LITMIR.BIZ

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it was, there was a sudden explosion of breathing and footsteps.

      Something had caught their attention, and they were on the move.

      Priscilla was tempted to follow them, at least to see who the poor creature was that had drawn their ire.

      Whatever or whoever it was, Priscilla felt a pang of regret as she hid in the pitch-black.

      At least, she thought, whatever was out there wouldn’t suffer for long.

      LAKESH HAD HEARD DOMI stalk away from him, and even in his compromised memory situation, he knew that she was planting the seed of a trap. Born in the wilderness, the slender, pixie-haired albino girl could move with the silence of a cat. If she was obvious enough that Lakesh could locate her by hearing alone, that meant she was baiting someone she had sensed, risking her existence by making herself a target.

      Lakesh clenched his eyes shut, squeezing the skin between his brows. Only a few months ago he had the physique and endurance of a man who was less than a fifth of his current chronological age of two and a half centuries. And while he knew that he’d crossed the Nevada desert, deposited there by one of the interphaser units he’d built, he wasn’t certain how much of a liability he had been across the hot, arid sands. Domi wasn’t one to keep her mouth shut about Lakesh acting like a baby, but she was unusually taciturn now.

      He was out of breath, and if it hadn’t been for the layers of clothing he wore, his naturally dark complexion still would have burned in the blazing sun. One of the advantages of the multiple layers that were loosely bound around his torso and limbs was that they allowed for pockets of cool air, as well as absorbing sweat and whisking excess heat away. Domi didn’t look as if she had been in a recent conflict even past the hour or so he’d retained his memories for, so there was no other reason for Lakesh to assume that it was anything other than a walk in the sand that had so exhausted him.

      “Useless,” Lakesh lambasted himself. He took a quick inventory of himself and found that he had a pistol in his belt. She hadn’t left him defenseless, and since it was only his short-term memory that was failing him, he made sure the weapon was locked safe, but still had a round in the chamber. Unfortunately he had to click off the safety lever to retract the slide enough to see there was a bullet in place. He closed the action and flicked the switch. “Don’t shoot by accident.”

      There was the distant sound of grunts that distracted him from the heavy chunk of steel in his hand. It took everything in his willpower to keep from calling out to the feral girl to warn her.

      Again, if Lakesh could hear them, there was no way her wilderness-honed senses missed them. He did roll over and peer over the berm of sand Domi had tucked him behind. He spotted a pair of big, bestial creatures. The last time he’d seen anything similar to this was when Quavell, the Area 51 hybrid who had befriended the Cerberus redoubt and Domi especially, resisted the clarion call of Tiamat so that she could give birth. Their skins were mottled with scaly, fine armor, and their limbs had swollen from the usual hybrid spindles to something slender and tightly corded. They were nowhere nearly as bulky and powerful as the Nephilim, but neither did they seem to be something Lakesh could best in a fistfight.

      Both appeared to be about six feet in height, and their faces, still looking like those of the original Quad Vs, were twisted in anger. Each bore a length of steel with a hooked end, a bent L pipe that had been made into an improvised hatchet by hammering the tube shut with a rock and scraped to sharpness. They were tool users, and able to improvise, but that was where their civilization and advancement ended. Lakesh was reminded of cavemen, down to the tattered dark sheets that hung around their waists like loincloths.

      Lakesh lowered himself behind the sandy berm, his thumb sweeping the safety off on the pistol. The gun felt so heavy, he wondered how he could keep it steady and on target if he had to shoot.

      There was a gruff bark, and Lakesh lifted his head again. Domi was nowhere to be seen, and the pair of savages appeared confused. A smile crept across his fleshy lips.

      The albino could disappear in plain sight. He didn’t envy the creatures.

      Then two sets of black, teardrop-shaped eyes swiveled toward him. Their slitlike mouths curled up, revealing sharpened teeth awaiting inside.

      They had seen him!

      Lakesh started to lower back down, in the hope that they hadn’t, but the two beasts exploded from a standstill, legs pumping as they rushed to fall upon the former Cerberus redoubt leader.

      Chapter 3

      There had been two of them, stuck halfway between the snake-faced drones that served the Annunaki overlords and the odd, bigheaded spindles they had grown from. Domi made enough noise to alert the pair, and she continued to stomp until they had nearly gotten into sight. With deft quickness, the feral girl nestled herself in the shell of what used to be an automobile, shadows covering her like a blanket.

      These freaks reminded Domi of Quavell in her final, suffering moments, a tormented beast tearing itself out of what used to be a gentle, delicate friend. She remembered the exponentially increasing strength that the hybrid woman had applied to her hand as she held it, lending emotional support to her. She remembered the final promise that she’d made, to protect her baby, the fragile little life for which she fought biology and alien technology to free from the prison of her body before it transformed into a sexless drone.

      There was a brief jolt of pain, as Domi recalled when Balam had taken the child, disappearing so that neither the Annunaki nor the Cerberus rebels could claim control of the ninth overlord, which was what the infant had become. Domi had hoped that in the days since the apparent death of the orbiting dragon ship Tiamat, they would have the chance to locate Quavell’s child. Things never went according to plan. One menace had faded from the center stage, and dozens more popped up. Domi had done her best to bury those feelings, but the monsters who reacted to her baiting were just too similar to her dead friend to pass from her thoughts quickly.

      “Waiting for more,” Domi whispered to herself, seeking an excuse to deflect her recriminations. So far, despite the long moments she waited, there were no more of the odd, alien hunters stalking in the open. Satisfied that she wasn’t going to be blindsided, she drew her wicked combat knife from its sheath. Just because only two had come to the sound of her footsteps didn’t mean others would ignore the discharge of a firearm.

      The two of them would die quietly, and then Lakesh could be taken to shelter in the half-collapsed building they had emerged from. With nearly boneless ease, she slithered out of the derelict car’s window, crawling onto the sand, ruby eyes locked on the monstrosities even through her protective goggles. The rearmost creature would be her first target, and she already envisioned herself clamping a hand over its slit mouth, keeping it quiet as the saw-backed blade tore through the blend of scales and hybrid skin.

      The hunters suddenly turned, and Domi’s plans disappeared. They’d spotted something, and out of the corner of her eye she recognized the steel-gray shock of Lakesh’s hair. He’d pulled his hood and cap off to maintain a lower profile as he spied upon the mutated hybrids, and he’d pushed his luck too far. They noticed him, and the swiftness of their response changed the albino’s plans in the blink of an eye.

      Domi burst to her feet, tossing the knife from her right hand to her left so that she could reach her Detonics Combat Master. The need for silence had disappeared with the luxury of the hunters’ ignorance of their surroundings, and she brought up the locked and cocked little pistol, thumb snapping down its safety. Her arm was an ivory rod, corded muscles spearing the gun ahead of her as her legs shoved against the sand beneath her. She waited until the thumbnail of a front sight was almost swept toward the head of one of the two half-breeds before she applied force to the trigger. With a thunderous crash, the .45 spit out its deadly message. Her aim was off—she had meant to core the skull of her first target, but the fat bullet merely ripped a crease in the side of the beast’s head, missing a dead-on hit to bone and causing the slug to only split skin with a glancing impact.

      The blast had done its job in protecting Lakesh, however, despite her miss. The two creatures skidded to a halt. The one

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