Cyn Read online

  CYN

  BEAST HORDE

  BOOK THREE

  Cari Silverwood

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  PREYFINDERS: THE TRILOGY BOXSET

  THE DARK MONSTER FANTASY BOOKS: PREY, STEEL, BLADE

  RULED

  CONDEMNED

  THE MACHINERY OF DESIRE BOXSET

  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

  About Cari Silverwood

  Also by Cari Silverwood

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  Chapter 1

  Death was not the best start to the day.

  This bed was not the best place to watch the dead be examined.

  Her hands loosely over her knees, Cyn mused through eyes half-lidded, concentrating partly on the terrible and bloody scene before her and partly on what Maura had found on Willow’s desk. Those notes would’ve stunned her at any other time to the exclusion of thinking about anything else.

  Not today.

  As well as those notes about the origins of beasters, four people were dead, and Willow was missing. It was enough to make her switch from puzzled, to bitter horror, then back and forth. I’m a demon. Really? How could I be a fucking demon, or even half of one? Yet that did explain much of what she’d done. And the burning fingers, those too. It told her why blood and violence made her want to lick her lips. Why nasty, glorious sex with her two beaster lovers where she teased them until they did all the worst things to her body, rammed themselves into her, took her as they wished to…

  Sex, where she was brought writhing and gasping to the edge of destruction…

  With her nails sinking into their male flesh.

  The origin of the genetic material in her nanites explained why the sex was so goddamned HOT.

  She swallowed, blinked, refocused on the body on the floor. There, right there in those thoughts she was having while surrounded by atrocity, was a big fat clue that she was not a good or a safe person to be around.

  Dead people, right. Back on topic.

  They must be thorough—Vargr had insisted.

  They must make sure of what had happened. And so he and Rutger, her other lover and bondmate, were helping to gather notes, bodies, objects of interest. Vincent had been sent downward and elsewhere, to go wherever he might need to go to gather the other beasters. He had to find Mads too, Willow’s mate. She frowned deeply. Poor Vincent. Poor Mads. This would break his heart.

  On the quest to discover Big Daddy, the Worshippers had followed Willow here and they needed to be informed of their loss. Maura had left with Vincent, bearing most of the documents and items Willow had been studying. She’d return them to Big Daddy where they might be safer.

  Big D. Once upon a time that abbreviation might’ve made her smirk. It was a pity he hadn’t revived properly. Rebooted, that was the term? His system was stuck in a loop.

  Vargr slipped onto the bed to sit next to her and gather her to his side with one arm. The bed sank halfway to the floor and creaked alarmingly. The heat from his male body instantly settled her, and she leaned into him. Showing weakness was not her usual thing, except during sex… but this was a good excuse.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She nodded.

  Her mind did a reset, as it was inclined to do.

  It was dusk, and Willow was gone, taken by their enemies.

  Cyn let out a long, shaky breath. She’d thought herself tough—a tough, demon-crossed girl with an octopus butt tattoo.

  If she was part demon, fuck, who would trust her now? She didn’t trust herself. She side-eyed her fingers, noting the lack of charring. Freaky. A demon was what Dr. Nietz must have thought the world needed.

  She possessed fiery fingers, anti-Lure powers, the strength of a few men, impossibly fast healing, and maybe wings of fire. This was probably good when you were in the middle of an apocalypse.

  Rutger returned from the study carrying a full tote bag. Loose papers, document folders, and a sword hilt projected from the open top. He dropped it beside the wall, pausing to sigh as if the world had also become too heavy for him, then he eyed her from beneath his brow. “The skinsuits could return?”

  She shook her head. “They fear the dark too much. It’s very unlikely.”

  The Ghoul Lords hated the dark within the scrapers, even when there was daylight outside. It made them sizzle, scorched their surface through every defect in the human skins they wore.

  This whole raid had been unlikely. Why had they come?

  “You still think they aimed to get Willow?” she addressed Vargr.

  “He said that, not me.” Vargr gestured at Rutger. “But yeah, I agree. Those fuckers… I wonder if they recorded us somehow, saw her giving orders?”

  She tilted her face and stared up at him, noting the seethe of the red demon-tide within his eyes—a minor froth on a sea of beaster blue. The flat wedges of his hair were graying and resembled overlapping teeth. For every strange feature on her beaster bondmates, she realized she could say: yes, this is what a gargoyle might have.

  They were striking males. Beautiful. Vicious when they had to be. And she’d grown to love them and to appreciate the connection they had.

  Even if they somehow won this war, would she be worthy of or safe for them? For she was not of their kind. Actually, Vargr was part demon. If this was Fetlife or Facebook, she’d have to write in the relationship box: Complicated.

  Was it ever.

  “How? When could the Ghoul Lords have seen that?” she asked Vargr.

  “The stinkers might have? They are the only GL creature that sees us often.” He shrugged.

  “Perhaps. That seems horribly possible.”

