“‘Unfortunate industrial challenges’ sounds better,” Blake suggested.
“I guess if you call a zombie being pulled into a grinder and turned into a fine powder a
challenge
, then that works.”
“Do we conduct quality tests?”
“No. I forge results and grease palms.”
Blake nodded, his face thoughtful. “While it’s clear we have some challenges to address, I’d say, with some planning and some focus, we’ll soon be ready to impose our will upon the gelatin market. The invisible hand will be forced to pause before us, open in supplication.”
“Er…exactly.” That sounded like something
he
should say as the Evil Overlord, not the number-two guy. He’d have to keep an eye on Blake and make sure more thunder wasn’t stolen. Make sure the guy wasn’t in his lighting, stealing the scene.
They walked toward the break room. Several insanely cheery motivational posters hung on the wall next to a mess of bulletins about Federal minimum wage and the Family Leave Act. All in all, Jeremiah thought the tour had gone rather well. Well, except for the lack of alluring ninjas of the feminine persuasion, that was.
Blake gave him a needle-thin smile. “So, how well do you play golf?”
Chapter Nine: A Few Good Mercenaries
Mercenary Wing Rv6-4 “Zero Dogs”
Zero Dog Compound
North Wing Stairwell 3rd Floor Landing
1846 Hours PST April 13th
The heavenly smells of stir-fry drifted through the house. My stomach grumbled, sounding like an outboard motor drowning in four-stroke engine oil. I followed the scent down the stairs, toward the large dining room. Mai’s voice announcing dinner over the intercom had cut my shower short, although most of the time I was an empty-the-hot-water-heater kind of girl. I’d thrown on some cargo pants, a long-sleeve shirt with the word
Pyromania
in fiery letters on the front, and boots. Jump boots, not anything with heels. What the outfit lacked in feminine style it more than made up for in comfort and utility.
Besides, I wasn’t about to start dressing to impress Jake.
The After Action Report following our training exercise had been long and detailed, with both Jake and I going over what the teams had done right, what goals we achieved and what could use work. We presented a unified command front, but I took the lead, doing most of the talking, and he seemed cool with that. I felt proud of my people. I thought we’d handled ourselves well overall, but I focused on the challenges Jake had mentioned, how splitting our forces had diminished our firepower in close quarters. I took the blame for the call, of course, but I made it sound as if I’d been the one to recognize the potential problem first and I didn’t feel guilty in the least about doing so. Jake didn’t protest and didn’t even seem to notice. Which annoyed me. No man should be that easy to get along with or sport that much self-control.
I hadn’t seen him since the AAR. I’d been locked down in the office, poring over the accounts. The initial payment for the mission had gone through. After I’d indulged in a little happy cha-cha-cha in my chair, I’d used the payment to gain some breathing room with our vendors, setting aside a healthy chunk for rent and other overhead. Next, I’d obsessed over the cost of diesel fuel. Drank strong coffee. Obsessed over the cost of paintballs. Drank tea, English breakfast, so hot it almost burned my mouth, just the way I liked it. Obsessed over food costs. Considered drinking something alcoholic, but had behaved like a big, responsible girl and hadn’t.
I finished double-timing it down the last of the stairs, on my way across the tile floor and hall toward the main dining room. My heart beat faster, and not from the stairs. All right, I might have left something out earlier when I’d been vowing never to impress Jake. Despite the clothes, I’d prettied myself up just the tiniest bit. Light makeup, doing my best to make it look
au naturel
. He’d probably never notice. But just in case…
Damn, talk about stupid. What the hell was I doing? He was a problem. He’d been a problem since he arrived. My mission was to get the job done, get him gone and get on with life.
Well…maybe, just maybe, he might be fun too. If he weren’t working with me on this mission, that was—and let’s tell the truth and screw the devil—if he weren’t an outsider, a possible threat to my people and my command, it’d be a no-brainer. Because every so often I caught that vibe from him, an intense regard, the focus that made me feel like a piece of art in the center of a gallery, displayed in the perfect lighting. A feeling I found both exhilarating and teetering on the edge of terrifying.
The whole crew had converged on the dining room and were already well into the business of dishing out food. Nobody stood on ceremony here. Come late to dinner and you had table scraps—if that. The table stretched nearly the length of the room, a long marble slab which could seat twenty easy. Everybody clustered around the far end near Jake.
“It’s the captain.” Gavin raised his beer to me in mock salute. “Mai cooked, which means something edible tonight.”
