Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 19
“Maybe we’ll just try and walk her to her room,” Rhys said. Rhys on one side, Khos on the other, they half-walked, half- dragged Nyx to her cot at the back of her office and laid her down. She had lost a sandal somewhere, so Rhys took off the remaining one, and covered her in a light blanket. He moved to the brazier at the corner of the room and used a handful of bugs to start a fire.
When he turned around, he saw Khos sitting next to Nyx.
She was snoring softly now.
“I’m Rhys,” Rhys said to him, holding out a hand. “Khos,” the man said, taking his wrist.
“Yes, you told me.” Rhys sat beside him. “You know Nyx.” “Only met her tonight,” Khos said, “in a brothel.”
Well, that explained a lot, Rhys thought. “You have a place to stay?” he asked. He’d been a foreign man in Nasheen long enough to know what the answer probably was.
“Sometimes,” Khos said.
“You can stay the night,” Rhys said. “Extra bed in the back. Taite’s the kid at the com. Anneke is out tonight, but she does weapons, sniper work, that sort of thing.”
“That’s nice of you,” Khos said. “Haven’t met many nice people here.”
“Well, I’m not Nasheenian,” Rhys said.
Khos grinned. “I can see that.” He nodded at Nyx. “She be all right?”
“Probably,” Rhys said. He hesitated. “If she isn’t, we’ll all need to get out of here quickly. You understand?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’ll blame us.”
“Yes,” Rhys said. “You want to clean up? Her blood’s all over you.”
Khos looked down at his large, bloody hands. Her blood was smeared across his face and tunic. “Thank you, yes,” he said. “Back there?”
“Yeah, past the kitchen,” Rhys said.
When Khos was gone Rhys lay down next to Nyx’s cot and listened to her snore. He stared at the ceiling and clasped his hands over his stomach. He hated her, so why did it hurt to see her get what she deserved? This was the life she’d chosen. And she would keep choosing it. She would come home every day bloody and drunk and spouting nonsense. Resigning was the only way to be free of her. Distance was the only way he could get himself to stop caring. Otherwise he’d just be here day after day at her bedside, watching her destroy herself.
“Rhys?” Nyx reached down and took his hand.
Rhys didn’t protest. He stared at her filthy, broken nails, the rough calluses, the smears of dried blood and the rough, lined skin and squeezed her hand back.
“Nyx,” he said, and it was a sigh. “I need to piss,” she said.
He let go of her hand, and went to find her a bucket.
Nyx woke with a start, still reeling from a terrible dream about being eaten alive by maggots. She swung her legs out of the cot and dry-heaved. She saw a neat bedroll on the floor beside her, and had a dim memory of Rhys lying next to her all night. She stumbled to her desk. Her arm ached, and she stank terribly. She rubbed at her eyes and then dug through her desk drawers.
“There’s no whisky in there,” Rhys said from the doorway.
He held a plate of fried plantains that smelled great. “Catshit,” she said.
He set the tray down on her cot. “I’ll get you tea.” “Buni, at least, for fuck’s sake.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” she said. Her head felt stuffed with honey. Her mouth felt like she’d set it on fire sometime the night before.
“For not letting me get blown up yesterday,” he said. “You remember?”
She shrugged. “I need a magician.”
“I’ll get the buni,” he said, and she saw his face fall as he turned, and she resolved not to look at him again. What, was she supposed to say thanks to him, too, for . . . whatever? She was his fucking employer. It was in his best interest to keep her alive.
She noticed a sealed letter on her desk and opened it. “What’s this?”
He glanced back. “Nothing, don’t—” He reached for the letter. She held it away from him, squinting at the text.
“It’s . . . a resignation letter,” Rhys said.
“The fuck? We’re leaving for Alabbas today. I need a magi- cian.”
“Let me get the buni. We can talk.” He hurried out of the room before she could say more.
Nyx rubbed her face. Her memories of the night before were bubbling up, hot and sticky things that came in dim flashes. Blood, bodies, liquor. Always the same.
