Thrill-Kinky (9 page)

Before Drax could say anything, Rita hugged the felinoid fiercely. “Of course they need you. We all need you. Everyone needs a cat-girl in their lives to remind them what fun is, and we do more than most. Mik and Gan have a damn grim mission. Buck has a black hole where some of his soul’s supposed to be. And I’m the kind of girl who thinks it’s great to spend Friday night fixing the
Malcolm
’s engine.”

Xia punched her shoulder. “Don’t give me that spacedust, Rita,” she said lightly. “You’re also the kind of girl who thinks it’s a good idea to rappel up a building in the middle of the night because a hot guy needs help, and what’s more can do it, which not many human women could. Great stars, you’re the kind of girl who can find a hot guy in a recycling bin. I want lessons when this is over! I promise I’ll still be around to tease Buck and Dad and Gan after tonight, and make sure you get in the fun kind of trouble at least once or twice a cycle.” Her voice turned serious. “But first I’m going to make sure Nitari Belesku doesn’t kill Drax or any of the rest of us. I’m the predator here. Let me do my job.”

Drax looked like he wanted to argue more. Instead he sighed and said, “I won’t dishonor you by trying to dissuade you again. I’ll have your back.”

Xia laughed carelessly. “You could have all of me if you asked nicely, pretty winged man. But like I said, Miss Rita has first dibs and she’s my friend.” Xia stretched up on tiptoes and kissed Drax’s cheek. For once in her life when interacting with someone attractive, she didn’t press up against him and wiggle, or grab his butt, or do anything suggestive. It was the kind of kiss she’d give Rita for good luck. Even with Rita, she’d make it more suggestive, though Rita wasn’t queerbent at all and Xia was only a little bent toward the girlside. If a peck on the cheek could be sad, this one definitely was. “But seriously, watch my back from a safe distance. I’ll do my best to make sure she runs off or dies before she even knows you’re here.”

Mik and Buck returned from their scouting mission around the perimeter of the building. “No guards on the outside,” Buck confirmed.

“And no perimeter alarms, which confirms Drax’s intel.” Mik adjusted the small instrument he’d been carrying, which Drax looked at curiously.

“Where did you get an Arinath grid disrupter? I have one…had one…but they’re not exactly something you can pick up at the local hypermarket.”

“Not on most planets,” Mik said with a shrug as he slipped the disrupter into an interior pocket of his greatcoat. As the fabric swept aside, Rita saw how many weapons he was carrying. When she met his eyes, they were hard and gray as steel and cold as space. “Time to get into place, everyone.”

Mik was taking this seriously too. Scary seriously.

For a second, just a second, Rita desperately wanted to back out.

Then she turned and looked at Drax. The gold of his skin was dimmed in the darkness, and his magnificent wings were hidden. He looked merely handsome, not spectacular. But that didn’t matter. He looked at her with those almond-shaped dark eyes and what she felt wasn’t just desire—although there was a fair measure of that—but a kind of connection Rita didn’t feel with anyone else. Not Xia, her best friend. Not Mik or Gan. Not the family that had given her birth then, puzzled by the strange star-child in their groundbound midst, sent her off with their love to see the galaxy.

The sense of connection might not make a speck of sense. It most probably was the effect of some really weird and intense shared experiences, not to mention crazy, impulsive sex. It soothed her, nevertheless.

Drax needed to do this job, and he couldn’t do it alone. Therefore, she’d help him. Her reasoning really was as simple and insane as that.

“Let’s do this thing,” she told Mik.

She took three steps before she realized she’d forgotten something very important, as critical to her success in this as the ropes and crampons in her pack. She turned back, flung her arms around Drax and kissed him.

No lust this time. Okay, some lust, but she layered it with everything else she wanted Drax to know. That he mattered to her, even though she hardly knew him. That she couldn’t imagine not helping him.

That even if they parted ways after tonight, she wanted to know that somewhere in the galaxy, he was alive, well, and doing slightly shady things for good reasons.

And that if he died, she might just jump into a black hole like those crazy followers of the god Gusmas, who believed you could get to paradise that way, so she could track him down and beat the tar out of him for being stupid.

It was hard to say all that from one kiss, one hurried kiss in the shadow of a museum that they needed to break into so they could
not
steal a priceless artifact. But she did her best.