Mai grinned. One of her pets had draped itself around her shoulders like some weird mink stole. In fact, the thing looked suspiciously like an ermine. Except pink and white, with an all-too-expressive face and three strange sets of folded purple wings appearing as soft as velvet. The more I thought about it, the more my gag reflex and I didn’t want to know if she let her summoned pets help with the cooking.
We rotated through cooks (since the last one had quit after Rafe, in werewolf form, had chased him around the yard, terrorizing him for serving something loaded with soybean oil, trans fats and high fructose corn syrup). Mai ranked as the best cook out of all of us, and cooking on a large scale demanded a certain amount of talent and planning. My cooking skills scored in the mediocre-to-poor range, though I thought my meatloaf always turned out decent. I tended to over-spice things. Oh, and burn them. Go figure.
I took my seat at the head of the table, Sarge on my left, Jake on my right. I didn’t feel as uncomfortable having Jake this close as I’d felt during our client meeting—a disturbing change.
“Wine?” Jake indicated a bottle with a fancy gold and black label.
What kind of commando drank wine? Still, in an attempt to be diplomatic, I made a show of smiling and nodding, although I’d always thought wine tasted more like fermented elf piss. Don’t ask how I knew about elf piss. The long and horrible story didn’t have a happily ever after.
He filled my glass while I speculated whether I could get away with accidentally knocking it over so I wouldn’t have to drink it. Sarge passed me one of the serving bowls filled with stir-fry, and I loaded up. The furnace must have fuel, so I grabbed a fork and shoveled it in.
Tiffany’s quiet, smoky voice broke through the conversation, surprising me because she usually stayed so reserved, and when Tiffany spoke, people listened. Mostly men, but whatever. “Captain Sanders, may I ask when we’ll go after the necromancer?”
Jake smiled at her and rasped a hand across a cheek dark with stubble. I watched him like a Catholic nun at a junior high dance for any sign of flirting. Tiffany—I loved her to death, but if she pulled this guy’s attention off me, I’d sew her into a burka and sell her to a convent. The strength of my reaction gave me pause for a second, and then I dismissed it. Yeah, Captain Sanders was growing on me. So fucking what?
Don’t answer that.
Jake kept silent for a long moment, swirling his red wine in his glass. I started to think he wouldn’t answer, which began to rub my fur the wrong way. I’d never been one for keeping information from the grunts. Hell, I’d been a line animal myself for too long. Double hell, I was
still
a line animal.
At last, Jake answered. “When? Soon. A couple more days perfecting our offensive capabilities and we’ll timeline an assault. Then Captain Walker will give the final go order.”
“What if the necromancer makes a move before then?” Mai asked, as she fed snow peas to her alien ermine. “Will we quick-deploy?”
Mai had directed her question at Jake, but I answered before he could. “We have multiple assault scenarios planned out.” Mai glanced at me and seemed a trifle miffed. I started to feel unloved. “If we need to stop him right away, we have a contingency plan for just that purpose.”
Stefan the vampire stood up and lifted his glass. “To us renown, to us the glory bring. Thus we may free the Zero Dogs of war.”
“Hear, hear,” Rafe said and raised his glass. From the smell of it, he’d just toasted the Zero Dogs with açaí berry juice in a double shot glass. He wore his favorite T-shirt, the one with three disembodied wolf heads howling at the moon—a piece of clothing he’d once, to my amazed horror, told me had gotten him laid dozens of times.
Everyone else lifted various drinks in a toast, and I did too, not wanting to bring bad luck on us, though premature celebration made me skittish.
Stefan kept standing. He’d dressed in coat and tails, with his hair raked back from his forehead and shiny with something I assumed wasn’t frying-pan grease. He sipped from his glass, which didn’t hold wine, no matter how dark red the liquid might be. Looking at the contents of his wineglass killed what little desire I had to finish my own. I had blood shipped in from a blood bank in Beverly Hills, at Stefan’s expense, coded by donor details and year. Something a trifle disturbing about the bouquet of your warm inner red suddenly turned into a product’s selling point or a wine-tasting joke.
Everybody continued to look at Stefan, and he reveled in the attention. His pupils glowed a mellow red, lighter than the blood in his glass. “Although,” he continued, “I’ve raised my objection to the term
Dog
in our moniker on several occasions, since it conjures images of flea-bitten curs slinking through the gutters, and I say that only as an aside.”
Gavin laughed. “You hear that, Rafe? He’s talking about you and your personal flea circus.”