Rhys brought her a cup of buni and asked her sit on the cot so he could rub more salve into her wound.
“Can do it myself,” she muttered, but drinking the buni sounded better than wiping stinking salve on herself, so she let him do it.
She winced as he unwrapped her crusted bandages. The skin was scabbed over. He rubbed more salve onto the wound and started putting on a clean bandage.
“So you leaving me?” she said.
“What happened to you last night?” he said. “That wasn’t what I asked you.”
He knotted her bandage and frowned at her. It wasn’t often he’d sit this close to her. Their knees touched.
“I can’t watch you kill yourself,” Rhys said. “That’s not what—”
“How drunk were you, to not remember if you called someone or not? So drunk you fell into a very stupid and obvious trap and nearly got yourself killed, is that right? Good guess?”
“Didn’t know you cared,” she said, rolling her shoulder.
He packed what remained of the bandage back into the medical pouch. “I don’t care, Nyx. Do what you want. It’s your awful life.”
“Then get the fuck out of here,” she said. “Live on the fucking street for all I fucking care.”
“You make everything awful,” he said. “Every hand some- one holds out, you chop it off.”
“You hold out enough hands, you get them chopped off,” she said. “Maybe you’ll learn that someday.”
“I saved your life last night, Nyx.”
She picked up her plate of fried plantains and set it on her lap. She used both hands to take the buni from the floor and drank it down in one go. “Buni’s good,” she said.
He waited.
“I know what you did,” she said. “Know it’d be easier for you all to let me go, right? But you gotta get this, Rhys. If I let these people go, other people are going to come. This isn’t going to end until I end it in Alabbas. They will come for me. They will come for you, too, no matter where you go. Sorry, but that’s what it is. I’ve pissed on people in my time, and if they see weakness, they’ll kill all of us.”
“I believe you,” he said. “I’ll go to Alabbas, but that’s it.” She poked at her food. “We’re better together, Rhys.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t think you believe it either.”
He went to the door.
“That Mhorian still here?” she asked. “Sleeping in the back,” Rhys said.
“I’m going to shower off,” she said. “Send him in in twenty?” Rhys nodded, and left her.
Nyx ate the plantains and stumbled her way to the wash- room, passing Anneke as she came out.
“You look like shit,” Anneke said. “Thanks,” Nyx said. “Bakkie packed?”
“Yeah. And I won six notes at flush last night.”
“Great,” Nyx said, and shut the bathroom door. She rinsed off using a hose attached to the sink and watched the dirty water whirl through the drain at the center of the washroom. When she was more or less clean—or cleaner, at least—she knotted on a new dhoti and pulled a tunic over her breast binding. She didn’t feel like going through the bother of changing that one just yet.
She pushed back into her office and saw the Mhorian was already there, standing in front of her desk with his hands clasped in front of him like he’d come to the front of the class to be scolded. He gazed up at her with winter-blue eyes, his face nearly lost in the mop of his dreads.
Nyx had met a good number of shifters she didn’t like, but none this . . . big. Big men always made her wonder about the fullness of the rest of their package, but they generally disappointed her. A thick, confident woman with a prized, custom dildo was a far better bet if that was how she felt like playing it. The fact that she was thinking about dildos made her realize she was feeling a lot better.
“Have a seat,” Nyx said.
Khos trundled into the chair across from her desk. He was so large he dwarfed the chair. It creaked under his weight.
“Why do you need a shifter?” he asked. “Why do you need a job?”
He huffed at her; it put her in mind of a frustrated dog, which she supposed was a fair comparison.
“I need a dog shifter,” she said. “You look the part, but I need to verify you can shift into a dog. Yeah?”
“I can,” he said. “You can fight?”
“I can. Trained as a brawler.” “What, like a gladiator?” “Something like that.” “Good shot?”
“Reasonable,” he said. “Not a sniper, but I’m good with weapons. Not blades, but bullets.”
