Lust Plague (Steamwork Chronicles) (7 page)

Without her asking, he took off his shirt and gave it to her. Luckily it was long enough to go to below her buttocks. Then, to her astonishment, he made her sit on the haversack so he could wrap her feet in cloth and tie it on—temporary shoes. Bliss. No more twigs poking into her soles.

“Good?” He arched an eyebrow at her while still holding her foot.

Saying
thank you
was on the tip of her tongue. Pure politeness and manners struggled to come out. She wriggled her toes, eyed him. The bastard who’d left her aching. “It’s good. Thank you.”

He let go of her foot and straightened. “I figure you should know, I had to shoot a burning fellow back at the gyro crash. Orange eyes, so an überzomb?”

“No. Raised man.” She looked around for his wolf, spotted it some yards away, waiting. Its upper lip curled. “What about it?”

“You worried he’ll eat you? Cadrach is picky. You be nice to me. He’ll be nice to you.” He helped her up. “We’d better move. See if we can find shelter.”

“You’re sure he’s not dangerous?”

But Sten ignored her and sauntered off. Keeping a wary eye on the big wolf, Kaysana jogged to catch up.

As they walked through the cooling forest, with the crickets awakening and an owl drifting overhead, she took the time to consider all that had happened. Without Sten, she’d be dead.

But she couldn’t figure him out. Half caring for her welfare—crashing the gyro, for heaven’s sake, in his rush to find her? She was used to being the one doing the caring, to looking out for the hundreds of people under her. And then doing what he’d done to her body, almost without asking. It had been so damn intimate and invasive.

They continued on, walking southward, wordless. What he’d done violated her every belief in herself in some indefinable way, and yet she’d allowed it, agreed to it, and in her heart craved more.

The remaining slickness on her inner thighs reminded her of how close she’d come to begging for relief from him. Next time she’d have a pin handy to jab into herself. Anything except letting him arouse her like he had.

Cadrach accompanied them, walking on a parallel path without being commanded to. Pets, to her mind, should be small and happy and their mouths should only open wide enough to nip fingers, not entire limbs. The brooding wolf sent glacier cold sliding through her veins.

“I shall call you Fluffy,” she muttered.

Sten followed along behind Kaysana—the view was better.

Her curvaceous backside swayed before him beneath his own shirt. Damn, that was sexy, especially remembering how she’d moaned under his mouth. What a hard-on that had given him.

Kissing,
hah
, he’d not been sure she’d go with that logic.

A few hundred yards of walking and they emerged from under the tree line into the night sky. Only stars above. No burning airships despite the faint smell of smoke. He felt relief. So many odd things had happened.

“Don’t suppose you want to give me a weapon, Sten?”

“Nope.”

“We’ll be meeting zombies. I promise not to shoot you.”

“I’ll consider it.” She expected a weapon? Heaven and hell. He wasn’t that nuts. Maybe when indignation wasn’t coming off her in waves every time she looked at him.

She snorted, turned away. “Fool. Come on. Looks like a farmhouse up there.” She pointed. Up a slope, through a field of some tall crop, the silhouette of a building showed at the peak. Light flickered across the crop, washing the field in yellow and orange as if it were some strange golden sea.

“I’ll watch your tail. Just keep wriggling it like that.”

“I’ve been known to gouge out the eyes of men who ogle.”

He grinned, then followed her into the crop. The stalks rustled and scraped against them as they pushed through. Squeaks and chitters from foot level told of some small nocturnal critters. Kaysana didn’t balk. Tough woman. After all that had happened, here she was taking point, armed only with her gorgeous body.

He sighed.
So many curves, so many angry words
. He’d fix that somehow. Once he decided on something, it happened.

The smoke smell intensified.

By the time they’d slowly scouted their way up to the farmhouse, the flickering glow had turned into a fire. The house was fully alight. Flames poured out the windows, crawled in snakes of boiling yellow up the outer walls, ate into the timber, curled over the eaves and onto the roof. Beams crashed down inside. Puffs of hot air, smoke, and ashes billowed out and shrouded them.

Together they circled the building. Cadrach sat upwind of the smoke and waited. To Sten’s approval, Kaysana was clearly looking for survivors as much as he was.

