Intimidator Read online

  Kasper would have found out someone had stolen his victim by now. She’d seen him touch the girl’s drink. He’d spiked it. Must have. While he was talking to someone, the woman had slowly slumped into the corner at her seat near the ladies’ restroom. She’d heard through the gossip at the pub that Kasper had done this before. Dope ’em, get them back to his house, rape them, party on, let the boys do them again, then let them go miles away.

  No one around here seemed game to tell the cops when they came investigating. Or if they had, there’d been no evidence found.

  Lucky for this girl… Was her name Monique? Luckily, it’d been the end of her shift. After three rum and cokes, nobody was this knocked out, and it was definitely three. She’d served two of them herself.

  Breathe slowly.

  “Hey, girl, Monique? Is that you? Maybe you can tell me a number I can call?”

  Just as she found the spot for the key, a car pulled up behind them, headlights blazing across the neighborhood. Loud music cut off and a door slammed.

  She swallowed, feeling the scrape as the key rotated against metal. Once inside, she’d be safe. The house repelled angry people like it was anti-matter for angry. Crazy but true. Boyfriends with their knickers in a twist never made it through the door. If they got angry while inside, they never stayed long. It had to work on Kasper too, didn’t it?

  This old house of her aunt’s was Castle Freaky. It wasn’t normal but she’d given up trying to figure out how or why, years ago, soon after her aunt died.

  The key turned all the way. Click. The door swung open.

  “Hey. Where the fuck are you going?” The low, menacing voice carried yards in the night air. She’d heard Kasper talk like that to a man lying gasping on the ground, two seconds before he kicked him in the guts. “That’s my girl you’ve got there. Did you ask her if she wants to go in?”

  From the sounds, they’d leaped over the gate and there were too many footsteps to be from only one man.

  Go, go, go. She did not want Kasper as her enemy but she ignored him. She staggered in with the girl weighing down her shoulder, then swiveled and kicked the door shut. It locked automatically. Someone jumped onto the porch, and there was silence, except for the harsh male breathing inches away, on the other side of the door.

  He spoke again. “You better never, ever, turn your back on me again.”

  Cold tendrils crackled into her flesh.

  Shit. Her eyes refused to close. He was going to punch his fist through the timber any second. Still holding the keys tight so they wouldn’t jingle, she gave him the finger.

  Asshole.

  “Get out here!” A kick slammed into the door and shook a boom through the house.

  Her hand trembled. She swept back a twirl of hair dangling across her eye.

  She did nothing more – didn’t move, didn’t talk, tried not to breathe.

  A minute passed. Another. Something made long dragging scratches on the other side of the door. Scre-e-eetch. Scritch. Her heart cowered down small and painful in her chest. It might stop beating, she was that scared. It hadn’t taken this long with that craziest boyfriend, Alan, had it?

  She heard the thumps of footsteps on the porch again then car doors opened and shut. Maybe they were pretending? Maybe, maybe, maybe ran frantic circles in her mind, bouncing off the walls, while she waited for some new frightening sound.

  The engine revved and they drove away, the noise lessening, dwindling, gone.

  Fuck. Light-headed from breathing barely enough for a mouse, she opened her mouth and hauled in a long draught of air.

  Muscles braced, she let the girl slide slowly to the floor where she lay in a pile.

  “God.” She took another big shuddery lungful. “God dammit. Don’t you throw up on our rug.”

  She hadn’t wanted Kasper to know. Phoning for an ambulance or maybe driving the girl to the hospital ER had been her first plan. But after she bundled Monique into her car, the girl had started crying about not wanting the cops involved. When Kasper exited the pub a few yards in front of her car, she’d made a snap decision – take her home. After all, she lived only three streets from the pub and Monique seemed okay, just plastered.

  He knew though, he did. Disaster.

  Bright side, he hadn’t punched in the flimsy door or broken a window to come in that way. The freaky house effect had worked.

  She grinned. Kasper was the big bad wolf trying to blow the house down.

  Problem was, she had to leave sometime. What had she been thinking?