Nyx drummed her fingers on her desk. “I don’t get it,” she said, leaning toward him. “You’re Mhorian. Why leave a peaceful country and come out here and wallow in all this war and shit?”
His grim expression didn’t change, but he considered the question for a long moment. Then, “I wanted to go somewhere where the pain outside matched what I felt here,” he said, and touched his heart. “A country at war with itself seemed like the best option.”
Nyx snorted. “I get that,” she said. “I don’t need to know all about your shit though, understand? You keep the past in the past.”
“All right,” he said.
She stood. “You’re hired. I’ll have Rhys write up a short- term contract. If you make it through this job alive maybe we’ll make this a regular thing. We’re headed to Alabbas, so go out and get anything you need to pack up for a trip. You have an hour.”
He nodded and walked right back out the front door. She stayed there a long moment looking after him. She liked that, unlike Rhys, he hadn’t pointed out that he’d saved her life. He didn’t ask for a thank-you. He just did his fucking job and didn’t try and collect points for it.
“Anneke!” she yelled.
“Yeah, boss!” she called back from the workroom. “Don’t forget to pack the whisky!”
“Already done, boss!”
Alabbas was a dirty city, dry and rotted like a mite-infested foot left too long in the sun. It was a company town, its inhabitants stuck working for the big factories on the south side of the city. The air had a briny smell to it, and Nyx noted contagion sensors ringing the whole city. Mostly she saw those on the edges of the front and up north to warn people of miasmas caused by wild bug swarms and contagions. Out here they were most likely an early warning system for a factory that had an explosion. Not that it was likely to help them much this close to a blown out building.
They’d passed the burned-out wreck of just such an unlucky factory on the way in. Nyx had managed to stuff the whole team into the bakkie, but had to have Khos shift to do it. He rode beside her up front, sitting between her and Rhys; he was a panting, good-natured buffer between them, and Nyx couldn’t help patting his fluffy dog head a few times on the way up.
Taite and Anneke rode in the back with the trunk open, using respirators to breathe through the dust kicked up by the bakkie. They stayed cool with organic blankets that wicked away their body heat.
Rhys didn’t speak a word to her the whole way, which was quite a feat, because it took five days to drive all the way south to Alabbas and the address they’d pulled from the bug. By the time they all got there Taite and Anneke were bickering, Khos spent most of his time napping, and Rhys mostly just glared at her.
Nyx didn’t feel like defending her decisions any more than she already had. It was looking less and less like she’d get paid for this job, which was quickly turning into a vendetta, and she knew it.
Once they got holed up inside a seedy company-owned hotel, she splurged on three rooms because she wanted one all to herself so she could piss and sleep without listening to someone whining or enduring Rhys’s odious stare.
She sent Taite out to do reconnaissance on the so Mahasin house to gather intelligence and put Khos on dog duty. “They’re running with dogs,” she told him. “I want you to find out if they’re feral or shifters. I have a good idea of how they’re triggering these bombs.”
“What’s a Muhktar doing with so Mahasins?” Taite said, shaking his head.
“Adopted, remember? Who the fuck knows how families work out here. Maybe she got sold to them. Maybe she just likes them better. Small town politics are tricky, though, so don’t step into any shit.”
She sent Anneke out to collect local gossip and found that Rhys had already left to find some food before she could give him instructions. Well, fuck him, she thought, and went back to her room and napped for almost six hours.
When she woke, Khos was looming over her in the blue light of the second dusk.
“The fuck?” she said.
“Found the dogs,” he said. “They aren’t at the address you sent Taite to. I sent him to where the dogs are instead.”
“You did what?” “I thought—”
“I don’t pay you to think,” Nyx said. “Just report. Where is he now?”
“I’ll take you there,” he said. “Rhys is with him.”
“Lot of fucking uppity assholes on this team,” she said, and rolled out of bed.