Rafe glowered. His myriad tattoos added to his dangerous predator air—an air diminished more than a little by the açaí berry juice. “Hey, Gavin, you’re supposed to be an empath. What am I feeling right now?”
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself because you’re an idiot.”
“No. That’s not it.”
“You’re feeling a burning desire to hump Sarge’s leg.”
Rafe growled deep in his throat. “You know, for an empath you can really be an asshole.”
“My work here is done. Get my punch card, it’s time to clock out.”
“Enough, you two.” Must I ever be the den mother for kindergarteners? Could they not
for two seconds
act like professionals and not embarrass me in front of Jake? “Until we get a green light, I want us to stay in top shape, and that includes refraining from pointless bickering. I emailed each of you dossiers on necromancy and zombie plagues. Read them and memorize them.”
“Know thy enemy,” Hanzo said, stroking his smooth chin. “Know thyself. And you will never be defeated. So says the great Sun Tzu.”
Had he been weaned on reruns of
Kung Fu
or had he just been dropped on his head as a small child? Probably both.
The ermine squeaked, and Mai let it lap out of her wineglass. “Remember that fight we had in Shenyang? Against that outbreak of yaomo monkeys? We were neck deep in screeching monkey demons and some Chinese government official showed up and wanted to quarantine Gavin for the swine flu.”
“Good times,” Rafe said, grinning.
Good times, my ass. But I kept my mouth shut and poured more hot mustard on my plate. Two years back we’d been reserve support for a Hellfrost Group detachment backing up the Ministry of State Security’s demon suppression wing. Lots and lots of money, but murderous paperwork, passport problems and bureaucratic political nightmares abounded. And Rafe barely avoided arrest for tattooing
Free Tibet
on his forearm.
“What about you, Captain Sanders?” Sarge asked in his deep bass rumble. “Don’t like to talk business at the table?”
Jake shrugged and pushed his food around with his fork. “Don’t believe in trotting out the glory days to impress others.”
“A worthy sentiment,” Stefan said. “I never mention the glory I earned in Vlad Tepes’s Night Attack, or as we say in the homeland,
Atacul de noapte
.”
“The captain is too reserved,” Mai chided. Her ermine let out a chirrup, as if in agreement. “We’re curious.”
“Yeah.” I gave in to the devil on my shoulder. “Tell us about the good old days. Don’t be shy. We’re all friends here.”
“Except for me.” Gavin raised his beer bottle in another mock salute. “I hate you all equally.”
Rafe snorted, berry juice spraying from his nose. He grinned and wiped his face with the back of his hand. The flower vase now contained dead roses speckled with purplish spots.
Jake gave us a small, wary smile. He shifted a little, stared down at his plate for a moment and then looked straight at me. “What do you want to hear? War stories?”
Although he’d been looking right at me, it seemed everyone felt the need to chime in.
Tiffany’s slit eyes glowed. “Ooh. Something exciting!”
“Something hardcore,” Sarge suggested. “Guns. Magic. Certain death.”
Rafe nodded. “Yeah, what Sarge said. Needs hot chicks though. There should be far more melons to sausage. A three-to-one ratio at least.”
“Guys,” Mai said. “This isn’t story hour. He isn’t making it up for you.”
“Spoken truly, Mai.” Hanzo gave Mai such a look of puppy-love worship that I almost heaved up my stir-fry. I hoped to God I never appeared that desperate. I caught myself glancing at Jake and heat crept up my chest and neck.
“I could tell a tale or two,” Stefan said, and smiled so as to show a glimpse of fang. “Of murder and treachery in the old country, and how the proud Dalca family spared an entire seaside peasant village from assault by drunken mermaids.”
Gavin sneered. “Nobody asked to hear that stupid story again, Stefan. Better yet, if we’re gonna rehash stupid stories, tell them how we used your hair grease to fry those crawdads we caught when we almost starved to death in the bayou hunting that fucking cybernetic goblin wizard with the nose shaped like a can opener. Now
that’s
a story.”
Stefan’s fist clenched. “Lies, you worthless hack. You purveyor of filth and sentence fragments. Peddler of poor grammar and misused semicolons, be warned. I can smell your blood from here.”
“And I can smell your Brylcreem, you blood-sucking freak,” Gavin shot back, half-rising from his seat. “Why don’t you go put on a shirt with frilly cuffs and mismanage an exotic nightclub? And don’t forget the goddamned glitter, so you sparkle in the midday sun…right before you burst into
flames
.”