Blade (Dark Monster Fantasy Book 3) Read online

  BLADE

  Dark Monster Fantasy 3

  by

  Cari Silverwood

  This book contains adult language and situations only suitable for adult readers.

  To join my mailing list and receive notice of future releases and sales:

  My mailing list

  If you’d like to talk about the erotic romance books you fall in love with, you’re welcome to join Cari’s group on Facebook:

  Dark Hearts Discussion Group

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Additional Story - Disposing of Tiana

  About Cari Silverwood

  Acknowledgements & Copyright

  Chapter 1

  For those who read PREY and wish to see more of what happened to Tiana,

  look for “Disposing of Tiana” after the last chapter of this main story.

  PS She deserved it.

  Thorn stalked along the ship corridor, her knee-high red boots with the buckle accents clacking as they hit the plas-metal floor, and then...then she stopped dead. She’d been waggling her hips again, or waggling her ass as Baldor liked to point out, smirking.

  Not her way of doing things, but maybe the imminence of the naming ceremony was doing something to her hormones? She hadn’t had her first cycle yet and was late hitting sexual maturity for a s’kar. Brain maturity was more important as far as she was concerned.

  Though she dreaded the coming of her first sexual cycle, she’d also rather like to get it over with. Dammit. Her tail lashed, swiping the lower edge of her coat. She caught it absentmindedly, ran her hand down to the tufted end then released it. The thing had a mind of its own when she was agitated.

  Body, get your act together. On second thoughts, make it happen after the Naming.

  Sex, being in heat, was something she’d have to endure for at least a few weeks. Twice a year, and a few weeks each cycle at that. She could do this.

  Thorn stomped her boot heels into place and smiled. Any males who thought she’d be on their menu would find she had other plans.

  The ship would be hers entirely in a week. Last barrier was the naming. Her father would have been proud. The Jocelyn had been his for the last two decades of his life. She let out a meditative sigh and rested her fingers on the wall of the white corridor, ran the tips over the bumps and the cool smoothness as she ambled – ambled without swaying her lower torso.

  A ship’s captain must be proper. No one was looking, though. She cleaned the wall with the elbow of her burgundy coat then lightly kissed the surface.

  “Mine.”

  Yes, the Jocelyn answered in her mind. The ship’s firm whisper seemed to echo.

  “Hi there. Everything ready for landing, Jocelyn?”

  Yes ma’am. We are squared away. Your co-captain Baldor awaits you on the bridge.

  Did he now? The asswipe wanted her ship, prayed she’d mess up or admit him as her equal.

  She straightened the front of her uniform – historically the skin-hugging suit for s’kar officers was made for quick entry into a spacesuit in an emergency. The tighter the fit, the better – that way one could slip into the full spacesuit, screw and snap on the helmet, seal up faster than a missile could ream an airlock.

  Centuries ago, they’d been pirates of the systemways but had adapted, made peace with the solar system lords, ladies, monarchs, and governments.

  Buttons and logos, buckles and graffiti were integrally printed nowadays and not real, but getting fancy was half the reason for the uniforms for most officers. Show off your badassery with a well-tailored suit and the enemy, or fellow s’kars, were halfway to being cowed.

  Her chosen theme today borrowed from warriors of fantasy – angel wings on the back of the red coat, and a ripped and clawed, explosion-blown rendering on the material of the suit – black, gold and white. Golden dust and a hint of blood, a wave of gemstones across the bodice.

  It was pretty awesome, in her opinion. There were silhouettes of black birds on the back but the coat hid that. With her stark-white hair sculpted into a peaked wave, she could probably cut down her foes by blowing on them.

  A tingle ran across her body and she gasped. She glanced down, frowning. Excited, yes, this was normal but the burgeoning of her nipples until they visibly poked out was a step too far.

  Love the battle-damaged theme, Jocelyn murmured.

  “Thanks, girl. Me too.” Thorn smiled and couldn’t help the sway of her hips. It felt, oddly, good.

  Fine. She’d let her emerging hormones take charge and be female until she hit the bridge.

  A heated wind seemed to swirl across her, staggering her sideways. She planted her feet and waited for the surreal situation to normalize.

  The corridor became silent and still.

  Nothing was out of order.

  What in the Ten Worlds was that?

  The extreme coolness of her chest made her look down again. Threads had popped, shredded, for reals. Her skin showed, as well as her black bra with the silken cloth and the three-stranded sexy straps. She smacked her palm over her breast area. Fuck!

  Today was the weirdest. She’d have a severe chat to her tailor next time they landed on his planet – using a knife to his groin, if this was deliberate sabotage.

  A cloth-degenerating chemical? Poor-quality fabric made to degrade over time? She wouldn’t put it past Baldor to do something to make her respect score go down. Disastrous if it happened up on stage on Naming Day.

  She drew a breath to settle herself. Then another.

  Get changed but test the cloth first.

  Thorn swiveled efficiently, boots squealing on the floor, and headed back to her quarters.

  “Landing procedure on Planet BART will be delayed for a few minutes, Jocelyn!”

