AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Help me!” Order calls out to Justice. It would seem there are limits to his silk reserves, with Rage cutting through them as quickly as they go on, beating his wings furiously with a rattling, hissing, growling sound. The ambiance is evocative of the very end of the world.
Justice needs to drop me and help Order, or else Rage is about to escape. But Justice doesn’t. He just keeps holding onto me, and within the next thirty seconds, Rage gets his wings free and takes to the skies, fleeing with loud cursing.
Order turns to Justice, panting and furious, his sharp teeth exposed with panting breaths. I let out a shriek. His sunglasses have been knocked off his face, and now eight bright blue human eyes blink at us. He has two normal size eyes, another two stacked above them, and then four more that go around the sides of his head at a slightly smaller scale. The effect is nothing short of absolutely fucking terrifying, and it is not helped by the mood he is in, which is furious.
“We lost him because you won’t put down your human cuddle toy.”
Finally, when it no longer really matters, Justice relinquishes me. I scramble away from the pair of them and make a run not for freedom, but to the gap in the storage containers. I squeeze through that as fast as possible and find myself facing one open door.
“Tessie!”
“Sally!”
“Don’t call me that!”
I run into the container and find Tessie wrapped up in web, suspended from both the ceiling and the floor. I wonder if Order would have had enough web to catch Rage if he hadn’t already blown his spider load on her. She seems otherwise unharmed, just sort of hanging there with her head exposed and most of her body encased.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “This is more comfy than it looks.”
Obigor is sleeping on a pillow nearby. He seems unperturbed, but he is both deaf and exhausted, so he doesn’t care.
I look around. This shipping container is not a filthy old empty space. This is an outfitted home with high end but outdated furniture. The style is retro, not quite teal blue with a lot of leathery beige accents that make the space masculine without being aggressive about it. Tall arm chairs are set around a CRT television set resplendent in wooden paneling. The rug beneath my feet has to be handwoven. It is that same blue with white accents of large insect motifs. I have the feeling that I have stepped into a single chamber of what is a very large and expansive above ground burrow that runs back quite deep and branches off all over the place.
“The shipping container was developed later than we were by almost a decade, but when it was, our creator realized it provided the perfect cover. We could be present in plain sight almost anywhere. All we needed was some industrial use space and a few cranes operated by humans who did not know precisely what they were transporting.”
I turn around again to see Justice standing in front of me. I do not give a flying moth fuck about the history of shipping containers right now. I have a bigger bone to pick with him.
“You almost let him kill me!”
Justice has the gall to look confused.
“I did tell you that you were going to be bait. You begged to be bait. You do know what happens to bait, correct?”
“He almost got me!”
“Almost,” Justice agrees. “But that’s just a scratch.”
I narrow my eyes. His indifference is unacceptable, both professionally and personally. I know better than to think someone I hooked up with mid-air is going to be the love of my life, but he could at least try to keep me slightly safe.
“You really don’t care if you get me, or Tessie, or Obigor killed, do you? It’s all about getting what you want, using us as tools, and then leaving when it’s all over.”
“It had to feel real, Sally.”
I gasp and draw back a foot before lunging forward again, my finger pointed against his chest. “Don’t you ever use that name audibly. Or inaudibly,” I say.
Tessie is laughing, which really pisses me off. I pretend as much as I can not to have a first name. Sally is just so… so many things I do not want to identify with. Old-fashioned, feminine, delicate, wholesome. I wish I had been called something with more edge. Sally is the sort of name that makes a girl desperate to prove herself. Maybe it made me tougher than I’d otherwise be. Whatever. I don’t want to hear it coming out of this guy’s mouth.
“You have to stay here until morning,” he says, changing the subject, or more likely, ignoring me. “Rage has your scent, and he will come back for you. Nowhere will be safe for you tonight besides this place.”
He has the whole night to hunt for me, and he’s pissed. He’s going to be limited with his hands still cuffed together, but he has already proven he’s plenty dangerous that way.
“If he goes to my apartment and hurts my books…”
Justice looks very confused. “What do you care about books when your life is at stake?”
“What do you care about my life when you were dangling me like a fucking…”
