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“He’s not a house pet either, Axel,” Mozley said.
Honor snorted. “You wish that was all he was to Axel. That irqed and my boy are mates, Mozley. I found out first-hand just how dangerous it is to come between them.”
“Mates?” Mozley’s eyes widened.
I felt my face flush. “Apparently, if you give an irqed a pizza roll, you get to feed it for a lifetime.”
Mozley massaged his temples. “I don’t want to hear this. I don’t need to hear this.”
“Easy there, Mozley.” Honor patted Mozley’s back. Hard. “You’ll give yourself an aneurysm stressing out like that.”
Mozley sighed. “They don’t pay me enough to put up with this shit. I didn’t think I’d have to say it, but apparently, I do. Stop. Fucking. Monsters. Just stop. There are eight billion humans to choose from in every shape and size. Yet you people…You can’t stop putting your dicks in monsters! What iswrongwith you?”
I frowned. “Hey, no kink shaming. Besides, some of us would rather get a good monster dicking than give one. Not that I’m picky. Or exclusively into dick. Or, you know…monsters.”
“He can swallow you whole!”
Honor shrugged, leaning back. “Honestly, that’s half the fun.”
Mozley glanced between us, his jaw hanging open. “I’m surrounded by suicidal madmen. This is going to be much more difficult than I thought.”
“What I do with Ghost isn’t really your business,” I said. “Or anyone’s.”
“Unfortunately, it is when they can use you to get to him.” Mozley pointed at me. “You’re familiar with Parker’s experiments, yes?”
I frowned. “I thought all of that was shut down.”
“Officially, the project never existed in the first place. Unofficially…” Mozley shrugged. “Nobody in charge wants to acknowledge Parker. He’s one of those bad decisions everybody wants to forget…except when he’s useful. And he had a knack for always being useful at exactly the right time. Just as he was about to get his funding cut, he’d come up with something every year to impress the right people. First, there was this mind control crown. He claimed that if he could mass produce it, he could build an army of thoughtless monster drones to fight our wars for us. Then he’s got a monster that can warp reality. Imagine that… A monster that can just imagine your enemies out of existence and make it so. Next year, it’s some telepathy project based on the same tech that made the crown. Then he’s talking about training irqed to be operatives. Lucky for us, his entire project went FUBAR when the base imploded.”
“And lucky for us, me and Ziggy took out the secondary base he was trying to use to start a war,” Honor said.
I held up my hands. “I thought Parker was dead. Chappie said…”
Mozley grunted and took a drink from his soda. “The base in Montana they destroyed was definitely a setback for Parker and the shadow faction of ESCU.”
“Really?” Honor asked, arching an eyebrow. “You’re calling them the shadow faction?”
“You got a better name?” Mozley groused before turning back to me. “Anyway, Parker had discovered these special stones that were apparently sacred to the Pomtuki. They had the power to grant long life to anyone who was in contact with them. He was using them to make clones of himself. Your friends destroyed most of them, and the original, but the people backing Parker weren’t idiots. They had a back-up stored off site.”
Honor frowned and crossed his arms. “So you knew. This whole fucking time, you knew I was right about Parker and you didn’t say anything?”
“Men died to bring this information to me,” Mozley said coldly. “I only just found out all of this recently, and the cost…” He shook his head. “My superiors want to bury the whole thing and pretend like none of this ever happened. The shadow faction would love nothing more than to be forgotten so they can rebuild. A few decades, and Parker could even recover most of his research. All he needs is to recapture a few of his specimens, starting with his favorite pet. The irqed you’re calling Ghost.”
“Why is he so special?” I sat back, folding my arms over my chest. “Can’t he just go get another irqed and start over?”
Not that I wanted him to do that either, but there had to be a reason he was so set on getting Ghost back.
Mozley shook his head. “Retrieving an irqed egg from its nest cost a dozen lives. No one is ever going to authorize that mission again, and he knows it. Short of going through the tear to get the egg himself, he’s got no other options. Right now, Parker and whoever’s supporting him are running scared. They’re low on resources and allies. Now is the time to strike.” He drovehis finger into the table. “Without Colonel Jacobs, they’re weak. Their command structure is in disarray and communication is broken. Unfortunately, they’ve all gone to ground. Despite our efforts to draw them out, they’ve stayed hidden, and so has Parker. I’m running out of time and resources to keep up this fight, boys. If I don’t come back with some concrete evidence soon, my superiors are going to shut me down, and if that happens, you’ll be on your own against whatever Parker has planned. So, we need to flush the rats out of the walls and into the light. And I need you two to help me.”
Honor narrowed his eyes. “Help you how, exactly?”
“Well,” said Mozley, folding his hands on the table, “we know what they want and where it is, which gives us the upper hand.”
There was a brief pause before Honor said, “You want to use Ghost as bait.”
“No,” I said, standing quickly. “He’s been through enough!”
“Calm down, kid.” Mozley motioned for me to sit. “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him. All I want to do is fit him with a tracker. Then we let Parker—or whoever—grab him, follow the tracker to wherever they’re holed up, kill everyone, and rescue your monster boyfriend.”
