Page 28 of Savagely Mated


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I see Rafe try and fail to hide his smile. He likes how fucked up this girl is. He likes the fact that she keeps doing things that get her into trouble. But he also didn’t pay for the van. I did. My estate pays for a lot of our toys. All of these bikes came out of my coffers. It wouldn’t do to mention it, but I am not pleased at the prospect of having to replace the vehicle.

Einar looks a lot less amused.

“The van doesn’t matter,” he says through gritted teeth. “It’s Darcy we need.”

“She’s probably run back to the academy,” Rafe says.

“Maybe, but I doubt we will get the same jump on her again. She’s not going to be sleeping at night for a while. My guess, she’s curled up somewhere right now, asleep.”

“I’ve got an idea. We go to the academy, and we get a release for her. That’s possible. They have an external recruitment sector, remember? We can just ask them.”

“Ask them to release their only female shifter cadet? One intended for the king’s bed?”

“Someone has to be protecting her. She’s twenty, and she hasn’t been taken to the palace. You know the king’s tastes. Usually, the second it’s legal, he has them in his boudoir.”

“She’s not ready for the palace. She might not be considered acceptable at all,” Rafe says. “Can you imagine her speaking to the king the way she spoke to us?”

“She wouldn’t do that. She’d be respectful,” Einar says.

Rafe and I laugh at that. Even Einar smirks slightly.

We haven’t known Darcy long, but we’ve known her long enough to know that any facade of propriety she might put on for a monarch would be the thinnest of veneers, and she’d show her true nature sooner rather than later. The academy knows that. They’d have to know it.

“You still have pull there,” Rafe says to Einar. “It might be time to try an official application. See if you can’t take her on as an apprentice or similar. You know she’s got to be pissing them off.”

“I left the academy years ago,” Einar reminds him. “They’re not going to hand over a rare shifter female to us just because she’s annoying sometimes. She’s a card they’ll be able to play one day, and they know that.”

We’ve pulled off the main street and have our bikes leaned up in a parking space while we have this discussion. All around us, Eclipse City is performing its usual bustling mass dance. Everybody here is stressed the hell out and on something. Either a stimulant, a sedative, a dissociative, a psychogenic, or all four at the same time.

A delivery bike races past us at full speed, splitting traffic, winding in and out of cars before it hits a curb, spins into apassing vehicle and explodes. I feel the heat of the combustion in my face from hundreds of feet away. Whatever was stacked precariously on the back of that thing needed a dangerous goods tag.

Traffic continues to flow around the accident without stopping. There’s not much to salvage. There’s nothing organic left at all. There’s just a lot of carbon and twisted metal. The only thing to survive is the yellow tail flag that got caught on a pole on the way to the accident, and still flags out with the company’s details…

Darcy

Delivery 2 Go

I am standing in a smoky office with a map of Eclipse City on the wall. There are dozens of little yellow lights rushing all over it. Occasionally, one blinks out. I assume that’s a delivery completed. I hope that’s a delivery being completed. Otherwise it’s something a little less productive.

Clint.That’s the name on the tag affixed to the big man behind the desk. Clint looks like the culmination of a long line of breeding for the middle-management gene.

His shirt is white with blue stripes and yellow stains underneath the armpits. I don’t know what his pants are like, because he hasn’t gotten up since I got here. He has the most impressive mustache I have ever seen, a big fluffy creature that seems to have a life of its own.

He’s chewing on the business end of a vaporizing pen, which I am almost certain is malfunctioning. It keeps fizzing and spitting, and every now and then it sets a bit of his mustache on fire. He puts it out between two fingers, not seeming to care. The mustache almost seems to regenerate instantly, or maybe it’s so bushy and thick that a little fire can’t stop it being fabulous.

“Can you ride?” the mustache asks.

“Of course,” I lie. I did a motorbike handling skills course three years ago for two sessions before the instructors said I ‘wasn’t responsible enough’ and was ‘going to kill myself and probably someone else.’

“Good. You get a bike, but you pay for it. Your first three hundred deliveries are paying it off, so you don’t get paid until those three hundred deliveries are completed. If, at any time, you leave the employ of Delivery 2 Go, the bike will be reclaimed.”

“You mean if I leave before it’s paid off, or…”

He looks at me with milky eyes. “If, at any time, you leave the employ of Delivery 2 Go, the bike will be reclaimed.”

“How do I eat, and live?”

“Vending machines,” he says, gesturing to a hall outside the office, which is lined with vending machines. I saw them on my way past. They’re old and sticky and the goods inside don’t look like they’ve been replenished in ages. “You get tokens for the vending machines.”