  It was a danger no one had suggested before—that the stinkers were more than random attackers. The likelihood of surveillance from the GL only made her more determined to do the same back at them. The drone recording should be a priority.

  It must be close to seven PM now, in old pre-invasion time. Or would it be six? There’d been daylight saving back then, and time zones, and other shit that no longer mattered. It was Beaster Time, when the Ghoul Lords feared to tread.

  Grim-faced, with her fingers laced under her chin so as to remind her not to let them burst into flame, Cyn watched Rutger where he kneeled beside the last sprawled and very bloody body. The head was buried under the arm. He checked the pockets and removed the weapons—blaster and knife. She should have done this, but strangely it daunted her.

  Blood was good, except when it was the blood of friends.

  The life liquid had pooled, blackish red, for it’d darkened over time. As his head was lifted, she winced. Strings of clotted blood stretched, linking the head to the floor. The strands broke and pale hair was revealed. Rutger parted the hair and revealed its color—white.

  Oh no. Hell… Tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Mads?” she choked out the question. No, it couldn’t be. Mustn’t.

  “Yes.” Carefully, Rutger lowered the head. “
Should have known he’d be here.”

  Mads hadn’t survived, after all.

  “Fuck today,” Vargr growled.

  Hatred fired up, and Cyn unholstered her gun and held it on her lap, caressing the deadly metal. Her usual solution nudged her—if only she could shoot something to fix this day. She’d called this weapon, Willow, after her missing friend.

  She would shoot something, one day, in memoriam. The creature that had done this.

  Avidex. The name thumped down, as solid as a signature on a contract. She’d harvested info from the skinsuit she’d killed, though much of it she couldn’t quite grasp. That one was dead though, wasn’t it?

  Humans kissed things better. A demon girl needed to kill things to make everything better. She holstered the gun, bit her lower lip until it bled, and tasted the blood. The lip healed faster than any human could ever manage.

  “You okay?” Vargr asked. “We will get past this.”

  “I am. Yeah, I know.”

  Rutger put his hand to the nearby wall, leaving a bloody handprint. “Cyn, we’ll mourn them properly. We’ll lay them out, say the words, then we’ll do what we have to do and go kill the fucking bad guys and fix the world.”

  “You get me.” She smiled, though there was no joy in her smile. “I’m feeling better already.”

  Was it bizarre to feel relief that Mads would never know about his bondmate’s fate?

  Willow had been taken to the Top, where she knew, she knew in her gut what would happen—she’d be tortured and eaten like the rest of the humans up there. Most had suffered that fate over the past five years. Chewed up and shredded by those triangular teeth she’d seen up close and personal the day she’d cut herself free.

  Fuck.

  She and her mates had been too busy love-making and snuggling in their own apartment just down the corridor.

  “Was the throat wound self-inflicted?” She asked because she had a morbid curiosity about how far the Lure could stretch. Was this suicide by way of Lure compulsion or had the skinsuits made them kill each other?

  “I think so.” He wiped his hands on the rug. His horns followed his moves. Those were a graceful, elegant ornament he could never remove, and they got in the way of door frames. Blue twinkling specks drifted in the air. In the still of night, she’d woken a few times and lain beside him simply watching those fall to the sheets and vanish.

  Rutger was a gargoyle.

  If the notes Willow had found were correct, none of them were even close to being human.

  She ran her gaze over his hulking body. She loved to grip those horns during lovemaking.

  “Jesus. He cut his own throat.”

  She glanced up at Vargr. “You too?”

  “This has been a terrible day, but we will survive. We will rise and defeat them.”

  “Wow. Normally it’s me with the over-the-top statements.”

  “I know we can do it.” He grinned at her, which was rather macabre considering the death toll in here. “Do you feel this fizzy high in your veins from your nanites? Because I do.”

  “Ummm.” She contemplated her somewhat unhinged lover. “Sometimes.”

  He was right, though.

  Cyn straightened, found a hair tie in a pocket then tucked a few strands of her hair behind her ear. At the back she gathered a handful and wrapped it in the tie to make a ponytail. Then she stood.

  “You’re right. We need to get things done. Maura found a strategy list Willow wrote out, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t start with, mope about after I die until the Ghoul Lords come down and fuck our asses and use us for ashtrays and hood ornaments.”

  Rutger let his eyebrows rise way up his forehead and they stayed there awhile before he spoke. “I always knew you’d make a great speech one day.”

  She smiled wanly, shrugged.

  Vargr grabbed her hand and studied it for a second before kissing the back. “And that was not it.”

  “Heyyy. And were you checking my hand for flames?”

  “Would anyone blame me?”

  “No they would not,” Rutger added. “And that was a goddamned awful speech. Okay. Let’s go down and find everyone. The bodies can stay where they are until we return. At Worshipper Quarter for funerals we interred them in the room, nicely, locked the door and put the notice of death on the door, then we piled more flowers at the door, made it pretty.”

  Cyn made an O with her mouth.