It seemed like Drax was trying to tell her a lot with his kiss too. Only she couldn’t tell what all it was, other than,
Be careful. I don’t want your death on my soul.
I’m sorry about this mess,
and again,
be careful
. All with a strong overlay of,
Assuming we survive tonight, I want to sex you until neither of us can walk.
Which wasn’t the best motivation for survival, Rita supposed, but it was far from the worst she’d heard.

Drax was the one who finally disengaged and pushed her gently away. In the reflected light from the front of the building, his eyes were curiously bright. It had to be a trick of the funny light, though. Rita would have sworn he was crying.

“I’m ready,” she said, sounding steadier than she felt.

But what could you do? When life threw you into a Deremian gas storm, you kept your ventilator clear and tried to enjoy the spiraling rush, because you weren’t getting out until the storm let up.

Drax watched Rita fade into the darkness. His face felt damp, and he didn’t want to contemplate why.

He was a coward. He didn’t want his life to end tonight at Nitari Belesku’s pitiless hands, so he hadn’t argued nearly hard enough to keep the
Malcolm
’s crew out of this deadly clusterfuck.

Because he had let his fear silence him, a young felinoid was going to take on an assassin for him. Never mind that she claimed to have wetwork training and probably did. She was putting her life on the line for him.

And Rita, his sweet and wild Rita (where did that
his
come from? It made no sense, but the truth of it resonated down to his wingtips) was about to scale a building that he should have been blithely flying to the top of, to do something he could usually do in his sleep.

He felt like an idiot. He felt like a heel and a cad, as the history-flash set liked to say. But Banjal and San’bal both needed this job to be done. The economic fortunes, if not the lives, of billions of people rode on stopping this theft and in the process, exposing the Blemondian conspiracy. For all he knew, people could die if the faulty neurorelays were released. It couldn’t be healthy to have bad tech implanted in your brain. This was bigger than his pride or any one person’s life.

He just wished he was in good enough shape he could risk his
own
life. That was what he’d signed on to do—and never mind that his initial signing on with the BIC had been kind of a “your options are this or jail and you’re way too pretty to do well in prison”, he was patriotic and his work had come to mean something to him. The others had volunteered to help, sure. Their choice to risk their lives.

But if he hadn’t screwed up in some way he hadn’t figured out yet, if the Blemondians hadn’t found him, his new friends wouldn’t have to risk themselves.

Rita wouldn’t have to risk herself.

He watched her walk away, a small, staunch figure in the dim light. He’d used women before in the course of both his professions—but never like this. They’d been cover or information sources, but he’d never let them take on the bad guys for him.

Mik touched his arm, making him jump. “You couldn’t have stopped either of them, mate,” he said quietly. “Rita’s been part of my crew for four years and Xia’s like my kid, and neither of them listen to me. Especially not when I’m trying to keep them from doing something marling insane. They’re certainly not going to listen to you. Very determined, our Rita, and kind of overprotective—ask her about fixing one of the external panels in a solar storm off Arcturus.”

Drax gulped. He wasn’t a spacer by any measure—he traveled on ships, sure, had even flown small personal transports, but he didn’t claim to understand how they worked. But he did know a few things. “A suit’s only good for about five minutes under those conditions.”

“If the panel wasn’t resecured, we’d have needed to make an emergency landing, and odds were we’d have lost the panel completely and wouldn’t have survived re-entering atmosphere. If we made it, the whole northern hemisphere of Arcturus was under quarantine for Ganth’s disease. She figured it was worth it. Got the panel reattached in four-point-two minutes.”

That made Drax feel only slightly better.

Actually, it made him feel worse.

“And Xia?”

Mik shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s telling the truth about wetwork training. Until now she’s always refused to talk about how she ended up where we found her. Even though she wasn’t raised by her own people, she’s all felinoid in a lot of ways, including a loose attachment to truth when a good story suits her ends better.” The human snorted, a nervous sound that wanted to be a laugh but couldn’t quite manage it. “But the night we found her, she was covered with blood, crouched by the body of a grown man who’d raped her. She was seven Standard years old.”

“As grown as a Banjali or human ten-year-old. Stars and gods, I hate people sometimes.”

But at least it proved that the felinoid’s hunter’s instincts, if nothing else, would come out in a pinch. Maybe she’d know, equally instinctively, how to fade into the shadows.