  Yes, ma’am.

  This would cost them in fuel.

  Her eyelids lowered and she saw through a blur as she walked. Shoving her hand down her pants while in her bunk would be too much, take too long, wouldn’t it?

  For once she wished she had someone else’s pants to get her hands into.

  Her hormones were going to kill her.

  Chapter 2

  “Our love of life shows in mysterious ways,” the purple nixnix bug had wisely told Ledderik at the beginning of the negotiation.

  The deal was now done. A weight had lifted from him. A weight arrived.

  Conflicted and homicidal cyborg – that was he.

  Centuries of life, with the last hundred being under Lord Zarblu’s careful mentorship and yet now he was masterless. Also angry, annoyed, and ready to kill someone. Zarblu would be disappointed but he felt terribly adrift.

  Zarblu had left but gifted him with Tiana to torment, a sxsynthflesh cock, and a talking sword. The exchange was a poor one.

  What person with any respect for themselves would regard a cock as a reason for life?

  Okay, a few, a few would be dancing on tables and fucking everything in sight, just not him.

  He’d never thought he’d be the type to go wit
h Last-of-Life, but life felt weary and dismal. Hundreds of years weighed on a cyborg.

  Before his sxsynthcock was attached he’d have happily sexually tortured her, thrilled at it. Now? It seemed too menial, too obedient for a cyborg thrown away by his master.

  Here, dog, have a bone. Have a dick. Pat the head of the hound then walk away.

  Once upon a time he had dreamed of being able to have sex. From the time he was made as a soldier, three hundred years ago in the Third Dynasty War of the Mouse, he’d dreamed, but he hadn’t been assigned that role.

  Now he had a cock, and it was a bitter gift.

  Ledderik collected Smorg, the far-too-talkative sword, and departed through the front double entrance of this desert mansion. He waited for the aircab he’d summoned, with his feet shoulder-width apart and the cloak billowing in the hot breeze.

  From what had just happened, the nixnix had Tiana well in hand...make that well in tentacle and claw.

  The nixnix treasured humans, liked to breed from them if they could get consent, left them hanging in their reproductive caverns while they stimulated them to orgasm repeatedly, before implanting their pre-fertilized eggs. How they got consent to this baffled him.

  If he hadn’t felt so disengaged from his almost existential dick – he might’ve asked if he could join the orgasmic festivities at the table.

  Was it the whole parting gift idea?

  Or that he was three centuries old and a little late to the sex game?

  Maybe he was just tired of life.

  Some might say he just needed the right female to get him going.

  Once he joined Last-of-Life none of this would matter.

  In return for her and payment, the nixnix would do as contracted – donate his possessions and money to the mech planet charity, arrange the deal with the Last-of-Life merchant on planet BART. He’d take Smorg with him. He’d not decided what to do with it; after all it was an AI, and he would never dispose of such a creature randomly. Smorg was sentient, as well as a pain in the ass.

  “So, you’re really doing it then,” the sword muttered from where he held it by his side, inside the sheath.

  “I am.”

  “Lame.”

  “You know you can retinal text me. I let you into my comm-link.” He’d rather hear Smorg that way than out-loud. It was prone to interjecting with comments at the wrong time – which was how most of the owners of these poorly designed swords were killed.

  Though lately Smorg had been quiet.

  “I prefer to talk. Texting? Lame.”

  Led rummaged and allowed audio. “You can talk mind to mind now.”

  Was Smorg truly a mind? How Gnersh Corp had jammed so much AI into a short sword was beyond him. Most of those swords had malfunctioned terminally, decades ago. Smorg might even be the last of its kind.

  *Lame this way too.*

  Ledderik sighed.

  * * * * *

  The take-off from the planet’s surface, the short intersystem burn to get to the hyperspace wormhole to get to planet BART, and the wormhole travel, these barely registered. He kept to himself, to his cabin, departed with the others, and because he didn’t pause to marvel at anything on landing, he was processed and out of the spaceport, fast.

  There were advantages to being pissed off at everything.

  The Last-of-Life center was a street away from an open-front bar called Grax’s Galactic Drinking Hole. It seemed ridiculous not to give his body a send-off before he gave it away, so he slid onto a barstool and ordered several shots of the most potent local liquor.

  A row of skinny, nose-high glasses were delivered to him and the ellurian bartender grinned over the glasses, showing off his gleaming fence of triangular teeth. The burnt-orange sludge in the glasses, crackled. Ledderik frowned.

  Almost as orange and nasty-looking as the bartender.

  He chugged down one dose, felt it scorch its way down to his gullet. If he wore out his stomach lining, Tewel, the owner of LoL on this planet might cut his time in the virtual world.

  “Virtworlds suck,” he declared, and was surprised to get an answer from the ellurian.

  “Going to LoL?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure that’s the answer?”

  “No.” He drank another dose, sucked on his clamped teeth while processing the pain. He slid the emptied glass to the alien then twisted to assess the crowd sitting between him and the daylight-toasted street.