  The lights were on down the hallway. The girl lay curled on the floor, breathing quietly and drooling on the rug. Her blond hair was as short as Willow’s black curls. She looked sweet and terribly innocent even if her skirt was petite enough to show glimpses of her panties, her upper arm had a bleeding heart tattoo…and she was in trouble with the cops.

  What was she going to do with her? “Monique! You got some angry guys after us. Can I call the cops now? Monique?”

  The croaked no and the head shake that stirred the rug were determined.

  “What the hell did you do? Rob a bank? A church? Flick a booger on a cop?” She stuck her splayed fingers in her hair. “What am I going to do with you now? Maybe I can have you stuffed and mounted on my mantelpiece?” Pity she had no mantelpiece. She yelled out, “Ally? You there?”

  She hadn’t thought at all. Now she’d gone and involved Ally, her younger cousin, the one she’d protected all these years, and for what? To get them both killed by some dickhead when they went to get groceries?

  “I’m here.” Ally trudged out of her bedroom and stood blinking at her, in her PJs, clutching her teddy bear. Twenty-three, she still had a teddy, and Ally was as scatterbrained and out of this world as they came. “Who’s that, Will?” She frowned down at their guest.

  Maybe Ally could help? Though if her meds for the night had kicked in, she might be too drowsy to think straight. That she’d taken this long to emerge after all that ruckus, and wasn’t spazzing out like a frightened Bambi, meant she must have swallowed them a while ago.

  “Monique. I think that’s her name… You’re always on the ’net. Seen her in any crime stories?”

  “Not that I remember.” Ally knelt and tucked the bear into the girl’s hand.

  The girl looked up at them blearily. “Will? You’re a boy?”

  She grunted. It wasn’t worth explaining the whole Will was short for Willow thing.

  Actually, Ally was so agoraphobic she barely left the house. The only one likely to get grabbed or assaulted by Kasper was her. And the house had worked its magic. In the past, boyfriends had totally forgotten arguments. As in gone, completely. Willow sucked on her lip. If Kasper forgot, truly, she could use this.

  She’d play it cool for a few days and listen to see if people heard about her Good Samaritan blooper. She thought about the neighborhood with the heroin and crack addicts, the gangs, the occasional stupid violence. On the days that she walked in to work, she had to take care not to step on needles. If anything like this happened again, no way was she standing aside to let someone be abused.

  She’d tread carefully for a while. Willow leaned back against the door and patted the panel. Good house.

  She could use this if she had the balls. Fuck sitting around and watching shit happen. Who else ever got the chance to be the superhero?

  You can only die once.

  Willow frowned. Bad saying. When life serves you lemons, make lemonade? When the shit hits the fan, get a shovel?

  Yeah, one of those. Definitely not the dying one.

  When she went outside in the morning and found SLUT HOWSE written in blood on the door, she didn’t change her mind. Who listened to bad spellers anyway?

  But she scrubbed it off before Ally could see it.

  *****

  The Bak-lal factory queen examined the altered human through the eyes of the little spidery rover. The metal legs snicked quietly as they extracted his breathing tube. The human
gasped and coughed up blood and phlegm then stared unfocused for a few seconds before sitting up on the table. More blood specked the places on his hands and feet where she’d first pierced him.

  “Are you aware and functioning correctly, Christopher One?” The rover’s voice came out with an over-riding buzz but then nothing was perfect after so many years.

  At least human technology had advanced enough to allow use of some of their machinery. The many legs of Raska’s true body twitched where they were tucked, hundreds of yards deep into the surrounding soil. Exciting, this was.

  One day soon, she might burrow upwards, emerge, and stride across the surface.

  “I am. Functioning. Correctly.” The man blinked slower than a normal human but it was sufficient to moisturize his eyes. The brain had suffered during transformation.

  For a micro-second, the factory queen, Raska, ran through the statistics and the predicted arcs of the events she planned. Nothing was certain. She had poor brain function for a queen and knew it. The fight damage from the ancient battle was irreparable.