He hoped. If she could taunt Belesku, lure her away, then disappear, they all had a much better chance of surviving the night. But if she tried to confront the assassin directly, he dreaded to think what might happen.

It was one thing to have Xia run interference, but if it came down to a fight between Xia and Belesku, he’d have to intervene.

Somehow.

While Buck had kindly given him a laserpistol, Drax was very aware of his own weaknesses as an operative.

And one of them was he wasn’t a great shot. Terrific at hand-to-hand when he was in better shape, but not an expert with a laserpistol. Not good enough, anyway, to shoot an enemy who was tussling with a friend and make sure he hit only his intended target. So he’d have to come up with another way to make sure Xia, Rita and the others didn’t die for him.

Even if it meant walking up to Belesku and punching her in the face, which was bound not to end well.

Chapter Ten

Rita’s heart raced when she stood at the foot of the National Museum, looking at the crazy, irregular walls and the peaked roof. The only good news, she thought, was the roof was also irregular, following the same naturalistic aesthetic as the rest of the building. There were even vines growing on it, though she wouldn’t trust them as handholds.

That and the fact that no one seemed to be hanging around the museum. There must be guards inside, but they were probably few and far between and probably counting the minutes until they got off shift so they could go party. At least she hoped so.

So many things could go wrong. Xia was so much better suited for this. But Rita could do it, and there was no way she could hold off a trained assassin, let alone kill her like Xia bragged she could do. Hopefully she wasn’t just bragging.

Don’t think about that.
Rita couldn’t control Xia’s part of the plan. She couldn’t control how the Blemondian and San’balese criminals would react when they found out their plot had been compromised, no matter how much she fretted about that, and about whether Drax or the others might get hurt. (She hadn’t gotten around to dealing with the fact she’d be down there too and thus liable to get hurt herself.)

All she could control was climbing the building, using Mik’s disrupter and a solar screwdriver to disrupt the alarm system, open the skylight, then get into the building to admit the others. So she’d better get climbing.

And once she did, her mind emptied of everything except the climb. No time to worry about other aspects of the plot not going well, no time to wonder whether Drax was safe, no time to think about Xia’s startling revelation, or if, under the circumstances, her friend might be a little too distracted to be as good at belaying as she usually was. Just one handhold at a time, one foot rest, one camming device secured to an irregular spot on the building’s face, carabiners attached to those. Soon, sooner than she would have expected, she ceased to think of the National Museum as a building, ceased to think of this as an illegal and dangerous job.

It was a rock face, like many others she’d climbed, and this was a climbing adventure, like the ones she did for fun whenever she got a chance.

Just like that day in orbit over Arcturus, once she got going, had been another spacewalk, another time testing herself to see how fast she could fix something in zero-G while in a bulky space suit.

Once she got going, it was just another game, not that much different than blowing off steam rock-climbing with Xia.

Her body knew what it was doing. Her adrenaline surged, pushing her when her brain tried to kick in and think too much. Handhold, footrest, anchorpoint for the ropes, climb, repeat. The poor lighting made it challenging. On the positive side, there was more symmetry to the seeming asymmetrical construction than it had looked like from the ground. Patterns of four decoratively protruding stones, grouped into clusters of eight, not perfectly consistent, but consistent enough for her muscles to discover the pattern before her brain puzzled it out.

Her muscles started to ache after a while—just how long she didn’t know, and she knew better than to look down and try to get a feel for it that way. This was far from the most challenging climb she’d done, once she got a hang for how the stones were arranged, but it was long. Four-story building, she remembered from the blueprints, plus the sloped roof. She’d deliberately blocked out how high that translated to in metric standard units, but it seemed higher than most of the cliff faces she’d scaled.

Straightforward, though…

Until she reached for an expected handhold and it wasn’t there.

She’d been moving a little too fast, her foot already in motion toward a protruding rock that also wasn’t where it should have been.

There was an awful time period, both instantaneous and longer than a lifetime, when Rita knew she was going to fall and she couldn’t do anything about it. Oddly, instead of panicking, her mind was perfectly clear and steady. She could see exactly what she’d done wrong, figure out why the pattern had changed and even what it must have changed to. She must be almost at the roof. There was a line of ordered stonework around the top of the building, an obvious pattern of fours and eights, but much neater and closer together than the naturalistic one she’d been expecting. It must be like getting too close to a black hole and knowing you were doomed and yet still having time to note all the bizarre ways time and space distorted, effects so fascinatingly weird they almost but not quite distracted you from the fact you were about to die.