“Most boring part of the job,” Taite said, munching from his bag of crisps in the front seat of the bakkie. The bakkie was parked outside a big walled house where half a dozen dogs slept out on the sidewalk in front of the garden gate. They were all rangy little mutts that looked like littermates.
“But it’s a great way to learn a lot without getting a bullet,” Nyx said from the seat beside him. Khos had shifted again, and was already out on the street, sniffing in gutters. It surprised her the other dogs hadn’t tried to attack him. She took the pack of crisps from Taite and grabbed a fistful. She hadn’t eaten since they got to Alabbas. “They come out yet today?”
“Only to feed the dogs.”
“What, these strays?” She offered the crisps packet to Rhys beside her, but he ignored her. Whatever.
“Yeah, there are more in the courtyard. The two kids come out, the twins, and they feed the dogs. Address says this is a Muhktar house. Just so you know.”
“Twins, huh? What do they feed them?”
“I dunno. Table scraps? They like dogs, I guess. I heard more inside, when I did the walk by. Khos thinks there are at least eight more dogs inside.”
“They raise them to eat them?” she said. “Some got to be shifters.”
“I think . . . I think they keep them as pets?” “Bizarre.”
Taite shrugged. “Everybody’s different. They just seem too friendly with them to eat them, but who knows? I used to name the ditch bugs we raised before we ate them.
A woman came out of the house, wrapped in a heavy burnous. “Here we go,” Nyx said. “You know that one?”
Taite squinted. “Can’t tell. You?”
“Naw,” she said. “How many you figure are left in there?
People, I mean. Not dogs.”
“Don’t know,” he said. “That’s the third woman who’s left, and I’ve only ever seen those three—her and the twins. But I’d think they’d leave someone with the dogs.”
“May be time to go in,” she said. “Real polite-like.” “That’s it? No plan or anything?”
“What, you wanted to wait for an invitation?” “Damn, Nyx, but—”
“I said I’d be polite.”
She pulled out her pistol, slid out of the bakkie. She bet they’d only leave a couple young kids, maybe, or some teen apprentices, to watch the dogs. Maybe a dowdy old matriarch. She could handle that many.
Nyx tried the door first the old-fashioned way to verify it wasn’t unlocked. She had tried busting in her fair share of doors that turned out to be open because someone had just popped out; not often, but enough to check. She waved for Rhys, but it was Taite that got out.
“No,” she said, “Rhys. What, you going to talk it open?” Rhys came out and sidled up to her along the doorway.
“If we’re arrested for this,” he said, “I want your guarantee of protection.”
“So, it speaks,” Nyx said, watching the street behind him. “You want my protection in prison? They don’t much like me in prison.”
“So I keep hearing,” he said. He pulled a long black bug
from the sleeve of his robe and set it onto the great outer gear of the door. It was a clunky old pre-war thing. The bug skittered up into the gears of the mechanism. Rhys murmured something she couldn’t make out, and the door clicked open. Nyx pressed into the room, gun raised. She wasn’t a great shot with a pistol, but the ammunition for it was cheaper than what she put in her scattergun. She snorted dusty air and padded into the dim room, noting the two doors inside: one into the courtyard, one into something that might be a kitchen.
A little Ras Tiegan girl stood there holding a bowl of pastry. Her mouth hung open when she saw Nyx. Nyx was dressed in her dirty dhoti, tattered breast binding, and a faded burnous with months of dirt caked up along the hem. Her braids were coming undone and she hadn’t washed anything but her face since they had arrived in Alabbas two days before.
The girl wore the tricorn-shaped hijab the Ras Tiegans called a wimple, gazed out at Nyx with big eyes. She was probably about Taite’s age, and if Nyx guessed right, had spent her whole life either at home with her mother or right here serving the people in this big house.
“I’m here to see the head of the house,” Nyx said. “You tell her the bel dame council has words for her.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl said, staring hard at Nyx’s feet, “the head of the house is not home.”
“Then you won’t mind if I look around,” Nyx said.