A black limb flailed and twisted in the flames. She jerked to a halt, craning her neck to stare.

“Warped timber.” Least he hoped it was. Too far in to tell. He watched Kaysana lean with her head down and hands on thighs for a moment. Her mouth moved as if she said silent curses. Damn, underneath her toughened steel exterior was a heart—shriveled maybe, but it was there.

“Come on.” He coughed, then plucked at her sleeve. “The barn’s okay. Whoever was here has left…or they’re in there, dead. We’ll sleep in the barn.”

She gave him a suspicious look.

He laughed. “I said sleep, meant it. Though in the morning, you owe me another kiss.”

She sniffed and stalked toward the barn.

Why the hell am I after her? All on a whim?
Sure, he didn’t do hate anymore…much, but wasn’t wanting to fuck her sweet ass going too far the other way? Or was he doing it just to mess with her mind? He shook his head. Both maybe, neither. He couldn’t figure his own head out, let alone hers. Was it just some delayed effect of Zombie F?

Her body begged him; then her mind did a backflip. What would it take to get her mind saying yes properly? He eyed her ass again and the seductive wiggle under the shirt.

The barn was a hundred yards away on the peak of the hill and on the right side of the wind, so the air was clear. In the distance, a glittering snake of tiny lights curved across the landscape.
A road? Must be
. From the looks of it, there were a few vehicles out there. People who were still people fleeing to the border of the zone. He and Kaysana were heading toward whatever those down there were running from.

The barn doors were padlocked, but the chain, when he bent down to look, was breakable.

“Stand back.” He wrapped his hands around the door handle and hauled it outward until the chain gave with a
crack
. A weld had opened up, like he thought it would. He pushed the doors back, rubbed his hands on his pants to lessen the sting, then caught her eyeing him. “What?”

Her mouth worked, like she struggled to decide on the right reply. “Impressive. Don’t let it go to your head.” Then she went to waltz past him into the barn.

“Wait.” He stuck out his arm, unsheathed the shotgun. “Nice words’ll get you nowhere, lady.” After one last check of the slope and the horizon—no signs of orange, burning guys, just one morose-looking Cadrach—he entered the barn with the nose of his weapon leading the way, scanning left to right, his finger gentle on the trigger.

“It was locked, mister. Nothing will be in here.”

“Just being prudent. I don’t fancy being someone’s main course.” Any movement, any at all, might be a zomb. Dark corners…a coop full of startled, flapping chickens, and at the far wall, hay stacked in bales.

“Aha. A great many deadly chickens.” She squeezed past.

But she had waited for him to clear the barn.

“It’s polite to say thank you.” He spotted it. “Damn.”

“Yes. Damn. For once I agree.”

Kaysana circled the gleaming vehicle in the center of the barn, leaned in over the low door to check out the dashboard inside. Half-in, half-out of the cabin and the gold metal and white canvas roof meant she had to lean down low. The shirt rode up.

A steam cycle. Tapering three seater, two seats side by side at the back. Three-wheeler. Polished ebony timber, glass, and brass. Chromed, sweeping exhaust tails. Someone had loved this beauty. The front hood bulged out sexily—black shiny molded timber. The hood ornament was a golden dolphin sitting up on its tail, balancing a large ball on its nose.

But…he eyed Kaysana and the half-moons of her bottom showing below the edge of the shirt, then the cycle, and knew just what he was going to do come morning. God, if she didn’t come out of there quick, he might just break their agreement.

Sleeping wasn’t easy. Every time she roused and sat up to check the barn, Sten was already awake. The fourth time, he spoke.

“If you don’t go to damn sleep and stop waking me, I’ll come over there and do something you’ll regret.”

“I’ll regret? Hmph.” She moved on the makeshift bed, trying to get comfy on the straw and the two burlap sacks. The chunk missing from the roof let her see moonlit wisps of clouds sift across the blue-black sky. Where would her ship be right now? Her crew?

“You thinking of your people up there?”

His voice startled her.

“Won’t hurt no one to tell me that, you know. Is there someone special?”