Then she was falling with a rush of air. She didn’t bother screaming. There wasn’t much point to it, and besides, she was too busy checking her harness. She had just about enough time to hope that all the anchor points she’d chosen held steady before she stopped with a painful jerk and swung into the building. That time, she did make a sound, a soft, stifled curse. Noise would travel in the quiet night air and they had enough problems without her alerting the whole damn planet to the fact that someone was trying to climb the National Museum.

She dangled on the ropes for a second, catching her breath. Bruised, but not broken. She’d done worse to herself climbing for fun, and she’d put in an anchorpoint not far from where she’d fallen, so she didn’t even have far to go.

That had definitely broken her flow, though. All her muscles were screaming at her and so was her brain, reminding her she still had the roof to do and that would be harder than the flat face, because there were fewer obvious protrusions to use.

But she could do it. She sighed to herself, startling herself by how loud the rush of breath seemed in the darkness. She hauled herself forward, using the ropes and the strength of her arms, then started to climb again.

Only to realize Drax was in the air, flying toward her. His wings were startlingly pale against the pavement and the dark building, reflecting every bit of light in the area. It would be stunning in the right circumstances, like on a romantic date when she could sit back and admire the beauty, but this was far from the circumstances. He was way too visible.

And that made it easy to see his flight was far from smooth and steady. She’d been scared during her short moment of free-fall, but honestly, she’d been climbing long enough that she’d learned to trust her ropes and anchors.

Right now, she was more frightened for him than she’d ever been for her. He had no backup, no safety lines, just strength that he could usually trust but couldn’t tonight.

Making sure she was securely anchored where she was, she gestured at him, pointing toward the ground. He ignored her, or maybe he just couldn’t see her in the dimness.

He lurched visibly. It left her no choice. She only hoped that the acoustics in the area weren’t too great, and anyone who overheard would think it was a woman yelling at her friend from street level. “I’ve got this!” she called. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

He continued in his wobbly but determined flight.

As an afterthought, she added, “I’ve got plans for you later, handsome.”

Maybe that would deflect the attention of any eavesdroppers, who might figure they were just overhearing a couple of people who’d had too much fun at the festival and were indulging in a little horseplay as a result.

And maybe, she thought wildly, it would help convince Drax to get back on the ground, where he must feel pretty frustrated as a grounded flyer, but where at the moment he needed to stay.

She caught a glimpse of his smile, bright in the darkness, and she thought but couldn’t be sure that he blew her a kiss before gyring back to the ground.

She took a deep breath and continued climbing.

Her body hurt. The climbing was definitely harder now. At the same time, though, she knew where the handholds were. She knew to anticipate the change in pattern that had thrown her off before. When the slanted, vine-covered roof seemed obnoxious, she remembered Drax’s smile and let her body take over for her mind.

At last Rita reached the skylight, anchored the rope in several places. She clicked on the disrupter. Red lights began to flash, indicating the presence of an alarm despite Drax’s intel. No problem. Hunching over the disrupter to hide the light, not that she thought anyone could see its beam from this height, she ran it over the skylight. A soft crackling noise, so low that she almost didn’t hear it, and the red light turned green.

The skylight wasn’t designed to open from the outside. No surprise there; they usually weren’t, although she found herself wondering if roofs had doorways on Banjal so people could fly in for a visit. But she wasn’t a mechanic for nothing. She wasn’t as good at picking locks as Xia, but this wasn’t locked. And figuring out mechanisms she could do.

She pulled out a tiny light, shielding it as best as she could, and a few tools. She quickly recalibrated the disrupter, because the skylight appeared to open automatically, probably on a timer, and she needed to force it to a manual override. Luckily she’d had to use the disrupter that way before to fix something on the
Malcolm
where the software was so glitchy she couldn’t open the access panel any other way. A few twists and turns here, a few yanks there, and she was in.

She set the disrupter back to the setting Drax had recommended for the building’s alarms, clipped it to her belt, checked one last time to make sure her lines were well secured and lowered herself through the now open skylight.

The climb, except for a few scary minutes, had been calm. She’d slipped into the meditative place climbing often put her.