  Because of that, interstellar communication was impossible from the surface, let alone buried as she was. Her sister factory queen had been destroyed due to poor calculation of risk. She would be careful and slow and sure.

  Soon, though, soon, soon, soon, she would call, she would succeed, and the rest of her family would arrive from space in a vast fleet of Bak-lal.

  Until then, one human convert at a time. No multiple clones, not this time. That had somehow triggered an alert in the Preyfinder’s database. A small yet effective army was best.

  This room inside her body was small compared to the others with assembly lines that stood idle, waiting to spit out soldiers. Frustrating, to have to be so simple. Wait, she whispered to herself. Wait. I am crippled.

  “Can you return to your home now, Christopher One?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  “How?” The question would be a final test of the creature’s reasoning. Fail and he would be terminated like several before him.

  “I will fly. I will go to the airport.” He shook his head and his speech became smoother. “I’ve still got the ticket I came here on. Return trip. Brisbane to Adelaide and back again.”

  This one, Christopher, would be the first to go back, a vanguard in another city, the city where her factory queen sister had reigned until she died. Because there, somehow, the data Raska tasted insisted there were anomalies – there were human females whose parameters existed outside the norm.

  She had gathered data from everywhere since her sister’s death, even tasted remnants of the brain of Jonathan Two that had been unearthed from the rubble by a brave rover. The rover had limped to her with that fragment of preserved brain.

  The taste had been electric. The pieces had slotted in. A female bond-mated to an Igrakk warrior. A woman with a sparrow familiar. The fact had led to an avalanche of strange information.

  Witches. Myths. Lies?

  Fact: An eruption of healing that had temporarily healed even the Jonathan clone. Exceptional data. Extraordinary. Paranormal, said the human sources she’d searched. Best of all, there were tantalizing hints and tastes of more, back there, in Brisbane, her sister’s city.

  More, more, more.

  If these witches existed, she would find them, take them for her own.

  “Go find me witches,” she whispered to the man. “Make them mine. Use the nerve chewers in your case.”

  “I will.”

  The microscopic nerve chewers, when injected, would eat their way across the nerve networks of a human and into the brain, and take over most of the personality. Raska preened. This transportable method was her invention. This way, she could stay here safely, and send out her Bak-lal people to convert others.

  As the Christopher cleaned off the blood, dressed in its suit, put on shoes, and combed its hair, Raska was already dipping her metal feelers into the internet data stream from which she drank daily. The things she found on there, the things humans said to each other. Yumm. She slurped up more data and settled. She twitched her gigantic legs where they extended hundreds of yards into the dirt, her mind plump with gigabytes and YouTube videos, dreaming of victory and of calling to her people.

  With one awakened eye, she watched the human. Briefcase in hand, he went to the outer air-locked door and departed for the grueling climb that led to the surface.

  Come. Come to me, my sisters and brothers, to Earth, for humans are plentiful and weak, and awaiting our glorious instruction.

  Chapter 2

  The mission, such as it was, hadn’t begun well. Brask had taken him out through the tunnel connecting the ship and the house, then brought him here, to the jetty at the back. The lake was still. Pinpoint lights and chirping from the weed-clogged banks told of bugs exploring the night. Brask handed him what he remembered was called a fishing rod then Brask proceeded to fiddle with his own rod, put bait on a hook, and cast the line out across the dark water.

  Stom frowned and stared at the rod and the line dipping into the lake. Frivolous. And it reminded him of home, as did the light of the fireflies and the trees, the sway of their branches and the murmur as wind ruffled through the leaves.

  Difficult to believe that the Preyfinder’s massive ship was buried beneath these waters. He heaved out a sigh. Calmness had crept in, no matter how he resisted. This Earth was a world of peace. He bowed his head a little, watching from under his brow, remembering. The moonlight had found its way through leaves and left dapples on the skin of his forearms. The splashes of dark and light matched his Feya coloring – a camouflage pattern of black on paleness. In plain daylight he was as obvious as an Earth zebra on an open plain. Here, beneath trees, was where he belonged.