  Everyone in here was an alien, technically, except him, if you assumed he was classed as human. Tentacles waved, antennae twitched, scaly legs were thrust out almost tripping the waiters. Not that most humans thought cyborgs, with their machine parts, were the same as them. He’d been stuck in no-human’s land for centuries.

  Not human, not alien,” he muttered. “Going to finally forget it all.”

  He’d bought three thousand perceived years in the LoL virtual-world where every dream could be imagined. Die a million times in there and rebirth was guaranteed – until your years ran out.

  They said the real time in a virtworld varied, that some clients were thrown off the program and perma-dead within a year.

  They said it was foolish, a waste, to give up your real body in exchange for nothing but electrons exchanged in a program, for ones and zeroes.

  “Lame,” grumbled Smorg from where it was propped against the bar beside his feet.

  “Talking again?” First time it’d spoken since he’d left Tiana with the nixnix. Was his pessimism infectious to swords?

  Smorg blew a raspberry.

  “I get ’em all in here,” the bartender volunteered while drying a glass with a dish cloth. Surely the creature had a dishwasher? “The sad, the mad, those who think real life is as crazy as living in a virtworld. You one of the sad ones?”

  Ledderik was surprised at how the question caused a growl to build in his throat.

  “Fuck no. I’m the angry one.” He tossed down another dose, killed a few more stomach and throat cells. Was he right?

  Sad and angry, maybe.

  He made his cyborg hand crunch into a fist, watching the gold-toned metal relays glint and shunt. Before this, he’d covered it up, worn synthskin over it or hidden his hand inside a coat sleeve. It scared people less but mostly he’d done it to be secretive.

  He swiveled and set his back to the bar.

  The bartender kept talking. “How many –”

  His words never did get said.

  From the street, a girl walked into the bar crowd, stalked through in thigh-length red coat and mostly white uniform, trailing a what-the-fuck attitude and what Ledderik could only assume were nuclear pheromones. Her hair was white, short, and sculpted, but he’d swear he could see tendrils of it unfurling, waving outward in a gravity-impossible fashion.

  The fabric used in her uniform must be way thin as he could distinctly see the pop of her nipple buds, areolae and all. His sxsynthcock stood up and waved hello in his pants for the first time ever. The air around her seemed to froth and shimmy, rendering those in her background into slightly unfocused figures, as if seen at the bottom of a glass.

  And that tail of hers lashing from under the coat’s edge. Something about it...about the idea of grabbing it and hauling her to him...he almost swallowed his tongue.

  Ledderik scowled and glanced into the glass he held. No, wasn’t that. He knew how alcohol affected him. So the cock worked? He’d considered a complaint to the cybermonk manufacturers until he learned of their deaths. His warranty was shafted.

  Maybe before it had just been him and his shitty attitude?

  Of all the women in the universe it had to be this one – a s’kar, star-faring, star-trading harrier. The s’kars of the harrier type had their morals and ethics so far up their asses one would need a probe and a mountaineer to reach them. Sex was not a priority with the females and always, always, they did it with their own kind.

  “Down, dick-thing,” he whispered. Maybe the on-off switch was stuck? That ass was r
apidly vanishing into the morass of aliens.

  Tentacles and eyes on stalks were swiveling her way.

  Weapons were pinging on, being quietly drawn from holsters, as audible as a shout to his cyborg-enhanced ears.

  He’d swear he could also hear dicks erecting and the bump of male hearts as their pulse amplitude rose to bounding, lustful heights. They were watching her as if she was a delicacy on a stick.

  Had she been drenched in some arousal drug?

  “Sic ’em, cy-boy,” Smorg piped up, gleefully.

  “Shush.” He rose to his feet, joints humming then stooped to collect the sword and slide the belt over his shoulder and head. Was a wonder Smorg hadn’t commented on him being essentially unarmed.

  Not that he was going to chase her.

  This situation made him want to twitch, truthfully. He no longer owned projectile, laser, or blaster weapons and felt naked without them. No knives or needles, garroting nanowire, poisons, grenades, or any other various lethal bits and pieces.

  He’d sold everything – everything bar the clothes and the sword.

  “Bad timing,” he whispered.

  At least five males were tracking her, following her path. Two were tentacled molloks, two were rock-tall andurians, one was a lumbering mountain-shouldered, ugly-faced dalk.

  “I should indeed have thought a little deeper, longer,” he said to the puzzled bartender, as he leaned back to wave his wrist over the payment portal on the bar.

  Then he sidled through the nearby patrons. Just looking.

  Shooting virtual dragons was easier than fending off real-world bad guys – assuming her trackers were bad and she was good...which really was a big assumption.

  “Gonna help her?”

  “Naaa.” Keeping Smorg in the know was not a priority.

  If he did, what if she was the naughty one?

  Her, naughty? He liked that idea. Really liked it.

  His cock whirred and grew harder.

  “Walk faster, asshole. She’s getting away.”

  He should’ve taped over its speakers.

  “I’m only curious, and what if she’s bad, little sword?”