Descending on a line through open air, into unknown conditions that she couldn’t see, was anything but serene. Her heart raced as she zipped down the line, and her palms sweated inside her gloves. She was dank all over with nervous sweat, and she had no way to know…

She hit the floor with a thump that vibrated through her bones.

That answered that question of how fast she was moving toward the floor. Ow.

She unhooked herself from the harness, then tapped the slither-tab to loosen the anchorpoint and retract the rope back to her.

Rita didn’t have a visual reference, but the maps and floor plans she’d seen earlier were burned into her brain. Quick decision: main stairs, not elevator, because at least one person, the turncoat guard, had to be there tonight and it would be typical for the
Malcolm
’s luck if someone noticed the elevator was moving. She tried to find a balance between stealth and speed as she moved. Knowing an outright run might be noisy, she settled on a quick lope. Through an exhibit hall, this one apparently devoted to the wildlife of San’bal Prime, which she would have enjoyed on another day, in another life. Down the hall. Through a side room full of odd-looking sea creatures.

There it was. The EXIT sign was written only in San’balese, but she knew from the placement it was the right one.

Just in case it was a fire exit only, she checked it with the disrupter. Either it wasn’t an alarmed door or the disrupter was still doing its job. Thank goodness for small mercies.

Four flights down, and in the enclosed safety of the stairwell, Rita let loose and ran like an entire platoon of irate Zenon warriors were after her. (This had actually happened to Xia once, although the Zenon warriors weren’t irate in that case, more aroused. Which hadn’t made the prospect of being caught by them much more enticing. Something about the tusks, Xia said, and the pungent musk.) Her legs didn’t hurt as much as her arms did, but they were still sore, and she’d already run more today than she had in months. “Business as usual” had been quieter than usual of late, with only a few hair-raising escapes needed.

The fact that she caught herself wishing she’d had to go through a few more crises so she’d have been in better shape brought her up short, laughing wheezily. Yeah, it had been an interesting day.

She was still chuckling when she opened the door.

Drax pushed between Buck and Mik and took her into his arms with a muffled groan that said more than words could. He stroked her hair, ran his hand down her back, but didn’t actually speak. Finally, he cupped her face in his hand and just looked at her, studied her face with those amazing eyes of his, studied her so intently that she knew what Xia’s prey must feel like.

“I’m all right,” she insisted, suddenly uncomfortable. “Startling, sure, but I was well secured. I have a few bruises, but I’m still in better shape than you are at the moment. And I’d punch you for trying to fly to me, except I can’t remember where all your injuries are and you’ve already done yourself enough damage with your little rescue attempt.”

“When you fell,” he whispered, “I fell too.”

She gasped and felt tears well up in her eyes. She’d be spaced if he didn’t mean it, at least at this moment.

She reminded herself that adrenaline and fear did funny things to people, that he must feel responsible and extra worried, since a human had been stuck doing a job that should have been his, one that should have been easy for him to pull off. Probably he’d have been just as concerned if one of the others had had to make the climb.

Though, she conceded, he probably would word it differently to one of the guys. Or not. Maybe it didn’t sound so romantic and dramatic in his native language, like Xia’s outbursts didn’t sound as comical in her head as they did in Standard.

Telling herself that did little for the way Rita’s blood sang and her clit clamored for attention.

She was thrill-kinky. Of course a hot man saying sexy things to her would be that much more affecting while they were in the middle of doing something very, very illegal that was just going to get more dangerous as they went on.

“You’re good, Mr. Drax,” Xia stage-whispered from the shadows. “You two make me all fluttery inside.”

“I feel a little fluttery myself,” Buck commented. “No, wait, that’s nausea. Can we get this show on the road?”

“In a second or so,” Drax said.

The kiss took far more than a few seconds, as if as if he wanted to kiss her so thoroughly it would last them both a lifetime. But at the moment, about to head into unknown dangers, kissing that way felt right. Something cracked inside her and she didn’t know if it was her heart or the place she’d been hiding the last bit of reserved courage, now released for action. As she pressed herself against Drax, feeling his lips on hers, his tongue relentlessly yet tenderly exploring her mouth, his body strong and despite everything sure against hers, she couldn’t be scared anymore about tonight. It was crazy, she knew, but something about the way he was kissing her promised her that everything would be all right and she believed him.