  “I forgot what it was like to sit beneath trees and think of nothing much.” He said the words so quietly that maybe only a mouse would hear him.

  “Better?” Brask asked.

  He turned and cocked his head.

  “You looked ready to crack into pieces back at the ship. I thought this might be good. You’re from Grearth? Correct?”

  He bit back a terse response. The Preyfinders were just soldiers, men, like him, obeying orders. “Yes. I thought we were to start this mission? Catch a girl, try to make her a pet?”

  Silence.

  “I’ve been rewarded for valor.” He put aside his fishing rod. “I don’t want this. Let’s make it fast so I can get off this planet and back doing my job. What’s the minimum I can get away with without upsetting anyone?”

  Brask chuckled. “You don’t want this?”

  “I watched my planet burn, break up. I lost my offspring and my bond mate…” He paused, couldn’t say her name even now, not without pain. “I don’t want another to take her place, not even a pet.”

  “I understand.” Brask began reeling in the line. “I know who you are. I respect you and what you’ve done. Still, you’re the only man who has ever wanted to refuse this, and if you did, you’d make someone higher up panic and pop an eyeball.”

  “I know. Feya and Igrakk diplomacy is a nightmare.”

  “The minimum would be this first stage. Studies showed you don’t have to have intercourse to transfer the first dose of the pet nano-chem. Kiss her. After that, I’ll fudge the figures.”

  “I’ll be done? No hunt?”

  “We’ll come out and pretend you tried for the second stage of the capture.” Brask turned to him. “I’m not making a hero of Grearth do anything he doesn’t want to, Stom.”

  “I might need your team of Preyfinders to cover for me. I’m going to kiss her even if I have a few witnesses.”

  “Sure.” He nodded then rose to his feet and held out his clenched fist. The moonlight reflecting off the lake water played on the blue of his cheek grooves and highlighted the spikes of his hair. “Just make sure it’s only a few. We can clean their memories with the look, but if you do it in front of too many, questions will be asked.”

  Stom hauled
himself to his feet and knocked his fist against Brask’s. “I will do that. And I thank you.”

  As he collected the rods at their feet, Brask added, “Not that I wouldn’t leap at the chance to hunt here myself. In human words, damn, she’s hot. Not your girl, another one.”

  He laughed. It felt surprisingly good and he realized it had been months since he’d even smiled. “Hot? You must show me her.”

  “Can’t. She’s gone back to her home city. It’s only a dream. Preyfinders never get honors like this. Unless you’re lucky, like Jadd. I will survive. Good to see you’ve at least learned the local Australian language.”

  “It was simple. Forced language acquisition is nothing compared to weapons training. Some words will come to me as I speak.”

  “As long as you know ‘ass’, ‘hot’, ‘cunt’, ‘fuck’, ‘where’s the nearest toilet’, and ‘where will this bus take me to’, you’re good to go.”

  Stom nodded, sure he was being taunted. “I see. I know those. Except the bus one.”

  “Pussy? You know ‘pussy’? Not the cat variety. Jadd didn’t, so maybe the language misses that one?”

  “I know it, soldier, but I won’t be going anywhere near one of those.”

  He snorted, grinned. “Come. Let’s do this.” Then he turned and walked up toward the house, throwing back one last line. “Just don’t try to get acquainted by saying, ‘is your pussy glowing for me’. Jadd told me that don’t work!”

  Stom smiled, shaking his head, but he stayed where he was for a while longer.

  Was he being terrible by dismissing this reward so lightly? Perhaps. But the sorrow within had already returned. He had no room for anything but this cold grayness and the blood of battle. The light had left his world forever when Nasskia died.

  *****

  The pub, as it was termed, was thriving with humans – at least twenty were in range. Stom folded his arms and glowered at a girl who ventured into their alcove looking for empty glasses. When they had arrived, despite their concealing long coats, his coloring and height had made several patrons turn and stare. But it seemed even he became a part of the scenery with time.