I could that she would not wake up and find me standing over her naked and promptly freak out beyond all possible imaginable levels of freak out. Her face was contorted in the way it had been before. The dreaming non-dream.

It was hardly the time, what with Sam in the other room and my needing to get back to her and all, but I had a thought: What if I had frozen the part of Sadie that was here and not frozen some part of her that . . . wasn't?

I'd already missed one opportunity. I couldn't miss another.

I grabbed her hand and put it to her forehead, willing the idea to work, and lo and behold, when I pulled her hand away from her skin, purple-black solid-smoke pieces were attached to them. I put them into my head quickly.

I was instantly transported to a different place. A beach, where Sadie was wearing a long gray gown, the kind women wore on runways or red carpets, and a menacing Alexander Raven was behind her, his lips on her neck, a hand on her breasts.

The bastard. I could somehow tell the place wasn't a dream. It was too real. He had some part of her, in a place inside his mind.

And he wasn't just infiltrating these non-dreams — or whatever you could call this — but he was taking advantage of the emotions she felt and read. I was having sex with Sam, and he was seducing Sadie, hoping she'd give into it since she was feeling what Sam was.

The concept made me sick, literally, actual nausea rising to my throat. All this time we thought watching her was protecting her, and Sadie was being molested in a realm we couldn't touch, in a place we couldn't guard, in a way we couldn't protect.

But I couldn't think about that. Not right now. Not when I had to make a girl believe that whatever sensations she was feeling from healing and couldn't discern were really just a part of being wrapped around the hottest guy she'd ever touched.

I left Sadie's room, closing the door behind me and hoping his dream invasion would end soon with Sam's feelings paralyzed. But I couldn't worry about Sadie in this moment. Not when we had come so far. Not when he had already done what I could only imagine were torturous things to her in her own mind.

I got back on the bed, hovered over Sam, and putting myself back where I belonged, I unfroze her and did what I did best.