  “Same at Mercantor Quarter. We can’t bury. Can’t burn easily or do anything like mummify them or preserve them, so we tuck some bottles of good liquor around them, salt around the body, scatter plastic flowers, and leave them after we say the words we want to, need to. I always figured we were copying the ancient Egyptians with their pyramids.” Vargr looked around the room. “Only smaller. Come.” He tugged her hand. “Time to go.”

  Outside the door, squatting on his haunches, was Toother, Willow’s nanodog. From the smears on the flesh trail left by the skinsuits, he’d followed it to the edge and back. Head low, he whined at them, and Cyn’s heart stuttered. Her grief was nothing compared to what Toother’s was, when she considered how little he would understand.

  Along with Vargr and Rutger, she went to the nanodog and patted his huge head. The cream curls were soft under her hand.

  “We’d better make sure he follows us,” she suggested.

  “Yes but who is going to watch over him now? Toother’s lost two owners.”

  “Oh. Yes.” She frowned at the nanodog and the eye closest tracked her, rolling before he shut it, his long eyelashes descending. “Poor boy. Willow was our only biotech… our last fae.”

  “There will be someone.” Vargr rested his palm on her back. “Orm wasn’t fae, and both he and Willow seemed to develop a mental bond.”

  “True.” She gently rubbed Toother’s head above his eye. What had Orm been? He hadn’t looked gargoyle, had he? Maybe he too was a mix, like Vargr? “Toother wasn’t here when she was taken.”

  “I think he wanders.” Rutger hefted the bag and gun he carried. “Remember he was a wild nanodog first. We should get going. I don’t like this, how unsettled everything is. We need to set some new rules in place, get a new leader.”

  Luckily, with some coaxing and calling, Toother followed them.

  A new leader? She’d thought this too. It struck her in an amused way that it was so very gargoyle of Rutger to want order. There were characteristics of each beaster that had come with their new genetic material. Which meant her too. Only she wasn’t sure she could predict herself—it was like a doctor doing a self-examination.

  She wasn’t even certain Dr. Nietz had gifted them with the DNA of fae, demon, dwarf or gargoyle. Did those even have DNA? He’d dug up their fossils or something similar…

  Fuck this, unless those notes said it, they’d likely never know what he’d stuck in them.

  Chapter 2

  Avidex reflected on the fate of his most recent captive. He couldn’t exactly rest chin on hand, as the humans in his collection of brains had once done, but he could ponder in an appropriately thoughtful way. Tentacle to teeth, as it were. He was Socrates mulling over what action to take, over the consequences, and over the fun to be had if he did this or that.

  Rendered oblivious to her surroundings by the Lure, the woman waited, swaying a little on her bare feet.

  The more bloodthirsty of his nine brains urged him to eat her. Some had deteriorated with time inside his core and had become less human, more Ghoul Lord in their thoughts. This was due to osmosis, one of them volunteered.

  What is the meaning of this osmosis, he asked it as he slid in a rough circle about the female human called Willow. He knew her name from the rippers that’d gone below to reconnoiter. The sounds and images sucked from ripper nervous systems were flawed and messy, but her name, that had been said several times, and it was her true name.

  Willow, he hissed across the mind spectrum. Whether or not she was conscious of her dire situation, she perked up, her h
ead rising. Her eyes met his, and he recognized more intelligence there than was normal. Avidex recoiled. The last to be like this was his nemesis, Cyn—the hateful one who’d cut him.

  Eat her, rattled out his brains. Taste her.

  He would, he would… it was just such a waste to only do it once. There was a way to make it happen over and over, to feel her screams penetrating his… soul.

  Do I have one of those? he asked the brains.

  No.

  No.

  The answers bothered him, and he slithered a fat tentacle into the squeaking woman’s mouth, spearing the sharp-formed tip deep enough to feel her thoughts at the very edge of her brain. No deeper; he wanted this part of her intact. Then he spoke to her directly.

  I will get a soul, soon. Perhaps I will have yours.

  He could eat her, make her hurt, strip her flesh, fuck her with his tentacles, pull out her brain, and with some extra-fine effort he could make a copy of her again if he wanted to, so he could repeat the cycle of pain and pleasure.

  Yes. I will do this.

  Without Cyn, his revenge gnawed at him. This Willow would do as a substitute. He could even keep her original brain in his flesh core and let her watch the torture of her cloned self.

  Yummy, insisted a brain.

  Nine brains wobbling in his flesh jelly, and they were getting so like him, so like how he’d once been—without an adequate… functioning brain cell in his head, haha, that it was starting to annoy him.

  Willow’s brain will be fresh and feisty.

  The clone’s brain would not have her soul, her personality, but it would be most interesting to let her see herself hurt and pleasured and hurt again.

  He extracted the tentacle, wrapped it around her ankle, and hauled her upward, flipping her upside down, then he wrenched apart her legs and her mouth with other appendages.

  Beginning at the ankles, he began to dine while he tentacle-fucked her, and so on ad infinitum, almost. It did have to end. Blood ran down her body in streams and her writhing was exceptionally gymnastic.