She frowned. No. It wouldn’t hurt, but it seemed inappropriate. Talking was alluring, though. It’d ease her heart and the acid squirming in her stomach. She got up on her elbow, found him in the darkness, his shoulder and head silhouetted against the wall. The long gleam in front of him would be the shotgun. It was good to see the man…the frankenstruct, had some sense. And he hadn’t made another move on her, just like he’d promised.

“I was thinking of them.” She wasn’t going to mention Ling. Her awful memory of his blood and flesh blowing out his back after she’d pulled the trigger…too raw to share. “Especially of Emily.”

“The young lady outside the gym door? Pigtails? She got off the ship, far as I know. I sent her to the landing bay with two others. Since a gyro was gone when I got back, least some of them made it off.”

“Oh. Good.” She shut her eyes, counted to ten. “Thank you.” Second time she’d said that to him. It pained her to do so, but the surge of relief at knowing he’d helped her crew made thanking him worth it. Emily especially somehow touched her heart. Her youth, maybe?

In the past, nothing had affected her like this. It was new and weird, this feeling, like finding a tooth where none had been before. She didn’t like it. A captain should be aloof.

“So you weren’t fucking anyone?”

The air in the barn boiled. “My gods. Having you around is like walking with a burr in my shoe. No, but then no one on my ship
fucks
. You are so foul of mouth. I would appreciate it if you kept that word to yourself in future.”

“No one fucks? Must be fucking boring, then.”

She pressed her lips firmly together, refusing to reply to his taunt.

“Guess that plants me right in the middle of low-life territory, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thought so. Point made. You judge people on goddamned flimsy reasons, Kaysana. People use different words—you condemn them. Frankenstruct—condemned. Guilty. Done with.”

“I do not. I judge people by many criteria.” Why was she arguing with this fool?

“Sure you do. Fuck. Fuckitty fuck fuck. Fuck.”

She glared hard enough to send a heated trail across the barn.
Damn him.

“G’night, Kaysana.”

“Captain,” she snapped. “It’s Captain, to you!”

“The fuck it is.”

Sleeping wasn’t easy. At all.

Breakfast turned out to be beef sticks washed down with water. Though Sten had offered her an egg from the coop at the back of the barn, Kaysana found her stomach churning at the idea of raw eggs.

She sat on a hay bale, looking out through the barn doors at the charred remains of the house. Ironic, really—all that flame last night and they couldn’t cook breakfast. Maybe if they scrounged around, they could find something to fry the eggs on?

She blinked away the tiredness in her eyes. Someone had used a scrubbing brush on them.

The wolf was nowhere to be seen, almost like she’d imagined it.

She got up, picked stalks of straw from the back of her shirt, and pulled one piece from between her butt cheeks. If the house hadn’t burned, she’d have clothes, for sure. As it was, underneath the shirt she was still indecent, and she had to constantly fight the urge to look away whenever Sten showed up. Bare-chested, he was magnificent. An ugly, or at least a rugged face, but his body made her drool. Couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t do anything about the way her body revved up like some teenage girl with too many hormones.
This weird side effect must go away eventually, mustn’t it?

She strode over to the steam cycle.

“Do you know anything about the engines on these?” Sten asked as he came across from where he’d just shooed the last of the chickens from the coop. One madly flapping hen charged past Kaysana, squawking and headed for the open.

She frowned. With no one to feed them, they may as well be let loose. But she’d expected Sten to wring their necks like the brute he was. The way he’d gently herded them out seemed…wrong somehow. Like a wolf helping little girls across the road.

The engine—he’d asked her about it. “You’ve not seen to the fuel?” If there was no boosted coal, the steam cycle was as useless as tits on a dragon.

Curious. The dolphin ornament had been bent back until it nearly touched the hood. For such a pampered bit of machinery to suffer so without the owner fixing it seemed odd. Had it been that way yesterday? She went to the front, heard him coming up behind as she reached for the handle to pull open the hood, knew instantly he had devious plans but with no time to react…then his hand ran up the inside of her leg. She shivered, let out a slow breath.

Time to show him her ice lady side. Her heart beat faster.

“You forgot our morning kiss, darling.”

Anger would help her resist this strange alteration of her psyche. She clenched her teeth. “No. I did n—”

Then he put his hands to her waist, picked her up, and resettled her at the very front, over the curve of the hood, with her legs dangling either side of the dolphin ornament.